■■n LIBRARY OF JPHE University of California. GIF^T OF Mrs. SARAH P. WALSWORTH. Received October, i8g4. ^Accessions No..§*f3S..f>..- Cta No. *%>* Of THl^^SS [WI7BRSITT] ■FV MjMM QjfouOJ X0,/U?4M <_/UM^ GUESSES AT TRUTH: BY TWO BROTHERS. MdvTts 6° api• an age alien and almost averse from the higher and more strenuous exercises of imagination and thought, — as the purifiers and regenerators of poetry and phi- losophy. It was a great aim; and greatly have you both wrought for its accomplishment. Many, among those who are now England's best hope and stay, will respond to my thankful acknowledgement of the bene- fits my heart and mind have received from you both. Many will echo my wish, for the benefit of my country, that your influence and his may be more and more widely diffused. Many will join in my prayer, that health and strength of body and mind may be granted to you, to complete the noble works which you have still in store, so that men may learn more worthily to understand and appreciate what a glorious gift God bestows on a nation when He gives them a poet. Had this work been dedicated to you then, it might have pleased you more to see your great friend's name beside your own. The proof of my brother's regard too would have endeared the offering. Then, — if you will allow me to quote a poem, which, from its faithful expression of fraternal love, has always sounded to me like the voice of my own heart, — "There were 4 two springs which bubbled side by side, As if they had been made that they might be Companions for each other." But now for a while that blessed companionship has been interrupted : " One has disappeared : The other, left behind, is flowing still.' ' Yet, small as the tribute TO WILLIAM WORDSWOKTH. v is, and although it must come before you without these recommendations, may you still accept it in considera- tion of the reverence which brings it; and may you continue to think with your wonted kindness Of your affectionate Servant, Julius Charles Hare. Herstmonceux, January, 1838. 'UHIVEKSITT' TO THE READEE. I here present you with a few suggestions, the fruits, alas ! of much idleness. Such of them as are distin- guisht by some capital letter, I have borrowed from my acuter friends. My own are little more than glimmer- ings, I had almost said dreams, of thought : not a word in them is to be taken on trust. If then I am addressing one of that numerous class, who read to be told what to think, let me advise you to meddle with the book no further. You wish to buy a house ready furnisht : do not come to look for it in a stonequarry. But if you are building up your opinions for yourself, and only want to be provided with materi- als, you may meet with many things in these pages to suit you. Do not despise them for their want of name and show. Remember what the old author says, that " even to such a one as I am, an idiota or common per- son, no great things, melancholizing in woods and quiet places by rivers, the Goddesse herself Truth has often- times appeared." Reader, if you weigh me at all, weigh me patiently ; judge me candidly ; and may you find half the satisfac- tion in examining my Guesses, that I have myself had in making them. viii TO THE HEADER. Authors usually do not think about writing a preface, until they have reacht the conclusion ; and with reason. For few have such steadfastness of purpose, and such definiteness and clear foresight of understanding, as to know, when they take up their pen, how soon they shall lay it down again. The foregoing paragraphs were written some months ago : since that time this little book has increast to more than four times the bulk then contemplated, and withal has acquired two fathers instead of one. The temptations held out by the free- dom and pliant aptness of the plan, — the thoughtful excitement of lonely rambles, of gardening, and of other like occupations, in which the mind has leisure to muse during the healthful activity of the body, with the fresh, wakeful breezes blowing round it, — above all, intercourse and converse with those, every hour in whose society is rich in the blossoms of present enjoy- ment, and in the seeds of future meditation, in whom too the Imagination delightedly recognises living real- ities goodlier and fairer than the fairest and goodliest visions, so that pleasure kindles a desire in her of por- traying what she cannot hope to surpass, — these causes, happening to meet together, have occasioned my becom- ing a principal in a work, wherein I had only lookt for- ward to being a subordinate auxiliary. The letter u, with which my earlier contributions were markt, has for distinction's sake continued to be affixt to them. As our minds have grown up together, have been nourisht in great measure by the same food, have sympathized in their affections and their aversions, and been shaped reciprocally by the assimilating influences of brotherly communion, a family likeness will, I trust, be perceiv- able throughout these volumes, although perhaps with such differences as it is not displeasing to behold in the TO THE READER. j x children of the same parents. And thus I commit this book to the world, with a prayer that He, to whom so much of it, if I may not say the whole, is devoted, will, if He think it worthy to be employed in His service, render it an instrument of good to some of His chil- dren. May it awaken some one to the knowledge of himself ! May it induce some one to think more kindly of his neighbour ! May it enlighten some one to behold the footsteps of God in the Creation ! u. May 17th, 1827. In this new edition the few remarks found among my brother's papers, suitable to the work, have been, or will be incorporated. Unfortunately for the work they are but few. Soon after the publication of the first edition, he gave up guessing at Truth, for the higher office of preaching Truth. How faithfully he discharged that office, may be seen in the two volumes of his Ser- mons. And now he has been raised from the earth to the full fruition of that Truth, of which he had first been the earnest seeker, and then the dutiful servant and herald. My own portion of the work has been a good deal enlarged. On looking it over for the press, I found much that was inaccurate, more that was unsatisfactory. Many thoughts seemed to need being more fully de- velopt. Ten years cannot pass over one's head, least of all in these eventful times, without modifying sundry opinions. A change of position too brings a new hori- zon, and new points of view. And when old thoughts are awakened, it is with old recollections : a long train of associations start up ; nor is it easy to withstand the pleasure of following them out. Various however as 1* x TO THE READER. are the matters discust or toucht on in the following pages, I would fain hope that one spirit will be felt to breathe through them. It would be a delightful reward, if they may help the young, in this age of the Confusion of Thoughts, to discern some of those principles which infuse strength and order into men's hearts and minds. Above all would I desire to suggest to my readers, how in all things, small as well as great, profane as well as sacred, it behoves us to keep our eyes fixt on the Star which led the Wise Men of old, and by which alone can any wisdom be guided; from whatsoever part of the intellectual globe, to a place where it will rejoice with exceeding great joy. J. C. H. January 6th, 1838. FIRST SERIES. Xpvaov oi Si£i7/zei>oi, (prjaiv 'HpajcAeiros, yrju 7to\\t]P opvcTaovai, Kal evpio-Kovcriv 6\iyov. — Clem. Alex. Strom. IV. 2, p. 565u As young men, when they knit and shape perfectly, do seldom grow to a further stature; so knowledge, while it is in aphorisms and observations, it is in growth ; but when it once is comprehended in exact methods, it may per- chance be further polished and illustrated, and accommodated for use and practice ; but it increaseth no more in bulk and substanee. — Bacon, Advance- ment of Learning \ B. I. &**, •.. jj». L*7 ADYEETISEMENT TO THE THIED EDITION. This third edition is little else than a reprint of the second, with the addition of a quotation here and there in support of opinions pre- viously exprest, and with the insertion of some half a dozen passages, partly to vindicate or to correct those opinions, partly to enforce them by reference to later events, partly to prevent their being misconstrued in behalf * of certain errours which have recently be- come current. October QtL 1847. [UIIVBRSIT7] oar ^LjipI GUESSES AT TRUTH. The virtue of Paganism was strength : the virtue of Chris- tianity is obedience. Man without religion is the creature of circumstances : Re- ligion is above all circumstances, and will lift him up above them. Moral prejudices are the stopgaps of virtue : and, as is the case with other stopgaps, it is often more difficult to get either out or in through them, than through any other part of the fence. A mother should desire to give her children a superabundance of enthusiasm, to the end that, after they have lost all they are sure to lose in mixing with the world, enough may still remain to prompt and support them through great actions. A cloak should be of three-pile, to keep its gloss in wear. The heart has often been compared to the needle for its con- stancy : has it ever been so for its variations ? Yet were any man to keep minutes of his feelings from youth to age, what a table of variations would they present ! how numerous ! how 14 GUESSES AT TRUTH. diverse ! and how strange ! This is just what we find in the writings of Horace. If we consider his occasional effusions, — and such they almost all are, — as merely expressing the piety, or the passion, the seriousness, or the levity of the moment, we shall have no difficulty in accounting for those discrepancies in their features, which have so much puzzled professional com- mentators. Their very contradictions prove their truth. Or could the face even of Ninon de l'Enclos at seventy be just what it was at seventeen ? Nay, was Cleopatra before Augus- tus the same as Cleopatra with Antony? or Cleopatra with Antony the same as with the great Julius ? The teachers of youth in a free country should select those books for their chief study, — so far, I mean, as this world is concerned, — which are best adapted to foster a spirit of manly freedom. The duty of preserving the liberty, which our ances- tors, through God's blessing, won, establisht, and handed down to us, is no less imperative than any commandment in the sec- ond table ; if it be not the concentration of the whole. And is this duty to be learnt from the investigations of science ? Is it to be pickt up in the crucible ? or extracted from the proper- ties of lines and numbers ? I fear there is a moment of broken lights in the intellectual day of civilized countries, when, among the manifold refractions of Knowledge, Wisdom is almost lost sight of. Society in time breeds a number of mouths which will not consent to be entertained without a corresponding vari- ety of dishes, so that unity is left alone as an inhospitable singu- larity ; and many things are got at any way, rather than a few in the right way. But " howsoever these things are thus in men's depraved judgements and affections," would we imbibe the feelings, the sentiments, and the principles which become the inheritors of England's name and glory, we must abide by the springs of which our ancestors drank. Like them, we must nourish our minds by contemplating the unbending strength of purpose and uncalculating self-devotion which nerved and ani- mated the philosophic and heroic patriots of the Heathen world : and we shall then blush, should Christianity, with all her addi- GUESSES AT TRUTH 15 tional incentives, have shone on our hearts without kindling a zeal as steady and as pure. Is not our mistress, fair Religion, As worthy of all our heart's devotion, As Virtue was to that first blinded age V As we do them in means, shall they surpass Us in the end ? Donne, Satires, iii. 5. The threatenings of Christianity are material and tangible. They speak of and to the senses ; because they speak of and to the sensual and earthly, in character, intellect, and pursuits. The promises of Christianity, on the other hand, are addresst to a different class of persons, — to those who love, which comes after fear, — to those who have begun to advance in goodness, — to those who are already in some measure delivered from the thraldom of the body. But, being spoken of heaven to the heavenly-minded, how could they be other than heavenly ? The fact then, that there is nothing definite, and little invit- ing or attractive, except to the eye of Faith, in the Christian representation of future bliss, instead of being a reasonable objection to its truth, is rather a confirmation of it. And so perhaps thought Selden, who remarks in his Table-Talk : " The Turks tell their people of a heaven where there is a sensible pleasure, but of a hell where they shall suffer they don't know what. The Christians quite invert this order : they tell us of a hell where we shall feel sensible pain, but of a heaven where we shall enjoy we can't tell what." l. Why should not distant parishes interchange their appren- tices ? so that the lads on their return home might bring back such improvements in agriculture and the mechanical arts, as they may have observed or been taught during their absence. e. A practice of the sort was usual two centuries ago, and still exists in Germany, and other parts of the Continent. The first thing we learn is Meum, the last is Tuum. None can have lived among children without noticing the former 16 GUESSES AT TRUTH. fact ; few have associated with men and not remarkt the latter. To address the prejudices of our hearers is to argue with them in short-hand. But it is also more : it is to invest our opinion with the probability of prescription, and by occupying the understanding to attack the heart. The ancients dreaded death : the Christian can only fear dying. A person should go out upon the water on a fine day to a short distance from a beautiful coast, if he would see Nature really smile. Never does she look so joyous, as when the sun is brightly reflected by the water, while the waves are rippling gently, and the scene receives life and animation here and there from the glancing transit of a row-boat, and the quieter motion of a few small vessels. But the land must be well in sight ; not only for its own sake, but because the vastness and awful- ness of a mere sea-view would ill sort with the other parts of the gay and glittering prospect. The second Punic war was a struggle between Hannibal and the Roman people. Its event proved that the good sense and spirit of a nation, when embodied in institutions, and exerted with perseverance, must ultimately exhaust and overpower the resources of a single mind, however excellent in genius and prowess. The war of Sertorius, the Roman Hannibal, is of the same kind, and teaches the same lesson. Nothing short of extreme necessity will induce a sensible man to change all his servants at once. A new set coming to- gether fortuitously are sure to cross and jostle . . like the Epicurean atoms, I was going to say ; but no, unlike the silent atoms, they have the faculty of claiming and complaining ; and they exert it, until the family is distracted with disputes about the limits of their several offices. GUESSES AT TEUTH. 17 But after a household has been set in order, there is little or no evil to apprehend from minor changes. A new servant on arriving finds himself in the middle of a system : his place is markt out and assigned ; the course of his business is set before him; and he falls into it as readily as a new wheel- horse to a mail, when his collar is to the pole, and the coach is starting. It is the same with those great families, which we call nations. To remould a government and frame a constitution anew, are works of the greatest difficulty and hazard. The attempt is likely to fail altogether, and cannot succeed thor- oughly under very many years. It is the last desperate resource of a ruined people, a staking double or quits with evil, and almost giving it the first game. But still it is a resource. We make use of cataplasms to restore suspended animation ; and Burke himself might have tried Medea's kettle on a carcass. Be that, however, as it may, from judicious subordinate reforms good, and good only, is to be lookt for. Nor are their benefits limited to the removal of the abuse, which their author designed to correct. No perpetual motion, God be praised ! has yet been discovered for free governments. For the impulse which keeps them going, they are indebted mainly to subordinate reforms ; now, by the exposure of a particular delinquency, spreading salutary vigilance through a whole administration ; now, by the origination of some popular im- provement from without, leading, — if there be any certainty in party motives, any such things in ambitious men as policy and emulation, — to the counter-adoption of numerous meliora- tions from within, which would else have been only dreamt of as impossible. As a little girl was playing round me one day with her white frock over her head, I laughingly called her Pishashee, the name which the Indians give to their white devil. The child was delighted with so fine a name, and ran about the house crying to every one she met, / am the Pishashee, I am ?0*"*6? THE 18 GUESSES AT TRUTH. the Pishashee. Would she have done so, had she been wrapt in black, and called witch or devil instead? No; for, as usual, the reality was nothing, the sound and colour every- thing. But how many grown-up persons are running about the world, quite as anxious as the little girl was to get the name of Pishashee ! Only she did not understand it. True modesty does not consist in an ignorance of our merits, but in a due estimate of them. Modesty then is only another name for self-knowledge ; that is, for the absence of ignorance on the one subject which we ought to understand the best, as well from its vast importance to us, as from our continual opportunities of studying it. And yet it is a virtue. But what, on second thoughts, are these merits? Jeremy Taylor tells us, in his Life of Christ : " Nothing but the innu- merable sins which we have added to what we have received. For we can call nothing ours, but such things as we are ashamed to own, and such things as are apt to ruin us. Ev- erything besides is the gift of God; and for a man to exalt himself thereon is just as if a wall on which the sun reflects, should boast itself against another that stands in the shadow." Considerations upon Christ's Sermon on Humility. After casting a glance at our own weaknesses, how eagerly does our vanity console itself with deploring the infirmities of our friends ! t. It is as hard to know when one is in Paris, as when one is out of London. r. The first is the city of a great king; the latter, of a great people. m. When the moon, after covering herself with darkness as in sorrow, at last throws off the garments of her widowhood, she does not expose her beauty at once barefacedly to the eye of man, but veils herself for a time in a transparent cloud, till by GUESSES AT TRUTH. 19 degrees she gains courage to endure the gaze and admiration of beholders. To those whose god is honour, disgrace alone is sin. Some people carry their hearts in their heads ; very many carry their heads in their hearts. The difficulty is to keep them apart, and yet both actively working together. a. Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation, or of assimilation, not of self-nurture ; for then a steam-engine over a coalpit might be made to live. Philosophy, like everything else, in a Christian nation should be Christian. We throw away the better half of our means, when we neglect to avail ourselves of the advantages which starting in the right road gives us. It is idle to urge that, unless we do this, antichristians will deride us. Curs bark at gentlemen on horseback; but who, except a hypochondriac, ever gave up riding on that account? In man's original state, before his soul had been stupefied by the Fall, his moral sensitiveness was probably as acute as his physical sensitiveness is now; so that an evil action, from its irreconcilableness with his nature, would have inflicted as much pain on the mind, as a blow causes to the body. By the Fall this fineness of moral tact was lost ; — Conscience, the voice of God within us, is at once its relic and its evidence ; — and we were left to ourselves to discover what is good ; though we still retain a desire of good, when we have made out what it con- sists in. They who disbelieve in virtue, because man has never been found perfect, might as reasonably deny the sun, because it is not always noon. Two persons can hardly set up their booths in the same 20 GUESSES AT TRUTH. quarter of Vanity Fair, without interfering with, and therefore disliking each other. b. Fickleness in women of the world is the fault most likely to result from their condition in society. The knowing both what weaknesses are the most severely condemned, and what good qualities the most highly prized, in the female character, by our sex as well as their own, must needs render them desirous of pleasing generally, to the exclusion, so far as Nature will permit, of strong and lasting affection for individuals. Well ! we deserve no better of them. After all, too, the flame is only smothered by society, not extinguisht. Give it free air, and it will blaze. The following sentence is translated from D'Alembert by Dugald Stewart : " The truth is, that no relation whatever can be discovered between a sensation in the mind, and the object by which it is occasioned, or at least to which Ave refer it : it does not appear possible to trace, by dint of reasoning, any practicable passage from the one to the other" If this be so, if there be no necessary connection between the reception of an object into the senses, and its impression on the mind, what ground have we for supposing the organs of sense to be more than machinery for the uses of the body? The body may indeed be said to see through the eye : but how, — if we can trace no nearer connection between the mind and an object painted on the retina, than between the mind and the object itself, — how can it be asserted, that the mind needs the eye to see with ? Most idle, then, are all disquisitions on the intermediate state, founded on the assumption that the. soul, when apart from the body, has no perceptions. Waller's couplet, The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new lights through chinks that time has made, may be, perhaps is, no less true in fact, than pretty in fancy. Spirits may acquire new modes of communication on losing GUESSES AT TRUTH. 21 their mouths and ears, just as a bird gets its feathers on burst- ing from the shell. Our own experience furnishes a similar analogy. As the unborn infant possesses dormant senses, which it puts forth on coming into this world, in like manner our still embryo soul may perhaps have latent senses, — living inlets shall I call them, or capacities of spiritual vision and communion? — to be exercised hereafter for its improvement and delight, when it issues from its present womb, the body. But here a dreadful supposition crosses me. What if sin, which so enfeebles the understanding, and dulls the conscience, should also clog and ultimately stifle these undevelopt powers and faculties, so as to render spiritual communion after death impossible to the wicked ? What if the imbruted soul make its own prison, shut itself up from God, and exclude everything but the memory of its crimes, evil desires " baying body," and the dread of intolerable, unavoidable, momentarily approaching punishment ? At least it is debarred from repentance : this one thought is terrible enough. In Bacon's noble estimate of the dignity of knowledge, in the first book of the Advancement of Learning, he observes that, " in the election of those instruments, which it pleased God to use for the plantation of the faith, notwithstanding that at the first He did employ persons altogether unlearned, other- wise than by inspiration, more evidently to declare His imme- diate working, and to abase all human wisdom or knowledge, yet nevertheless that counsel of His was no sooner performed, but in the next vicissitude and succession He did send His divine truth into the world waited on with other learnings, as with servants or handmaids : for so we see St. Paul, who was the only learned amongst the Apostles, had his pen most used in the Scriptures of the New Testament." From this remark let me draw a couple of corollaries : first, that such a man, as well from his station, as from his acuteness, and the natural pride of a powerful and cultivated intellect, was the last person to become the dupe of credulous enthusi- asts ; especially when they were lowborn and illiterate. And 22 GUESSES AT TRUTH. secondly, that from this appointment we may draw an inference in favour of a learned ministry. If some of the Apostles had no other human instructor than the best Master that ever lived, Jesus Christ; the one most immediately and supernaturally called by Him to preach the Gospel was full of sacred and profane learning. It was a practice worthy of our worthy ancestors, to fill their houses at Christmas with their relations and friends ; that, when Nature was frozen and dreary out of doors, something might be found within doors " to keep the pulses of their hearts in proper motion." The custom however is only appropriate among people who happen to have hearts. It is bad taste to retain it in these days, when everybody worth hanging oublie sa mere, Et par bon ton se deTend d'etre pere. Most people, it is evident, have life granted to them for their own sake : but not a few seem sent into the world chiefly for the sake of others. How many infants every year come and go like apparitions ! This remark too, if true in any degree, holds good much further. A critic should be a pair of snuffers. He is oftener an extinguisher; and not seldom a thief. u. The intellect of the wise is like glass : it admits the light of heaven, and reflects it. They who have to educate children, should keep in mind that boys are to become men, and that girls are to become women. The neglect of this momentous consideration gives us a race of moral hermaphrodites. a. Poetry is to philosophy what the sabbath is to the rest of the week. GUESSES AT TKUTH. 23 The ideal incentives to virtuous energy are a sort of moon to the moral world. Their borrowed light is but a dimmer sub- stitute for the lifegiving rays of religion ; replacing those rays, when hidden or obscured, and evidencing their existence, when they are unseen in the heavens. To exclaim then, during the blaze of devotional enthusiasm, against the beauty and usefulness of such auxiliary motives, is fond. To shut the eye against their luminous aid, when re- ligion does not enlighten our path, is lunatic. To understand their comparative worthlessness, feel their positive value, and turn them, as occasion arises, to account, is the part of the truly wise. I have called these incentives a sort of moon. Had the image occurred to one of those old writers, who took such pleasure in tracing out recondite analogies, he would scarcely have omitted to remark, that, in the conjunctions of these two imaginary bodies, the moral moon is never eclipst, except at the full, nor ever eclipses, but when it is in the wane. " Love," says our greatest living prose-writer,* in one of his wisest and happiest moods, " is a secondary passion in those who love most, a primary in those who love least. He who is inspired by it in a great degree, is inspired by honour in a greater." So it is with Honour and Religion. Before me were the two Monte Cavallo statues, towering gigantically above the pygmies of the present day, and looking like Titans in the act of threatening heaven. Over my head the stars were just beginning to look out, and might have been taken for guardian angels keeping watch over the temples be- low. Behind, and on my left, were palaces ; on my right, gardens, and hills beyond, with the orange tints of sunset over them still glowing in the distance. Within a stone's throw of * Landor, in his beautiful Conversation between Roger Ascham and Lady- Jane Gray. The passage is all the better for its accidental coincidence with those noble lines by Lovelace : I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more. 24 GUESSES AT TRUTH. me, in the midst of objects thus glorious in themselves, and thus in harmony with each other, was stuck an unplaned post, on which glimmered a paper lantern. Such is Rome. Many men, however ambitious to be great in great things, have been well content to be little in little things. a. Jupiter-Scapin was a happy name, witty and appropriate : he however for whom it was invented was one of a large family. By the vulgar he is admired, and has been almost worshipt, as the hero of Marengo, of Austerlitz, of Jena, and of how many other fields of carnage : but go and read his will in Doctors' Commons ; and you will find that this man-slayer on a huge and grand scale could also relish murder on the meanest scale, and that in his solitude in St. Helena such ma- lignity festered in his heart, as made him leave a legacy of ten thousand franks to a man for having attempted to assassinate the true hero, who conquered him at Waterloo. u. So great enormities have been committed by privateers, within the memory of living men, — as may be seen in the Journal of Alexander Davidson, in the Edinburgh Annual Reg- ister, vol. iii. p. 2, — that it seems advisable that, on board every such ship, except perhaps in the four seas, there should be a superintending national officer, to keep a public journal, and to prevent crimes. If the officer die on the cruise, the privateer should be bound to make the nearest friendly port, unless she meet with a national ship-of-war that can spare her a superintendent out of its crew. A privateer not con- forming to the regulations on these points should be deemed a pirate. Unless some such provisions are adopted, the States now springing up in America will one day send forth a swarm of piratical privateers, cruel as the Buccaneers, and more unprin- cipled. A statesman may do much for commerce, most by leaving it alone. A river never flows so smoothly, as when it follows GUESSES AT TRUTH. 25 its own course, without either aid or check. Let it make its own bed : it will do so better than you can. A. Anguish is so alien to man's spirit, that nothing is more difficult to will than contrition. Therefore God is good enough to afflict us, that our hearts, being brought low enough to feed on sorrow, may the more easily sorrow for sin unto repentance. In most ruins we see what Time has spared. Ancient Rome appears to have defied him ; and its remains are the limbs which he has rent and scattered in the struggle. t. How melancholy are all memorials ! t. Were we merely the creatures of outward impulses, what would faces of joy be but so many glaciers, on which the seem-- ing smile of happiness at sunrise is only a flinging back of the rays they appear to be greeting, from frozen and impassive heads ? It is with flowers, as with moral qualities : the bright are sometimes poisonous ; but, I believe, never the sweet. Picturesqueness is that quality in objects which fits them for making a good picture ; and it refers to the appearances of things in form and color, more than to their accidental associa- tions. Rembrandt would have been right in painting turbans and Spanish cloaks, though the Cid had been a scrivener, Cortez had sold sugar, and Mahomet had been notorious for setting up a drug-shop instead of a religion. It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is slower and harder than loss, in all things good : but, in all things bad, getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of. Would you cure or kill an evil prejudice ? Manage it as you would a pulling horse, tickle it as you would a trout, 2 26 GUESSES AT TRUTH. treat it as you would the most headstrong thing in the world, and the readiest to take alarm, the likeliest to slip through your fingers at the moment you think you have got it safe, and are just about to make an end of it. Three reasons occur to me for thinking bodily sins more curable than mental ones. In the first place, they are more easily ascertained to be sins ; since they clothe themselves in outward acts, which admit neither of denial, nor, except in way of excuse, of self-decep- tion. Nobody, the morning after he has been drunk, can be ignorant that he went to bed not sober : his nerves and stom- ach assure him of the fact. But the same man might be long in finding out that he thinks more highly of himself than he ought to think, from having no palpable standard to convince him of it Secondly, bodily sins do not so immediately affect the reason, but that we still possess an uncorrupted judge within us, to discover and proclaim their criminality. "Whereas mental sins corrupt the faculty appointed to determine on their guilt, and darken the light which should show their darkness. Moreover, bodily sins must be connected with certain times and places. Consequently, by a new arrangement of hours, and by abstaining, so far as may be, from the places which have ministered opportunities to a bodily vice, a man may in some degree disable himself for committing it. This in most vices of the kind is easy, in sloth not ; which is therefore the most dangerous of them, or at least the hardest to be cured. The mind, on the other hand, is its own place, and does not depend on contingencies of season and situation for the power of indulging its follies or its passions. Still it must be remembered that bodily sins breed mental ones, thus, after they are stifled or extinct, leaving an evil and vivacious brood behind them. " Nothing grows weak with age (says South, vol. ii. p. 47), but that which will at length die with age ; which sin never does. The longer the blot continues, the deeper it sinks. Vice, in retreating from the practice of GUESSES AT TRUTH. 27 men, retires into their fancy," . . . and from that stronghold what shall drive it ? 'Twas a night clear and cloudless, and the sight, Swifter than heaven-commissioned cherubim, Soaring above the moon, glancing beyond The stars, was lost in heaven's abysmal blue. There are things the knowledge of which proves their reve- lation. The mind can no more penetrate into the secrets of heaven, than the eye can force a way through the clouds. It is only when they are withdrawn by a mightier hand, that the sight can rise beyond the moon, and, ascending to the stars, repose on the unfathomable ether, — that emblem of omnipres- ent Deity, which, everywhere enfolding and supporting man, yet baffles his senses, and is unperceived, except when he looks upward and contemplates it above him. It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what most mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own impor- tance, which would render us insupportable through life. Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him, before he is old enough to know the sense of it ! A man who strives earnestly and perseveringly to convince others, at least convinces us that he is convinced himself, r. It has been objected to the Reformers, that they dwelt too much on the corruption of our nature. But surely, if our strength is to be perfected, it can only be " in weakness." He who feels his fall from Paradise the most sorely, will be the most grateful for the offer of returning thither on the wings of the Redeemer's love. Written on Whitsunday. Who has not seen the sun on a fine spring morning pouring his rays through a transparent white cloud, filling all places 28 GUESSES AT TRUTH. with the purity of his presence, and kindling the birds into joy and song ? Such, I conceive, would be the constant effects of the Holy Spirit on the soul, were there no evil in the world. As it is, the moral sun, like the natural, though "it always makes a day," is often clouded over. It is only under a combination of peculiarly happy circumstances, that the heart suffers this sweet violence perceptibly, and feels and enjoys the ecstasy of being borne along by overpowering, unresisted influxes of good. To most, I fear, this happens only during the spring of life : but some hearts keep young, even at eighty. After listening to very fine music, it appears one of the hardest problems, how the delights of heaven can be so attem- pered to our perceptions, as to become endurable for their pain. A speech, being a matter of adaptation, and having to win opinions, should contain a little for the few, and a great deal for the many. Burke hurt his oratory by neglecting the latter half of this rule, as Sheridan must have spoilt his by his care- lessness about the former. But the many always carry it for the moment against the few ; and though Burke was allowed to be the greater man, Sheridan drew most hearers. " I am convinced that jokes are often accidental. A man, in the course of conversation, throws out a remark at random, and is as much surprised as any of the company, on hearing it, to find it witty." For the substance of this observation I am indebted to one of the pleasantest men I ever knew, who was doubtless giving the results of his own experience. He might have carried his remark some steps further, with ease and profit. It would have done our pride no harm to be reminded, how few of our best and wisest, and even of our newest thoughts, do really and wholly originate in ourselves, how few of them are voluntary, or at least intentional. Take away all that has been suggested or improved by the hints and remarks of others, all that has fallen from us accidentally, all that has been struck out by col- GUESSES AT TEUTH. 29 lision, all that has been prompted by a sudden impulse, or has occurred to us when least looking for it ; and the remainder, which alone can be claimed as the fruit of our thought and study, will in every man form a small portion of his store, and in most men will be little worth preserving. We can no more make thoughts than seeds. How absurd then for a man to call himself a poet, or maker! The ablest writer is a gardener first, and then a cook. His tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts, and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and so that they may have a relish. To recur to my friend's remark : let me strengthen it with the authority of one of the wittiest men that ever lived ; who, if any man, might assuredly have boasted that his wit was not a foundling, "As the repute of wisdom, (says South, Sermon viii.), so that of wit also is very casual. Sometimes a lucky saying or a pertinent reply has procured an esteem of wit to persons otherwise very shallow ; so that, if such a one should have the ill hap to strike a man dead with a smart saying, it ought in all reason and conscience to be judged but a chance- medley. Nay, even when there is a real stock of wit, yet the wittiest sayings and sentences will be found in a great measure the issues of chance, and nothing else but so many lucky hits of a roving fancy. For consult the acutest poets and speak- ers ; and they will confess that their quickest and most admired conceptions were such as darted into their minds like sudden flashes of lightning, they knew not how nor whence ; and not by any certain consequence or dependence of one thought upon another." Were further confirmation needed, the poet of our age has been heard to declare, that once in his life he fancied he had hit upon an original thought, but that after a while he met with it in so common an author as Boyle. Whoever wishes to see an emblem of political unions and enmities, should walk, when the sun shines, in a shrubbery. So long as the air is quite still, the shadows combine to form 30 GUESSES AT TRUTH. a pretty trellice-work, which looks as if it would be lasting. But the wind is perverse enough to blow ; and then to pieces goes the trellice-work in an instant ; and the shadows, which before were so quiet and distinct, cross and intermingle con- fusedly. It seems impossible they should ever re-unite: yet, the moment the wind subsides, they dovetail into each other as closely as before. Before I traveled, I had no notion that mountain scenery was so unreal. Beside the strangeness of finding common objects on new levels, and hence in new points of view, you have only to get into a retired nook, and you hear water, and catch a glimpse of the tops of trees, but see nothing distinctly except the corner of rock where you are standing. You are surrounded by a number of well-known effects, so completely severed to the eye and imagination from their equally well- known and usually accompanying causes, that you cannot tell what to make of them. All things here are strange ! Rocks scarred like rough-hewn wood ! Ice brown as sand Wet by the tide, and cleft, with depths between, And streams outgushing from its frozen feet ! Snow-bridges arching over headlong torrents ! And then the sightless sounds, and noiseless motions, Which hover round us ! I should dream I dreamt, But for those looks of kindness still unchanged. these mob torrents ! here, with show of fury, Rushing submissive to an arch of snow, That frailest fancy-work of Nature's idlesse ; There threatening rocks, and rending ancient firs, The sovereins of the wood, yet overwhelmed, And dasht to the earth with hooting violence. Many actions, like the Rhone, have two sources, one pure, the other impure. It is with great men as with high mountains. They oppress us with awe when we stand under them : they disappoint our GUESSES AT TRUTH. 31 insatiable imaginations when we are nigh, but not quite close to them : and then, the further we recede from them, the more astonishing they appear ; until their bases being concealed by intervening objects, they at one moment seem miraculously lifted above the earth, and the next strike our fancies as let down from heaven. The apparent and the real progress of human affairs are both well illustrated in a waterfall ; where the same noisy, bub- bling eddies continue for months and years, though the water which froths in them changes every moment. But as every drop in its passage tends to loosen and detach some particle of the channel, the stream is working a change all the time in the appearance of the fall, by altering its bed, and so subjecting the river during its descent to a new set of percussions and rever- berations. And what, when at last effected, is the consequence of this change? The foam breaks into shapes somewhat different; but the noise, the bubbling, and the. eddies are just as violent as before. A little management may often evade resistance, which a vast force might vainly strive to overcome. a. Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and changeable : they even dance : yet God has made them part of the oak. In so doing He has given us a lesson not to deny the stout-heartedness within, because we see the lightsomeness without. How disproportionate are men's projects and means! To raise a single church to a single Apostle, the monuments of antiquity were ransackt, and forgiveness of sins was doled out at a price. Yet its principal gate has been left unfinisht ; and its holy of holies is encrusted with stucco. On entering St. Peter's, my first impulse was to throw my- 32 GUESSES AT TRUTH. self on my knees ; and, but for the fear of being observed by my companions, I must have bowed my face to the ground, and kist the pavement. I moved slowly up the nave, opprest by my own littleness ; and when at last I reacht the brazen canopy, and my spirit sank within me beneath the sublimity of the dome, I felt that, as the ancient Romans could not condemn Manlius within sight of the Capitol, so it would be impossible for an Italian of the present day to renounce Popery under the dome of St. Peter's. The impressions produced by an object which addresses itself to the understanding and the heart by a number of conflicting associations, will probably vary much, even in the same mind, under different aspects of moral light and shade : nor do I believe that there is any real discrepancy between my own feelings and my brother's, when I say that the hollowness and fraud of Popery were never brought before my mind more forcibly, nay, glaringly, than beneath the dome of St. Peter's. One of my first visits to that gorgeous cathedral was on Christ- masday 1832. I expected to see a sight agreeing, at least in outward appearance, with the title of Catholic, which the Church of Rome claims as exclusively her own, — to find a multitude of persons thronging in from the city and from the neighboring country to attend the celebration of high mass on that blessed festival by him whom they were taught to revere as Christ's vicegerent upon earth. But instead of this a row of soldiers was drawn up along each side of the nave, and kept everybody at a distance during the whole service, except the few who were privileged by station or favour to enter within the lines. Beside the altar, under the dome, seats had been erected for persons of rank or wealth, who were mainly forein- ers, and consequently in great part English or German Prot- estants. Thus the whole proceeding acquired the character, not of a religious ceremony, in which the congregation was to join, but of a theatrical exhibition before strangers, regarded, for the most part, as heretics, and many of whom came merely out of curiosity to see the show. After a while the Pope was GUESSES AT TRUTH. 33 brought in, borne on a raised seat or palanquin, with splendid robes and plumes and fans and other paraphernalia. He cele- brated mass, the persons who ought to have formed the congre- gation, a very scanty one at the utmost, being prevented from approaching by the barrier of troops : and when the rite was over, the chief performer, or chief victim, in this miserable pageant was carried out again with the same pomp. The thought of the moral debasement thus inflicted on a man, who personally might be honest and pious, and of his utter inability to struggle against such a crushing system, so opprest me as I walkt away, that when, in mounting the steps before the Trinita, my eyes fell on a poor beggar who used to sit there, and who had neither hands nor feet, picking up the alms thrown to him with his mouth, I could not refrain from ex- claiming, How infinitely rather would I be that poor cripple;, than Pope ! Can the effect of the ceremonies in St. Peter's on intelligent Italians in these days be very different ? I doubt it ; whatever might be their feelings when they merely saw the empty shell of the building. I have known men indeed, whom I esteem and honour, and who have regarded Rome as a solemn and majestic witness of what they have deemed the Truth. But to me, though, from the indescribable beauty and grandeur of many of the views, the intense interest of its Heathen and Christian recollections, and its inexhaustible stores of ancient and modern art y the three months I spent there were daily teeming with fresh sources of delight, and have left a love such as I never felt for any other city, yet when I thought of Rome in connexion with the religion, of which it is the metropolis, it seemed to me of all places the last where a man with his eyes open could be converted to Romanism. In the Tyrol, I could have understood how a person living amongst its noble and devout inhabitants might have been led to embrace their faith, but not at Rome. The vision of the Romish Church, and of its action upon the people, which was there graven on my mind, accords with that implied in the answer of an ingenious English painter, whom I askt, how he could bring himself to leave 2* c 34: GUESSES AT TKUTH. Rome, after living so many years there. It was indeed very painful, he replied, to tear myself away from so much exquisite beauty : but, as my children grew up, it became absolutely neces- sary ; for I found it utterly impossible to give them a notion of truth at Rome. The terrible curse, which is represented in the words of the ancient satirist, — Quid Romae faciam I mentiri nescio, — seems still to cleave to the fateful city. u. The germ of idolatry is contained in the proneness of man's feelings and imagination to take their impressions from out- ward objects, rather than from the dictates of reason ; under the controll of which they can scarcely be brought without a great impairing of their energies. It may possibly have been in part from a merciful indulgence to this tendency of our nature, that God vouchsafed to shew Himself in the flesh. At least one may discern traces which seem to favor such a belief, both in the Jewish scheme and in the Christian. In both God revealed Himself palpably to the outward senses of His people : in both He addrest Himself personally by acts of loving-kindness to their affections. It is not merely for being redeemed, that we are called on to feel thankful ; but for being redeemed by the blood of the God-man Jesus Christ, which He poured out for us upon the Cross. So it was not simply as God, that Jehovah was to be worshipt by the Jews ; but as the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the house of bondage, whose voice they had heard and lived, who had chosen them to be His people, and had given them His laws, and a land flowing with milk and honey. The last sentence has suggested a query of some importance. Out of the house of bondage. What says the advocate of co- lonial slavery to this ? That the bondage was no evil ? that the deliverance of a people from personal slavery was not a work befitting God's right hand ? Or will he tell us that the cases differ ? that the animal wants of the Israelites were ill attended to ? that they were ill fed ? This at least will not serve his purpose : for the fleshpots of Egypt are proverbial. What will serve it, I leave him to discover ; only recommending him to GUESSES AT TSUTH. 35 beware of relying much on the order to expose the Hebrew- children. If he does, it will give way under him. Meanwhile to those religious men who are labouring for the emancipation of the Negroes, amid the various doubts and difficulties with which every great political measure is beset, it must needs be an inspiring thought, that to rescue a race of men from personal slavery, and raise them to the rank and self-respect of inde- pendent beings, is, in the strictest sense of the word, a god-like task ; inasmuch as it is a task which, God's Book tells us, God Himself has accomplisht. But these things, as Paul says, ex- pressly speaking of the Pentateuch, happened for examples, and were written for our admonition. Often would the lad Watch with sad fixedness the summer sun In bloodred blaze sink hero-like to rest. Then, to set like thee ! but 7, alas ! Am weak, a poor, unheeded shepherd boy.