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3fn ilemoriam 
 
 JOHN LARKIN LINCOLN 
 
 1817 189I 
 
 Requisitus in Academiam Caelestem 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 1894 
 

 Copyright, 1894, 
 By WILLIAM E. LINCOLN. 
 
 All rights reserved, 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A. 
 Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton and Company. 
 
This volume is published as a memorial of my father, but it is 
 not a memoir, for this I did not dare attempt. I have endeavored 
 only to select and edit such of his writings, public and private, as 
 seemed most characteristic and appropriate. The manuscripts 
 were intended solely for his own eye, and were written hastily 
 at night after hard days' work, and with many alterations and 
 interlineations. The proofreading demanded what I do not pos- 
 sess, — a fund of learning, full and accurate, and akin to his own. 
 This has compelled very slow progress for almost two full years, 
 and an amount of hard work and study which I had not imagined, 
 and which found me " not prepared." Many times on many 
 pages have I wished that even for a moment I might turn to him 
 for the clear explanation I well knew he could give of some place 
 that seemed extremely hard to me. In the printing of Latin 
 words, following some of the earlier of his published papers, diph- 
 thongs have been printed with the ligature, and some other old- 
 fashioned methods have been used, which now I could not alter 
 even if I would. The detection and correction of a number of 
 errors in the stereotyped proofs is due to assistance kindly ren- 
 dered by my friend and classmate Professor William Carey 
 Poland, and which I gratefully acknowledge. I wish also to 
 thank the many friends to whom I am indebted for information, 
 and especially to thank Professor George P. Fisher, D. D., for 
 his appreciative and scholarly Memorial Address. 
 
 The number and variety of persons with whom my father was 
 personally or intellectually acquainted may be seen to some extent 
 in the Index of this volume, — names of contemporaries men- 
 tioned by him being given, as far as possible, in full. I have 
 
 ivil5ge55 
 
IV 
 
 often felt in the moments — all too few — which I have been 
 permitted to pass with him in his old age, that during a life spent 
 in teaching the lore of the ancients to the young, he himseK had 
 been learning constantly by mental companionship with his pupils 
 the secret of youth. This characteristic seems to me to be dis- 
 cernible in the masterly likeness of my father which the alumni 
 of Brown presented to the University. It is my hope that in the 
 pages of this Memorial Volume also may be seen not alone his 
 accurate scholarship and wide culture, but his genial nature and 
 devout spirit, and, drawn by his own pen, his portrait of himself. 
 
 Inasmuch as the greater part of my father's life was dedicated 
 to Brown University, I feel that I cannot do otherwise than dedi- 
 cate to the alumni of Brown, who in more than a half century of 
 classes have been his pupils, this memorial of his life. This vol- 
 ume is the most enduring monument within my ability to erect to 
 his memory, and I believe it is also the most useful one to the 
 college which he loved so well. Upon the front of Sayles Me- 
 morial Hall are engraved the simple and fitting words, written by 
 my father, " FiLio pater posvit." I had never suspected the 
 " limae labor " which he had given to this short sentence until 
 after his death, when I found among his papers a half sheet cov- 
 ered with other mottoes and beginnings of mottoes which he had 
 written and erased and emended and rejected. I therefore feel 
 that it will be a quite excusable plagiarism if, in imitation of his 
 words, I inscribe upon this page this sentence, so expressive of my 
 feelings, patri filivs posvit. 
 
 WILLIAM ENSIGN LINCOLN. 
 Pittsburgh, Pa., January 1, 1894. 
 
• FA t^ 
 
 CONTENTS. p^c^Ll 
 
 !• PACK 
 
 Portrait of Professor Lincoln (^tat. 60) .... Frontispiece 
 
 Memorial Address, by Prof. George P. Fisher, LL. D. . . i 
 
 II. 
 
 "Notes of my Life" 22 
 
 Diary of Student Life, 1833-1834 . . . . . . .27 
 
 Diary at Columbian College, 1836-1837 34 
 
 Diary at Newton Theological Institution, 1838-1839 . . 46 
 
 Diary of Student Life in Germany, 1841-1842 ... 61 
 
 Letters from Europe, 1841-1844 67 
 
 Diary and Letters, Europe, 1857 114 
 
 III. 
 
 The Herkomer Portrait (Mtat. 69) Facing page 150 
 
 An Introduction to Goethe's Faust (1868) 151 
 
 Gladstone's Juventus Mundi (1869) 185 
 
 kome and the romans of the time of horace (1870) . . 208 
 
 The Platonic Myths (1872) 232 
 
 The Relation of Plato's Philosophy to Christian Truth (1873) 259 
 
 Plato's Republic (1873) 273 
 
 Roman Travel and Travelers (1874) 296 
 
 The Poem of Lucretius (1875) 315 
 
 The Theory of Lucretius (1875) 337 
 
 The Life and Teachings of Sophocles (1876) .... 356 
 
 Roman Women in the First Century of the Empire (1877) . 378 
 
 Tacitus (1878) 402 
 
 Galileo and the Inquisition (1879) 427 
 
 Dean Stanley on Baptism (1879) ....... 456 
 
 Professor Tyndall's Belfast Address 461 
 
 Froude's C^sar (1880) 464 
 
 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1881) 484 
 
 The Religion of the Romans (1882) 603 
 
 Old Age (1883) 624 
 
 James Clerk Maxwell (1884) 644 
 
 The Historian Leopold von Ranke (1889) 668 
 
 IV. 
 
 Appendix 686 
 
 Index 627 
 
MEMOEIAL ADDKESS ON THE CHARACTER AND 
 SERVICES OF JOHN LARKIN LINCOLN. 
 
 Delivered Tuesday, June 21, 1892, in the First Baptist Meeting- 
 House, Providence, by Professor George P. Fisher, LL. D., of Yale 
 University. 
 
 Once more we have entered this ancient sanctuary, to many of 
 us full of the memories of by-gone days. We have come back to 
 the scenes of our youth; but where are the men to whom we 
 looked up as our teachers and guides, who foUowed our departing 
 steps with their blessing, and honored us with their lasting friend- 
 ship ? Vanished are the faces that once, when we returned to these 
 college anniversaries, looked on us with an almost paternal kind- 
 ness ! Silent are the voices whose familiar tones haunt the memory 
 as echoes from afar ! We rejoice in the growth and prosperity of 
 the institution where our youth was nurtured. Yet there recur to 
 us, unbidden, the poet's words : — 
 
 " It is not now as it hath been of yore : — 
 Turn whereso'er I may, 
 By night or day, 
 The things that I have seen I now can see no more." 
 
 We feel the truth of the saying that even the objects of nature 
 about us 
 
 " Do take a sober coloring from an eye 
 That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality." 
 
 It is true that when we meet our college classmates, we fall under 
 a strange and pleasing illusion. Holmes illustrates in one of his 
 humorous poems how the intervening years disappear. All titles 
 of honor are forgotten, all acquired gravity dispelled. Again we 
 are boys, transported back to the moods of feeling that were ours 
 when we recited and played together, and life had the brightness 
 of a holiday. But even in a gathering of classmates, more som- 
 bre thoughts arise when the roll is called, and they close their 
 ranks to fill up the gaps made by those who have fallen by the 
 way. When we have occasion to look on our fellow graduates in 
 
'ly^Y'i: i //, ' : MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 a body, in their long gradation from the youngest to the oldest, 
 we behold as in a picture the changes wrought in the progress of 
 the years. We see how the stages of human life follow one an- 
 other in their order of succession, — each imprinting its char- 
 acteristic stamp upon form and feature, and equally upon the cast 
 of thought. At one end of the procession are the youngest, with 
 their diplomas in their hands, light-hearted, peering into the fu- 
 ture, eager for the race. At the other end are the oldest, with 
 no surplus vivacity to expend, halting, perhaps, under the burden 
 of years. It is the contrast so vividly pictured in the lines of 
 Schiller : — 
 
 " Youth with thousand-masted vessel 
 Ploughs the sea at morning light ; 
 Age, in shattered skiff escaping, 
 Calmly drifts to port at night." 
 
 I have been led into this vein of remark by the circumstance 
 that Professor Lincoln, the eminent scholar whose merits and 
 whose long service to the University we are met to commemorate, 
 is the last of the company of teachers who constituted the Fac- 
 ulty when the class to which I belong was in college. Only one 
 of them is now living, and many years have passed since he left 
 the institution. The last link that connected myself and my con- 
 temporaries with the corps of instructors here has now been re- 
 moved. When I was honored by the invitation of the Faculty to 
 deliver the address to-day, my first impulse was to decline the 
 request, partly, I confess, from an instinctive desire to avoid a feel- 
 ing of sadness which the associations of the time and place, and 
 the thronging recollections of the past, could not fail to awaken ; 
 but, mainly, for the reason that, as it seemed to me, one of the 
 younger pupils of Professor Lincoln, who had been more conver- 
 sant with him in the later years, might be better qualified to do 
 justice to some aspects of his character and work. But I was 
 moved by a sense of loyalty to the University to comply with the 
 call of the Faculty ; and I was influenced in so doing by a fact 
 which may have had something to do in prompting their choice, — 
 the fact, namely, that I was a pupil of Professor Lincoln at the 
 very beginning of his academic career. This fact must be my 
 apology if personal reminiscences should mingle at the outset m 
 the remarks which I have to make respecting him and his work. 
 
 Professor Lincoln commenced his duties as Professor of Latin 
 in the autumn of 1844, when my class was just entering upon the 
 
ON JOHN LARKIN LINCOLN. 3 
 
 Sophomore year. Let us pause for a moment to glance at the 
 Faculty, as the Faculty was then composed. At the head of the 
 company of teachers was Dr. Wayland, then but forty-eight years 
 of age, although he was thus early referred to in the talk of stu- 
 dents as " the old Doctor." Unaffected in manner, there was yet 
 that in his looks and bearing which bespoke a kingly man. His 
 strong personality cast a spell upon all who approached him. His 
 love of truth, his deep sense of right, and his independence of 
 the bonds of party, were a lifelong inspiration to his pupils. How 
 easily do we recall his portly figure, as he walked to or from his 
 college room, his head bent forward, with a slow gait, as of one 
 absorbed in thought ! Next in age to the President — being 
 about three years younger — was the beloved Caswell, grave 
 and genial, — genial and grave in an equal proportion, — whose 
 benignant spirit was never ruffled by a gust of passion. Then 
 followed Professor Chace, keen in perception, strict in the dis- 
 charge of official duty, never holding a loose rein, equally expert 
 in the analysis of a chemical compound and in decomposing a 
 state of consciousness into its elements of thought ; and Professor 
 Gammell, the polished critic, the sworn foe of vulgarity in char- 
 acter and manners, as well as in style, devoted in his service to 
 all who could be drawn into sympathy with his ideals of culture. 
 With these was associated a much younger man, our faithful 
 teacher of Greek, Professor Boise, the only one of the number 
 who survives. Into this group of men — we can see them now as 
 they sat together on the platform of the old chapel — Professor 
 Lincoln was introduced as a colleague. 
 
 How well he was equipped for the place will appear if we con- 
 sider his course of preparation for it. He was born in Boston on 
 the 28d of February, 1817, and was consequently at that time in 
 his twenty-eighth year. The occupation of his father, Mr. En- 
 sign Lincoln, was that of a printer and publisher. He was a man 
 of more than ordinary intelligence, of perfect uprightness, and of 
 earnest piety. Although a layman and in business, he was li- 
 censed to preach in the Baptist communion, to which he belonged. 
 Professor Lincoln in brief " Notes " of his own life, which I have 
 had the privilege of reading, recalls with tender feeling the death 
 of his mother, which occurred when he was only four years old. 
 This bereavement brought him into closer intimacy with his 
 father, of whom he says : " My dear father was one of the best of 
 men, always cheerful and kind, with a wonderful equableness of 
 
4 MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 temper. I never heard him speak petulantly or angrily ; but his 
 grave and troubled look, if I did wrong, was enough to break me 
 into penitence. . . . How loving he was at home, and how I 
 loved to be in his lap in the evening and hear him talk ! . . . His 
 example and life have gone with me through all years as a con- 
 stant guide and helper in all temptation and trouble. ... I used 
 to go with my father out of town when he went to preach for dif- 
 ferent churches. How many miles I have driven him out of Bos- 
 ton and back again, and how good and thoughtful he was in talk- 
 ing to me ! " Mr. Lincoln was fitted for college mainly at the 
 Boston Latin School, under masters, famous in their day, among 
 whom were Gould, Dillaway, Leverett, and Dixwell. On the list 
 of his schoolfellows are the names of Henry Ward Beecher, Dr. 
 George E. Ellis, Judge Devens, and Dr. Edward Everett Hale. 
 He entered the school when he was between eight and nine years 
 old. The course ran through five years, but he completed it in 
 four. At the anniversary, he had assigned to him the delivery of 
 a Latin poem of his own composition. To quote his own account 
 of it, — "I remember Mr. Leverett said some very encouraging 
 words to me about the poem. I have often recalled the working 
 over that poem in my room at home. And yet it was not work 
 exactly ; it came to me quite beyond all my expectations. I had 
 had good teaching, and had the quantities of words and syllables 
 quite accurate, and words and phrases came to me pretty easily, 
 and I made out thirty-eight lines, I remember, and got through 
 the delivery pretty well." Surely here is an augury of future 
 proficiency in Latin. It would almost seem, from his simple 
 account, that he 
 
 " Lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." 
 
 Being only thirteen years old, he was too young to be sent to col- 
 lege. Then followed a year in the High School, and then a fifth 
 year in the Latin School, at the end of which, as being at the 
 head of the class, the valedictory, and the Franklin medal with 
 it, were awarded to him. His teachers besought his father to 
 send him to Harvard, whither they said all the valedictorians be- 
 fore him had gone. But his father's religious affiliations were 
 with Brown. He was a friend of Dr. Wayland, whose fame was 
 extending, and with it the reputation of the college. So to Brown 
 he was sent, entering the Freshman class in the autumn of 1832. 
 A sore grief to him was the death of his father, at the end of the 
 
ON JOHN LARKIN LINCOLN. 6 
 
 first term. He makes grateful mention of the comfort and sym- 
 pathy that he received from Dr. Caswell on his return from the 
 sad funeral rites. Of his college days he writes : " I was a boy and 
 full of vivacity, and found many companions and friends." In 
 his Junior year, he tells us, he was not so diligent in his studies, 
 but rallied and did good work in his Senior year. He graduated 
 with honors in 1836. He kept, through all his college tempta- 
 tions, the purity of his earlier years, always avoiding the society 
 of the vicious. After graduation Mr. Lincoln spent one year at 
 Washington, where he held the post of tutor in Columbian Col- 
 lege. The work there was in some respects trying, but it initiated 
 him in the practice of teaching. Then came two years — years, 
 he informs us, of " good wholesome study and progress " — in New- 
 ton Theological School. During the second year at Newton, he 
 came into close relations with Dr. Sears, afterwards President of 
 this college, a scholar of remarkable abilities and acquirements, 
 who had made himself familiar with the modern German learn- 
 ing in theology, especially in the department of church history, 
 in which he was a proficient. Of Dr. Sears, Mr. Lincoln says : he 
 " was a very stimulating teacher, and kindled in me a zeal for 
 learning and scholarship and progress in everything." No doubt 
 this year was an epoch in Mr. Lincoln's intellectual development, 
 opening before him new ranges of thought and investigation. 
 From Newton he was called to Brown, in 1839, and here as tutor, 
 during the next two years, in association with his former instruc- 
 tors, his habits of teaching were formed. This period was fol- 
 lowed by his residence abroad for three years, a most important 
 era in his experience, for which the preceding years, including his 
 time of study at Newton, had well prepared him, and to which he 
 always looked back with the utmost thankfulness and pleasure. 
 Two years he spent as a student in Germany, the first at Halle, 
 and the second at Berlin. The third year was mostly devoted to 
 travel, the winter being passed at Rome. 
 
 In Germany, while his attention was given to philology, he did 
 not drop his theological studies. At Halle, there was at that 
 period a cluster of eminent teachers. There Mr. Lincoln was 
 brought into contact, in the lecture-rooms and in social life, with 
 Tholuck, Gesenius, Julius Miiller, Leo, Erdmann, Rodiger, Bern- 
 hardy, — most of them men of world-wide distinction in their sev- 
 eral branches of learning. These men, Mr. Lincoln says, " were 
 great for me, giving me broader, larger views than I had ever 
 
6 MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 had of study and attainments, and showing me what and how to 
 study." The second year was spent in Berlin, where he studied 
 philology with Boeckh and Zumpt, and church history with the 
 illustrious Neander, and where he profited by the presence of 
 Ranke, Schelling, and many other inspiring teachers. His in- 
 structors include names that are identified with the progress of 
 modern learning. In the list of his foreign teachers it was Tho- 
 luck, I think, with whom he was best acquainted. After his year 
 at Halle, where he saw much of this distinguished theologian, he 
 traveled with him in the summer, for two months, in Switzerland 
 and northern Italy. Tholuck was then a foremost leader of the 
 evangelical reaction against the Eationalism of that time. His 
 mind w^as brilliant, remarkably versatile, unceasingly active, stored 
 with vast and various acquisitions. Seldom is a theologian so 
 gifted with imagination and eloquence. His lectures and dis- 
 courses in the pulpit, open as they are in some respects to criticism, 
 were always irradiated with flashes of genius. His conversation 
 was full of spirit. He loved the society of students, and made 
 them his companions. Few men have excelled him in the power 
 of kindling the minds of the young. Ten years later than the 
 date of which I am speaking, I knew him well ; and even then, 
 although prematurely old from excess of labor, his attractive power 
 was very remarkable. Apart from Mr. Lincoln's testimony on 
 the subject, we might be sure that a close intimacy of such a 
 teacher with such a pupil, including months of travel, could not 
 fail to be in the highest degree awakening and instructive. The 
 mention of the teachers of Mr. Lincoln in that land of scholars, 
 and of the particular branches that he studied, conveys no ade- 
 quate idea of the atmosphere that he breathed, — the collective 
 influences of literature and art that left on him an impress never 
 to be effaced. In one of his published essays he refers to the rep- 
 resentation of the play of Antigone that he witnessed at Berlin, 
 on the occasion when, under the auspices of that patron of letters, 
 Frederick William IV., this tragedy, translated into German, was 
 reproduced on the stage, with the aid of " all the resources of his 
 capital in learning and scholarship and musical genius." Looking 
 back to that scene, after a long interval, Mr. Lincoln writes : " It 
 was an imposing spectacle to behold ; there was a wealth of Men- 
 delssohn music to dehght the ear, and yet those sights and sounds 
 have long since faded from the mind." . . . But " even now there 
 seems to be seen that stately figure of Antigone, and her voice 
 
ON JOHN LARKIN LINCOLN. 7 
 
 seems to be heard, pronouncing her faith ' in the unwritten and 
 unchanging laws of God,' and her purpose to abide by that faith 
 even unto death." 
 
 In the autumn of 1843 Mr. Lincoln spent some time at Geneva, 
 engaged in the study of French. Then he repaired to Rome, 
 where he remained for the winter and a part of the ensuing spring, 
 studying the classical authors in the midst of the scenes and relics 
 that breathe new life upon their pages. He attended weekly the 
 meeting of the Archaeological Society on the Capitoline HiU, 
 meeting there a gathering of students that included Grote, Preller, 
 William M. Hunt, our distinguished historian Mr. Parkman, and 
 many other kindred spirits. Leaving Rome, he tarried for brief 
 intervals in Paris and London, reaching home in the autumn, in 
 time to commence his work as assistant professor of Latin, — his 
 promotion to the full professorship taking place at the end of one 
 year's service. 
 
 Three years he had spent under circumstances in the highest 
 degree propitious for his intellectual development, gathering up 
 all the while stores of knowledge. The things of the spirit are 
 more precious than material treasures. I count it no extrava- 
 gance to say of this young American scholar that, like the Roman 
 conquerors of old, with whose achievements he was so familiar, he 
 had come back with the spoils of kingdoms, and ascended the hill 
 sacred to learning, to bring them to the door of his Ahna Mater. 
 
 The class of which I was a member had been instructed in 
 Latin, in the Freshman year, by a refined gentleman and very 
 competent teacher, Mr. Henry S. Frieze, who died in 1889, after 
 a long and honorable service in the University of Michigan. Dur- 
 ing the year the news had reached us that a new professor in this 
 department was to be installed in office in the next autumn. No 
 small curiosity existed as to what manner of man he would prove 
 to be. Our first impressions were favorable. The professor, 
 when he appeared in the class-room, had the air and manner of 
 one who was not a stranger to the world of men beyond the col- 
 lege walls. There was missing a certain constraint that college 
 officers in those days naturally wore in contact with their pupils. 
 For the intercourse between professor and pupil was less frank 
 and more conventional than at present. There was much more 
 surveillance over the students. The exercise of authority was 
 more visible and continuous. Mr. Lincoln's manner was not 
 wanting in self-respect, but was unconstrained. Then he early 
 
8 MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 showed, on a certain occasion, an openness and a disposition to 
 put faith in the class. We represented to him, and with truth, 
 that he was giving out too long lessons. He, at once, with the 
 utmost grace and good-nature, said that he would shorten them, 
 and kept his word. It was evident that he did not think of a col- 
 lege as a prison where the greatest possible amount of work was 
 to be exacted from reluctant inmates, and where any remonstrance 
 deserved a rebuff. Then there was an occasional flash of humor 
 to enliven the hour. For example, when we were on the opening 
 passage of the " Ars Poetica," where Horace protests against in- 
 congruous descriptions and imagery, illustrating his point by like 
 absurdities in painting, and apostrophizes an artist who plumed 
 himself on his skill in depicting a cypress, and hence brought that 
 tree into the picture of a shipwrecked sailor striking for the land, 
 — our teacher looked up, and remarked with a smile : " He was 
 great on cypresses ! " But what struck us from the first, and im- 
 pressed us always, was the fact that, although an accurate linguist, 
 and never careless of the niceties of the language, he was vastly 
 more. He was the interpreter of his author in a far deeper way. 
 The words were dealt with as the windows through which to dis- 
 cern his thoughts and sentiments, and to gain access to his inmost 
 life and spirit. Moreover, under this inspiring guide, we were 
 brought into a living relation to the conditions under which the 
 author wrote, and to the whole life of antiquity. Here, to use 
 one of Carlyle's phrases, was no mere gerund-grinder. There was 
 genuine historical feeling and literary taste and insight. To some 
 at least, it was a discovery that Roman men and women had any 
 other occupation than to furnish the raw material of Latin gram- 
 mars and dictionaries. Classical instruction in this country has 
 passed through a number of phases. There was a time when there 
 was a certain relish for the Latin authors, especially, — for the 
 Greek authors were little read. It was common to garnish public 
 addresses by quotations — a little hackneyed, it might be — from 
 Virgil and Horace and the orations of Cicero. But in the instruc- 
 tion given in school and college, the grammatical groundwork 
 was for the most part sadly defective. At length there sprung up 
 a reform in this particular, owing in a considerable measure to 
 the influence of German scholarship. One result of this reaction 
 against the loose methods that had prevailed was an absorbing 
 devotion to grammar and lexicon. Classical instruction was re- 
 solved into a linguistic drill. The slovenly teaching in nearly all 
 
ON JOHN LARKIN LINCOLN. 9 
 
 the preparatory schools might have been alleged as an apology for 
 this grammatical fanaticism. College professors have been handi- 
 capped by being compelled to travel over the ground which had 
 been negligently traversed before. In truth, a minor part of the 
 blame is to be laid at the door of the colleges. The great defects 
 of education in this country have been in the first sixteen or sev- 
 enteen years of the boy's training. Nevertheless, I believe that 
 the opposition to classical studies is due about as much to the 
 spiritless way in which they have been taught as to the urgent 
 demands made by the modern languages and the new sciences. 
 As if the poets, orators, and philosophers of antiquity simply 
 wrote exercises in parsing ! How could a scholar care anything 
 for the contents of a literature when he was forced to spend all 
 his time in breaking through the shell ? It is a case where " the 
 letter killeth." The distinction of Professor Lincoln lies in the 
 enthusiasm which he himself felt, and, as far as possible, imparted, 
 for the authors whom he interpreted, and his living interest in 
 the many-sided intellectual and social life of which the ancient 
 literature is the expression. In a word, Mr. Lincoln was, in the 
 best sense of the word, a man of letters. Even when he jour- 
 neyed, he was apt to take a Greek or Latin writer with him, for 
 his familiarity with Greek as well as Latin authors was constantly 
 growing. 
 
 My impressions of Professor Lincoln at the beginning of his 
 work in college are confirmed in letters written to me by several 
 of my college friends and contemporaries, graduates in later 
 classes. President Angell writes : " He was brimful of scholarly 
 enthusiasm. He was at work on his edition of Livy, and we who 
 were at once set to reading that author soon caught something of 
 the zest of the editor. His ardent interest in whatever author the 
 class was reading was contagious. There was something wonder- 
 fully vital and inspiriting in his teaching. ... I remember that 
 I used to think that the Latin poet (Horace) could have had no 
 more genial or appreciative companion in his Sabine house. Pro- 
 fessor Lincoln had a nice literary sense, which especially fitted 
 him to guide us young pupils in the study of the odes of Horace. 
 I am sure some of us first awoke to the real perception of poetic 
 beauty." In the same vein. Dr. Murray, the Dean of the Faculty 
 at Princeton, writes : " He loved the authors he taught, and he 
 sought earnestly and successfully to be an interpreter of them to 
 us. . . . The brilliant passages from Livy, the graceful odes from 
 
10 MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 Horace, the weighty sentences of Tacitus, were sure to elicit from 
 him striking comment. I do not think any of his classes could 
 ever forget with what interest he would dwell on the closing pas- 
 sages of the Agricola." The Hon. Edward L. Pierce, after re- 
 marks equivalent to the foregoing, adds : " His voice was most 
 attractive. In our Freshman year (1846-47) he read to the class 
 Macaulay's Lays. His reading inspired me, and I then made my 
 first acquaintance with Macaulay. . . . He [Professor Lincoln] 
 fully enjoyed his work, altogether content with it, — never indif- 
 ferent or perfunctory." 
 
 As Professor Lincoln was, at the beginning, in the presence of 
 his classes, so he continued to be to the end, but with increasing 
 attractiveness and power. In his earlier years, it is said — for I 
 never observed it — he was sometimes caustic in dealing with the 
 dull and careless. But college teachers, as they grow older, espe- 
 cially if they come to have children of their own, are wont to grow 
 more lenient, and gentle in their rebukes. One of his later pupils 
 and a colleague remarks respecting him : " He became more 
 patient and enduring as the years went on, and though he could 
 let no error pass uncorrected, he was content with rebuking care- 
 lessness with some dry, humorous criticism, the sting of which did 
 not rankle in the mind." Professor Poland proceeds to speak of 
 his assiduity in the correction of all the exercises in Latin compo- 
 sition, which were often piled upon his table, and his quickness to 
 recognize and appreciate whatever merit he discerned in them, or 
 in any of the work done by his pupils. When there was a moral 
 lesson to be drawn from the author, he never failed to point it 
 out. " To him," says Professor Poland, " the classics were the 
 ' Humanities,' and he taught them in that spirit, and used them 
 as means to develop in his students a noble and refined ideal of 
 manhood." 
 
 I wish now to speak of Mr. Lincoln as a man of letters, 
 independently of his relation as an academic teacher. Fortunately 
 he has left behind him ample proofs of his capacity as a writer. 
 His editions of Livy, Horace, and Ovid, from a linguistic point of 
 view, were, as I am assured, fully abreast, and even in advance 
 of, the standard of scholarship at the time when they were issued. 
 But their characteristic merit is on the aesthetic side. His literary 
 perception and his felicity of style are conspicuous in the pre- 
 liminary lives of Horace and Ovid, and in the quality of the 
 notes appended. But the power of Mr. Lincoln in the department 
 
ON JOHN LARKIN LINCOLN. 11 
 
 of authorship is seen especially in a number of essays which 
 he contributed to periodicals. The subjects on which he wrote 
 indicate the bent of his thought and the direction of his studies. 
 Several of these essays were first read at meetings of the Friday 
 Club, a society of cultivated gentlemen which, for many years, 
 met frequently for literary converse and social enjoyment. I will 
 not stop to dwell on an early article of Mr. Lincoln in the 
 " Bibliotheca Sacra," which is purely of an historical character. It 
 presents an elaborate picture of ancient Roman life. The Papers 
 which I should single out as of cardinal value are the Review of 
 Mr. Gladstone's Juventus Mundi, and the essays on the relation of 
 Plato's Philosophy to Christian Truth, on the Life and Teach- 
 ings of Sophocles, and on Goethe's Faust. The four themes — 
 Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Goethe — are adapted to serve as a test 
 of his ability to appreciate the highest productions of human 
 genius and to unfold the secret of their power. I am confident 
 that these essays must elicit, both as to matter and form, the 
 cordial admiration of all discerning critics. They are not simply 
 rich in thought and beautiful in diction. They are pervaded by 
 a spontaneous enthusiasm. There runs through them a flow of 
 eloquence, never transcending the bounds of good taste, which 
 bears the reader along, as on the crest of a wave, from beginning 
 to end. Let me briefly touch upon certain literary characteristics 
 of the author as they are disclosed in these essays. 
 
 One is struck with his broad conception of the end and aim of 
 classical studies. They are prized, not merely because they bring 
 us face to face with the ancient peoples providentially chosen to 
 be the founders of European civilization. Their use is made to 
 extend much farther. It is evident, to quote Mr. Lincoln's own 
 language, in " those tastes for all that is beautiful and ennobling 
 in ancient letters, which grew up insensibly in the season of 
 youth, under the propitious influences of place and books, and 
 teachers and companions ; the lingering witchery of eloquence and 
 song, which first caught the ear and led captive the soul; the 
 enthusiastic admiration and love for the great writers of antiquity, 
 which with so many scholars was first awakened in that spring- 
 time of intellectual life, and cherished in its subsequent periods, 
 the grace of manhood and the solace of age." But this is not all. 
 Far from it. Classical studies, it is affirmed, may do far more 
 than quicken the mind and discipline the taste. Speaking of 
 " the comparative method " that is winning so large results in 
 
12 MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 every branch of study, our author predicts even grander discoveries 
 to be achieved by it. " As we think of its onward career," he 
 says, " we seem to see its studious followers, in brilliant succession, 
 even as the runners in the ancient torch-race, handing along the 
 lights of science by the successive stages of their course of 
 research, the eyes and energies of all bent upon the ultimate goal, 
 — the knowledge of one united race, of the vast and varied 
 interests of one common humanity. It is indeed the unusual 
 human interest inspired by this method of study that makes at 
 once its worth and its charm, and gives it a hold upon all 
 thoughtful minds, like the spell of a fascination." Under this 
 head, he claims for philological studies, in which the method was 
 first exemplified, that they "are the true Humaniora^ truly hu- 
 mane and humanizing studies." In another place he distinctly 
 sets forth what he considers " the ultimate end " of classical 
 studies. " Not alone," he says, " to form a basis for mental 
 discipline and culture, by furnishing models of consummate excel- 
 lence in thought and expression, are these studies designed. The 
 true and ultimate end is a moral and religious one, — the knowledge, 
 gained by a deeper and maturer study of classical antiquity, of 
 the place and function of all ancient philosophy, letters, art, life, 
 in the providential order of the world in preparing the way for 
 the entrance of Christianity into human life and history." Holding 
 this comprehensive view, he felt earnestly that culture and religion 
 must be united in the objects of study and investigation. " We 
 are craving," he says, " in these modern Christian days the fusion 
 and union of religion and culture ; and how we miss it often in 
 the best teaching of the pen and the voice, culture lacking the 
 inspiration of religion, and religion failing to take up and master 
 the resources of culture." It was natural that he should direct 
 his attention with a fervent interest to comparative religion, and 
 to the relation of the other religions of mankind to Christianity. 
 While insisting firmly that Christianity is the supreme, absolute 
 religion, he is a champion of broad and liberal views concerning 
 the origin of religion, and as to the defective systems that have 
 sprung up beyond the pale of the Christian Kevelation. In the 
 review of Gladstone, Mr. Lincoln, carrying his agreement with 
 him on what is called " the Homeric question " farther than most 
 scholars at present would sanction, dissents from his author's 
 opinion that the Olympian religion, and the other Gentile religions 
 with it, are the remains of a primitive divine revelation. He 
 
ON JOHN LARKIN LINCOLN. 13 
 
 advocates what he pronounces "a more excellent way" of ac- 
 counting for the phenomena. He finds the solution, not in a 
 supposed primitive revelation or tradition, but in "a primitive 
 faith," — a faith implanted in the very constitution of the human 
 soul, and so not only anterior to all religious instruction but 
 essential to the reception of it, whether it come from a natural 
 or a supernatural source. Elsewhere, as we might expect, he 
 repudiates the old, crude way of thinking, which consigned the 
 Greek and Roman religions, without discrimination, to the realm 
 of superstition and falsehood. " We might as well," he exclaims, 
 "go back to the notion that Greek and Latin were somewhere 
 developed out of Hebrew." Cherishing these catholic ideas, it is 
 no wonder that, with so many kindred souls, he is attracted to 
 Plato, the philosopher whom he designates as one who stands, on 
 the broad page of history, — even as he is depicted in Raphael's 
 picture of the School of Athens, — with uplifted hand, " pointing, 
 not Grecian sages alone, but all thoughtful minds, above the 
 world of matter and sense, to a world of spirit, to a world of 
 ideas as divine and eternal things, and the true home of the soul 
 as a spiritual being." Nowhere are the affinities of Platonism 
 with the Christian faith, together with the regulative supreme 
 place that belongs to the religion of Christ, set forth in a more 
 interesting style than in this Essay of Professor Lincoln, the ripe 
 fruit of a generously cultivated, sympathetic, and religious mind. 
 