* 'Twas that alas undid him. His ambition, Once the vague instinct of his nobleness, Thus tempered in the glowing furnace-heat Of lone repinings and aye-present aims, Brightened to hope and hardened to resolve. To hope ! What hope is that whose clearest ray- Is drencht with mother's tears? what that resolve, Whose strength is crime, whose instrument is death ? There is something melancholy and painful in the entire abandonment of any institution designed for good. It is too plain a confession of intellectual weakness, too manifest a re- ceding before the brute power of outward things. Any one can amputate : the difficulty and the object is to restore. To reanimate lifeless forms, — to catch their departed spirit, and embody it in another shape, — in the room of institutions grown obsolete, to substitute such new ones as will mould, sway, and propell the existing mass of thought and character, * Since these lines were written, a fine passage, expressing the feelings with which an ambitious lad sits watching the setting sun, has been pointed out to me in Schiller's Bobbers. 36 GUESSES AT TRUTH. and thus do for the present age, what the old in their vigour did for the past, — these are things worth living a politician's life for, with all its labours and disgusts. Did that alone suffice who would live any other ? But to accomplish these things, the most dextrous mastery of the art is requisite, guided by the brightest illuminations of the science : and where is the man with both these, when so few have either ? Quicquid credam valde credo, must be the motto of every true poet. His belief is of the heart, not of the head, and springs from himself much more than from the object. It is curious that we express personality and unity by the same symbol. Is there any country in which polygamy is more frequent than in England? In some cases the mistress has been so much a wife, it only remains for the wife to be a mistress. Yet, strictly speaking, it is just as impossible for any but a wife to be a wife, as for any but a wife to be a mother. And wisdom cries, through the lips of a great French philosopher, '• N'en croyez pas les romans : il faut etre epouse pour etre mere." Bonald, Pensees, p. 97. Xerxes promist a great reward to the inventer of a new pleasure. What would he not promise in our days to the in- venter of a new incident ? Fancy and Chance have long since come to an end, the one of its combinations, the other of its legerdemain. Now the huge book of faery-land lies closed ; And those strong brazen clasps will yield no more. But since the fictitious sources of poetry are thus as it were drunk up, is poetry to fail with them ? If not, from whence is it to be supplied ? From the inexhaustible springs of truth GUESSES AT TRUTH. 37 and feeling, which are ever gurgling and boiling up in the caverns of the human heart. It is an uncharitable errour to ascribe the delight, with which unpoetical persons often speak of a mountain-tour, to affecta- tion. The delight is as real as mutton and beef, with which it has a closer connexion than the travelers themselves sus- pect, — arising in great measure from the good effects of moun- tain air, regular exercise, and wholesome diet, upon the spirits. Tris is sensual indeed, though not improperly so : but it is no con ession to the materialist. I do not deny that my neighbour has a soul, by referring a particular pleasure in him to the body. Poetry should be an alterative : modern playwrights have converted it into a sedative ; which they administer in such unseasonable quantities, that, like an overdose of opium, it makes one sick. Time is no agent, as some people appear to think, that it should accomplish anything of itself. Looking at a heap of stones for a thousand years will do no more toward buildino- a house of them, than looking at them for a moment. For Time, when applied to works of any kind, being only a succession of relevant acts, each furthering the work, it is clear that even an infinite succession of irrelevant and therefore inefficient acts would no more achieve or forward the completion, than an infinite number of jumps on the same spot would advance a man toward his journey's end. There is a motion without progress in time as well as in space ; where a thing often re- mains stationary, which appears to us to recede, while we are leaving it behind. A sort of ostracism is continually going on against the best, both of men and measures. Hence the good are fain to pur- chase the acquiescence of the bad, by contenting themselves with the second, third, or even fourth best, according as they can make their bargain. 38 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Courage, when it is not heroic self-sacrifice, is sometimes a modification, and sometimes a result of faith. How vast a field then is opened to man, by establishing faith and its modi- fications upon the power and truth of God ! Had this great Gospel virtue (which, as the New Testament philosophically affirms, has power to remove mountains) been really and ex- tensively operative, what highth or perfection might we not have reacht ? As the apparent impossibilities, which check man's exertions, vanisht, his views would have enlarged in propor- tion : so that, considering how the removal of a single obstacle will often disclose unimagined paths, and open the way to un- dreamt of advances, our wishes might perhaps afford a surer measure even than our hopes, for calculating the progress of man under the impulse of this master principle. Who, twenty years ago, notwithstanding the Vicar of Wakefield, thought that practicable, which Mrs. Fry has shewn to be almost easy? From a narrow notion of human duty, men imagine that the devout and social affections are the only qualities stunted by want of faith. Were it so, we should not have to deplore that narrow sphere of knowledge, that dearth of heroic enterprise, that scarcity of landmarks and pinnacles in virtue, for which cowardly man has to thank his distrust of what he can accom- plish, God assisting. We could in no wise have had more than one discoverer of America ; but we should then have been blest with many Columbuses. So Bacon teaches in his Essay on Atheism : " Take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on, when he finds himself maintained by a man, who to him is instead of a god, or melior natura ; which courage is manifestly such, as that creature, without that confidence of a better nature than his own, could never attain. So man, when he resteth and assureth himself upon divine protection and favour, gathereth a force and faith, which human nature in itself could not obtain. Therefore, as atheism is in all respects hateful, so it is especially in this, that it destroys magnanimity, and depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty. " GUESSES AT TKUTH. 39 But I may be told perhaps that, although this is spoken most truly against atheism, no such thing as atheism is to be found now ; and I may be askt, Who are atheists ? I answer, with sorrow and awe, Practically every mjxn is an atheist, who lives without God in the world. Friendship is Love, without either flowers or veil. Juliet's flow of feeling is a proof of her purity. As oftentimes, when walking in a wood near sunset, though the sun himself be hid by the highth and bushiness of the trees around, yet we know that he is still above the horizon, from seeing his beams in the open glades before us, illumining a thousand leaves, the several brightnesses of which are so many evidences of his presence ; thus it is with the Holy Spirit. He works in secret ; but his work is manifest in the lives of all true Christians. Lamps so heavenly must have been lit from on high. As the Epicureans had a Deism without a God, so the Uni- tarians have a Christianity without a Christ, and a Jesus but no Saviour. Christian prudence passes for a want of worldly courage; just as Christian courage is taken for a want of worldly prudence. But the two qualities are easily reconciled. When we have outward circumstances to contend with, what need we fear, God being with us ? When we have sin and temptation to contend with°what should we not fear? God leaving our defense to our own hearts, which at the first attack surrender to the en- emy, and go over at the first solicitation. Of Christian courage I have just spoken. On Christian pru- dence it is well said, that he who loves danger shall perish by it. " He who will fight the devil at his own weapon, must not won- der if he finds him an overmatch." South, Sermon lxv. 40 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Mark how the moon athwart yon snowy waste An instant glares on us, then hides her head, Curtained in thickest clouds, while half her orb Hangs on the horizon like an urn of fire. That too diminishes, drawn up toward heaven By some invisible hand: and now 'tis gone: And nought remains to man, but anxious thoughts, Why one so beautiful should frown on him, With painful longings for a gift resumed, And the aching sense that something has been lost. Li?;ht will blind a man, sooner than darkness. Are we then to pray that we may be left in darkness? O no ! but beware, ye who walk in light, lest ye turn your light into a curse. a. Plan for the Alleviation of the Poor-rates, written in 1826. I entreat every one who does not see the grievous evil of the Poorlaws, as now administered, or who doubts the necessity of applying some strong remedy, to read the article on those laws in the 66th number of the Quarterly Review. It is written professedly in their defense: yet, unless with Malachi Mala- growther I called them a cancer, I could say nothing severer than is there said against their present administration, and its effects and tendencies ; which the writer refers to the act passed in 1795, " enabling overseers to relieve poor persons at their own homes" For nearly a century before, the Poor-rates had fluctuated little. In the thirty-one years since, they have risen from two to six millions ; and if no measures are taken to stop the evil, they must still go on increasing. " Yet (as the Reviewer says) the direct savings which would accrue from a better sys- tem of supporting the poor, are not worth consideration, when contrasted with the indirect advantages, from the melioration of the character and habits of the agricultural labourer." Almost every man in England is affected by this evil system ; almost every man, except the farmers, who are the loudest in their complaints, is directly injured by it ; the poor most. Let them then, to use their own phrase, know the rights of the matter. Shew them how great, how important a part of the system, as it now exists, is quite new. Appeal to their own ex- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 41 perience, whether it is not most pernicious. Half the difficulty which impedes an alteration of the Poorlaws, will be at an end. The repeal of the Act of 1795 may do a good deal, especially for the payers of Poor-rates. But I am disposed to go much further ; not from hard-heartedness, or a disregard for the hap- piness and welfare of the honest and industrious poor of this land ; but from a belief that, after a few years, when the evil effects of the present system are worn out of the character and habits of the English labourer, his condition would be improved by a complete change in our system of legal charity. Old age is the only period of a poor man's life, when, if hon- est and industrious, he would not be sorry to owe his regular support to any hands except his own. Now in old age his comforts would be augmented, and, what is of still more conse- quence to him, his respectability would be increast, — he would be a richer man, a more independent man, a man of greater weight in the village, — from the adoption of some regulations of this sort. Let a fund be establisht for the benefit of the poor, to be called the National Poor-fund. Out of this fund, every labourer (pay- ing the sum of weekly, from the time he is sixteen till he is ) shall at the age of sixty-five be entitled to re- ceive the third of a hale labourer's average wages. That third at the end of four years is to be doubled ; and at the end of eight years tripled. Thus at seventy-three the labourer, if he live so long, will be entitled of right to receive the full amount of a healthy labourer's wages. The poor of large towns and manufacturers, I conceive, are shorter-lived than peasants. If so, they should be entitled to the benefits of the National Poor-fund earlier. The trifle to be paid weekly both by them and by the agricultural labourers should be less, perhaps considerably less, than what would be demanded by an Insurance-office guaranteeing the same pro- spective advantages. Occasional distress may safely be left to private charity. Consequently there need not be any temporary relief; nor 42 GUESSES AT TRUTH. should there, as that would reopen a door to all the present evils. There should also be few poor-houses. Orphans, and occasionally the aged, in country parishes might be boarded out, (as is, or was, the custom at Lyons with the foundlings, who, instead of being reared in the hospital, were put out to nurse,) due care being taken to place the orphans with cottagers of good repute. But a subscriber to the fund, if disabled by an accident, might at any age claim relief from it apportioned to his maimedness. Persons who had not contributed to the fund in their youth, would receive no relief from it in old age. Contributions for less than years should be forfeited ; but every man, pay- ing his dues for that number of years, and then discontinuing his contribution, should be entitled to relief proportionate. Whether he should begin to receive at sixty-five, only receiving less weekly, or should begin to receive aid later, is a question I am not prepared to answer. Perhaps the latter would be the better plan in most cases. Of women I say nothing : but it would be easy to form a liberal scale, — and liberal it should be, — for them. Only I would allow contributors, who die without benefiting by the fund, to bequeathe to women who are, or to female infants provided they become, contributors, the amount of one year's contribution for every during which the testator may have contributed ; such amount being carried to the account of the legatee, exactly as if she had paid it herself. To increase this Poor-fund, either a parliamentary grant should be voted yearly, or, — what would be far better, and should therefore be tried in the first instance, — the rich should come forward as honorary subscribers. Nay, every one without exception should belong to it, either as subscriber or contribu- tor. It is the littles of the little that make the mickle. Of the contributors I have spoken already. For subscribers the following yearly proportion, or something like it, would suffice : one pound for all who in any way have sixty pounds a year ; two for all who have a hundred ; and so on. Only there should be a maximum, and that not a large one ; so that in rich GUESSES AT TRUTH. 43 families the wife might subscribe as well as the husband. All persons now liable to be rated should put in a trifle for every child above six or seven years old : this in the case of the wealthy should be as much, or nearly so, as they put in for themselves. Moreover all masters should take care that their servants are subscribers, making them an allowance on purpose. In return for this they should be admitted to relief in old age, as they would now be, on making out a case of necessity. But only bond fide working persons should be entitled to receive of right, as contributors to the fund ; who are carefully to be dis- tinguish^ from the subscribers in aid of it. The Jacobins, in realizing their systems of fraternization, always contrived to be the elder brothers. l. I rise From a perturbed sleep, broken by dreams Of long and desperate conflict hand to hand, Of wounds, and rage, and hard-earned victory, And charging over falling enemies With shouts of joy . . . How quiet is the night ! The trees are motionless; the cloudless blue Sleeps in the firmament; the thoughtful moon, With her attendant train of circling stars, Seems to forget her journey through the heavens, To gaze upon the beauties of the scene. That scene how still ! no truant breeze abroad To mar its quietness. The very brook, So wont to prattle like a merry child, Now creeps with caution o'er its pebbled way, As if afraid to violate the silence. Handsomeness is the more animal excellence, beauty the more imaginative. A handsome Madonna I cannot conceive, and never saw a handsome Venus : but I have seen many a handsome country girl, and a few very handsome ladies. There would not be half the difficulty in doing right, but for the frequent occurrence of cases where the lesser virtues are on the side of wrong. 44 GUESSES AT TEUTH. Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope. Since the generality of persons act from impulse, much more than from principle, men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them. There is an honest unwillingness to pass off another's obser- vations for our own, which makes a man appear pedantic. Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerint ! . . . Immo vivant ! provided they are worthy to live. So may we have the satis- faction of knowing, — what literary incentive can be greater ? — that we too have been permitted to utter sacred words, and to think the thoughts of great minds. The commentator guides and lights us to the altar erected by the author ; but he himself must already have kindled his torch at the flame which burns upon it. And what are Art and Science, if not a running commentary on Nature ? what are poets and philosophers, but torchbearers leading us through the mazes and recesses of God's two majestic temples, the sen- sible and the spiritual world? Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read Nature. Eschylus and Aristotle, Shakspeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses. Do you not, since you have read Wordsworth, feel a fresh and more thoughtful delight, whenever you hear a cuckoo, whenever you see a daisy, when- ever you play with a child ? Have not Thucydides and Machi- avel aided you in discovering the tides of feeling and the currents of passion by which events are borne along the ocean of Time ? Can you not discern something more in man, now that you look at him with eyes purged and unsealed by gazing upon Shakspeare and Dante? From these terrestrial and celestial globes we learn the configuration of the earth and the heavens. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 45 But wheresoever good is done, good is received in return. The law of reciprocation is not confined to the physical system of things : in the career of benevolence and beneficence also every action is followed by a corresponding reaction. Intel- lectual light is not poured from a lantern, leaving the bearer in the shade : it supplies us with the power of beholding and con- templating the luminary it flows from. The more familiar we become with Nature, with the greater veneration and love do we return to the masters by whom we were initiated ; and as they have taught us to understand Nature, Nature in turn teaches us to understand them. " When I have been traveling in Italy (says a lively mod- ern writer), how often have I exclaimed, How like a picture ! I remember once, while watching a glorious sunset from the banks of the Arno, I caught myself saying, This is truly one of Claude's sunsets. Now when I again see one of my favor- ite Grosvenor Claudes, I shall probably exclaim, How natural! how like what I have seen so often on the Arno, or from the Monte Pincio ! " Journal of an Ennuyee, p. 335. The same thing must have happened to most lovers of land- scape-painting. How often in the Netherlands does one see Cuyp's solid, oppressive sunshine ! and Rubenses boundless, objectless plains, which no other painter would have deemed either worldly or susceptible of being transferred from Na- ture's Gallery to Art's ! More than once, in mounting the hill of Fiesole to Landor's beautiful villa, have I stopt with my companion to gaze on that pure, living ether, in which Peru- gino is wont to enshrine his Virgins and Saints, and which till then I had imagined to be a heavenly vision specially vouch- safed to him, such as this world of cloud and mist could not parallel. Many a time too among the Sussex downs have I felt grateful to Copley Fielding for opening my eyes to see beauties and harmonies, which else might have been unheeded, and for breathing ideas into the prospect, whereby " the repose Of earth, sky, sea, and air was vivifjed." Hence we may perceive, why what is called a taste for the picturesque never arises in a country, until it has reacht an 46 GUESSES AT TRUTH. advanced stage of intellectual culture : because an eye for the picturesque can only be formed by looking at pictures ; that is, primarily. In this, as in other cases, by Art are we first led to fix our attention and reflexion more observantly on the beauties of Nature : although, when such attention and reflexion have once become general, they may be excited in such as have never seen a picture. When we are told therefore that the earliest passages to be found in any ancient author, which sa- vour of what we should now call poetical description, are in the Epistles of Pliny, we must not infer from this that Pliny had a livelier and intenser love of Nature than any of the ancient poets. Supposing the remark to be correct, — and I will not stop to enquire how far it is so, — all it would prove is, that Pliny was, as we know him to have been, what we used to call a virtuoso, a picture-fancier, and that people in his day were beginning to look at Nature in the mirror of Art. It is a mistake however to conclude that men are insensible to those beauties, which they are not continually talking about and an- alysing, — that the love of Nature is a new feeling, because the taste for the Picturesque is a modern taste. When the mountaineer descends into the plain, he soon begins to pine with love for his native hills ; and many have been known to fall sick, nay, even to die, of that love. Yet, had he never left them, you would never have heard him prate about them. When I was on the Lake of Zug, which lies bosomed among such grand mountains, the boatman, after telling some stories about Suwarrow's march through the neighbourhood, askt me, Is it true, that he came from a country where there is not a mountain to he seen ? — Yes, I replied : you may go hundreds of miles without coming to one. — That must be beautiful! he exclaimed: das muss schon seynf His exclamation was prompt- ed no doubt by the thought of the difficulties which the moun- tains about him opposed to traffic and agriculture ; though even on his own score he erred, as Mammom is ever wont to do grossly. For those mountains gave him the lake, and attract- ed the strangers, whereby he earned his livelihood. But it is a perverse habit of the Imagination, when there is no call GUESSES AT TKUTH. 47 for action, to dwell on " the ills we have," without thinking of " the others which we know not of." This very man however, had he been transported to the plains he sighed for, — even though they had been as flat as Burnet's Paradise, or the tab- ula rasa which Locke supposed to be the paradisiacal state of the human mind, — would probably have been seized with the homesickness which is so common among his countrymen, as it is also among the Swedes and Norwegians, but which, I believe, is hardly found, except in the natives of a mountain > ftod beautiful country. The noisest streams are the shallowest. It is an old saying, but never out of season ; least of all in an age, the fit symbol of which would not be, like the Ephesiari personification of Na- ture, midtimamma, — for it neither brings forth nor nourishes, — but multilingua. Your amateur will talk by the ell, or, if you wish it, by the mile, about the inexpressible charms of Na- ture: but I never heard that his love had caused him the slightest uneasiness. It is only by the perception of some contrast, that we become conscious of our feelings. The feelings however may exist for centuries, without the consciousness ; and still, when they are mighty, they will overpower Consciousness ; when they are deep, it will be unable to fathom them. Love has indeed been called " loquacious as a vernal bird ; " and with truth ; but his loquacity comes on him mostly in the absence of his beloved. Here too the same illustration holds : the deep stream is not heard, until some obstacle opposes it. But can anybody, when floating down the Ehine, believe that the builders and dwellers in those castles, with which every rock is crested, were blind to all the beauties around them ? Is it quite impossible that they should have felt almost as much as the sentimental tourist, who returns to his parlour in some metropolis, and puffs out the fumes of his admiration through his quill ? Has the moon no existence independent of the halo about her ? Or does the halo even flow from her ? Is it not produced by the dimness and density of the atmosphere through which she has to shine ? Give me the love of the bird that broods over her own nest, 48 GUESSES AT TRUTH. rather than of one that lays her eggs in the nest of another, albeit she warble about parental affection as loudly as Rousseau or Lord Byron. Convents too . . how many of them are situate amid the sublimest and most beautiful scenery! I will only mention two, the great Chartreuse, and the monastery of the Camal- dulans near Naples. The hacknied remark at such places is, yes ! the monks always knew how to pick out the eyes of the land, and to pounce upon its fatness. It is forgotten that, when the convents were built, the country round was mostly either a barren wilderness, or a vast, impenetrable forest, and that, if things are otherwise now, the change is owing to the patient industry of the monks and their dependents, not liable to alter- nations and interruptions, as is the case with other proprietors, but continued without intermission through centuries. Though one is bound however to protest against this stale and vulgar scoff, I know not how we can imagine that the men, who, when half " the world lay before them, were to choose their place of rest," pitcht their homes in spots surrounded by such surpass- ing grandeur and beauty, can have been without all sense for what they saw. Rather, in retiring from the world to worship God in solitude, did they seek out the most glorious and awful chambers in that earthly temple, which also is " not made with hands." Add to this, that in every country, where there are national legends, they are always deeply and vividly imprest with a feeling of the magnificence or the loveliness in the midst of which they have arisen. Indeed, they are often little else than the expression and outpouring of those feelings: and such primitive poetical legends will hardly be found, except in the bosom of a beautiful country, growing up in it, and pendent from it, almost like fruit from a tree. The powerful influence exercised by natural objects in giving shape and life to those forms in which the Imagination embodies the ideas of super- human power, is finely illustrated by Wordsworth in one of the noblest passages of the Excursion: where he casts a glance over the workings of this principle in the mythologies of the GUESSES AT TRUTH. 49 Persians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, and the Greeks; shewing with what plastic power the imaginative love of Na- ture wedded and harmonized the dim conceptions of the mys- teries which lie behind the curtain of the senses, with the objects by which it happened to be surrounded, incarnating the invisible in the visible, and impregnating the visible with the invisible. The same principle is of universal application. You may perceive how it has operated in the traditions of the High- lands, of the Rhine, of Bohemia, of Sweden and Norway, in short of every country v, . re poetry has been indigenous. As the poetry of the Asiatic tions may be termed the poetry of the sun, so the Edda is tht poetry of ice. u. I have been trying to shew, that, though a taste for the picturesque, as the very form of the word picturesque, which betrays its recent origin, implies, is a late growth, a kind of aftermath, in the mind of a people, which cannot arise until a nation has gone through a long process of intellectual culture, nor indeed until after the first crop has been gathered in, still a feeling and love for the beauties of Nature may exist alto- gether independently of that self-conscious, self-analysing taste, and that such a feeling is sure to spring up, wherever there is nourishment for it, in a nation's vernal prime : although there may be a period, between the first crop and the aftermath, when the field looks parent and yellow and bristly, and as if the dew of heaven could not moisten it. When the mind of a people first awakes, it is full of its morning dreams, and holds those dreams to be, as the proverb accounts them, true. A long time passes, — it must encounter and struggle with opposition, — before it acquires anything like a clear, definite self-conscious- ness. For a long time it scarcely regards itself as separate from Nature. It lies in her arms, and feeds at her breast, and looks up into her face, and smiles at her smiles. When it speaks, you rather hear the voice of Nature speaking through it, than any distinct voice of its own. It is like a child, in all whose words and thoughts you may perceive the promptings of its mother. Very probably indeed it may not talk much about 3 d 50 GUESSES AT TRUTH. its love for its mother ; but it will give the strongest proofs of that love, by thinking in all things as its mother thinks, and speaking as its mother speaks, and doing as its mother does. This is the character of poetry in early times. It may be objected that you find no picturesque descriptions in it. That is to say, the poets have not learnt to look at Nature with the eye of a painter, nor to seek for secondary, reflex beauties in natural objects, arising whether from symbolical, or from acci- dental associations. Nor do you see their love of Nature from their talking about nature : for they are not conversant with abstractions; they deal only with persons and things. You may discern that love however by the way in which it is mixt up with the whole substance of their minds, as the glow of health mixes itself up with the whole substance of our bodies, unthought of, it may be, until we are reminded of it by its opposite, but still felt and enjoyed. Of Asiatic poetry it is needless to speak : for that even now has hardly emerged from its nonage, or risen beyond a child's fondness for flowers. But even in Homer, — although in Greek poetry afterward the human element, that which treats of man as being and doing and suffering, predominated more than in the poetry of any other country over the natural, which dwells on the contemplation of the outward world, its forms, its changes, and its influences, — and though the germs of this are to be found in the living energy and definiteness and bodiliness of all Homer's characters, — still what a love of Nature is there in him! What a fresh morning air breathes through those twin firstbirths of Poetry ! what a clear bright sky hangs above those two lofty peaks of Parnassus ! In his own words we may say, that over them vireppdyrj ao-neros al6t]p. Indeed this ao-n-eroy aldfjp may be regarded as the peculiar atmosphere of Greek literature and art, an atmosphere which then first opened and broke upon it. Of all poems the Homeric have the most thoroughly out-of-door character. We stand on the Ionian coast, looking out upon the sea, and beholding it under every variety of hue and form and aspect. And there he too was wont to stand ; there, as Coleridge so melodiously expresses it, he GUESSES AT TRUTH. 51 Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea. Every epithet he gives to a natural object, every image taken from one, has the liveliest truth: and truth is ever the best proof that any one can give of love. Of the poetical descrip- tions of morning composed since the days of Homer, the chief part are little else than expansions and amplifications of his three sweet epithets, qptyipeia, K/joK6Ve7rAos, and pododdicrvKos. Nor can anything be more aptly chosen than his adjuncts and accompaniments: which shews that he was not destitute of what we call the sentimental love of Nature, that love of Nature which discerns a correspondence, and as it were a sympathy, between its appearances and changes, and the vi- cissitudes of human feeling and passion. Chryses, after his entreaties have been denied, walks d^ewi/ iraph diva nokvcpXoLo-ftoio 6a\do-(rr)s, where the murmur of its waves responds to his feel- ings, and stirs him to pour them forth in a prayer to Apollo. In like manner Achilles, when Briseis is taken from him, sits apart by himself, ffiv efji akbs TroKirjs opowv iiii oivoira 7t6vtov. The epithet o'ivona, denoting the dark gloom, perhaps the purple grape-color of the distant sea, while it was dashing and foaming at his feet, brings it into harmony and sympathy with Achilles. A bright, blue sea would have been out of keeping. Or take a couple of similies. When Apollo comes down from Olympus to avenge his insulted priest, he comes wktI eWws. When Thetis rises from the sea to listen to her son's complaint, she rises fjvr ofxix^v- Parallels to these two similies may be found in two of our own greatest poets. Milton says that Pandemo- nium "Rose like an exhalation from the earth." Coleridge's Ancient Mariner tells us that he passes " like Night from land to land." Milton's image is a fine one. Coleridge's appears to me, to adopt an expression which he uses in speaking of Wordsworth's faults, "too great for the subject," a piece of "mental bombast." Be this however as it may, how inferior are they both, in grandeur, in simplicity, in beauty, in grace, to the Homeric! which moreover have better caught the spirit and sentiment of the natural appearances. For Apollo does 52 GUESSES AT TRUTH. come with the power and majesty, and with the terrours of Night ; and the soft waviness of an exhalation is a much fitter image for the rising of the goddess, than for the massiness and hard, stiff outline of a building. In Homer's landscapes, it is true, there is a want, or rather an absence, of those ornamental, picturesque epithets, with which Pope has bedizened his trans- lation. This however only shews that the objects he speaks of " had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed from the eye." Such as they are, he loves them for their own sake. In his vivid, transparent verse, e£e(fiavev iracrai vitomaL Kal jrpcooves aKpoi, Kal vcnrai, — Havra. he t ci'Serai acrrpa. We feel too that he, as he says of his shepherd, yiyr)6e (ppeua at the sight; though no "conscious swain," as Pope styles him, nor thinking of " blessing the useful light," as by a kind of second sight of utilitarianism the bard of Twick- enham is pleased to make him. This distinctness of the Homeric descriptions leads Cicero, in a fine passage of the Tusculan Questions, to contend that he who, though blind, could so represent every object as to enable us to see what he himself could not see, must have derived great pleasure and enjoyment from his inward sight. There is more reason, however, in the witticism of Velleius, that, if any one supposes Homer to have been born blind, he must himself be destitute of every sense. For never was a fable more repugnant to truth, than that of Homer's blindness. It origi- nated, probably, in the identification of the author of the Iliad with the author of the Hymn to Apollo, and was then fostered by the notion that Homer designed to represent himself under the character of Demodocus in the Odyssee. Milton has indeed made a fine use of Homer's blindness : but, looking at it as a fact, one might as reasonably believe that the sun is blind, as that Homer was. x \_^-^ In the Greek poets of the great age, I have already ad- mitted, there is little love of Nature. Man was then become very nearly all-in-all, to whose level the gods themselves were brought down, — not the skeleton man of philosophy, nor the puppet of empirical observation, — but the ideal man of imagi- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 53 native thought, an idea as perfect as it can be, when drawn from no higher source than what lies in man himself. The manifold, dazzling glories of Athens and of Greece filled their minds with the notion of the greatness of human nature : and that greatness they tried to exhibit in its struggles with fate and with the gods. Their characters are mostly statuesque even in this respect, that they have no background. In the Prometheus itself, the wilderness and the other natural horrours are mainly employed, like the chains and wedge, as instruments by which Jupiter tries to intimidate the benefactor of mankind. This, however, is not so much the case with Sophocles; in whose Edipus at Colonics, Ajax, and Philoctetes, the scenery forms an important element, not merely in the imaginative, but even in the dramatic beauty. In after times, when the glory of Greece had faded and sunk, when its political grandeur had decayed, and man was no longer the one engrossing object of admiration, we find a revival of the love of Nature in the pas- toral poetry of the Sicilians. With regard to modern poetry, when we are looking at any question connected with its history, we ought to bear in mind that we did not begin from the beginning, and that, with very few exceptions, we had not to hew our materials out of the quarry, or to devise the groundplan of our edifices, but made use, at least in great measure, of the ruins and substructions of antiquity. Hence, Greece alone affords a type of the natural development of the human mind through its various ages and stages. Owing to this, and perhaps still more to the influence, direct and indirect, of Christianity, we from the first find a far greater body of reflective thought in modern poetry than in ancient. Dante is not, what Homer was, the father of poetry springing in the freshness and simplicity of childhood out of the arms of mother earth : he is rather, like Noah, the father of a second poetical world, to whom he pours out his prophetic song, fraught with the wisdom and the experience of the(old world. Indeed he himself expresses this by representing him- self as wandering on his awful pilgrimage under the guidance of Yirgil. 54 GUESSES AT TRUTH. It would require a long dissertation, illsuited to these pages, to pursue this train of thought through the literature of modern Europe. Let me hasten home, and take a glance at our own poets. The early ones, especially the greatest among them, were intense and devoted lovers of Nature. Chaucer sparkles with the dew of morning. Spenser lies bathed in the sylvan shade. Milton glows with orient light. One might almost fancy that he had gazed himself blind, and had then been raised to the sky, and there stood and waited, like " blind Orion hungering for the morn." So abundantly had he stored his mind with visions of natural beauty, that, when all without became dark, he was still most rich in his inward treasure, and " Ceast not to wander where the Muses haunt Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill." Shakspeare "glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." All nature minis- ters to him, as gladly as a mother to her child. Whether he wishes her to tune her myriad-voiced organ to Romeo's love, or to Miranda's innocence, or to Perdita's simplicity, or to Rosa- lind's playfulness, or to the sports of the Fairies, or to Timon's misanthropy, or to Macbeth's desolating ambition, or to Lear's heart-broken frenzy, — he has only to ask, and she puts on every feeling and every passion with which he desires to invest her. But, when Milton lost his eyes, Poetry lost hers. A time followed, when our poets ceast to commune with Nature, and ceast to love her, and, as there can be no true knowledge with- out love, ceast therefore to know anything about her. Man again became all-in-all, — but not the ideal human nature of Greek poetry, in its altitudes of action and passion. The human nature of our poets in those days was the human nature of what was called the town, with all its pettinesses and hollow- nesses and crookednesses and rottennesses. The great business and struggle of men seemed to be, to outlie, outcheat, outwhore, and outhector each other. Our poets then dwelt in Grub- street, and, to judge from their works, seldom left their garrets, save for the coffeehouse, the playhouse, or the stews. Dry- den wrote a bombastical description of night, from which one GUESSES AT TRUTH. 55 might suppose that he had never seen night, except by candle- light. He talkt of "Nature's self seeming to lie dead," — of " the mountains seeming to nod their drowsy head," — much as Charles the Second used to do at a sermon, — and of » sleeping flowers sweating beneath the nightdews," — which I can only parallel by a translation I once saw of Virgil's Scilicet is superis labor est, "Ay sure, for this the gods laborious sweat." Yet this was extolled by Rymer, a countryman of Shak- speare's, as the finest description of night ever composed : an opinion which Johnson quotes, without expressing any dissent; tellino- us, moreover, that these lines were repeated oftener in his days than almost any others of Dryden s. It is true that, as I have been reminded, Shakspeare also has said of night, " Now o'er the one half world Nature seems dead ; " and doubtless it was from hence that Dryden took what he thought a very grand idea. But as thieves never know or dare to make the right use of their stolen goods, so is it mostly with plagiaries. The verbal likeness only exposes the empty turgidity of Dryden : nor can there be a more striking illustration of Quintilian's saying, Multa jiunt eadem, sed aliter. For observe where Shakspeare uses this expression, and how it exemplifies that unrivaled power of imagination, wherewith, under the impulses of a mighty passion, he fuses every object by its intense radiation, and brings them into harmony with that passion by bathing them in a flood of bright, or sombre, or mellow, or bloodred light. Macbeth, just as he is going to commit the murder, standing on the very brink of hell, and about to plunge into it, sees the reflexion of his own chaotic feelings in all things. Order is turned into disorder; law is suspended ; every natural, every social tie is cracking : he is hurling an innocent man, his guest, his king, into the jaws of death : death is in all his thoughts. To him therefore, w T ith the deepest truth, "o'er the one half world Nature seems dead ; " even as he had just seen the instrument with which the crime was to be perpetrated, "in palpable form" before him, though only " a dagger of the mind, a false creation, Pro- ceeding from the heat-oppressed brain." All the other visions too which haunt him are of the same kind. 56 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Wicked dreams abuse The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate's offerings ; and withered Murder, Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl 's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, With Tarquin's ravishing strides, toward his design Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear The very stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horrour from the time, Which now suits with it. With what wonderful fitness do all the images, all the thoughts, all the words here " suit " with each other, and with Macbeth's terrific purpose! whereas in Dryden's description there is no congruity, but only a string of poor and incongruous conceits, cold and extravagant ; and the occasion is merely that Cortez, who with like incongruity has fallen in love at sight with the daughter of Montezuma, cannot sleep, because " Love denies Rest to his soul, and slumber to his eyes." What then must have been the knowledge of Nature, and what the feeling for it, in an age when the poetical imagery, which the readers and repeaters of poetry were accustomed to associate with night, was Nature's lying dead, mountains nodding their drowsy heads, little birds repeating their songs in sleep, and sleeping flowers sweating beneath the nightdews ? People even learnt to fancy, and to tell one another, that all this was indeed so. As it is the wont of hollow things to echo, whenever a poet hit on a striking image, or a startling expression, it was bandied from mouth to mouth. Thus nodding mountains became a stock phrase. Pope makes Eloisa talk of " lowbrowed rocks that hang nodding o'er the deep : " where however we may suppose the poet to trans- fer the motion of the image in the water to the rocks them- selves. In his Iliad, " Pelion nods his shaggy brows," and "nodding Ilion waits the impending fall:" in his Odyssee, " On Ossa Pelion nods with all his woods." The same piece of falsetto is doubtless to be found scores of times in the verse- writers of the same school. Yet description, and moral satire or declamation, were the richest veins, poor and shallow as they are at best, which were GUESSES AT TEUTH. 57 opened in our serious verse between the death of Milton and the regeneration of English poetry at the close of the last century. Nor was our description of the highest kind, being deficient both in imaginativeness and in reality. It seldom betokened anything like that intimate, personal, thoughtful, du- tiful, and loving communion with Nature, which we perceive in every page of Wordsworth : and owing to this very want of familiarity with the realities, our poets could not deal with them as he does, shaping and moulding and combining and animating them, according to the impulses of his imagination, and calling forth new melodies and harmonies, to fill earth, sea, and sky. They did look at Nature through the spectacles of books. It was as though a number of eyes had been set in a row, like boys playing at leap-frog, each hinder one having to look through all that stood before it, and hence seeing Nature, not as it is in itself but refracted and distorted by a number of more or less turbid media. Ever and anon too some one would be seized with the ambition of surpassing his predecessors, and would try by a feat at leap eye to get before them : in so doing however, from ignorance of the ground, he mostly stumbled and fell. Making an impotent effort after originality, he would attempt to vary the combinations of words in which former writers had spoken of the same objects: but, as one is ever liable to trip, and to violate idiom at least, if not grammar, when speaking a forein language, so by these aliens to Nature, and sojourners in the land of Poetry, images and expressions, which belonged to particular circumstances, or to particular phases of feeling, were often misapplied to circumstances and feelings with which they were wholly incongruous. When the jay spread out his peacock's tail, many of the quills were stick- ing up in the air. But though our descriptive poetry was mostly wanting both in imaginativeness and in reality, this did not disqualify it for being what is called picturesque. For picturesqueness, as it is commonly understood, consists not in looking at things as they really are, and as the sun or Homer look at them, nor in seeing them, as Shakspeare, Milton, Wordsworth see them, transfig- 3* 58 GUESSES AT TRUTH. ured by the plastic power of the Imagination, but rather in seeing them arrayed in the associations of various kinds with which the course of ages has surrounded them. Painting, even historicar'painting, being mute, and poorly supplied with means for expressing new or remote combinations of thought, has ever succeeded best in representing that which is familiar and easy to be understood. It has so scanty a vocabulary to tell its story with, that its story must needs be a short one, and ought to be such that its outline and main features should be discernible at a glance. For it has to speak to the eye, which does not proceed cumulatively and step by step, and the impres- sions of which are rather coinstantaneous than successive. Its business is to give the utmost accuracy, completeness, and del- icacy, to the details it makes use of in expressing such ideas as have already got possession of the popular mind, and form a portion of the popular belief. If it can do this, it can well refrain from seeking to utter new ideas, or going on a voyage of discovery into unknown regions of thought. Its stock in trade may be said to consist chiefly in commonplaces : and it no more tires of or by repeating them, than a rosebush tires of or by pouring forth roses, or than the sun tires of or by shining daily upon the same landscape. In poetry on the other hand commonplaces are worthless. Only so far as a work is original, only so far as a thought is original, either in its form and conception, or at least in its position and combina- tion, can it be said to be truly poetical. Poetry and Painting are indeed sister arts, as they have often been termed. But the sphere of each is totally distinct from that of the other : though they can be made to touch at any point, they cannot be made to coincide ; nor can they be brought to touch in more points than one at the same moment, without some bruise and injury to one or the other. Painting by the outward is to express the inward ; Poetry by the inward is to express the outward : but the main and immediate business of Painting is with the outward, that of Poetry with the inward. That which Painting represents, Poetry describes : that which Poetry rep- resents, Painting can only symbolize. Whenever this is for- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 59 gotten, it is hurtful to both. Fuseli, for instance, was always forgetting the painter, in striving to be a poet. Perhaps the same was sometimes too much the case with Hogarth. As- suredly it is so with Martin, and frequently with Turner, who would have been a still greater painter, had he not been per- petually striving to be more than a painter can be. On the other hand, when Poetry becomes picturesque, it is like Pros- pero casting away his wand, to take up a common sceptre: and it will mostly have to learn that ordinary men are more unmanageable, not only than Ariels, but even than Calibans. In truth this has been one of the misfortunes of our poetry for the last hundred and fifty years, that it has been much more picturesque than poetical. To many of the excellences of painting indeed it has made little pretension. It has no fore- ground ; it has no background : it wants light ; it wants shade : it wants an atmosphere : it wants the unity resulting from hav- ing all the parts placed at once before the eye. AH these things are missing in descriptive poetry; though in epic and dramatic there are qualities that correspond to them. This is enough to shew how idle it is for Poetry to abandon its own domain, and try to set up its throne in the territory of its neigh- bour. Everything that our poets had to mention, was described and reflected upon. First one thing was described and reflected upon ; and then something else was described and reflected upon ; and then . . . some third thing was treated in the same way. The power of infusing life and exhibiting action is wanting. No word was supposed to be capable of standing alone ; all must have a crutch to lean on : every object must be attended by an epithet or two, or by a phrase, pickt out much as schoolboys pick theirs out of the Gradus, with little regard to any point except its fitting the verse, and not disturb- ing its monotonous smoothness. If it had ever been applied to the object by any poet, if it ever could be applied to it under any circumstances, this was enough: no matter whether it suited the particular occasion or no. The grand repository for all such phraseology was that translation of Homer, which has perhaps done more harm than any other work ever did to the 60 GUESSES AT TRUTH. literature of its country ; thus exactly reversing the fate of its original. For assuredly no human work ever exercised so powerful and beneficial an influence on the literature and arts of the people out of whom it sprang, as the Homeric poems. Nor can I think that there was much ground in point of fact for Plato's charge, of their having been injurious to religion and morality. The mischief had other sources, inherent in Poly- theism, and such as Natural Religion cannot quench. But as for Pope's translation, it has been a sort of poetic stage-ward- robe, to which anybody might resort for as much tinsel and tawdry lace, and as many Bristol diamonds, as he wanted, and where everybody might learn the welcome lesson, that the last thing to be thought of in writing verses is the meaning. Ever since the dawn of a better day on our poetry, descrip- tion and reflexion have still absorbed too large a portion of its energy. Few writers have kept it before their eyes so dis- tinctly as the authors of Count Julian and of Philip Van Arte- velde, that the great business and office of poetry is not to de- scribe, but to create, not to pour forth an everlasting singsong about mountains and fountains, and hills and rills, and flowers and bowers, and woods and floods, and roses and posies, and vallies and allies, but to represent human character and feeling, action and passion, the ceaseless warfare, and the alternate victories of Life and of Death. u. The line of Milton quoted above, in which Pandemonium is described as rising out of the earth, " like an exhalation," is supposed by Mr. Peck to be " a hint taken from some of the moving scenes and machines invented for the stage by Inigo Jones." This conjecture is termed very probable by Bishop Newton, in a note repeated by Dr. Hawkins, and by Mr. Todd ; and the latter tries to confirm it by an extract from an account of a Mask acted at Whitehall in 1637. Alas for poets, when the critics set about unraveling their thoughts ! when they even pretend to make out by what old bones their minds have been manured \ On seeing a poet overlaid by a copious vari- orum commentary, one is often reminded of Gulliver lying help- GUESSES AT TEUTH. 61 less and stirless under the net that the Lilliputians had spun around him. Thus Malone suggests that, when Shakspeare made Lady Macbeth, in the trance of her bloody ambition, pray that heaven might not " peep through the blanket of the dark," he was probably thinking of " the coarse woolen curtain of his own theatre, through which probably, while the house was yet but half lighted, he had himself often peept." But to be serious : even if the Mask referred to had been acted in 1657, instead of 1637, and if Milton in that year had had eyes to see it with, I should still have been slow to believe that a thought so trivial could have crost his mind, when he was hovering on the outspread wings of his imagination over the abyss of hell. An eagle does not stoop after a grub. Sheridan indeed, who never scrupled to borrow, whether money or thoughts, and to pass them off for his own, might have caught such a hint from the stage. For, having no light in himself, he tried to patch up a mimic sun, by sticking together as many candles as he could lay hands on, — wax, mould, or rushlights, no matter which. Hence, brilliant as his comedies are, they want unity and life : they rather sparkle, than shine ; and are like aJbox of trinkets, not a beautiful head radiant with jewelry. Of Milton's mind, on the other hand, the leading characteristic is its unity. He has the thoughts of all ages at his command ; but he has made them his own. He sits " high on a throne of royal state, adorned With all the wealth of Or- mus and of Ind, And where the gorgeous East with richest hand Has showered barbaric pearl and gold." There are no false gems in him, no tinsel. It seems as if nothing could dwell in his mind, but what was grand and sterling. Besides, if we look at the passage, the " fabric huge " does not rise at once, as the commentators appear to have supposed, ready-made by a charm out of the earth, like a scene from the floor of a theatre ; which is thus strangely brought in to serve for a go-between in this simily; as though Milton, without such a hint, could not have thought of comparing the erection of Pandemonium to the rising of a mist. Such was the dignified severity of Milton's mind, that he has carefully abstained 62 GUESSES AT TEUTH. throughout Paradise Lost from everything like common magic. His spirits are superhuman ; and their actions are supernatural, but not unnatural or contranatural. That is, the processes by which they accomplish their purposes are analogous to those by which men do so : they are subject to the same universal laws ; only their strength and speed are immeasurably greater. But he has nothing arbitrary, no capricious, fantastical transforma- tions. When anything appears to be such, there is always a moral purpose to justify it ; as in the sublime passage where the applause which Satan expects, is turned into "a dismal universal hiss," exemplifying how the most triumphant success in evil is in fact a sinking deeper and deeper in misery and shame. To a higher moral law the laws of Nature may bend, but not to a mere act of wilfulness. That Pandemonium was built aboveground, and not drawn up from underground, is clear from the previous account of the materials prepared for it. Milton wanted a council-chamber for his infernal conclave. Of course it was to surpass everything on earth in magnificence ; and it was to be completed almost instantaneously. Hence, instead of exhibiting the gradual process of a laborious accumu- lation, it seemed to spring up suddenly, to rise " like an ex- halation." This comparison may possibly have been suggested by the Homeric tjvt JptgX?. At least a recollection of Homer's image may have been floating in Milton's mind ; as it is clear that just after, when he says, the fabric rose " with the sound Of dulcet symphonies, and voices sweet," he must have been thinking of the legend of Amphion building the walls of Thebes. For his mind was such a treasury of learning, — he had so fed on the thoughts of former ages, transubstantiating them, to use his own expression, by " concoctive heat," — and the knowledge of his earlier years seems to have become so much more vivid and ebullient, when fresh influxes were stopt, — that one may allowably attribute all manner of learned allusions to him, pro- vided they are in harmony with his subject, and lie within the range of his reading. Many of these have been detected by his commentators : but the investigation is by no means exhausted. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 63 Not a few of his allusions they have mist : others they have mistaken. For instance, in the note on the passage where Milton com- pares one of the regions of hell to " that great Serbonian bog Betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old, Where armies whole have sunk," the modern editors, in a note taken from Patrick Hume, refer only to Herodotus and Lucan ; neither of whom says a word about armies being lost in the bog. I conclude therefore that no commentator has traced this passage to its real source in Diodorus Siculus (i. 30) ; where we are told, that " persons ignorant of the country, who approach the lake Serbonis, have to encounter unlookt-for perils. For the firth being narrow and like a fillet, and vast sandbanks lying round it on all sides, when the south wind blows for a continuance, a quantity of sand is driven over it. This covers the water, and renders the surface of the lake so like that of the land, as to be quite undistinguishable. Hence many who did not know the nature of the spot, missing the road, have been swallowed up, along with whole armies" In a subsequent part of his History (xvi. 46), he says that Artaxerxes, in his expedition into Egypt, lost a part of his army there. The substance of the preceding passage is indeed given by George Sandys in his Travels, and thence extracted by Purchas, p. 913 ; but Milton's source was probably the Greek. For his historical allusions are often taken from Diodorus, with whom he seems to have been better acquainted than with the earlier historians, — the immense superiority of the latter not being generally recognised in those days ; — and who, as Wakefield has shewn, was his authority for the beautiful passage about the mariners off at sea, senting " Sabean odours from the spicy shore Of Araby the blest." Other blind men, it is true, seldom quote books : but it is not so with Milton. The prodigious power, readiness, and accuracy of his memory, as well as the confidence he felt in it, are proved by his setting himself, several years after he had be- come totally blind, to compose his Treatise on Christian Doc- trine ; which, made up as it is of Scriptural texts, would seem 64 GUESSES AT TEUTH. to require perpetual reference to the Sacred Volume. A still more extraordinary enterprise was that of the Latin Dictionary, — a work which, one would imagine, might easily wear out a sound pair of eyes, but in which hardly any man could stir a couple of steps without eyes. Well might he, who, after five years of blindness, had the courage to undertake these two vast works, along with Paradise Lost, declare that he did " not bate a jot Of heart or hope, but still bore up and steered Uphill- ward" For this is the word which Milton at first used in his noble sonnet ; though for the sake of correctness, steering up- hiUward being a kind of pilotage which he alone practist, or which at all events is only practicable where the clogs of this material world are not dragging us down, he altered it into right onward. To return to the passage which led to this discussion : not only is Mr. Peck's conjecture at variance with Milton's concep- tion of the manner in which Pandemonium is constructed, and with the processes by which thoughts arise in the mind of a true poet, as incongruous as it would be for the sun to shoot his rays through a popgun : there is also a third objection, to which some may perhaps attach more weight; namely, the long interval which must have elapst since Milton saw the machinery referred to, if indeed he had ever seen it at all. Sheridan, as I have said, had he been at the play overnight, and been writing verses about Pandemonium the next morning, might have bethought himself that it would be a happy hit to make Pandemonium rise up like a palace in a pantomime. But even Sheridan would hardly have done this, unless the impression had been so recent and vivid, as to force itself upon the mind in despite of the more orderly laws of association. Now Milton can have seen nothing of the sort since the closing of the theatres in 1642. Nor is it likely that he was ever present at a Court- mask. But Inigo Joneses improvements in machinery were probably confined to the Court. For new inventions did not travel so fast in those days as now ; and the change of scene in Comus from the wood to the palace seems to have been effected in a different manner. At all events one should have GUESSES AT TKUTH. 65 to suppose that this spectacle, which Milton, if he ever saw it, would have forgotten forthwith, lay dormant in his mind for above fifteen years, until on a sudden, it started up unbidden, when he was describing the building of Pandemonium. That an antiquarian critic, like Mr. Peck, should have brought forward such a conjecture, may not be very wonder- ful. For it requires no little self-denial to resist the temptation of believing that we have hit on an ingenious thought: the more strange and out of the way the thought, the likelier is it to delude us. But that he should have found companions in his visionary ramble, — that a person like Bishop NewtonJ who was not without poetical taste, and who had not the same temp- tation to mislead him, should deem his conjecture very proba- ble, — that critic after critic should approve of it, — is indeed surprising. With regard to Mr. Todd however, we see from other places that he too has an itching for explaining poetry by the help of personal anecdotes. Thus he suggests that the two lines in the description of the castle in the Allegro, — " Where perhaps some beauty lies, The Cynosure of neighbouring eyes," — were designed as a compliment to the Countess of Derby, who had a house near Milton's father's at Horton. Yet in the same breath he tells us that she was already a grandmother ; and so, whatever she might have been in earlier days, she could hardly be any longer the Cynosure of neighbouring eyes, or even fancy that she was so. Therefore, unless Milton had expressly told her that she was his Cynosure, the compliment must have been wholly lost. And what need is there for sup- posing a particular reference to any one? The imaginative process by which Milton animates his castle, is so simple and natural, that I believe there are few young men, who have ever read a tale of romance, in whose minds, when they have been passing by castles, especially if " bosomed high in tufted trees," the fancy has not sprung up, how lovely a sight it would be, were a beautiful damsel looking out from the turret-window. The very first novel I have happened to take up since writing the above, Arnim's Dolores, opens with a description of an old castle, with its little bright gardens in the turrets, where, he E 66 GUESSES AT TKUTH. says, " perchance beautiful princesses may be watching the passing knight among wreaths of flowers of their own train- ing." This is nothing but the ordinary working of the Imagi- nation, " Which, if it would but apprehend some joy, Straight comprehends some bringer of that joy." These remarks would hardly have been worth making, un- less anecdotical explanations of poetry were so much in vogue. People of sluggish imaginations, whose thoughts seldom wander beyond the sphere of their eyes and ears, are glad to detect any mark in a great poet, which brings him down to their level, and proves that he could think of such matters as they themselves talk about with their neighbours. Moreover, as there is an irrepressible instinct of the understanding, which leads us to seek out the causes of things, they who have no eyes to discern the cause in the thing itself, look for it in some- thing round about. They fancy that every thought must needs have an immediate outward suggestment: and if they catch sight of a dry stick lying near a tree, they cry out, evprjKa ! Here is one of the roots. The vanity of these anecdotical explanations is well re- proved by Buttmann in his masterly Essay on the supposed personal allusions in Horace. But unfortunately even his own countrymen have not all taken warning from his admonitions. An overfondness for these exercises of ingenuity is the chief fault in Dissen's otherwise valuable edition of Pindar : where, among a number of similar fantasies, we are told that the famous words, by which critics have been so much puzzled, apio-Tov pep vdcop, — which, as the context plainly shews, declare the superiority of water to the other elements, like that of the Olympic to the other games, — were merely meant by the poet to remind Hiero's guests that they ought to mix water with their wine : a conjecture which for impertinence is scarcely surpast by the notorious one, that Shakspeare served as a butcher's boy, because he has a simily about a calf driven to the shambles, and makes Hamlet say, " There 's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will." On equally valid grounds might we establish that he practist every trade, GUESSES AT TRUTH. 67 and was a native of every country under heaven : nay, that he, instead of Pythagoras, must have been the real Euphorbus, and that the souls of half mankind must have transmigrated into his. What then ! Is it essential to poetry, that there should be nothing personal and individual in it? nothing indicative of the poet's own feelings ? nothing drawn from his own experi- ence ? nothing to shew when, and where, and how, and with whom he has lived ? Is he to dwell aloof from the earth, as it were in a ring like Saturn's, looking down on it in cold abstrac- tion, without allowing any of its influences to come near him, and ruffle the blank mirror of his soul ? So far from it, that the poet, of all men, has the liveliest sympathy with the world around him, which to his eyes " looks with such a look," and to his ears " speaks with such a tone, That he almost receives its heart into his own." Nor has a critic any higher office, than that of tracing out the correspondence between the spirit of a great author, and that of his age and country. Illustrations of manners and customs too may be valuable, as filling up and giving reality to our conception of the world the poet saw around him. Only in such enquiries we must be on our guard against our constitutional tendency to mistake instruments for causes, and must keep in mind that the poet's own genius is the corner-stone and the keystone of his works. "While we confine ourselves to generalities, we may endeav- our, and often profitably, to explain the growth and structure of a poet's mind, so far as it has been modified by circum- stances. But to descend to particulars, to deduce such and such a thought, or such and such an expression, from such and such an occasion, unless we have some historical ground to pro- ceed on, is hazardous and idle ; just as hazardous and idle as it would be to determine why a tree has put forth such and such a leaf, or to divine from what river or cloud the sea has drawn the watery particles which it casts up in such and such a wave. Generals, being few and lasting, we may apprehend : but par- ticulars are so numerous, indefinite, and fleeting, one might as easily mark out and catch a mote dancing in the sunbeam. 68 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Not however that authentic information concerning the pro- cesses of a poet's mind, and the origin of his works, when attainable, is to be rejected. In a psychological view it may often be instructive. Even "Walter Scott's confessions about the composition of his novels, external and superficial as they are, according to the character of his genius are not without interest. Benvenuto Cellini's one can hardly read without par- taking in his anxieties. Cowper's poems derive a fresh charm from their connexion with the incidents of his life. Above all, in Goethe's Memoirs, and of the other writings of his later years, we see the elements of his more genial works, and the nisus formativus which gave them unity and shape, exhibited with his own exquisite clearness, like the beautiful fibrous roots of a hyacinth in a glass of water. To take an image some- thing like that which he himself has applied to Shakspeare, after pointing out the hours and the minutes which mankind has reacht in the great year of thought, he has opened the watch and enabled us to perceive the springs and the wheels. Here, to make my peace with anecdote-mongers, let me tell one relating to the origin of the finest statue of the greatest sculptor who has arisen since the genius of Greece droopt and wasted away beneath the yoke of Rome. An illustrious friend of mine, calling on Thorwaldsen some years ago, found him, as he said to me, in a glow, almost in a trance of creative energy. On his enquiring what had happened, My friend, my dear friend, said the sculptor, I have an idea, I have a work in my head, which will be worthy to live. A lad had been sitting to me some time as a model yesterday, when I bade him rest a while. In so doing he threw himself into an attitude which struck me very much. What a beautiful statue it would make! I said to myself. But what would it do for ? It would do . . . it would do . . . it would do exactly for Mercury, drawing his sword, just after he has played Argus to sleep. I immediately began modeling. Iworkt all the evening, till at my usual hour I went to bed. But my idea would not let me rest. I was forced to get up again. I struck a light, and workt at my model for three or four hours ; after which I again went to bed. But again I GUESSES AT TRUTH. 69 could not rest : again I was forced to get up, and have been working ever since. my friend, if I can but execute my idea, it will be a glorious statue. And a noble statue it is ; although Thorwaldsen himself did not think that the execution came up to the idea. For I have heard of a remarkable speech of his made some years after to another friend, who found him one day in low spirits. Being askt whether anything had distrest him, he answered, My genius is decaying. — What do you mean ? said the visiter. — Why / here is my statue of Christ : it is the first of my works that I have ever felt satisfied with. Till now my idea has always been far beyond what I could execute. But it is no longer so. I shall never have a great idea again. The same, I believe, must have been the case with all men of true ge- nius. While they who have nothing but talents, may often be astonisht at the effects they produce, by putting things together which fit more aptly than they expected ; a man of genius, who has had an idea of a whole in his mind, will feel that no out- ward mode of expressing that idea, whether by form, or col- ours, or words, is adequate to represent it. Thus Luther, when he sent Staupitz his Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, said to him (Epist. clxii), " Nee jam adeo placent, quam placuerunt primum, ut videam potuisse latius et clarius eos exponi." Thus too Solger, writing about his dialogues to Tieck, says (i. p. 432), " Now that I have read them through again, I find that they are far from attaining to that which stood before my mind when I wrote them : I feel as though they were a mere extract or shadow thereof. My only conso- lation is, that so it must doubtless be with every one who has aimed at anything excellent, that the execution of his plan does not satisfy him." Hence it comes that men of genius have so often attacht the highest value to their less genial works. God alone could look down on His Creation, and behold that it was all very good. This contrast is remarkt by Bacon, and a grand use is made of it, at the close of the Introduction to the Novum Organum: " Tu postquam conversus es ad spectandum opera quae fecerunt manus Tuae, vidisti quod omnia essent bona 70 GUESSES AT TKUTH. valde, et requievisti. At homo conversus ad opera quae fece- runt manus suae, vidit quod omnia essent vanitas et vexatio spiritus, nee ullo modo requievit. Quare, si in operibus Tuis sudabimus, facies nos visionis Tuae et sabbati Tui participes." Thorwaldsen's Mercury, it appears, was suggested by a lad whom he had seen sitting at rest. But does that detract from the sculptor's genius ? Every other man living might have seen the lad ; and no statue of Mercury would have sprung out of the vision: even as millions upon millions before New- ton had seen apples drop, without being led thereby to meditate on universal gravitation. So that, though Genius does not wholly create its works out of nothing, its "mighty world" is not merely what it perceives, but what, as Wordsworth ex- presses it in his lines on the Wye, " it half creates." u. Another form of the same Materialism, which cannot com- prehend or conceive anything, except as the product of some external cause, is the spirit, so general in these times, which attaches an inordinate importance to mechanical inventions, and accounts them the great agents in the history of mankind. It is a common opinion with these exoteric philosophers, that the invention of printing was the chief cause of the Reforma- tion, that the invention of the compass brought about the dis- covery of America, and that the vast changes in the military and political state of Europe since the middle ages have been wrought by the invention of gunpowder. It would be almost as rational to say that the cock's crowing makes thie sun rise. Bacon indeed, I may be reminded, seems to favour this notion, where, at the end of the First Book of the Novum Organum, he speaks of the power and dignity and efficacy of inventions, " quae non in aliis manifestius occurrunt, quam in illis tribus quae antiquis incognitae — sunt, Artis nimirum Imprimendi, Pulveris Tormentarii, et Acus Nauticae. Haec enim tria re- rum faciem et statum in orbe terrarum mutaverunt ; primum, in re litteraria ; secundum, in re bellica ; tertium, in naviga- tionibus. Unde innumerae rerum mutationes secutae sunt ; ut non imperium aliquod, non secta, non stella, majorem efficaciam GUESSES AT TRUTH. - 71 et quasi influxum super res humanas exercuisse videatur, quam ista mechanica exercuerunt." However, not to speak of the curious indication of a belief in astrology, it must be remem- bered that Bacon's express purpose in this passage is to assert the dignity of inventions, that is, not of the natural, material objects in themselves, but of those objects transformed and fashioned anew by the mind of man, to serve the great inter- ests of mankind. The difference between civilized and savage life, he had just said, " non solum, non coelum, non corpora, sed artes praestant." In other words, the difference lies, not in any material objects themselves, but in the intelligence, the mind, that employs them for its own ends. These very inventions had existed, the greatest of them for many centuries, in China, without producing any like result. For why? Be- cause the utility of an invention depends on our making use of it. There is no power, none at least for good, in any in- strument or weapon, except so far as there is power in him who wields it : nor does the sword guide and move the hand, but the hand the sword. Nay, it is the hand that fashions the sword. The means and instruments, as we see in China, may lie dormant and ineffective for centuries. But when man's spirit is once awake, when his heart is alert, when his mind is astir, he will always discover the means he wants, or make them. Here also is the saying fulfilled, that they who seek will find. Or we may look at the matter in another light. We may conceive that, whenever any of the great changes ordained by God's Providence in the destinies of mankind are about to take place, the means requisite for the effecting of those changes are likewise prepared by the same Providence. Niebuhr applied this to lesser things. He repeatedly expresses his conviction that the various vicissitudes by which learning has been pro- moted, are under the controll of an overruling Providence ; and he has more than once spoken of the recent discoveries, by which so many remains of Antiquity have been brought to light, as Providential dispensations, for the increase of our knowledge of God's works, and of His creatures. His convic- 72 GUESSES AT TEUTH. tion was, that, though we are to learn in the sweat of our brow, and though nothing good can be learnt without labour, yet here also everything is so ordered, that the means of knowing what- ever is needful and desirable may be discovered, if man will only be diligent in cultivating and making the most of what has already been bestowed on him. He held, that to him who has will be given, — that not only will he be enabled to make increase of the talents he has received, but that he is sure to find others in his path. This way of thinking has been re- proved as profane, by those who yet would perhaps deem it impious if a man, when he cut his finger, or caught a cold, did not recognise a visitation of Providence in such accidents. Now why is this ? In all other things we maintain that man's labour is of no avail, unless God vouchsafes to bless it, — that, without God's blessing, in vain will the husbandman sow, in vain will the merchant send his ships abroad, in vain will the physician prescribe his remedies. Why then do we outlaw knowledge ? Why do we declare that the exercise of our intellectual powers is altogether alien from God ? Why do we exclude them, not only from the sanctuary, but even from the outer court of the temple ? Why do we deny that poets and philosophers, scholars and men of science, can serve God, each in his calling, as well as bakers and butchers, as well as hewers of wood and drawers of water ? It is true, there is often an upstart pride in the Understand- ing ; and we are still prone to fancy that Knowledge of itself will make us as gods. Though so large a part of our knowl- edge is derivative, from the teaching either of other men or of things, and though so small a tittle of it can alone be justly claimed by each man as his own, we are apt to forget this, and to regard it as all our own, as sprung, like Minerva, full-grown out of our own heads ; for this among other reasons, that, when we are pouring it forth, in whatsoever manner, its original sources are out of sight ; nor does anything remind us of the numberless tributaries by which it has been swelled. This ten- dency of Knowledge however to look upon itself as self-created and independent of God is much encouraged by the practice of GUESSES AT TRUTH. 73 the religious to treat it and speak of it as such. Were we wise, we should discern that the intellectual, the natural, and the moral world are three concentric spheres in God's world, and that it is a robbery of God to cut off any one of them from Him, and give it up to the Prince of Darkness. As we read in the Book of Wisdom, it is God, that hath given us certain knowledge of the things that are, to know how the world was made, and the operation of the elements, — the beginning, ending, and midst of the times, — the alterations of the turning of the sun, and the change of seasons, — the circuits of years, and the posi- tions of stars, — the natures of living creatures, and the furies of wild beasts, — the violence of winds, and the reasonings of men. Thus then does it behove us to deem of inventions, as instru- ments ordained for us, by the help of 'which we are to fulfill God's manifold purposes with regard to the destinies of man- kind. At the fit time the fit instrument shews itself. If it comes before its time, it is still-born : man knows not what to do with it ; and it wastes away. But when the mind and heart and spirit of men begin to teem with new thoughts and feelings and desires, they always find the outward world ready to sup- ply them with the means requisite for realizing their aims. In this manner, when the idea of the unity of mankind had become more vivid and definite, — when all the speculations of History and Science and Philosophy were bringing it out in greater ful- ness, — when Poetry was becoming more and more conscious of its office to combine unity with diversity and multiplicity, and individuality with universality, — and when Religion was applying more earnestly to her great work of gathering all mankind into the many mansions in the one great house of the Eternal Father, — at this time, when men's hearts were yearn- ing more than ever before for intercourse and communion, the means of communication and intercourse have been multiplied marvellously. This is good, excellent ; and we may well be thankful for it. Only let us be diligent in using our new gifts for their highest, and not merely for meaner purposes ; and let us beware of man's tendency to idolize the works of his own 4 r 74 GUESSES AT TKUTH. hands. The Greek poet exclaimed with wonder at the terrible ingenuity of man, who had yoked the horse and the bull, and had crost the roaring sea: and still, though the immediate occasions of his wonder would be somewhat changed, he would cry, 7roAXa to. Setra, Kovdev dvOpwnov Seivorepov TreXct. But, though a Heathen, he kept clear of the twofold danger of wor- shipping either man or his work. May we do so likewise ! For there is not a whit to choose between the worship of steam, and that of the meanest Fetish in Africa. Nor is the worship of Man really nobler or wiser. u. \ I spoke some pages back of Greek literature as being char- acterized by its ao-neros aldqp, its serene, transparent brightness. Ought I not rather to have said that this is the characteristic of the Christian mind, of that mind on which the true Light has indeed risen ? Not, it appears to me, so far as that mind has been manifested in its works of poetry and art ; at least with the exception of a starry spirit here and there, such as Fra Angelico da Fiesole and Raphael. For the Greeks lookt mainly, and almost entirely, at the outward, at that which could be brought in distinct and definite forms before the eye of the Imagination. To this they were predisposed from the first by their exquisite animal organization, which gave them a lively susceptibility for every enjoyment the outward world could offer, but which at the same time was so muscular and tightly braced as not to be overpowered and rendered effeminate there- by : and this their natural tendency to receive delight from the active enjoyment of the outward world found everything in the outward world best fitted to foster and strengthen it. The climate and country were such as to gratify every appetite for pleasurable sensation, without enervatingor relaxing the frame, or allowing the mind to sink into an Asiatic torpour. They rewarded industry richly : but they also called for it, and would not pamper sloth. By its physical structure Greece gave its inhabitants the hardihood of the mountaineer. Yet the Greeks were not like other mountaineers, whose minds seem mostly to have been bounded by their own narrow horizon, so as hardly GUESSES AT TKUTH. 75 to take count of what was going on in the world without : to which cause may in a great measure be ascribed the intellectual barrenness of mountainous countries, or, if this be too strong an expression, the scantiness of the great works they have pro- duced, when compared with the feelings which we might sup- pose they would inspire. But the Greek was not shut in by his mountains. Whenever he scaled a hight, the sea spread out before him, and wooed him to come into her arms, and to let her bear him away to some of the smiling islands she en- circled. Herce, like the hero, who in his Homeric form is perhaps the best representative of the Greek character, ttoXX^i/ dvdpamew 'Idev aarea, ical voov i'ypto. He had the two great stimulants to enterprise before him. The voice of the Moun- tains, and the voice of the Sea, " each a mighty voice," were ever rousing and stirring and prompting him ; each moreover checking the hurtful effects of the other. The sea enlarged the range and scope of his thoughts, which the mountains might have hemmed in. Thus it saved him from the " homely wits," which Shakspeare ascribes to "home-keeping youth." The mountains on the other hand counteracted that homelessness, which a mere sea-life is apt to breed, except in those in whom there is a living consciousness that on the sea as on the shore they are equally in the hand of God : to which homelessness, and want of a solid ground to strike root in, it is mainly owing that neither Tyre nor Carthage, notwithstanding their power \ and wealth, occupies any place in the intellectual history of mankind. To the Greeks however, as to us, who have a coun- try and a home upon the land, the sea was an inexhaustible mine of intellectual riches. Nor is it without a prophetic sym- bolicalness that the sea fills so important a part in both the Homeric poems. The amphibious character -of the Greeks was already determined: they were to be lords of land and sea. Both these voices too, "Liberty's chosen music," as Words- worth terms them in his glorious sonnet, called the Greeks to freedom : and nobly did they answer to the call, when the sound of the mighty Pan was glowing in their ears, at Mara- thon and Thermopylae, at Salamis and Platea. 76 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Freedom moreover, and the free forms of their constitutions, brought numerous opportunities and demands for outward ac- tivity. The Greek poets and historians were also soldiers and statesmen. They had to deal with men, to act with them, and by them, and upon them, in the forum, and in the field. Their converse was with men in the concrete, as living agents, not with the abstraction, man, nor with the shadowy, self-reflecting visions of the imagination. Even at the present day, though our habits and education do so much to remove the distinctions among the various classes of society, there is a manifest differ- ence between those authors who have taken an active part in public life, and those who are mere men of letters. The former, though they may often be deficient in speculative power, and unskilled in the forms of literature, have a knowledge of the practical springs of action, and a temperance of judgement, which is seldom found in a recluse, unaccustomed to meet with resistance among his own thoughts, or apt to slip away from it when he does, and therefore unpractist in bearing or dealing with it. That mystic seclusion, so common in modern times, as it has always been in Asia, was scarcely known in Greece. Even the want of books, and the consequent necessity of going to things themselves for the knowledge of them, sharpened the eyes of the Greeks, and gave them livelier and clearer percep- tions : whereas our eyes are dimmed by poring over the records of what others have seen and thought ; and the impressions we thus obtain are much less vivid and true. Added to all this, their anthropomorphic Religion, which sprang in the 'first instance out of these very tendencies of the Greek mind, reacted powerfully upon them, as the free exercise of every faculty is wont to do, and exerted a great influence in keeping the Greeks within the sphere which Nature seemed to assign to them, by preventing their thinking or desiring to venture out of that sphere, and by teaching them to find con- tentment and every enjoyment they could imagine within it. For it was by abiding within it that they were as gods. The feeling exprest in the speech of Achilles in Hades was one in which the whole people partook : GUESSES AT TEUTH. 77 fiovXoiprjv k indpovpos eav drjrevepcv aXXa, t) nacriv veKveaai KaracpdipevoLcrip dvdaaeiv. Through the combined operation of these causes, the Greeks acquired a clearness of vision for all the workings of life, and all the manifestations of beauty, far beyond that of any other people. Whatever they saw, they saw thoroughly, almost palpably, with a sharpness incomprehensible in our land of books and mists. > To mention a couple of instances : the anatomy of the older Greek statues is so perfect, that Mr. Haydon, — whose scat- tered dissertations on questions of art, rich as they often are in genius and thought, well deserve to be collected and preserved from a newspaper grave, — in his remarks on the Elgin mar- bles, pledged himself that, if any one were to break off a toe from one of those marbles, he would prove " the great conse- quences of vitality, as it acts externally, to exist in that toe." Yet it is very doubtful whether the Greeks ever anatomized human bodies, — at all events they knew hardly anything of anatomy scientifically, from an examination of the internal structure, — before the Alexandrian age. Now, even with the help of our scientific knowledge, it is a rarity in modern art to find figures, of which the anatomy is not in some respect faulty ; at least where the body is not either almost entirely concealed by drapery, or cased, like the yolk of an egg, in the soft albu- men of a pseudo-ideal. When it is otherwise, as in the works of Michael Angelo and Annibal Caracci, we too often see studies, rather than works of art, and muscular contortions and convolutions, instead of the gentle play and flow of life. Mr. Haydon indeed contends that the Greek sculptors must have been good anatomists : but all historical evidence is against this supposition. The truth is, that, as such wonderful stories are told of the keen eyes which the wild Indians have for all man- ner of tracks in their forests, so the Greeks had a clear and keen-sightedness in another direction, which to us, all whose perceptions are mixt up with such a bundle of multifarious notions, and who see so many things in everything, beside what we really do see, appears quite inconceivable. They 78 GUESSES AT TRUTH. studied life, not as we do, in death, but in life ; and that not in the stiff, crampt, inanimate life of a model, but in the fresh, buoyant, energetic life, which was called forth in the gym- nasia. Another striking example of the accuracy of the Greek eye is supplied by a remark of Spurzheim's, that the heads of all the old Greek statues are in perfect accordance with his system, and betoken the very intellectual and moral qualities which the character was meant to be endowed with; although in few modern statues or busts is any correspondence discoverable between the character and the shape of the head. For ground- less and erroneous as may be the psychological, or, as the authors themselves term them, the phrenological views, which have lately been set forth as the scientific anatomy of the human mind, it can hardly be questioned that there is a great deal of truth in what Coleridge {Friend iii. p. 62) calls the indicative or gnomonic part of the scheme, or that Gall was an acute and accurate observer of those conformations of the skull, which are the ordinary accompaniments, if not the infallible signs, of the various intellectual powers. But in these very observations he had been anticipated above two thousand years ago by the unerring eyes of the Greek sculptors. In like manner do the Greeks seem, by a kind of intuition, to have at once caught the true principles of proportion and harmony and grace and beauty in all things, — in the human figure, in architecture, in all mechanical works, in style, in the various forms and modes of composition. These principles, which they discerned from the first, and which other nations have hardly known anything of, except as primarily derivative from them, they exemplified in that wonderful series of master- pieces, from Homer down to Plato and Aristotle and Demos- thenes ; a series of which we only see the fragments, but the mere fragments of which the rest of the world cannot match. Rome may have more regal majesty ; modern Europe may be superior in wisdom, especially in that wisdom of which the owl may serve as the emblem : but in the contest of Beauty no one could hesitate ; the apple must be awarded to Greece. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 79 This is what I meant by speaking of the aaiveros al$rjp of Greek literature. The Greeks saw what they saw thoroughly. Their eyes were piercing; and they knew how to use them, and to trust them. In modern literature, on the other hand, the pervading feeling is, that we see through a glass darkly. While with the Greeks the unseen world was the world of shadows, in the great works of modern times there is a more or less conscious feeling that the outward world of the eye is the world of shadows, that the tangled web of life is to be swept away, and that the invisible world is the only abode of true, living realities. How strongly is this illustrated by the contrast between the two great works which stand at the head of ancient and of Christian literature, the Homeric poems, and the Ztiwna Commedia ! While the former teem with life, like a morning in spring, and everything in them, as on such a morning, has its life raised to the highest pitch, Dante's wan- derings are all through the regions beyond the grave. He begins with overleaping death, and leaving it behind him ; and to his imagination the secret things of the next world, and its inhabitants, seem to be more distinctly and vividly present than the persons and things around him. Nor was Milton's home on earth. And though Shakspeare's was, it was not on an earth lying quietly beneath the clear, blue sky. How he drives the clouds over it ! how he flashes across it ! Ever and anon indeed he sweeps the clouds away, and shines down brightly upon it, — but only for a few moments together. Thus too has it been with all those in modern times whose minds have been so far opened as to see and feel the mystery of life. They have not shrunk from that mystery in reverent awe like the Greeks, nor planted a beautiful, impenetrable grove around the temple of the Furies. While the Greeks, as I said just now, could not dream of anatomizing life, we have anatomized everything : and whereas all their works are of the day, a large portion of ours might fitly be designated by the title of Night Thoughts. j As to the frivolous triflers, who take things as they are, and skip about and sip the surface, they are no more to be reckoned into account in estimating the charac- 80 GUESSES AT TRUTH. ter of an age, than a man would take the flies and moths into account in drawing up an inventory of his chattels. Perhaps however the reason why modern literature has not had more of this serenity and brightness, is that it has so sel- dom been animated by the true spirit of Christianity in any high degree. A little knowledge will merely unsettle a man's prejudices, without giving him anything better in their stead : and Christianity, intellectually as well as morally, unless it be indeed embraced with a longing and believing heart, serves only to make our darkness visible. The burning and shining lights of Christianity have rather been content to shine in the vallies : those on the hills have mostly been lights of this world, and therefore flaring and smoking. For individual Christians there are, individual Christians, I believe, there have been in all ages, whose spirits do indeed dwell in the midst of an acnreros aWrjp. Nay, as Coleridge once said to me, " that in Italy the sky is so clear, you seem to see beyond the moon," so are there those who seem to look beyond and through the heavens, into the very heaven of heavens. u. Thirlwall, in his History, — in which the Greeks have at length been called out of their graves by a mind combining their own clearness and grace with the wealth and power of modern learning and thought, and at whose call, as at that of a kindred spirit, they have therefore readily come forth, — re- marks, that Greece " is distinguisht among European countries by the same character which distinguishes Europe itself from the other continents, — the great range of its coast, compared with the extent of its surface." The same fact, and its impor- tance, are noticed by Frederic Schlegel in his second Lecture on the Philosophy of History. Nothing could be more favor- able as a condition, not only of political and commercial, but also of intellectual greatness. Indeed this might be added to the long list of grounds for the truth of the Pindaric saying, apivTov pev vba>p, and would suggest itself in an ode addrest to Hiero far more naturally and appropriately than the superiority of wine and water to wine ; a superiority which it may be a GUESSES AT TRUTH. 81 mark of barbarism to deny, but which few Englishmen would acknowledge. A similar extent of coast was also one of the great advan- tages of Italy, and is now one of the greatest in the local con- dition of England. Goethe, who above all men had the talent of expressing profound and farstretching thoughts in the sim- plest words, and whose style has more of light in it, with less of lightning, than any other writer's since Plato, has thrown out a suggestion in one of his reviews (vol. xlv. p. 227), that " perhaps it is the sight of the sea from youth upward, that gives English and Spanish poets such an advantage over those of inland countries." He spoke on this point from his own feelings : for he himself never saw the sea, till he went to Italy in his 38th year: and it is ingeniously remarkt by Francis Horn, though apparently without reference to Goethe's obser- vation, in his History of German Poetry and Eloquence (iii. p. 225), that " whatever is indefinite, or seems so, is out of keep- ing with Goethe's whole frame of mind : everything with him is terra jirma or an island : there is nothing of the infinitude of the sea. This conviction (he adds) forced itself upon me, when for the first time, at the northernmost extremity of Ger- many, I felt the sweet thrilling produced by the highest sublim- ity of Nature. Here Shakspeare alone comes forward, whom one finds everywhere, on mountains and in vallies, in forests, by the side of rivers and of brooks. Thus far Goethe may accompany him : but in sight of the sea, and of such rocks on the sea, Shakspeare is by himself." Solger, too, in one of his letters (i. p. 320), when speaking of his first sight of the sea, says, " Here for the first time I felt the impression of the illim- itable, as produced by an object of sense, in its full majesty." To us, who have been familiar with the Sea all our lives, it might almost seem as though our minds would have been " poor shrunken things," without its air to brace and expand them, — if for instance we had never seen the dvrjpiOfiov -yeAaoyza of the waves, as Aphrodite rises from their bosom, — if we had never heard the many-voiced song with which the Nereids now hymn the bridal, now bewail the bereavement of Thetis, — if we 4 * F 82 GUESSES AT TKUTH. knew not how changeful the Sea is, and yet how constant and changeless amid all the changes of the seasons, — if we knew not how powerful she is, whom Winter with all his chains can no more bind than Xerxes could, how powerful to destroy in her fury, how far more powerful to bless in her calmness, — if we had never learnt the lesson of obedience and of order from her, the lesson of ceaseless activity, and of deep, unfathomable rest, — if we had no sublunary teacher but the mute, motionless earth, — if we had been deprived of this ever faithful mirror of heaven. The Sea appears to be the great separator of nations, the impassable barrier to all intercourse : dissociabilis the Roman poet calls it. Yet in fact it is the grand medium of intercourse, the chief uniter of mankind, the only means by which the opposite ends of the earth hold converse as though they were neighbours. Thus in divers ways the 7t6utos drpvyeros has become even more productive, than if fields of corn were waving all over it. That it has been an essential condition in the civilizing of nations, all history shews. Perhaps the Germans in our days are the first people who have reacht any high degree of cul- ture, — who have become eminent in poetry and in thought, — without its immediate aid. Yet Germany has been called " she of the Danube and the Northern Sea ; " and might still more justly be called she of the Rhine. For the Danube, not bring- ing her into connection with the sea, has had a less powerful influence on her destinies: whereas the Rhine has acted a more important part in her history, than any river in that of any other country, except the Nile. Hence the example of Germany will not enable us to con- ceive how such a people as Ulysses was to go in search of, — ol ovk 'lo-aai Oakacro-av 'Avepes, oibe & aXea-ai pep.iyp.evov eldap edov- aiu, — how those who, not knowing the sea, have no salt to season their thoughts with, — how the Russians for instance can ever become civilized ; notwithstanding what Peter tried to effect, from a partial consciousness of this want, by building his capital on the Baltic. Still less can one imagine how the centre of Asia, or of Africa, can ever emerge out of barbarism ; GUESSES AT TRUTH. 