 The articles on Sophocles and the Greek drama and on Faust, 
 taken together, are fine illustrations of Mr. Lincoln's literary 
 ability and of the variety of his accomplishments. The one takes 
 us back into the atmosphere of Athenian life ; the other leads us 
 into the midst of the intellectual ferment of the present day. 
 In dealing with Faust, the masterpiece of modern tragedy, he 
 presents us with a lucid and glowing exposition of the argument 
 of the play, and with a penetrating inquiry into its motive and 
 underlying ideas. A sentence or two upon the opening " Prologue 
 in Heaven" will indicate the elevated and spirited tone of the 
 entire essay. " We are lifted," says the author, " in imagination 
 to the courts of heaven, to the very presence-chamber of the Lord. 
 In those heavenly hosts that throng around in shining ranks, and 
 in Mephistopheles, who comes also to present himself before the 
 Lord, we seem to touch at their very springs, in the invisible 
 world, the powers of good and evil, which are to invest with their 
 mysterious conflict of agency the life of a human being on earth. 
 
14 MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 The voices of archangels utter forth in adoring, jubilant song the 
 high praises of God ; the sun rounding his appointed course, and 
 ringing out his rival accord in the music of the spheres ; the pomp 
 of the swift-revolving earth, its brightness of day alternating with 
 awful night; the foaming ocean heaving up its broad floods, — 
 these, and all His sublime works, past comprehending, are glorious 
 as in time's first day." 
 
 Professor Lincoln read, at different times, before the Rhode 
 Island Historical Society, papers on Tacitus, Marcus Aurelius, 
 and the historian Ranke. Among his papers read to the Friday 
 Club were essays on Rome and the Romans in the time of Hor- 
 ace, Travel and Travelers among the Ancient Romans, Lucretius, 
 Galileo and the Inquisition, Fronde's Life of Csesar, the Roman 
 Religion and its Relations to Philosophy, Old Age, as described 
 in Cicero's treatise, Plato's Republic. These titles illustrate the 
 nature of the topics to which his mind naturally turned. 
 
 A man like Mr. Lincoln would not be likely to take a narrow 
 view of the scope of college education. In these latter days there 
 have been those who have been disposed to act upon the theory, 
 even if they have not openly espoused it, that the design of a pub- 
 lic institution of this nature is simply to furnish to applicants the 
 different sorts of knowledge at a stipulated price. The responsi- 
 bility of the college teacher, it is implied, ends at this point. A 
 somewhat larger view is taken when it is admitted that to stimu- 
 late the intellect, to spur the mind to reflect and to undertake 
 independent researches, is embraced in the function of an aca- 
 demic professor. Yery different is the old conception, still cher- 
 ished in this place, that in the critical period of youth, when the 
 nature is plastic, the forming of character should be included as 
 a distinct object in college education. " The attainment of know- 
 ledge," says Daniel Webster, " does not comprise all that is con- 
 tained in the larger term of education. The feelings are to be 
 disciplined, the passions are to be restrained, true and worthy 
 motives are to be inspired ; a profound religious feeling to be 
 instilled, and pure morality to be inculcated, under all circum- 
 stances." Long ago Plato wrote in the same strain. Besides the 
 education that fits one for a particular occupation, there is that 
 education, he says, " which makes a man eagerly pursue the idea] 
 perfection of citizenship, and teaches him how rightly to rule and 
 how to obey. This is the only training which, upon our view, 
 would be characterized as education ; that other sort of training. 
 
ON JOHN LARKIN LINCOLN. 15 
 
 which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or 
 mere cleverness apart from intelligence and justice, is mean 
 and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all." 
 No one who knew Mr. Lincoln was left in doubt as to his convic- 
 tions on this subject. There is another truth relative to the method 
 of education which, owing to the growth of colleges and the 
 multiplying of the number of students, is in danger of being dis- 
 regarded. The ancient teachers, Socrates and the other masters 
 of Greek philosophy, set a great value upon the personal con- 
 verse of the teacher with the disciple, and upon the educating 
 influence dependent on this personal tie. The Great Teacher 
 of mankind exemplified this principle. Whatever advantages 
 may arise, a serious loss is incurred from bringing together a great 
 concourse of pupils without a proportionate increase in the number 
 of teachers. The students are known as a body, but not as indi- 
 viduals. The inestimable benefit of a direct interchange of 
 thought and feeling with the instructor is lost. I am sure that 
 the graduates of Brown with whom I was acquainted in my col- 
 lege days appreciate this benefit to the fullest extent. The 
 classes taught by Professor Lincoln then, and in later times, will 
 gratefully testify that he was not unmindful of the opportunities 
 for doing good through the channel referred to. His personal 
 influence did not limit itself to intellectual guidance in friendly 
 conversation. The student who stood in need of religious coun- 
 sel, especially after the college was deprived of the pastoral coun- 
 sels of Dr. Wayland and Dr. Caswell, felt free to resort to him. 
 For a considerable time, the annual receptions of the College 
 Christian Association were held at his house. 
 
 During Professor Lincoln's long term of service as professor, 
 extending over a period of forty-seven years, he visited Europe 
 three times ; first in 1857, for the sake of his health, when he 
 was absent for six months, again in the summer of 1878, and 
 finally ten years later, when he was absent for a year. From 
 1859 to 1867 he was released from a portion of his work on 
 account of the insufiiciency of the stipend paid him by the col- 
 lege ; and during this interval superintended, with gratifying 
 success, a school of young women in Providence. The ladies 
 who were taught by him are warm in their appreciation of the 
 manner in which he incited them to study from the love of know- 
 ledge, and of his readiness to solve all difliculties clearly, while 
 he showed them also how to solve them for themselves. While he 
 
16 MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 carried forward the school, he still instructed the Senior class in 
 college, and furnished a substitute for the other classes. 
 
 This chronological statement, and what has been said before 
 of his work as an instructor, are quite inadequate as a record of 
 the extent of his labors in behalf of the college. For thirty-six 
 years he was a member of the Library Committee, and for twen- 
 ty-six years wrote its annual reports. He edited the annual cata- 
 logues, first in conjunction with Dr. Wayland, and afterwards 
 alone for about thirty years (1855-1884) ; and in connection with 
 Mr. Guild he prepared the Alumni Catalogues, with one exception, 
 from 1846 to 1886. He loved the college, and because he loved 
 it he never ceased to plan for its advancement. When tempted 
 by enticing offers to go elsewhere, he refused them. Our older 
 colleges, let me add, have been built up by means of a like spirit 
 of devotion and self-sacrifice on the part of their professors. They 
 have not been willing to sink to the rank of mere hirelings, ready 
 to obey the call of the highest bidder. They have considered their 
 calling to involve something more than to meet their classes with 
 due punctuality, and to draw their salaries with a punctuality 
 even more strict. They have given themselves to the institution 
 which they have served. They have engaged heart and soul in 
 unceasing endeavors to promote its honor and welfare. Whatever 
 tended to strengthen it, they have rejoiced in, as if it were a- per- 
 sonal gain ; every misfortune that befell it, they have deplored, as 
 if it were a personal loss. If, in the changes of the time, a new 
 order of things is to arise, let us at any rate do honor to the men 
 who have been examples of so noble, unselfish a spirit. 
 
 It would be strange if, possessing the admirable qualities to 
 which I have been led to refer. Professor Lincoln had not com- 
 bined with them a singular charm in the intercourse of friendship 
 and social life, — a charm that was never lost. In reference to 
 this winning side of his character, I shall content myself with cit- 
 ing the words of President Angell, who in this relation knew him 
 so well : " Only a short time before his decease, he sent for me 
 to come to his room, and received me with his old cheerfulness and 
 brightness, though he was very weak. That youthful and com- 
 panionable spirit which never deserted him was still there. How 
 all his life he cheered and irradiated every company into which 
 he came ! What a host, what a guest he was ! How welcome he 
 was at every dinner table ! No one in these last years who wit- 
 nessed his exuberant flow of spirits and looked upon that face 
 
ON JOHN LARKIN LINCOLN. 17 
 
 could have guessed that he was reaching the term allotted by the 
 Psalmist to man." 
 
 I may not omit a reference to Professor Lincoln's interest in 
 the cause of religion, in connection with the communion to which 
 he belonged, and to his exertions in this cause. For twenty-five 
 years, beginning in 1855, he performed the duties of superintend- 
 ent of the Sunday-school in the First Baptist Church in this city. 
 For many years he was president of the ecclesiastical society 
 worshiping in the First Church. From 1869 to his death he held 
 the office of deacon. He attended with great regularity the meet- 
 ings of the church, and one who knew him well in this relation 
 informs me that " if anything special was to be done, — if, for 
 example, money was to be raised, — Professor Lincoln was the 
 man to do it." His religious activity was not confined within 
 the borders of the city of his residence. He acted as president, 
 for a number of years, of the Rhode Island Sunday-school Union, 
 and delivered an address to that body. Without aspiring to 
 prominence, his willingness and his capacity made him a leader 
 in Christian work of this nature. 
 
 During his long connection with the university. Professor Lin- 
 coln enjoyed the respect and esteem of his colleagues in the Fac- 
 ulty. He was for many years the senior professor. Whenever a 
 special committee was appointed to consider a matter of impor- 
 tance, he was pretty sure to be a member of it. There were times 
 when his influence in the management of affairs, although never 
 obtrusive, was of necessity predominant. At other times, when a 
 degree of self-assertion might have been deemed excusable, he 
 averted discord by contenting himself with the quiet expression of 
 his opinions and the quiet performance of his duties. A factious 
 temper was foreign to his nature. Thoroughly familiar with the 
 traditions and precedents of the institution, he was frequently 
 able to speak the decisive word on controverted questions of pol- 
 icy. I am informed that, although he uniformly leaned to the 
 conservative side, he was always ready to listen and to yield to 
 good reasons. In his later years there was a perceptible increase 
 of his appreciation of the physical sciences as a means of intellec- 
 tual development. I am assured, on the best authority, that in the 
 deliberations of the Faculty " he never became excited nor lost 
 his temper in argument, but was always considerate and courteous, 
 however strongly he urged his views." One who has had much 
 experience in Faculty meetings can easily imagine how those 
 
18 MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 assemblies miglit be brightened by the presence of one whose 
 conversational gifts, in which a genial humor played so prominent 
 a part, never failed to give pleasure. 
 
 Professor Lincoln was in sympathy with the undergraduate life 
 of the university. No man is really fit to deal with college boys 
 who has not something of the boy left in him. Emerson, referring 
 to advantages and titles to respect that belong to men who are no 
 longer young, quotes an observation of Red Cloud, that " sixty 
 has in it forty and twenty." Happy are those in whom these 
 components that go to make up the full siun have not lost their 
 vitality ! I believe it is Coleridge who defines genius as a union 
 of the feelings of childhood with the powers of manhood. A very 
 inadequate account of genius ; but surely he is to be pitied in 
 whom the feelings of childhood and youth are smothered by the 
 weight of advancing years. Professor Lincoln, had he lived in 
 old times, when students were governed overmuch and trusted too 
 little, would never have become one of that class of obtuse or 
 morose college officers who confound exuberant spirits with moral 
 depravity. The modern zeal for athletic sports did not spring up 
 until the later period of his life. He was far from looking on 
 this new development with antipathy or lukewarmness. He be- 
 lieved in the wholesome influence of these out-of-door contests. 
 He took pleasure in watching the ball-games, sharing in the gav/- 
 dium certaminis, and rejoicing when victory perched on the col- 
 lege banner. In his honor, the field where the games are played 
 received the name of Lincoln Field. His interest in undergraduate 
 life was manifested in other ways. For example, the performances 
 of the musical societies had in him a delighted listener. He was 
 not one whom prolonged study could metamorphose into a book- 
 worm. He was not one whom the hearing of recitations shrivels 
 to the dimensions of a mere pedagogue. His spirit grew, not less, 
 but more buoyant with the lapse of time. He preserved the ardor 
 of youth to the end of his days. 
 
 It is not strange that as he grew old tokens of honor and love 
 from students and graduates were poured in upon him. On re- 
 peated occasions his appearance at annual gatherings of the alumni 
 was the signal for a well-nigh unexampled outburst of enthusiasm. 
 In connection with the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation, a 
 full-length portrait of their teacher, by an artist of extraordinary 
 merit, was given by the graduates to the college. In honor of 
 him, for the benefit of the university, a fund of 1100,000 was pre- 
 
ON JOHN LARKIN LINCOLN. 19 
 
 sented to the institution by the alumni, — an almost unique proof 
 of esteem to be conferred during the lifetime of a person thus dis- 
 tinguished. 
 
 I have no need to dwell on the religious character of Professor 
 Lincoln. He held fast to the essential doctrines of the Christian 
 system which have been the faith of the Church in all ages ; but 
 he was no polemic. He was not one of those in whom religion 
 assumes the appearance of an excrescence upon character. With 
 him religion was a pervading sentiment, leavening the spirit and 
 manifesting itself in a daily course of duty and self-sacrifice. He 
 spoke from the heart in the sentences that close the essay on 
 Faust : " The cry of the soul for light has nowhere found a clearer 
 utterance in modern literature than in the Faust of Goethe. . . . 
 But only from the experiences of those who have learned in the 
 school of Christ, and have been enlightened and renewed by divine 
 grace, do we reach, in its positive form, the great truth that man 
 was made for God, and only in Him can find fullness of blessing 
 and peace. How does this truth shine out in the writings of Au- 
 gustine, who, after having traversed the whole world, and consulted 
 all its oracles, and found them dumb to his anxious question, 
 ' Who will show us any good,' heard at last a voice as from heaven, 
 speaking out of ' the lively oracles ' to his stricken and contrite 
 spirit, ' Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and 
 wantonness ; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ,' and in that 
 voice found entire response to the cravings of his soul, and by its 
 guidance reached the crowning experience of perfect and enduring 
 peace, in the knowledge of God as revealed in Christ and by 
 Christ, and in his love and service." Familiar with the ancient 
 authors, Mr. Lincoln loved to recall passages in them that illus- 
 trate or corroborate Christian truth. I may be pardoned for 
 referring to a letter which he kindly wrote to me, occasioned by 
 something I had published on the subject of faith and revelation. 
 The letter is under the date of March 22, 1890 ; " the Lord's 
 day," he says, " on which my ill health keeps me in doors." He 
 speaks — I quote his language — of " the difiiculty which Chris- 
 tian people have sometimes in clinging to a believing trust in 
 God's love, and in the Saviour's love as revealed in the gospel. It 
 is so true that one's sense of unworthiness often hides in dimness 
 or even in darkness the precious truth of the divine mercy and 
 love in Christ." Then he alludes to the need of increasing one's 
 faith by the habitual contemplation of Christ's life and character. 
 
20 MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 and by prayer. I had made use of the maxim, " It is hard to 
 forgive those whom we have injured." This brings to his mind 
 at once a series of parallel sayings from Latin writers ; one from 
 the Agricola of Tacitus, one from the Annals by the same author, 
 with an analogous statement from Seneca's treatise on anger ; to 
 which he adds a reference to Lucretius, where a superficial mod- 
 ern notion as to the origin of the belief in a world of spirits is 
 anticipated. In this way did the unsought recollections of the 
 scholar mingle with devout reflections. 
 
 Our assembling to-day testifies to the loss which this academic 
 community has suffered in the death of Professor Lincoln. It is 
 not for me to enter within the circle of domestic grief. I speak 
 now of the public loss that ensues when such a man grows old and 
 departs from the earth. How much enters into the making of 
 such a man ! Propitious circumstances connected with birth and 
 ancestry ; streams of influence from so many different sources, in 
 their combined effect ; care expended by relatives and teachers ; 
 years spent in assiduous efforts to prepare for usefulness ; inter- 
 course with many men in different lands ; the reflex action of long 
 communion with books ; accumulated results of observation and 
 experience, of culture, of inward conflict and self -discipline — how 
 much is required to make such a man what he is ! Thoughts like 
 these help us to estimate aright the loss that is suffered when his 
 activity among men comes to an end. 
 
 It is well, however, at the same time, to bear in mind how much 
 goes forth from such a man during the period allotted to him by 
 divine Providence. Who shall measure the total effect of his 
 presence and example, of the instruction that he has imparted, of 
 the impulses that he has communicated, to successive generations 
 of young men at times when mind was growing and character was 
 forming ? The good accomplished by a Christian scholar in the 
 course of a long career is to a large extent intangible. From its 
 amount, as well as from its nature, it passes the limit of possible 
 calculation. 
 
 Our departed friend takes his place on the roll of the honored 
 sons and servants of this university who have finished their work. 
 The memory of them is the priceless heritage of the college. The 
 great money-makers of the land may found their universities. 
 They may be doing well ; even though it were sometimes wiser to 
 build on good foundations laid of old by the fathers. But there 
 is one thing their millions cannot buy. Age it is impossible to 
 
ON JOHN LARKIN LINCOLN. 21 
 
 purchase. The store of recollections that gather about an ancient 
 seat of learning, money avails not to procure. Brown University 
 antedates the national government under which we live, and the 
 war of revolution that paved the way for it. The mention of the 
 name of the university calls to mind a long array of noble men 
 who have gone forth from her walls to win distinction for them- 
 selves and to confer blessings on the land and on the world. And 
 to-day, while we miss from the ranks of her teachers a leader 
 revered and beloved, we do it in the consciousness that one more 
 jewel has been set in her crown. 
 
NOTES OF MY LIFE. 
 
 Written by Professor Lincoln, Friday Evening, May 28, 1886, 8 to 
 11, IN A Feeling of Presentiment. 
 
 I WAS born February 23, 1817, in Boston, No. 9 Myrtle Street. 
 Of this house my earliest remembrance is of the death of my 
 mother, when I was four years old. In that back parlor they took 
 me to her bedside, many people standing around, and I remember 
 that pale, heavenly face (as if I saw her now) as I looked at her, 
 and heard her feeble voice amid the hush of the whole room of 
 people. Ah, if I had only had the nurture of that saintly woman 
 during my boyhood and youth ! 
 
 I went to school to Mrs. Jacobs, on Myrtle Street, — a worthy 
 woman and kind, good teacher. I remember the room, her table, 
 and the little desks around. She was George Sumner's aunt, and 
 George was a schoolmate with me. But I used to go home every 
 afternoon with a sick-headache, and they gave me what they called 
 picra ; it was ttlkp6l indeed. My father had my aunt Becky, as we 
 called her, to keep house, whom I remember with affection ; and 
 my aunt Betsey (afterwards Mrs. Childs) I remember, too, who 
 used to be often at our house, and who was very good to me. My 
 dear father was one of the best of men, always cheerful and kind, 
 with a wonderful equableness of temper. I never heard him speak 
 petulantly or angrily ; but his grave and troubled look, if I did 
 wrong, was enough to break me into penitence. He was for all 
 my childhood and youth the model of a Christian man, and to my 
 maturest thought he is so now in memory. Ah, how loving he 
 was at home, and how I loved to be in his lap in the evening, and 
 hear him talk ! Ah, it was a treasure of good to us all to have 
 such a father. Thank God, above all else, for him. His example 
 and life have gone with me through all years, as a constant guide 
 and helper in all temptation and trouble. We were, on the whole, 
 a happy family, and our one sister Sophia was the pride and love 
 of us all ; and when she became a Christian girl, what a Christian 
 she was, though I always thought her faultless before. My bro- 
 thers I loved very much, though we younger ones had our little 
 
NOTES OF MY LIFE. 23 
 
 quarrels, some of which I keenly remember to this day with 
 shame. William and Joshua I was with more than the others, — 
 William so thoughtfully kind to me, and Joshua so generous and 
 affectionate. Henry and Heman were younger, and I used to try 
 to help them in little ways. Oliver was away a good deal, at col- 
 lege, and elsewhere. I used to go with father out of town when 
 he went to preach for different churches. How many miles I have 
 driven him out of Boston and back again, and how good and 
 thoughtful he was in talking to me ! 
 
 I went to school from Mrs. Jacobs to Israel Alger, the man who 
 made the grammar, — Alger's Murray ; a good teacher, intelligent 
 and kind ; then to Nathaniel Magoun, also one whom I remember 
 with respect. I remember I got a silver medal there at the end of 
 my school period, when I was between eight and nine years old. 
 But my best school-days were at the Latin School, where I went 
 in 1826, when I was nine years old. Joshua went with me, but 
 he did n't like it very well, and so he induced father to let him go 
 to the High School, and so I went to the Latin School alone. I 
 loved Latin and Greek, even the grammars. My first lesson in 
 Latin I recited alone to Mr. B. A. Gould, dear, good man as he 
 was, and so kind to a little shaver like me. He patted me on the 
 head and said, "A good lesson, my boy, very good. Go on so and 
 you will do as well as your brothers " (Oliver and William, who 
 had been there before me). Mr. F. P. Leverett, too, I remember, 
 who taught me Greek, and in the last part of the course, Latin, 
 too, — a classical man in scholarship, and manner, and tone, and 
 style every way. I got on very well in my studies, though I do 
 not remember feeling my lessons as tasks, except writing compo- 
 sitions. These I wrote slowly and carefully, but rather prosily, I 
 think. I went through the usual five years' course in four years, 
 as a little division of us were promoted, and got through early. I 
 was thirteen when I was ready for college, and at the anniversary 
 day had a Latin poem, in 1830. I remember Mr. Leverett said 
 some very encouraging words to me about the poem, and pleased 
 me very much with his praise about the rhythm and diction of the 
 poem. I have often recalled my working over that poem in my 
 room at home. And yet it was not work exactly ; it came to me 
 quite beyond all my expectations. I had had good teaching, and 
 had the quantities of vowels and syllables quite accurate, and words 
 and phrases came to me pretty easily, and I made out thirty-eight 
 lines, I remember, and got through with the delivery pretty well. 
 
24 NOTES OF MY LIFE. 
 
 Then for a year I went to the High School, as my father thought 
 me too young to go to college. There I had Mr. S. P. Miles and 
 Thomas Sherwin. The former, especially, I remember as a very 
 gentlemanly, and at the same time a strict and earnest man. But 
 I had some faults of character that year which, by God's blessing, 
 I was cured of when I began seriously to think of religious things, 
 and to try to practice what my dear father was always teaching 
 me, and yet teaching more by his life and example than by words. 
 Then I went back to the Latin School, and stayed a fifth year. I 
 remember that I was that year at the head of the class, and the 
 monitor up in that upper room in the schoolhouse on School 
 Street. Mr. Dillaway was the principal, and Mr. Dixwell sub- 
 master. I had the valedictory at the end of the year, and enjoyed 
 writing my farewell, though I was grievously disappointed by 
 being sick in bed when the great day came round. They brought 
 me up my Franklin medal, and hung it up before me, where I 
 seem to see it now. How Mr. Dillaway and the school committee 
 importuned my father to have me go to Harvard ! So father used 
 to tell us, when he would come home to dinner, how they came to 
 the store, and said it was never the case before that the valedicto- 
 rian went anywhere but to Harvard. But Dr. Wayland was at 
 Brown, and rising to fame, and raising the college ; and Dr. Way- 
 land and father had become well acquainted in Boston ; and then 
 it was a Baptist college, and so to Brown I went. I remember 
 that I was baptized by dear Howard Malcom, in Federal Street 
 Church, on a Sunday, October 7, 1832, and then went to Provi- 
 dence, and was examined for admission, on Monday. At that 
 time we traveled by stage-coach, leaving Boston at five A. M., and 
 arriving at noon. I was examined by Professor Elton and Tutor 
 Gammell, in Professor Elton's room, and I thought it was a very 
 easy examination. A Latin School every-day lesson had much 
 more in it. I roomed the first year with my cousin, Henry Wiley, 
 in No. 20, University Hall, but at the end of the term I lost my 
 dear father. I got the news of his illness too late to see him alive 
 and have his parting blessing. Ah, what a grief that was to me 
 when I reached the door of my father's house, — that dear home 
 which had been such a blessing to me, — and found the carriages 
 just going to the church for his funeral ! Ah, that day of my 
 boyhood's deep grief I never can forget. But he left good words 
 for me, which I have always carried in memory. " Tell him to do 
 well ; the Church expects much of him." When I got back to 
 
NOTES OF MY LIFE. 25 
 
 college, how good Dr. Caswell was to me, who had his room next 
 to mine. I have alluded to this in my discourse upon Dr. Cas- 
 well. About my college life : I found the studies very easy 
 through the first two years, though I did not neglect them. But 
 I was a boy, and full of vivacity, and found many pleasant com- 
 panions and friends, and in Junior year did not study hard to keep 
 up in scholarship. But I never had any vicious habits in college. 
 I never drank wine the whole four years, and indeed for many 
 years after, and never went with vicious men in college. But I 
 did not give myself with full vigor to work, and I had nobody like 
 my dear father to say a word either of warning or encouragement 
 to me, though I never really neglected my lessons, and in Senior 
 year studied with much interest and with progress. I might have 
 done much better. But they were days of young joy and delight. 
 Steph Shepard was my dear good friend. How attached I was to 
 him, and am still ; and what good times we had over in that W. 
 H. Smith house on Angell Street (next to Dr. Caswell) in our 
 Senior year ! 
 
 After college, one year at Washington in Columbian College as 
 teacher, first in the preparatory school, then tutor in the college, 
 which, though trying, was useful to me ; then two years at Newton 
 of good, wholesome study and progress. The second year, with 
 Dr. Sears, in theology, was very improving. Dr. Sears was a very 
 stimulating teacher and kindled in me a zeal for learning and 
 scholarship and progress in everything. Then, in September, 
 1839, I went back to Providence to be college tutor for two years, 
 in which my habits in teaching became firmer. From there, in 
 September, 1841, to Europe, where I studied in Germany two 
 years, and then spent one year in travel, studying, however, all the 
 while. My German studies at Halle with Tholuck, Gesenius, Ju- 
 lius Miiller, Leo, Erdmann, and Bernhardy, and Rodiger, were 
 great for me, giving me broader, larger views than I had ever had 
 of study and attainments, and showing me what and how to study. 
 Then the winter in Italy, especially at Rome, was of immense ser- 
 vice. (In Berlin, Neander, Hengstenberg, Ranke, Boeckh, Zumpt, 
 Schelling, and many others, were full of inspiration for use in 
 their several studies.) 
 
 Tholuck I not only respected and admired, but loved, — a learned 
 man, a most inspiring teacher, full of Geist^ but of Gemuth^ too, 
 and a truly Christian man. My journeying with him in southern 
 
26 NOTES OF MY LIFE. 
 
 Germany, Switzerland, and upper Italy, as far as Milan and the 
 lakes, was of immense service to me, as I have shown in my jour- 
 nal and note-book.^ 
 
 1 The journal or note-book containing the account of this journey has been 
 lost. 
 
DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE AT BROWN UNIVERr- 
 SITY, 1833-1834. 
 
 On January 21, 1833, just before the beginning of his second Fresh- 
 man term at Brown, Professor Lincoln, then in his sixteenth year, began 
 to keep a diary. This, as he states upon its first page, he undertook 
 with the hope " that I may be enabled by the blessing of God to record 
 the feelings which I may have from time to time.'' The last entry is 
 dated July, 1839, when he was a student in Newton Theological Semi- 
 nary. This diary throws light upon the early development of his char- 
 acter, and is full of encouragement to any one who may be striving now, 
 as he was in his boyhood, to live a Christian life in college. Therefore, 
 although upon the inner cover is written, in his youthful and as yet but 
 partly-formed handwriting, the inscription, " Privatae res et propriae," it 
 seems appropriate, and in accord with w^hat his own wishes would be, 
 to present some extracts. 
 
 This boy, who on October 8, 1832, entered Brown, brought fresh from 
 the baptismal font into his college life all the joy of a newly converted 
 and sincerely consecrated heart. But on the first page of his diary is 
 this record of a great sorrow : — 
 
 " I cannot help thinking of the difference between my present 
 situation and that in which I was placed at the commencement of 
 the last term. Then I was beginning my college course with glad- 
 ness of heart, blessed with an inestimable parent, who was ever 
 bestowing upon me his affectionate and wholesome counsels ; one 
 to whom I could always apply for instruction and advice ; who had 
 ever endeavored to impress upon my mind the importance of the 
 possession of ' fixed religious principles,' of a love to God, and an 
 interest in the Redeemer. But now it is entirely different. I 
 come back to college mourning the loss of this dear parent, and 
 feeling bitterly my need of his paternal advice. Oh, how precious 
 is that promise, ' When father and mother forsake thee, then the 
 Lord will take thee up.' " 
 
 At an age when few boys now have progressed farther in education 
 than the high school or preparatory academy, this boy has entered col- 
 lege life, and, looking beyond college life, longs for " more zeal for God 
 and decision in his cause ; " for growth in " character," and for " holiness 
 
28 DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY. 
 
 of heart, purity of motive, and fixedness of purpose in the service of 
 my Lord and Saviour." He early records the prayer, afterwards so 
 wonderfully fulfilled, "If it never should be my happy lot to preach the 
 gospel, may I be enabled in the capacity of a private Christian to win 
 souls to Christ by my life and conversation." 
 
 The following very brief entry occurs Saturday, February 2, 1833 : — 
 
 " Joined the Philermenian Society connected with the college." 
 
 Through all his life he loved this grand old debating society. While 
 he never depreciated its more youthful rival, The United Brothers, the 
 Philermenian Society had the warmer place in his heart. It was here 
 that he essayed to speak and to debate before his fellow-students. The 
 manuscript he prepared for one of these debates is still in existence. In 
 it he maintains that " Manufactures are advantageous to our community," 
 and enforces his arguments under all possible heads and subdivisions* 
 In such discussions he doubtless found healthful interruption to those 
 too rigid and introspective moods of mind wjiich appear in his diary, as 
 when on many pages he laments his " besetting sin of levity " and his 
 " light-mindedness." Doubtless what he was led to distrust as evils were 
 almost entirely the proper social cravings and happy overflowings of a 
 vigorous young nature. There are in these portions of the diary clear 
 intimations that his sound judgment discerns that the sin to be avoided 
 is not " frivolous conversation with some classmate, or doing something 
 wholly useless," but neglect of opportunity to do good to some one, or by 
 seeming indifference to fail in duty. We may feel sure that " levity " 
 and " light-mindedness " and such like atrce curce lost their power to vex 
 when he crossed the Philermenian threshold. Some time in the sixties, 
 after these two venerable societies had been continued in existence for 
 some years for the sole purpose of the hauling upstairs unlucky Fresh- 
 men at the annual " rushes," and after their hallowed homes had been 
 invaded by the " Hammer and Tongs," Professor Lincoln gave his ap- 
 proval to their disbanding. But it gave him more of a heartache than 
 people knew, and he always treasured his Philermenian badge. 
 
 The following appears in the diary, Wednesday, May 15, 1833 : — 
 
 " Joined the Society of Inquiry to-night by a relation of my 
 experience, and have certainly reason to bless God that I have at 
 length been enabled to come out and join this society. The thoughts 
 of joining have troubled me somewhat ever since I entered college. 
 I dreaded to get up in the chapel and relate to the students of the 
 upper classes the exercises of my mind." 
 
 This quaintly phrased record is suggestive of decided changes in the 
 religious life and language of undergraduates. Is there any real gain in 
 the loss of such old-fashioned sturdiness ? 
 
DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY. 29 
 
 Sunday, May 26, 1833, he writes : — 
 
 " Took a class in a Sunday-school. 'T is quite an interesting 
 class and I think that I shall keep it, and if I do, I hope that I 
 may commence in the true spirit of a Sunday-scjiool teacher, 
 anxiously desirous to be useful." 
 
 In his after life he could look back upon the fulfillment of this prayer 
 in connection with his long service in the Sunday-school of the First Bap- 
 tist Church of Providence. 
 
 Thursday, June 20, 1833, the diary contains this passage : — 
 
 " Providence has to-day been honored with a visit from Presi- 
 dent Jackson, or rather with a call. He arrived in the morning 
 and was welcomed cordially by the citizens, and was brought into 
 the city in a barouche amidst the shouts of the spectators. In 
 the afternoon he came up to college attended by his suite, one of 
 whom. Governor Cass, made an extemporaneous address to the 
 students, which was received with great eclat. In allusion to the 
 President, he remarked that 'his whole visit has been but one 
 procession.' I suspect that this is not far from the reality, and 
 although proper respect ought by all means to be paid to the Chief 
 Magistrate of our Republic, yet I fear that many things have 
 been done with this object in view which in the estimation of an 
 holy and righteous God are highly criminal. I fear that many 
 expenses have been incurred in order to render his visit pleasant, 
 whose direct tendency is to inflate the heart of man with pride, 
 and lead him to forget that he is but man. I should earnestly 
 hope that this might not be their effect in the present case, but 
 still I think that that man must have a spirit of fervent piety 
 and the deepest sense of his own nothingness in the sight of his 
 Creator, who can receive without injury such distinguished marks 
 of honor as have been paid to General Jackson. Oh, that it may 
 have a good effect upon his mind, and lead him to see the empti- 
 ness of the applause of men when compared with the approbation 
 of God and one's own conscience." 
 
 Words like these from a hoy of sixteen would sound very odd in these 
 days, yet if Jackson's mind had been tempered with somewhat of this 
 strict loyalty to God, and more given to measuring self by the divine pat- 
 tern, who can say what might have been the gain to our country. 
 
 In October, 1833, he writes thus : — 
 
 " A year ago this month I made a public profession of my 
 faith in Christ, and first sat down with the children of God to 
 
30 DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY. 
 
 commemorate the dying love of the Lord Jesus. Then, how trans- 
 porting were my feelings, how ardent my professions of attachment 
 to the Saviour and his cause." 
 
 A marginal note appears upon this page written in his mature and more 
 faniiliar hand. 
 
 "October 7, 1832 (Sunday), I was baptized by my pastor, 
 Howard Malcom, in the Federal Street Church, Boston, and the 
 next day went to Providence and was entered as a Freshman. -— 
 October 8, 1882,-50 years ! " 
 
 An entry January 10, 1834, reads as follows : — 
 " Started from Boston at twelve o'clock, after having enjoyed a 
 very pleasant vacation, and arrived at Providence in safety at six 
 p. M. Found my room in rather a cold and desolate condition, but 
 soon contrived to make it comfortable. I think that I have re- 
 turned to college with new resolutions concerning my future reli- 
 gious course. ... I am convinced that, with the assistance of 
 God, it is possible for a student to enjoy religion while in college, 
 and 1 am resolved hereafter to strive constantly for the attainment 
 of this object. Indeed, I think that I should feel unwilling any 
 longer to remain in college, to make so slow advances in religion 
 and to exert so feeble a religious influence as I did during the last 
 year. . . . Had a conversation this evening with three of my 
 classmates who are pious, on that subject which relates to our best 
 interests. Was gratified to find that their feelings with relation 
 to the future were similar to my own. We unitedly resolved to be 
 circumspect in our ways this term, and to strive daily to live near to 
 the Saviour. Oh, may the resolutions which we made be strictly 
 performed ! Eetired at ten o'clock." 
 
 How strange it sounds to-day for any one to speak of himself as 
 " pious." Yet the first disciples seem to have felt no mock modesty in 
 calling themselves "saints." Will it come to pass as modern culture 
 advances that Christians will feel it over-boastful to call themselves " con- 
 verted," and even perhaps be chary of calling themselves " Christians " 
 at all ? However this may he, the resolutions of these four young men 
 were kept, and the diary throughout this year is rich in the records of a 
 great revival. 
 
 January 14, 1834. "Commenced a practice of meeting with 
 three of my classmates who are pious (A. N. A., W. L. B., and 
 S. B. R.), three times a week for religious conversation and 
 prayer." 
 
DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY. 31 
 
 January 18, 1834. " Had a religious class-meeting in my room 
 this evening, which was exceedingly interesting. Two or three of 
 my irreligious classmates were present. Felt more anxiety for 
 their conversion than I ever before felt, and was enabled to pour 
 out my soul in supplications for this object with greater earnest- 
 ness than I ever before exercised. Oh, may the Spirit of God 
 * convince them of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment to 
 come,' and sweetly force them into submission to the Redeemer. 
 Oh, how little interest have I manifested hitherto for them! 
 May my conduct and influence henceforth be entirely different." 
 
 January 20. " Had a conversation with my friend and class- 
 mate X to-day about his eternal interests. Oh, what a 
 
 happy thing it would be if he should become pious ! What an 
 extensive religious influence he might exert ! " 
 
 Saturday, February 1. " The religious class-meeting was filled 
 with interest. Five or six irreligious members of the class were 
 
 present, among whom were my friends Z and X . 
 
 Oh, I do think I long for their conversion, and I am determined 
 to labor for the accomplishment of this object." 
 
 Wednesday, February 19. " An excellent meeting in the chapel ; 
 quite full ; interesting remarks from Dr. Wayland ; my friend 
 
 Z present. After meeting went with him to his room and 
 
 had a conversation upon the great subject of religion. Rejoiced to 
 hear him acknowledge that he had thought much more upon the 
 subject this term than he had ever done before, and to hear him 
 express his determination to seek religion with his whole heart. 
 He told me, too, which should certainly encourage me much, that 
 his impressions were owing in a great measure to an apparent 
 increase of religious feeling in me, and to my conversation and 
 company. Oh, I shall never forget my feelings when he told me 
 this. I cannot describe them." 
 
 Thursday, February 20. " Had a walk to-day with my friend 
 
 Y , who has within a few days met with a change. He is 
 
 a member of the Senior class and rooms very near me. He told 
 me, much to my joy (although I would at the same time desire to 
 be humbled on account of it), that he was first led to think seri- 
 ously of religion by observing my religious appearance this term." 
 
 Friday, February 21. "Had a conversation to-day with my 
 
 friend V on the great subject of religion ; found him very 
 
 anxious indeed. How gloriously has the Holy Spirit already 
 begun to work ! " 
 
32 DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY. 
 
 Saturday, February 22. "Very interesting and solemn day, 
 the beginning of good days for Brown University. A meeting 
 was held in the chapel in the afternoon for the special purpose 
 of giving an opportunity to the religious students to relate their 
 exercises of mind, that it might be found out what was the general 
 state of feeling and what was the prospect concerning a revival. 
 
 " In the evening a religious class-meeting at my room. Several 
 
 present who are unconverted. One of my class (U ) arose, 
 
 and declared his determination to seek religion." 
 
 Monday, February 24. " Heard with great joy that my friend 
 
 and classmate X , with whom I have so often conversed, and 
 
 for whom I have this term felt much anxiety, last night came to 
 the serious and solemn determination to seek religion." 
 
 Wednesday, February 26. "A very interesting meeting in 
 
 the chapel. One student, Q , a member of the Senior class, 
 
 who was recently brought into the fold of Christ, arose and 
 addressed the meeting, and with great earnestness entreated his 
 fellow-students to attend to the subject immediately. My friend 
 
 Z this evening indulged for the first time a hope in the 
 
 mercy of God." 
 
 Thursday, February 27. " Day of Prayer for Colleges. Has 
 been as happy a day as I have spent in college. Meeting in the 
 chapel at ten o'clock, and ten of the students successively arose 
 and related the recent gracious dealings of God with their souls. 
 Also a class-meeting at one o'clock, and also at six o'clock. My 
 
 friends Z and X were among those who spoke in 
 
 the chapel. Oh, how much need have I for gratitude that they 
 have been converted." 
 
 Saturday, March 1. " Rather unwell to-day, very violent head- 
 ache which completely unfitted me for my studies. Attended a 
 very full and interesting class-meeting in the evening. Tutor 
 Gammell came in and made some very pertinent and profitable 
 remarks. Had a conversation this forenoon with my classmate 
 
 O . He seems to be ' almost a Christian.' He sees the 
 
 way and knows clearly his duty, but will not come up to its per- 
 formance." 
 
 Monday, March 3. "Am confined to my room by a slight 
 illness. Awoke yesterday morning with a very oppressive head- 
 ache and something of a fever. Called in a doctor at noon, and 
 this morning feel much relieved. During the day and especially 
 just before the time of my evening devotions, had some distressing 
 
DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY. 33 
 
 doubts and fears relative to my adoption into the family of Christ. 
 The thought that I had been deceiving myself and others was for 
 a few moments indescribably painful. But after coming to God, 
 and telling my feelings, and earnestly entreating Him to lift upon 
 me the light of his reconciled countenance, I felt much relieved. 
 My fears were dissipated, and the Saviour appeared precious to 
 me. Here let me erect my Ebenezer and say, ' Hitherto has the 
 Lord helped me.' But still I have not that full assurance that 
 my heart is renewed, and that I am indeed a child of God, which 
 I desire to possess. When I look forward, and imagine myself in 
 the last agonies of death, I cannot but indulge in some anxiety 
 lest I may not be prepared for the society of heaven." 
 
 March 14. " To-day heard the joyful news that my friend and 
 
 classmate T was under conviction for sin. In the evening 
 
 he sent for me, and I found him humbled in the dust on account 
 of his sins. Oh, I bless the Lord for this fresh token of his 
 goodness ! I had long been laboring and praying for this." 
 
 March 16. "Had a conversation with S . He appears 
 
 entirely careless." 
 
 March 19. " Class-meeting at noon to pray for the recovery of 
 S , who is lying upon a bed of sickness, perhaps of death." 
 
 March 27. "Met this evening with those few of my friends 
 with whom I have been accustomed to meet for prayer and mutual 
 disclosure of religious feelings. Was obliged to acknowledge that 
 for myself I had been less circumspect and more inclined to levity 
 for two days past than for a long time." 
 
 Monday, March 31. " The meeting in the chapel this evening 
 was very solemn and interesting, as might well be expected from 
 the circumstance of its being the last of the term. This has been 
 a happy term in all respects." 
 
 However strange some of these old-fashioned reHgious phrases may 
 sound to modern ears, they are evidently the expression of one who, with 
 a heart thoroughly in earnest, gave himself to God in his youth, and 
 having kept the faith steadfastly through manhood and old age, is now 
 " enjoying the society of heaven." 
 
EXTRACTS FEOM PROFESSOR LINCOLN'S DIARY 
 
 WHILE INSTRUCTOR AT COLUMBIAN COLLEGE, WASHINGTON, D. C, 
 
 1836-1837. 
 
 During Professor Lincoln's Junior and Senior years at Brown his 
 diary fell into disuse. Some pages are missing, as if he had become 
 dissatisfied with what he had written. The next entry in the diary is 
 dated Columbian College, Washington, D. C, November 29, 1836, when 
 he begins " once more to keep a journal that I may keep a sort of watch 
 over my mind and heart." His entrance upon his life's work of teaching 
 was anything but encouraging. 
 
 "I ascended this College HiU on the night of the 25th of 
 October, in accordance with an engagement made two or three 
 weeks ago to take charge of the Preparatory Department connected 
 with the Columbian College. Drove immediately to Dr. Chapin's^ 
 and was received with kindness by himself and family. After a 
 night's rest, at nine o'clock, was shown to the scene of my pedago- 
 gial labors. Ma conscience ! what a place did I find it ! Won- 
 der, amazement, and a frightful host of the ' blues ' fell upon me 
 the moment my foot crossed the threshold, and my eye fell upon 
 the 'place. I shall never forget my posture and look of survey at 
 that queer moment. It was the upper story of a two-story brick 
 building. Its exterior might, with some latitude of language, be 
 pronounced decent. But what can be said of the ' inner man ' of 
 this peculiar locus. No one would have mistaken it for a school- 
 room. The dimensions of the room were about 30 x 25 feet. The 
 first thing that caught the eye on opening the door, and within 
 three feet of it, was a little, dirty box-stove, placed on a slight 
 elevation of brick-work, which from old age and hard wear had 
 become inclined to the ground at an angle of about 45°. From 
 this ran up a funnel in real zigzag fashion, and terminated in a 
 hole in the wall, which, being too large for its reception, was 
 ingeniously and neatly filled up in part by bricks, stones, etc. 
 The room had five glass windows and one wooden window. This 
 last was a large, square hole filled up by nailing up pieces of 
 plank on the outside. How much of a window such an invention 
 
DIARY AT COLUMBIAN COLLEGE. 35 
 
 was, any one might easily determine. On the hypothesis of the 
 building having been intended for a stable, it would have made 
 an excellent place for the pitching in of hay, etc. ; and this 
 hypothesis, I now remember, is not imaginary, for such was in 
 fact the original design of this classical building. The furniture 
 was Very concise. One chair for the pedagogue ; several long, 
 huge forms, evincing by their looks that they had long been a 
 surface upon which the ' luckless wights ' might try the temper of 
 their knives, hacked up so horribly, fit only for fuel. The walls 
 in the infancy of time had been whitewashed, but now were any- 
 thing but white, — they were ' many colored,' like Joseph's coat, 
 and then a great smooch, telling plainly that the room had been 
 the arena of apple-fights and other schoolboy rencontres. On the 
 whole, then, this place had a touch of originality about it. So 
 much for the mere physical objects in this attic. Here I found 
 also fourteen or fifteen young chaps, awaiting the approach of 
 their new teacher. I looked over their faces with considerable 
 interest, but saw nothing particularly striking about any of them. 
 By a paper left me by the former teacher, I found out their 
 names and the ' Order of Exercises.' I went to work, and in the 
 course of the day dispatched about twenty recitations or more, 
 besides being bothered to death by continual questions in arith- 
 metic, Latin, Greek, etc. After giving them a very short lec- 
 ture I set the urchins free, and by the act freed myself from 
 what seemed to a novice like myself a worse than Egyptian 
 slavery. However, though most perplexing, it was a good mental 
 and moral exercise. My patience, judgment, self-confidence, and 
 confidence in the general sense of the word, were all tried in this 
 one day. To take the lead in such a way, even in so small a 
 school, really tried me pretty severely, and though by a sort of 
 dissembling I might have appeared to feel at home, yet I was 
 conscious of feeling very diffident. Shame on this diffidence ! it 
 must be overcome. Every moment seemed to bring in some new 
 trial of judgment, and though the occasions of the trials might 
 have been trivial, yet the exercise was salutary. So much for the 
 school. My condition in other things I find not very comfortable ; 
 things wear an uninviting aspect in general. Dr. Chapin's family 
 are agreeable and very kind, and I am acquainted with one student 
 to whom I am indebted for efforts to make my new conditions 
 agreeable ; but all else — Oh, dear ! " 
 
 The journal now indicates that he found need of keeping " a sort of 
 
36 DIARY AT COLUMBIAN COLLEGE. 
 
 watch " not only over his heart and his mind, but over his temper, and 
 records other "exercises" in addition to "exercises of mind," — of a 
 new sort. 
 
 " I have had squally times in my little school. The little scamps 
 imagined, I suppose, that they could handle me and behave them- 
 selves as they pleased. At any rate, some have tried it, but 'have 
 found, I hope, by this time that, though they have a little fellow 
 over them, they must sail according to his directions. I have 
 passed through scenes v^^holly new and vexatious, but on the whole, 
 I think, very profitable. It is strange how little I have known 
 about matters and things ; how little about human nature ; how 
 long have some of my faculties been unemployed. I have waked 
 them up of late and made them do some good service. Among 
 the few in my school I have found some of the hardest characters 
 I have ever had to deal with. For so young persons they combine 
 more bad traits than any perhaps I ever met with in my school- 
 days in the same number. Their moral character is very bad. 
 They will lie and swear just as they will drink water. Their 
 disposition is bad, — great lovers of low mischief and of making 
 trouble. As for study, it is a thing among the things unknown 
 to them ; they have no conception of its nature, nor any desire for 
 such knowledge. I soon picked out two or three of them, and 
 had my eyes upon them. In one forenoon I had to whip pretty 
 considerably one of them, and break a ruler over a second. In 
 the afternoon of the next day, the third met with his fate, which 
 he had been long courting. Indeed, I have been told since that 
 he wanted me to call him out, for he wanted a chance to try his 
 powers with me. If it was so, his courage evaporated when the 
 time came. He came out, mad as a piper and with his fists 
 doubled. Not seeing this, however, I just took a pretty whalebone 
 stick I had with me and laid it over his back with considerable 
 activity, until he began to beg, and promised me that he would 
 behave himself. This mortified him exceedingly and at the same 
 time enraged him. He did not dare do anything, but kept still. 
 After school, when outdoors, surrounded by the school, he insulted 
 me, and actually walked behind me, and muttered something about 
 fighting me." 
 
 These incidents led to the expulsion of the two worst hoys, and their 
 mother then paid a visit to the school to express her disapprobation. The 
 result is thus recorded : — 
 
 " She then made a low and unladylike expression, which dis- 
 
DIARY AT COLUMBIAN COLLEGE. 37 
 
 gusted me and the school. I couldn't stand this, and, turning 
 round, told her that neither she nor any one else should talk so in 
 that school ; that she was no lady, and had no business to disturb 
 me and my school. This brought the matter to a crisis ; she mut- 
 tered something and retreated, and thus the curtain dropped.- I 
 could not have desired a better termination of the affair for my 
 own sake, as it was plain to the whole school that she had only 
 disgraced herself, and by the subsequent looks and whispers of 
 the boys, I saw that the thing had come out just right. By this 
 time my school became quiet, numerically inferior, but only so. I 
 plucked up courage and went ahead." 
 
 But the school did not go ahead ; and before long came to wreck on 
 financial breakers. In order to secure scholars, inducements were held 
 out of such a nature that " those who attend are of no pecuniary advan- 
 tage." As the inevitable result of this " strange and foolish plan adopted 
 some time ago, which I have n't the patience to put down here," the 
 school came to a sudden end. The president and the professors now of- 
 fered him "their influence" to get him another school, or an office in one 
 of the government departments. This last suggestion had no attractions. 
 
 " I told him I should n't like it as well as teaching ; indeed I 
 should n't at all ; 't would be dangerous, I fear, in many respects. 
 Perhaps I ought to return to New England and enter Newton 
 Institute. How near I came to entering it at the regular time ! I 
 did not dare, and yet wanted to. I was on the brink of going 
 when the offer of this Preparatory Department came. I must say, 
 I reluctantly consented, as some of my best friends advised it 
 strenuously. After all, would it not have been rash to have gone 
 to Newton? It is a mighty undertaking; a mistake would be 
 dreadful. Oh, for wisdom and divine light ! Oh, for more active 
 and deeper piety, and love to God and men ! " 
 
 The way, however, unexpectedly was opened for him to remain, and, 
 as he says, " by a master-stroke I am elevated to the rank of tutor." This 
 proved to be a much more congenial position. 
 
 " I like my present much better than my last employment. It 
 is altogether more pleasant and more useful. I am obliged to 
 revive old studies and acquire a more intimate familiarity with 
 them than while in college. The exercise of teaching is also an 
 excellent discipline. Of course I must form a habit of exact think- 
 ing and speaking, else I could not make myself intelligible nor 
 throw light upon the subject. The very nature of my situation 
 imposes a degree of self-confidence and decision, so that my char- 
 
38 DIARY AT COLUMBIAN COLLEGE. 
 
 acter may in this way acquire strength. Besides, a thousand 
 things compel me to the formation of many good habits. I really 
 hope, with the assistance of God, I may be able to conduct myself 
 aright and to the satisfaction of all parties concerned." 
 
 Pending his " elevation " from principal to tutor, he found opportunity 
 to see something of the political world. 
 
 " Have been to the Capitol to witness the opening of Congress. 
 My impatience to see the senate chamber filled with senators was 
 extreme. I had been into the chamber two or three weeks before, 
 but though everything was splendid and gorgeous, yet the scene 
 wanted life; it wanted spirit, that which makes it the Senate, 
 the presence of the members. It is but a tasteless, vapid affair, 
 to see the senate chamber when empty ; as dreary and desolate 
 as a banquet hall after the joyous revelry has ceased and the com- 
 pany departed. But now I was to see the thing itself, of which 
 the former had been a dim shadow. What strange and varied 
 feelings ran over me as I entered the gallery and looked down 
 upon the senators exchanging their glad salutations with, each 
 other after their separation. I soon found out their names, and 
 then watched them with eager interest. I looked in vain for 
 Webster. Calhoun and Preston were also absent. I saw Van 
 Buren, the president-elect. From his dress and bearing no one 
 would ever suppose him to be fifty-four years old. His dress and 
 manners in general are rather finical. I was ratber surprised at 
 his reception. He came in, and for a time ' stood alone ; ' after- 
 wards went round and saluted the senators, friends and foes, with 
 like cordiality. I watched in particular his meeting with Judge 
 White. 'T was amusing to see these rival presidential candidates 
 and antipodes in politics embrace externally^ like bosom friends. 
 I wonder how the stern old judge looked and felt within^ to see 
 the lady-president slide up to him ' and greet him with the phrase 
 of fashion ' with all the grace and refinement of a Brummell. By 
 the way, White is the queerest-looking figure I saw there. His 
 form is not tall, and very slender, even to fragility, and his head 
 fairly triangular, his hair gray with age, and flowing down his 
 neck in ocean profusion. Compared with Van in appearance, he 
 would remind you of a stern old Roman in the days of Rome's 
 primitive simplicity. 'Twas good to see Henry Clay enter the 
 hall, and to witness the reception he met with. The moment he 
 entered he was fairly surrounded by senators. His tall, erect 
 
DIARY AT COLUMBIAN COLLEGE. 39 
 
 figure towered above them all, reminding one of ' ^neas^ os hw- 
 merosque deo slmilis.^ How instinctive and fervent the homage 
 to lofty talents ! What spectator in the gallery did not rather envy 
 Henry Clay, though unsuccessful in the race for the presidency, 
 than Martin Van Buren, even at that moment in the meridian 
 of political success, the president-elect of the United States ? 
 
 " Saw also the famous Benton, the ' Jupiter Tonans ' of the Sen- 
 ate. He has a huge, mammoth figure, and rolls it about as though 
 he were ' monarch of all.' He seemed to be well received, and to 
 exhibit in his movements more of the gentleman than I expected 
 to see in him. I had been told he was always writing something 
 or other, and, sure enough, he went at it forthwith, as though it 
 was the middle of the session, before the senators generally began 
 to think of such a thing. — ' Laborious idleness ! ' 
 
 " Was disappointed in not seeing Calhoun and Preston. Rives 
 of Virginia was present, who succeeded John Tyler, and was ' in- 
 structed ' into his seat to vote for Benton's Expunging Kesolution, 
 while Tyler resigned, from unwillingness to obey such instructions. 
 He is a man of middling stature, and has rather a youthful ap- 
 pearance ; nothing striking in his countenance ; said to be a 
 man of fine talents, and already talked of as the leader of the Van 
 Buren party in the Senate, if he remains, and also as a member 
 of the next Cabinet, and even as the successor of Van Buren ! 
 
 " Saw Van Buren take the chair and call the House to order ; 
 no important business. 
 
 " Passed from the Senate into the House. What a change ! 'T is 
 like passing from the stillness of the lake to the roar of the ocean. 
 I have been into the Massachusetts House, and thought that had 
 a look of disorder about it, but this is certainly worse. Members 
 with their hats on, talking, walking about, etc. The speaker and 
 the gentleman upon the floor alone reminded you that the body 
 was in session. These seemed to be the only persons interested. 
 I found there was no such thing as distinguishing members in 
 such a dense mass. Saw old John Q. Adams. It seemed odd to 
 see an ex-president jostled about down there among the ' vulgus.^ 
 The old man looks bright and keen as ever. He is certainly an 
 extraordinary man ; probably a man of more learning than any 
 other in the United States, — certainly in political learning, for 
 he has been in politics from his cradle upwards. It has been the 
 element in which he has lived and moved. His face is certainly 
 intellectual. There is a darting, acute look about it, which indi- 
 
40 DIARY AT COLUMBIAN COLLEGE. 
 
 cates intellect. Yet this does not seem to proceed wholly from the 
 eye ; the countenance as a whole is certainly intellectual. Strange 
 that an ex-president should become a member of the House ! It 
 is republican perhaps, but yet there is an incongruity about it. 
 He is a man of such surprising activity of mind, and so deeply 
 interested in politics, that it is probably a great relief to him to be 
 in his present place. If he would stay at home and write a his- 
 tory of the times or something of that nature, would he not be 
 doing equal service to his country and to the world ? 
 
 " I wanted to see Wise of Virginia, who made such a figure last 
 winter. He was pointed out to me, but was so far off that I 
 couldn't distinctly see him. Peyton of Tennessee, his stanch 
 friend, was by his side. Was n't much pleased, on the whole, with 
 the House. 'T is too noisy, — nothing but confusion. 'T is a real 
 relief to get out of such a stormy place." 
 
 What a vivid description this is of old-time giants ! And what matu- 
 rity of mind does it show in this ex-principal of the Preparatory Depart- 
 ment, and as yet unknowingly the tutor that is to be ! It is, therefore, 
 something of a surprise to turn the page and read the record, — 
 
 " Thursday, February 23, 1837. This day I am twenty years 
 old! What an appropriate point to make a full and solemn 
 pause, and to indulge in sober, rational, religious reflection ! What 
 a time to review the past and thoroughly to inspect my mind and 
 heart, my whole character ! Such varied and numberless thoughts 
 and emotions rush in upon me that I know not where to bestow 
 my attention." 
 
 At this mature age of twenty he examines his intellectual life, going 
 back to his youthful days in college, and passing upon himself judgment 
 which, if impartiality consisted of severity, might be considered impartial 
 in the extreme. His reflections have some bearing upon the matter of 
 elective studies. 
 
 " How has it been with my mind the past year ? In this respect 
 it has been to me an interesting period of life. As the time of 
 graduating drew near, I became sensible of a gradual change in 
 my views and feelings. I began to think of the past and of the 
 future, to examine how I had been preparing my mind for some 
 active profession. Many of my studies were more interesting and 
 occupied more of my time and thoughts. I began to see the folly 
 of some of my former habits of study, and to form others. My 
 college life hitherto had been but frivolous and vain, — anything 
 
DIARY AT COLUMBIAN COLLEGE. 41 
 
 but the life of a student. I did n't think enough of the objects 
 of study. Things which I liked I attended to, and those which 
 I disliked I neglected, except so far as was actually necessary. 
 What notions had I been cherishing ! About writing I had toler- 
 ably correct ideas, and paid some attention to it, but if I had done 
 ten times as much 't would have been better. I almost wish I had 
 entered college two years later. I should not have been such a 
 fool. As it is I have lost about two thirds of a college life. I 
 attended to so many ten thousand things having nothing to do 
 with college, merely because I wanted to^ that I neglected studies 
 of great imporlpnce. When it was too late, i. e., just at the wrong 
 time, I began to wake up. The time came on, and I graduated. 
 It is strange, passing strange, what new notions all at once seem 
 to come in upon me about myself, about others, about knowledge, 
 a profession, life, — everything. Whatever acquisitions I had 
 made seemed to be a mere cipher. So much — everything — 
 seemed to be done, and so little time to do it in, that I was lost. 
 My reading and reflection began to be new employments. My 
 former purposes were all trifling, and I almost despised them. 
 Specially about history I felt ignorant, about the characters of 
 other times, the minds and habits of great men. A thousand his- 
 tories and objects of study occurred to me, and I wanted to devour 
 them at once. Oh, we cannot well conceive till we feel it our- 
 selves, what a sensation of freshness, of life, comes over a young 
 mind when it really begins to look forth and survey its rich and 
 widespread inheritance. Hitherto it has lain in a sort of dreamy, 
 chrysalis state, conscious of the surrounding light only by fitful 
 gleams ; but now it seems to spring forth at once into an en- 
 larged, active being, and to range abroad uncontrolled, and with 
 glad delight over its boundless and glorious world. At such a 
 time one begins to get sound, elevated views. Many of his former 
 notions and habits sink to very nothingness. Those ideas which 
 were formerly but dimly and partially correct now begin to ex- 
 pand, and at once he becomes sensible of a burning thirst for 
 knowledge. Most of all, at such a time, does one feel his consum- 
 mate ignorance. He is impatient of acquisition, — to be put in 
 immediate possession. He would know more, and more, and more; 
 he would know all. I have felt much like this. I have much to 
 do, and would be about it. If God sees fit to spare my life, I 
 would endeavor to use aright whatever faculties He has given me, 
 — to push them up to their highest point. And yet there is so 
 
42 DIARY AT COLUMBIAN COLLEGE. 
 
 much to do, and I have done so little, and have so abused my 
 mind thus far, that I am almost discouraged. Still, I take delight 
 in reading, writing, and study ; and in such employments my life 
 will probably be spent. I hope my desires are pure, my motives 
 right in the sight of God. I know that in such things I do not 
 enough consult his glory. But for the future how am I to live ? 
 I hope and pray, better in every way. I would live more like a 
 sober, rational, responsible being, — a Christian. In God alone I 
 would trust for strength. In myself I have no confidence. Oh, 
 may the next year, if I live, testify to some advancement ! " 
 
 Upon this, his twentieth birthday, he also reviews his religious experi- 
 ences, and writes : — 
 
 " The past year has been to me in many respects one of the 
 most important of my whole life. Changes have been wrought in 
 my condition, and also seemed to be working in my character, of 
 an interesting nature. In the course of it I have passed the 
 most important and pleasant of my college life, have graduated, 
 and since been engaged in the business of instruction, — all im- 
 portant points in a young man's life. How has it been with my 
 heart the past year ? Have I made sensible, delightful progress ? 
 On this subject I am certainly obliged to confess to myself and to 
 my Heavenly Parent that I have been fearfully remiss. I look 
 back, as I ever have done, with regret and shame. It is true I 
 have sometimes sought the mercy-seat, and there found peace and 
 joy in communion with God. I have sometimes taken great 
 delight in religious exercises. But then when I remember how 
 foolish and unfaithful I have been, and deficient in love to God 
 and active, self-denying piety, I feel ashamed and sad. ... In 
 everything I have come short and been an unprofitable servant. 
 The great secret of my miserable piety in college is, that my de- 
 votional habits were not sufficiently fixed ; my religious character 
 was not firm enough. I feel sure it was my desire to be a grow- 
 ing Christian, but I did not pursue the object with those regular, 
 prayerful, repeated efforts which its greatness demands, and must 
 have. During the interval between graduating and coming on 
 here, I think I had more enjoyment in religion. My situation 
 made me thoughtful and solemn. The question, Am I to preach? 
 then came up with full force. This question has engaged my 
 thoughts at intervals all through college, and indeed before the 
 period of entering college. But it was always to me such a tre- 
 
DIARY AT COLUMBIAN COLLEGE. 43 
 
 mendous subject that I could never think of it with a view to im- 
 mediate decision. The time for decision seemed far in the pros- 
 pect and I delayed. But there was no escape after leaving col- 
 lege, — it must come up. I felt I could decide it only by getting 
 nearer to God. Earthly aid was pleasant and in a degree useful, 
 but altogether insufficient. A thousand difficulties seemed in the 
 way. I tried to get near to God in prayer, and to some degree 
 succeeded. I enjoyed prayer very much and loved to throw my- 
 self before God and beseech his wisdom to instruct and guide me. 
 I became quite satisfied it was my duty to prepare for the minis- 
 try. Then came up the question, When ? Though it seemed pre- 
 mature, yet I was nearly on the point of going to Newton, when 
 the offer of the Preparatory Department here decided me to wait 
 a year. The subject has been with me ever since. I never dare 
 to acknowledge my positive intention to go to Newton next fall, 
 but I probably shall. With all my weakness and inability per- 
 haps I ought to do so, in reliance upon God and in the firm con- 
 viction that He will prepare me for usefulness." 
 
 As he entered college immediately after his conversion and baptism, 
 it would appear that his first impressions as to the ministry must have 
 antedated his public profession of religion. 
 
 Among Professor Lincoln's papers was found a brief memorandum 
 headed " Religious Experience, Winter of '31-2," when he was fifteen 
 years of age, and before he had entered college. This is of special in- 
 terest since it indicates that just as in the case of his father, Ensign Lin- 
 coln, his religious impressions, if not his conversion, dated from early 
 childhood, and that he, like his father, in young boyhood habitually 
 sought to be alone with God. This disjointed memorandum is without 
 date, but from the handwriting appears to have been written while he was 
 a student in Newton, and quite possibly at some hour when he was ex- 
 amining his earlier life in its relation to his call to the ministry. It 
 reads as f oUows : — 
 
 " Grown remiss in duties, cold, negligent ; had backslidden ; 
 school, studies, amusements ; was expected to make profession ; im- 
 prepared, began to look back, examine present state. As I ex- 
 amined, began to doubt. Was at same time filled with fears and 
 distress. Things went on for several days; prayed more, read 
 Bible more and religious books ; found that with present feelings 
 could not believe myself a Christian. At any rate if I was, had 
 no religious enjoyment. Began to pray earnestly for forgiveness ; 
 that I might know if I was a Christian ; that I might be con- 
 
44 DIARY AT COLUMBIAN COLLEGE. 
 
 verted now, if never before. Views of law of God ; my own sin- 
 fulness and guilt clearer, more deep and distressing than ever 
 before. Remember how Bible looked to me as I sat alone one 
 day in my chair brooding over my condition ; looked compact, 
 solid, just so ; could be no different. So I felt the law of God 
 to be ; it condemned me ; it could n't do otherwise. I could n't 
 alter it ; I must bear it. My gloom and distress awful from day 
 to day, week to week. No pleasure in anything, home, school, 
 company, anything. Went about mourning ; most of the time 
 was alone in my room. Praying all the time ; prayed at school 
 (down cellar at school). Used to love to go to bed to get to 
 sleep ; felt a dreadful weight upon me when I woke up ; hated 
 to move. Was not willing to trust to Christ ; to give up all 
 works of my own, confess myself nothing, Christ all my right- 
 eousness. When I prayed, desire was rather to be freed from 
 agony than to be forgiven and made holy. With all this con- 
 nected much confusion of mind ; sometimes when alone so con- 
 fused did n't know what I was thinking about, nor what to ask in 
 prayer. Seeing picture in little book at store of little children 
 in a posture of prayer, seemed to show me at a glance how to 
 come to God, what to do. Instantly applied it to myself ; looked 
 to God ; felt happier," etc. 
 