83 unless indeed the Steam-king be destined hereafter to effect, what the Water-king in his natural shape cannot. Genius or knowledge, springing up in those regions, would be like a foun- tain in an oasis, unable to mingle with its kindred, and unite into a continuous stream. Or if such a thing as a stream were to be found there, it would soon be swallowed up and lost, from having no sea within reach to shape its course to. In the legends Neptune is represented as contending with Minerva for the honour of giving name to Athens, and with Apollo for the possession of Corinth. But in fact he wrought along with them, — ■ and mighty was his aid, — in glorifying their favorite cities. There is also a further point of analogy between the position of Greece and that of England. Greece, lying on the frontier of Europe toward Asia, was the link of union between the two, the country in which the practical European understanding seized, and gave a living, productive energy to the primeval ideas of Asia. Her sons carried off Europa with her letters from Phenicia, and Medea with her magic from Colchis. When the Asiatics, attempting reprisals, laid hands on her Queen of Beauty, the whole nation arose, and sallied forth from their homes, and bore her back again in triumph : for to whom could she belong rightfully and permanently, except to a Greek ? If Io went from them into Egypt, it was to become the ancestress of Hercules. Now England in like manner is the frontier of Europe to- ward America, and the great bond of connexion between them. Through us the mind of the Old World passes into the New. What our intellectual office may be in this respect, will be seen hereafter, when it becomes more apparent and determinate, what the character of the American mind is to be. At present England is the country, where that depth and inwardness of thought, which seems to belong to the Germanic mind, has assumed the distinct, outward, positive form of the Roman. An intermixture of the same elements has also taken place in France, but with a very different result. In the English character, as in our language, the Teutonic or spiritual element 84 GUESSES AT TRUTH. has fortunately been predominant ; and so the two factors have coalesced without detriment : while in France, where the Roman or formal element gained the upperhand, the consequence has been, that they have almost neutralized and destroyed each other. The ideas of the Germans waned into abstractions : the law and order of the Romans shriveled into rules and forms, which no idea can impregnate, but which every insurgent ab- straction can overthrow. The externality of the classical spirit has worn away into mere superficiality. The French character is indeed a character, stampt upon them from without. Their profoundest thoughts are bons mots. They are the only nation that ever existed, in which a government can be hist off the stage like a bad play, and which its fall excites less consterna- tion, than the violation of a fashion in dress. In truth the ease and composure with which the Revolution of July 1830 was accomplisht, and by which almost everybody was so dazzled, notwithstanding the fearful lessons of forty years before, — when in like manner Satan appeared at first as an angel of light, and when all mankind were deluded, and worshipt the new-born fiend, — would have been deemed by a wise observer one of the saddest features about it. O let us bleed when we are wounded ! let not our wounds close up, as if nothing had been cleft but a shadow ! It is better to bleed even to death, than to live without blood in our veins. And in truth blood will flow. If it does not flow in the field from principle, it is sure to flow in tenfold torrents by the guillotine, through that ferocity, which, when Law and Custom are overthrown, nothing but Principle can keep in check. Hearts and souls will bleed, or will fester and rot. A Frenchman might indeed urge, that his patron saint is related in the legend not to have felt the loss of his head, and to have walkt away after it had been cut off, just as well as if it had been standing on his shoulders. But where no miracle is in the case, it is only the lowest orders of creatures that are quite as brisk and lively after decapitation as before. 1836. u. I hate to see trees pollarded . . or nations. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 85 Europe was conceived to be on the point of dissolution. Burke heard the death-watch, and rang the alarm. A hollow sound past from nation to nation, like that which announces the splitting and breaking up of the ice in the regions around the Pole. Well ! the politicians and economists, and the doctors in statecraft, resolved to avert the stroke of vengeance, not indeed by actions like those of the Curtii and Decii ; — such actions are extravagant, and chivalrous, and superstitious, and patri- otic, and heroic, and self-devoting, and unworthy and unseemly in men of sense, who know that selfishness is the only source of good ; — but by borrowing a device from the Arabian fabulist. They seem to have thought they should appease, or at least weary out the minister of wrath, if they could get him to hear through their thousand and one Constitutions. u. From what was said just now about the French character, as a combination the factors of which have almost neutralized each other, it follows that the French are the very people for that mode of life and doctrine, which has become so notorious under the title of the juste milieu, and which aims at reconciling oppo- sites by a mechanical, or at the utmost by a chemical, instead of an organical union. It is only in the latter, when acting to- gether under the sway of a constraining higher principle, that powers, which, if left to themselves, thwart and battle against each other, can be made to bring forth peace and its fruits. According to the modern theory however, the best way of pro- ducing a new being is not by the marriage of the man and woman, but by taking half of each, and tying them one to the other. The result, it is true, will not have much life in it : but what does that matter ? It is manufactured in a moment : the whole work goes on before the eyes of the world : and the new creature is fullsized from the first. How stupid and impotent on the other hand is Nature ! who hides the germs and first stirrings of all life in darkness ; who is always forced to begin with the minutest particles ; and who can produce nothing great, except by slow and tedious processes of growth and assimila- tion. How tardily and snail-like she crawls about her task ! 86 GUESSES AT TEUTH. She never does anything per saltum. She cannot get to the end of her journey, as we can, in a trice, by a hop, a skip, and a jump. It takes her a thousand years to grow a nation, and thousands to grow a philosopher. Amen ! so be it ! Man, when he is working consciously, does not know how to work imperceptibly. He cannot trust to Time, as Nature can, in the assurance that Time will work with her. For, while Time fosters and ripens Nature's works, he only crumbles man's. It is well imagined, that the creature whom Frankenstein makes, should be a huge monster. Being unable to impart a living power of growth and increase by any effort of our will or understanding, or except when we are con- tent to act in subordination to nature, we try, when we set about any work, on which we mean to pride ourselves as espe- cially our own, to render it as big as we can ; so that, size being our chief criterion of greatness, we may have the better warrant for falling down and worshipping it. Thus Frankenstein's man- monster is an apt type of the numerous, newfangled, hop-skip- and-jump Constitutions, which have been circulating about Eu- rope for the last half century ; in which the old statesmanly practice of enacting new ordinances and institutions, as occasion after occasion arises, has been superseded by attempts to draw up a complete abstract code for all sorts of states, without regard to existing rights, usages, manners, feelings, to the necessities of the country, or the character of the people. Indeed the fol- lowing description of the monster, when he first begins to move, might be regarded as a satire on the Constitution of 1791. " His limbs were in proportion ; and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful ! His yellow skin scarcely covered the muscles and arteries beneath. His hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing, — his teeth of a pearly whiteness : but these only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, which seemed almost of the same colour as their dun white sockets, his shriveled complexion, and straight, black lips." So it is with abstract constitutions. Their fabricaters try to make their parts proportionate, and to pick out the most beautiful features for them : but there are muscular and arterial workings ever GUESSES AT TRUTH. 87 going on in the body of a nation, there is such an intermingling and convolution of passions, and feelings, and consciousnesses, and thoughts, and desires, and regrets, and sorrows, that no yellow parchment, which man can draw over, will cover or hide them. Though the more external and lifeless parts, the hair and teeth, which are so often artificial, may be bright and dazzling, — though the teeth especially may be well fitted for doing their work of destruction, — no art can give a living eye : opixdrav d y ev d\r]viais eppci naa Acppobira. The man-monster's cruelty too was of the same sort as that of the French constitution-mongers, and of their works ; and it resulted from the same cause, the utter want of sympathy with man and the world, such as they are. The misfortune is, that we cannot get rid of them, as he was got rid of, by sending them to the North Pole ; although its ice would be an element very congenial to the minds that gave birth to them, and would form a fitting grave for monstrosities, which, starting up in the frozen zone of human nature, were crystallized from their cradle. 1836. u. The strength of a nation, humanly speaking, consists not in its population or wealth or knowledge, or in any other such heartless and merely scientific elements, but in the number of its proprietors. Such too, according to the most learned and wisest of historians, was the opinion of antiquity. "All an- cient legislators (says Niebuhr, when speaking of Numa), and above all Moses, rested the result of their ordinances for virtue, civil order, and good manners, on securing landed property, or at least the hereditary possession of land, to the greatest possible number of citizens." They who are not aware of the manner in which national character and political institutions mutually act and are acted on, till they gradually mould each other, have never reflected on the theory of new shoes. Which leads me to remark, that modern constitution-mongers have shewn themselves as unskil- ful and inconsiderate in making shoes, as the old limping, sore- 88 GUESSES AT TRUTH. footed aristocracies of the Continent have been intractable and impatient in wearing them. The one insisted that the boot must fit, because, after the fashion of Laputa, it had been cut to diagram : the others would bear nothing on their feet in any de°ree hard or common. Leather is the natural covering of the hands : on them we will still wear it : on the legs it is ignoble and masculine. Any other sacrifice we are content to make : but our feet must continue as heretofore, swathed up in fleecy ho- siery, especially when we ride or walk. It is a reward we may justly claim for condescending to acts so toilsome. It is a priv- ilege we have inherited, with the gout of our immortal ancestors ; and we cannot in honour give it up. But you say, the privilege must be abolisht, because the commodity is scarce. Let the people then make their sacrifice, and give up stockings. Beauty is perfection unmodified by a predominating ex- pression. Song is the tone of feeling. Like poetry, the language of feeling, art should regulate, and perhaps temper and modify it. But whenever such a modification is introduced as destroys the predominance of the feeling, — which yet happens in ninety-nine settings out of a hundred, and with nine hundred and ninety-nine taught singers out of a thousand, — the essence is sacrificed to what should be the accident ; and we get notes, but no song. If song however be the tone of feeling, what is beautiful sing- ing ? The balance of feeling, not the absence of it. Close boroughs are said to be an oligarchal innovation on the ancient Constitution of England. But are not the forty- shilling freeholders, in their present state, a democratical innovation ? The one may balance and neutralize the other ; and. if so, the Constitution will remain practically unaltered by the accession of these two new, opposite, and equal powers. Whereas to destroy the former innovation, without taking away the latter, must change the system of our polity in reality, as well as in idea. 1826. l. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 89 When the pit seats itself in the boxes, the gallery will soon drive out both, and occupy the whole of the house. a. In like manner, when the calculating, expediential Under- standing has superseded the Conscience and the Reason, the Senses soon rush out from their dens, and sweep away every- thing before them. If there be nothing brighter than the reflected light of the moon, the wild beasts will not keep in their lair. And when that moon, after having reacht a mo- ment of apparent glory, by looking full at the sun, fancies it may turn away from the sun, and still have light in itself, it straightway begins to wane, and ere long goes out altogether, leaving its worshipers in the darkness, which they had vainly dreamt it would enlighten. This was seen in the Roman Em- pire. It was seen in the last century all over Europe, above all in France. u. He who does not learn from events, rejects the lessons of Experience. He who judges from the event, makes Fortune an assessor in his judgements. What an instance of the misclassifications and misconcep- tions produced by a general term is the common mistake, which looks on the Greeks and Romans as one and the same people? because they are both called ancients ! The difference between desultory reading and a course of study may be illustrated by comparing the former to a number of mirrors set in a straight line, so that every one of them reflects a different object, the latter to the same mirrors so skil- fully arranged as to perpetuate one set of objects in an endless series of reflexions. If we read two books on the same subject, the second leads us to review the statements and arguments of the first; the errours of which are little likely to escape this kind of proving, if I may so call it; while the truths are more strongly im- printed on the memory, not merely by repetition, — though 90 GUESSES AT TRUTH. that too is of use, — but by the deeper conviction thus wrought into the mind, of their being verily and indeed truths. Would you restrict the mind then to a single line of study ? No more than the body to any single kind of labour. The sure way of cramping and deforming both is to confine them entirely to an employment which keeps a few of their powers or muscles in strong, continuous action, leaving the rest to shrink and stiffen from inertness. Liberal exercise is neces- sary to both. For the mind the best perhaps is Poetry. Ab- stract truth, which in Science is ever the main object, has no link to attach our sympathies to man, nay, rather withers the fibres by which our hearts would otherwise lay hold on him, absorbing our affections, and diverting them from man, who, viewed in the concrete, and as he exists, is the antipode of abstract truth. High therefore and precious must be the worth and benefit of Poetry ; which, taking men as individuals, and shedding a strong light on the portions and degrees of truth latent in every human feeling, reconciles us to our kind, and shews that a devotion to truth, however it may alienate the mind from man, only unites it more affectionately to men, in their various relations of love (for love is truth), as children, and fathers, and husbands, and citizens, and, one day perhaps much more than it has hitherto done, as Christians. Vice is the greatest of all Jacobins, the arch-leveler. A democracy by a natural process degenerates into an ochlo- cracy : and then the hangman has the fairest chance of becom- ing the autocrat. A. Many of the supposed increasers of knowledge have only given a new name, and often a worse, to what was well known before. u. God did not make harps, nor pirouettes, nor crayon-drawing, nor the names of all the great cities in Africa, nor conchology, nor the Contes 3foraux, and a proper command of countenance. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 91 and prudery, and twenty other things of the sort. They must all be taught then ; or how is a poor girl to know anything about them ? But health, strength, the heart, the soul, with their fairest inmates, modesty, cheerfulness, truth, purity, fond affection, — all these things He did make ; and so they may safely be left to Nature. Nobody can suppose it to be mamma's fault, if they don't come of themselves. How fond man is of tinsel ! I have known a boy steal, to give away, a. Offenders may be divided into two classes, — the old in crime, and the young. The old and hardened criminal, in becoming so, must have acquired a confidence in his own fate- fencedness, or as he would call it, his luck. The young then are the only offenders whom the law is likely to intimidate. Now to these imprisonment or transportation cannot but look much less formidable, when they see it granted as a commuta- tion, instead of being awarded as a penalty. It is no longer transportation, but getting off with transportation : and doubtless it is often urged in this shape on the novice, as an argument for crime. So that in all likelihood the threat of death, in cases where it can rarely be executed, is worse than nugatory, and positively pernicious. These remarks refer chiefly to such laws as are still continu- ally violated. With those, which, having accomplisht the pur- pose they were framed for, live only in the character of the people, let no reformer presume to meddle, until he has studied and refuted Col. Frankland's Speech on Sir Samuel Romilltfs Bills for making alterations in the Criminal Law. 1826. It is an odd device, when a fellow commits a crime, to send him to the antipodes for it. Could one shove him thither in a straight line, down a tunnel, he might bring back some useful hints to certain friends of mine, who are just now busied in asking mother Earth what she is made of. But that a rogue, 92 GUESSES AT TKUTH. by picking a pocket, should earn the circuit of half the globe, seems really meant as a parody on the conceptions of those who hold that the happiness of a future life will consist mainly in going the round of all the countries they have not visited in the present. Unless indeed our legislators fancy that, by setting a man topsy-turvy, they may give his better qualities, which have hitherto been opprest by the weight of evil passions and habits, a chance of coming to the top. How ingeniously contrived this plan is, to render punish- ments expensive and burthensome to the state that inflicts them, is notorious. Let this pass however : we must not grudge a little money, when a great political good is to be effected. True, it would be much cheaper and more profitable to employ our convicts in hard labour at home. Far easier too would it be to keep them under moral and religious discipline. But how could Botany Bay go on, if the importation of vice were put a stop to ? For, as there is nothing too bad to manure a new soil with, so, reasoning by analogy, no scoundrels can be too bad to people a new land with. The argument halts a little, and seems to be clubfooted, and is assuredly topheavy. In all well-ordered towns the inhabitants are compelled to get rid of their own dirt, in such a way that it shall not be a nuisance to the neighbourhood. It is singular that the English, of all na- tions the nicest on this point, should in their political capacity deem it justifiable and seemly to toss the dregs and feces of the community into the midst of their neighbour's estate. Deportation, as the French termed it, for political offenses may indeed at times be expedient, and beneficial, and just. For a man's being a bad subject in one state is no proof that he may not become a good subject under other rulers and a different form of government. More especially in this age of insurrec- tionary spirits, — when the old maxim, which may occasionally have afforded a sanctuary for establisht abuses, has been con- verted into its far more dangerous opposite, that whatever is, is wrong, — there may easily be persons who from incompatibility of character cannot live peaceably in their own country, yet who may have energy and zeal to fit them for taking an active GUESSES AT TKUTH. 93 part in a new order of things. Such was the origin of many of the most flourishing Greek colonies. Men of stirring minds who found no place in accord with their wishes at home, went in search of other homes, carrying the civilization and the glory of the mother country into all the regions around. Some- thing of the same spirit gave rise to the settlements of the Nor- mans in the middle ages. In this way too states may be formed, great from the power of the moral principle which cements them. In this way were those states formed, which, above all the nations of the earth, have reason to glory in their origin, "New England, and Pensylvania. But transportation for moral offenses is in every point of view impolitic, injurious, and unjust. " Plantations (says Bacon, speaking of Colonies) are amongst ancient, primitive, and heroical works. — It is a shameful and unblessed thing, to take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant. And not only so ; but it spoileth the plantation : for they will ever live like rogues, and not fall to work, but be lazy, and do mischief, and spend victuals, and be quickly weary, and then certify over to their country to the discredit of the plantation." Yet, in defiance of this warning from him, whom we profess to revere as the father of true philosophy, and the " wisest of mankind," we have gone on for the last half century peopling the new quarter of the world with the refuse of the gallows ; as though we conceived that in mor- als also two negatives were likely to make an affirmative, — that the coacervation of filth, if the mass be only huge enough, would of itself ferment into purity, — and that every paradox might be lookt for in the country of the ornithorynchus para- doxus. Bacon's words however have been fulfilled, in this as in so many other cases ; for the prophet of modern science was gifted with a still more piercing vision into the hearts and thoughts of men. What indeed could be expected of a people so utterly destitute of that which is the most precious part of a nation's inheritance, — of that which has ever been one of the most powerful human stimulants to generous exertion, — the glory of its ancestors ? "What could be expected of a people 94 GUESSES AT TRUTH. who, instead of glory, have no inheritance but shame ? For it will hardly be argued in these days, that the Romans, who reacht the highest pitch of earthly grandeur, sprang originally from a horde of bandits and outlaws. That fable may be regarded as exploded : and assuredly there never was a nation, in whom the glory of their ancestors was so lively and mighty a principle, as among the Romans. But not content with the ignominy of the original settlement, though we ought to know that disease is ever much more contagious than health, we yearly send out a number of plague-ships, as they may in truth be called, for fear lest the sanitary condition of our Australian colonies should improve. If any persons are to be selected by preference for the peo- pling of a new country, they ought rather to be the most temperate, the most prudent, the most energetic, the most vir- tuous, in the whole nation. For their task is the most arduous, requiring Wisdom to put forth all her strength and all her craft for its worthy execution. Their responsibility is the most weighty ; seeing that upon them the character of a whole people for ages will mainly depend. And they will find much to dishearten them, much to draw them astray ; without being protected against their own hearts, and upheld and forti- fied in their better resolves, as in a regularly constituted state all men are in some measure, by the healthy and cordial influ- ences of Law and Custom and Opinion. O that statesmen would consider what a glorious privilege they enjoy, when they are allowed to become the fathers of a new people ! This how- ever seems to be one of the things which God has reserved wholly to himself. Yet how enormous are the means with which the circum- stances of England at this day supply her for colonization ! How weighty therefore is the duty which falls upon her ! With her population overflowing in every quarter, with her imperial fleets riding the acknowledged lords of every sea, mistress of half the islands in the globe, and of an extent of coast such as no other nation ever ruled over, her manifest calling is to do that over the Atlantic and the Pacific, which Greece did so GUESSES AT TRUTH. 95 successfully in the Mediterranean and the Euxine. As Greece girt herself round with a constellation of Greek states, so ought England to throw a girdle of English states round the world, — to plant the English language, the English character, English knowledge, English manliness, English freedom, above all to plant the Cross, wherever she hoists her flag, wherever the simple natives bow to her armipotent sceptre. "We have been highly blest with a glory above that of other nations. Of the paramounts in the various realms of thought during the last three centuries, many of the greatest have been of our blood. Our duty therefore is to spread our glory abroad, to let our light shine from East to West, and from Pole to Pole, — to do what in us lies, that Shakspeare and Milton and Bacon and Hooker and Newton may be familiar and honoured names a thousand years hence, among every people that hears the voice of the sea. Of this duty we have been utterly regardless ; because we have so long been regardless of a still higher duty. For our duties hang in such a chain, one from the other, and all from heaven, that he who fulfills the highest, is likely to fulfill the rest ; while he who neglects the highest, whereby alone the others are upheld, will probably let the rest draggle in the mire. We have long been unmindful, as a nation, of that which in our colonial policy we ought to deem our highest duty, the duty of planting the colonies of Christ. We have thought only of planting the colonies of Mammon, not those of Christ, nor even those of Minerva and .Apollo. Nay, till very lately we sent out our colonists, not so much to christianize the Heathens, as to be heathenized by them : and when a Christian is heathen- ized, then does the saying come to pass in all its darkness and woe, that the last state of such a man is worse than the first. Let us cast our thoughts backward. Of all the works of all the men who were living eighteen hundred years ago, what is remaining now? One man was then lord of half the known earth. In power none could vie with him, in the wisdom of this world few. He had sagacious ministers, and able generals. Of all his works, of all theirs, of all the works of the other 96 GUESSES AT TEUTH. princes and rulers in those ages, what is left now ? Here and there a name, and here and there a ruin. Of the works of those who wielded a mightier weapon than the sword, a weapon that the rust cannot eat away so rapidly, a weapon drawn from the armory of thought, some still live and act, and are cherisht and revered by the learned. The range of their influence how- ever is narrow : it is confined to few, and even in them mostly to a few of their meditative, not of their active hours. But at the same time there issued from a nation, among the most despised of the earth, twelve poor men, with no sword in their hands, scantily supplied with the stores of human learning or thought. They went forth East, and West, and North, and South, into all quarters of the world. They were reviled : they were spit upon : they were trampled under foot : every engine of torture, every mode of death, was employed to crush them. And where is their work now ? It is set as a diadem on the brows of the nations. Their voice sounds at this day in all parts of the earth. High and low hear it : kings on their thrones bow down to it : senates acknowledge it as their law : the poor and afflicted rejoice in it : and as it has triumpht over all those powers which destroy the works of man, — as, in- stead of falling before them, it has gone on age after age in- creasing in power and in glory, — so is it the only voice which can triumph over Death, and turn the King of terrours into an angel of light. Therefore, even if princes and statesmen had no higher mo- tive than the desire of producing works which are to last, and to bear their names over the waves of time, they should aim at becoming the fellowlabourers, not of Tiberius and Sejanus, nor even of Augustus and Agrippa, but of Peter and Paul. Their object should be, not to build monuments which crumble away and are forgotten, but to work among the builders of that which is truly the Eternal City. For so too will it be eighteen hun- dred years hence, if the world lasts so long. Of the works of our generals and statesmen, eminent as several of them have been, all traces will have vanisht. Indeed of him who was the mightiest among them, all traces have well-nigh vanisht already. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 97 For they who deal in death are mostly given up soon to death, they and their works. Of our poets and philosophers some may still survive ; and many a thoughtful youth in distant re- gions may repair for wisdom to the fountains of Burke and Wordsworth. But the works which assuredly will live, and be great and glorious, are the works of those poor, unregarded men, who have gone forth in the spirit of the twelve from Judea, whether to India, to Africa, to Greenland, or to the isles in the Pacific. As their names are written in the Book of Life, so are their works : and it may be that the noblest me- morial of England in those days will be the Christian empire of New Zealand. This is one of the many ways in which God casts down the mighty, and exalts the humble and meek. Through His bless- ing there have been many men amongst us of late years, whose works will live as long as the world, and far longer. But, as a nation, the very Heathens will rise up in the judgement against us, and condemn us. For they, when they sent out colonies, deemed it their first and highest duty to hallow the newborn state by consecrating it to their national god : and they were studious to preserve the tie of a common religion and a com- mon worship, as the most binding and lasting of all ties, be- tween the mother-country and its offspring. Now so inherent is permanence in religion, so akin is it to eternity, that the mon- uments even of a false and corrupt religion will outlast every other memorial of its age and people. With what power does this thought come upon us when standing amid the temples of Paestum ! All other traces of the people who raised them have been swept away: the very materials of the buildings that once surrounded them have vanisht, one knows not how or whither : the country about is a wide waste : the earth has become barren with age : Nature herself seems to have grown old and died there. Yet still those mighty columns lift up their heads toward heaven, as though they too were "fashioned to endure the assault of Time with all his hours : " and still one gazes through them at the deep-blue sea and sky, and at the hills of Amalfi on the opposite coast of the bay. A day spent 5 G 98 GUESSES AT TEUTH. among those temples is never to be forgotten, whether as a vis- ion of unimagined sublimity and beauty, or as a lesson how the glory of all man's works passes away, and nothing of them abides, save that which he gives to God. When Mary anointed our Lord's feet, the act was a transient one : it was done for His burial: the holy feet which she anointed, ceast soon after to walk on earth. Yet he declared that, wheresoever His gos- pel was preacht in the whole world, that act should also be told as a memorial of her. So has it ever been with what has been given to God, albeit blindly and erringly. While all other things have perisht, this has endured. The same doctrine is set forth in the colossal hieroglyphics of Girgenti and Selinus. At Athens too what are the buildings which two thousand years of slavery have failed to crush? The temple of Theseus, and the Parthenon. Man, when working for himself, has ever felt that so perishable a creature may well be content with a perishable shell. On the other hand, when he is working for those whom his belief has en- throned in the heavens, he strives to make his works worthy of them, not only in grandeur and in beauty, but also in their im- perishable, indestructible massiness and strength. Moreover Time himself seems almost to shrink from an act of sacrilege ; and Nature ever loves to beautify the ruined house of God. It is not however by the Heathens alone that the propagation of their religion in their colonies has been deemed a duty. Christendom in former days was animated by a like principle. In the joy excited by the discovery of America, one main element was, that a new province would thereby be won for the Kingdom of Christ. This feeling is exprest in the old patents for our Colonies : for instance, in that for the plantation of Virginia, James the First declares his approval of " so noble a work, which may by the providence of Almighty God here- after tend to the glory of His Divine Majesty, in propagating the Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God." For nations, as well as individuals, it might often be wisht, that the child were indeed " father of the man." u. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 99 In republishing a work like this after intervals of ten and twenty years, it must needs be that a writer will meet now and then with thoughts, which, in their mode of expression at least, belong more or less to the past, and which in one way or other have become out of keeping with the present. If his watch pointed to the right hour twenty years ago, it must be behind time in some respects now. For in addition to the secular precession of the equinoxes in the intellectual world, each year advances a day ; and ever and anon conies a leap-year, with an unlookt-for intercalation. Even in the writer's own mind, un- less he has remained at a standstill, while all things else have been in motion, — and in that case he can never have had much real life in him, — subsequent reflection and experience must have expanded and matured some opinions, and modified or corrected others. In his relation to the outward world too there must be changes. Truth will have gained ground in some quarters : in others the prevalent forms of errour will be differ- ent, perchance opposite. Opinions, which were just coming out of the shell, or newly fledged, will have reacht their prime, and be flying abroad from mouth to mouth, from journal to journal. He who has sought truth with any earnestness, will at times have the happy reward, — among the pleasures of authorship one of the greatest, — of finding that thoughts, which in his younger days were in the germ, or just sprouting up, or bud- ding forth, have since ripened and seeded, — that truths, of which he may have caught a dim perception, and for which he may have contended with the ardour inspired by a struggle in be- half of what is unduly neglected, are more or less generally recognised, — and, it may even be, that wishes, which, when first uttered, seemed visionary, have assumed a distincter shape, and come forward above the horizon of practical reality. Thus, in revising these Guesses of former years for a third edition, I am continually reminded of the differences between 1847 and 1827, and these not solely lying within the compass of my own mind. Nor is it uninteresting to have such a series of landmarks pointing out where the waters have advanced, and where they have receded. For instance, the observations 100 GUESSES AT TRUTH. in pp. 40 - 43 pertain to a time when the old Poorlaw, after its corruptions through the thoughtlessness of our domestic policy during the French War, was exciting the reprobation, which has since been poured out, with less reason and more clamour, on its successor. At that time our ministers, one after another, shrank from the dangers which were foreboded from a change ; and this should be borne in mind, though it is mostly forgotten, when the new Poorlaw is tried. It should be remembered that, whatever evils may have ensued, they are immeasurably less than were anticipated. Yet, though the wish exprest above for the correction of the old Poorlaw has in some respects been fulfilled, very little has been done in the view there proposed for elevating the character of our labouring classes. That which was to relieve the purses of the land-owners, has been effected. As to the substitutes requisite in order to preserve the aged and infirm from want, and to foster the feeling of self- dependence and self-respect, they are still problems for the future. Again, there is now a cheering hope that what is spoken of in these latter pages as the object of a dim, though earnest wish, will at last be accomplisht. More than two centuries have rolled by since Bacon lifted up his oracular voice against the evils of Penal Colonies. The experience of every generation since has strengthened his protest. During the last twenty years those Colonies have been the seats of simple, defecated vice, and have teemed with new, monstrous births of crime. It could not be otherwise, when a people was doomed to grow up as a mere festering mass of corruption, and when the healthier influences of Nature were continually counteracted by the im- portation of new stores of pestilential matter, as though a hell were continually receiving fresh cargoes of fiends to stock it. At last however our ministers have been stirred with a desire to abate and abolish this tremendous evil. A few years after the utterance of the wish recorded above (in pp. 91 - 94), the Archbishop of Dublin, in two Letters to the late Lord Grey, exposed the mischiefs of Penal Colonies with unanswerable cogency and clearness ; and now the son of that Lord Grey has been awakened to a consciousness of the guilt incurred by GUESSES AT TRUTH. 101 England in maintaining those Colonies, and of our duty to abandon a policy which is planting a new nation out of the refuse of mankind. May God prosper his attempt, and bring it to a happy issue ! May our legislators neither be daunted nor deluded by those who assert that such abominations are a necessary safety-valve for the crimes of England ! It is sad indeed that so many of our Judges should uphold the expediency of transportation, in defiance of such appalling facts. But so it ever is with establisht abuses. Too many good men are apt to put on the trammels of Custom, and to fancy that one cannot walk without them. While the ingenious are ever liable to be ensnared by their own ingenuity, even those who have shewn great ability and integrity in working out the details of a system, though they may be quick in per- ceiving and removing partial blemishes, will be very slow to recognise and acknowledge the whole system to be vicious. Moreover, through that feebleness of imagination, and that bluntness of moral sympathies, which- we all have to deplore, when an evil is once removed from sight, it almost ceases to disturb us ; so that, provided our criminals are prevented from breaking the peace in England, w r e think little of what they may do, or of what may become of them, at the opposite end of the Globe. Nevertheless they who stand on that high ground, whence Principle and Expediency are ever seen to coincide, — if they cling to this conviction, and are resolute in carrying it into act, — may be sure that, after a while, all those whose approbation is worth having, — even they who may have kept aloof, or have laid great stress on scruples and objections in the first instance through timidity or narrowmindedness, — will join in swelling their song of triumph, and in condemning the abuse which they themselves may long have regarded as indispensable to the preservation of social order. We have an additional ground too for thankfulness, in the higher and wiser notions concerning the duties of Colonization which have been gaining currency of late, and to which the attention of our Legislature has been especially called by Mr. Buller in some excellent speeches. Hence we may hope that 102 GUESSES AT TRUTH. ere long our Government will seriously endeavour to redeem this vast province from the dominion of Chance, and will try to substi- tute an organic social polity for the vague confluence of appetites and passions by which our Colonies have mostly been peopled. Above all have we reason for giving thanks to Him who has at length roused our Church to a deeper consciousness of her duties in this region also. Among the events and measures of the last twenty years, I know none which hold out such a rich promise of blessings, or which seem already to project their roots so far into the heart of distant ages, as that which has been done for the better organization and ordering of the Church of Christ in our Colonial Empire. 1847. u. Once on a time there was a certain country, in which, from local reasons, the land could be divided no way so conveniently as into foursided figures. A mathematician, having remarkt this, ascertained the laws of all such figures, and laid them down fully and accurately. His countrymen learnt to esteem him a philosopher ; and his precepts were observed religiously for years. A convulsion of nature at length changed the face and local character of the district : whereupon a skilful sur- veyor, being employed to lay out some fields afresh, ventured to give one of them five sides. The innovation is talkt of uni- versally, and is half applauded by some younger and bolder members of the community : but a big-mouthed and weighty doctor, to set the matter at rest for ever, quotes the authority of the above-mentioned mathematician, that fixer of agricul- tural positions, and grand landmark of posterity, who has demonstrated to the weakest apprehensions that a field ought never to have more than four sides : and then he proves, to the satisfaction of all his hearers, that a pentagon has more. This weighty doctor is one of a herd: everybody knows he cannot tell how many such. Among them are the critics, " who feel by rule, and think by precedent.' , To instance only in the melody of verse : nothing can be clearer than that a polysyl- labic language will fall into different cadences from a language which abounds in monosyllables. The character of languages GUESSES AT TRUTH. 103 too in this respect often varies greatly with their age : for they usually drop many syllables behind them in their progress through time. Yet we continually hear the rule-and-precedent critics condemning verses for differing from the rhythms of for- mer days ; just as though there could only be one good tune in metre. For the motive of a man's actions, hear his friend ; for their prudence and propriety, his enemy. In our every-day judge- ments we are apt to jumble the two together; if we see an action is unwise, accusing it of being ill-intentioned ; and, if we know it to be well-intentioned, persuading ourselves it must be wise ; both foolishly ; the first the most so. Abuse I would use, were there use in abusing; But now 't is a nuisance you '11 lose by not losing. So reproof, were it proof, I 'd approve your reproving; But, until it improves, you should rather love loving. How few Christians have imbibed the spirit of their Master's beautiful and most merciful parable of the tares, which the ser- vants are forbidden to pluck up, lest they should root up the wheat along with them ! Never have men been wanting, who come, like the servants, and give notice of the tares, and ask leave to go and gather them up. Alas, too ! even in that Church, which professes to follow Jesus, and calls itself after His sacred name, the ruling principle has often been to destroy the tares, let what will come of the wheat ; nay, sometimes to destroy the wheat, lest a tare should perchance be left standing. Indeed I know not who can be said to have acted even up to the letter of this command, unless it be authors toward their own works. u. It is not without a whimsical analogy to polemical fulmina- tions, that great guns are loaded with iron, pistols and muskets fire lead, rapidly, incessantly, fatiguingly, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they say, without effect. 104 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Knowledge is the parent of love ; "Wisdom, love itself. They who are sinking hi the world, find more weights than corks ready to attach themselves to them ; and even if they can lay hold on a bladder, it is too likely to burst before it raises their heads above water. a.. The independence of the men who buy their seats, — a for- einer would think I am speaking of a theatre, — is often urged by the opposers of Parliamentary Reform as an advantage resulting from the present system. And independent those gentlemen certainly are, at least of the people of England, whose interests they have in charge. But the parliamentary balance has two ends ; and shewing that a certain body of members are not dependent on the people, will hardly pass for proof that they are not hangers on at all. Independent then is not the fit term to describe these members by : the plain and proper word is irresponsible. Now their being so may be una- voidable, may even be desirable for the sake of some contin- gent good. But can it be good in itself, and for itself? can it be a thing to boast of? Observe, we are talking of representa- tives, not of peers, or king. 1826. In proportion as each word stands for a separate conception, language comes nearer to the accuracy and unimpressiveness of algebraic characters, so useful when the particular links in a chain of reasoning have no intrinsic value, and are important only as connecting the premisses with the conclusion. But cir- cumlocutions magnify details ; and their march being sedate and stately, the mind can keep pace with them, yet not run itself out of breath. In the due mixture of these two modes, lies the secret of an argumentative style. As a general rule, the first should prevail more in writing, the last in speaking ; circumlocution being to words, what repetition is to arguments. The first too is the fitter dress for a short logical sentence, the last for a long one, in which the feelings are any wise appealed to; though to recommend in the same breath, that shortness GUESSES AT TEUTH. 