 The next entry in the diary records the carrying out of his conviction 
 of duty. 
 
 "Left Washington, October, 1837. Received invitation to 
 return and spend another year.^ After some reflection felt I 
 must go to Newton. Entered Junior class at Newton. Felt it to 
 be what I had always anticipated, a very solemn step. A theo- 
 logical student ! A candidate for the ' ministry of reconcilia- 
 tion ' ! Within a few years of being a pastor of some branch of 
 the church of Christ, with the responsibility of leading immortal 
 souls by instruction, exhortation, and prayer to the Lamb of God ! 
 How much need for laborious, prayerful, incessant effort I Who 
 is sufficient for these things ? I know not how some persons can 
 look forward with such complacency, I have thought sometimes 
 almost carelessness, to this great work." 
 
 ^ At the considerably increased salary of $250 per annum and board. 
 
EXTRACTS FROM PROFESSOR LINCOLN'S DIARY 
 
 WHILE A STUDENT AT NEWTON THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION, 
 
 1838-1839. 
 
 He begins anew his diary at the beginning of his theological studies 
 with thoughts as follows : — 
 
 " Newton Theological Institution, June, 1838. 
 
 " Have determined to recommence the practice of keeping a 
 journal. I have felt ever since I relinquished it, at intervals, the 
 need of it, both in respect to my progress in study and in piety. 
 The practice induces habits of watchfulness and self-examination, 
 as well as promotes system. I shall not make it strictly a reli- 
 gious diary, as I should greatly fear the effects upon myself of 
 attempting such an object. I fear it would insidiously generate 
 pride and a sort of self-deception. I will make it a repository of 
 such things concerning my progress, not merely in religion, but in 
 all other matters, which shall seem to myself sufficiently interest- 
 ing and important for preservation. The last entry in my journal 
 had reference to the fact of my leaving Washington in October, 
 1837, and entering the Institution here. I am now just com- 
 mencing the summer term. Have commenced, I hope, with some 
 increased enjoyment in religion, and with more ardent desires 
 than I have ever before experienced for making large attainments 
 in knowledge and mental discipline. God in his providence saw 
 fit to afflict me four weeks before the close of the last term with a 
 disease in my eyes, so that for the last three months I have been 
 unable to study. I hope I have tried to discover and learn the 
 lesson which He designed to teach me in this providence. My 
 time was employed, I hope, in profitable reflection. I endeavored 
 to look back upon the past to ascertain what progress I had made. 
 In some respects, at least with reference to the nature and method 
 of my studies, I think my eyes were opened for the first time in 
 my life. By ascertaining the little I had already done, and what I 
 needed to do, and by trying to discover and group together what 
 objects seemed on the whole most worthy of strenuous effort, my 
 
46 DIARY AT NEWTON THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION. 
 
 mind was led into a new train of thought and new resolves. Col- 
 leges and instructors may do much to prepare the mind for action, 
 but even the best cannot do all, and perhaps the most important 
 things. Horace, or some one else, said well, that every one must 
 be his own artifex. Till the student himself, by progress in age, 
 comes at length to gain some just views of the nature, objects, and 
 vast extent of study, and is filled with an irrepressible ardor for 
 high attainments, the most exalted privileges are lavished upon 
 him in vain. Would that my own views were more correct and 
 expanded, and my ardor in study tenfold deeper and purer. Let 
 me press forward. 
 
 " My feelings concerning the ministry are much the same as ever. 
 My fears concerning my fitness are often distressing. My hach- 
 wardness in action^ always my greatest obstacle, more painful to 
 me than words can possibly describe. This, added to the appre- 
 hensions of my friends, — and, I am suspicious, their uncharitable 
 opinions; not uncharitable, because not blamable, but opinions 
 formed without the requisite data, — troubles me often excessively. 
 I ought to be more forward and active, and yet I feel that I 
 can't, and therefore feel not that I ought. And yet I am unfit- 
 ting myself for the future. What shall I do ? Can I be a min- 
 ister of the gospel ? Those who know me best speak confidently 
 that I can and ought.^ Besides the above I need more piety, much 
 more piety. Oh, for more love to Christ, the grand spring of all 
 piety and devotion to God. I have enjoyed religion considerably 
 since I have been here. I do love Christ, and his service. Saviour, 
 ' thou knowest that I love thee.' And yet what wretched evidence 
 of my love ! Can I love Christ and have so little of his spirit, and 
 be so little engaged in his service ? Can He take any notice of 
 such a fitful, glimmering light ? Oh, Saviour, make me thy de- 
 voted disciple. Accept of my affection and my whole soul, un- 
 worthy as the offering is." 
 
 1 In 1839, when he was offered a position as tutor in Brown University, one 
 of his stanchest friends wrote to him thus : " If you enter Brown as a tutor 
 you will never be a minister. I want you to be a clergyman. It is what you 
 are built for, and what the Creator intended for you. You speak of your 
 youthful appearance, as if that was an objection. It is the mind that makes 
 the man. Let people feel you and they won't care whether you are ten feet 
 high or four feet, whether *■ bearded like the pard ' or smooth as a Sybarite. I 
 am confident that if you do go there, you will be a professor in a few years, 
 but you will never be a minister." 
 
DIARY AT NEWTON THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION. 47 
 
 Twice during his stay in Newton he was interrupted in his studies by 
 trouble with his eyes. On June 28, 1838, he wrote his first sermon and" 
 " enjoyed the exercise very much." 
 
 November 26, 1838. " Preached yesterday for the first time to 
 a little congregation at Needham. Felt better than I expected and 
 was more at ease than I could have hoped. Still the scenes were 
 so strange, and my sense of inability such, that I did not much 
 enjoy it." 
 
 On Thursday evening, February 7, 1839, he applied to the church for 
 a license to preach, and in the diary he writes : — 
 
 " Endeavored in view of that application to go over my views 
 and feelings, and reexamine my decision ; also to put together in 
 some shape the feelings through which I passed, just after leav- 
 ing college, in coming to a decision for the first time. For my 
 own convenience in future, will put them down in brief. 
 
 " First thing : I met as an obstacle a sense of. unfitness, men- 
 tally, morally, and in piety. Had felt it before ; have felt it to 
 some extent ever since. 
 
 "I. In respect to inclination, 
 
 " 1. An entire disinclination to any other profession. For med- 
 icine or law never had a particle of desire. 
 
 " 2. Felt some inclination for ministry, even considered profes- 
 sionally. Its subjects, immediate and collateral, best suited to my 
 prevailing tastes. 
 
 " 3. This inclination was stronger, when to the above was 
 added the idea of being useful. The gospel contains the most 
 glorious of all truth. Who would not desire to make it his busi- 
 ness to communicate it to his fellow-men ? 
 
 " II. In regard to providential circumstances. These were not 
 only not unfavorable, but were and always had been very pro- 
 pitious; health, youth, collegiate education, means of obtaining 
 theological education, — how highly favored ! 
 
 " III. With regard to more direct point of duty, 
 
 "1. Was certainly bound as a Christian to serve God in the 
 best possible manner. 
 
 " 2. Was it not altogether probable I could be most useful in 
 the ministry ? It seemed to me it was. 
 
 "3. Besides, the destitution of ministers was proverbial — 
 churches praying for laborers ; societies laboring to raise up young 
 men, some kept back, contrary to their strong desires, on account 
 
48 DIARY AT NEWTON THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION. 
 
 of pecuniary difficulties. Nothing in my way, could I refrain 
 from saying, I ought to preach ? 
 
 " 4. Still it was an important matter, fearfully responsible. 
 God will not take anybody for his ministers. Endeavored, I 
 think in sincerity, to seek the direction of God in prayer. Found 
 some satisfaction ; enjoyed the exercise, enjoyed a rededication of 
 myself to his service. Felt satisfied that it would be my duty to 
 make preparations to preach. 
 
 " My feelings since have been materially the same, though I 
 have often been much depressed through a fear of inability. 
 Though I have often felt like shrinking back, yet I could never do 
 it conscientiously." 
 
 On many pages of the diary he records his deep feeling of insuffi- 
 ciency for the ministry. Doubtless a proper conception of his weakness 
 is desirable for any theological student, yet it would seem that it was ow- 
 ing in great measure to convictions of this nature that Professor Lincoln 
 did not complete the course at Newton. 
 
 In December, 1838, he writes : — 
 
 " Have suffered very much within a few days from despond- 
 ency and gloom. At times felt that I could scarcely lift my head. 
 The general cause, in addition to others, was an old one, and more 
 or less always operating, viz., my sense of disqualification for the 
 laborious duties of the ministry. The prospect, now so near 
 at hand, of going forth to this work is at times fearful in the 
 extreme." 
 
 At a later date he writes again : — 
 
 " I tremble to think of the short interval now remaining previ- 
 ous to leaving this Institution. I am not yet prepared for the 
 ministry. I shrink from its laborious, responsible duties." 
 
 Ajid again : — 
 
 " Have had many desponding seasons this term. Have been 
 afraid that my piety was sadly declining. No deficiency seems so 
 appalling as this, when I contemplate the ministry as my future 
 occupation in life. Have been troubled also at times concerning 
 matters of doctrine. The difficulties here are many and exceed- 
 ingly perplexing. Oh, for light from above, the Source of all 
 light and truth. When shall I see and know ; when shall I com- 
 prehend, where now I can only bow and adore ? Feel the need 
 more than ever of living near to God, of holding fast to the 
 
DIARY AT NEWTON THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION. 49 
 
 throne of mercy, lest I be swept away by doubts and skepticism. 
 Trust in God is a grace that needs continual and diligent cultiva- 
 tion. I do not feel enough interested in the spiritual welfare of 
 the world in general. Am too selfish in my feelings and thoughts 
 and prayers. Practical benevolence, the great field for the growth 
 of piety as well as of habits of usefulness, is not sufficiently cher- 
 ished. This last is a danger to which students are very liable 
 from the secluded life they follow." 
 
 To most of Professor Lincoln's friends and pupils these records of 
 early doubts and difficulties must be a surprise. His real vocation was 
 that of a teacher, and after a most practical and conscientious test as 
 to the matter of the ministry, he was the better able to devote his life 
 cheerfully and undoubtingly to the cause of education. He early had 
 found the cure for uneasiness in doctrinal matters : " I have felt some- 
 times, after some perplexity, a degree of calm satisfaction, by opening 
 the Bible and reading its plain affirmations. Here is solid foundation ; 
 no refined and wire-drawn metaphysics to split words and syllables and 
 do away with all language." To the end of his life he studied his Bible, 
 especially the New Testament in the Greek, and in later life in connec- 
 tion with Farrar's writings. His reference to the necessity and value of 
 " practical benevolence " in the development of a religious character was 
 not a mere abstract speculation. In all his after life that part of the 
 worship of God which consists of paying money to Him was a part of 
 his religion. After his death, when it became necessary to examine his 
 modest financial accounts, it was found that the largest single item of 
 expenditure had been that of religion and charity. 
 
 The last extract which will be presented here is one which is very 
 touching in its affectionate remembrance of a brother who had died not 
 very long before this diary was begun, and in its looking forward to the 
 happy reunion in the better world which now, after these many busy and 
 useful years, has taken place. 
 
 "February 23, 1839. The anniversary of my birthday, — 
 twenty-two years old ! A large moiety of the ' threescore years and 
 ten.' Perhaps I have already spent altogether the largest portion 
 of my life. I am sure it is a solemn season with me in all respects. 
 How swift the flight of time ! I am now at the same age at which 
 brother William had attained when he died. That name ! Wil- 
 liam ! How many recollections it awakens ! Like the memory 
 of departed music, pleading and mournful to the soul. His form, 
 appearance, habits, character, are all before me. Oh, if he had 
 been spared to this time I But such was not the will of God. 
 
50 DIARY AT NEWTON THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION. 
 
 At this late period I would not revive anything like a murmuring- 
 spirit. I can only cherish the fond hope that his spirit is in 
 heaven, in communion with the spirits of my dear parents and all 
 the redeemed, in the presence of the exalted Mediator. God 
 gTant that myself and the remaining members of our now par- 
 tially scattered family may have grace given us to ' endure to the 
 end,' to perform all his will, that we, too, at length ' may receive 
 the promise,' and be united no more to separate, ' a whole family in 
 heaven.' " 
 
DIAKY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY, 1841-1842. 
 
 During Professor Lincoln's student days in Germany, before he became 
 Professor of Latin in Brown University, he wrote at intervals between 
 November 27, 1841, and July 3, 1842, a few pages of the nature of a 
 diary. This brief diary consists chiefly of memoranda of the more inter- 
 esting contents of museums and picture galleries and also of personal 
 matters, such as writing and receiving letters. But it also contains some 
 personal reminiscences of the professors and students at Halle and else- 
 where. 
 
 THOLUCK's opinion of GOETHE. 
 
 He did not like his works in general, because they went to 
 destroy all distinction between right and wrong. His " Faust " he 
 wrote in early life. In youth he was the subject of religious 
 impressions, and when he wrote this, he had not wholly shaken 
 them off. There was at that time a twofold conflict going on 
 within him. First, between simple faith and science ; he felt that 
 he had not a scientific ground for his faith, and was in doubt 
 whether it were practicable to secure it. Secondly, between faith 
 and the influences drawing him to sensual pleasures. Hence he 
 represents Faust carried about by the devil in search of all the 
 pleasures of the world, flesh, etc. Thus the book really grew out 
 of his own experience. In general Goethe never proposed any 
 distinct object to himself in his works. He wrote from an internal 
 necessity; he felt that he must write to relieve the inward fullness 
 which oppressed him. 
 
 CHRISTMAS EVE AT THOLUCK'S HOME. 
 
 December 24, 1841. Christmas! a German Christmas! Every- 
 thing is made of it here. Nothing but Christmas has been talked 
 of for a fortnight back, and now this evening it has begun in 
 right earnest. We have spent Christmas eve at Tholuck's, about 
 fifteen students in all. When we entered the haU it was a gay 
 scene indeed before us. A long table ran across, covered with 
 books, etc., presents, and at either end large spruce-trees, illu- 
 minated and laden with various little trinkets, sugar work, etc. 
 
62 DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 
 
 All round the table plates with names upon them, and the presents 
 from Tholuck and his lady. Besides other things, for every one 
 there were two great Christmas cakes. Two or three students 
 with Mrs. Tholuck and another lady were singing at the piano as 
 we entered, and Tholuck himself walking up and down the hall. 
 After the music Tholuck came up towards the table, laughing, 
 and told us to find our places ; and here, says he, are the places 
 for the American gentlemen. Hackett and I marched up forth- 
 with. And then a merry time ensued, every one examining his 
 own and his neighbors' presents. They were chiefly books, and 
 these simple and useful. On my plate I found a collection of 
 church songs. Hackett had Tholuck's address at the Reformation 
 festival. The Frau Rathinn, to put a joke upon me, had placed 
 in my plate a most whimsical confectionery man with a round, 
 merry face and a jolly, fat figure, dressed in large, old-fashioned 
 coat, red waistcoat and breeches, with a beer-jug under his arm, 
 and with a glass in his hand, in the act of drinking. The whole 
 thing was laughable and occasioned no little merriment. Another 
 table in the hall was set for a poor family, and covered with 
 articles of clothing and food, and they all came in, an old woman 
 and several children, and received them from Mrs. Tholuck. The 
 interview was concluded at about half past ten by Tholuck, by 
 reading the Bible, an address and a prayer, — the best part of the 
 whole. And then we lugged off our booty, huge cakes and all. I 
 had some hesitation, but did as the rest did, and, it being the 
 custom, nobody noticed it. But it was most ridiculous to say 
 good-evening to the Frau Rathinn with hands, arms, and even 
 pockets, full of presents. 'T was a rare chance for fun, and, in 
 my turn, I made the best of it. 
 
 tholuck's personal character and influence. 
 
 Sunday, January 8, 1842. A fine sermon from Tholuck. In 
 regard to the spirit of it, I could almost imagine myself listening 
 to a sermon in New England. Subject ; The Means for Private 
 Christians to Use in Building up the Church. Insisted primarily 
 upon every one's duty to cultivate with all diligence his own 
 spiritual character ; then to exert a religious influence in his 
 own circle, and thus the whole church. In the details he was 
 very practical, earnest, and religious. He seems to stand up here 
 like a great light in the midst of much darkness, bold, very bold, 
 and yet affectionate and kind. His labors must be blessed. In 
 
DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 53 
 
 tlie afternoon our two friends from Scotland, with Hackett and 
 myself, had our Sunday prayer-meeting together, which was very 
 useful to me ; has done me much good and I feel its effects to 
 be most refreshing and salutary. So good is it to find a few here 
 with whom one can converse on common religious topics of 
 Christian experience and unite in prayer and praise. We spoke 
 much of our relations here as Christians to students and others in 
 society with whom we might become acquainted. I have not 
 been careful enough thus far to exhibit the example of a Christian, 
 and to seek opportunities to introduce the subject and make some 
 religious impressions. I have suffered myself to be too much 
 absorbed in intellectual matters. A few evenings ago, at Tholuck's, 
 he alluded to this topic in relation to foreigners who had been 
 here, and made some remarks which awakened me to thought and 
 feeling with regard to my own remissness. He was surprised, he 
 said, that English and American Christians who had been here 
 had not more earnestly improved casual opportunities to exert 
 a directly religious influence. It put me at once upon self- 
 examination, and I could not but be surprised and ashamed that 
 within the last eight months here I had so sunk the Christian in 
 the student. In the evening took tea with Tholuck in his study, 
 as his lady was out of the city. He was unusually agreeable and 
 instructive in conversation, — spoke casually of his religious re- 
 lation to the late Olshausen. He was the means of the conversion 
 of Olshausen when they were at Berlin, Tholuck a student and 
 Olshausen a privat-docent. Olshausen used to laugh at him for 
 his pietism. Tholuck remonstrated, told him he knew nothing 
 about the matter, and urged him to serious consideration, the 
 result of which was his conversion. Also of a visit which he 
 made to De Wette when he was not long ago in Basle. In regard 
 to evangelical Christianity said De Wette was fluctuating, waver- 
 ing (^gebrochenes, Ja — Nein). After a conversation in regard to 
 the present theological controversies in Germany, De Wette told 
 him he felt the controversies to be going on in his own soul ; had 
 no firm resting - place ; spoke of Tholuck's recent review of his 
 " Commentary of the First Three Gospels ; " said he felt it to be 
 very severe ; was chiefly concerned that Tholuck would not allow 
 that he was a Christian ; said he believed a new spirit had come 
 into the world since the time of Christ ; this, Tholuck told him, 
 was very vague ; one must have a more particular faith than this 
 to be a Christian. With regard to miracles, he said, I believe in 
 
64 DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 
 
 animal magnetism, and of course also in miracles. He has a 
 religious wife, who, he said, was always urging him to practical 
 religion, so that the Pietism controversy was also daily going on 
 in his own house. Tholuck speaks of him as a man of much soul, 
 and also one who has had true religious impressions ; a favorable 
 indication that he is so sensitive in regard to the title of Christian ; 
 here he differs heaven-wide from Strauss, who scorns the name 
 from his very heart. 
 
 WEGSCHEIDER AND THE DECLINE OF OLD RATIONALISM. 
 
 January 10. Heard Wegscheider to-day for the first time, 
 the Coryphaeus here of Old Eationalism. He reminds me some 
 of our older New England Unitarians, e. ^., Norton, both in 
 intellectual character and way of using the Bible. A man of 
 dry Verstand, doing away with all mystery in religion, and be- 
 lieving only what he can understand, and explaining away the 
 richest parts of the New Testament. He seems a quiet, sober 
 sort of man ; rather pleasant delivery ; lectures right on, and 
 when the clock strikes, gets up and walks out. His day is gone 
 by. He had to-day only sixteen to hear him, which is not far 
 from the usual number. In his best days he has had hundreds 
 in his lecture-room. But that Zeit-Geist has passed away, and 
 with it his popularity. 
 
 AN INTERNATIONAL DINNER-PARTY. 
 
 January 26, 1842. To-day has come off a dinner in Halle on 
 the occasion of the baptism of the Prince of Wales. It was 
 started by an English gentleman residing here, joined in by the 
 other English here, and the " two Americans," and some of the 
 professors and citizens. Gesenius and Leo were the most active. 
 Tholuck present, Friedlander, Erdmann, Bernhardy, etc. It went 
 off with great eclat. Davidson toasted the King of Prussia and 
 with English honors ; then the Prussian song ; Gesenius toasted 
 the Queen of England ; then " God Save the Queen ; " Pernice, the 
 President of the United States ; Leo, the Prince ; and Hackett, 
 the University; speeches good, and well received; afterward 
 speeches from Friedlander in English, " Merry Old England ; " 
 Gartz, in English and German, " Leo, the Old Saxon ; " Rosen- 
 berger, " Gesenius, Leo, and Davidson." The wine flowed merrily, 
 "the flow of soul," too, and all were in excellent humor. Gesenius 
 and Leo spoke with each other for the first time for many years. 
 
DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 55 
 
 The former was lively enough, going all round the table, drinking 
 to " Old England ; " he had drunk quite enough wine. After 
 dinner, cigars, coffee, etc. ; then singing, German, English, Scotch, 
 and American. Leo and some round him kept up German ; 
 Eobertson and the rest of us the remainder. Von Reich wanted 
 Yankee Doodle ; thereupon I struck it up without the words^ 
 because I did n't know them. Funny enough ! but everything was 
 going on so merrily that one could sing anything. He afterward 
 oame to me and got me to hum the melody to him, as he wished 
 to retain it in his memory. Leo struck up among others " Gau- 
 deamus." He sang also " Auld Lang Syne," " Scots Wha Hae," 
 *' Merry May the Boat Row," " Duncan Gray," and others. We 
 got a crowd around us and made it go off merrily. There was a 
 singular mingling in my mind of these professors as I had im- 
 agined them in books, and as I found them here. It was odd 
 enough to me to sit between Leo and Tholuck and go halves with 
 them. Hackett was nearly opposite me, between Delbriick and 
 Bernhardy ; Davidson at one end, Gesenius at the other, Leo 
 exactly opposite Hackett. We broke up about eight P. m., six 
 hours in all. I shall not forget the farewell Gesenius gave us 
 young fellows as we crowded about him and bade him good- 
 night. 
 
 A SERENADE TO THOLUCK. 
 
 January 28. To-night I have just witnessed a very interesting 
 scene, illustrative of University life, worthy of record, a serenade 
 to Tholuck by the students. It has been elicited by the fact of 
 his having been recently created a Knight of the Red Eagle. My 
 lodgings being next house to Tholuck's, I have had a fine oppor- 
 tunity of seeing from beginning to end. The students and others 
 began to collect about eight o'clock in little knots about the street, 
 and the musicians and singers collected before the University 
 building, but a short distance from the professor's residence. The 
 music was for some time delayed, as the professor happened to be 
 not at home, and was at Gesenius' house on some University busi- 
 ness. He was sent for by the Frau Rathinn, and came as soon as 
 practicable. By this time the street in front of the professor's 
 house, and some ways both sides, had become quite thronged with 
 students and citizens. The windows of the adjacent houses were 
 filled with heads ; all were on the qui vive of expectation. Then 
 were brought into the streets, from Tholuck's, tables and candles 
 for the use of the musicians, and directly we heard the music and 
 
66 DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 
 
 procession from the University. As soon as the music com- 
 menced, the professor, with his pretty little wife, appeared from 
 above at one of the drawing-room windows. Their appearance 
 excited a general agitation through the whole dense crowd. My 
 heart leaped within me to think of the contrast between his pres- 
 ent position and that which he occupied when he first came to 
 Halle. Then he was compelled to bar his windows and doors 
 against the rude assaults of a tumultuous mob bent upon the most 
 open and violent demonstrations of their hatred of his theologi- 
 cal opinions and deeply religious character. By their insults and 
 persecution gladly would they have driven from their University 
 and city one of the ablest and most learned scholars, and one of 
 the kindest and humblest men, that Germany has ever known. 
 But time had passed away ; he had quietly but earnestly gone on in 
 his vocation ; he had lived down opposition, had won his way into 
 general esteem and love ; and there he stood quietly at his own 
 open window, looking down upon hundreds of German students 
 assembled to do him public honor. After one of the musical pieces, 
 suddenly the name of the professor, prefixed by his titles of honor, 
 came forth from a stentorian voice amid the crowd, and instantly 
 uprose from the whole multitude, once, twice, and yet again, louder 
 than ever, the enthusiastic shout. Long live Tholuck ! The effect 
 was sublime. It was a worthy tribute to genius and piety. Af- 
 ter more music the professor leaned forth from the window, and 
 amid the deepest silence addressed the students. He told them 
 the world abounded in crowns and badges of honor, but the only 
 earthly crown to which he aspired was the love of his students. 
 He reminded them of the controversial character of the times, 
 Halle, above all others, the scene of controversy. To-night he had 
 a proof that, notwithstanding, mutual esteem could be felt and 
 expressed ; a very happy, religious conclusion of his address, short, 
 good, every way apt and to the point. 
 
 A VISIT TO LEIPSIC AND ITS PKOPESSORS. 
 
 February 7. Have spent three days in Leipsic ; Jiospitaling in 
 the University. Heard Tuch in Theological Philology ; formerly 
 in Halle ; the present his first semester in Leipsic. Himself and 
 Gesenius personal enemies ("no mantel from such Tuch," — yes, 
 there will; such as "war niemal Ges(eh)en"). About twenty- 
 five hearers, on Genesis. Distinct, pleasant enunciation, manner 
 lively, interesting. In outward appearance quite spruce, a leetle fin- 
 
DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 57 
 
 ical, rings on his fingers not a few. Haupt, on Old Grerman. Mid- 
 dling size, stout-built fellow, face round and large, dark complexion, 
 and long, black hair. Most comfortably easy, at home in posture 
 and whole manner of lecturing. Only about a dozen present. 
 Then Wester mann, on Plutarch. One of the best in classics there, 
 but lecturing to half a dozen. Whole appearance that of a scholar, 
 manner wanting in animation. Wachsmuth on Koman History. 
 Was delighted with him ; seemed to be over forty ; in dress and out- 
 ward appearance quite simple, rather rustic ; seemed full of good 
 humor, and enthusiastically interested in his subject. Extempore 
 and very animated. Winer, — the learned Winer ! Not pleased 
 either with his outward appearance or manner of lecturing ; quite 
 indifferent in both. No one would be at all impressed by them. 
 Was lecturing on Protestant Theological Literature. Voice low 
 and indistinct, read every word and very fast, except a small part 
 which was dictated. His dress a little peculiar by a dress-coat 
 buttoned up tight to the neck. About a hundred hearers, utmost 
 attention. Most of the students either medical or law. Disgusted 
 with their general appearance and manners ; rude, ill-dressed, and 
 boisterous; came in eating apples, cake, etc., and smoking cigars, 
 — one fellow smoked all lecture time. 
 
 LITEKATURE, SUPPER, AND GESEGNETE MAHLZEIT. 
 
 February 17. Have been to-night to a Gesellschaft at Tho- 
 luck's, — ladies and gentlemen. Professors Witte, Blanc, Bern- 
 hardy, Ulrici, Pastor Dryander, etc. The first hour was occupied 
 in a familiar lecture from Witte, on Dante, to which we all lis- 
 tened as in a lecture-room, the ladies, meanwhile, sitting round the 
 room knitting stockings. After this followed a supper, which 
 was the main part, which occupied all the rest of the time. The 
 Frau Rathinn put me on her right, and a lady on my other side to 
 whom I had n't been introduced. The custom always here is to 
 put each guest's name on his plate, and every one is to find his 
 place for himself, of which trouble I was relieved by her Lady- 
 ship. I amused myself by talking English partly with Mrs. 
 Tholuck, and partly Deutsch with my other neighbor, but had to 
 keep my wits about me amidst such a hubbub of sounds. The 
 supper consisted of courses of fish and flesh, then dessert of 
 cake and confectionery, lastly bread, cheese, etc., wines, red 
 and white. The carving, I noticed, was not done by the master 
 of the house, but entirely by the guests. On Professor Witte, at 
 
68 DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 
 
 the left of Frau Rathinn, devolved the duty of carving a huge 
 turkey, which, after divers cuttings and slashings, he effected. The 
 legs he passed to Frau Rathinn to carve, of which I tried to 
 relieve her, though, from being awfully pressed for room between 
 the two ladies, 't was a difficult enterprise. Meats, etc., were all 
 passed from one to another, as I notice at dinners. The company 
 was very lively, even noisy, at table, — as much as I could do to 
 know what I was about. The whole broke up at about haH past 
 ten. There was much more formality in manners than with us ; 
 bowing intolerable, so many bows and so low. As we rose from 
 supper I noticed the whole room was suddenly in a bowing attitude, 
 and especially all making up their way towards the lady of the 
 house for that purpose. I took it for granted it was the parting 
 salutation, but found it had mere reference to the supper. One of 
 the professors came to me, and exclaimed, bowing low, Gesegnete 
 Mahlzeit^ — blessed supper ! I asked for explanation, and found 
 this was the meaning of all the uproar ; what nonsense ! In en- 
 tering the room and leaving there was a vast deal of bowing. 
 
 A QUIET DINNER AT PROEESSOR LEO'S. 
 
 March 18. Dined to-day with Leo. Two Wittenberg young 
 doctors, Voigt of the Paedagogium, Hackett, and myself. Leo 
 was very lively and entertaining. He seems much interested in 
 America and all its affairs, and intimately acquainted with the 
 geography, present condition, etc., of the States, especially the 
 western and the remoter territories. He showed me maps, pic- 
 tures, etc., illustrating the United States. Leo's wife was unusu- 
 ally agreeable and full of animation. I had a long talk with her, 
 and she seemed very much afraid Leo would take it into his head 
 to go to America. She would like to go herself for the journey 
 and see the country, but not to remain. She spoke of Prentiss 
 and Smith, whom she knew. Leo also remembered Sears. Leo 
 spoke very favorably of Alexander's Transcendentalism. 
 
 A READING CIRCLE. 
 
 March 21. To-night at a reading circle at Von Tippelskirch's, 
 a pastor in the vicinity of Halle. Tholuck, Muller, with their 
 ladies, and others ; conversation, reading, Southey's " Wesley " 
 translated, supper, etc. Miiller, for a man of his talents and posi- 
 tion, extremely retiring and reserved. He read " Wesley." Tho- 
 luck not so lively as usual. Tippelskirch, a man of good talents 
 
DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 59 
 
 and education, and warm, genuine piety. A parish of about 2,000. 
 He says they are an irreligious, immoral people. His predecessor 
 was a man of bad character. Tippelskirch's wife is a very good 
 and cultivated woman, and of noble family, — a countess, — very 
 quiet and reserved. He was in Italy five years, chaplain to the 
 Prussian embassy. He knew Chace in Rome, and spoke of his 
 baptizing an English gentleman there. These circles are very 
 common here. 
 
 VACATION TOUR ON FOOT THROUGH SAXON SWITZERLAND. 
 
 ^TAT. 25. 
 
 May 24, 1842. Just returned from a tour with a party of stu- 
 dents to Dresden and the Saxon Switzerland, — in student's style, 
 on foot. The chief articles of equipment were a knapsack, large 
 enough for all that is absolutely necessary, a loose linen blouse, or 
 smock frock, — a common article of dress on the Continent, — a 
 cane, and a pair of stout, easy shoes. But a no less indispensable 
 arrangement is a pipe, with an accompanying stock of tobacco, 
 which many an American student would regard as a luxus^ an 
 application, however, of a favorite expression in a German stu- 
 dent's vocabulary, which he would pronounce a gross perversion 
 of language. With a party as large as ours, too, a student's song- 
 book is never left behind, and is a constant source of delight. 
 The journey to Dresden we made by railroad, the distance being 
 too great and the road too uninteresting for walking. We reached 
 Dresden in the evening, and paraded up through the Neu Stadt, 
 over the magnificent bridge by the Catholic church palace, through 
 Alt Stadt to the Kleine Rauch-Gasse, the rendezvous here for 
 students, especially from Halle, and a very good hotel. Next day 
 I went to the Picture Gallery, and spent there the whole morn- 
 ing, till it closed at one. The pieces there of Raphael, Correggio, 
 Titian, and Dolce are exquisite, the Madonna of Raphael a won- 
 der in art, — that heavenly face I can never forget. In the even- 
 ing I went to the Opera, a magnificent house, inside and out, the 
 decorations very splendid. The piece was " Robert den Teufel ; " 
 the singing of Robert, Bertram, Isabella, and Alice very fine ; 
 Isabella exquisite ; my first opera ; enjoyed it most exceedingly ; 
 but the dancing! The opera strikes me as a mixture. The 
 acting must always seem unnatural in connection with music and 
 song. This particular piece did not please me, the idea a most 
 general one, the conflict between good and evil in man, and indif- 
 
60 DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 
 
 f erently carried out. Next morning I went to church, first to hear 
 Ammon, the great Rationalist, the house full and sermon full of 
 stale moral maxims. Thence I went to the royal Catholic church 
 and heard high mass, — such mummery ! The church is con- 
 nected behind by a little covered gallery with the palace, through 
 which the king and royal family, all of them Catholic, though the 
 country is Lutheran, enter the church. I saw them at the bow- 
 windows above, at one side of the altar, their places entirely sepa- 
 rated from the rest of the audience. In the afternoon most of our 
 party started for the tour, myself and a fellow-student stayed be- 
 hind, intending to join them next day at Pillnitz. Next morning 
 at six we went by steam, a pleasant sail of an hour, to Pillnitz, the 
 residence of the king in summer. We mounted, on foot, the steep 
 ascent behind the palace, saw the ruins of the old castle, and 
 gained the Porsberg summit ; thence down through the Liebetha- 
 ler Grund, a very beautiful two hours' walk to Lohmen; drank 
 milk at a mill on the little stream, and between high, perpendicu- 
 lar rocks clambered up the ascent by steps in the rock through 
 Lohmen, and after a mile's walk came to the Uttewalder Grund. 
 On the way we joined a pleasant party of four fellows with a 
 guide, two young Prussian officers from Konigsberg, a Russian, 
 and a Pole. They were very much interested about England and 
 America, and we had some pleasant conversation with them. 
 Then came an hour's walk through the Grund, wilder, more ro- 
 mantic than the former, the passage often very narrow, between 
 high rocks, in one place only a few feet apart, an awful place, 
 called Hell, dark, low, roofed over by rocks, some of which have 
 fallen down and filled up the passage, then another cave, called 
 Devil's Kitchen. We came at length to the Bastei, the first place 
 of importance in the route, a huge mass, close by the river bank, 
 800 feet high. A good hotel on the summit and plenty of people 
 we found here ; music, drinking beer, all sorts of things going on 
 here, gentlemen, ladies, children, etc. Two or three parties of stu- 
 dents, and the singing went merrily. The view from the Bastei 
 was fine : the river below, then a cultivated country stretching away 
 and bounded by mountains, the Liiienstein and Konigstein the 
 chief, then behind the Bastei very wild scenes, high, single rocks 
 shooting up several hundred feet and separated by deep chasms. 
 We made our way down by steps in the mountain to a little place 
 called Rathen. And here we had glorious scenes, lots of students, 
 the party with whom we came, and the house already full ; such 
 
DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 61 
 
 running and roaring, such screaming for soup and food of all sorts 
 in the dining-hall, such snatching and claiming property when a 
 dish came in, and after all such arrangements for sleeping ! I 
 slept with my friend and our party of four in one room, three of 
 them on beds, the fourth on a sofa, and we on a pile of straw on 
 the floor, with one sheet, a narrow covering, and our knapsacks 
 for pillows. A memorable night that ! About twenty students 
 slept in the cockloft on straw, with a plentiful scarcity of pillows 
 and beds among them. We heard them singing and roaring long 
 after we got into our nest. Morning came, and the students were 
 off before us. We parted with our friends and then went on our 
 way through a pretty valley called Amsel Grund, to the Hockstein, 
 a rock running up on the side of the Elbe some 500 feet. From 
 the main road we reached it by a little footpath, and at the end 
 by a frail bridge, flung over a deep, yawning chasm, called Wolfs- 
 schlucht. The prospect was very beautiful, the green of the trees 
 below with the dark shade, and then the winding river and the 
 opposite castle of Hohnstein and the village. This in former 
 times was a stronghold of robber knights, this rock a sort of look- 
 out for the opposite castle. We made our way down to the river 
 through the Schlucht by a very narrow, steep passage, partly 
 steps cut in the rock, partly a rude ladder-work; then climbed 
 the steep ascent to the village. Here I satisfied my hunger and 
 thirst with fresh milk, cold meat, bread and butter, and had a 
 chat with a very pretty, rosy-cheeked, Hohnstein maiden. From 
 there we went onward and soon came to a place called the Brand, 
 where another fine view is afforded. Here we came up with a lot 
 of students, and joined them. A dusty, disagreeable walk we had 
 till we came into Schandau, about half past two, a considerable 
 town on the Elbe. Here we found a good house, and had a good 
 time, with coffee and cigars and pleasant talk. We found here a 
 party of ladies and gentlemen, whom we met on the mountain 
 bridge at the Bastei, a German pastor and wife with a pretty, 
 black-eyed, lively daughter of nineteen, and a gentleman and wife, 
 relatives, all going our way. We filled two coaches, and rode to 
 the foot of the Kuhstall, — here a miserable, artificial fall. 
 Thence, tug-tug, began our ascent, with the Kuhstall, the Little 
 and finally the Great Winterberg stretching away above us. The 
 Kuhstall is a singular natural arch some eighty feet wide and 
 nearly as high, through which, and on top of which, reached 
 through a narrow cleft in the rock, a mingled scene of rocks and 
 
62 DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 
 
 trees, rising and piling upon each other, is before the eye. From 
 here we raced down the hill through fields and forests to the foot 
 of the Little Winterberg. The singing of the students, with the 
 additional excitement of ladies in the party, was thrilling and full 
 of quickening effect ; in going down through narrow, rocky ways, 
 especially so where the voices bounded over each other and were 
 echoed through the valley and up the hills. The ascent to the 
 Winterberg was long and extremely fatiguing. The ladies made 
 it nobly, the little one always ahead. Finally we reached the 
 summit, about seven o'clock. A busy and stirring little world we 
 found here, some 1,700 feet above the Elbe, and the highest of 
 the range on this side the river, also a good hotel and well filled. 
 We got a room, with two others, in a little building adjoining the 
 hotel, ours affording a passage to another, where two more were 
 finally deposited by the chambermaid, after we were got to bed, 
 and I had been obliged to turn out and unlock the door and let 
 them in, with the cold air rushing in upon me, with my shirt on. 
 But going to bed was a late operation. The dining-hall was full 
 of people when we made our appearance, and we got seats where 
 we could, and made a hearty supper. After supper we got a table 
 on one side of the hall, with three Tyrolese girls behind us, with 
 guitars. We were soon joined by our lady party, and there sat 
 till eleven, with beer, talk, and singing, alternating songs with the 
 Tyrolese. The old pastor enjoyed it mightily, and the pastorinn 
 and her laughing, lively daughter, no less. Her little black eyes 
 sparkled about among us, and her tongue went glibly, I can well 
 testify. We all separated at length with a Gute Nacht^ and Avf- 
 wiedersehen next morning at sunrise, to see the king of day as- 
 cend over the Bohemian mountains, though for myself no other 
 idea was farther from my hopf than such a romantic vision. I 
 slept soundly, dreaming about steep hills, beautiful prospects, and 
 black eyes, and awoke refreshed about seven o'clock. Nobody 
 saw the sunrise, though some poor devils turned out and mounted 
 the cupola to greet an overclouded sky, and then turn in again 
 with a plague on all romantic notions and dreamings of sunrise. 
 But the clouds cleared away, the air was fresh and delightful, and 
 after breakfast down we went to the Prebischthor, on the whole 
 the most magnificent place in the tour, a huge natural arch, colos- 
 sal in dimensions, and running out into a deep, green chasm, and 
 surrounded by mountains, far and near. One single rock in soli- 
 tary majesty runs up in column form from the chasm below, as if 
 
DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 63 
 
 it disdained all communion with all its kindred, a singular sight. 
 The arch itself 120 feet high ; all the scenery around, from the 
 platform above the arch, is full of wildness. Thence a very de- 
 lightful walk, most of the way by a little stream, till we came at 
 length to an &,wfully hard-named place, Herrnskretschen. Here 
 myself and friend went up the river, and the rest down. We 
 parted with the pastor (after a general toast, *'^Aufgluckliche 
 deine,''^ started by himself) with an invitation to come and see him 
 at Bischofswerda, between Dresden and Bautzen, and a hope on 
 my part that we should meet again in America ! With the black- 
 eyed daughter I parted after great exertions, with no tears in my 
 eyes, and, I believe, tolerably at heart. Thence a pretty sail to 
 Tetschen, and from there a tedious, long ride to Teplitz, the fa- 
 mous German watering-place, especially of princes and nobles. 
 The town nothing remarkable, but the vicinity delightful. We 
 bathed at the city fountain, Stadt Badhaus, and drank some of 
 the water. Here we joined our whole party, who had had about 
 two hours' start of us all the way. From Teplitz on a fine warm 
 morning we marched out to Schlossberg, a little way out of town, 
 and a hard hill it was to climb ; the ruins of an old castle on top, 
 with the ditch around, and all the appearance of former strength, 
 and a beautiful panorama view. I waited behind with my friend, 
 with whom I had made most of the journey, and was finally left 
 entirely alone, as he concluded to go on to Prague with, a gentle- 
 man we met on the summit. So I had a long two hours', dusty, 
 sunny walk, over an unknown way, all to myself, to Aussig, on the 
 Elbe. I reached there just after the others, who had taken an- 
 other road all the way. Thence we took gondel and sailed down 
 river to Herrnskretschen, the last part by moonlight, a most beau- 
 tiful, charming sail. We sang the Ave Sanctissima, which ac- 
 corded exactly with the whole occasion. Late when we left the 
 boat, and after a late supper we were glad to get to bed. Next 
 morning we crossed the river, climbed up the steep bank, and 
 pushed on our way homewards. The most interesting object in 
 our long day's walk (rendered awful to me from the fact of hav- 
 ing bathed in the Teplitz hot water, and got sore feet from it on 
 walking) was the Konigstein fortress. Its lofty situation, some 
 800 feet above the river ; impenetrable strength, standing quite 
 alone and too far from any other height to be reached by guns, 
 and built upon a natural rock basis; its beautiful prospect, — 
 the river below, Lilienstein opposite, and the cultivated meadow 
 
64 DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 
 
 hemmed in by the river, which describes here a graceful bend ; 
 the well, 1,800 feet deep, cut down in solid rock ; all conspire to 
 make a place of extreme interest. It has never been taken, and 
 never will. Napoleon tried it by cannon from Lilienstein, but 
 could effect nothing. We walked as far as Pirna, and from there 
 took omnibus to Dresden, which we reached about dark. I stayed 
 another day in Dresden, half of which I spent in the Gallery, and 
 the afternoon in the Griine Gewolbe, — vaults under the palace 
 containing the collected treasures of the crown, and a most sump- 
 tuous collection, too ! But I was soon satiated ; precious stones, 
 diamonds, costly brilliant objects, how soon they pall upon the 
 sight ! What a contrast with works of divine art ! I took leave 
 of this beautiful Dresden with hope of seeing it again. A dusty, 
 disagreeable railroad ride to Leipsic, and thence to Halle, which 
 we reached at length, heated, fatigued, and sleepy. Ate a light 
 dinner at home, and philosophically spent the whole afternoon in 
 snoozing on my sofa. My windows were open all the time, so that 
 I got a dreadful cold, from which I have been suffering ever since. 
 Here must end my record of a very delightful tour. 
 Zum Andenhen der Sdchischen Schweitz ! 
 
 AN ANTICIPATED TOUR WITH THOLUCK. 
 
 May 27, 1842. Spent the evening with Tholuck and the Frau 
 Rathinn ; no one else there ; their garden rooms most delightful. 
 Both of them in fine spirits. So after all he is not going to 
 Scotland. His doctor protests against it, and his wife too, and 
 himself yields that on the whole it would be imprudent. Well for 
 me that I had not set my heart to go with him. He has now 
 invited me to make the tour of the Rhine with him through 
 Switzerland over Munich and Augsburg. Just what I wanted. I 
 took him up in a moment ; told him I would go with him anywhere 
 on the Continent, and travel anyway he chose. (Must confess I 
 felt flattered at the manner in which himself and wife received 
 my reply. The latter quite broke out in exclamation and proceeded 
 to tell me how I must look out for the health and comfort of the 
 professor.^) This tour with Tholuck is just what I have wished. 
 I shall anticipate it with great delight. 
 
 ^ In the diary these two sentences, probably from feelings of modesty, were 
 very carefully blotted out. The diary here ends abruptly, or, if it was ever 
 continued, the remainder has been lost. 
 
DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 65 
 
 Tholuck recalls this Alpine trip in the following characteristic English 
 letter written by him from Halle, August 28, 1843, to " Rev. John Lin- 
 coln, Studiosus Theol. aus America : " — 
 
 " I am very glad that you have written to me before setting out. 
 Next Monday I must drive to Magdeburg, so that you would just 
 miss me if you should arrive that day. Let me request, therefore 
 as much as I can, to arrange your journey so as to arrive Satur- 
 day evening and right into my house. If you do not, you will 
 leave behind you in Germany a broken heart. I hope to be en- 
 abled to devote you a great part of the Sunday and to enjoy once 
 more in recollection with you the day of the Furca, the Gotthard, 
 Monte Cenere, and so on. 
 
 "You must absolutely devote to me this day. What would 
 Mrs. Tholuck say if you had left Germany without having he- 
 griisst once more that house where you will not soon be forgotten ? 
 I take it for granted that next Saturday evening the railroad will 
 bring you into my house and into my arms." 
 
 On a previous page, in Professor Lincoln's Notes of his Life, refer- 
 ence is made to this journey. Among his letters from Germany, on a later 
 page, may be found some description of a carriage journey, which, how- 
 ever, appears to have been a distinct and shorter excursion. A very in- 
 teresting account of this Alpine journey is found in Witte's " Das Leben 
 d. Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck " (Band II. s. 473-478). From 
 this account we learn that Tholuck's companions were Wedler (for a long 
 time his amanuensis) and " two young American theological students, a 
 Mr. Hay of New York (?) and Mr. Lincoln of Boston. The last was a 
 Baptist, of whom Tholuck was especially fond. ' Oh, how I love that 
 nervous, humorous, intelligent boy,' he wrote once in his diany." The 
 journey was by carriage via Heidelberg to Switzerland. On the way 
 Tholuck was exceedingly ill, and almost wholly unable to sleep. Several 
 days were passed in Berne, where Tholuck, although weak in body, 
 preached with great power. At Interlaken the party visited the Lauter- 
 brunnen waterfall by night, and Tholuck was so refreshed by the Alpine 
 air that next morning they pushed on, arriving at evening at Grindel- 
 wald, and the next at the Grimsel Hospice. There they heard that Pro- 
 fessor Agassiz and Mr. Forbes were on the Upper Aar Glacier, engaged 
 in researches as to glacial phenomena. Next morning the party set out 
 at six o'clock with two guides, to climb to the glacier, 8,000 feet high, 
 each with a long staff. After an hour they came to the ice crevasses, 
 which one must leap over. Into one of these Tholuck sank his long 
 staff ; suddenly it slipped from his hand, and it could be heard as it fell 
 down into immeasurable depths. Tholuck would go no farther, but 
 
66 DIARY OF STUDENT LIFE IN GERMANY. 
 
 returned with one guide, while the others continued, and were received 
 most hospitably by Agassiz in his hut on the ice. In the evening Agas- 
 siz descended to the Grimsel to meet Tholuck. 
 
 The next day the travelers proceeded on foot through the valley of 
 the Rhone over the Furca Pass. It was a rainy day, — stormy, horrid 
 weather, and Tholuck could hardly move, yet forced himself to go on. 
 The next day they walked over the Gotthard, and reached Giornice at 
 eleven at night. Here the crowded, dirty rooms proved so disagreeable 
 that Tholuck decided to go on at any cost, and a wretched little wagon, in 
 which they sat on cross-boards clinging to one another to avoid being 
 jolted out, brought them to Lugano. From Milan the return to Swit- 
 zerland was made by the Simplon. On the way the " Americans " had 
 gone on ahead, and Tholuck and Wedler turned off on a footpath which 
 appeared to be a short cut. Here they came to a chasm some 2,000 feet 
 deep, crossed by a round spruce-tree about twenty feet long, over which 
 they safely crossed, rather than return and seek the road they had left. 
 
 During all this journey Tholuck talked freely of practical religious 
 themes, as was his custom, with the guides, drivers, or others in whose 
 company he might chance to be. Doubtless Professor Lincoln had in 
 mind these instances of what may be called Tholuck's everyday theol- 
 ogy, when he mentions in his Notes and Diary and Letters the name of 
 Tholuck with so profound admiration and gratitude. 
 
LETTEES FKOM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 HAMBURG CUSTOMS AND HABITS. — TRIALS OF BAPTIST MISSIONS. 
 
 {A Letter to ^'The Watchman") 
 
 Hamburg, September 24, 1841. Arrived in this city at about 
 one p. M., after a very pleasant voyage from London, of about 
 fifty hours, in the steamer Countess of Lonsdale. We were saved 
 the trouble and detention of a custom-house examination on land- 
 ing ; but were met on the steps of the wharf by a man of author- 
 ity, with book and pen and ink, who quietly asked our names, 
 profession, and business. Being quite unaccustomed to this pro- 
 cess, I felt instinctively tempted to ask in reply of what possible 
 concern all this was to him. But recollecting that this was but 
 the beginning of evils in traveling on the Continent, I at once en- 
 deavored to check all such improper tendencies. In my turn, I 
 gave him my name, told him I had no profession, and in regard to 
 business was on my way to Germany as a student. On the Con- 
 tinent, a traveler must submit with as good a grace as possible to 
 exhibit his passport vised by an indefinite number of ministers, 
 consuls, and police agents, every time he comes to a place that falls 
 within the limits of a new dominion. To an American, this sys- 
 tem of strict surveillance furnishes constant occasion to keep alive 
 within him the memory of his own country, where one may come 
 and go at will, without molestation, if he only pays his bills and 
 behaves like a quiet, gentlemanly citizen. But the reduction in 
 the rate of charges which he meets with on reaching the Conti- 
 nent is very agreeable to one who has just been traveling in 
 England. It is rather surprising how many little facilities exist 
 in England for lightening the traveler's purse, particularly in 
 regard to servants. It may be estimated that a single look from 
 an English servant costs about sixpence, and all other services are 
 quite in proportion. 
 
 Occupied the remainder of the day in walking about the city, to 
 observe its objects of interest. I had occasion to observe on the 
 streets some of the peculiarities of the place, of which I had be- 
 
68 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 fore heard and read. Saw some of the hired mourners who are 
 employed for funeral processions. They were dressed in black, 
 with short cloaks, powdered wigs, and with plaited ruffs about 
 their necks. A stranger cannot fail, also, to be struck with the 
 appearance of the female domestics in the streets, when on an 
 errand to the market, or to perform some other house service. 
 They are dressed as if for some other purpose, with elegantly 
 worked caps, long kid gloves, and large, gay shawls. They man- 
 age to adjust this last article upon the arm, so as to conceal a 
 basket containing the articles they have just procured from the 
 market or elsewhere. 
 
 Saturday, 25. Called to-day to see Mr. Oncken, the well-known 
 missionary connected with our American Baptist board. Was 
 disappointed to find he was not at home. He is absent from the 
 city, on a tour connected with the mission, chiefly to organize a 
 church in Memel, Prussia, and one in Pomerania, both which have 
 been gathered under interesting circumstances. I gained some in- 
 teresting information from Mrs. O., in relation to the Hamburg 
 mission, and also the mission in Denmark. The civil authorities 
 in Hamburg desist, at present, from all measures of open vio- 
 lence. The delegation of English and American clergy seems to 
 have produced some salutary results. If it has not awakened tbe 
 thoughtful attention of the magistrates and people to the subject 
 of religious toleration, it has, at least, presented to them in a new 
 attitude the little band of Christians on whom they have poured 
 their contempt and denunciations, as well as inflicted civil pun- 
 ishment, by showing that they are connected in opinions, practice, 
 and sympathy with extensive Christian communities in other coun- 
 tries. But still the position of Mr. O. and his fellow-laborers is 
 only one of sufferance. The laws against them have not been 
 relaxed, nor altered in the least degree, and are liable to be en- 
 forced with the same rigor as before. The grand source of all 
 the persecution is to be traced to the established clergy. They 
 are opposed to this missionary movement by the prejudices of 
 education, their station, and by strong considerations of temporal 
 interest ; and all history proves that where serious spiritual errors 
 prevail in a community, such a clergy present the most deter- 
 mined and bigoted opposition to a reformation. They influence 
 the separate families of their congregations, and thus the whole 
 people. These ministers of Christ profess to behold with extreme 
 concern the religious efforts of Mr. Oncken and his brethren. 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 69 
 
 r 
 
 They ask among themselves, To what will all this lead ? These 
 men are invading the quiet, questioning the long-established insti- 
 tions, threatening to subvert the very structure of our church. 
 And associating the progress of truth and of the spiritual king- 
 dom of Christ only with the one form prevailing among them- 
 selves, under the protection of the state, they would fain persuade 
 themselves, and teach the people, that this innovating organiza- 
 tion is pregnant with the seeds of heresy and schism, and des- 
 tined, if not checked and crushed, to retard the progress and 
 even extinguish the existence of Christianity in the community. 
 It may be that these clerical gentlemen have yet to learn that this 
 divine religion may not be dependent upon any one particular 
 form, least of all, a state-established form ; nay, may flourish, and 
 win its best victories, even amid many forms. 
 
 The Denmark Mission continues in a very critical state. The 
 trial of the brethren has terminated unfavorably, as was feared. 
 They are condemned to a heavy fine, and commanded to desist 
 from their labors. To this they cannot submit, and have appealed 
 to a higher court, the highest judicial tribunal in the kingdom. 
 In the mean time, the missionaries are kept in prison. Here, too, 
 it is the priesthood who keep alive the flame of persecution. The 
 queen is said to be disposed to toleration, but is kept back by their 
 influence. Many of the people sympathize with the persecuted, 
 and one or two of the public prints espouse their cause. It is a 
 singular fact that the presiding ofiicer of the court before whom 
 the trial has already been held was removed, pro tem.^ from his 
 office, because it was known that he was a man of liberal opinions, 
 and it was feared that he would pronounce a decision favorable to 
 the prisoners. I have learned that he frequently visited them in 
 prison, exhorted them to constancy, and even avowed to the pris- 
 oners that his opinions and feelings were with them. The whole 
 subject has awakened general interest in Copenhagen. Whatever 
 may be the immediate results of this affair, it cannot be doubted 
 that a train of causes has been set in operation which will result, 
 sooner or later, in the more correct views of religious freedom and 
 the advancement of a simpler, purer Christianity. 
 
 26th. It has been Sunday here to-day, but not the Sabbath. The 
 distinction is quite necessary. To the exclusion of its peculiar 
 sacredness, the general idea of a holiday, partly in a religious and 
 partly in a secular sense, seems to be the one entertained here 
 with regard to this day. And, with the exception of England, 
 
70 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 this is probably the case throughout Europe, both in theory and 
 practice. The general outward aspect of this city to-day would 
 remind a New Englander of a Fourth of July celebration, though 
 indeed he would miss those great Sabbath-school celebrations 
 which, of late years, have become such an important and delight- 
 ful feature in the festivities of our national jubilee. 
 
 Yet, on some accounts, this has been a day which I shall not 
 soon forget. It is more profitable and delightful to visit those 
 missionary spots and scenes which have gained a kind of sacred- 
 ness from long association with the " Monthly Concert " and the 
 " Missionary Magazine." It gives one some insight, as for the 
 first time, into the nature of a missionary life, and helps him, not 
 to laud in unfelt words, but to feel in his heart the blessings of a 
 more favored land, and especially the priceless value of a religious 
 freedom. To see a little band of the disciples of Christ gathered 
 together like the disciples in Jerusalem, " in an upper room," and 
 for a similar reason isolated in the midst of a great city, con- 
 temned, despised, threatened with fines and imprisonment, and 
 liable at any moment to be interrupted in the midst of their devo- 
 tions and dispersed by the civil authorities, is a spectacle which 
 awakens in one's mind a throng of interesting reflections, which 
 may have occurred to him before, but have never come home to 
 his bosom with that freshness and life with which they are now 
 invested. And who on earth can suggest any satisfactory reason 
 why such a moral phenomenon should be allowed to exist, espe- 
 cially in a professedly Christian city? 
 
 At nine o'clock I went to Mr. Oncken's house, to be present at 
 the services of his church. They are compelled by the laws to 
 meet in this private manner, though from their number it is very 
 inconvenient. They meet twice on the Sabbath, half the church 
 at a time. Found the room full, and people in the entry and on 
 the stairs. In the absence of Mr. Oncken, Mr. Kbbner officiated. 
 The services being in German, I could only catch a word here 
 and there, and understood but little. But still they were full of 
 interest. The natural language of the preacher and his hearers, 
 in connection with all the circumstances, was quite enough for the 
 mind and heart. Throughout, and especially in his prayers, Mr. 
 K. seemed pervaded with the truest earnestness. His eloquence 
 was of the heart, and his gestures, his expressions of countenance, 
 his whole frame, united with the voice in giving utterance to the 
 life-giving truth. And in silent attention, and apparently with 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 71 
 
 the fullest sympathy, his audience heard his words. It was of 
 itself an eloquent spectacle to observe the solemn earnestness visi- 
 ble on every countenance. It was good to be there. In a scene 
 so full of influences congenial to devotion, a spot which seemed to 
 afford unwonted nearness in prayer, one could but lift his soul to 
 God in humble thanks for the gift of the gospel, and in petition 
 for these his servants, who felt its rich blessings in their own 
 hearts, and in the midst of obloquy and persecution were seeking 
 to shed them abroad in the hearts of their fellow-men. 
 
 OLD-TIME RAPID TRANSIT. — JOURNEYMEN. — LEIPSIC IN FAIB 
 TIME. — GERMAN LANGUAGE AND GERMAN BEDS. 
 
 (A Letter to ''The Watchman:') 
 
 Hamburg, September 26, 1841. We leave to-night for Leipsic, 
 with the comfortable prospect of riding forty hours by coach, 
 night and day. By means of this conveyance, and the line of 
 steamers from London to Hamburg, one may go from London to 
 Leipsic in five days. And allowing fourteen days for a passage 
 across the Atlantic in one of the Cunard steamers, and one day 
 from Liverpool to London, it is thus possible to accomplish a 
 journey from the good city of Boston to the city of Leipsic, a dis- 
 tance of some 4,500 miles, in less than three weeks ! Verily, we 
 can get beyond the vulgar ideas of time and space without the 
 help of a spiritual philosophy ! 
 
 Tuesday, 28. This conveyance goes by the German name of 
 Schnell Post (^Quick Post). Its rate of progress, however, does 
 not well correspond with its name, thus far at least, not more than 
 five miles an hour, and renders it not unworthy the name some- 
 times given it by the incorrect pronunciation of English travelers. 
 Snail Post. All the carriages, offices, and buildings belong to 
 the government, and are superintended by its officers. No one 
 can take a place without showing his passport, and having it vised, 
 and indorsed for the place to which he is going. The road we 
 have found generally good, in some parts macadamized. For 
 about thirty miles from Hamburg it passes through the Danish 
 territory of Lauenburg. The country affords good material for 
 macadamizing, in the boulder rocks of slate and granite which are 
 scattered over it and are said to be found, indeed, throughout 
 northern Germany. These boulders, from the fact that they do 
 not geologically belong to the country between the Elbe and the 
 
72 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 Baltic, are supposed to have been transported from the mountains 
 of Norway and Sweden by some vast current of water, perhaps 
 the floods of the Deluge. 
 
 A person traveling on any one of these great roads in Germany 
 will become acquainted, by frequent personal observation, with a 
 curious custom which prevails throughout the country. He will 
 observe young men, travelers on foot, decently dressed, and always 
 having a stick in hand, knapsacks on their backs, and above all 
 pipes in their mouths. They are traveling journeymen, called in 
 German, Handwerhshurschen, It is an old rule that no appren- 
 tice shall become a master in his trade until he has traveled sev- 
 eral years, and exercised his trade in other countries. The prac- 
 tical intention of this is to give him some knowledge of the world 
 as well as information about his own craft as it is practiced in 
 other countries besides his own. When he starts on his journey 
 he receives a book in which he is to keep an account of his wan- 
 derings. Whenever he wishes to stop he applies to a master- 
 workman in his trade for employment. If work can be given him 
 he remains for a while ; if not, after a short delay, he journeys on. 
 Sometimes, when work is scarce, he is reduced to extremities, and 
 becomes an object of charity. Whatever inconveniences may 
 belong to such a custom, it is obvious that it may raise up a very 
 intelligent set of workmen. I have seen it stated, upon good 
 authority, that by this means tradesmen are not unfrequently en- 
 abled to speak three or four languages, and acquire a large stock 
 of general knowledge, and become well informed as to the state of 
 many of the countries of Europe. When his wanderings are 
 ended the apprentice comes home, and commences business as a 
 master-workman . 
 
 Wednesday, 29. At about nine A. M. we reached Magdeburg. 
 Here we gladly left stage-coach and proceeded to Leipsic by rail- 
 road, where we arrived at about four p. M. The business of get- 
 ting established in a hotel on the Continent is not so simple a 
 process as in England or America. All hotel-keepers are obliged 
 to submit to the police an account of the arrival and departure 
 of their guests. The " Stranger's Book " is brought to you for 
 the entry, not merely of your name and residence, but also for all 
 manner of things about your private affairs, which it is a study at 
 first to attend to with due order. Then your passport must be 
 sent to the police, a receipt given you, allowing you to remain a 
 stated length of time. At the end of this time, if you wish to stay 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 73 
 
 longer, you must have it renewed, and when you leave town it is 
 delivered back to the authorities, and your passport returned. 
 
 On going out to see the city, we found ourselves in the midst 
 of one of the great Leipsic fairs. It seemed as though all the 
 world had come to Leipsic, and, arrayed in their respective na- 
 tional costumes, were mingled together in the streets in a grand 
 masquerade. All the squares and streets were filled with booths 
 and stalls, in which were exhibited all kinds of goods. But I 
 searched in vain for books, and as I afterwards learned, for the 
 very good reason that there were none. The book trade is not 
 affected by these fairs, except that the booksellers are accustomed 
 to meet together for the mutual settlement of accounts. But a 
 long and tedious ride was a poor preparation for exploring such 
 a scene, and we were glad to make our way back to the hotel. 
 
 The first part of one's residence in a foreign country, when he 
 cannot speak the language, is full of little personal events which 
 will long abide in his memory. His experience is apt to awaken 
 a distinct recollection of the history of the Tower of Babel ; and 
 at such a time the whole affair seems to have been an extremely 
 unfortunate one. He is visited by an order of sensation quite 
 peculiar, and not unfrequently rather uncomfortable. It is the 
 worst sort of a quarantine. You are so cut off from rational, 
 kindly intercourse with your fellow-men, who seem to be moving 
 about you in a kind of panoramic show, that you might as well 
 have your abode on one of the desolate isles of the sea. But one 
 must be sure to keep in good humor, taking special care to laugh 
 a great deal, whatever befalls him ; and for the first few days, 
 even for the supply of ordinary wants, must rely upon his wits 
 and a phrase book. My friend, who is with me, and whose com- 
 pany I have enjoyed during the whole journey from Boston, has 
 remarked to me that there are two German phrases which one 
 ought to have as capital at the outset, namely : IcJi verstehe nicht 
 (I don't understand), and Wie heissen Sie das? (What do you call 
 that ?) He will be sure to find it to his account to make himself 
 a perfect master of these as speedily as possible. The latter is to 
 be used for making acquisitions, and the former chiefly for self- 
 defense, and to be pronounced with as much composure as you 
 can command, when a man takes the liberty to talk to you as 
 though you were a native, and sets up a distracting hurly-hurly 
 of sounds about you, as if you were in the midst of the machinery 
 of a New England steam factory. It matters not at first how- 
 
74 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 ever familiarly one may be acquainted with the language in books. 
 This is an entirely different thing from being able to speak it and 
 to understand it when you hear it spoken. The ear must first 
 pass through its novitiate, and learn to distinguish the sounds 
 with readiness and correctness. Then one may make rapid pro- 
 gress, and then, too, no amount of previous knowledge comes amiss. 
 Everything becomes a source of instruction. There can be no 
 doubt that one can acquire a language in the country where it is 
 spoken, with vastly more pleasure, rapidity, and correctness than 
 at home. There can be no comparison between the cases. You 
 feel that you are really in contact with a language, a living lan- 
 guage, and not a mere collection of printed characters. Especially 
 is one constantly urged, and also furnished with numerous facili- 
 ties, to increase his stock of words, and not only to increase them, 
 which of itself is nothing at all, but to strive with the utmost care 
 to retain them in the memory. This is a point of the first impor- 
 tance in all languages, and hence the invaluable utility of frequent 
 reviewing. The principle of repetition, incessant repetition, can- 
 not be too much insisted upon in the study of languages. Only 
 the practice must be pursued intelligently, and with diligence and 
 interest, and not, as in some instances, as a mere lifeless, inane 
 form. 
 