105 should be made still shorter, and that length should be length- ened, may sound paradoxical. Yet this amounts to much the same thing with the old Stoic illustration. Zeno, says Cicero (Orat. 32), "manu demonstrare solebat, quid inter dialecticos et oratores interesset. Nam cum compresserat digitos, pugnumque fecerat, dialecticam aiebat ejusmodi esse: cum autem diduxerat, et manum dilataverat, palmae illius similem eloquentiam esse dicebat. With an evi- dent reference to this illustration, Fuller {Holy State, B. II. c. 5) says of Campian, that he was " excellent at the flat hand of rhetoric, which rather gives pats than blows ; but he could not bend his fist to dispute." Oratory may be symbolized by a warrior's eye, flashing from under a philosopher's brow. But why a warrior's eye, rather than a poet's ? Because in oratory the will must predominate. The talk without effort is after all the great charm of talking. The proudest word in English, to judge by its way of carry- ing itself, is I. It is the least of monosyllables, if it be indeed a syllable : yet who in good society ever saw a little one ? Foreiners find it hard to understand the importance which every wellbred Englishman, as in duty bound, attaches to him- self. They cannot conceive why, whenever they have to speak in the first person, they must stand on tiptoe, lifting themselves up, until they tower, like Ajax, with head and shoulders above their comrades. Hence in their letters, as in those of the uned- ucated among our own countrymen, we now and then stumble on a little i, with a startling shock, as on coming to a short step in a flight of stairs. A Frenchman is too courteous and pol- isht to thrust himself thus at full length into his neighbour's face : he makes a bow, and sticks out his tail. Indeed this big one-lettered pronoun is quite peculiar to John Bull, as much so as Magna Charta, with which perchance it may not be alto- gether unconnected. At least it certainly is an apt symbol of 5* 106 GUESSES AT TRUTH. our national character, both in some of its nobler and of its harsher features. In it you may discern the Englishman's freedom, his unbending firmness, his straightforwardness, his individuality of character: you may also see his self-impor- tance, his arrogance, his opiniativeness, his propensity to sepa- rate and seclude himself from his neighbours, and to look down on all mankind with contempt. As he has bared his represent- ative / of its consonants and adjuncts, in like manner has he also stript his soul of its consonants, of those social and affable qualities, which smoothe the intercourse between man and man, and by the help of which people unite readily one with another. Look at four Englishmen in a stage-coach : the odds are, they will be sitting as stiff and unsociable as four Ies. Novalis must have had some vision of this sort in his mind, when he said (vol. iii. p. 301) : " Every Englishman is an island." But is / a syllable ? It has hardly a better claim to the title, than Orson, before he left the woods, had to be called a family. By the by, they who would derive all language from simple sounds, by their juxtaposition and accumulation, and all x society from savages, who are to unite under the influence of mutual repulsion, may perceive in /and Orson, that the isolated state is as likely to be posterior to the social, as to be anterior. You have only to strip vowels of their consonants, man of his kindly affections, which are sure to dry up of themselves, and to drop off, when they have nothing to act on. Death crum- bles its victims into dust : but dust has no power in itself to coalesce into life. u. Perhaps the peculiar self-importance of our / may number among the reasons why our writers nowadays are so loth to make use of it ; as though its mere utterance were a mark of egotism. This over-jealous watchfulness betrays that there must be something unsound. In simpler times, before our self- consciousness became so sensitive and irritable, people were not afraid of saying I, when occasion arose : and they never dreamt that their doing so could be an offense to their neigh- bours. But now we eschew it by all manner of shifts. We GUESSES AT TEUTH. 107 multiply, we dispersonate ourselves : we turn ourselves outside in. We are ready to become he, she, it, they, anything rather than I. A tribe of writers are fond of merging their individuality in a multitudinous we. They think they may pass themselves off unnoticed, like the Irishman's bad guinea, in a handful of half- pence. This is one of the affectations with which the litera- ture of the day is tainted, a trick caught, or at least much fostered, by the habit of writing in Reviews. Now in a Re- view, — which, among divers other qualities of Cerberus, has that of many-headedness, and the writers in which speak in some measure as the members of a junto, — the plural we is warrantable ; provided it be not thrust forward, as it so often is, to make up for the want of argument by the show of au- thority. This distinction is justly drawn by Chateaubriand, in the preface to his Memoir on the Congress of Verona : " En parlant de moi, je me suis tour-a-tour servi des pronoms nous et je ; nous comme representant d'une opinion, je quand il m'arrive d'etre personnellement en scene, ou d'exprimer un sentiment individuel. Le moi choque par son orgueil ; le nous est un peu janseniste et royal." Still, in ordinary books, except when the author can reason- ably be conceived to be speaking, not merely in his own person, but as the organ of a body, or when he can fairly assume that his readers are going along with him, his using the plural we impresses one with much such a feeling as a man's being afraid to look one in the face. Yet I have known of a work, a history of great merit, which was sent back to its author with a request that he would weed the Ies out of it, by a person of high emi- nence ; who however rose to eminence in the first instance as a reviewer, and the eccentricities in whose character and conduct may perhaps be best solved by looking upon him as a reviewer transformed into a politician. For a reviewer's business is to have positive opinions upon all subjects, without need of sted- fast principles or thoroughgoing knowledge upon any : and he belongs to the hornet class, unproductive of anything useful or sweet, but ever ready to sally forth and sting, — to the class 103 GUESSES AT TRUTH. of which Iago is the head, and who are " nothing, if not criti- cal." So far indeed is the anxiety to suppress the personal pronoun from being a sure criterion of humility, that there is frequently a ludicrous contrast between the conventional generality of our language, and the egotism of the sentiments exprest in it. Un- der this cover a man is withheld by no shame from prating about his most trivial caprices, and will say, we think so and so, we do so and so, ten times, where Montaigne might have hesi- tated to say / once. Often especially in scientific treatises, — which, from the propensity of their authors to look upon words, and to deal with them, as bare signs, are not seldom rude and amorphous in style, — the plural we is mere clumsiness, a kind of refuge for the destitute, a help for those who cannot get quit of their subjectivity, or write about objects objectively. This, which is the great difficulty in all thought, — the forgetting oneself, and passing out of oneself into the object of one's con- templation, — is also one of the main difficulties in composition. It requires much more self-oblivion to speak of things as they are, than to talk about what we see, and what we perceive, and what we think, and what we conceive, and what we find, and what we know: and as self-oblivion is in all things an indispen- sable condition of grace, which is infallibly marred by self- consciousness, the exclusion of such references to ourselves, except when we are speaking personally or problematically, is an essential requisite for classical grace in style. This, to be sure, is the very last merit which any one would look for in Dr Chalmers. He is a great thinker, and a great and good man ; and his writings have a number of merits, but not this. Still even in him it produces a whimsical effect, when, in declaring his having given up the opinion he once held on the allsuffi- ciency and exclusiveness of the miraculous evidence 'for Chris- tianity, although he is speaking of what is so distinctively personal, he still cannot divest himself of the plurality he has been accustomed to assume: see the recent edition of his Works, vol. iii. p. 385. Droll however as it sounds, to find a man saying, We formerly thought differently, but we have now GUESSES AT TKUTH. 109 changed our mind, the passage is a fine proof of the candour and ingenuousness which characterize its author : and every lover of true philosophy must rejoice at the accession of so illustrious a convert from the thaumatolatry by which our the- ology has been debased for more than a century. Moreover the plural we, though not seldom used dictatorially, rather diminishes than increases the weight of what is said. One is slow to believe that a man is much in earnest, when he will not stand out and bear the brunt of the public gaze ; when he shrinks from avowing, What I have written, I have written. Whereas a certain respect and deference is ever felt almost instinctively for the personality of another, when it is not im- pertinently protruded : and it is pleasant to be reminded now and then that we are reading the words of a man, not the words of a book. Hence the interest we feel in the passages where Milton speaks of himself. This was one of the things which added to the power of Cobbett's style. His readers knew who was talking to them. They knew it was William Cobbett, not the Times, or the Morning Chronicle, — that the words proceeded from the breast of a man, not merely from the mouth of a printing-press. It is only under his own shape, we all feel, that we can constrain Proteus to answer us, or rely on what he says. In a certain sense indeed the authorial we will admit of a justification, which is beautifully exprest by Schubert, in the Dedication of his History of the Soul. " It is an old custom for writers to dedicate the work of their hands to some one reader, though it is designed to serve many. — This old custom appears to be of the same origin with that for authors, when they are speaking of themselves, or of what they have done, not to say I, but we. Both practices would seem originally to have been an open avowal of that conviction, which forces itself upon us in writing books, more strongly than in any other employment, — namely, that the individual mind cannot pro- duce anything worthy, except in a bond of love and of unity of spirit with another mind, associated with it as its helpmate. For this is one of the purposes of life and of its labours, that a HO GUESSES AT TEUTH. man should find out how little there is in him that he has received in and through himself, and how much that he has received from others, and that hereby he may learn humility and love." Another common disguise is that of putting on a domino. Instead of coming forward in their own persons, many choose rather to make their appearance as the Author, the Writer, the Reviewer. In prefaces this is so much the fashion, that our best and purest writers, Southey for instance, and Thirlwall, have complied with it. Nay, even Wordsworth has sanc- tioned this prudish coquetry by his practice in the Preface to the Excursion, and in his other later writings in prose.. In earlier days he shewed no reluctance to speak as himself. This affectation is well ridiculed by Tieck, in his Drama- turgische Blaetter, i. 275. " It has struck me for years (he says), as strange, that our reviewers have at length allowed themselves to be so overawed by the everlasting jests and jeers of their numberless witty and witless assailants, as to have dropt the plural we ; much to their disadvantage, it seems to me ; nay, much to the disadvantage of true modesty, which they profess to be aiming at. In a collective work, to which there are many anonymous contributors, each, so long as he continues anonymous, speaks in the name of his collegues, as though they agreed with him. The editor too must examine and ap- prove of the articles : so that there must always be two persons of one mind; and these may fairly call themselves we. Ee- viewers moreover have often to lift up their voices against whatever is new, paradoxical, original, — and are compelled on the other hand, whether by their own convictions, or by per- sonal considerations, to praise what is middling and common- place. Hence no soverein on earth can have a better right to say we, than such a reviewer ; who may lie down at night with the calmest conscience, under the conviction that he has been speaking as the mouthpiece of thousands of his countrymen, when he declared, We are quite unable to understand this and that, or, We can by no means approve of such a notion. How tame in comparison is the newfangled phrase ! The reviewer confesses that he cannot understand this. GUESSES AT TRUTH. HI " Still stranger is it to see, how writers in journals, even when they sign their names, and thus appear in their own per- sons, have for some time almost universally shunned saying I, just as if they were children, with an unaccountable squeam- ishness, and have twisted and twined about in the uncouthest windings, to escape from this short, simple sound. Even in independent works one already meets with such expressions as The writer of this, or, The writer of these lines, — a long- winded, swollen Z which is carrying us back to a stiff, clumsy, lawpaper style. In journals the phrase is, The undersigned has to state, Tour correspondent conceives. Ere long we shall find in philosophical treatises, The thinker of this thought takes the liberty of remarking, or, The discoverer of this notion begs leave to say. Nay, if this modesty be such a palpable virtue, as it would seem to be from the general rage for it, shall we not soon see in descriptive poetry, The poet of these lines walkt through the wood? Even this however would be far too pre- sumptuous, to call oneself a poet. So the next phrase will be, The versifier of this feeble essay Walkt, if his memory deceive him not, Across a meadow, where, audacious deed! He pluckt a daisy from its grassy couch: or, The youth, whose wish is that he may hereafter Be deemed a poet, sauntered toward the grove. There is no end of such periphrases ; and perhaps the barba- rism will spread so widely that compositors, whenever they come to an / in a manuscript, will change it into one of these trailing circumlocutions. When I look into Lessing and his contempo- raries, I find none of this absurd affectation. Modesty must dwell within, in the heart ; and a short / is the modestest, most natural, simplest word I can use, when I have anything I want to say to the reader." There is another mode of getting rid of our I, which has recently become very common, especially in ladies notes, so that I suppose it is inculcated by the Polite Letter-writer ; though, to be sure, / is such an inflexible, unfeminine word, one cannot wonder they should catch at any means of evading it. Ask a couple to dinner : Mrs Tomkins will reply, Mr Tomkins and myself wall be very happy. This indeed is needlessly awkward : 112 GUESSES AT TRUTH. for she might so easily betake herself to a woman's natural place of shelter, by using we. But one person will tell you, Lord A. and myself took a walk this morning ; another, Col. B. and myself fought a duel ; another, Miss E. and myself have been making love to each other. "Thus by myself myself is self-abused." One might fancy that, it having been made a grave charge against Wolsey, that he said, The King and I, everybody was haunted by the fear of being indicted for a simi- lar misdemeanour. In like manner myself is often used, incorrectly, it seems to me, instead of the objective pronoun me. Its legitimate usage is either as a reciprocal pronoun, or for the sake of distinction, or of some particular emphasis ; as when Juliet cries, " Romeo, doff thy name, And for that name, which is no part of thee, Take all myself; " or as when Adam says to Eve, " Best image of myself and dearer half." In the opening of the Paradisia- cal hymn, — " These are thy glorious works, Parent of good, Almighty ! Thine this universal frame, Thus wondrous fair ! Thyself how wondrous then/" — there is an evident contrast : If thy works are so wondrous, how wondrous must Thou Thy- self be I In like manner when Valentine, in the Two Gentle- men of Verona, says of Proteus, "I knew him as myself; And though myself have been an idle truant, Omitting the sweet benefit of time, To clothe my age with angel-like perfection, Yet hath Sir Proteus — Made use and fair advantage of his days ; " — it amounts to the same thing as if he had said, Though I for my part have been an idle truant. Where there is no such emphasis, or purpose of bringing out a distinction or contrast, the simple pronoun is the right one. Inaccuracies of this kind also, though occasionally found in writers of former times, have become much more frequent of late years. Even Coleridge, when speaking about his projected poem on Cain, says, " The title and subject were suggested by myself" In such expressions as my father and myself my brother and my- self we are misled by homoeophony r but the old song begin- ning " My father, my mother, and I," may teach us what is the idiomatic, and also the correct usage. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 113 On the other hand, me is often substituted vulgarly and ungrammatically for I. For the -objective me, on which others act, is very far from being so formidable a creature, either to oneself or to others, as the subjective I, the ground of all con- sciousness, and volition, and action, and responsibility. Gram- matically too it seems to us as if / always required something to follow it, something to express doing or suffering. Hence, when one cries out, Who is there ? three people out of four answer Me. Hence too such expressions as that in Launce's speech, where he gets so puzzled about his personal identity, after having once admitted the thought that he could be any- thing but himself: "I am the dog ... no, the dog is himself; and I am the dog . . . oh, the dog is me, and I am myself ... ay, so, so." It may be considered a token of the want of in- dividuality in the French character, that their je is incapable of standing alone ; and that, in such phrases as the foregoing, moi would be the only admissible word. u. This shrinking from the use of the personal pronoun, this autophoby, as it may be called, is not indeed a proof of the modesty it is designed to indicate ; any more than the hydro- phobia is a proof that there is no thirst in the constitution. On the contrary, it rather betrays a morbidly sensitive self- sciousness. It may however be regarded as a mark of the decaj; of individuality of character amongst us, as a symptom that, as is mostly the case in an age of high cultivation, we are ceasing to be living persons, each animated by one per- vading, formative principle, ready to follow it whithersoever it may lead us, and to stake our lives for it, and that we are shriveling up into encyclopedias of opinions. To refer to spe- cific evidence of this is needless. Else abundance may be found in the want of character, the want of determinate, con- sistent, stedfast principles, so wofully manifest in those who have taken a prominent part in the proceedings of our Legis- lature of late years. There is still one rock indeed, stout and bold and unshakable as can be desired : but the main part of the people about him have been washt and ground down to H 114 GUESSES AT TRUTH. sand, the form of which a breath of air, a child's caprice, a man's foot will change. Or what other inference can be drawn from the vapid characterlessness of our recent poetry and novels of modern life, when compared with that rich fund of original, genial, humorous characters, which seemed to be the peculiar dower of the English intellect, and which abode with it, amid all the vicissitudes of our literature, from the age of Shakspeare, nay, from that of Chaucer, down to the days of Swift and Defoe and Fielding and Smollett and Goldsmith ? Yet by a whimsical incongruity, at the very time when strongly markt outlines of character are fading away in the haze of a literary and scientific amalgama, every man, woman, and child has suddenly started up an individual. This again is an example how language is corrupted by a silly dread of plain speaking. Our ancestors were men and women. The former word too was often used generally, as it is still, like the Latin homo, for every human being. Unluckily however we have no form answering to the German Mensch ; and hence, in seeking for a word which should convey no intimation of sex, we have had recourse to a variety of substitutes : for, none being strictly appropriate, each after a time has been deemed vulgar ; and none has been lasting. In Chaucer's days wight was the common word in the singu- lar, folk in the plural. Neither of these words had any tinge of vulgarity then attacht to them. In the Doctor's Tale, he says of Virginia, " Fair was this maid, of excellent beautee, Aboven every wight that man may see : " where we also find man used indefinitely, as in German, answering to our present one, from the French on, homo. So again soon after : " Of alle treason soverein pestilence Is, when a wight betray eth innocence." A hundred other examples might be cited. In like manner folk is used perpetually, especially in the Parson's Tale : " Many be the ways that lead folk to Christ;" "Sins be the ways that lead folk to hell." When Shakspeare wrote, both these words had lost somewhat of their dignity. Biron calls Armado " a most illustrious wight;" and the contemptuous application of this term to others is a piece of Pistol's gasconading. The use of it GUESSES AT TRUTH. 115 is also a part of the irony with which Iago winds up his descrip- tion of a good woman : " She was a wight ... if ever such wight were ... To suckle fools, and chronicle small beer." Folk was seldom used, except with the addition of a plural s, in such ex- pressions as old folks, good folks, country folks. The word in repute then, in the singular, was a body, of which we retain traces in the compounds, somebody, nobody, anybody, everybody. Rosalind, on recovering from her fainting fit, says, " A body would think this was well counterfeited;" where we should now say a person. Bianca, in the Taming of the Shrew, speaks of " a hasty-witted body" That there was nothing derogatory in the word, is clear from Angelo's calling himself " so eminent a body:' Other words, such as a soul, a creature, a fellow, were mostly attended with a by-shade of meaning. A number were summed up under the general word people, the Latin counterpart of the Saxon folk, which it superseded. Of this use we find the germs in our Bible, in the expressions much people, all people, all the people. " O wonder ! (cries Mi- randa, when she first sees the shipwreckt party ;) How many goodly creatures are there here ! How beauteous mankind is ! O brave new world, That has such people in it ! " Bassanio, after opening the casket, compares himself to one " That thinks he hath done well in people's eyes." So too Richard the Second says of himself, " Thus play I in one person many people." These passages justify the idiomatic use of the word, which, it is to be hoped, will still keep its ground, in spite of the ignorant affectation of unidiomatic fine writing. Next everybody became a person; a word which is not inap- propriate, when we bethink ourselves of its etymology, seeing that so many persons are in truth little else than masks, and that every breath of air will sound through them : for to the lower orders, who do not wear masks, the term is seldom ap- plied. Several causes combined to give this word general cir- culation. It was a French word : it belonged to Law Latin, and to that of the Schools : it was adopted from the Vulgate by our translators. It was coming into common use in Shak- speare's time. Angelo asks Isabella, what she would do, " Find- 116 GUESSES AT TRUTH. ing herself desired of such a person, Whose credit with the judge could save her brother." Dogberry says, " Our watch have comprehended two auspicious persons." Rosalind tells Orlando, that " Time travels in divers paces with divers persons." Nowadays however all these words are grown stale. Such grand people are we, for whom the world is too narrow, our dignity will not condescend to enter into anything short of a quadrisyllable. No ! give us a fine, big, long word, no matter what it means : only it must not have been degraded by being applied to any former generation. As a woman now deems it an insult to be called anything but a female, — as a strumpet is become an unfortunate female, — and as every day we may read of sundry females being taken to Bowstreet, — in like manner everybody has been metamorphosed into an individual, by the Circe who rules the fashionable slang of the day. You can hardly look into a newspaper, but you find a story how five or sfx individuals wepe lost in the snow, or were overturned, or were thrown out of a boat, or were burnt to death. A minister of state informs the House of Commons, that twenty individuals were executed at the last assizes. A beggar this morning said to me, that he was an unfortunate individual. A man of lit- erary eminence told me the other day that an individual was looking at a picture, and that this individual was a painter. One even reads, how an individual met another individual in the street, and how these two individuals quarreled, and how a third individual came up to part the two individuals who were fighting, and how the two individuals fell upon the third indi- vidual, and belaboured him for his pains. This is hardly an exaggerated parody of an extract I met with a short time back from a speech, which was pronounced to be " magnificent," and in which the word recurs five times in eighteen lines. Nay, a celebrated preacher, it is said, has been so destitute of all feel- ing for decorum in language, as to call our Saviour " this emi- nent individual." Also too ! even Wordsworth, of all our writ- ers the most conscientiously scrupulous in the use of words, in a note to one of the poems in his last volume, says that it was " never seen by the individual for whom it was intended." So GUESSES AT TRUTH. H7 true is the remark, which Coleridge makes, when speaking of the purity of Wordsworth's language, that "in prose it is scarcely possible to preserve our style unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere, from the sermon to the newspaper." For, if Landor has done so, it is because he has spent so much of his life abroad. Hence his- knowledge of our permanent language has been little troubled by the rub- bish which floats on our ephemeral language, and from which no man living in England can escape. When and whence did this strange piece of pompous inanity come to us? and how did it gain such sudden vogue? It sounds very modern indeed, scarcely older than the Reform- Bill. Have we caught it from Irish oratory? or from the Scotch pulpit ? both of which have been so busy of late years in corrupting our mother English. To the former one might ascribe it, from seeing that, of all classes, our Irish speakers are the fondest of babbling about individuals. Its empty grandilo- quence too sounds like a voice from the Emerald Isle ; while its philosophical pretension would bespeak the north of the Tweed. Or is it a Gallicism ? for the French too apply their individu to particular persons, though never, I believe, thus promiscuously. Its having got down already into the mouth of beggars is a curious instance of the rapidity with which words circulate in this age of steampresses, and steamcoaches, and steamboats, and steamthoughts, and steamconstitutions. The attempt to check the progress of a word, which has already acquired such currency, may perhaps be idle. Still it is well if one can lead some of the less thoughtless to call to mind, that words have a meaning and a history, and that, when used according to their historical meaning, they have also life and power. The word in question too is a good and valuable word, and worth reclaiming for its own appropriate signification. We want it ; we have frequent occasion for it, and have no substitute to fill its place. It should hardly be used, except where some distinction or contrast is either exprest or implied. A man is an individual, as regarded in his special, particular unity, not in his public capacity, not as a member of a body : 118 GUESSES AT TRUTH. he is an individual, so far as he is an integral whole, different and distinct from other men : and that which makes him what he is, that in which he differs and is distinguisht from other men, is his individuality, and individuates or individualizes him. Thus, in the Dedication of the Advancement of Learning, Bacon says to the King : " I thought it more respective to make choice of some oblation, which might rather refer to the propriety and excellency of your individual person, than to the business of - your crown and state." Milton indeed uses individual for un- divided or indivisible ; as for instance in that grand passage of his Ode on Time, where he says that, when Time is at an end, " Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss With an individual kiss." And this usage is common in our early writers. Ra- legh, in the Preface to his History (p. 17), speaks of the notion of Proclus, " that the compounded essence of the world is con- tinued and knit to the Divine Being by an individual and in- separable power." To our ears however this sounds like a Lat- inism. Indeed this is the only sense in which the Romans used the word. - The sense it bears with us, it acquired among the School- men, ^rora whom we derive so large a portion of our philosoph- ical vocabulary ; as may be seen, for instance, in the following passage of Anselm's Monologium (c. xxvii.) : " Cum omnis substantia tractetur, aut esse universalis, quae pluribus substan- tiis essentialiter communis est, — ut, hominem esse, commune est singulis hominibus ; aut est individua, quae universalem essentiam communem habet cum aliis, — quemadmodum singuli homines commune habent cum singulis, ut homines sint." Thus Donne, in his 38th Sermon (vol. ii. p. 172), speaking of Christ, says : " This is that mysterious Person, who is singularis, and yet not individuus ; singularis., — there never was, never shall be any such ; — but we cannot call him individual, as every other particular man is, because Christitatis non est genus, there is no genus or species of Christs : it is not a name which can be communicated to any other^a^the name of man may to every individual man." Again Bacon,, in the first Chapter of the second Book De Augmentis ikieftiiarum, writes : f Historia r GUESSES AT TRUTH. 119 proprie individuorum est. — Etsi enim Historia Naturalis circa species versari videatur, tamen hoc fit ob promiscuam rerum naturalium similitudinem ; ut, si unam noris, omnes noris. — Poesis etiam individuorum est. — Philosophia individua dimit- tit, neque impressiones primas individuorum, sed notiones ab illis abstractas complectitur." This usage might be illustrated by a number of passages from our metaphysical writers ; as where Locke says (iii. 3, 4), that men " in their own species, — wherein they have often occasion to mention particular persons, make use of proper names ; and there distinct individuals have distinct denomina- * tions." This example shews how easily the modern abuse J might grow up. In the following sentence from the Wealth of Nations (B. v. c. 1), — "In some cases the state of society places the greater part of individuals in such situations as nat- urally form in them almost all the abilities and virtues which ^ — e This is why it was not good for man to be alone. What in truth would Adam have been, if Eve had never been created ? What was he before her creation ? A solitary I, without a thou. Can there be such a being ? Can the human mind be 140 GUESSES AT TRUTH. awakened, except by the touch of a kindred mind ? Can the spark of consciousness be elicited, except by collision ? Or are we to believe that his communion with God was intimate enough to supply the place of communion with beings of his own kind? The indispensableness of an object to arouse the subject is finely set before us in Troilus and Cressida, in the Dialogue between Ulysses and Achilles. Ulysses. A strange fellow here Writes me that man, — how dearly ever parted, How much in having, or without, or in, — Cannot make hoast to' have that which he hath, Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflexion : As when his virtues shining upon others Heat them, and they retort that heat again To the first giver. Achilles. This is not strange, Ulysses. The beauty that is borne here in the face • The bearer knows not, but commends itself M To others eyes: nor doth the eye itself, I That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself, Not going from itself: but eye to eye opposed > Salutes each other with each other's form. For speculation turns not to itself, Till it hath traveld, and is married there Where it may see itself. Hence it is only by the reciprocal action of these two ideas, the continual play and weaving of them one into the other, that a true system of philosophy can be constructed. In a logical vacuum indeed /may dream that it can stand alone : and then it will compass itself about with a huge zero, an all-absorbing negation, summing up everything out of itself, as Fichte did, in the most audacious word ever coined by man, Nicht-ich, or Not-L His system, a work of prodigious energy and logical power, was the philosophical counterpart to the political edifice which was set up at the same time in France: and its main fallacy was the very same, the confounding of the particular subjective mind with the eternal, universal mind of the All wise, — the fancy that, as God pours all truth out of Himself, man may in like manner draw all truth out of himself, — and the GUESSES AT TRUTH. 141 forgetting that, beside /and Not-I, there is also a Thou in the world, our relations to whom, in their manifold varieties, are the source of all our affections, and of all our duties. By the way, some persons may think that we have cause to congratulate ourselves on the bareness of our I, which is such that nothing can adhere to it ; inasmuch as it thereby forms a kind of palisade around us, preserving us from the inroads of German philosophy. Nobody acquainted with the various sys- tems, which have sprung up since Kant sowed the teeth of the serpent he had slain, and which have been warring against each other from that time forward, can fail to perceive that in England they must all have been still-born, were it solely from the impossibility of forming any derivatives or compounds from our I. One cannot stir far in those systems without such words as Ichheit, ichheitlich, tchltch, Nicht-ich. But the genius of our language would never have allowed people to talk about Ikood, Ihoodly, lly, JVot-I. Like the sceptre of Achilles, our / oiWre cpvWa Ka\ o£ovs 3>ucr«, eVeidj) npcoTa TOfxfjv iv opeacrt \e\onrcv. And this, which is true of our pronoun, is also true of that for which it stands. No old stick, no iron bar, no bare I, can be more unproductive and barren than Self, when cut off and isolated from the tree on which it was set to grow. u. Everybody has heard of one speech in Seneca's Medea, small as may be the number of those whose acquaintance with that poet has gone much further. In truth the very conception of a tragedy written by a Stoic is anything but inviting, and may be deemed scarcely less incongruous than a garden of granite. Nor would this furnish an unsuitable emblem of those trage- dies : the thoughts are about as hard and stiff; and the charac- ters have almost as much life in them. Still there is one speech in them, which is sufficiently noto- rious. When Medea's nurse exhorts her to be patient, by urg- ing the forlornness of her situation, reminding her how Abiere Colchi ; conjugis nulla est fides ; Nihilque superest opibus e tantis tibi ; she answers, Medea superest : and thus far her answer is a fine 142 GUESSES AT TRUTH. one. But the rhetorician never knew when to have done, in the accumulation either of gold or of words. For, while truth and genius are simple and brief, affectation and hypocrisy, whether moral or intellectual, are conscious that their words are mere bubbles, and blow them till they burst. What follows is wild nonsense : Medea superest : hie mare et terras vides, Ferrumque, et ignes, et deos, et fulmina. Now how should one translate these two words, Medea super- est ? They are easy enough to construe : but an English poet would hardly make her say, Medea is left, or Medea remains. The question occurred to me the other day, when listening to a modern opera of little worth, except for the opportunity it has afforded Madame Pasta for putting forth her extraordinary tragic powers ; powers to which, as there exhibited, I know not what has been seen comparable in any actress, since she who shed such splendour over the stage in our younger days, welcomed her son back to Rome. Yolumnia, I believe, was the last part Mrs. Siddons ever played: at least it was the last I saw her in: and well did it become her in the days of her matronly dignity. Even now, after near twenty years, I still seem to hear the tone of exulting joy and motherly pride, bursting through her efforts to repress it, when, raising her kneeling son, she cried, Nay, my good soldier, up ! My gentle Marcius, worthy Caius, and By deed atchieving honour newly-named . . . What is it ? Coriolanus must I call thee ? Nor will any one easily forget the exclamation with which Me- dea repells Jason's question, Che mi resta ? the simple pronoun Io. The situations are somewhat unlike: but the passage is evidently an imitation of that in Seneca's tragedy, or at least has come from it at second or third hand. For Corneille's cele- brated Moi, which the French have extolled as though it had been the grandest word in all poetry, must no doubt have been the medium it past through, being itself merely a prior copy of the same original. In the French tragedy too a like change has been made from the name to the pronoun : and one feels gup:sses at truth. 143 that this change is imperatively required by the spirit of modern times. An ancient poet could not have used the pronoun : a modern poet in such a situation could hardly use the proper name. But is not this at variance with what was said before about the readiness of the ancients, and the comparative reluctance in modern times, to make use of the simple personal pronouns ? No : for this very contrast arises from the objective character of their minds, and the subjective character of ours. They had less deep and wakeful feelings connected with the personal pro- noun, and therefore used it more freely. But, from attaching less importance to it, when they wanted to speak emphatically, they had recourse to the proper name. Above all was this the case among the Romans, with whom names had a greater power than with any other people ; owing mainly to the political insti- tutions, which gave the Roman houses a vitality unexampled elsewhere ; so that the same names shine in the Fasti for cen- tury after century, encircled with the honours of nearly twenty generations. Hence a Roman prized and loved his name, almost as something independent and out of himself, as a kind of house- hold god : and he could speak proudly of it, without being with- held by the bashfulness of vanity. Even the immortality which a Greek or Roman lookt chiefly to, was that of his name. We on the other hand have been taught that there is some- thing within us far more precious and far more lasting than anything that is merely outward. Hence the word / has a charm and a power, which it never had before, a power too which has gone on growing, till of late years it has almost swal- lowed up every other. Two examples of this were just now alluded to, Fichte's egoical philosophy, and the French Consti- tution, in which everything was deduced from the rights of man, without regard to the rights of men, or to the necessities of things. The same usurpation shews itself under a number of other phases, even in religion. Catholic religion has well-nigh been split up into personal, so that the very idea of the former is almost lost ; and it is the avowed principle of what is called the Religious World, that everybody's paramount, engrossing 144 GUESSES AT TRUTH: duty is to take care of his own soul. Of which principle the philosophical caricature is, that Selfishness is the source of all morality, the ground of benevolence, and the only safe founda- tion for a State to build on. Thus the awakening of our self- consciousness, which was aroused, in order that, perceiving the hollowness and rottenness of that self, we might endeavour to stifle and get quit of it, has in many respects rather tended to make us more its slaves than ever. In truth it may be said of many a man, that he is impaled upon his I. This is as it were the stake, which is driven through the soul of the spiritual suicide. Still there are seasons, when, asserting its independence of all outward things, an / may have great Stoical dignity and grandeur ; especially if it rises from the midst of calamities, like a mast still erect and unbending from a wreck. " Frappe deux fois de la foudre, — says De Maistre (Soirees de Saint Petersbourg, i. 11) alluding to the losses and sufferings he had to endure in the Revolution, — je n'ai plus de droit a ce qu'on appelle vulgairement bonheur. J'avoue meme qu'avant de m'etre raffermi par de salutaires reflexions, il m'est arrive trop souvent de me demander a moi-meme, Que me reste-t-il! Mais la conscience, a force de me repondre Moi, m'a fait rougir de ma foiblesse. ,, In a certain sense moreover, and that a most awful one, the question Quid superest f concerns us all. For to all a time will come, when we shall be stript as bare of every outward thing, in which we have been wont to trust, as Medea could ever be. And one answer which we shall all have to make to that ques- tion, will be the same as hers. When everything else has past away from me, / shall still remain. But alas for those who will have no other answer than this ! u * No people, I remarkt just now, ever had so lively a feeling of the power of names as the Romans. This is a feature of that political instinct, which characterizes them above every other nation, and which seems to have taught them from the very origin of their state, that their calling and destiny was regere GUESSES AT TRUTH. 145 imperio populos ; whereby moreover they were endowed with an almost unerring sagacity for picking out and appropriating all such institutions as were fitted to forward their two great works, of conquering and of governing the world. In the East we seldom hear of any names, except those of the sovereins and their favorites : and those of both classes often become extinct before the natural close of their lives. In Greece the individual comes forward on the ground of his own character, without leaning on his ancestors for support. The descendants of Aristides, of Pericles, of Brasidas,, were scarcely distinguisht from their fellowcitizens. But in Rome the name of the house and family predominated over that of the individ- ual. It is at Rome that we first find family names or surnames, names which do not expire with their owners, but are transmit- ted from generation to generation, carrying down the honours they have already earned, and continually receiving fresh in- fluxes of fame. Traces of a like institution are indeed per- ceivable in others of the old Italian nations, and even among the Greeks : but it is among the Romans that we first become familiar with it, and behold its political power. By means of their names, political principles, political duties, political affec- tions were imprest on the minds of the Romans from their birth. Every member of a great house had a determinate course markt out for him, the path in which his forefathers had trod: his name admonisht him of what he owed to his country. The Valerii, the Fabii, the Claudii, the Cornelii had special and mighty motives to prompt them to patriotism : and a twofold disgrace awaited them, if they shrank from their post. This has been observed by Desbrosses, in his Traite du Mecanisme des Langues. " L'usage des noms hereditaires (he says) a pro- digieusement influe sur la facon de penser et sur les moeurs. On sait quel admirable effet il a produit chez les Romains. Rien n'a contribue davantage a la grandeur de la republique que cette methode de succession nominale, qui, incorporant, pour ainsi dire, a la gloire de l'etat, la gloire des noms heredi- taires, joignit le patriotisme de race-au patriotisme national." Niebuhr (vol. ii. p. 376) has pointed out how the measures of 7 j 146 GUESSES AT TKUTH. eminent Roman statesmen were often considered as heirlooms, so as to be perfected or revived by namesakes of their first proposers, even after the lapse of centuries. And who can doubt that the younger Cato's mind was stirred by the renown of the elder ? or that the example of the first Brutus haunted the second, and whispered to him, that it behoved him also, at whatsoever cost of personal affection, to deliver his country from the tyrant? The same feeling, the same influence of names, manifests itself in the history of the Italian Republics. Nor have the other nations of modern Europe been without it. Only unfor- tunately the frivolous love of titles, and the petty ambition of mounting from one step in the peerage to another, have stunted its power. How much greater and brighter would the great names in our history have been, — the names of Howard, and Percy, and Nevile, and Stanley, and "Wentworth, and Russell, — if so much of their glory had not been drawn off upon other titles, which, though persons verst in pedigrees know them to belong to the same blood, are not associated with them in the minds of the people ? This may be one of the reasons why our nobility has produced so few great men, that is, considering the means and opportunities afforded by our Constitution. Great men rise up into it ; and a title is put as an extinguisher upon them. What is the most gorgeous, highflown title which a soverein of France could devise, even were it that of arch- grand-duke, compared with the name of Montmorency ? The Spanish grandees shew a truer aristocratical feeling, in wear- ing their oldest titles, instead of what are vulgarly deemed their highest. For the true spirit of an aristocracy is not personal, but cor- porate. He who is animated by that spirit, would rather be a branch of a great tree, than a sucker from it. The dema- gogue's aim and triumph is to be lifted up on the shoulders of the mob : when thus borne aloft, he exults, however unsteady his seat, however rapidly he may be sure to fall. But the aris- tocrat is content to abide within the body of his order, and to derive his honour and influence from his order, more than from GUESSES AT TKUTH. 147 himself. The glory of his ancestors is his. Another symptom of the all-engulfing whirl with which the feeling of personality has been swallowing up everything else for the last century, is the stale, flat ridicule lavisht by every witling and dullard on those who take pride in an illustrious ancestry. We had be- come unable to understand any honour but that which was per- sonal, any merit or claim but personal. We had dwindled and shrunk into a host of bare Ies. Even the way in which a Roman begins his letter, heading it with his name at full length, was significant. Whereas we skulk with ours into a corner, and often pare it down to in- itials, u. A rumpled rose-leaf lay in my path. There was one little stain on it : but it was still very sweet. Why was it to be trampled under foot, or lookt on as food for swine ? There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a per- fumer's shop. When you see an action in itself noble, to suspect the sound- ness of its motive is like supposing everything high, mountains among the rest, to be hollow. Yet how many unbelieving believers pride themselves on this uncharitable folly ! These are your silly vulgar-wise, your shallow men of penetration, who measure all things by their own littleness, and who, by professing to know nothing else, seem to fancy they earn an exclusive right to know human nature. Let none such be trusted in their judgements upon any one, not even on them- selves always. Certain writers of works of fiction seem to delight in playing at cup and ball with vice and virtue. Is it right, you thought you saw ? you find it to be wrong : wrong ? presto ! it has become right. Their hero is a moral prodigy, mostly profligate, often murderous, not seldom both ; but, whether both or either, 148 GUESSES AT TRUTH. always virtuous. Possessing, as they inform us, a fine under- standing, resolved, as he is ever assuring us, to do right in despite of all mankind, he is perpetually falling into actions, atrocious and detestable, — not from the sinfulness of human nature, — not from carelessness, or presumption, or rashly dallying with temptation, — but because the world is a moral labyrinth, every winding in which leads to monstrous evil. Such an entanglement of circumstances is devised, as God never permits to occur, except perhaps in extraordinary times to extraordinary men. Into these the hero is thrown headlong ; and every foul and bloody step he takes, is ascribed to some amiable weakness, or some noble impulse, deserving our sym- pathy and admiration. And what fruits do these eccentric geniuses bring us from their wilderness of horrours ? They seduce us into a perni- cious belief that feeling and duty are irreconcilable ; and thus they hypothetically suspend Providence, to necessitate and sanction crime. Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose ; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry. Taste appreciates pictures : connoisseurship appraises them. t. We are always saying with anger or wonder, that such and such a work of genius is unpopular. Yet how can it be other- wise ? Surely it would be a contradiction, were the most ex- traordinary books in a language the commonest; at least till they have been made so by fashion, which, to say nothing of its capriciousness, is oligarchal. Are you surprised that our friend Matthew has married such a woman ? and surprised too, because he is a man of genius ? That is the very reason of his doing it. To be sure she came to him without a shift to her back: but his genius is rich enough to deck her out in purple and fine linen. So long as GUESSES AT TRUTH. 149 these last, all will go on comfortably. But when they are worn out and the stock exhausted, alas poor wife ! shall I say ? or alas poor Matthew ! Jealousy is said to be the offspring of Love. Yet, unless the parent makes haste to strangle the child, the child will not rest till it has poisoned the parent* a. Man has, First, animal appetites ; and hence animal impulses. Secondly, moral cravings; either unregulated by reason, which are passions ; or regulated and controlled by it, which are feelings : hence moral impulses. Thirdly, the power of weighing probabilities ; and hence prudence. Fourthly, the vis logica, evolving consequences from axioms, necessary deductions from certain principles, whether they be mathematical, as in the theorems of geometry, or moral, as of Duty from the idea of God : hence Conscience, at once the voice of Duty speaking to the soul, and the ear with which the soul hears the commands of Duty. This idea, the idea of God, is, beyond all question or com- parison, the one great seminal principle ; inasmuch as it com- bines and comprehends all the faculties of our nature, converg- ing in it as their common centre, — brings the reason to sanction the aspirations of the imagination, — impregnates law with the vitality and attractiveness of the affections, — and establishes the natural, legitimate subordination of the body to the will, and of both to the vis logica or reason, by involving the neces- sary and entire dependence of the created on the Creator. But, although this idea is the end and the beginning, the ocean and the fountain-head of all duty, yet are there many contributory streams of principle, to which men in all ages have been con- tent to trust themselves. Such are the disposition to do good for its own sake, patriotism, that earthly religion of the ancients, obedience to law, reverence for parents. A few corroborative observations may be added. 