 One of the most disagreeable things to a stranger, on first com- 
 ing to this country, is the German arrangement for a bed. To an 
 Englishman or an American this seems at first a very extraordi- 
 nary contrivance. It is a striking illustration of the inferiority of 
 the Germans in all practical matters, especially in all that con- 
 cerns the comforts of life. Indeed, there is really no word in the 
 language which fully expresses the English idea of comfort, I 
 had some previous notion of a German bed from a college account 
 of it, which I remember to have once heard, but I was not quite 
 prepared for the reality. As for curtains, or indeed any fixtures 
 whereon to hang them, these things are entirely extraneous to the 
 whole arrangement. Nor is there, properly speaking, any bed- 
 stead. The poor substitute for it is a low, boxlike frame, always 
 constructed for only one person ; and also, in all its dimensions, 
 evidently constructed with a democratic view to people of middling 
 stature, as that class is supposed to be in the majority. A tall 
 gentleman must find himself in very close quarters, and be obliged 
 to use some little ingenuity for the proper bestowment of his 
 whole person. Then the pillows are very large, and make a very 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 75 
 
 low angle with the bed, coming nearly half way down, as if, on 
 going to bed, one intended, on the whole, not to lie down at full 
 length, but only to put himself into a reclining, half-sitting pos- 
 ture. 
 
 But the most peculiar thing is that you not only have a bed 
 under you, but also one above you ; for a feather bed supplies the 
 place of blankets and all other articles of clothing. In sickness, 
 especially in case of a desperate cold, one of these things may 
 have an excellent effect in promoting perspiration ; and perhaps a 
 considerate physician might order two with advantage. But at 
 other times it is liable to the obvious objection of being rather too 
 warm, except in the coldest weather, and then, too, unless one is 
 of very quiet habits, it is liable to be kicked off, and leave the 
 sleeper in the utmost extremity, who, on waking, finds the tem- 
 perature of his body very rapidly sinking to the freezing point. 
 In very warm weather, if the bed keep its position during the 
 v^hole night, it is well if one escape suffocation. I have seen the 
 remark, quoted from Coleridge, that " he would rather carry his 
 blanket about with him, like a wild Indian, than submit to this 
 abominable custom." 
 
 LEIPSIC PUBLISHERS AND PROFESSORS. 
 
 (A Letter to " The Watchman:') 
 
 Leipsic, September 30, 1841. Through the politeness of Mr. 
 Tauchnitz, to whom we brought letters, we have become acquainted 
 to-day with most of the objects of interest in Leipsic. The name 
 of Tauchnitz is familiar to every student, as a publisher, especially 
 of editions of the classics. His establishment is one of the largest 
 in Germany. He is a man of liberal education and of the kindest 
 manners, and also a decidedly pious man. I remember to have seen 
 an allusion to his religious history, in a speech of Professor Sears 
 on the religious condition of Germany, delivered, I believe, at the 
 meeting of the Triennial Convention in New York, in '38. When 
 he first became a Christian, some ten years ago or more, his piety 
 gave so great offense to his father that he threatened to disinherit 
 him, though an only child. But the father not long after died 
 very suddenly, without having made a will, and his son came into 
 immediate possession of his estate. It could not have fallen into 
 better hands. 
 
 In St. Nicholas's Church, considered the finest in the town. 
 
76 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 Luther preached his first Protestant sermon, at the introduction 
 of the Reformation. We saw, in a closet in the church, the identical 
 pulpit in which he preached. Leipsic is celebrated for its Uni- 
 versity, its commercial importance, and its interesting historical 
 events. The University, after that of Prague, is the oldest in 
 Germany, and was founded in 1409. Here, among sixty other 
 professors, and nearly as many privatim docentes^ are Winer, in 
 the department of theology ; and in the classics and classic history 
 and antiquities, Hermann, Wachsmuth, Westermann, and Haupt. 
 The library contains about 100,000 volumes, and the average 
 number of .students is 1,000. We find that it is vacation at present, 
 and the next semester will begin in about a fortnight. 
 
 Three fairs are held here during the year, in January, in March, 
 and in September. During this time, Leipsic is visited by people 
 from all parts of the world, sometimes to the number of 40,000 ; 
 in the year 1834 the names of 80,000 were entered on the books 
 of the police. The sales amount annually to more than fifty 
 millions of dollars. The sale of books is one of the most important 
 branches of business in Leipsic. Indeed, the whole book trade of 
 book-making Germany, which at present is flooding the world 
 with books at the rate of 8,000 per annum, is centred at Leipsic ; 
 and every bookseller in the country has an agent here. At the 
 March fair, the time of their annual meeting, 600 booksellers 
 sometimes meet together for the settlement of their accounts. 
 They have a large exchange building, where they meet for the 
 transaction of their business. 
 
 HALLE. — HIGH LIVING AT LOW COST. — UNIVERSITY LIFE. — PRO- 
 FESSOR AND MRS. THOLUCK. A BRITISH-AMERICAN WAR-CLOUD. 
 
 Here I am in the city of Halle, No. 147 Fleischegasse, alias 
 Butchers' Street (and yet no mean street, I assure you, for 
 Tholuck is my very next door neighbor), in my own study, 
 where I have been living for two weeks in real bachelor style, and 
 expect to remain till spring, and perhaps longer. Indeed, for my 
 tastes there is quite too much of the bachelor about it. My 
 dinner I get at a public place, and my breakfast and supper are 
 brought me by my hostess, or Philista^ as the students say, which 
 I eat all sole alone. Here on my left are now the remains of my 
 supper, — ah ! here is the PMlista herself, saluting me with her 
 '' Guten Abend ^ and coming for the dishes, leaving behind the 
 sugar, butter, etc., which I take care of myself. Just think of 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 77 
 
 me keeping my provisions in one of my drawers in my own room ! 
 Is n't it a funny way of living for me ! She brings whatever I 
 order, keeps an account, and brings it in according to my request 
 every Saturday night. And for the curiosity of it, what do you 
 think these two meals have cost me for these first two weeks? 
 Just about $1.70 ! The meals are as good as I could wish, coffee 
 and bread and butter, and sometimes, when I am disposed to be 
 extravagant, eggs in addition for breakfast, and cake for supper. 
 This is certainly cheap living. For my dinner, at the first hotel 
 in the city, I pay about $4.32 per month. How they can board 
 people at this rate, I can't say. For my lodgings, a study-room 
 and a little bedroom attached to it, I pay at the rate of $22.00 
 per year. They are large enough, comfortable, and have re- 
 spectable furniture, the most important article a large, easy sofa, 
 which is as common with a German student as a rocking-chair 
 with an American. There is also a large sort of secretary with 
 drawers, writing-desk and private drawers, and book-case. Besides, 
 I have attendance, making bed, cleaning room, running errands, 
 etc., included in the above sum. I am living very busily and 
 very happily ; never more so, I assure you, in all my life. I 
 never was conscious of so much life, life of every kind, as now. 
 I will tell you how I pass my day at present ; you don't know how 
 systematic I am ! I rise at six o'clock, make my toilet (the chief 
 of which by the way an entire ablution from head to foot) ; then 
 a short walk, which I accomplish by seven ; then from seven to 
 eight, my coffee and reading German Bible ; then from eight to 
 twelve, study either in my room, or at some lecture, or with my 
 teacher, — in any case, study in German; from twelve to two, 
 exercise and dinner ; from two to three, don't do much but digest 
 my dinner, talking, lounging, etc. ; from three to five, study German 
 in one way or another ; from five to seven, walk and supper ; from 
 seven till I go to bed, study ; retire about eleven ; about going to 
 bed, not over regular, I must confess ; once I pulled my feather 
 hed over me, that is to say, retired, at half past one. My Sundays 
 thus far I devote to the German Bible in the main, and a little 
 English reading in Henry Martyn and Wilson's " Sacra Privata." 
 I have had some most delightful Sunday hours. I have been 
 enrolled, and received my matriculation, as a regular student in 
 the University. The scene with the Prorector and other function- 
 aries on the occasion of enrollment was quite amusing. They 
 could n't speak English at all, and I German but precious little. 
 
78 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 The communication was partly in Latin, partly in German, and 
 on the whole went off quite glibly, — at any rate accomplished the 
 object. At present I attend but one lecture, Tholuck on the 
 first three Gospels. Until I have made more headway I doubt 
 whether I shall attend more, — perhaps, in the course of a month, 
 one other. I am employed on the German now with all my might 
 in every possible way, grammar, reading, lecture, conversation, 
 and anything and everything else. Everything and everybody I 
 make a teacher, besides spending an hour with a regular instructor 
 every day. I have become acquainted with several students, with 
 whom I negotiate exchanges of English for German, and with one 
 I have a walk every day for this purpose. I wish you could hear 
 us talk. I can really jahher German quite decently. They tell 
 me I can talk very well in three months. I begin to have the 
 vanity to believe that I am blessed with considerable natural 
 aptitude in catching sounds, and in general of acquiring the 
 knowledge of a foreign language. It fills one to running over 
 with enthusiasm for study to be thus situated ; and a consciousness 
 of constant progress, in spite of what remains to be done, furnishes 
 the most delicious sensations and a perpetual source of stimulus. 
 I am quite certain that I can now read the German with four 
 times the facility with which I could read it three weeks ago, 
 when I commenced at Leipsic. With Tholuck I have become 
 quite acquainted, and with his charming little wife. The latter 
 took the trouble to inquire about lodgings for us, which were 
 ready as soon as we arrived in Halle. She talks English brokenly, 
 but in a most fascinating way. She has more of what the French 
 call naivete about her than any lady I ever met with. She is 
 small, well-formed, a fine head, black hair and eyes, Grecian nose, 
 and beautiful countenance ; her manners utterly destitute of affec- 
 tation, easy and lady-like. I felt when I was talking with her 
 the other evening, as we were there at tea, as if I were with an 
 unsophisticated girl. I am not sure I have not fallen in love 
 from first sight, the first day I was in Halle. Tholuck I see 
 mostly in his walks, — have had long walks with him. He is a 
 right fine fellow, — what I call a large-souled man. He talks 
 English exceedingly well. I inquired with interest about the 
 other Americans who have been here, all of whom he well re- 
 membered. In lecture and in conversation, his countenance some- 
 times lights up, and seems to undergo an actual change ; such a 
 brilliancy of light playing about it ; his manners very kind and 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 79 
 
 familiar, the manner of a warm, good heart, — not a tincture of 
 school manners ; in dress exceedingly ordinary. He has offered 
 me the use of his library at any time, also to walk, to talk about 
 anything, and I will avail myself, I am quite sure, to the full. 
 
 We have had terrible rumors about McLeod, that he was con- 
 demned, and war was inevitable ! but I did n't believe a word of 
 it. It cannot be — will not be — that England and the United 
 States will go to war ! Horrible ! Pray stop that border war- 
 fare, Mr. President Tyler, and manage in some way to get that 
 McLeod man out of State hands into the power of the General 
 Government, and then Mr. Secretary Webster and Sir Robert 
 Peel will settle the matter amicably and speedily. Enough, this, 
 for politics. You must all be in a dreadful political condition in 
 the United States, with this matter in addition to the party poli- 
 tics. Here, under this despotic monarchy, we live quiet as a 
 summer's eve. Yet I am more a democrat than ever. 
 
 HALLE, ITS PROFESSORS. — REFORMATION CELEBRATION AND 
 SUNDAY BREAKING. — ORIGIN OF A GERMAN BAPTIST CHURCH. 
 
 (A Letter to " The Watchman:') 
 
 Halle, November 19, 1841. In Halle there is but little that is 
 worthy of remark, except the University, and I have been here 
 too short a time to venture at present upon any particular account 
 of this. The winter semester has already commenced. Tholuck 
 is lecturing upon the first three Gospels, and also upon Christian 
 Ethics. In ethics, by the way, he recently remarked to us in con- 
 versation that he had found Wayland's " Moral Science " a very 
 valuable work. He is also intending to get out this winter a new 
 edition of his work on Romans. Gesenius is lecturing upon 
 Genesis. He is just now engaged with a new edition of his He- 
 brew grammar, and is still constantly occupied in completing his 
 Hebrew Thesaurus. Bernhardy seems to be considered the most 
 distinguished man here in the classics. He has published a work 
 on the history of Greek literature, in connection with which he is 
 now lecturing, and also more recently a work on Greek syntax, 
 which last, if it at all corresponds with the accounts given of it, 
 would supply a desideratum with us, if it were translated. Halle 
 is chiefly distinguished, as it always has been, in the department 
 of theology. In the present chaotic condition of German phi- 
 losophy and theology, there are representatives here of all the 
 various opinions and systems. 
 
80 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 Since we have been here, there has been a centennial celebration 
 of the introduction of the Reformation in Halle. It occurred on 
 Sunday, October 31. An interesting historical address was deliv- 
 ered by Professor Tholuck, in the University Aula, after which, 
 Professor Wegscheider, the present dean of the theological fac- 
 ulty, pronounced a Latin oration, and at the close of the services 
 made an announcement of honorary degrees conferred by the Uni- 
 versity. Among these was the degree of Doctor of Theology, con- 
 ferred upon Dr. Robinson of New York. It is a fact worthy of 
 mention, and which I may state upon the authority of Dr. Tho- 
 luck, that this honor has never been conferred by this University 
 upon an Englishman, and now for the first time upon an Amer- 
 ican. One must have a very different view of the Sabbath from 
 that which prevails in New England, to perceive the propriety 
 of these last services upon that day. A Latin oration on the Sab- 
 bath ! Especially, as is not uncommon with such performances, 
 an oration de omnibus rehus^ et quihusdam aliis/ 
 
 A few days ago we had the pleasure of seeing our missionary, 
 Mr. Oncken, who passed through Halle, on his way to Hamburg. 
 We had a delightful interview with him, and were glad to learn 
 that he had successfully accomplished the objects of his tour. In 
 Memel he baptized twenty-nine persons and organized a church. 
 Among the persons baptized was an uncle of Rev. Dr. Hague of 
 Boston. This gentleman is a native of England, but for many 
 years has resided in Memel. It was through his instrumentality 
 that this Baptist church has been formed. Until recently, these 
 Christians, while they held to the baptism of none but adults, still 
 practiced sprinkling ; and in consequence of these views they had 
 all of them been re-sprinkled. Mr. Hague convinced them of 
 their error in regard to the mode of baptism, and it was thus 
 through his means that Mr. Oncken visited them and organized 
 the church. But it is a matter of more importance than any 
 change of views upon baptism, that these persons are earnest and 
 devoted Christians, and are earnestly striving in the midst of 
 many obstacles for the promotion of the truth as it is in Jesus. 
 
 COMMENTS UPON GESENIUS, WEGSCHEIDER, AND ONCKEN. 
 
 GREAT BRITAIN'S REFUSAL TO MAKE HER POSTAL CHARGES 
 REASONABLE. 
 
 Halle, November 25, 1841. I was agreeably surprised, in 
 calling upon that great Hebrew giant, Gesenius, to see on his 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 81 
 
 table a copy of Gould & Lincoln's " Conant's Translation." It 
 looked odd to see it in such a place. The old fellow is a good- 
 natured, gentlemanly fellow as you ever saw. He talks English 
 somewhat, but he certainly talks German much better. We 
 found him quite deshabille^ with his coffee on the table, himself 
 in slippers, easy dress, neck wonderfully loose, and hard at it in 
 study ; great books lying about open upon his table, and every- 
 thing seeming like the den of a lion in science. He loves to 
 laugh, and to laugh with all his might. He talks about Hebrew 
 and about his books with all the enthusiasm of a young man ; 
 remembered Sears very well; inquired about Conant, Stuart, 
 Eobinson, and some others. He has a pleasant, perhaps a little 
 roguish expression of countenance, and in manner lively, and 
 every way gentlemanly. I went to see Wegscheider, too, the 
 other day ; went as a student, to get his signature as dean of the 
 theological faculty, to my Student's Album, as they call it, a 
 book for the insertion of courses of lectures, etc. He lives a little 
 way out of town, on a place belonging to himself which is quite 
 princely for Halle. I found him in his garden. His English 
 was just about as good as my German, and with the two we made 
 out to talk sufficiently for the business. He is very plain in 
 dress and manners, and seems rather stiff and precise. He is one 
 of the old Rationalists, and is, moreover, an old sinner. Gesenius 
 is one of the most attractive lecturers I have heard ; his enuncia- 
 tion is very distinct, his tones very fine, and his whole manner 
 full of vivacity. But he is too much given to trifling and joking ; 
 he does n't make anything of cracking his jokes, and sometimes 
 bad ones, too, over the Bible with eighty or ninety students before 
 him. He is another old sinner. It 's too bad for such fellows so 
 to abuse their talents and learning. Oncken has been here. I 
 had a real good interview and was delighted with the man. He 
 is a whole-souled, energetic. Christian man. His conversation is 
 instructive and lively, inclined to be witty, and gives evidence of 
 a well-informed and very active mind. He speaks English exceed- 
 ingly well. His tour was very successful in all respects. I got a 
 line from the Barings, with my last letters, stating that they had 
 received a package on which there was a postage (English) of 
 nearly ^1, and asking if they should pay it and forward it. Of 
 course I told them I could n't pay so much, and they must leave 
 it in the post-office. The papers you sent with your letter of 
 October first (two packages) had upon them an accumulated 
 
82 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 postage of about f 20.00. Just think of #20.00 for nine Ameri- 
 can newspapers ! I told them I would give them two Prussian 
 thalers, about $1.50, for the lot^ but they would n't take it, and 
 so they got nothing, and the papers were left. It was too hady 
 abominable, that I couldn't have them. I wish I had offered 
 more. 
 
 A CONCERT BY LISZT, AND A PROPHETIC COMMENT UPON AMERI- 
 CAN SLAVERY. 
 
 Halle, January 23, 1842. I attended a concert lately given by 
 Liszt, a celebrated composer and pianoforte player. He plays 
 with exceeding taste ,• a very nice appreciation of sentiment in mu- 
 sic. In particular he sometimes gave the notes such a softness, 
 a dying-away-ness, as to make one feel they were endowed with 
 life. It seemed as though you were drinking in the spirit-lan- 
 guage of some quite ethereal being. What a wondrous thing in 
 all this our wondrous life is music ! 
 
 This week is to come off a dinner in Halle, on the occasion 
 of the christening of the baby Prince of Wales. . . . With our 
 present relations to England in regard to the right of search, 
 Northeast boundary, etc., which Lord Ashburton is coming among 
 you to settle, it would be a delicate matter to say much on such 
 an occasion. That confounded slavery business seems destined to 
 make most serious trouble, and if it does not sooner or later lead 
 to war and dissolution of the Union, I think we may thank the 
 special interposition of Providence. I see that a new item of trou- 
 ble has arisen in relation to a cargo of slaves who mutinied, kiUed 
 the owner and captain, and went into Nassau, and there were^ 
 most of them, set free. Of course the Southern slaveholders are 
 greatly enraged. I see, too, that some proposal is to be made for 
 the admission of Texas into the Union. I hope not, I am sure. 
 As an American I should be ashamed to acknowledge myself a 
 fellow-countryman of such a race of villains and cutthroats. 
 
 A TRIBUTE TO THOLUCK's PERSONAL CHARACTER. — THE UN- 
 AMERICAN CONDITION OF GERMAN WOMEN. 
 
 Halle, February 26, 1842. I wish we had such professors as 
 Tholuck among us, who felt so much interested in young men, 
 could inspire in them so much confidence, enter into their feelings 
 and wants, sympathize with them, and every way strive to do them 
 good. He is the sort of a man in whom I could feel perfectly 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 83 
 
 willing and secure to confide all personal doubts, trials, and diffi- 
 culties ; such a one as a young man in study always yearns to find, 
 but is nearly always disappointed. And then, too, he is so cheer- 
 ful, so full of playful, childlike kindness and love ; shows ever so 
 much of the brother and the friend, while at the same time he 
 tells you more than you can possibly remember ; impresses you 
 with a conviction that you are in contact with a great mind, and 
 inspires you with enthusiasm for all that is beautiful and great 
 and good. It is a great blessing to be near such a spirit as his. 
 He has already given me many impressions I shall never lose. 
 There is no other professor whom I care to see so much of, and 
 from whom, both in private and public, I get so much good. He 
 is as able and learned as any of them, superior to most, indeed 
 on the whole the most conspicuous man here, and still evangelical 
 and truly pious. Such a combination in a German professor is 
 very rare. Then he knows, better than any man here, the state 
 of opinion and feeling, and society in general, in England and 
 America, and is extremely interested in all the movements there. 
 In speaking of men and books he frequently speaks of their rela- 
 tion to our country. " Such a book," he will say, " would suit 
 your people very well ; such a man's spirit and writings are not 
 adapted to your state of society." In all respects he is probably 
 to me a more useful man than any other I could find in Germany. 
 Women seem to be brought up here to all sorts of work, such 
 as dragging carts through the streets, mud-scows through the 
 water, cutting up ice in the street with a pick-axe, and other such 
 feminine employments. I was walking along the banks of the 
 Saale and saw a man sitting quietly at the helm of a clumsy 
 craft in the river, and a woman on a footpath on the bank, with a 
 rope tied round her waist, hauling the craft and man along 
 through the water. Then in the streets one sees women pulling 
 along heavy carts and the man behind or one side, ostensibly push- 
 ing and helping, but really exercising a kind of superintendence, 
 and seeing that the things don't fall off. Then they lug im- 
 mense loaded baskets on their backs, containing country produce, 
 or provisions, and all sorts of things. This last is the most com- 
 mon sight in the streets. I have seen old women with baskets on 
 their backs that made them bend double. 
 
84 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 From " The Watchman,'' September 16, 1842. 
 
 (We have been so much pleased with the perusal of a private letter from 
 a young friend of ours, now a student in Germany, that we venture to 
 present some extracts to our readers. The picture which it presents of 
 the learned Professor Tholuck, in the free intercourse of private life, and 
 amid the varied scenes of a journey, on which he was accompanied by 
 the writer, is highly interesting.) 
 
 Our arrangements for traveling are admirable. We have a 
 large two-horse barouche for the whole route, hired in Halle, and 
 are four in number, there being besides Professor Tholuck and my- 
 self, his amanuensis and an Americo-German student from Penn- 
 sylvania. We can travel just as fast, and just when, and just how 
 we please, making digressions sometimes on railroad or steamboat, 
 or the best part on foot, sending, in such cases, the driver with 
 most of our baggage on before. We have thus far traveled about 
 forty English miles a day. Professor Tholuck's health is very 
 delicate, — indeed, it always is, — his nerves extremely irritable, 
 and his whole frame subject to pain and disorder. He has at best 
 but a shattered, feeble constitution. 
 
 On the journey it is especially difficult for him to find a suffi- 
 ciently quiet sleeping-room. It is impossible for him to sleep 
 until every sound in the house is hushed, and in the night the least 
 noise in his vicinity awakes him. I never knew a man so pecu- 
 liar in this respect, so excessively sensitive. Then he has a long- 
 standing bowel complaint from which he suffers, often intensely. 
 And yet he is the soul of our party, the most lively, entertaining 
 of us all. Such an activity of soul, such wondrous intellectual 
 life ! He walks more than all of us together, up hill and down, 
 and drives ahead like one possessed ; and then when he gets into 
 the carriage again, apparently exhausted, some question or remark 
 will put his spirit into action, and he will be as full of life as if 
 he was in perfect health and strength. He has talked with us 
 several times in answer to our inquiries about his early life, his 
 studies, etc., and has given me enough to think of for a year. 
 One day hfe was so unwell that he said he must go back, and we 
 made arrangements accordingly as soon as possible, but he recov- 
 ered and felt better, and we went on, much to our rejoicing. He 
 is so kind and affectionate, so brotherly^ I verily love, while I 
 admire him. I think now he will make the whole tour with us. 
 For the last two or three days we were on Catholic soil. The 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 85 
 
 towns and villages, the roadside, exhibit in the statues of the 
 Saviour, Virgin Mary, saints, etc., and crosses without number, 
 the peculiarities of Catholic countries. I must confess that these 
 many Christian emblems and outward signs of Christianity did 
 not affect me disagreeably. The cross teaches in itself the charac- 
 ter and contents of Christianity, and to me there is something 
 extremely interesting to meet with it thus everywhere in a Chris- 
 tian land. 
 
 Heidelberg is a charming place, thrown snugly into the valley 
 of the beautiful Neckar, directly on its left bank, on a narrow 
 strip of land between the river and a high range, on a rugged 
 rocky part of which yet hang the remains of the old castle. 
 These old walls and towers literally hang from the rocky range 
 just above the city, and as I look up to them from our hotel, I 
 can hardly refrain from bowing with reverence to their antiquity 
 and grandeur. I went all over the ruins early this morning. 
 The tower was undermined and blown up by the French, but its 
 walls were so thick and massive — some twenty feet or more — that 
 instead of being thrown to pieces and scattered in the air, the one 
 half of it slid down into the ditch below, and there now remains. 
 These old ivy-covered ruins have made an impression upon me 
 that can never leave me. The University here is less celebrated 
 for theology than law or medicine, there being in all only seven- 
 teen theological students. There are, however, two or three very 
 distinguished men in the theological faculty, — Ullmann, Um- 
 breit, and Rothe. The students in general study but little, but 
 drink beer, smoke tobacco, and fence, and fight duels at a great 
 rate. 
 
 BERLIN AND ITS UNIVERSITY. — A TORCH-LIGHT SERENADE TO 
 NEANDER. HEGEL AND SCHELLING VS. MORALS AND RELIGION. 
 
 (A Letter to " The Watchman.'') 
 
 Berlin, February 5, 1843. I will cheerfully comply with your 
 request, so far as I am able, and try to give you a glance or two 
 into the life and present goings on of this Prussian metropolis. 
 Of its various attractions, however, of its galleries, its collections 
 of science and of art, and of the many other things that swell the 
 catalogue of its lions^ I must reserve all account till another time ; 
 for, indeed, I cannot speak of the half of them from personal 
 observation, having as yet done but little here in the way of sight- 
 
86 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 seeing. But one thing, in passing, I can tell you, and with all 
 seriousness, as a remarkable fact which has forced itself upon my 
 notice nearly every day during the four months that I have spent 
 here, and that is that Berlin is famous, at least during the winter, 
 for a plentiful scarcity of sunshine and pleasant weather. We 
 have nothing at all like winter, except a few cold days at the end 
 of November, and since that time, in two instances, a very incon- 
 siderable fall of snow. There has been a singular continuity of 
 just such disagreeable weather as that which hangs about New 
 England so tenaciously in the spring, and not at all inferior in all 
 its varieties, Boston and Newport fogs scarcely excepted. Last 
 week we had a lucid interval of two days and a half, and the 
 people thronged out en masse to greet the glad, returning beams 
 of the sun, and the splendid Broadway of Berlin, and the mag- 
 nificent adjoining park, glittering with gay equipages and joyous 
 faces. Our editors tell us that the fact about the weather is not 
 peculiar to Berlin, but is more or less common all over Europe ; 
 and if this be so, we may be sure that some learned and acute 
 German will erelong make a thorough investigation of the whole 
 matter, and furnish the scientific world with some luminous me- 
 teorological speculations, preceded of course by an exhaustive his- 
 torical introduction, containing all the phenomena touching the 
 subject, from the earliest authentic records down to the present 
 time. Notwithstanding, the city has not been at all wanting in 
 the usual gayety of the winter season, and has been visited by a 
 more than ordinary number of strangers, and among them per- 
 sonages of great distinction, kings and their titled representatives, 
 and German princes and princesses not a few. The lovers of 
 musical art are just now favored with the presence of some of the 
 most distinguished ornaments of that art in Europe ; among them 
 Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer the prince of living German composers, 
 Rubini the celebrated tenor, and the pianist Liszt of whose praise 
 all Germany is full, and who created an enthusiasm here last win- 
 ter not surpassed even by that which has been awakened in Amer- 
 ica in late years by the performances of certain European artists. 
 Berlin is, on all accounts, a place of great interest. The capi- 
 tal city of by far the most important kingdom in the German 
 confederation, the residence of the ablest European sovereign 
 (unless, perhaps, we except Louis Philippe, King of the French), 
 and the seat of the first German university, it is a central source 
 of influence to Europe and the world. The policy of the present 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 87 
 
 king, for the fullest development of the resources of the country 
 and the security and elevation of the state, has attracted from the 
 first the observation and interest of intelligent and thinking men 
 in Europe ; and while it is naturally a matter of divided opinion 
 in its bearings upon free institutions, has yet made but one impres- 
 sion in relation to its sagacious and comprehensive character, and 
 has already won for the monarch a high intellectual reputation. 
 On no object has he bestowed a more generous and enlightened 
 interest than on the University in his capital. It has been his 
 cherished plan from the period of his accession, to gather around 
 him here the brightest luminaries of science and literature in Ger- 
 many, and to secure to this institution, established in 1810 by his 
 royal father, the first rank among German universities. In pro- 
 moting this object, he has spared no pains nor expense. He has 
 laid contributions upon all parts of Germany, has selected out 
 from the faculties of other institutions its most distinguished 
 members, occasioning thereby, especially in case of those in the 
 smaller states, an irreparable loss ; so that this University, though 
 one of the youngest in the country, has become the very focus of 
 German literary influence, and can boast a more brilliant constel- 
 lation of genius and learning than any other in Europe. It is 
 indeed a magnificent instance of a university, in the original and 
 proper sense of the word, furnishing the utmost facilities of 
 preparation in teachers, libraries, and apparatus for the various 
 branches of professional and literary life. I venture to say that 
 there is no subject within the whole range of human knowledge, 
 which one may desire to make a matter of investigation, for the 
 prosecution of which he cannot find here the amplest arrange- 
 ments. The catalogue of lectures is truly a curiosity to one who 
 has never before seen such a document. It contains the pro- 
 posed lectures of some one hundred and fifty teachers, professors 
 ordinarii, extraordinarily and the privatim docentes^ belonging 
 to the four faculties, and not only embraces all the subjects con- 
 nected with the regular professions, and with philosophy and phi- 
 lology, but covers the whole ground of polite and general litera- 
 ture, of abstruse and curious learning ; in short, includes all the 
 topics that the human mind can think of, or dream about, or busy 
 itself with in any possible way. The number of students during 
 the present winter semester is 2,157, and of these the largest 
 number is in the faculty of law, the next largest in the philosoph- 
 ical faculty, and the smallest in the faculty of medicine. The 
 
88 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 faculties of law and of medicine have long been superior to those 
 of any other German university. The place of von Savigny, in 
 the former, the first German jurist and now Prussian minister, 
 has been supplied by Puchta, formerly of Leipsic, who is lecturing 
 here this winter for the first time to a crowded auditory. The 
 various divisions of the philosophical faculty are rich in great 
 names. Among them are Schelling and Steffens in philosophy ; 
 in classical philology, Bekker, Boeckh, Zumpt, and Franz ; in 
 history, Ranke and Raumer, the brothers Jacob and William 
 Grimm, the pioneers and still diligent laborers in the investiga- 
 tion and study of the Old German ; Charles Ritter, in universal 
 geography ; Encke, in astronomy ; Bopp, in Sanskrit, and many 
 others whom I cannot mention. The theological faculty is better 
 filled than any other in Germany, unless that of Halle form an 
 exception, which, however, in the death of the lamented Gesenius, 
 has lost one of its ablest members. Theremin and Strauss, both 
 of them court - preachers, and the former the most eloquent of 
 German divines, lecture upon homiletics and pastoral theology. 
 Marheineke, the veteran disciple of Hegel, still adheres to the 
 Hegelian philosophy, and is lecturing this winter upon the im- 
 portance of its introduction into theology. Twesten is favorably 
 known in the department of systematic theology, two volumes of 
 his works on this subject having been already some time before the 
 public. He holds the place formerly occupied by Schleiermacher, 
 and is one of the warmest admirers of the genius and religious 
 spirit of that great man, and indeed has formed his own theologi- 
 cal system upon the basis of that of Schleiermacher, though free 
 from his peculiar, I may say pantheistic, tendencies, and adhering 
 more closely than he to the Bible as an objective standard of 
 faith. Hengstenberg has long enjoyed a high reputation as an 
 Oriental scholar and an interpreter of the Old Testament, and 
 occupies a more conspicuous, unequivocal position as a super- 
 naturalist and a champion of evangelical Christianity than any 
 other German theologian. Neander is as well known in the 
 United States as in Germany as the first ecclesiastic historian of 
 the age, and as a lecturer with scarcely an equal in the depart- 
 ment of New Testament exegesis. I need not say a word in illus- 
 tration of his immense learning and his warm Christian spirit. 
 He lectures this winter three hours a day in succession, on the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews, on the History of Christian Doctrines, 
 and on Church History, before a more crowded auditory than any 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 89 
 
 other professor in the University. The recent recurrence of his 
 birthday gave occasion to a demonstration of the esteem and 
 honor of his many students, consisting of a Fackel Zug^ a torch 
 procession, a serenade, and a present of a silver cup. The scene 
 on the evening of this occasion was one of no little outward pomp 
 and display. A procession of some 300 students, each carrying 
 a huge blazing torch, preceded by a band of music, and attended 
 by mounted guards, with an open carriage and four containing 
 the committee deputed to deliver the address and present, and 
 followed by a large portion of the 300,000 inhabitants of Berlin, 
 it was on the whole a very brilliant and exciting affair. Ere the 
 procession reached Neander's house, the street was thronged far 
 and near, and the torches and the guards were of essential aid in 
 forcing a passage. The committee then alighted, and went up to 
 Neander's apartments, and meantime the dense crowd was hushed 
 to silence and order by low and gentle music from the band. 
 Soon Neander appeared at the open window above and addressed 
 the students. He had an audience of thousands before him, repre- 
 senting all ranks of society in Berlin. The remarks, few and 
 simple, came warm and fresh from the heart of the speaker, and 
 illustrated the Christian humility and earnestness of his character. 
 He expressed his sense of un worthiness of such a manifestation 
 of honor and love, attributed it less to himself than to the sacred 
 cause to which he had devoted his life and labors, and exhorted 
 his students to be true to themselves as Christians, to be true to 
 the principles and doctrines of evangelical Christianity. After 
 long and loud acclamations of "Long live Neander! " the students 
 sang some verses from the favorite Latin song " Gaudeamus," and 
 then retired from the spot. They then moved off in procession to 
 the military Parade-Place, where they flung their torches into one 
 huge, smoking pile, and after gathering about it and finishing the 
 above song and joining in some hearty shoutings of " Academic 
 Freedom," the watchword of German students, quietly dispersed, 
 and left the ground to the police and the rabble. 
 
 The at length decided settlement of Schelling here and his lec- 
 tures form the only feature of peculiar interest in the life of the 
 University during the present semester. His position is a novel 
 and important one. After half a century of labor in the field of 
 philosophy, he appears in Berlin, and commences his course anew 
 with all the zeal of youth, and at once the successor of Hegel in 
 his present chair, and his predecessor in the line of German phi- 
 
90 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 losophical masters, is now engaged in combating the prevailing 
 Hegelian system, and attempting to introduce a new era in Ger- 
 man philosophy. There is but little probability that he will fur- 
 nish the world with a Christian philosophy, but he will doubtless 
 exert here a salutary negative influence in loosening the strong- 
 hold of the now unquestionably pantheistic and unchristian sys- 
 tem of Hegel. I do not speak at random nor utter any language 
 of cant ; I have given some attention to the bearings of this phi- 
 losophy upon Christianity, and I am sure it is little to say that the 
 believer in Jesus must look elsewhere for a solution of the prob- 
 lems of life, and for an explanation of the sacred mysteries of his 
 faith. It is utterly at variance with the specific claims and un- 
 questioned truths of Christianity, and is quite foreign to the facts 
 of Christian consciousness and experience. It takes quite too 
 lofty a position, and strides on in its high path of* thought, with 
 a confident air and a proud step, but ill adapted to the relations 
 of the world in which we live, to the condition and character of a 
 race of beings, high indeed in its origin, high in its destiny, but 
 alas, in its pre'sent state, at best but dependent, weak, and sinful. 
 If we would adopt its results we must shut our eyes to the imper- 
 fection and misery that sadden and darken human life and society. 
 We must forget what we have felt within us, what we know of 
 ourselves, must learn to look upon the spiritual facts that lie in 
 the depths of our souls, our consciousness of ignorance and mani- 
 fold want, our sense of sin and guilt, and need of reconciliation 
 with God, as weak prejudices of childhood and the fictions of the 
 nursery, utterly unbecoming a mature and dignified manliness. 
 The point of departure of this system is the reason, its method 
 the development of all truth out of itself by a logical necessity of 
 thought ; and its final results are an utter confusion and merging 
 of the Infinite and the finite, the Divine and the human, reason 
 and revelation. Strauss has applied this system to systematic the- 
 ology in his philosophical " Dogmatik," and during the process has 
 not only done away with all Christian theology, but even with the 
 existence of theology itself as a science ; and the writers of the 
 school who compose the class that go by the name of the " Young 
 Germany " are now working out its pernicious results in the prov- 
 ince of Morals with a most terrific activity, as if they had sold 
 themselves with a clear consciousness to the prince of darkness 
 and were bent upon turning the earth into an unbroken, frightful 
 waste of wickedness. Amid the incessant changes and the chaotic 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 91 
 
 controversy of human philosophy, the Christian may well turn 
 with quickened and more earnest faith to the teachings of Him 
 who said of himself, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. 
 
 GERMAN AND AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES. 
 
 (A Letter to ^'The Watchman.'') 
 
 Gotha, September 8, 1843. I arrived here yesterday on my 
 way from Berlin to the Rhine, by the usual post route througli 
 Halle, Weimar, and Erfurt. 
 
 I have remained a day in Gotha, chiefly for the purpose of vis- 
 iting its ancient Gymnasium and forming a personal acquaintance 
 with some of the professors. Through the kindness of one of the 
 gentlemen I was enabled to visit in his study the venerable Fred- 
 eric Jacobs, the veteran gymnasial teacher and philologian, so well 
 known among us by the many editions and extensive use of his 
 Greek reader. He was dictating a letter to his secretary as we 
 came in, but laid it aside, and received us with extreme kindness 
 and cordiality. On learning from my friend, who was with me, 
 my strong desire to see in his own home one whose name had been 
 so familiar to me from my school-days, he good-naturedly remarked 
 that I should find in him at least but a ruin. He is indeed a good 
 deal broken in body and intellect, but his venerable countenance, 
 worn as it is by the cares of a long life, is lighted up with the 
 kindly beams of charity and good-will, and his conversation, inter- 
 rupted occasionally by forgetfulness and absence of mind, is ani- 
 mated, intelligent, and full of interest. He spoke of art and 
 artists, of scholars, their toils and high vocation, with the quiet, 
 lingering enthusiasm of a veteran in intellectual service, adverted 
 with delight to the present advanced state of philology in com- 
 parison with the period of his own early life, and bade us look 
 well to the aims we should cherish and the increased obligations 
 we should fulfill. He has lived a long and laborious life, and 
 reached with honor a serene and cheerful old age. 
 
 I have spent several hours to-day in attending the recitations 
 of some of the higher classes in the Gymnasium. The classical 
 course is longer and more extensive than in the German gym- 
 nasia in general, and besides the ordinary five classes, Prima, Se- 
 cunda, etc., there is a Selecta, the highest of all, in all the re- 
 citations of which Latin only is spoken, and a higher order of 
 instruction imparted. It is not unfrequently the case that stu- 
 
92 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 dents from Berlin and other gymnasia, after having passed all 
 their examinations with the first honors, come to Gotha and spend 
 two years in the Selecta. The whole course covers at least a period 
 of ten years, and the ordinary age at graduating is twenty, and 
 during this period all the branches of study are pursued, which 
 are preparatory to a professional course at the university. I use 
 the word " university " here in the German and the proper sense of 
 the word ; an American university, if we institute a very general 
 comparison, is a limited German gymnasium. It were scarcely 
 possible by any modifications, as, for instance, by the union of 
 professional faculties, as at Yale and Cambridge, with the collegi- 
 ate faculty, to convert an American college into a German univer- 
 sity ; it were easier to convert it into a German gymnasium, by 
 merging in it the academy, and increasing the period and course 
 of study. I believe that it is conceded by our wisest men that our 
 systems of education require radical change ; and it seems to me 
 to be indispensable to all real improvement to perceive and ac- 
 knowledge the simple fact that a college is a college, and no uni- 
 versity. 
 
 Perhaps a little notice of the three recitations which I attended 
 may be of some interest to some of your readers. The first was 
 the Unter-Secunda, in Homer's Odyssey. They had been read- 
 ing Homer since the commencement of the semester at Easter, 
 The two things that most struck me here were the extreme atten- 
 tion given to the doctrine of accents, and the constant comparison 
 of the Greek with corresponding expressions in Latin. In gram- 
 mar, great accuracy and thoroughness in the forms. Homer is 
 read regularly four years, and in the highest class generally once 
 a week. The second recitation was the Prima in Virgil. With 
 this I was extremely pleased. The mode of instruction illustrated 
 very happily the union of the two divisions in classical instruction, 
 as well as in the whole business of philology, which, in imitation 
 of the German expressions, may be called the formal and the ma- 
 terial. The grammar, in all its parts, was faithfully attended to, 
 and the subject-matter developed and explained. Some of the 
 questions I still remember. The passage, if I remember aright, 
 was in the 6th book, somewhere about the 61st line. ^'•Fas est^ 
 What is the distinction between this expression and licet and debet f 
 Illustrate the distinction in Latin. " Obstitit.^^ What is its pri- 
 mary meaning, and what does it mean here? How would you 
 express the present meaning in other Latin words? ^'' Sanctissima 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 93 
 
 vates.''' Give a similar Greek expression applied to Juno by Ho- 
 mer. "Solido ex marmore.^' Develop the meaning of solido 
 from the theme. What is the connection between this and such 
 expressions as " solidus homo,'' '' solida gloria?" Is '' solida 
 doctrina " good Latin ? The allusion to the temple promised by 
 ^neas gave rise to a description of the Apollo Palatinus, built 
 by Augustus, and thus skillfully mentioned by Virgil, its library, 
 its manner of being collected, etc. The conditional nature of the 
 promise involved inquiries concerning the nature of prayer among 
 the Greeks and Romans, as illustrated by passages from other 
 writers, and comparison with Christian prayer. The last recita- 
 tion I attended was Latin grammar, in the Unter-Secunda, — the 
 syntax. This was conducted quite differently from the manner 
 pursued among us, not by memory and recitation, but a close and 
 thorough course of questions, accompanied by an exaction of origi- 
 nal and copious examples. Afterwards, exercises in writing were 
 presented and corrected. 
 
 GENEVA AND ITS SUER0UNDING8 AND ASSOCIATIONS. 
 
 {A Letter to " The Watchman^) 
 
 Geneva, October 20, 1848. I have enjoyed so much my visits 
 to some of the places on this famed lake that I feel tempted to 
 give you some notices of them before speaking of Geneva itself. 
 Voltaire said rather boldly of the lake of Geneva, ''^Mon lac est le 
 premier;'' and Rousseau and Byron loved to wander upon its 
 banks and sail upon its waters, gazing upon its varied scenery, 
 and furnishing their imaginations with forms of beauty and sub- 
 limity ; and, in their poetry, they have employed all the force and 
 riches of their genius in rendering it celebrated in literature. 
 
 I got my first view of the lake, by moonlight, from the hills 
 behind Vevay. Left quite to myself toward the close of the day's 
 journey, in the coupe of the diligence, I had been busying myself 
 in recalling what I had heard and read of the lake, and in nour- 
 ishing agreeable anticipations of the pleasures awaiting me. It 
 was* a fine autumn evening, the air clear and cool, the sky was 
 serene, and all nature in silent repose. On gaining the brow of 
 the hill, a scene of surpassing beauty broke in at once upon the 
 view. There lay the lake, reflecting in its clear bosom the stars 
 and the moon, and stretching away in the distance like a sea of 
 silvery light, and the mountains beyond, rising up from its margin 
 
94 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 and extending in either direction as far as the eye could reach, 
 with their dark, gloomy sides piled up against the bright heavens, 
 and piercing it with their clear-defined, sharp outline. The height 
 of the hills at this end of the lake and the gradual, winding de- 
 scent of the road contribute to render this view one of the best 
 that can be had from any point. But it passed away quite too 
 soon. With a drag on one wheel, and the horses in full trot, we 
 soon got to the bottom of the hill, and were rattling across the 
 market-place, and in a minute more were buried in the narrow, 
 dark street of the town ; and, on the coach stopping at the dili- 
 gence office, all my pleasant emotions were put an end to by the 
 usual bustle of such scenes, the importunities of hotel porters, and 
 the care of looking after luggage. 
 
 The next morning the agreeable impressions of the evening 
 were renewed by a view of the same scenery in the clearer light 
 of the sun, and in the finest weather. The hotel at which I 
 stopped, called the Trois Couronnes, and the best in all Switzer- 
 land, is finely situated directly on the lake. You step from the 
 breakfast-room into a garden tastefully furnished with trees and 
 shrubbery and graveled walks and a flight of stone steps to the 
 lake. Here you find yourself in the midst of the scenes which 
 furnished the materials of Rousseau's " Nouvelle Heloise," and of 
 Byron's " Prisoner of Chillon," and some of the finest passages 
 of his " Childe Harold." 
 
 Immediately opposite, the little town of Meillerie, backed by a 
 range of rocky hills ; on the curved shore of the lake, to the east, 
 Montreux, Clarens, and Chillon ; farther on, a distant view of the 
 upper end of the lake, of the town of Villeneuve, and the entrance 
 of the Rhone, and behind these, towering to the heavens, ^the 
 snowy peaks of the Valais Alps. The near vicinity of these lofty 
 Alpine summits, and the contrast of the pleasant slopes on the 
 Vevay side, with the steep, rocky hills on the opposite shore, ren- 
 der the view extremely grand. The poets have not exaggerated 
 the singular beauty of the water of the lake. Such a perfect crys- 
 tal clearness, united with their blue color, is certainly very re- 
 markable. In the afternoon I made an excursion to Villeneuve 
 in the steamboat, and walked back on the lake road, visiting the 
 places of interest. In approaching Villeneuve we passed close by 
 the 
 
 " Little isle, 
 Which in my very face did smile, 
 The only one in view," 
 
1841-1844. 95 
 
 so beautifully described in the " Prisoner of Chillon." Nothing 
 could be more accurate than the poetical description of this little 
 spot. After a short walk from Villeneuve I came to the castle 
 of Chillon. It is a large, gloomy-looking building, on a rock in 
 the lake, but close by the road, with which it is connected by a 
 little wooden bridge. A Swiss soldier was walking up and down 
 the bridge, in the harmless occupation of keeping guard; and in 
 the courtyard I met with a man who seemed to be the present 
 factotum of the place, who took me all about it, telling me much 
 more about all its history and mysteries, in which he appeared to 
 be perfectly au fait^ than I can just now distinctly recall. After 
 descending a flight of steps leading from the yard, and passing 
 through a large vault and a narrow, very dark passage, I came 
 into the celebrated dungeon of " the prisoner." It is very much 
 as Byron describes it, though not so deep nor so very dark and 
 gloomy as I had expected to find it ; and indeed the rays of the 
 declining sun, reflected through the little hole in the wall upon its 
 pillars and rocky sides, made a very agreeable impression, though, 
 indeed, not agreeable enough to excite any desire to take up a 
 residence there for any length of time. The "seven columns 
 massy and gray " divide the dungeon into two parts, and give it a 
 kind of Gothic church-like appearance. There is still a ring on 
 one of them, to which the prisoner's chain was fastened. On the 
 same column Byron has left his name, cut in the stone, and under 
 it is that of a Russian poet who has translated Byron's works. 
 In the passage close by I was shown a black, ugly-looking beam, 
 hung across the walls, on which condemned prisoners are said to 
 have been hung. In another part of the building are the remains 
 of one of those frightful places, in use in former ages, into which 
 unfortunate victims were flung down upon instruments of torture 
 and death from a trap-door above. 
 
 This building was used in former times as a state prison, and 
 some of the early reformers were confined here. Byron mentions 
 the name and fate of Bonnivard, in the sonnet upon Chillon, 
 though it seems that he was not acquainted with the particulars 
 of his history before composing his poem. He was a prior, who 
 was " seized by the Duke of Savoy for his exertions to free the 
 Genevese from the Savoyard yoke, and carried off to this castle," 
 where he lay immured for six years. But on the recovery of the 
 Pays de Vaud and the taking of Chillon by the Bernese and 
 Genevese forces, Bonnivard, with some other prisoners, was set 
 
96 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 free. The building is now used by the canton as a magazine for 
 military stores. 
 
 Montreux is one of the most quiet, beautiful spots on the lake, 
 at the foot of a high mountain called the Dent de Jaman. Its 
 sheltered situation and mild climate render it a delightful winter 
 residence. Then farther on you come to Clarens, " sweet Clarens," 
 which Byron has described with such enthusiasm ; but you must 
 not be in a prosaic mood, if you would realize his fine verses upon 
 this spot. Indeed, nothing less than the poet's eye and fine frenzy 
 of inspiration could invest it with such peculiar charms, for it is 
 an extremely ordinary village, and has no particular merit above 
 many others on the lake. But we must not take the poet too 
 literally; he seems to have chosen Clarens to give some local 
 habitation to the rich thoughts and glowing images which thronged 
 in upon his mind in the midst of all the surrounding scenery. 
 With this impression you can appreciate and enjoy all that he 
 has said of the place. 
 
 "'Tislone 
 And wonderful, and deep, and hath a sound 
 And sense and sight of sweetness; here the Rhone 
 Hath spread himself a couch, the Alps have reared a throne." 
 
 Lausanne. The next morning I took a steamboat for this place. 
 It is a sail of about an hour from Vevay. It is situated very high, 
 and makes a fine impression from the lake, the houses built along 
 upon the slope of the hill, and peering above them all, its cathedral 
 and castle. The boat stops at a little viUage called Ouchy. Close 
 by the landing-place is the little inn in which Byron wrote his 
 " Prisoner of Chillon " during two days in which he was kept here 
 by bad weather. Behind the Cathedral is the Castle, the former 
 residence of the bishops, a large, irregular building, surmounted 
 with four turrets. The terraces in the higher parts of Lausanne 
 furnish agreeable views and pleasant walks ; and there is a mag- 
 nificent prospect from a lofty point called The Signal, which well 
 repays all the trouble of climbing up to it, especially at sunset. 
 Nothing can be finer than the view at that time. The lake glit- 
 ters like gold in the light of the setting sun, and all the trees and 
 the vineyards and the tops of the houses reflect its rich mellow 
 hues ; and as the sun sinks behind Mount Jura, you watch its 
 last rays lingering upon the summits of the Savoy hills and the 
 mountains beyond. 
 
 My high expectations of Geneva have not been disappointed ; 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 97 
 
 one could not well be in a more agreeable spot, nor richer in 
 combinations of the beautiful and the grand. Its situation at the 
 end of the lake, embosomed in woods and waters, and surrounded 
 by every variety of hill and mountain scenery, is one of the finest 
 in the world. The sloping banks of the lake are scattered with 
 gardens and vineyards and beautiful villas, and on one side and 
 extending far around you have the lofty, unbroken range of the 
 Jura, and on the other, through an opening in the hills, the snowy 
 peaks of Mont Blanc and of the other mountains in the chain 
 of the Savoy Alps. But it is Mont Blanc that forms the all- 
 oommanding object of interest in the scenery of Geneva. Wherever 
 you may be, whether on the lake, on the promenades, or on the 
 neighboring hills, at sunrise, sunset, and at noonday, the presence 
 of '' the monarch of mountains " is with you, impressing you with 
 its quiet grandeur, and mingling its solemn lessons with all your 
 thoughts and feelings. 
 
 The city itself is divided by the rushing Rhone into two parts, 
 united together by several bridges, one of them long and handsome 
 and connected with a little isle, on which there is a statue of 
 Rousseau. The older and Jarger part, on the left bank of the 
 Rhone, consists of the upper and lower town, from the uneven 
 nature of the ground. The former only is very agreeable, and is 
 graced with many elegant mansions of the wealthier citizens ; in 
 the lower town are the shops, and offices, and places of public 
 lousiness, in which the streets are narrow and damp, and the 
 houses very high. 
 
 In former times, when the distinctions of rank were more marked 
 than now, as well in the form of government as in social life, the 
 aristocracy lived exclusively above, and the democracy below, and 
 the two parties were engaged in continual quarrels with each 
 other ; and one way in which the democracy used to amuse them- 
 selves at the expense of their patrician neighbors, and bring them 
 to terms, was by cutting off the pipes which supplied the upper 
 town with water, the hydraulic machine being down below, and 
 quite under their control. 
 
 Among the many pleasant walks I have made in the vicinity is 
 one to the junction of the Arve with the Rhone, a little way 
 behind the city. You go along by a shady footpath on the left 
 bank of the Rhone : on the other side, the banks are very high, 
 and the narrow slopes below are covered with vineyards. You 
 soon come to the narrow point of land where the two rivers meet^ 
 
98 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 two streams as different as possible in outward appearance, the 
 Rhone blue and clear and rapid, and the Arve having all the 
 muddy heavy look of all mountain streams fed by snows and 
 glaciers. For some little distance the waters keep quite distinct, 
 and the opposing colors seem to refuse all union, but the beautiful 
 blue proves too feeble in the struggle, and at length entirely dis- 
 appears. It is a retired, quiet spot, quite shut in by the banks 
 of the two rivers. Another pleasant walk is to Diodati, in the 
 village of Cologny, the residence of Lord Byron while he was in 
 Geneva. It is a pleasant villa on the south shore of the lake, 
 sufficiently high for a good view, and having agreeable gardens 
 and walks ; but the pictures I have often seen of it pleased me 
 better than the place itself. Byron wrote here his " Manfred '^ 
 and the third canto of " Childe Harold." Ferney, the place where 
 Voltaire lived so many years, is about five miles from Geneva, on 
 the road to Paris ; but I have not yet been to see it, and indeed 
 I have not sufficient admiration for his genius and character to 
 induce any strong desire to go at all. The most interesting ex- 
 cursion in the immediate vicinity is to the summit of Mont Saleve, 
 a mountain to the southeast of Geneva, and more than 3,000 
 feet above the lake. I made the ascent a few days ago with 
 some friends, and, though I found it very fatiguing, was well 
 repaid for my pains by the view from the top. After walking 
 about three miles, you reach the foot of the mountain, whose 
 steep, rugged sides make a very picturesque appearance. Hence 
 you get up by a steep footpath, the upper part formed of steps 
 cut in the rock, to the little village of Monnetier. From this 
 village to the top you have two miles of rather hard climbing 
 on a path covered with pieces of broken rock, which no one 
 should begin to mount without first looking well to the quality 
 of his shoe-leather, as we all learned from the fate of one of 
 our party, quite unsuitably provided in this respect, who, poor 
 fellow, bore it as long as he could, picking his way and treading 
 softly, but finally gave up in despair and turned back, protesting 
 that Mont Saleve was not worth seeing. The rest of us pushed 
 on, and after some hard experience reached the top. With the 
 exception of three or four trees, the summit is very bare and 
 exposed ; and the air being sufficiently cold, we were glad to 
 get into a little rude chalet, the only dwelling there, and warm 
 ourselves round a fire made upon the rocky earth, the smoke 
 of which got out as well as it could through a large hole in 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844:. 99 
 
 the roof. Here we got a cup of coffee and some bread, but 
 unfortunately the coffee was cold and the bread hard, the latter 
 from age, and the former from being two thirds milk, but as 
 we were hungry and thirsty, it was all gradually disposed of, 
 with no worse results than rendering our stomachs a little less 
 warm and light than they were before. But we found enough 
 in the scenery without to dissipate all thoughts of fatigue and 
 inconvenience. The prospect is varied and extensive and fidl 
 of surpassing interest, — Mont Blanc and the adjacent mountains 
 directly in view, their peaks crowned with snow, and glaciers 
 streaming from their sides ; and the populous valley below, inter- 
 sected by the Khone and the Arve, and bounded on the north 
 by the Jura, and on the east by the vast expanse of the lake. 
 It was late in the day as we went away, and most of the way 
 down to Monnetier we had these snowy mountains before us, 
 glowing in the soft rich colors of the setting sun ; the view of 
 these hoary peaks in the mellowed hues of sunset, if it be less 
 sublime, is certainly all the more beautiful, and mingles with 
 softer sentiments those grander impressions which they usually 
 awaken. 
 
 Geneva is rich in historical associations, from the fame of her 
 great men and the momentous events which have occurred in it ; 
 and as the home of Calvin and one of the principal seats of the 
 Reformation, its history is coincident with that of Europe and 
 the world. In regard to matters of religious faith and practice, 
 Calvin would scarcely recognize in the Geneva of the nineteenth 
 century the place where he lived and preached and wrote, and 
 ruled so long with uncontrolled dominion. In this respect, Geneva 
 has been more seriously influenced than England and America, and 
 scarcely less than Germany, by the prevailing forms of philosophy 
 and intellectual culture since the beginning of the present century. 
 The theology taught in its academy and preached in most of its 
 pulpits resembles in its great features the Unitarianism of New 
 England and the earlier forms of German Rationalism, and, like 
 these systems, it is fluctuating and uncertain, and wanting in posi- 
 tive, enduring elements. Very important differences of opinion 
 exist within the pale of the national church ; and the stricter adher- 
 ents of Calvinism have separated themselves, and now form a dis- 
 tinct, dissenting organization, having in addition to their church 
 a separate school of theology. M. d'Aubigne, the distinguished 
 author of the " History of the Reformation," is one of the profes- 
 
100 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-18M. 
 
 sors in this school. This party is generally designated in conver- 
 sation and in the daily journals by the name of Methodists ; and 
 on inquiring several times about the meaning of the word, I have 
 been told that they held to the stricter Orthodox doctrines, and 
 disapproved of people going to the theatre, and mingling in what 
 are usually called worldly pleasures. 
 
 THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. — AN INTERESTING EXCUR- 
 SION AND A SHORTAGE OF CASH. 
 
 Geneva, November 24, 1843. I have been much more inter- 
 ested than I ever expected to be in the study of these modern 
 languages (Italian and French), and hope to find, as I have 
 already in part done, my experience in this way of great avail in 
 the further prosecution of Latin and Greek. The habits which 
 one acquires, and the new views one gets on the whole subject of 
 language, by getting well acquainted with living tongues, may be 
 turned to excellent account in the study of languages which are 
 now extinct. At any rate, my time and money spent in this foreign 
 expedition never could have been better employed ; of this I am 
 absolutely sure. I am only sorry that I have not enough left for 
 a long enough residence in Italy, and (pray don't tell me I don't 
 want to come home) one not less long in Greece ! Indeed, if I 
 were sure of devoting myself hereafter to the ancient languages, I 
 would scarcely scruple to devote the few hundreds still remaining 
 to me to a residence in these two countries of some months at least. 
 The benefit resulting would be infinite in comparison with the 
 outlay of money. I feel as happy as a child when I think of en- 
 tering the gates of the " Eternal City," and exploring its localities 
 and gazing upon its time-honored ruins. I scarcely dare to think 
 about it in advance, much less to write about it, lest it should 
 after all be denied me. 
 
 I have made an interesting excursion, which I enjoyed very 
 much, to the Perte du Rhone, literally, the loss of the Rhone, a 
 place where the river mysteriously disappears for a short distance 
 in the earth, visiting I know not what sort of people in the regions 
 below. I went with three of the young men who live here in our 
 pension^ two of them Russians, and the third German. We took 
 a carriage from Geneva, and were gone in all a day and a half. 
 It was fine weather when we started, and we had high expecta- 
 tions. It was a ride of about four hours on the road to Lyons, 
 when we came to a place called CoUonges, already some ways into 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-im .> >, ; ; : ; ,1*01; 
 
 France, where we stopped for the night. It was about seven 
 o'clock in the evening, and we were cold and hungry. We got a 
 room upstairs, had a good fire made, and ordered supper. And a 
 grand supper it was ; and we sat and eat and drank and talked, 
 and sang songs, Russian, French, German, and English, till about 
 eleven o'clock, when we were ready to break up and go to bed. 
 We slept soundly enough till six o'clock, when we woke up to find 
 the heavens hung in black clouds, and pouring rain, snow, and 
 hail I A fine prospect before us of seeing the Perte du Rh6ne ! 
 We waited till eight, hardly knowing what to do, when there be- 
 gan to be some signs of better weather, and we determined to go 
 on. Into the carriage we got, and shut up ourselves against the 
 fog and damp without, for which we endeavored to make up as 
 well as we could by conversation and singing within. We came in 
 a little while to the French Fort de I'Ecluse, a place of wondrous 
 strength, both by nature and art. It is built on the side of the 
 lofty Jura, hanging above the narrow road, far down below which 
 runs the Rhone, and on the other side a high, curious-looking Sa- 
 voy mountain, called the Vouache. We passed by it, leaving all 
 further examination till our return. We came at length to a lit- 
 tle place called Bellegarde, near which is the Perte. It was such 
 wet, muddy walking, and we were so badly provided with boots, 
 we had to muster among the good villagers some thick, clumsy, 
 shoes, with which we fortified ourselves, and following in the wake 
 of an old woman as guide, went down the steep bank of the river. 
 It is a grand, magnificent place, and the bad weather, with the 
 thick, lazy clouds rolling about the sides of the mountains, only 
 added to the wildness of the scene. Byron well describes the spot 
 in the lines, — 
 
 " Where the swift Rhone cleaves his way between 
 Heights which appear as lovers who have parted." 
 
 There we went down below the mountains, which surrounded us 
 on all sides, the swift river rushing on and foaming in its rocky 
 course, and then disappearing as quietly as possible in the earth, 
 and some hundred yands farther flowing on again as if nothing 
 in the world had happened. It is a curious phenomenon enough, 
 and looks so strange to see a rushing river all at once utterly 
 vanish and for some distance remain entirely concealed from view. 
 In coming back in the afternoon we were scarcely less pleased in 
 viiiiting the Fort. It makes a very threatening, warlike appear- 
 
1Q2.< - , ;, LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 ance from the road below, built all the way up along the steep 
 mountain, and presenting its ranges of ramparts and batteries. 
 The parts above are connected with each other and the main 
 building below by staircases cut in the mountain. Imagine your- 
 self going up some 1,100 steps hewn out in the midst of the 
 solid mountain. One feels a little uneasiness sometimes lest the 
 mountain should cave in upon one's head, and thus effectually 
 prevent one from reaching the top, or indeed perhaps from get- 
 ting down again. But the old Jura played us no such freak, 
 and we got up at last to enjoy a fine prospect, mountains behind 
 and on both sides, and directly before a fine open view, extending 
 as far as Geneva and the lake. From the fort we returned on 
 foot to Collonges, as we had sent the carriage on before. We had 
 a funny adventure to close our excursion. While at supper at 
 Collonges, we sent for our bill, and, mustering all our purses and 
 pockets, found that our resources fell short of the required 
 amount. An unpleasant predicament, as we were perfect stran- 
 gers in the place ! In truth we had lived pretty freely, and what 
 with two suppers and breakfast for four of us, to say nothing of 
 the fluids for the former, and beds and fire and candles, the bill 
 came to forty-three francs ! We made a parley with " mine host," 
 and got off by leaving a watch in pawn for the deficiency in the 
 money ! That was a great joke, was n't it, for four respectable fel- 
 lows like us ? We sent the money next day, but the watch has n't 
 yet made its appearance, though we expect it to-day. So much 
 for not counting the cost and not taking one's purse. It was on 
 the whole a very agreeable excursion, and did me a great deal of 
 good, for I have kept myself rather close since I have been here, 
 and taken too little exercise, and had begun to feel the need of 
 some little change. I shall get to Rome as quickly as possible. 
 I feel that I have no time to lose, and much less money to spare. 
 
 GENOA. — ROMISH AND PROTESTANT HABITS OF REVERENCE. — 
 ACROBATIC BEGGARS. 
 
 (A LeUer to " The Watchman:') 
 
 Genoa, December 12, 1843. Here is a city well worth visit- 
 ing. It has more marked, peculiar features than any which I 
 have before seen, charming in the extreme beauty of its situation, 
 and imposant by the grandeur of its churches and palaces. I 
 wish I could give you an idea of Genoa as I saw it to-day from a 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1^. ,' : -103 > 
 
 high point just out of the city, overhanging the sea. There lay 
 the beautiful, crescent-shaped bay, covered with shipping, and the 
 city beyond extending around the base of a declivity of the Apen- 
 nines, its sloping sides adorned with a brilliant succession of villas, 
 gardens, and woods, and the tops crowned with a line of fortifica- 
 tions. The coup d'oeil is grand, the curved shape of the bay and 
 city, the houses rising above each other, tier upon tier, and the 
 gallery of fortifications, giving the impression of a magnificent 
 amphitheatre. The interior of the city is scarcely less interesting. 
 In some of the older parts, the streets are narrow and disagree- 
 able, but modern Genoa is inferior to few cities in Europe in its 
 squares and promenades, its public buildings, and the palaces of 
 the old noble families. One of the streets, the Strada Nuova, is 
 occupied exclusively by palaces, and nothing can exceed the grand 
 effect produced by these lines of magnificent buildings. They are 
 characterized throughout by a colossal style of grandeur, their 
 massive facades exhibiting grand portals, gigantic windows, and 
 projecting cornices, covered with various architectural ornaments, 
 and connected on one side with long, terraced galleries, through 
 whose arches and columns you catch a glimpse of the fountains 
 and trees in the adjoining gardens. All these palaces contain 
 choice collections of paintings, which a trifling fee to the porter 
 renders admissible to every stranger. Genoa is not less distin- 
 guished in the number and character of its churches. I have been 
 astonished at the grand scale on which they are built, and with 
 the splendor and magnificence with which they have been adorned. 
 No pains nor expense have been spared in rendering them costly 
 monuments of art, as well as fitting temples of the Most High. 
 Some of them have been erected by private individuals and noble 
 families of Genoa, grand and lasting memorials of the piety and 
 munificence of their founders. 
 