150 GUESSES AT TEUTH. First : passion is refined into feeling by being brought under the controll of reason ; in other words, by being in some degree tempered with the idea of duty. Secondly : a deliberate impulse appears to be a contradiction in terms : yet its existence must be admitted, if we deny the existence of principles. For there are actions on record, which, although the results of predetermination, possest all the self-sac- rifice of a momentary impulse. The conduct of Manlius when challenged by the Gaul, contrasted with that of his son on a like occasion, strikingly illustrates the difference between prin- ciple and impulse : of which difference moreover, to the unques- tionable exclusion of prudence, the premeditated self-devotion of Decius furnishes another instance. Thirdly : the mind, when allowed its full and free play, prefers moral good, however faintly, to moral evil. Hence the old confession, Video meliora, proboque : and hence are we so much better judges in another's case than our own. In like manner the philosophic Apostle demonstrates the existence of the law written in our hearts, from the testimony borne by the conscience to our own deeds, and the sentence of acquittal or condemnation which we pass on each other. And although this preference for good may in most cases be so weak, as to require the subsidiary support of promises and threats, yet the auxiliary enactment is not to be confounded with the primary principle. For, in the Divine Law certainly, and, I believe, in Human Law also, where it is not the arbitrary decree of igno- rance or injustice, the necessity and consequent obligation to obedience must have existed, at least potentially, from all eter- nity ; Law being an exposition, and not an origination of Duty : while punishment, a thing in its very nature variable, is a sub- sequent appendage, "because of transgressions." Even the approval of conscience, although coincident with the performance of the act approved, must be as distinct from it as effect from cause ; not to insist on that approval's not being confined to duty in its highest sense, but being extended on fitting occasions both to moral impulses and to prudence. Fourthly : there are classes of words, such as generous and GUESSES AT TRUTH. 151 base, good and bad, right and wrong, which belong to the moral feelings and principles contended for, and which have no mean- ing without them : and their existence, not merely in the writ- ings of philosophers, but in the mouths of the commonalty, should perhaps be deemed enough to establish the facts, of which they profess to be the expressions and exponents. Sure- ly the trite principle, Ex nihilo nihil Jit, is applicable here also, and may for once be enlisted in the service of the good cause. But besides, the existence of Duty, as in itself an ultimate and satisfactory end, is notoriously a favorite topic with great ora- tors ; who can only be great, because their more vivid sensibility gives them a deeper practical insight into the springs and work- ings of the human heart ; and who, it is equally certain, would not even be considered great, were their views of humanity altogether and fundamentally untrue. Without going back to Demosthenes, the most eloquent writers of our days have dis- tinguish themselves by attacks on the selfish system. • To the same purpose is the epitaph on Leonidas and his Spartans: They fell in obedience to the laws. Were not obedi- ence a duty in itself, without any reference to a penalty, this famous epitaph would dwindle into an unintelligible synonym for They died to escape whipping. On the other hand, were not such obedience possible, the epitaph would be rank nonsense. The fact is, if the doctrines of the selfish philosophers, — as I must call them, in compliance with usage, and for lack of a more appropriate name, though they themselves, were they con- sistent, would shrink from the imputation of anything so fan- tastical and irrational as the love of wisdom, and would rather be styled systematic self-seekers, — if, I say, their doctrines are true, every book that was ever written, in whatsoever language, on whatsoever subject, and of whatsoever kind, unless it be a mere table of logarithms, ought forthwith to be written afresh. For in their present state they are all the spawn of falsehood cast upon the waters of nonsense. Great need verily is there that this school of exenterated rulemongers and eviscerated logicians should set about rewriting every book, ay, even their 152 GUESSES AT TRUTH. own. For, whatever they may have thought, they have been fain to speak like the rest of the world, with the single excep- tion of Mr Bentham ; who, discerning the impossibility of giving vent to his doctrines in any language hitherto spoken by man, has with his peculiar judgement coined a new gibberish of his own for his private circulation. Yet one might wager one should not read many pages, before even he would be caught tripping. Clumsy as this procedure may be, it is at all events honester and more straightforward than the course adopted by Hobbes ; who, instead of issuing new tokens, such as everybody might recognize to be his, chose to retain the terms in common use, stamping their impress however on the base metal of his own brain, and trying to palm this off as the king's English. If any one wishes to see the absolute incompatibility of the selfish doctrines with the universal feelings of mankind, let him read the eighth and ninth chapters of Hobbeses Human Nature, and remark how audaciously he perverts and distorts the words he pretends to explain, as the only means of keeping them from giving the lie to his system. It is curious, to what shifts a man, who is often a clear thinker, and mostly writes with precision, is compelled to resort, when, having mounted the great horse of philosophy with his face tailward, he sets off on this a posteriori course, shouting, Look! how fast I am getting on! It is true, instead of coming to meet me, everything seems to be running away : but this is only because I have emancipated myself from the bondage of gravitation, and can distinguish the motion of the earth as it rolls under me ; while all other men are swept blindly along with it. When one looks merely at the style of Hobbes, and at that of Mr Bentham's later works, it is not easy to conceive two writers more different. Yet they have much in common. Both have the same shrewdness of practical observation, the same clearness of view, so far as the spectacles they have chosen to put on allow them to see, — the same fondness for stringing everything on a single principle. Both have the same arrogant, overweening, contemptuous self-conceit. Both look with the GUESSES AT TKUTH. 153 same vulgar scorn on all the wisdom of former times, and of their own. Both deem they have a monopoly of all truth, and that whatever is not of their own manufacture is contraband. Both too seem to have been men of regular moral habits, having naturally cold and calm temperaments, undisturbed by lively affections, unruffled by emotions, with no strong feelings except such as were kindled or fanned by self-love. Thus they both reacht a great age, exemplifying their systems, so far as this is possible, in their own lives ; and they only drew from themselves, while they fancied they were representing human nature. In knowledge indeed, especially in the variety of his infor- mation, Mr Bentham was far superior to the sophist of Malms- bury ; although what made him so confident in his knowledge, was that it was only half-knowledge. He wanted the higher Socratic half, the knowledge of his own ignorance. Hobbes, it is said, was wont to make it a boast, that he had read so little ; for that, if he had read as much as other men, he should have been as ignorant. What his ignorance in that case might have been, we cannot judge ; but it could not well have been grosser than what he is perpetually displaying. To appreciate the arrogance of his boast, we must remember that he was the friend of Selden ; who, while his learning embraced the whole field of knowledge, was no way inferior to Hobbes in the vigour of his practical understanding, and in sound, sterling, desophisticating sense* was far superior to him. As to the difference in style between the two chiefs of the selfish school, it answers to that in their political opinions. For a creed, which acknowledges no principles beyond the figments of the understanding, may accommodate itself to any form of government ; not merely submitting to it, as Christianity does, for conscience sake, but setting it up as excellent in itself, and worshiping it. Accordingly we find them diverging into op- posite extremes. While Hobbes bowed to the ground before the idol of absolute monarchy, his successor's leanings were all in favour of democracy. The former, caring only about quiet, and the being able to pursue his studies undisturbed, wisht to 7* 154 GUESSES AT TRUTH. leave everything as it was ; and thus in style too conformed, so far as his doctrines allowed, to common usage. Mr Bentham on the other hand, as he ever rejoiced to see society resolving into its elements, seemed desirous to throw back language also into a chaotic state. Unable to understand organic unity and growth, he lookt upon a hyphen as the one bond of union. u. By a happy contradiction, no system of philosophy gives such a base view of human nature, as that which is founded on self-love. So sure is self-love to degrade whatever it touches. it. There have indeed been minds overlaid by much reading, men who have piled such a load of books on their heads, their brains have seemed to be squasht by them. This however was not the character of the learned men in the age of Hobbes. Though they did not all rise to a commanding highth above the whole expanse of knowledge, like Scaliger, or like Niebuhr in our times, so as to survey it at once with a mighty, darting glance, discerning the proportions and bearings of all its parts ; yet the scholars of those days had no slight advantages, on the one hand in the comparative narrowness and unity of the field of knowledge, and on the other hand in the labour then re- quired to traverse it ; above all, in the discipline of a positive education, and in having determinate principles, according to which every fresh accession of information was to be judged and disposed of. Their principles may have been mixt up with a good deal of errour ; but at all events they were not at the mercy of the winds, to veer round and round with every blast. Their knowledge too was to be drawn, not at second or third or tenth hand, from abstracts and abridgements, and com- pilations and compendiums, and tables of contents and indexes, but straight from the original sources. Hence they had a firmer footing. They often knew not how to make a right use of their knowledge, and lackt critical discrimination : but few of them felt their learning an incumbrance, or were disabled by it for walking steadily. Thus even in their scantiness of means GUESSES AT TRUTH. 155 there were advantages ; just as, according to the great law of compensation, riches of every kind have their disadvantages. That which we acquire laboriously, by straining all our faculties to win it, is more our own, and braces our minds more. Even in Melanchthon's time this was felt, and that the greater facilities in obtaining books were not purely beneficial. The exercise of transcribing the ancient writers, he tells his pupils ( Oper. in. 378), had its good. " Demosthenes fertur octies descripsisse Thucydidem. Ego ipse Pauli Epistolam ad Eomanos Grae- cam ter descripsi. Ac memini me ex Capnione audire, quon- dam eo solidius fuisse doctos homines, quia certos auctores, et in qualibet arte praecipuos, cum manu sua singuli describerent, penitus ediscebant. Nunc distrain studia, nee immorari ingenia certis auctoribus, vel scribendo, vel legendo." It is true, there is an aptness to exaggerate the evils of improvements, as well as the benefits ; and a man may be great in spite of his riches, even as he may enter into the Kingdom of Heaven in spite of them. But great men are such by an inward power, not through outward means, and may be all the greater for the want of those means. Yet on the other hand in Bacon himself one may perceive that many of the flaws, which here and there disfigure his writings, would have vanisht if he had entertained less dispar- aging notions of his predecessors, and not allowed himself to be dazzled by the ambition of being in all things the reformer of philosophy. Even if learning were mere ballast, a large and stout ship will bear a heavy load of it, and sail all the better. But a wise man will make use of his predecessors as rowers, who will waft him along far more rapidly and safely, and over a far wider range of waters, than he could cross in any skiff of his own. Adopting Bacon's image, that we see beyond anti- quity, from standing upon it, at all events we must take up our stand there, and not kick it from under us : else we ourselves fall along with it. True wisdom is always catholic, even when protesting the most loudly and # strongly. It knows that the real stars are those which move on calmly and peacefully in the midst of their heavenly brotherhood. Those which rush out 156 GUESSES AT TRUTH. from thence, and disdain communion with them, are no stars, but fleeting, perishable meteors. Even in poetry, he would be a bold man who would assert that Milton's learning impaired his genius. At times it may be obtrusive ; but it more than makes amends for this at other times. Or would Virgil, would Horace, would Gray, have been greater poets, had they been less familiar with those who went before them ? For this is the real question. They must be compared with themselves, not with other poets more richly gifted by Nature. Desultory reading is indeed very mischievous, by fostering habits of loose, discontinuous thought, by turning the memory into a common sewer for rubbish of all sorts to float through, and by relaxing the power of attention, which of all our fac- ulties most needs care, and is most improved by it. But a well-regulated course of study will no more weaken the mind, than hard exercise will weaken the body: nor will a strong understanding be weighed down by its knowledge, any more than an oak is by its leaves, or than Samson was by his locks. He whose sinews are drained by his hair, must already be a weakling. u. "We may keep the devil without the swine, but not the swine without the devil. The Christian religion may be lookt upon under a twofold aspect, — as revealing and declaring a few mysterious doctrines, beyond the grasp and reach of our reason, — and as confirming and establishing a number of moral truths, which, from their near and evident connexion with our social wants, might enter into a scheme of religion, such as a human legislator would devise. The Divine origin of any system confining itself to truths of the latter kind would be liable to strong suspicions. For what a mere man is capable of deducing, will not rise high enough to have flowed down from heaven. On the other hand a sys- tem composed wholly of abstruse doctrines, however it might GUESSES AT TRUTH. 157 feed the wonder of the vulgar, could never have been the gift of God. A Being who knows the extent of our wants, and the violence of our passions, — all whose ordinary dispensations moreover are fraught with usefulness, and stampt with love, — such a Being, our Maker, could never have sent us an unfruit- ful revelation of strange truths, which left men in the condition it found them in,, as selfish, as hardhearted, as voluptuous. Ac- cordingly, as Dr. Whately has shewn in his Essays on some Peculiarities of the Christian Religion, the practical character of a Revelation, and its abstaining from questions of mere curi- osity, is an essential condition, or at least a very probable mark of its truth. Christianity answers the anticipations of Philosophy in both these important respects. Its precepts are holy and impera- tive ; its mysteries vast, undiscoverable, unimaginable ; and, what is still worthier of consideration, these two limbs of our Religion are not severed, or even laxly joined, but, after the workmanship of the God of Nature, so " lock in with and over- wrap one another," that they cannot be torn asunder without rude force. Every mystery is the germ of a duty : every duty has its motive in a mystery. So that, if I may speak of these things in the symbolical language of ancient wisdom, — every- thing divine being circular, every right thing human straight, — the life of the Christian may be compared to a chord, each end of which is supported by the arc it proceeds from and termi- nates in. Were not the mysteries of antiquity, in their practical effect, a sort of religious peerage, to embrace and absorb those persons whose enquiries might endanger the establisht belief? If so, it is a strong presumption in favour of Christianity, that it con- tains none ; especially as' it borrows no aid from castes. A use must have preceded an abuse, properly so called. Nobody has ever been able to change today into tomorrow, — or into yesterday ; and yet everybody, who has much energy of character, is trying to do one or the other. u. 158 GUESSES AT TRUTH. I could hardly feel much confidence in a man who had never been imposed upon. u. There are instances, a physician has told me, of persons, who, having been* crowded with others in prisons so ill ventilated as to breed an infectious fever, have yet escaped it, from the grad- ual adaptation of their constitutions to the noxious atmosphere they had generated. This avoids the inference so often drawn, as to the harmlessness of mischievous doctrines, from the inno- cent lives of the men with whom they originated. To form a correct judgement concerning the tendency of any doctrine, we should rather look at the fruit it bears in the disciples, than in the teacher. For he only made it ; they are made by it. La pobreza no es vileza, Poverty is no disgrace, says the Bis- cayan proverb. Paupertas ridiculos homines facit, says the Roman satirist. Is there an Englishman, who, being askt which is the wiser and better saying, would not instantly an- swer, The first? Yet how many are there, who half an hour after would not quiz a poor gentleman's coat or dinner, if the thought of it came across them? Be consistent, for shame, even in evil. But no ! still be inconsistent ; that your practice, thus glaringly at variance with your principle, may sooner fall to the ground. Who wants to see a masquerade t might be written under a looking-glass. u. Languages are the barometers of national thought and char- acter. Home Tooke, in attempting to fix the quicksilver for his own metaphysical ends, acted mu«h like a little playfellow of mine, at the first school I was at, who screwed the master's weatherglass up to fair, to make sure of a fine day for a holiday. Every age has a language of its own ; and the difference in the words is often far greater than in the thoughts. The main employment of authors, in their collective capacity, is to trans- GUESSES AT TEUTH. 159 late the thoughts of other ages into the language of their own. Nor is this a useless or unimportant task : for it is the only way of making knowledge either fruitful or powerful. Reviewers are forever telling authors, they can't understand them. The author might often reply : Is that my fault t u. The climate might perhaps have absorbed the intellect of Greece, instead of tempering it to a love of beauty, but for the awakening and stirring excitements of a national poem, bar- baric wars, a confined territory, republican institutions and the activity they generate, the absence of any recluse profession, and a form of worship in which art predominated. The poets of such a people would naturally be lyrical. But at Athens Homer, the Dionysiacs, and Pericles, by their united influence, fostered them into dramatists. The glories of their country in- spired them with enthusiastic patriotism ; and an aristocratical religion (which, until if was supplanted by a vulgar philosophy, was revered, in spite of all its errours,) gave them depth, and made them solemn at least, if not sublime. Energy they owed to their contests, and correctness to the practist ears of their audience. On the other hand, the centurion's rod, the forum, the con- sulate, Hannibal, and in later times the Civil Wars, — pride, and the suppression of feeling taught by pride, — Epicureanism, which dwarft Lucretius, though it could not stifle him, — the overwhelming perfection of the great Greek models, and the benumbing frost of a jealous despotism, — would not allow the Romans, except at rare intervals, to be poets. Perhaps the greatest in their language is Livy. Such at least must be the opinion of the author of Gebir, whose writings are more deeply impregnated, than those of any Englishman of our times, with the spirit of classical antiquity. In a note on that singular poem, he goes so far as to compare Livy with Shakspeare, and in one respect gives the advantage to the Roman. " Shakspeare (he says) is the only writer that ever knew so intimately, or ever described so accurately, the 160 GUESSES AT TRUTH. variations of the human character. But Livy is always great." The same too must have been the opinion of the great historian, who seemed to have been raised up, after a lapse of eighteen centuries, to revive the glories of ancient Rome, and to teach us far more about the Romans, than they ever knew about themselves. Niebuhr agrees with Landor in praising Livy's brilliant talent for the representation of human character ; while in another place he justly complains of Virgil's inability to infuse life into the shadowy names with which he has swelled the muster-roll of his poem. South's sentences are gems, hard and shining: Voltaire's look like them, but are only French paste. Kant extends this contrast to the two nations, in his Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, where he says, § 4, "In England profound thoughts are native, — tragedy, epic poetry, and the massive gold of wit ; which is beat out by a French hammer into thin leaves of a great superficies." Some men so dislike the dust kickt up by the generation they belong to, that, being unable to pass, they lag behind it. Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one's horse as he is leaping. u. How much better the world would go on, if people could but do now and then, what Lord Castlereagh used to deprecate, and turn their backs upon themselves ! u. The most mischievous liars are those who keep sliding on the verge of truth. ij. Hardly anything is so difficult in writing, as to write with ease. u. Contrast is a kind of relation. GUESSES AT TKUTH. 161 Instead of watching the bird as it flies above our heads, we chase his shadow along the ground; and finding we cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing. There is something odd in the disposition of an Englishman's senses. He sees with his fingers, and hears with his toes. En- ter a gallery of pictures : you find all the spectators longing to become handlers. Go to hear an opera of Mozart's : your next neighbour keeps all the while kicking time ... as if he could not kill it without. u. Excessive indulgence to others, especially to children, is in fact only self-indulgence under an alias. u. Poverty breeds wealth ; and wealth in its turn breeds pov- erty. The earth, to form the mound, is taken out of the ditch ; and whatever may be the highth of the one, will be the depth of the other. Pliny speaks of certain animals that will fatten on smoke. How lucky would it be for sundry eloquent statesmen, if they could get men to do so ! u. The great cry with everybody is, Get on ! get on ! just as if the world were travelling post. How astonisht people will be, when they arrive in heaven, to find the angels, who are so much wiser, laying no schemes to be made archangels ! Is not every true lover a martyr ? u. Unitarianism has no root in the permanent principles of human nature. In fact it is a religion of accidents, dep*ending for its reception on a particular turn of thought, a particular state of knowledge, and a particular situation in society. This alone is a sufficient disproof of it. But moreover its postulates involve the absurdity of coupling infinity with man. No wonder that, beginning with raising him K 162 GUESSES AT TRUTH. into a god, it has ended with degrading him into a beast. In attempting to erect a Babel on a foundation of a foot square, the Socinians constructed a building which, being top-heavy, overturned ; and its bricks, instead of stopping at the ground, struck into it from the violence of the fall. Calvinism is not imaginative. To stand therefore, it should in some degree be scientific : whereas no system pf Christianity presents greater difficulties to the understanding, none so great to the moral sense. Heavy as these difficulties are, the unbend- ing faith of the Swiss Reformer would have borne up under still heavier. But after a few generations, when zeal subsides, such a weight is found to be inconvenient ; and men loosen the articles which press the hardest, until they slip off one after another. Scepticism however, like other things, is enlarged and pampered by indulgence : as the current gets more sluggish, the water gets thicker: and the dregs of Calvinism stagnate into Socinianism. A Christian is God Almighty's gentleman : a gentleman, in the vulgar, superficial way of understanding the word, is the Devil's Christian. But to throw aside these polisht and too current counterfeits for something valuable and sterling, the real gentleman should be gentle in everything, at least in every- thing that depends on himself, — in carriage, temper, construc- tions, aims, desires. He ought therefore to be mild, calm, quiet, even, temperate, — not hasty in judgement, not exorbitant in ambition, not overbearing, not proud, not rapacious, not oppres- sive ; for these things are contrary to gentleness. Many such gentlemen are to be found, I trust ; and many more would be, were the true meaning of the name borne in mind and duly inculcated. But alas! we are misled by etymology; and be- cause a gentleman was originally homo gentilis, people seem to fancy they shall lose caste, unless they act as Gentiles. To no kind of begging are people so averse, as to begging pardon ; that is, when there is any serious ground for doing so. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 163 When there is none, this phrase is as soon taken in vain, as other momentous words are upon light occasions. On the other hand there is a kind of begging which everybody is forward enough at; and that is, begging the question. Yet surely a gentleman should be as ready to do the former, as a reasona- ble man should be loth to do the latter. u. What a proof it is that the carnal heart is enmity, to find that almost all our prejudices are against others ! so much i*o indeed, that this has become an integral part of the word : whatever is to a man's prejudice, is to his hurt. Nay, I have sometimes found it hard to convince a person, that it is possible to have a prejudice in favor of another. It is only Christian love, that can believe all things, and hope all things, even of our fellow-creatures. But is there not a strange contradiction here ? The carnal heart, which thinks so basely of its neighbours, thinks haugh- tily of itself: while tRe Christian, who knows and feels the evil of his own nature, can yet look for good in his neighbours. How is this to be solved ? Why, it is only when blinded by selflove, that we can think proudly of our nature. Take away that blind; and in our judgements of others we are quicksighted enough to see there is very little in that nature to rely on. Whereas, the Christian can hope all things ; because he grounds his hope, not on man, but on God, and trusts that the same power which has wrought good in him, will also work good in his neighbour. u. Temporary madness may perhaps be necessary in some cases, to cleanse and renovate the mind; just as a fit of illness is to carry off the humours of the body. A portrait has one advantage over its original : it is uncon- scious : and so you may admire, without insulting it. I have seen portraits which have more. u. A compliment is usually accompanied with a bow, as if to beg pardon for paying it. a. 164 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel. Children always turn toward the light. O that grown-up people in this would become like little children. u. Civilization takes the heart, and sticks it beside the head, just where Spurzheim finds the organ of acquisitiveness. No wonder she fancies she has elevated man altogether, since she has thus raised the most valuable part of him, and at the same time has thus enlarged the highest. Men have often been warned against old prejudices : I would rather warn them against new conceits. The novelty of an opinion on any moral question is a presumption against it. Generally speaking, it is only the half-thinker, who, in matters concerning the feelings and ancestral opinions of men, stumbles on new conclusions. The true philosopher searches out something else, — the propriety of the feeling, the wisdom of the opinion, the deep and living roots of whatever is fair or enduring. For on such points, to use a happy phrase of Dugald Stewart's {Philosophy of the Human Mind, ii. 75), " our first and third thoughts will be found to coincide." Burke was a fine specimen of a third-thoughted man. So in our own times, consciously and professedly, was Coleridge ; who delighted in nothing more than in the revival of a dor- mant truth, and who ever lookt over the level of the present age to the hills containing the sources and springs whereby that level is watered. Let me cite an instance of what I mean from the life of Jeremy Taylor, by . . the title has, Reginald Heber. So let me call him then. I only anticipate the affectionate familiarity of future ages, in whose ears (as a friend of mine well prophesies) the Bishop of Calcutta will sound as strange, as the Bishop of Down and Connor would in ours. The pas- sage I refer to is a defense of the good old institution of sizars, or poor scholars. Its length prevents my quoting it entire ; but I cannot forbear enriching my pages with some of the conclud- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 165 ing sentences. " It is easy to declaim against the indecorum and illiberality of depressing the poorer students into servants. But it would be more candid, and more consistent with truth, to say that our ancestors elevated their servants to the rank of students ; softening, as much as possible, every invidious dis- tinction, and rendering the convenience of the wealthy the means of extending the benefits of education to those whose poverty must otherwise have shut them out from the springs of knowledge. And the very distinction of dress, which has so often been complained of, the very nature of those duties, which have been esteemed degrading, were of use in preventing the intrusion of the higher classes into situations intended only for the benefit of the poor ; while, by separating the last from the familiar society of the wealthier students, they prevented that dangerous emulation of expense, which in more modern times has almost excluded them from the University." (p. ix.) * Was it superfluous to quote a passage, which my readers were already acquainted with ? I rejoice to hear it ; and wish I could believe they had as good cause for objecting to the fol- lowing extract from Coleridge's Literary Biography (ii. p. 60), containing a similar apology for a practice dictated by natural feelings, but which has often been severely condemned. " It is no less an errour in teachers, than a torment to the poor chil- dren, to enforce the necessity of reading as they would talk. In order to cure them of singing, as it is called, — the child is made to repeat the words with his eyes from off the book ; and then indeed his tones resemble talking, as far as his fears, tears, * The foregoing page was just printed off, when the news came that India had lost its good Bishop. At the time when I ventured on that passing men- tion of him, I was little disturbed by the thought of its inadequateness ; know- ing that it would not offend him, if the passage ever chanced to meet his eye. He would have deemed himself beholden to the meanest stranger for an offer- ing of honest admiration, and, I doubted not, would accept my tribute of grat- itude and affection with his wonted gentleness. And now . . . now that he has been taken from us . . . why should I not declare the truth ? Though I should have rejoiced to speak of him worthily, if God had given me the power to speak worthily of such a man, yet, being what I am, that I have said no more does not pain me . . . perhaps because my heart seems to say, that love and sorrow make all gifts equal. 166 GUESSES AT TRUTH. and trembling will permit. But as soon as the eye is again directed to the printed page, the spell begins anew : for an in- stinctive sense tells the child, that to utter its own momentary thoughts, and to recite the written thoughts of another, as of another, and a far wiser than himself, are two widely different things ; and as the two acts are accompanied with widely differ- ent feelings, so must they justify different modes of enuncia- tion." My introductory remarks however, I scarcely need add, apply to ends only, not to means. For means are variable ; ends con- tinue the same. The road from London to Edinburgh may be improved; horses may become swifter, carriages lighter: but Edinburgh seems likely to stay pretty nearly in the same spot where it is now. The next best thing to a very good joke, is a very bad joke : the next best thing to a very good argument, is a very bad one. In wit and reasoning, as in the streets of Paris, you must be- ware of the old maxim, medio tutissimus ibis. In that city it would lead you into the gutter: in your intellectual march it would sink you in the dry, sandy wastes of dulness. But the selfsame result, which a good joke or a good argument accom- plishes regularly and according to law, is now and then reacht by their misshapen brethren per saltum, as a piece of luck. Few trains of logic, however ingenious and fine, have given me so much pleasure, — and yet a good argument is among dainties one of the daintiest, — few, very few, have so much pure truth in them, as the exclamation, How good it was of God to put Sunday at one end of the week ! for, if He had put it in the middle, He would have made a broken week of it. The feel- ing here is so true and strong, as to overpower all perception of the rugged way along which it carries us. It gains its point ; and that is all it cares for. It knows nothing of doubt or faint- heartedness, but goes to work much like our sailors : everybody, who does not know them, swears they must fail ; yet they are sure to succeed. He who is animated with such a never hesi- tating, never questioning conviction that every ordinance of GUESSES AT TRUTH. 1G7 God is for good, although he may miss the actual good in the particular instance, cannot go far wrong in the end. There is a speech of a like character related in Mr. Turner's Tour in Normandy (i. p. 120). He entered one day into con- versation with a Frenchman of the lower orders, a religious man, whom he found praying before a broken cross. They were sitting in a ruined chapel. " The devotee mourned over its destruction, and over the state of the times which could countenance such impiety; and gradually, as he turned over the leaves of the prayer-book in his hand, he was led to read aloud the 137th Psalm, commenting on every verse as he pro- ceeded, and weeping more and more bitterly, when he came to the part commemorating the ruin of Jerusalem, which he ap- plied to the captive state of France, exclaiming against Prussia as cruel Babylon. Yet, we askt, how can you reconcile with the spirit of Christianity the permission given to the Jews by the Psalmist to take up her little ones and dash them against the stones'? — Ah! you misunderstand the sense; the Psalm does not authorize cruelty: mais, attendez! ce n' est pas ainsi: ces pierres-la sont Saint Pierre ; et heureux celui qui les attachera a Saint Pierre ; qui montrera de I'attachement, de Vintrepidite pour sa religion! This is a specimen of the curious perver- sions under which the Roman Catholic faith does not scruple to take refuge." " Surely in other thoughts Contempt might die." The ques- tion was at best very thoughtless and illjudged: its purpose was to unsettle the poor man's faith: it offered no solution of the doubts it suggested : and no judicious person will so address the uneducated. But it is cheering to see how the Frenchman takes up the futile shaft, and tosses it back again, and finds nothing but an occasion to shew the entireness of his faith. Moreover, though Mr. Turner hardly thought it, there is much more truth in the reply than in the question. All that there is in the latter, is one of those half truths, which, by setting up alone, bankrupt themselves, and become falsehoods ; while the Frenchman begins in truth, and ends in truth, taking a some- what strange course indeed to get from one point to the other. bufiversittI 168 ' GUESSES AT TRUTH. Still in him we perceive, though in a low and rude state, that wisdom of the heart, that esprit du cceur or mens cordis, which the Broad Stone of Honour inculcates so eloquently and so fer- vently, and which, if it be severed from the wisdom of the head, is far the more precious of the two ; while in their union it is like the odour which in some indescribable way mingles with the hues of the flower, softening its beauty into loveliness. No truly wise man has ever been without it : but in few has it ever been found in such purity and perfection, as in the author of that noble manual for gentlemen, that volume which, had I a son, I would place in his hands, charging him, though such prompting would be needless, to love it next to his Bible. 1826. u. These words, written eleven years ago, were an expression of ardent and affectionate admiration for a book, which seemed to me fitted, above almost all others, to inspire young minds with the feelings befitting a Christian gentleman. They refer to the second edition of the Broad Stone of Honour, which came out in 1823. Since that time the author has publisht another edition, or rather another work under the same title ; for but a small portion of the new one is taken from the old. To this new one, I regret to say, I cannot apply the same terms. Not that it is inferior to the former in its peculiar excellences. On the contrary the author's style, both in language and thought, has become more mature, and still more beautiful: his reading has been continually widening its range ; and he pours forth its precious stores still more prodigally: and the religious spirit, which pervaded the former work, hallows every page of the latter. The new Broad Stone is still richer than the old one in magnanimous and holy thoughts, and in tales of honour and of piety. If one sometimes thinks that the author loses himself amid the throng of knightly and saintly person- ages, whom he calls up before us, it is with the feeling with which Milton must have regarded the moon, when he likened her to "one that had been led astray Through the heaven's wide, pathless way." If he strays, it is " through the heaven's GUESSES AT TRUTH. 169 wide, pathless way ; " if he loses himself, it is among the stars. In truth this is an essential, and a very remarkable feature of his catholic spirit. He identifies himself, as few have ever done, with the good, and great, and heroic, and holy, in former times, and ever rejoices in passing out of himself into them : he loves to utter his thoughts and feelings in their words, rather than his own : and the saints and philosophers and warriors of old join in swelling the sacred consort which rises heavenward from his pages. Nevertheless the new Broad Stone of Honour is not a book which can be recommended without hesitation to the young. The very charm, which it is sure to exercise over them, hight- ens one's scruples about doing so. For in it the author has come forward as a convert and champion of the Romish Church, and as the implacable enemy of Protestantism. This polemical spirit is the one great blemish which disfigures this, and still more his later work, the Ages of Faith. The object he sets himself is, to shew that all good, and hardly anything but good, is to be found in the bosom of the Romish Church ; and that all evil, and hardly anything but evil, is the growth of Protestantism. These propositions he maintains by what in any other writer one should call a twofold sophism. But Achilles himself was not more incapable of sophistry, than the author of the Broad Stone of Honour. No word ever dropt from his pen, which he did not thoroughly believe ; difficult as to us double- minded men it may seem at times to conceive this. Therefore, instead of a twofold sophism, I will call it a twofold delusion, a twofold Einseitigkeit, as the more appropriate German word is. He culls the choicest and noblest stories out of fifteen centuries, — and not merely out of history, but out of poetry and ro- mance, — and the purest and sublimest morsels of the great religious writers between the time of the Apostles and the Reformation : and this magnificent spiritual hierarchy he sets before us as a living and trustworthy picture of what the Ages of Faith, as he terms them, actually were. On the other hand, shutting his eyes to what is great and holy in later times, he picks out divers indications of baseness, unbelief, pusillanimity, 170 GUESSES AT TKUTH. and worldlymindedness, as portraying what Europe has become, owing to the dissolution of the unity of the Church. Thus, in speaking of the worthies of the Reformed Churches, he himself not seldom falls into the same strain, which he most justly reprehends in the ordinary Protestant accounts of the middle ages. Alas ! whithersoever one looks throughout Christendom, %v& ave/ioi npciovai bvo Kpareprjs vtv dvdyKtjs, kcu Tvnos avrirvnos, Koi nrjfi era. 7rr]fxaTi Kelrai. But it grieves one to the heart to see those blowing the bellows, who ought to be extinguishing the flame. For, though wrath is denounced against those who cry Peace, Peace ! when there is no peace, — against those who would patch up the rent in the Church by daubing it over with untempered mortar, who think that indifference to all principle is the best cement of union, and that to let the bricks lie at sixes and sevens is the surest way of building up a house of them ; — it must never be forgotten on the other hand that a blessing waits upon the peacemakers, that they are the true children of God, and that the most hopeful method of restoring the unity of the Church is, while we un- flinchingly and uncompromisingly uphold every essential prin- ciple, to maintain all possible candour and indulgence with regard to whatever is accidental or personal. This is the main difference between the old Broad Stone of Honour and the new one. The former breathed a fervent long- ing for the reunion of the Catholic Church : the latter is tinged with the anticatholic spirit so common among those who would monopolize the name of Catholics, and is ever breaking out into hostility against Protestantism. The historical views too of the former were more correct. For the evidence, which was ample to vindicate the middle ages from unconditional reprobation, cannot avail to establish that their character was without spot or blemish. Nor does that which is erroneous and perverse in modern times, though well fitted to humble our supercilious pride, prove that we are a mere mass of corruption. An apology is a different thing from a eulogy; and even a eu- logy should have its limits. Nor are hatred and scorn for his GUESSES AT TRUTH. 171 own age likely to qualify a man for acting upon it and bet- tering it. These remarks will be taken, I hope, as they are meant. I could not suffer my former sentence about the Broad Stone of Honour to stand without explanation. Yet it goes against one's heart to retract praise, where love and admiration are undimin- isht. I trust that nothing I have said will hurt the feelings of one, who fulfills, as very few men have fulfilled, the idea his writ- ings give of their author, and whom I esteem it a blessed privi- lege to be allowed to number among my friends. 1837. u. Great changes have taken place in the opinions and feelings of many with regard to the Romish Church since the year 1837. The ignorant, truthless abuse, which had long been poured out upon her so unscrupulously, has not indeed ceast to flow, nay, may perhaps be as copious as ever : but it has pro- voked a reactionary spirit, which is now pouring out apologies and eulogiums, with little more knowledge, and an almost equal carelessness about truth. It would be inconsistent with the character of this little book to engage in such a controversy here. In other places I have been compelled to do so, and, if God gives me life, and power of speech and pen, shall have to do so a»ain and again. For this is one of the chief battles which we in our days are called to wage because of the word of truth and righteousness, a battle, about the final issue of which Faith will not let us doubt, but in the course of which many intellects will be cast on the ground and trampled under foot, many may be made captive, and may have their eyes put out, and may even learn to glory in their blindness and their chains. Still we know with whom the victory is ; and He will give it to the Truth, and to us, if we seek it earnestly and devoutly, with pure hearts and minds, in her behalf. Now among the delusions and fallacies, whereby divers minds, apter to follow the impulses of the imagination, than to weigh the force and examine the consistency of a logical chain, have been led to deck out the Church of Rome with charms which do not rightly appertain to her, a chief place I believe, 172 GUESSES AT TRUTH. belongs to those which the Broad Stone of Honour and the Ages of Faith have set forth with such beauty and richness. Hence, though I must reserve the exposition of those fallacies for an- other occasion, I feel bound to renew my protest against the misrepresentations of the whole of modern history which run through both these works, the apotheosis of the Middle Ages, and the apodiabolosis of the Reformation and its effects. The author has indeed attempted to reply to my objections in the Epilogue to his last volume, and stoutly maintains, though with his usual admirable Christian courtesy, that his pictures do not give an erroneous impression either of the past or of the pres- ent. An argument on this issue could not be carried on with- out long details, illsuited to these small pages. Therefore I must leave it to the judgement of such as may be attracted to contemplate the visions of beauty and holiness which are con- tinually rising up in those works. As these visions, however, through the revolutions of opinion, have now become deceptive, I cannot recommend them to the youthful reader, without reminding him at the same time that the theological and eccle- siastical controversies of the nineteenth century are not to be decided by any selection of the anecdotes or apophthegms of the twelfth and thirteenth, and that, even for the sake of form- ing an estimate on the worth of any particular period, it is necessary to consider that period in all its bearings, in its worse and baser, as well as in its better and nobler features, and in its relative position with reference to the historical development of mankind. If the picture of the Ages of Faith here presented to us were ' faithful and complete, instead of being altogether partial, it would no way avail to prove that Popery in our days is the one true form of Christianity, any more than York and Lincoln minsters prove that the Italians in our days build finer churches than we do. 1847. u. Every one who knows anything of Horace or of logic, has heard of the accumulating sophism : Do twelve grains make a heap ? do eighteen f do twenty ? do twenty-four ? Twenty-four grains make a heap ! oh no ! they make a pennyweight. The GUESSES AT TRUTH. 173 reply was well enough for that particular case : but, as a gen- eral rule, it is safest to answer such captious questions by a comparative, the only elastic and nicely graduated expression of degree which common language furnishes. Do twelve grains of sand make a heap f A greater than eleven. Are a hundred yards far for a healthy man to walk f Further than ninety- nine. There is another mode of defense however, which some may think sufficient, and for which I must refer my readers to Aris- totle's Treatise on Irony. Don't be alarmed at those grains of sand, said a philosopher to a young man who appeared sadly graveled by the accumulating sophism. The sophist is only playing the part of the East-wind in the comedy. But you dis- like such a quantity of dust blown or thrown so palpably into your eyes f Then put on a veil. Friendship closes its eyes, rather than see the moon eclipst ; while malice denies that it is ever at the full. If we could but so divide ourselves as to stay at home at the same time, traveling would be one of the greatest pleasures, and of the most instructive employments in life. As it is, we often lose both ways more than we gain. u. Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof. u. Not a few writers seem to look upon their predecessors as Egyptians, whom they have full licence to spoil of their jewels ; a permission, by the by, which, the Jews must have thought, was not confined to a particular occasion and people, but went along with them whithersoever they went, and has never quite expired. And as the jewels taken from the Egyptians were employed in making the golden calf, which the Israelites wor- shipt as their god, in like manner has it sometimes happened, that the poetical plagiary has been so dazzled by his own patch- work, as to forget whereof it was 'made, and to set it up as an idol in the temple of his self-love. 174 GUESSES AT TRUTH. When we read that the Israelites, at the sight of the calf, which they had seen molten in the wilderness, and the materials for which they had themselves supplied, cried out, These are thy gods, Israel, that brought thee up out of the land of Egypt! we can hardly repress our indignation at -such reckless folly. Yet how many are there fully entitled to wear the same triple cap! I do not mean misers merely: these are not the sole idolaters of the golden calf nowadays. All who worship means, of whatsoever kind, material or intellectual, — all, for instance, who think, like the able Historian of the War in the Peninsula, that it was wholly by the strength and discipline of our armies, and by the skill of our general, that we overthrew the imperial despotism of France, — all who forget that it is still the Lord of Hosts, who breaketh the bow, and knappeth the spear in sunder, and burnetii the chariots in the fire, — all who are heed- less of that vox populi, which, when it bursts from the heaving depths of a nation's heart, is in truth vox Dei, — all who take no account of that moral power, without which intellectual abil- ity dwindles into petty cunning, and the mightiest armies, as history has often shewn, become like those armed figures in romance, which look formidable at a distance, but which fall to pieces at a blow, and display their hollowness, — all who con- ceive that the wellbeing of a people depends upon its wealth, — all the doters on steamengines, and cottonmills, and spinning- jennies, and railroads, on exports and imports, on commerce and manufactures, — all who dream that mankind may be ennobled and regenerated by being taught to read, — all these, and mil- lions more, who are besotted by analogous delusions in the lesser circles of society, and who fancy that happiness may be attained by riches, or by luxury, or by fame, or by learning, or by sci- ence, — one and all may be numbered among the idolaters of the golden calf: one and all cry to their idol, Thou art my god! Thou hast brought us out of the Egypt of darkness and misery : thou wilt lead us to the Canaan of light and joy. Verily, I would as soon fall down before the golden calf itself, as worship the great idol of the day, the great public instructor, as it is called, the newspaper press. The calf could not even low a lie : GUESSES AT TRUTH. 175 and only when the words of the wise are written upon it, can paper be worth more than gold. And how is it with those who flatter themselves that their own good deeds have brought them out of Egypt ? those good deeds which God has commanded them to wrest as spoils from the land of Sim How is it with those who blindly trust that their good deeds will go before them, and lead them to heaven ? Are they not also to be reckoned among the worshippers of the golden calf? of an idol, which their own hands have wrought and set up ; of an idol, the very materials of which would never have been theirs, except through God's command, and the strength His command brings with it. Surely, whether it be for the past, or the future, we need a better leader than any we can either manufacture or mentefacture for ourselves. u. One evening, as I was walking by a leafy hedge, a light glanced through it across my eyes. At first I tried to fix it, but vainly ; till, recollecting that the hedge was the medium of sight, instead of peering directly toward the spot, I searcht among the leaves for a gap. As soon as I found one, I discov- ered a bright star glimmering on me, which I then stood watch- ing at my ease. A mystic in my situation would have wearied himself with hunting for the light in the place where he caught the first glance of it, and would not have got beyond an incommunicable assurance that he -had seen a vision from heaven, of a nature rather to be dreamt of than described. A materialist would have asserted the light to be visible only in the gap, because through that alone could it be seen distinctly ; and thence would have inferred the light to be the gap, or (if more acute and logi- cal than common) at any rate to be produced by it. I have often thought that the beautiful passage, in which our Saviour compares Himself to a Hen gathering her chickens un- der her wings, — and the sublime one in Deuteronomy, where Jehovah's care and guardianship of the Jewish nation is likened to an Eagle stirring up her nest, fluttering over her young, 176 GUESSES AT TRUTH. spreading abroad her wings, bearing them on her wings, and making them ride on the high places of the earth, — may be regarded as symbolical of the peculiar character of the two dis- pensations. The earlier was the manifestation of the power of God, and shews Him forth in His kingly majesty : the latter is the revelation of the love of God, full of all gentleness, and household tenderness, and more than fatherly or motherly kind- ness, a. It has been deemed a great paradox in Christianity, that it makes Humility the avenue to Glory. Yet what other avenue is there to Wisdom ? or even to Knowledge ? Would you pick up precious truths, you must bend down and look for them. Everywhere the pearl of great price lies bedded in a shell which has no form or comeliness. It is so in physical science. Bacon has declared it : Natura non nisi parendo vincitur : and the triumphs of Science since his days have proved how willing Nature is to be conquered by those who will obey her. It is so in moral speculation. Wordsworth has told us the law of his own mind, the fulfilment of which has enabled him to reveal a new world of poetry : Wisdom is oft-times nearer when we stoop, Than when we soar. That it is so likewise in religion, we are assured by those most comfortable words, Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. The same truth is well exprest in the aphorism, which Charles the First, when he entered his name on the books at Oxford, in 1616, subjoined to it : Si vis omnia subjicere, subjice te rationi. Happy would it have been for him, if that which flowed thus readily from his pen, had also been graven upon his heart ! He would not then have had to write it on the history of his coun- try with characters more glaring and terrible than those of ink. Moreover the whole intercourse between man and man may be seen, if we look at it closely, to be guided and regulated by the same pervading principle : and that it ought to be so, is generally recognised, instinctively at least, if not consciously. As I have often heard said by him, who, among all the persons I have converst with to the edification of my understanding, had GUESSES AT TKUTH. 177 the keenest practical insight into human nature, and best knew the art of controlling . and governing men, and winning them over to their good, — the moment anybody is satisfied with him- self, everybody else becomes dissatisfied with him : whenever a person thinks much of himself, all other people cease to think much of him. Thus it is not only in the parable, that he who takes the highest room, is turned down with shame to the low- est ; while he who sits down in the lowest room, is bid to go up higher. u. Strange feelings start up and come forward out of the inner- most chambers of Memory, when one is employed, after the lapse of ten or a dozen years, in revising a work like the pres- ent, which from its nature must needs be so rich in associations of all kinds, so intimately connected with the thoughts and feel- ings and visions and purposes of former days, and with the old familiar faces, now hidden from the outward eye, the very sight of which was wont to inspire joy and confidence and strength. What would be the heart of an old weatherb eaten hollow stump, if the leaves and blossoms of its youth were suddenly to spring up out of the mould around it, and to remind it how bright and blissful summer was in the years of its prime? That which has died within us, is often the saddest portion of what Death has taken away, sad to all, sad above measure to those in whom no higher life has been awakened. The heavy thought is the thought of what we were, of what we hoped and purpost to have been, of what we ought to have been, of what but for ourselves we might have been, set by the side of what we are ; as though we were haunted by the ghost of our own youth. This is a thought the crushing weight of which nothing but a strength above our own can lighten. Else if our hearts do but keep fresh, we may still love those who are gone, and may still find happiness in loving them. During the last few pages I seem to have been walking through a churchyard, strewn with the graves of those whom it was my delight to love and revere, of those from whom 1 learnt with what excellent gifts and powers the spirit of man 8* L 178 GUESSES AT TKUTH. is sometimes endowed. The death of India's excellent bishop, Reginald Heber, in whom whatsoever things are lovely were found, has already been spoken of. Coleridge, who is men- tioned along with him, has since followed him. The light of his eye also is quencht : none shall listen any more to the sweet music of his voice : none shall feel their souls teem and burst, as beneath the breath of spring, while the lifegiving words of the poet-philosopher flow over them. Niebuhr too has past from the earth, carrying away a richer treasure of knowledge than was ever before lockt up in the breast of a single man. And the illustrious friend, to whom I alluded just now, — he who was always so kind, always so generous, always so indul- gent to the weaknesses of others, while he was always endeav- ouring to make them better than they were, — he who was un- wearied in acts of benevolence, ever aiming at the greatest, but never thinking the least below his notice, — who could descend, without feeling that he sank, from the command of armies and the government of an empire, to become a peacemaker in village quarrels, — he in whom dignity was so gentle, and wisdom so playful, and whose laurelled head was girt with a chaplet of all the domestic affections, — the soldier, statesman, patriot, Sir John Malcolm, — he too is gathered to his fathers. It is a sorry amends, that death allows us to give utterance to that admiration, which, so long as its object was living, delicacy commanded us to suppress. A better consolation lies in the thought, that, blessed as it is to have friends on earth, it is still more blessed to have friends in heaven. But in truth through the whole of this work I have been holding converse with him who was once the partner in it, as he was in all my thoughts and feelings, from the earliest dawn of both. He too is gone. But is he lost to me ? O no ! He whose heart was ever pouring forth a stream of love, the purity and inexhaustibleness of which betokened its heavenly origin, as he was ever striving to lift me above myself, is still at my side, pointing my gaze upward. Only the love, which was then hidden within him, has now overflowed and transfig- ured his whole being ; and his earthly form is turned into that of an angel of light. 1837. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 179 Thou takest not away, Death ! Thou strikest: Absence perisheth; Indifference is no more. The future brightens on the sight; For on the past has fallen a light, That tempts us to adore. The Romans used to say of an argument or opinion which spreads rapidly, that it takes the popular mind. I should rather say, that the popular mind takes the argument or opinion. Takes it t Yes ; as one takes infection ; catches it, rather, as one catches a fever. For truth, like health, is not easily com- municated ; but diseases and errours are contagious. This being so, how much to be deplored are democratical ele- ments in a constitution ! Not unless the people are the head of the State : and I have always fancied them the heart ; a heart which at times may beat too fast, and perhaps feel too warmly; but which by its pulsations evinces and preserves the life and vigour of the social body. Of what use are forms, seeing that at times they are empty ? Of the same use as barrels, which at times are empty too. Men of the world hold that it is impossible to do a disinter- ested action, except from an interested motive, — for the sake of admiration, if for no grosser, more tangible gain. Doubtless they are also convinced, that when the sun is showering light from the sky, he is only standing there to be stared at. u. Everybody is impatient for the time when he shall be his own master. And if coming of age were to make one so, if years could indeed "bring the philosophic mind," it would rightly be a day of rejoicing to a whole household and neigh- bourhood. But too often he who is impatient to become his own master, when the outward checks are removed, merely becomes his own slave, the slave of a master in the insolent flush of youth, hasty, headstrong, wayward, and tyrannical. Had he really become his own master, the first act of his do- 180 GUESSES AT TRUTH. minion over himself would have been to put himself under the dominion of a higher Master and a wiser. u. By the ancients courage was regarded as practically the main part of virtue : by us, though I hope we are not less brave, purity is so regarded now. The former is evidently the animal excellence, a thing not to be left out when we are balancing the one against the other. Still the following considerations weigh more with me. Courage, when not an instinct, is the creation of society, depending for occasions of action (which is essential to it) on outward circumstances, and deriving much both of its character and its motives from popular opinion and esteem. But purity is inward, secret, selfsufficing, harmless, and, to crown all, thoroughly and intimately personal. It is indeed a nature, rather than a virtue ; and, like other natures, when mos> perfect, is least conscious of itself and its perfection. In a word, Courage, however kindled, is fanned by the breath ol man : Purity lives and derives its life solely from the spirit ot God. The distinction just noticed has also been pointed out bj Landor, in the Conversation between Leopold and Dupaty. " Effeminacy and wickedness (he makes Leopold say, vol. i. p. 62) were correlative terms both in Greek and Latin, as were courage and virtue. Among the English, I hear, softness and folly, virtue and purity, are synonymous. Let others deter- mine on which side lies the indication of the more quiet, deli- cate, and reflecting people." At the same time there is much truth in De Maistre's remark {Soirees de St. Peter sbourg, i. p. 246) : " Ce fut avec une profonde sagesse que les Romains ap- pellerent du meme nom la force et la vertu. II n'y a en effet point de vertu proprement dite, sans victoire sur nous-memes ; et tout ce qui ne nous cotite rien, ne vaut rien." Though mere bravery was the etymological groundwork of the name, moral energy became the main element in the idea, and, in its Stoic form, absorbed all the rest of it. Much has been written of late years about the spiritual GUESSES AT TRUTH. 181 genius of modern times, as contrasted with the predominance of the animal and sensuous life in the classical nations of an- tiquity. And no doubt such a distinction exists. With the ancients the soul was the vital and motive principle of the body: among the moderns the tendency has rather been to regard the body as merely the veil or garment of the soul. This becomes easily discernible, when, as in the Tribune at Florence, we see one of Raphael's heavenly Madonnas beside one of those Venuses in which the Spirit of the Earth has put forth all the fascination of its beauty. In the latter we look at the limbs ; in the former we contemplate the feelings. Before the one we might perhaps break out into the exclamation of the Bedouin, Blessed be God, who has made beautiful women ! unless even that thought stray too high above the immediate object before us. In the other the sight does not pause at the outward lineaments, but pierces through to the soul ; and we behold the meekness of the handmaiden, the purity of the virgin, the fervent, humble, adoring love of the mother who sees her God in her Child. But when the source of this main difference between the two great periods in the history of man has been sought after, the seekers have gone far astray. They have bewildered them- selves in the mazy forest of natural causes, where, as the old saying has it, one can't see the wood for the trees! One set have talkt about the influence of climate ; as if the sky and soil of Italy had undergone some wonderful change between the days of Augustus and those when Dante sang and Giotto painted. Others have taken their stand among the Northern nations, echoing Montesquieu's celebrated remark, that this fine system was found in the woods ; as though mead and beer could not intoxicate as well as wine ; as though Walhalla with its blood and its skull-cups were less sensual than the Elysian Islands of the Blest. A third party have gone a journey into the East: as if it were possible for the human spirit to be more imbruted, more bemired by sensuality, than amid the voluptuousness and the macerations of Oriental religions. The praise is not of man, but of God. It is only by His light, that 182 GUESSES AT TRUTH. we see light. If we are at all better than those first men, who were of the earth, earthy, it is because the second Man was the Lord from Heaven. Here let me take up the thread of the foregoing remark on the two notions concerning the primary constituent of vir- tue. Courage may be considered as purity in outward action; purity as courage in the inner man, in the more appalling struggles which are waged within our own hearts. The an- cients, as was to be expected, lookt to the former : the moderns have rather fixt their attention on the latter. This does not result however, as seems to be hinted in the first of the pas- sages quoted above, from our superior delicacy and reflexion. At least the same question would recur: whence comes this superiority of ours in delicacy and reflexion ? The cause is to be found in Christianity, and in Christianity alone. Heathen poets and philosophers may now and then have caught fleeting glimpses of the principle which has wrought this change : but as the foundation of all morality, the one paramount maxim, it was first proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount This leads me to notice a further advantage which the modern principle has over the ancient ; that courage is much oftener found without purity, than purity without courage. For although in the physical world one may frequently see causes, without their wonted and natural effects, such barren causes have no place in the moral world. The concatenation there is far more indissoluble, the circulation far more rapid and certain. On the other hand the effect, or something like it, is not seldom seen without the cause. Not only is there the animal instinct, which impurity does not immediately extin- guish ; there is also a bastard and ostentatious courage, gener- ated and fed by the opinion of the world. But they who are pure in heart, they who know what is promist to such purity, they who shall see God, what can they fear ? The chevalier sans peur was the chevalier sans reproche. It is with perfect truth that our moral poet has represented his Una as " of nought afraid : " for she was also " pure and innocent as that same lamb." u. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 183 Truth endues man's purposes with somewhat of immuta- bility. " Hell (a wise man has said) is paved with good intentions." Pluck up the stones, ye sluggards, and break the devil's head with them. A. Pouvoir c'est vouloir. To refer all pleasures to association is to acknowledge no sound but echo. Material evil tends to self-annihilation, good to increase. Graeculus esuriens in coelum, jusseris, ibit. Alas ! the com- mand has gone forth to the whole world ; but not even the hungry Greek will obey it. u. We often live under a cloud ; and it is well for us that we should do so. Uninterrupted sunshine would parch our hearts : we want shade and rain to cool and refresh them. Only it behoves us to take care, that, whatever cloud may be spread over us, it should be a cloud of witnesses. And every cloud may be such, if we can only look through to the sunshine that broods behind it. u. Forms and regularity of proceeding, if they are not justice, partake much of the nature of justice, which, in its highest sense, is the spirit of distributive order. Purity is the feminine, Truth the masculine, of Honour. He who wishes to know how a people thrives under a grov- eling aristocracy, should examine how vigorous and thick the blades of grass are under a plantain. Open evil at all events does this good : it keeps good on the 184 GUESSES AT TRUTH. alert. When there is no likelihood of an enemy's approach- ing, the garrison slumber on their post. u. The English constitution being continually progressive, its perfection consists in its acknowledged imperfection. In times of public dissatisfaction add readily, to gratify men's men's wishes. So the change be made without trepidation, there is no contingent danger in the changing. But it is diffi- cult to diminish safely, except in times of perfect quiet. The first is giving ; the last is giving up. It would have been well for England, if her ministers in 1831 had thought of this distinction. Much of this world's wisdom is still acquired by necroman- cy, — by consulting the oracular dead. u. Men of principle, from acting independently of instinct, when they do wrong, are likely to do great wrong. The chains of flesh are not formed of hooks and eyes, to be fastened and loost at will. We are not like the dervise in the Eastern story, that, having left our own body to animate another, we can re- turn to it when we please. Much less can we go on acting a double transmigration between the supernatural and the nat- ural, wandering to and fro between the intellectual and animal states, first unmanning and then remanning ourselves, each to serve a turn. Humanity, once put off, is put off for worse, as well as for better. If we take not good heed to live angelically afterward, we must count on becoming devilish. Men are most struck with form and character, women with intellect; perhaps I should have said, with attainments. But happily, after marriage, sense comes in to make weight for us. A youth's love is the more passionate : virgin love is the more idolatrous. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 185 When will talkers refrain from evil-speaking? When lis- teners refrain from evil-hearing. At present there are many so credulous of evil, they will receive suspicions and impres- sions against persons whom they don't know, from a person whom they do know . . in authority to be good for nothing. Charity begins at home. This is one of the sayings with which Selfishness tries to mask its own deformity. The name of Charity is in such repute, to be without it is to be ill spoken of. What then can the self-ridden do? except pervert the name, so that Selfishness may seem to be a branch of it. The charity which begins at home, is pretty sure to end there. It has such ample work within doors, it flags and grows faint the moment it gets out of them. We see this from what happens in the cases, where even such as reject the prior claim in its ordinary sense, are almost all disposed to maintain it. Very few are there, who do not act according to the maxim, that Charity begins at home, when it is to be shewn to faults or vices, unless indeed they are imaginary or trifling : and few, very few, are truly charitable to the failings of others, except those who are severe to their own. For .indifference is not charity, but the stone which the man of the world gives to his neighbour in place of bread. u. Some persons take reproof goodhumouredly enough, unless you are so unlucky as to hit a sore place. Then they wince, and writhe, and start up, and knock you down for your imperti- nence, or wish you good morning. u. Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quern laeseris. Such is the devil's hatred of God : and so fiendish is the nature of hatred, it is seldom very violent, and never implacable and irreconcilable, except when it is unjust and groundless. In truth what we hate is the image of our own wrong set before us in him whom we have injured : and here as everywhere our past sins are the fuel which make our passions burn the fierceliest. u. 186 GUESSES AT TEUTH. We look to our last sickness for repentance, unmindful that it is during a recovery men repent, not during a sickness. For sickness, by the time we feel it to be such, has its own trials, its own selfishness : and to bear the one, and overcome the other, is at such a season occupation more than enough for any who have not been trained to it by previous discipline and practice. The same may be said of old age, — perhaps with still more justice, since old age has no beginning. The feeling is often the deeper truth, the opinion the more superficial one. I suspect we have internal senses. The mind's eye, since Shakspeare's time, has been proverbial: and we have also a mind's ear. To say nothing of dreams, one certainly can listen to one's own thoughts, and hear them, or believe that one hears them, — the strongest argument adducible in favour of our hearing anything. • . . • Many objects are made venerable by extraneous circum- stances. The moss, ivy, lichens, and weatherstains on that old ruin, picturesque and soothing as they are, formed no part in the conception of the architect, nor in the work or purpose of the builder, but are the subsequent adaptations of Time, which with regard to such things is in some sort an agent, bringing them under the influences of Nature. And what should fol- low ? Only that, in obeying the perceptions of the intellect, and distinguishing logically between accidents and properties, we turn not frowardly from the dictates of the heart, nor cease to feel, because we have ascertained the composite nature of our feelings ; as though it were impossible to contemplate the parts in a living whole, and there were no other analysis than dissection. Only this; and thankfulness for that which has enabled us so to venerate ; and wisdom to preserve the mod- ifying tints, which have coloured the object to the tone of our imaginations. GUESSES AT TKUTH. 187 The difference between those whom the world esteems as good, and those whom it condemns as bad, is in many cases little else than that the former have been better sheltered from temp- tation, u. Political economists tell us that self-love is the bond of soci- ety. Strange then must be the construction of what is called Society, when it is cemented by the strongest and most eating of all solvents. For self-love not only dissolves all harmonious fellowship between man and man, but even among the various powers and faculties within the breast of the same man ; which, when under its sway, can never work together, so as to produce an orderly, organical whole. Can it be, that Society has been feeding upon poisons, till they have become, not merely harm- less, but, as this opinion would make them, the only wholesome, nourishing diet ? U. Ghosts never work miracles : nor do they ever come to life again. When they appear, it is to beg to be buried, or to beg to be revenged ; without which they cannot rest. Both ways their object is to lie in peace. This should be borne in mind by political and philosophical ghostseers, ghostlovers, and ghost- mongers. The past is past, and must pass through the present, not hop over it, into the future. u. What are those teeth for, grandmamma? said little Red-Rid- inghood to the Wolf. What are those laws for ? might many a simple man ask in like manner of his rulers and governors. And in sundry instances, I am afraid, the Wolf's answer would not be far from the truth. u. It is a mistake to suppose the poet does not know Truth by sight quite as well as the philosopher. He must ; for he is ever seeing her in the mirror of Nature. The difference between them is, that the poet is satisfied with worshiping her reflected im- age ; while the philosopher traces her out, and follows her to her remote abode between cause and consequence, and there im- 188 GUESSES AT TKUTH. pregnates her. The one loves and makes love to Truth ; the other esteems and weds her. In simpler ages the two things went together ; and then Poetry and Philosophy were united. But that universal solvent, Civilization, which pulverizes to cement, and splits to fagot, has divided them ; and they are now far as the Poles asunder. The imagination and the feelings have each their truths, as well as the reason. The absorption of the three, so as to con- centrate them in the same point, is one of the universalities requisite in a true religion. Man's voluntary works are shadows of objects perceived either by his senses or his imagination. The inferiority of the copies to their originals in the former class of works is evident. Man can no more string dewdrops on a gossamer thread, than he can pile up a Mont Blanc, or scoop out an ocean. How passing excellent may we then hope to find the realities, from which the offspring of his imagination are the shadows ! since that offspring, all shadowy as they are, will often be fairer than any sensible existence. In a mist the hights can for the most part see each other ; but the vallies cannot. Mountains never shake hands. Their roots may touch : they may keep together some way up : but at length they part com- pany, and rise into individual, insulated peaks. So is it with great men. As mountains mostly run in chains and clusters, crossing the plain at wider or narrower intervals, in like man- ner are there epochs in history when great men appear in clus- ters also. At first too they grow up together, seeming to be animated by the same spirit, to have the same desires and an- tipathies, the same purposes and ends. But after a while the genius of each begins to know itself, and to follow its own bent : they separate and diverge more and more : and those who, when young, were working in consort, stand alone in their old age. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 189 But if mountains do not shake hands, neither do they kick each other. Their human counterparts unfortunately are more pugnacious. Although they break out of the throng, and strive to soar in solitary eminence, they cannot bear that their neigh- bours should do the same, but complain that they impede the view, and often try to overthrow them, especially if they are higher. u. Are we really more enlightened than our ancestors ? Or is it merely the flaring up of the candle that has burnt down to the socket, and is consuming that socket, as a prelude to its own extinction ? Such at least has been the character of those for- mer ages of the world, which have prided themselves on being the most enlightened. u. What way of circumventing a man can be so easy and suit- able as a period t The name should be enough to put us on our guard : the experience of every age is not. I suspect the soul is never so hampered by its enthralment within the body, as when it loves,. Pluck the feathers out of a bird's wings ; and, be it ever so young, its youth will not save it from suffering by the loss, when instinct urges it to attempt fly- ing. Unless indeed there be no such thing as instinct; and flying real kites be, like flying paper kites, a mere matter of education : which reminds me to ask why, knowing there are instincts of the body, we are to assume there are no instincts of the mind ? To refer whatever we should at first sight take for such to the eliciting power of circumstances, is idle. Circum- stances do indeed call them out, at the particular moment when they try their tendencies and strength, but no more create, or rather (since creating is out of the question) no more produce them, except as pulling the end of a roll of string produces it, — that is, producit or draws it forth, — than flying is produced or given by the need of locomotion. To return to the soul : if, — and I believe the fact to be un- deniable, — human nature, until it has been hardened by much 190 GUESSES AT TRUTH. exposure to passion, and become used to the public eye, is fond of veiling love with silence and concealment, while it makes little or no scruple of exhibiting the kindred sentiment of friend- ship ; I see no good way of accounting for this, except by refer- ring such shamefastness of the soul to its sensitive recoil from a form of affection in which, as Nature whispers, its best and purest feelings are combined and kneaded up with body. . The bashfulness which hides affection, from a dread that the avowal will be ill received, — the fear of bringing one's judge- ment in question by what some may deem a misplaced choice, — the consciousness that all choice is invidious, from involving postponement as well as preference, — all these feelings and motives, I am aware, have often considerable weight. But they must weigh nearly as much in the case of friendship. Friend- ship indeed may be indulged in boyhood, while love is a boon reserved for our maturity ; and hence doubtless frequently during youth a fear of being thought presumptuous, if we are discovered fancying ourselves grown old enough to love. But this can never furnish the right key to a reserve, which is nei- ther limited to youth, nor directly acted on by time, which varies in different countries with their degree of moral cultivation, and in individuals appears to proportion its intensity to the depth and purity of the heart in which it cowers. . The body, the body is the root of it. But these days of adul- tery are much too delicate to allow of handling the subject further. Everybody is ready to declare that Cesar's wife ought to be above suspicion; and many, while saying this, will dream that Cesar must be of their kin. Yet most people, and among them her husband, would be slow to acknowledge, what would seem to follow a fortiori, that Cesar himself ought to be so too. Or does a splash of mud defile a man more than a mortifying ulcer ? Among the numberless contradictions in our nature, hardly any is more glaring than this, between our sensitiveness, to the slightest disgrace which we fancy cast upon us from without, GUESSES AT TKUTH. 191 and our callousness to the grossest which we bring down on our- selves. In truth they who are the most sensitive to the one, are often the most callous to the other. u. The wise man will always be able to find an end in the means ; though bearing in mind at the same time that they are means to a higher end. And this is according to God's work- ing, every member of whose universe is at once a part and a whole. The unwise man, on the other hand, he whom the Psalmist calls the fool, can never see anything but means in the end. Doing good is with him the means of going to heav- en ; and going to heaven is the means of getting to do nothing. For this is the vulgar notion of heaven, — a comfortable sine- cure, u. What if we live many and various lives ? each providing us its peculiar opportunities of acquiring some new good, and cast- ing away the slough of some old evil; so that the course of our existence should include a series of lessons, and the world be indeed a stage on which every man fills many parts. If the doctrine of transmigration has never been taught in this form, such is perhaps the idea embodied in the pvOos. Impromptus in recluse men are likely to be a loisir ; and presence of mind in thinking men is likely to be recollection. Cesar indeed says it is so generally (B. G. v. 33). " Titurius, uti qui nihil ante providisset, trepidare, concursare, cohortesque disponere; haec tamen ipsa timide, atque ut eum omnia deficere viderentur : quod plerumque iis accidere consuevit, qui in ipso negotio consilium capere coguntur. At Cotta, qui cogitasset haec posse in itinere accidere, ... nulla in re communi saluti deerat." Much to the same purpose is Livy's explanation of Philope- men's readiness in decision, when he suddenly found himself in the presence of a hostile force : xxxv. 28. It is pleasant to see theoretical and practical intellects thus jumping together. 192 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Napoleon is well said by Tiedge "to have improvisoed his whole life." He was Fortune's football, which she kickt from throne to throne, until at length by a sudden rebound he fell into the middle of the Atlantic. Whereas a truly great man's actions are works of art. Nothing with him is extemporized or improvisoed. They involve their consequences, and develope themselves along with the events they give birth to. u. He must be a thorough fool, who can learn nothing from his own folly. u. Is not man the only automaton upon earth ? The things usu- ally called so are in fact heteromatons. u. Were nothing else to be learnt from the Rhetoric and Ethics of Aristotle, they should be studied by every educated English- man as the best of commentaries on Shakspeare. No poet comes near Shakspeare in the number of bosom lines, — of lines that we may cherish in our bosoms, and that seem almost as if they had grown there,- — of lines that, like bosom friends, are ever at hand to comfort, counsel, and glad- den us, under all the vicissitudes of life, — of lines that, accord- ing to Bacon's expression, " come home to our business and bosoms," and open the door for us to look in, and to see what is nestling and brooding there. u. How many Englishmen admire Shakspeare ? Doubtless all who understand him ; and, it is to be hoped, a few more. For how many Englishmen understand Shakspeare ? Were Dioge- nes to set out on his search through the land, I trust he would bring home many hundreds, not to say thousands, for every one I should put up. To judge from what has been written about him, the Englishmen who understand Shakspeare are little more numerous than those who understand the language spoken in Paradise. You will now and then meet with ingenious re- marks on ^articular passages, and even on particular characters, GUESSES AT TRUTH. 193 or rather on particular features in them. But these remarks are mostly as incomplete and unsatisfactory as the description of a hand or foot would be, unless viewed with reference to the whole body. He who wishes to trace the march and to scan the operations of this most marvellous genius, and to discern the mysterious organization of his wonderful works, will find little help but what comes from beyond the German Ocean. It is scarcely worth while asking the third question: Would Shakspeare have chosen rather to be admired, or to be under- stood? Not however that any one could understand without admiring, though many may admire without understanding him. Birds are fond of cherries, yet know little about vegeta- ble physiology. Some years ago indeed there seemed to be ground for hoping that the want here spoken of might be supplied by the publica- tion of Coleridge's Lectures on Shakspeare. For though Cole- ridge, as he himself says of Warburton, is often hindered from seeing the thoughts of others by " the mist-working swarm," or rather by the radiant flood of his own, — though often, like the sun, when looking at the planets, he only beholds his own image in the objects of his gaze, and often, when his eye darts on a cloud, will turn it into a rainbow, — yet he had a livelier per- ception, than any other Englishman, of the two cardinal ideas of all criticism, — that every work of genius is at once an organic whole in itself, and the part and member of a living, organic universe, of that poetical world in which the spirit of man manifests itself by successive avatars. These, the two main ideas which have been brought to light and unfolded by the philosophical criticism of Germany since the days of Winc- kelmann and Lessing, he united with tllat moral, political, and practical discernment, which are the highest endowments of the English mind, and which give our great writers a dignity almost unparalleled elsewhere, from their ever-wakeful con- sciousness that man is a moral, as well as sentient and percip- ient and thinking and knowing being, and that his relations as a moral being are of all the most momentous and the highest. Coleridge's own imagination too enabled him to accompany all 9 m 194 GUESSES AT TRUTH. other poets in their boldest flights, and then to feel most truly in his element. Nor could anything be too profound or too subtile for his psychological analysis. In fact his chief failing as a critic was his fondness for seeking depth below depth, and knot within knot : and he would now and then try to dive, when the water did not come up to his ancles. Above all, for understanding Shakspeare, Coleridge had the two powers, which are scarcely less mighty in our intellectual than in our moral and spiritual life, Faith and Love, — a boundless faith in Shakspeare's truth, and a love for him, akin to that with which philosophers study the works of Nature, shrinking from no labour for the sake of getting at a satisfac- tory solution, and always distrusting themselves until they have found one, in a firm confidence that Wisdom will infallibly be justified by her children. It is quite touching to see how hum- bly this great thinker and poet hints his doubts, when the pro- priety of any passage in Shakspeare appears questionable to his understanding : and most cheering is it to read his assur- ance, that " in many instances he has ripened into a perception of beauties, where he had before descried faults ; " and that throughout his life, "at every new accession of information, after every successful exercise of meditation, and every fresh presentation of experience, he had unfailingly discovered a pro- portionate increase of wisdom and intuition in Shakspeare." See his Literary Remains, Vol. ii. pp. 52, 115, 139. The same truth is enforced by Mr De Quincey in his admirable remarks on the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth. In the study of poetry, as in yet higher studies, it is often necessary that we should believe, before we can understand : and through the energy, patience, and perseverance, which Faith alone can inspire, do we mount to the understanding of what we have already believed in. How, for instance, should we ever have discerned the excellences of the Greek drama, without a previous faith in its excellence, strong enough not to shrink from the manifold difficulties which would else have repelled us ? Who would be at the trouble of cracking a nut, if he did not believe there was a kernel within it? A study GUESSES AT TRUTH. 195 pursued in this spirit of faith is sure of being continually re- warded by new influxes of knowledge, not only on account of the spring which such a spirit gives to our faculties, but also because it delivers them from most of the prejudices, which make our minds the thralls of the present. Common men, on the other hand, are prone to look down on whatever passes their comprehension, thus betraying the natural affinity between ignorance and contempt. Unfortunately Coleridge's Lectures are among the treasures which the waves of forgetfulness have swallowed up. Precious fragments of them however have been preserved ; and these, like almost all his writings, are rich in thoughts fitted to awaken reflexion, and to guide it. And that there are writers amongst us, who understand Shakspeare, and might teach others to understand him, is proved by the remarks on Macbeth just referred to, as well as by the very acute and judicious Obser- vations on Shakspeare's Romeo as compared with the Romeo acted on the Stage. Much delicacy of observation too and ele- gance of taste is shewn in the Characteristics of Shakspeare's Women, — one of the happiest subjects on which a female pen was ever employed. u. " The German writers (Coleridge is reported to have said) have acquired an elegance of thought and of mind, just as we have attained a style and smartness of composition : so that, if you were to read an ordinary German author as an English one, you would say, This man has something in him ; this man thinks : whereas it is merely a method acquired by them, as we have acquired a style." Letters and Conversations of S. T. C. Vol. ii. p. 4. Such pieces of tabletalk are not legitimate objects of criti- cism ; because we can never feel sure how far the report is an accurate one, or how far the opinion uttered may have been modified, either expressly by words, or implicitly by the occa- sion which prompted it. What is here said is quite true, pro- vided it be not understood disparagingly. The peculiar value of modern German literature does not arise, except in a few 196 GUESSES AT TRUTH. instances, from the superior genius of the writers, so much as from their being better trained and disciplined in the principles and method of knowledge. For this advantage they are in- debted to their philosophical education. Fifty years ago the common run of German writers were as superficial and imme- thodical as those of the rest of Europe. The love of system, which has always characterized the nation, only prevented any gleam of light from breaking through the clouds of dulness in which they wrapt themselves. But now, as in most of the better writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we may discern the influence of the scholastic logic, in which they were trained, so one can hardly look into a German work of the present century, on whatever subject of enquiry, without perceiving that it is written by a countryman of Kant and Fichte and Schelling. And surely this is the highest reward which can fall to the lot of any human intellect, to be thus dif- fused through and amalgamated with the intellect of a whole people, to live in their minds, not merely when they are think- ing of you and talking of you, but even when they are totally unconscious of your personal existence. Nay, what but this is the ground of the superiority of civil- ized nations to savages ? Their minds are better moulded and disciplined, more or less, by the various processes of education. In fact training, if it does not impart strength, fosters and increases it, and renders it serviceable, and prevents its running waste: so that, assuming the quantity of ability allotted by Nature to two nations to be the same, that which has the better system of moral and intellectual culture, will bring up the greater number of able men. It is true, the forms of philosophical thought, when generally prevalent, so as to become fashionable in a literature, will be used by many without discernment of their value and power. Many will fancy that the possession of a few phrases is enough to open the gates of all knowledge to them, and to carry them at once beyond the wisdom of former ages, without any neces- sity for personal research or meditation : and imbecility, self- complacently mouthing big phrases, is more than usually offen- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 197 sive. Perhaps too it is impossible to devise any scheme of education, which can be reckoned upon for promoting the development of poetical genius. This is implied in the saying, Poeta nascitur, non jit. Nor is genius in philosophy, or in art, though more dependent on foregoing circumstances than in poetry, to be elicited with certainty by any system. But for the talents employed in the various enquiries of philology and science, a great deal may be done by appropriate stimulants and instruction, by putting them in the right way, and setting before them the mark they are to aim at. Hence, whenever a man of genius plants a colony in an unexplored region of thought, he finds followers ready to join him in effecting what his own unassisted arm could only partially have accomplisht : and though stray pieces of ore may be pickt up without excit- ing much notice, if a mine of truth has once been successfully opened, it is mostly workt on until.it is exhausted. Soon after reading the remark of Coleridge's just cited, I happened to open a German periodical work containing a dis- sertation on the Amphitryon of Plautus. That play, the writer observes, differs from all the other Roman comedies in having a mythological subject, which occasions essential differences in its treatment ; so that it forms a distinct species : and he pro- poses to examine the nature of this peculiar form of comedy, according to its external and internal character ; not to explain the poetical composition of the Amphitryon, considered as an individual work of art, but merely to determine the place it is to hold in the history of the Roman drama. Now this, which is exactly the plan any intelligent German writer would have taken in treating the same subject, may exemplify the quality in German literature spoken of by Coleridge. Here too one should say, This man knows what he is talking about : and one should say so with good reason. For in criticism, as in every other branch of knowledge, prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae est. He who has got the clue, may thread the maze. Yet the method of investigation here is totally different from what an English scholar would have pursued. The notion of regarding the Amphitryon as a distinct species of ancient comedy, and of 198 GUESSES AT TEUTH. considering that species in its relation to the rest of the Roman drama, — the distinction drawn between this historical view of it, and the esthetical analysis of it taken by itself, — these are thoughts which would never have entered the head of an Eng- lish critic, unless he had been inoculated with them either directly or indirectly from Germany. Deluged as we are with criticism in every shape, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily, — many thousands of pages as are written on criticism in Eng- land every year, — we hardly ever find the glimmering of a suspicion that there is anything essential in the form of a poem, or that there are any principles and laws to determine it, or that a poet has anything to do, except to get an interesting story, and to describe interesting characters, and to deck out his pages with as many fine thoughts and pretty images as he can muster. No wonder that our criticism is so worthless and unprofitable ! that it is of no manner of use, either in teaching our writers how to write, or our readers how to read ! Let me allude to another instance. Works containing criti- cisms on all Shakspeare's plays have been publisht of late years, by Hazlitt in England, and by Francis Horn in Ger- many. Nobody can doubt that Hazlitt by nature had the acuter and stronger understanding of the two: he had culti- vated it by metaphysical studies : he had a passionate love for poetry, and yielded to no man in his admiration for Shakspeare. By his early intercourse with Coleridge too he had been led to perceive more clearly than most Englishmen, that poetry is not an arbitrary and chanceful thing, that it has a reason of its own, and that, when genuine, it springs from a vital idea, which is at once constitutive and regulative, and which manifests itself not in a technical apparatus, but in the free symmetry of a liv- ing form. Yet, from the want of a proper intellectual discipline and method, his perception of this truth never became an intu- ition, nor coalesced with the rest of his knowledge : and owing to this want, and no doubt to that woful deficiency of moral discipline and principle, through which his talents went to rack, Hazlitt's work on Shakspeare, though often clever and spark- ling, and sometimes ingenious in pointing out latent beauties in GUESSES AT TRUTH. 199 particular passages, is vastly inferior to Horn's as an analytical exposition of the principles and structure of Shakspeare's plays, tracing and elucidating the hidden, labyrinthine workings of his all-vivifying, all-unifying genius. it. When a subtile critic has detected some recondite beauty in Shakspeare, the vulgar are fain to cry that Shakspeare did not mean it. Well! what of that? If it be there, his genius meant it. This is the very mark whereby to know a true poet. There will always be a number of beauties in his works, which he never meant to put into them. This is one of the resemblances between the works of Genius and those of Nature, a resemblance betokening that the powers which produce them are akin. Each, beside its immediate, apparent purpose, is ever connected by certain deli- cate and almost imperceptible fibres, by numberless ties of union and communion, and the sweet intercourse of giving and receiving, with the universe of which it forms a part. Hereby the poet shews that he is not a mere " child of Time, But off- spring of the Eternal Prime." His works are not narrowed to the climes and seasons, the manners and thoughts that give birth to them, but spread out their invisible arms through time and space, and, when generations, and empires, and even relig- ions have past away, still stand in unwaning freshness and truth. They have a living assimilative power. As man changes, they disclose new features and aspects, and ever look him in the face with the reflexion of his own image, and speak to him with the voice of his own heart ; so that after thousands of years we still welcome them as we would a brother. This too is the great analogy between Genius and Goodness, that, unconscious of its own excellences, it works, not so much by an intelligent, reflective, prospective impulse of the will, as by the prompting of a higher spirit, breathing in it and through it, coming one knows not whence, and going one knows not whither ; under the sway of which spirit, whenever it lifts up its head and shakes its locks, it scatters light and splendour around. The question therefore, whether a great poet meant 200 GUESSES AT TRUTH. such a particular beauty, comes to much the same thing as the question, whether the sun means that his light should enter into such or such a flower. He who works in unison with Nature and Truth, is sure to be far mightier and wiser than him- self. u. The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less ? or a sense the more ? Some hearts are like a melting peach, but with a larger, coarser, harder stone. I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popu- lar election. Almost every rational man can shew nearly the same num- ber of moral virtues. Only in the good man the active and beneficent virtues look outward, the passive and parsimonious inward. In the bad man it is just the contrary. His fore- thought, his generosity, his longsuffering is for himself; his severity and temperance and frugality are for others. But the religious virtues belong solely to the religious. God hides Himself from the wicked : or at least the wicked blinds himself to God. If he practically acknowledge any, which is only now and then, it is one whose nonexistence is certain, whose fabu- lousness is evident to him . . the Devil. We like slipping, but not falling : our real desire is to be tempted enough. The man who will share his wealth with a woman, has some love for her: the man who Can resolve to share his poverty with her, has more . . of course supposing him to be a man, not a child, or a beast. Our statequacks of late years have thought fit to style them- selves Radical Reformers: and though the title involves an GUESSES AT TRUTH. 201 absurdity, it is not on that account less fitted for the sages who have assumed it ; many of whom moreover may have no very clear notion what the epithet they give themselves means. For what can a Eadical Reformer be ? Is he a Reformer of the roots of things ? But Nature buries these out of sight, and will not allow man to tamper with them, assigning him the task of training and pruning the stem and branches. Or is a Radical Reformer one who tears up a tree by the roots, and reforms it by laying it prostrate ? If so, our Reformers may indeed put in a claim to the title, and might fairly contest it with the hurri- cane of last autumn. But what can be the good or comfort of a reformation, which is only another name for destruction ? The word may perhaps be borrowed from medicine, in which we speak of a radical cure. This however is a metaphor implying the extirpation, or complete uprooting of the disease, after which the sanative powers of Nature will restore the con- stitution to health. But there is no such sanative power in a state ; where the mere removal of abuses does not avail to set any vital faculties in action. In truth this is only another form of the errour, by which man, ever quicker at destroying than at producing, has confounded repentance with reformation, fiera- fxeXeia with fxerdvoia. Whereas the true Reformer is he who creates new institutions, and gives them life and energy, and trusts to them for throwing off such evil humours as may be lying in the body politic. The true Reformer is the Seminal Reformer, not the Radical. And this is the way the Sower, who went forth to sow His seed, did really reform the world, without making any open assault to uproot what was already existing. 1837. u. A writer, for whom I have a high esteem, in the Politics for the People (p. 222), objects to the foregoing remarks on the name Radical, and asserts that " there can be no Seminal Re- form, without Radical Reform first, where Reform is needed at all. Is the wheat (he asks) sown amidst the stubble, or on the rush-grown meadow, or on the common covered with heather and gorse ? Must not the stern ploughshare first be driven through 202 GUESSES AT TEUTH. the soil, rooting up, right and left, all evil growths of the past, all good growths grown useless ! Was He not the greatest of Radical Reformers, of whose work it was said, And now also the axe is laid to the root of the trees ; therefore every one that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire. Since the first day when the ground was curst for man's sake, and made to bring forth thorns and thistles, it has been every true man's lot and duty to be a Radical Reformer, whether on a small scale or a large. But such Radical Reform is indeed only a means towards Seminal Reform ; the weeds are only pluckt up, that the good seed may be put in ; and that seed every true man is bound to be throwing in as perpetually, as he is perpetually rooting out the weeds. It is not the Radical Reformer who is the Destructive ; it is the blind Conservative, who looks upon the thorns and thistles as holy, instead of feel- ing that they are God's curse." In reply to these objections, I will merely point out a couple of fallacies, as they seem to me, contained in them. The first is, that the analogy between agriculture and state- culture is pusht far beyond its due limits. The vegetable crop, as it has no living soul, no permanent being, — as it has a merely transient purpose, external to itself, — is swept away at the end of the harvest, when that purpose is fulfilled. But no Reformer, however Radical, not even Robespierre, has ventured to lay down that the generations of mankind are to be swept away one after another, in order to make room for their succes- sors. The chain of the human race does not consist of a num- ber of distinct, annual links: each annual link combines the produce of a century ; and all these run one into the other. So too do their habits ; so do their institutions, social and political. There is no new beginning in the history of the world : or, if there is one new era, it was introduced by a superhuman Author ; and even that stretches back through the whole of anterior history. The French Republicans did indeed attempt to estab- lish a new era : but the builders of Babel were not more sig- nally confounded, than they by the powers which they evoked from hell. The inherent vitality of the nation, after a while, GUESSES AT TRUTH. 203 prevailed over the destroyer, not however without incalculable misery at the time, and grievous deterioration to the moral character of the people. Hence I cannot see in what sense we can speak of " driving the stern ploughshare " through the social life and institutions of a nation. He who does not know that a nation has a living, permanent being, and that its organic institutions are intimately connected with that permanent life, he who feels no reverence for that being, and the institutions connected with it, — he who worships his own notions above , them, and would set up his own fancies in their stead, — is sadly lacking in that spirit, which is the primary element in the character of a wise and practical Reformer. In the next place it seems to me a total mistake, to apply the words of the Baptist, — And now the axe is laid to the root of the tree, &c. — to any work ordained for man. When the appointed time comes, God does indeed shew forth His justice by sweeping away that which is utterly corrupt. As He swept away the cities of the plain, so, when her cup was full, did He sweep away Jerusalem. Yet even the Son of God, in His human manifestation, came not to destroy, but to save. He would have gathered Jerusalem under His wings; but she would not : therefore was her house left desolate. Assuredly too this is the only part of His office, which we are called to discharge. As His ministers, we are to be ministers of salva- tion, not of destruction. The evil in ourselves indeed we are to pluck up, branch and root : but in our dealings with others, unless we have a special office committed to us by the laws of family or national life, our task will mainly be to contend against evil by sowing the seeds of good, not by Radical Re- form, but by Seminal. The satirist, the rhetorician, the moral- ist, will indeed try the former, and will therefore fail. The Christian has a higher power entrusted to him, the power of God's goodness and mercy, — the Gospel of redemption and salvation, — not the woes of the Trojan prophetess, who could gain no credence, but the glad tidings of the Kingdom of Heaven : and if he relies on this one power, he will succeed, where others must needs fail. For Earth cannot overpower 204 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Hell; but Heaven can. Elijah, under the old Dispensation, might be commissioned to destroy the worship of Baal by the sword : such destruction however is ineffectual, transitory : that which has been destroyed sprouts up again : for the roots dive beyond the reach of the hoe and pickaxe, even into the depths of the heart. Hence vou must sow the seed, which will change, and, as it were, leaven the heart, so that the heart itself will cast them out convulsively. This was what our Lord Himself did. Though the Jewish nation was doomed to perish, every act of His life was designed to save the Jews, if they would accept His salvation. Nor did the Apostles go forth to destroy the idols and idolatries of the nations. In so doing they would have forsaken Christ's way, and would have anticipated Mahomet's. Thry preacht Christ and the Resurrection, — Christ crucified, the power of God unto salvation; and hereby they overthrew the idolatries and superstitions of the nations, not transitorily, but permanently. So again at the Reformation, Luther, having the true Apostol- ical spirit in him, — the spirit of a Seminal, not of a Radical Reformer, was ever strenuous in resisting all attempts to carry out the Reformation by destructive, revolutionary, radical meas- ures. Preach the word of God, he said, — preach the truth; and the truth will set us free. The shooting of the new leaves will push off the old ones, far more effectually than the winds can tear them off. And the former is the human, Christian procedure : the latter is committed to the blind powers of Na- ture, though man, acting under the sway of his passions, may at times become their instrument. These same principles will also regulate the conduct of the true Christian statesman. Like Luther, he will be very slow and reluctant to destroy any ancient institution, knowing that the temporary evils which may arise from its perversion, are caused, not by the institution itself, but by the heart and will of those who pervert it, and that this heart and will would in no degree be corrected by its destruction. He will indeed find frequent occasion for lopping and pruning off morbid outgrowths and overgrowths, as well as for training the healthy growths of GUESSES AT TEUTH. 205 each successive year: but he will remember that this is his business, to prune off, not to cut down. The sophists of the last century, and at the beginning of the present, forgot this : nor is it sufficiently borne in mind now. They forgot that a nation has a living, organic growth, which manifests itself in its constitution, and in its various institutions; they regarded it rather as a machine, which they might take to pieces, and re- construct at will, this way or that. These notions, which are refuted by the teaching of all the greatest political philosophers, above all of Burke, — and which have been still more signally refuted by the cracking and breaking up of all such manufac- tured constitutions, — are so likewise by the two great witness- es that the history of the world brings forward, to shew the wisdom and permanence of organic constitutions, expanding and developing themselves along with the growth of the nation, and continuing the same, even as man is the same in manhood and old age as in childhood, notwithstanding the innumerable accre- tions which he has been continually assimilating and incorporat- ing with himself. These two great witnesses are Eome and England. Both indeed had to pass through divers critical tri- als, when the wilfulness and selfishness of man tried to suspend and arrest the organic development of the Constitution: and Rome at last perisht, when that development seemed to have become a practical impossibility. But each is the witness for true political wisdom, Rome in the ancient world, England in the modern. 1851. u. Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For Nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is the work of man, under the guidance and inspiration of a mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man, in the imbecility of his mimic understanding. u. What is the use of it ? is the first question askt in England by almost everybody about almost everything. When forein- ers, who have learnt English from our older writers, come amongst us, hearing such frequent enquiries after use, they 206 GUESSES AT TRUTH. must fancy they have fallen among a set of usurers. No won- der so many of them have applied for loans. The only wonder, as we are not usurers, is how they got them. Still there are a few things, a husband for one's daughter, a Rubens, four horses, a cure of souls, — the use of which is never askt : probably because it is so evident. In those cases the first question, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, is, What are they worth $ The worth of a cure of souls! O miserable money-loving people ! whose very language is pros- tituted to avarice. Wealth is money: Fortune is money: Worth is money : and, had not God for once been beforehand with the world, Providence would have been money too. The worth of a cure of souls is Heaven or Hell, according as he who is appointed to it does his duty or neglects it. You want to double your riches, and without gambling or stockjobbing. Share it. Whether it be material or intellect- ual, its rapid increase will amaze you. What would the sun have been, had he folded himself up in darkness ? Surely he would have gone out. So would Socrates. This road to wealth seems to have been discovered some three thousand years ago. At least it was known to Hesiod, and has been recommended by him in the one precious line he has left us. But even he complains of the fools, who did not know that half is more than the whole. And ever since, though mankind have always been in full chase after riches, though they have not feared to follow Columbus and Gama in chase of it, though they have waded through blood, and crept through falsehood, and trampled on their own hearts, and been ready to ride on a broomstick, in chase of it, very few have ever taken this road, albeit the easiest, the shortest, and the surest. it. One of the first things a soldier has to do, is to harden him- self against heat and cold. He must enure himself to bear sudden and violent changes. In like manner they who enter into public life should begin by dulling their sensitiveness to GUESSES AT TKUTH. 207 praise and blame. He who cannot turn his back on the one, and face the other, will probably be beguiled by his favorite, into letting his enemy come behind him, and wound him when off his guard. Let him keep a firm footing, and beware of being lifted up, remembering that this is the commonest trick by which wrestlers throw their antagonists. u. Gratification is distinct from happiness in the common appre- hension of mankind ; and so is selfishness from wisdom. But passion in its blindness disregards, or rather speaks as if it dis- regarded, the first distinction; and sophists, taking advantage of this, confound the last. Their confusion however is worse confounded. For it is not every gratification that is selfish, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, which implies blame and sin ; but such only as is undue or inordinate, whether in kind or degree. Never was a man called selfish for quenching his thirst with water, where water was not scarce ; many a man has been justly, for drinking Champagne. The argument then, if unraveled into a syllogism, would hang together thus : Some gratifications are selfish : No gratification is happiness : therefore, All happiness is selfish. I am not surprised that these gentlemen speak ill of logic. Misers are the greatest spendthrifts : and spendthrifts often end in becoming the greatest misers. u. The principle gives birth to the rule : the motive may justify the exception. When the Parisians set up a naked prostitute as the goddess of Reason, they can hardly have been aware what an apt type she afforded of their Reason, and indeed of all Reason, — if that divine name be not forfeited by such a traitorous act, — which turns away its face from heaven, and throws off its allegi- ance to the truth as it is in God. When Reason has done this, 208 GUESSES AT TRUTH. it is stark naked, and ready to prostitute itself to every capri- cious lust, whether of the flesh, or of the spirit. One can nev- er repeat too often, that Keason, as it exists in man, is only our intellectual eye, and that, like the eye, to see, it needs light, — to see clearly and far, it needs the light of heaven. u. Entireness, illimitableness is indispensable to Faith. What we believe, we must believe wholly and without reserve; wherefore the only perfect and satisfying object of Faith is God. A Faith that sets bounds to itself, that will believe so much and no more, that will trust thus far and no further, is none. It is only Doubt taking a nap in an elbow chair. The husband, whose scepticism is prurient enough to contemplate the possibil- ity of his wife's proving false, richly deserves that she should do so. u. Never put much confidence in such as put no confidence in others. A man prone to suspect evil is mostly looking in his neighbour for what he sees in himself. As to the pure all things are pure, even so to the impure all things are impure. u. Do you wish to find out a person's weak points ? Note the failings he has the quickest eye for in others. They may not be the very failings he is himself conscious of; but they will be their next-door neighours. No man keeps such a jealous look- out as a rival. u. In reading the Apostolical Epistles, we should bear in mind that they are not scientific treatises, armed at all points against carpers and misconceivers, but occasional letters, addrest to disciples, who, as the writer knew, were both able and in- clined to make due allowance for the latitude of epistolary expression. But is not this what the Socinians contend for ? If it were, I should have nothing to say against them. What I object to in them is their making, not due allowances, but un- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 209 d uej — allowances discountenanced by the plainest passages as well as the uniform tenour of the Sacred Writings, by the whole analogy, and, so far as we dare judge of them, the prompting principles of Revelation. But how shall we discern the due from the undue ? As we discern everything else : by the honest use of a culti- vated understanding. If we have not banisht the Holy Spirit by slights and excesses, if we have fed His lamp in our hearts with prayer, if we have improved and strengthened our facul- ties by education and exercise, and then sit down to study the Bible with enquiring and teachable minds, we need not doubt of discovering its meaning ; not indeed purely, — for where find an intellect so colourless as never to tinge the light that falls upon it ? not wholly, — for how fathom the ocean of God's word? but with such accuracy, and in such degree, as shall suffice for the uses of our spiritual life. If we have neglected this previous discipline, if we take up the book with stupid or ignorant, lazy or negligent, arrogant or unclean and do-no-good hands, we shall in running through its pages stumble on many things dark and startling, on many things which, aggravated by presumptuous heedlessness, might prove destructively of- fensive. What then are the poor to do ? They must avail themselves of oral instruction, have recourse, so far as may be, to written helps, and follow the guidance of God's ministers. But suitable faculties seem indispensable. Let a man be ever so pious and sincere, if blind, he could not see the book, nor, if unlettered, read it, nor, if ignorant of Eng- lish, know the meaning of the words, nor, if half-witted, com- prehend the sentences. Why suppose that the intellectual hindrances to mastering the book end here ? especially when we allow the existence of moral hindrances, and are aware that they combine with the intellectual in unascertainable and indef- inite proportions ; if they do not rather form their essence, or at least their germ. You grant that carelessness and impatience may hide the meaning of the book from us : you should be sure that stupidity does not spring from carelessness, nor bad logic N 210 GUESSES AT TRUTH. from impatience, before you decide so confidently that stupidity and bad logic cannot. Search the Scriptures, said Christ. " Non dixit legite, sed scrutamini (as Chrysostom, quoted by Jeremy Taylor, On the Minister's Duty, Serm. II Vol. vi. p. 520, observes on this text), quia oportet profundius effodere, ut quae alte delitescant invenire possimus. The Jews have a saying : qui non advertit quod supra et infra in scriptoribus legitur, is pervertit verba Dei viventis. He that will understand God's meaning, must look above, and below, and round about." Now to look at things below the surface, we must dig down to them. They who omit this, from whatever cause, be it the sluggishness of their will, or merely the bluntness of their instrument, — for this question, though important in judging of the workman, can- not affect the accomplishment of the work, — will never gain the buried treasure. Those on the other hand who dig as they are taught to do, will reach it in time, if they faint not. The number of demi-semi-Christians in the world no more estab- lishes the contrary, than the number of drunkards in the world establishes the impossibility of keeping sober. But, as Taylor remarks in the same Sermon (p. 509), "though many precious things are reserved for them who dig deep and search wisely, medicinal plants, and corn, and grass, things fit for food and physic, are to be had in every field." The great duties of a Christian are so plainly exprest, that they who run may read, and that all who listen may un- derstand them : expounders of doctrine are appointed by the Church : and in every case, to every one who truly seeks, suf- ficient will be given for his salvation. How deeply rooted must unbelief be in our hearts, when we are surprised to find our prayers answered ! instead of feeling sure that they will be so, if they are only offered up in faith, and are in accord with the will of God. a ' Moses, when the battle was raging, held up his arms to heaven, with the rod of God in his hand ; and thus Israel GUESSES AT TRUTH. 211 overcame Amalek. Hence a notion got abroad through the world, that in times of difficulty or danger the mightiest weapon man can make use of is prayer. But Moses felt his arms grow heavy ; and he was forced to call in Aaron and Hur to hold them up. In like manner do we all too readily weary of prayer, and feel it become a burthen, and let our hands drop ; and then Amalek prevails. Here however the wisdom of the eighteenth century has devised a substitute, at least for one of the cases in which our ancestors used to hold up their arms to heaven. Franklin has taught us to hold up iron bars to heaven, which have the ad- vantage of never growing weary, and under the guard of which we may feel sure that the storm will pass over without harming us. Besides they allow us to employ our hands to better pur- pose, in working, or eating, or fighting. Still there are sundry kinds of dangers, from which Frank- lin's conductors will not secure us : and against these, till the time when matter shall have utterly choked and stifled spirit, we still need the help of prayer. And as our flesh is so weak, that our prayers soon droop and become faint, unless they are upheld, Christ and the Holy Spirit vouchsafe to uphold our prayers, and to breathe the power of faith into them, so that they may mount heavenward, and to bear them up to the very Throne of Grace. u. All Religions, — for absolute Pantheism is none, — must of necessity be anthropomorphic. The idea of God must be adapted to the capacities of the human imagination. Chris- tianity differs from all other Religions in this, that its anthro- pomorphism is theopneustic. U. A weak mind sinks under prosperity, as well as under adver- sity. A strong and deep mind has two highest tides, — when the moon is at the full, and when there is no moon. u. What a pity it is that there are so many words ! When- ever one wants to say anything, three or four ways of saying 212 GUESSES AT TKUTH. it run into one's head together; and one can't tell which to choose. It is as troublesome and puzzling as choosing a rib- bon ... or a husband. Now on a question of millinery, or of man-millinery, I should be slow to venture an opinion. But style is a less intricate matter ; and with regard to the choice of words a clear and simple rule may be laid down, which can hardly be followed too punctually or too assiduously. First however, as it is a lady I am addressing, let me advise you to lessen your perplex- ities by restricting yourself to home manufactures. You may perhaps think it looks pretty to garnish your letters with such phrases as de tout mon cceur. Now with all my heart is really better English : the only advantage on the side of the other expression is its being less sincere. Whatever may be the su- periority of French silks, or French lace, English words sound far best from English lips : and, notwithstanding the example of Desdemona, one can seldom look with perfect complacency on the woman who gives up her heart to the son of another people. Man may leave country as well as father and mother : for action and thought find their objects everywhere. But must not feelings pine and droop, when cut off from the home and speech of their childhood ? As a general maxim however, when you come to a cross-road, you can hardly do better than go right onward. You would do so involuntarily in speaking: do so likewise in writing. When you doubt between two words, choose the plainest, the commonest, the most idiomatic. Eschew fine words, as you would rouge : love simple ones, as you would native roses on your cheeks. Act as you might be disposed to do on your estate : employ such words as have the largest families, keep- ing clear of foundlings, and of those of which nobody can tell whence they come, unless he happens to be a scholar. This is just the advice which Ovid gives : Munda, sed e medio, consuetaque verba, puellae Scribite : sermonis publica forma placet. To the same effect is the praise which Chaucer bestows on his Virginia : GUESSES AT TKUTH. 213 Though she were wise as Pallas, dare I sain Her faconde eke full womanly and plain. No contrefeted termes hadde she To semen wise : but after her degree She spake ; and all her wordes more or less Sounding in virtue and in gentillesse. Exquisite examples of this true mother English are to be found in the speeches put by Shakspeare into the mouth of his female characters. "No fountain from its rocky cave E'er tript with foot so free : " never were its waters clearer, more transparent, or more musical. This indeed is the peculiar beauty of a feminine style, munda verba, sed e medio, consue- taque, choice and elegant words, but such as are familiar in wellbred conversation, — words not used scientifically, or tech- nically, or etymologically, but according to their customary meaning. It is from being guided wholly by usage, undis- turbed by extraneous considerations, and from their character- istic fineness of discernment with regard to what is fit and ap- propriate, as well as from their being much less blown about by the vanity of writing cleverly or sententiously, that sensible, educated women have a simple grace of style rarely attained by men ; whose minds are ever and anon caught and entangled in briary thickets of hows, and how-fars, and whys, and why-nots ; and who often think much less what they have to say, than in what manner they shall say it. For it is in writing, as in painting and sculpture : let the artist adapt the attitudes of his figures to the feeling or action he wishes to express ; and, if his mind has been duly impregnated with the idea of the human form, without his intending it they will be graceful : whereas, if his first aim be to make them graceful, they are sure to be affected. When women however sally out of their proper sphere into that of objective, reflective authorship, — for which they are disqualified, not merely by their education and habits, but by the subjective character of their minds, by the predominance of their feelings over their intellect, and by their proneness to view everything in the light of their affections, — they often lose the simple graces of style, which within their own element 214 GUESSES AT TKUTH. belong to them. Here too may it be said, that " the woman who deliberates is lost." Going right, not from reflexion, not from calculating the reasons and consequences of each partic- ular step, but from impulse, — whether instinctive, or derivative from habit, or from principle, — when a woman distrusts her impulses, and appeals to her understanding, she is not unlikely to stray ; among other grounds, because this seldom happens, except when some wrong impulse is pulling against the right one, and when she wants an excuse for yielding to it. Men, in speech, as in action, may now and then forsake usage ; having previously explored the principles and laws, of which usage is ever an inadequate exponent. But no woman can safely defy usage, unless it be at the imperious, momentary call of some overpowering affection, the voice of which is its own sanction, and one with the voice of Duty. When a woman deviates from usage, to comply with some rule which she supposes to run counter to it, she is apt to misapply the rule, from igno- rance of its grounds and of its limits. For rules, though useful mementoes to such as understand their principles, have no light in themselves, and are mostly so framed as to fail us at the very moment of need. Clear enough when all is clear, they grow dim and go out when it is dark. The one which has just been proposed, of following your tongue when you are speaking, is a less sure guide for men than for women. Men's minds have so often crawled forth, more or less like a snail stretching out of its shell, from the region of impulse into that of reflexion, that they may need a secondary movement to resume their natural state, and replace the shell on their heads. With them what is nearest is often furthest off; and what is furthest is nearest. The word which comes uppermost with them will frequently be the book-word, not the word of common speech ; especially if they are in the habit of public speaking, in which there is a strong temptation to make up for emptiness by sound, to give commonplace obser- vations an uncommon look by swelling them out with bloated diction, — to tack a string of conventional phrases to the tail of every proposition, in the hope that this will enable it to fly, — GUESSES AT TRUTH. 215 and to take care that the buckram thoughts, in whatever re- spects they may resemble Falstaff's men, shall at least have plenty of buckram to strut in. Therefore a man, when Avriting, may often find occasion to substitute a plainer word for that which had first occurred to him. But with him too the rule holds good, that the plainest word, by which he can express his meaning, is the best. The beginning of Plato's Republic is said to have been found in his tablets written over and over in a variety of ways : the regard for euphony, which was so strong in the Greeks, led him to try all those varieties of arrangement which the power of inversion in his language allowed of. Yet after all, the words, as they now stand, and the order of their arrangement, are the simplest he could have chosen ; and one can hardly conceive how they could have been other than they are. This is the secret of the matchless transparency of his style, through which we look at the thoughts exprest in it, standing as in the lucid distinctness given by a southern atmosphere ; so that only by a subsequent act of reflexion do we discern the exceeding beauty of the medium. Where- as in most writers the words scarcely let the thoughts peer dimly through, or at best deck them out in gorgeous hues, and draw attention to themselves, veiling what they ought to reveal. The principle I have been urging coincides with that of Cob- bett's great rule : " Never think of mending what you write : let it go : no patching. As your pen moves, bear constantly in mind that it is making strokes which are to remain for ever." The power of habit, he rightly observes, is in such things quite wonderful : and assuredly it is not merely our style that would be improved, if we bore constantly in mind that what we do is to last for ever. Did we but keep this conviction steadily before us, with regard to all our thoughts and feelings and words and pur- poses and deeds, then might we sooner learn to think and feel and speak and resolve and act as becomes the heirs of eternity. One of the main seats of our weakness lies in this very notion, that what we do at the moment cannot matter much; for that we shall be able to alter and mend and patch it just as we like by and by. 216 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Cobbett's own writings are a proof of the excellence of his rule : what they may want in elegance, they more than make up for in strength. His indeed was a case in which it was especially applicable. Springing out of the lower orders, and living in familiar intercourse with them, he knew their language ; he knew the words which have power over the English people : he knew how those words must be wielded to strike home on their understandings and their hearts. His mind had never been tainted with the jargon of men of letters : he had no frippery to throw off ere he could appear in his naked strength : he scorned nourishes and manoovres, and marcht straight with all his forces to the onset. In some measure akin to Cobbett's writings in style, though with differences resulting both from personal and national char- acter, are those of the honest and hearty German patriot, Arndt, which did such good service in kindling and feeding the enthu- siasm during the war with France. He too was a child of the people, a peasant boy who used to feed his father's cows ; and his wings had not been dipt in the schools. So was Luther ; whom one can hardly conceive recalling and correcting a word, any more than one can conceive the sun recalling and correct- ing one of his rays, or the sea one of its waves. He who has a full quiver, does not pick up his arrows. If the first misses, he sends another and another after it. Forgetting what is be- hind, he presses onward. It is only in going through one's ex- ercise, that one retraces a false movement, and begins anew. To do so in battle would be to lose it. There is said indeed to be a manuscript of Luther's version of the first Psalm with a great number of interlineations and corrections. This however was a translation : and only when a man's thoughts issue from his own head and heart, can they come forth ready clad in the fittest words. A translator's aim is more complicated ; and all he can hope is to approximate nearer and nearer to it. For no language can ever be the com- plete counterpart of another : indeed no single word in any lan- guage can be the complete counterpart to a word in another language, so as to have exactly the same shades and varieties GUESSES AT TRUTH. 217 of meaning, and to be invested with the same associations. Hence a conscientious translator is perpetually drawn in oppo- site directions, from the wish to accomplish two incompatible objects, to give an exact representation of his original, and at the same time to make that representation an idiomatic one. Difficult as it often must needs be to express one's own mean- ing to one's wish, it is incomparably more difficult to express another man's, without making him say more or less than he intended. That the practice inculcated above has the highest of all sanctions, is proved by the Preface to the first edition of Shak- speare, where the editors say of him, " His mind and hand went together ; and what he thought, he uttered with that easi- ness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his pa- pers." The same thing is true of the greatest master of style in our days: in the manuscripts of his exquisite Imaginary Conversations very few words have ever been altered : every word was the right one from the first. I have also observed the same fact in Arnold's manuscripts, in which indeed, from the simple, easy flow of his style, one might sooner expect it. But Lieber tells us that Niebuhr also said to him, " Endeavour never to strike out anything of what you have once written down. Punish yourself by allowing once or twice something to pass, though you see you might give it better : it will accus- tom you to be more careful in future ; and you will not only save much time, but also think more correctly and distinctly. I hardly ever strike out or correct my writing, even in my dis- patches to the king. Persons who have never tried to write at once correctly, do not know how easy it is, provided your thoughts are clear and well arranged ; and they ought to be so before you put pen to paper." Thus a style, which appears most elaborate, and in which the thoughts would seem to have been subjected to a long process of condensation, may grow to be written almost spontaneously; as a person may learn to write the stiffest hand with considerable rapidity. Lieber how- ever also cites the similar confession in Gibbon's Memoirs ; which shews that this practice is no preservative from all the 10 218 GUESSES AT TKUTH. vices of affectation. For anything may become nature to man : the rare thing is to find a nature that is truly natural. u. Cesar's maxim, that you are to avoid an unusual word as you would a rock, is often quoted, especially by those who are just purposing to violate it. For this is one of the strange distor- tions of vanity, — which loves to magnify the understanding, at the cost of the will, — that people, when they are doing wrong, are fond of boasting that they know it to be wrong. Cesar himself however was a scrupulous observer of his own rule. A like straightforward plainness of speech characterizes the Eng- lish Cesar of our age, and is found, with an admixture of philo- sophical sweetness, in Xenophon. In truth simplicity is the soldierly style. The most manly of men coincide in this point with the most womanly of women. The latter think of the feelings they are to express ; the former, of the thoughts and purposes and actions ; neither, of the words. Not however that new words are altogether to be outlawed. What would language have been, had this principle been acted on from the first ? It must have been dwarft in the cradle. Did thoughts remain stationary, so might language : but they cannot be progressive without it. The only way in which a conception can become national property, is by being named. Hereby it is incorporated with the body of popular thought. Either a word already in use may have a more determinate meaning assigned to it : or a new word may be formed, according to the analogies of the language, by derivation or composition : or in a language in which the generative power is nearly extinct, a word may be adopted from some forein tongue which has already supplied it with similar terms. Only such words should be intelligible at sight to the readers they are designed for. This is one great objection to the new Greek words which Mr Bentham scatters over his pages, side by side with his amorphous, tumble-to- pieces English ones, like Columbine dancing with Pantaloon. They want a note to explain what he meant them to mean, and are just such lifeless things as might be expected from a man who grinds them out of his lexicon, — such dry chips as may GUESSES AT TRUTH. 219 drop from a writer whose mind is a dead hedge of abstractions ; whose chief talent moreover is that of a hedge, to intersect and partition off the field of knowledge. When words are thus brought in with a commentary at their heels, it is much as if a musician were to stop in the middle of a tune, and tell you what notes he is playing. To the last of the three classes just mentioned belongs the terminology of Science, which is almost wholly Greek. No language was ever so full of life as the Greek in its prime : and, as there have been instances of seeds which have retained their vital power for millennaries, the embers of life still linger about it ; so that two thousand years after, and a thousand miles off, we find it easier to grow Greek words than English. The plas- tic character of the language, affording unlimited facilities for composition, — and in such wise that its words really coalesce, and are not merely tackt together, — fits it for expressing the innumerable combinations, which it is the business of Science to detect. And as Science is altogether a cosmopolite, less con- nected than any other mode of intellectual action with the peculiarities of national character, — wherefore the eighteenth century, which confounded science with knowledge, set up the theory of cosmopolitism, — it is well that the vocabulary of Science should be common to all the nations that come and worship at its shrine. Of all words however the least vivacious are those coined by Science. It is only Poetry, and not Philosophy, that can make a Juliet. It is Poetry, the Imagination in one or other of its forms, that produces what has life in it. Eschylus, Shakspeare, Milton, are wordmakers. So are most humorists, Aristophanes, Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, Charles Lamb, Richter: only many of their words are merely fashioned sportively for a particular oc- casion, after some amusing analogy, without any thought of their becoming a permanent part of the language. The true criterion of the worth of a new word is its having such a familiar look, and bearing its meaning and the features of its kindred so visible in its face, that we hardly know whether it is not an old acquaint- ance. Then more especially is it likely to be genuine, when its 220 GUESSES AT TRUTH. author himself is scarcely conscious of its novelty. At all events it should not seem to be the fruit of study, but to spring spontaneously from the inspiration of the moment. The corruption of style does not lie in a writer's occasionally using an uncommon or a new word. On the contrary a mascu- line writer, who has been led to adopt a plain, simple style, not like women, by an instinctive delicacy of taste, but by a reflex act of judgement, and who has taken pleasure in visiting the sources of his native language, and in tracing its streams, will feel desirous at times to throw his seed also upon the waters : and he is the very person whose studies will best fit him for doing so. Even Cowper, whose letters are the pattern of pure, graceful, idiomatic English, does not hesitate to coin new words now and then. Such are, extra-foraneous, which, though he is so fond of it as to desire that it should be inserted in John- son's Dictionary, and to use it more than once (Vol. iv. p. 76, vi. 153, of Southey's Edition), is for common purposes a cumbrous substitute for out-of-doors, — a subscalarian, "a man that sleeps under the stairs" (vi. 286), — an archdeaconism (iv. 228), — syllablemongers (v. 23), — a joltation (v. 55), — calfiess (v. 61), — secondhanded (v. 87), a word inaccurately formed, as according to analogy it should mean, not at second hand, but having a second hand, — authorly (v. 96), — exspu- tory (v. 102), — returnable, likely to return (v. 102), — trans- latorship (v. 253), — poetship (v. 313), — a midshipmanship ("there's a word for you!" he exclaims, vi. 263), — man-mer- chandise (vi. 127), — Homer-conners (vi. 268), — walkable (vi. 13), — seldomcy (vi. 228). I know not that any of these words is of much value. The last is suggested by an errone- ous analogy. "I hope none of my correspondents (he says) will measure my regard for them by the frequency, or rather seldomcy, of my epistles." A Latin termination is here sub- joined to a Saxon word, which such a termination very rarely fits : and two consonants are brought into juxtaposition, from which in our language they revolt. Some of these words may perhaps have been already in use, at least in speech, if not in writing. It would be both enter- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 221 taining and instructive, were any one to collect the words in English invented by particular authors, and to explain the rea- sons which may either have occasioned or hindered their being incorporated with the body of the language. In some cases no want of the word has been felt : in others the formation has been incorrect, or unsupported by any familiar analogy. Learn- ing of itself indeed will never avail to make words : but in ages when the formative instinct is no longer vivid, judgement and knowledge are requisite to guide it. For the best and ablest writers are apt to err on this score, as we saw just now in the instance of seldomcy. Thus even Landor {Imaginary Convers. ii. 278) recommends the adoption of anidiomatic as an English word ; though our language does not acknowledge the Greek negative prefix, except in words like anarchy, intro- duced in their compound state, so that anidiomatical would exemplify itself; and though unidiomatic would clearly be a preferable form, which few writers would scruple to use, wheth- er authorized by precedent or no. Nor, I trust, will Coleridge's favorite word, esemplastic {Biographia Literaria, i. 157), to express the atoning or unifying power of the Imagination, ever become current; for, like others of his Greek compounds, it violates the analogies of that language. Had such a word existed, it would be compounded of els iv TrXdrreiv, not, as he intended, of els ev TtkaTreiv. On the other hand his word to desynonymize (Biog. Lit. i. 87) is a truly valuable one, as desig- nating a process very common in the history of language, and bringing a new, thought into general circulation. A Latin preposition is indeed prefixt to a Greek theme: but such mixtures are inevitable in a composite language ; and this is sanctioned by the words dephlegmate and dephhgisticate : after the analogy of which I have ventured above (p. 153) to frame the word desophisticating. Few eminent writers, I believe,, have not done more or less toward enriching their native tongue. Thus Rousseau, in one of his letters in defense of his Discourse on the Influence of the Arts and Sciences, vindicates his having hazarded the word investigation, on the ground that he had wisht "rendre un 222 GUESSES AT TEUTH. service a la langue, en essayant d'y introduire un terme doux, harmonieux, dont le sens est deja connu, et qui n'a point de synonyme en francais. C'est, je crois, toutes les conditions qu'on exige pour autoriser cette liberte salutaire." Sometimes too an author's bequests to his countrymen do not stay quietly at home, but travel from nation to nation, and become a perma- nent part of the language of mankind. What a loss would it be to the language of modern Europe, if Plato's word, idea, and Pythagorases, philosophy, with their families, were struck out of them ! It would be like striking out an eye ; and we should hardly know how to grope our way through the realms of thought without them. Again, when we read in Diogenes Laertius (iii. 24) that Plato irp&ros iv cptkoo-ocpla dvTinobas