 The cathedral, one of the oldest in the city, is built in a curious 
 style of architecture, partly Gothic and partly Oriental. The 
 facade is formed of alternate stripes of black and white marble, 
 and has an immense portal, the columns of which are said to have 
 been brought from Almeria, at the time of the taking of that city, 
 in the twelfth century. The nave of the church preserves still its 
 original character, its walls striped alternately with white and 
 black, and the columns of various materials and colors, marble, 
 porphyry, and granite, standing upon bases of basalt. The re- 
 mainder of the church is quite modern, and is decorated with 
 
,4Q4i'-; ; /, L:E,TTERS from EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 paintings and carved ornaments. One of the chapels, that of St. 
 John the Baptist, is a very wonder of taste and elegance. The 
 altar is supported by four columns of porphyry, between which is 
 a marble sarcophagus containing the supposed relics of the Bap- 
 tist, which, by the way, are taken out once a year, on the day of 
 his nativity, and carried in procession. Around the chapel are 
 sixteen statues, executed by Delia Porta. While 1 was lingering 
 here to gaze upon these works of art, I observed the people gath- 
 ering, and kneeling near the chapel, in considerable numbers, and 
 in a few moments a priest appeared with his attendants, and com- 
 menced reading the mass. I retired to a place among the wor- 
 shipers, and notwithstanding my want of acquaintance and sym- 
 pathy with the rites of the Catholic Church, I found enough, in the 
 solemnity of the place and of the whole scene, to inspire senti- 
 ments of reverence and devotion. I confess that I am scarcely 
 ever present at a Catholic service without being struck with the 
 contrast between the perfect decorum and silence observed by all 
 present, the air of solemnity upon every countenance and pervad- 
 ing the whole assembly, and the business-like way of coming into 
 church in our country, and the carelessness and languid indiffer- 
 ence too often visible during the time of worship. In these out- 
 ward matters, in the deep reverence for the church as the temple 
 of God, perhaps we may learn much from those in whose doctrines 
 and culture we see such mournful deviations from the teachings 
 and the spirit of Christ. 
 
 In Genoa you see in the streets all the animation and noisy 
 gayety of Italian life, and of beggars a full Italian proportion, of 
 all ages, sexes, and characters. Among these last, some of the 
 little boys brought up to the business are quite adepts in their 
 way, and the most amusing, interesting little fellows you can im- 
 agine. The little black-eyed urchins tell their story so well, wink- 
 ing and straining hard aU the while to keep their faces sober 
 enough, that you cannot help giving them something. They are 
 quite expert, too, in performing clever little feats of agility, to 
 secure your interest and charity. As I was walking yesterday, a 
 ragged little fellow came by and caught my attention with his 
 begging, imploring look, and, quick as lightning, darted off upon 
 the pavement in a series of circular somersets that was quite start- 
 ling. He was back again in an instant, with his hand out, and 
 telling me, with a woeful look and tone,- that he was a pauvre en- 
 fant, etc., for they manage to pick up some French phrases, too. 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 105 
 
 to get along better with foreigners. These poor little creatures 
 will describe you a dozen yards of somersets for a couple of cents. 
 
 ROME AND HER ANTIQUITIES. — ROMISH AND PROTESTANT WOR- 
 SHIP. — A CALL TO PREACH FROM MAINE. 
 
 Rome, January 10, 1844. My time is amply occupied here; 
 every day is a great one; all have to be italicized in my journal, 
 for all are full of events. It 's a great place to see, and think, and 
 study. A year's residence here might be the making of any man. 
 But my time is limited. I do as much as I can, and hope to bring 
 away somewhat that will be of service to me all my life. I had 
 no conception till I came here of the immense riches of Rome in 
 all that is great and valuable, in means of high cultivation. True, 
 it is chiefly art, its history, and all its branches, but besides this 
 the whole subject of classical archaeology, history, and a thousand 
 other things. One is influenced on all sides, wherever one goes, 
 by great subjects of thought and study, and is conscious of breath- 
 ing an intellectual atmosphere. I have studied all my mornings 
 till about one, and then gone out lionizing till five, when I dine ; 
 then I have the evening to try to collect myself, make notes, etc. 
 One sees, however, so much, and is so operated upon by what is 
 seen, that one gets wearied out by night. I have been to the old 
 site of the Forum more than anywhere else, and know it as well 
 as any part of Boston. One feels himself verily in old Rome in 
 walking about this place and the vicinity. You see the whole 
 course of the Via Sacra, and can trace it through the arch of Sep- 
 timius Severus, and winding round up to the Capitol between the 
 ruined columns of the beautiful temples which once adorned this 
 part of the Forum. You see the site of the old Rostra and the 
 Comitium. And near by is the Palatine, still covered with mas- 
 sive ruins of the palace of the Caesars. And then a little way on 
 is the Coliseum. What a magnificent pile is this ! Words give 
 no idea of it, nor of the feelings it inspires. I went up to see it 
 by moonlight one night, and it was the grandest spectacle I ever 
 witnessed. It was New Year's eve, and I had enough in the 
 scene and the occasion to impress me with solemnity and inspire 
 earnest resolution. Indeed, the sight of all these ruins has a sal- 
 utary moral influence upon one's whole character. There is more 
 in this than people are apt to suppose. Near the Forum, too, are 
 many other things ; the Circus Maximus, on the other side of the 
 Palatine, may be fixed as to its site, though the extremity towards 
 
106 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 the Tiber is now covered with modern houses. Across the whole 
 length of it runs a street, called the Street of the Circus. Then 
 there is the Cloaca Maxima, not far off from here ; a mysterious 
 sort of entrance, through a little path under low arches, brings you 
 to a clear, fine fountain, in which, as I was there, some Italians 
 were washing their dirty breeches ; then, farther on, you see the 
 mouth of the Cloaca, all hung over with moss and shrubbery, now 
 in a perfectly neglected state. The house under which it runs to 
 the Tiber is filled with straw and hay. One thing more illus- 
 trates the value of a residence here, in regard to classical studies, 
 namely, the great Circus of Romulus (the son of Maxentius). 
 This is some ways out of the city, on the old Via Appia. The 
 whole shape is visible, and ruins of the walls all round ; the Spina, 
 too, is there, and the Metae at each end. How quickly I under- 
 stood the construction of these Circi, of which, from pictures, I had 
 tried to get a conception in teaching the classics. You remember 
 the first ode of Horace, the "metaque fervidis evitata rotis," — 
 " curriculo pulverem," etc. I remember how in connection I tried 
 at Providence to understand perfectly the whole subject, — a sin- 
 gle visit here clears it all up. So it is in a thousand things. Hor- 
 ace actually becomes another book to one after seeing all these 
 spots. 
 
 I have been into the churches a good deal, as there have been 
 holy-days since I have been here. I do not wonder that people 
 of a certain style of character, both in England and America, get 
 a leaning to Catholicism. The Protestant service has not enough 
 of the outward, and not enough, strictly speaking, of worship ; 
 it is too exclusively for the mind^ and not enough for the heart ! 
 The sermon is all in all, which is a great fault, I think. There 
 is something extremely impressive in Catholic forms and cere- 
 monies. On the other hand, there is too much stuff about the 
 whole system, which no sensible and enlightened man can swallow, 
 to say nothing of the grave doctrinal errors. But in regard to 
 authority^ this tendency to Romanism is certainly surprising in 
 our times, so marked by an opposite tendency, a struggle to get 
 from all authority ; perhaps, indeed, in some cases it may be ex- 
 plained as a reaction ; people get unmoored and tossed about, 
 having no fixed resting-place, and are glad to rest in the bosom 
 of an infallible church. I feel more and more anxious to get 
 home. I shall love my country and all my friends better than 
 ever. Even in these attractive and awakening scenes, home has 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 107 
 
 charms for me beyond everything ; in the Coliseum I have felt 
 the strongest drawings homeward, and felt that I could turn my 
 back upon all, and hasten as on the wings of the wind. By the 
 way, I had almost forgotten to say where I read the Thanksgiving 
 letters. I went out to walk, and on the way stopped at Torlonia's 
 to inquire for letters, and found they were there. I went on in 
 my walk, with a friend with me, up the Quirinal, where we rested 
 by the fountain of Monte Cavallo, and where I ran over the 
 sheets, in the shade of the colossal figures of Castor and Pollux, 
 the work of Phidias and Praxiteles. Afterward I continued my 
 walk alone on to the Forum and Coliseum, and seeking out a nice 
 seat among the ruins of the latter, read the letters carefully over, 
 thanking you all from my inmost heart for all your kind wishes 
 and words of love. And singularly enough there was a letter 
 from Waterville, requesting me to come there and preach as soon 
 as I return ! The oddest of all things to come to a man in Rome ! 
 They little thought the sheet would travel so far ! If I intended 
 to settle, Waterville would please me in many respects, but this 
 is not^ cannot 5e, my destiny. I want occupation of another 
 kind, and think I am better fitted for it, by my whole education. 
 
 {A Letter to " The Watchman^) 
 
 Rome, January 15, 1844. 
 "I am in Rome ! oft as the morning sun 
 Visits these eyes, waking at once I cry. 
 Whence this excess of joy ? What has befallen me ? 
 And from within a thrilling voice replies. 
 Thou art in Rome ! " 
 
 My dear Sir, — You must pardon me in opening my letter with 
 these lines of poetry, which came from the heart and the expe- 
 rience of the author, and describe so truly the feelings of a stran- 
 ger in Rome. The most prosaic man may get a little out of the 
 sober vein at such a time, and borrow the aid of poetry in express- 
 ing the rapturous joy which he feels. It has been given me at 
 length to see with my own eyes the Eternal City. From Genoa, 
 where I wrote you last, I hastened on, my longing desire increas- 
 ing at every step, though mingled with a sort of tremulous feeling 
 that cast somewhat of mystery over the whole journey, and would 
 scarce let me venture to say to myself whither I was going. But 
 the several stages safely got over, and the wide, solemn Cam- 
 pagna traversed, the Tiber and the city burst upon my view ; and 
 
108 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 entering the Via Flaminia and passing under the Porta del Po- 
 polo, I could finally assure myseK that I was in Rome. But I 
 could not easily tell you those first feelings awakened within me, 
 nor perhaps give a very clear account of the several next succeed- 
 ing days. They passed away, more like the glad visions of a 
 dream than the sober passages of waking life. It is as if a new 
 life begins within you in seeing for the first time a city of which 
 you have seen and read and heard so much from the earliest 
 periods of your recollection, and which has been inseparably 
 associated with your whole education. An utter stranger in a 
 foreign city, you are yet in a place you have known long and well ; 
 nothing of all that is around you is really strange. You see with 
 your own eyes the scenes that have been familiar to your thoughts 
 and feelings, and cherished with sentiments of reverence and 
 affection, in the midst of which your spirit was nurtured and 
 gathered its early strength, and whence have come the richest 
 and most valuable elements of your intellectual culture. Goethe 
 was wont to speak of the day of his entrance into Rome as a 
 second birthday, and his residence in it as the period of his edu- 
 cation. Certainly in the life of any man, no event can be more 
 fruitful in intellectual influence. There is indeed but one Rome 
 in the world ; but one place around which cluster such an assem- 
 blage of great objects, a place so rich in historical interest, in 
 treasures of art and learning, in all that is grand and beautiful 
 and valuable, that most intimately affects the life and being of 
 man. It is a great school of study and high cultivation, for all 
 who come with open eye and earnest mind. The man of humblest 
 capacity gets quickened and strengthened to somewhat of high 
 effort and attainment, and no intellect so great and cultivated 
 that finds not here enough to learn. One feels himself brought 
 in mysterious nearness to the past, and impressed with reverence 
 and awe, in living in a city more than two thousand years old, its 
 history the history of the world, once the capital of an empire that 
 overshadowed the earth, the nurse of literature and the arts, and 
 the mother of great men. This mighty people has passed away 
 with the master spirits that guided and ruled them, that empire 
 long since broken up and scattered ; but here is the same soil, the 
 same hills, the walls of their city are yet standing, and every- 
 where around are monuments of their grandeur. 
 
 I should get too much into detail if I should begin to tell you 
 of the grand objects which I have beheld in exploring the locali- 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 109 
 
 ties of ancient Rome. True, it is often a perplexing labor, indeed, 
 a study in itself, to search out the old city in the present condi- 
 tion of the new ; but it has ever such an exciting, all-absorbing 
 interest, and abundantly repays one's time and pains. But much 
 comes unsought ; you have only to go with open eyes to see the 
 traces of the ancient glory, often where you least expect them, 
 amid the crowd and hum of men, in the busiest haunts of modern 
 Rome. Yesterday, in passing through a small, narrow street, I 
 came suddenly upon two beautiful columns of an old temple, which 
 are now half buried in the earth, in strange contrast with the small 
 hovels about them, of which modern masonry has made them a 
 part ; and near by ruins of another temple, three fine Corinthian 
 columns supporting a richly worked architrave, now in the midst 
 of the commonest buildings. In the heart of the city, on one of 
 the smaller business squares, which some days in the week you 
 find alive with the noisy scenes of a market-place of a modern 
 Forum Yenale, stands the noble Pantheon, worn and darkened 
 with age, but proud in its matchless strength and beauty as in the 
 days of Agrippa and Augustus. But if you will see classic Rome, 
 you must thread your way out of the narrow, crowded streets of 
 the modern city, and bend your steps to the Capitol and the 
 Forum. This spot, the proudest in the ancient cit}^, so rich in 
 classic associations, the changing influences of time and the reck- 
 less fury of invasion seem to have passed over less rudely, and 
 have left its general form and numerous monuments of its former 
 greatness. Though most of its present surface is many feet 
 above the old level, yet in some parts the ancient soil is visible ; 
 the whole course of the Via Sacra may be traced, the very pave- 
 ment still left, the site of the Comitium and the Rostra, and on 
 all sides the arches and columns of the temples that formerly 
 adorned this place. The Palatine, too, is there before you, cov- 
 ered with the massive ruins of the Palace of the Caesars, and near 
 by the grandest relic of antiquity, the Coliseum. In presence of 
 the Coliseum, everything else seems small and insignificant ; it 
 staggers your power of comprehension ; you seek in vain to get 
 within you some adequate image of it ; you go away and come 
 again and again, and every time it seems greater and more majes- 
 tic. It is extremely interesting, too, to visit the remains of the 
 great useful works of ancient Rome, the Cloaca Maxima and the 
 enormous ruins of the baths and the aqueducts. It gives some 
 just conception of the eminent practical spirit of the Romans, 
 
llO LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 informed and ennobled by taste and an enlightened sense of the 
 grand and magnificent. 
 
 But in alluding to all these fine monuments of the past, I am 
 reminded of that architectural wonder of modern times, the 
 church of St. Peter's. This wonderful structure yields, in gran- 
 deur of design and execution, to none of the finest of ancient 
 temples, and standing there in its entire perfection, teaches what 
 the cultivated art of modern times has been able to produce. 
 
 I have been amazed at the treasures of art in the Vatican and 
 the Capitol. It is incredible, the immense extent and riches of 
 the Vatican galleries. You wander from room to room in admi- 
 ration and delight, lost in a wilderness of art, and when you stand 
 before the Apollo Belvedere you are fastened to the spot as if by 
 a magic spell. It is an era in one's life when one sees for the first 
 time this exquisite work. For the study of the history and archae- 
 ology of art, as indeed of all that pertains to the subject of 
 classical antiquities, no place can be equal to Rome. And since 
 the days of Winckelmann, whose labors here formed an epoch 
 in these studies, much has been done by scholars of scarcely less 
 fame, in Italy by Zoega and Visconti, and in Germany, among 
 many others, by Bottiger, Hirt, Thiersch, and Otfried MiiUer. 
 Additional materials have been gathered, busts, inscriptions, and 
 statues discovered, collected, and explained, and the subjects have 
 assumed a scientific form and character. In the topography of 
 ancient Rome, great service has been rendered by the works of 
 Canina and Bunsen, and recently by a work on Roman archaeology 
 by Becker, the first volume of which, devoted to this subject, has 
 already appeared. 
 
 But I must hasten to close this letter, which may be getting too 
 long. Yet a notice, however, of one or two things which may be 
 of some interest. I was present at the Christmas service at St. 
 Peter's. It was certainly a grand and imposing spectacle, the 
 presence of the Pope and the whole body of cardinals in their offi- 
 cial robes, and a countless multitude assembled in the most mag- 
 nificent church in the world, to celebrate the birth of Christ ; but 
 there is too strong a mixture of the worldly in the whole scene, 
 too much of a pageant, to awaken Christian feelings and impres- 
 sions, and I must confess that I found the service growing tedious 
 and repulsive, and was glad when it was over. A few days ago 
 I attended an exhibition of languages at the Propaganda. Some 
 fifty exercises were exhibited in nearly as many different tongues, 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. Ill 
 
 belonging to all quarters of the world ; for instance, three dialects 
 of the Chinese, the Hebrew and its kindred dialects, the Coptic, 
 Bulgarian, etc., these of course all by native students. This, you 
 are aware, is the missionary school of Kome. If it only sent 
 abroad the pure truth, and scattered the written word ! 
 
 In closing, let me mention a rare pleasure which I enjoyed yes- 
 terday in attending a little religious meeting, composed of tempo- 
 rary residents here, mostly from England. It was an unexpected 
 privilege to meet here, among others, Mr. Ellis, the well known 
 missionary ; Dr. Keith, the author of the work usually called 
 " Keith on the Prophecies ; " and John Harris, the distinguished 
 author of the " Great Teacher." Thus in Rome, too, one meets 
 with valued Christians, and may enjoy the pleasures of social wor- 
 ship. I thought of the words of the Saviour, that neither in the 
 mountain of Samaria, nor yet in Jerusalem alone, may men wor- 
 ship the Father ; for " God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him 
 must worship Him in spirit and in truth." 
 
 POMPEII AND VESUVIUS. 
 
 Rome, April 6, 1844. I have just returned from Naples. It 
 is the most beautiful city I have yet seen ; an incomparably lovely 
 situation, and all the environs from Misenum, on one side, round 
 to Sorrento on the other extreme point of the semicircle, charm- 
 ing beyond description. Every day I made some new excursion. 
 Pompeii and Vesuvius were the places that interested me most, 
 though Baiae and Cumse and the whole vicinity are crowded with 
 classic associations. Pompeii I visited twice, and went over the 
 whole of it very carefully. You know that this city and Hercula- 
 neura were buried by one of the eruptions of Vesuvius in the year 
 79, and have been excavated since the middle of the last century. 
 In Herculaneum comparatively little excavation has been done, 
 because the modern town of Portici is built upon it; but of Pom- 
 peii a very large part has been laid open, and there you see the 
 streets and pavements, temples, theatres, private houses and shops, 
 just as they were eighteen centuries ago, when this unhappy city 
 was destroyed by the volcano. It is a place full of instruction, 
 and to myself, in regard to the life and manners of the Greeks 
 and Romans, of immense importance. Many things that I knew 
 only from books, I have here learned by personal observation, and 
 in a manner infinitely more clear and satisfactory. The ascent 
 of Vesuvius was laborious, but exciting and instructive. Erom 
 
112 LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 
 
 Naples to Portici, by railroad, about fifteen minutes, then we 
 walked about a mile to Resina, and there took ponies and com- 
 menced the ascent. We rode about an hour and a quarter, a large 
 part of the way surrounded everywhere by stones and rocks of 
 lava, till at length we reached the steep sides of the mountain it- 
 self. From here we climbed up on foot, a difficult, fatiguing oper- 
 ation, over rocks and sand, of perhaps three quarters of an hour. 
 Arrived at the top, we found ourselves on the ridge of the open 
 crater. I should say it is half a mile round it. Down below we 
 looked upon what seemed a sea of sulphur and lava, in the middle 
 of which rose the smaller cone, from which was continually issuing 
 smoke and flames and red-hot stones, attended by loud explosions. 
 We got down the sides of the crater, and to my surprise the sul- 
 phur and lava, which from above had looked quite liquid, were 
 hard, and easily admitted of a passage over them. We went over, 
 though in some places it cracked as we stepped, and clambered up 
 the steep sides of the cone till we got very near the very mouth, 
 and farther than which it was quite impossible to go. The cone is 
 open at the top only on one side, so that we felt tolerably secure, 
 though I confess, as I stood there and heard the explosions and 
 saw the flames and red-hot stones, I had some queer sensations. 
 But it is a grand though awful spectacle, and, associated with all 
 the historical interest of the mountain, inspires the most solemn 
 and the sublimest emotions. In various parts below, in the midst 
 of this vast sea of lava, are minor cones, or little eminences, which 
 are hissing and spitting, and sending little pieces of burning lava. 
 I stood by the side of one, and pulled out a little piece with my 
 cane, and jerked it along, and when it was cold enough, took it 
 with me. In returning we went down on another side, where 
 there is nothing but sand, and a precious time we had of it, tum- 
 bling down, and at every step up to our knees in the sand. 
 
 HOMEWARD WITH AN EMPTY POCKET-BOOK AND A GLAD 
 
 HEART. 
 
 Paris, May 14, 1844. Why, you will ask, are you not already 
 off and out upon the Atlantic, making for home ? Well, the ves- 
 sels for the 15th and 16th were third-rate affairs, and I should 
 have been booked, perhaps, for fifty days, with poor accommoda- 
 tions and no company. Then the Argo was to leave on the 24th, 
 the finest and fastest ship that goes out of the Havre, and already 
 some very agreeable people had taken passage in her. Moreover, 
 
LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1841-1844. 113 
 
 this arrangement would give me time to see Paris. So that, in 
 short, finally, and to conclude, without exhortation or farther prac- 
 tical observation, I beg leave to announce, with infinite joy, that I 
 have taken passage in this ship, to wit, the Argo, Captain An- 
 thony, which leaves Havre, wind and weather permitting, on the 
 24th this current month. Now I have only to hope and pray for 
 favorable winds and good weather, that I may have a short and 
 safe passage home. My money is dreadfully out at the elbows, 
 and indeed everywhere else. I am afraid I shall land at New 
 York without money enough to get me to Boston ! If you could 
 come on to New York about the 24th June, it would be very nice. 
 I will go to the Waverley House, Broadway, or, if that good old 
 house is no more, then to the Astor, but I shan't stop one moment 
 in New York if I can help it. 
 
DIAEY AND LETTERS WRITTEN DURING A VISIT 
 TO EUROPE IN 1857. 
 
 ACROSS THE ATLANTIC IN SEARCH OF HEALTH. 
 {From a Letter.) 
 
 Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, 24th March, 1857. 
 Most thankful and rejoiced am I to get on terra firma again, to 
 sit down to a table where things are not tumbling and rolling and 
 pitching and threatening a general smash-up. The voyage has 
 given me strength and vigor such as I have not had for a long 
 time ; it has given me appetite and courage, — courage to eat and 
 to walk and go about and keep about, and feel I need not be so 
 afraid of fever turns and the like. I kept on deck, on the saloon 
 deck, nearly the whole voyage, and sometimes stayed through 
 squalls of hail and snow. It was the best place close by the 
 smoke -pipe, that huge red thing by which we stood together. 
 There I got fresh air, and indeed gales of wind on one side, and 
 on the other warm air as from a fire, and the floor below me so 
 nicely heated from the pipe as to keep my feet just right. You 
 would have laughed to see me there, coat buttoned and shawl 
 around and cap close down, now breasting the wind and taking in 
 the air, and then turning about to hug the smoke-pipe. On one 
 night we had a perfect hurricane of four hours' length, during 
 which the sea carried away, or rather stove in, a part of our bul- 
 warks on one side. I was so fortunate as to sleep through it all, 
 though it was a very uneasy sleep. 
 
 LONDON HOTELS AND LONDON CROWDS. 
 
 {From a Letter.) 
 
 Morley's Hotel, London, 27th March, 1857. 
 Here I sit in the writing and reading room of this hotel, with 
 that fine Nelson statue looking down upon me, and am thinking 
 how far off you are from me. I got on nicely from Liverpool by 
 rail, despite a little headache. Such comfortable cars and seats, 
 six seats in the car, capacious, divided by elbow cushions, and 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 115 
 
 stuffed partitions almost up to the top of the car, so that each 
 seat is really an independent easy-chair ; and with my habit of 
 sleeping in a chair, I was as well off as possible. On arriving we 
 got into a cab and made for this hotel, where we arrived at about 
 ten p. M. They have capital arrangements at the station. Your 
 luggage is taken down from the top of the car by the conductor, 
 or rather the guard ; he finds you a cab, brings the cabman, puts 
 you and yours in, and then tells the man where to go, and you are 
 off. The cabmen are the company's, and never shout to you or 
 say a word, till the guard himself comes. How much better than 
 the uproar in our depots. Yesterday was a great day with me, — 
 bright and pleasant in the forenoon, and I improved it on the 
 driver's seat on an omnibus, riding in all about seven miles. I 
 went to St. John's Wood, saw the new college, a fine building, 
 beautifully situated, and found Dr. William Smith (the diction- 
 ary man), who received me very cordially and wished me to stop 
 and dine with him, which I declined. He is a very gentlemanly 
 man, regular English, but not like my idea of the independent 
 dissenters, to which denomination he and the new college belong. 
 I am very comfortable in this hotel, with all things as I could 
 desire them. From what I can judge, too, the prices are not so 
 high as I had feared in England. At Liverpool it was 37^ cents 
 for bed, 50 for breakfast with meat, and 37^ for tea, and the 
 dinner 50 or more, according to what you take, and fees for ser- 
 vants about 50 cents per day. My room was very comfortable, 
 large, with a double bed curtained and canopied, and every possible 
 convenience. Here I am about as well off, and with prices not 
 much higher. I sit in the coffee-room, or here in a nice place for 
 reading and writing, a fire in the grate, with the blazing coal, 
 materials for writing all at hand, and guide-books, maps, etc., all 
 about me. When not engaged I have sights enough from the 
 windows to interest and amuse me. What a world is this Lon- 
 don ! — such a streaming population of human beings of all ranks 
 and occupations and characters, driving, jostling, and pushing on, 
 I wonder where and for what, and with what thoughts and feel- 
 ings, and hopes and fears, and loves and hates, throbbing and 
 working within their heads and hearts ! Those cabmen over the 
 way in a long line with whips up and on the lookout for a pas- 
 senger — I wonder if they have happy homes, and a wife and chil- 
 dren to welcome them after their rushing drives through the noisy 
 thoroughfares of the city. I wonder if they think of much be- 
 
116 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 yond their sixpences and shillings, and stretch their hopes and 
 faith beyond this world to the promised blessedness and purity of 
 heaven. I dare say there are some good happy Christians among 
 them, though they are thought to be a hard, godless set. I have 
 found them well-disposed and merry, though willing enough to 
 get an extra sixpence. And so with that throng of gay fashion 
 and nobility and wealth that I saw yesterday at Hyde Park. As 
 I looked into the carriages as they passed me — and the carriages 
 come close to you and are quite low, with windows down — 1 won- 
 dered what those faces, of all features and expressions and all 
 ages, meant and might reveal if one could look within and read 
 the heart and character. Some looked happy, but I thought 
 many were very dull-looking folks, and trying very hard to have 
 a good time. A few rosy, fresh faces of young girls and children 
 really were quite a relief to the old-young gentlemen and faded 
 dowagers, setting up still for middle-aged and young. Still the 
 English face, especially of the men, and I noticed it most in the 
 foot- walks and in the horseback riders, is fresh-looking, robust, and 
 healthy. I noticed it, too, in the cars, and almost envied some of 
 those comfortable-looking fellows, who seemed to be strangers to 
 all sorts of aches and feeblenesses. But perhaps they, too, have 
 their troubles and ills. But what is all this to you and me, when 
 I am writing to you or trying to talk to you across that ocean of 
 three thousand miles. Ah, if the telegraph or some other scien- 
 tific wonder would only sharpen my eyes and ears, and give them 
 range enough to let me see you and know that all is going well at 
 home ! When these weeks and months of this interval are gone, 
 and have brought me all of health and strength that I look for, 
 with accessions of knowledge as well as of the experience of God's 
 goodness and mercy, what joy shall we have in my return to our 
 happy home. 
 
 THE GREAT EASTERN. — THE THAMES TUNNEL. — THE DR. 
 JOHNSON " COFFEE-HOUSE." 
 
 Saturday, March 28, 1857. Much better, and have done some 
 sight-seeing. By omnibus to Waterloo Bridge ; then took a little 
 steamer down the Thames about three miles ; then put ashore in 
 a boat at the shipyard where the Great Eastern is building. She 
 loomed up from the river side in enormous proportions. We found 
 ourselves disappointed about the time for seeing the ship, but by 
 dint of a little perseverance got attached to a party, and thus 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 117 
 
 shown all over the ship. It is immense, pro-d-i-g-i-o-u-s in all its 
 conception and details of execution, and impresses one with amaze- 
 ment at the wonders of science, and also the audacious enterprise 
 and scheming of man. Almost 700 feet long as she now rests on 
 her supports, with ten saloons, five smoke-pipes, paddle-wheels 
 over 100 feet in diameter. Will accommodate 4,000 passengers, 
 and carry (without passengers) 10,000 troops. She is for the 
 Australian service. Took a boatman and sailed up as far as the 
 Thames Tunnel ; went through it and back, all lighted with gas 
 and alive with crowds of people, little shops, music going on, and 
 all deep down below the tide of trade and commerce of the 
 Thames. As the steamer was long coming, we took another boat- 
 man, who rowed us to Waterloo Bridge. These bridges are mag- 
 nificent lines of arches, and look very imposing from the river ; 
 also the buildings, as the Tower and many others. Then we 
 walked up to the Strand and Fleet Street, and went to Bolt Court 
 and dined at the " Dr. Johnson," the veritable house and room 
 where Johnson, Goldsmith, and the rest used to sit together. Two 
 immense portraits in the coffee-room, one of Johnson, the other 
 of Goldsmith. If the old bear were now alive he could get much 
 better fare in London at many a place I could show him, if our 
 dinner was a fair specimen of the table. 
 
 AN invalid's SUNDAY IN LONDON. — SPURGEON'S CHAPEL AND 
 
 SERMON. 
 
 Sunday, March 29, 1857. Woke up with cold worse, and with 
 headache. Gave up going to Surrey Gardens to hear Mr. Spur- 
 geon. Abed nearly all the forenoon, and much better for it, so 
 that at twelve I had a good appetite for breakfast. Having 
 learned that Mr. Spurgeon preached in his own chapel. New Park 
 Street, Southwark, at half past six, I determined to go, though we 
 had no tickets, a limited number of which is issued gratis, on 
 account of the crowds that come to hear him. Took a cab and 
 went a Sabbath-day's journey, wellnigh, and drew up just at 
 dusk in a narrow, dark street, at a very indifferent looking chapel, 
 standing a little back from the sidewalk. People already stand- 
 ing at the doors as if at a concert-room or theatre, for doors to 
 open. I asked the policeman in attendance, who demanded my 
 ticket, if any of the deacons or church people were about, and 
 presently some one came along to whom he directed me. I told 
 my story and soon got in with my party to the yard, where after a 
 
118 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 little waiting the doors were opened and we made our way into 
 the chapel, a most uninviting, dark-looking room, with nothing to 
 impress or attract one. The seats for such comers as we were lim- 
 ited, and not in the pews, but just outside the pews, and as the 
 knowing ones made their way in quick, we found none left, except 
 just under the pulpit. People who owned or hired seats and pews 
 soon began to come in very thick and with no solemnity or deco- 
 rum at all. All was just as at a concert or a lecture, during the 
 interval before the exercises opened. There was talking and 
 laughing, quite loud, and persons about me were talking over fam- 
 ily matters, the news of the day, etc. We had like to have had 
 a bit of a scene too, as some gas escaped from one of the burners 
 in the gallery and took fire with a considerable explosion and 
 some smoking, so that for a moment all were rushing for the 
 doors with great alarm. But soon all grew quiet, and for the 
 next ten minutes the carpenter was at work repairing something 
 or other with hammer and nails with the utmost coolness as 
 though in his own shop. The opening was anything but edifying. 
 Then appeared the minister through the crowd near us, and 
 walked slowly up the pulpit stairs close by, — rather a stout, 
 square-built man as he seemed to me in passing, with a heavy 
 face, and quite inexpressive of the ability and the remarkable 
 gift for popular speaking which I found he had. He has light 
 complexion and light brown hair, I should say, and his appear- 
 ance in general, in dress, etc., quite nice and well looked to. The 
 hair especially seemed quite well arranged. He commenced the 
 service with reading a very long hymn, in a voice of large compass 
 and variety of sound, and though not rich, yet rather agreeable 
 and impressive. Reading very good and surely such as would 
 interest ; he seemed to feel what the hymn said, and, as I after- 
 ward noticed from the sermon, was already in the hymn interested 
 in the subject he was to preach upon. After the hymn, which was 
 sung without organ or other accompaniment by the congregation, 
 he read a few verses with a very full exposition or rather para- 
 phrase, so that one hardly knew when he was reading or when he 
 was speaking ; the language was quite biblical, and flowed without 
 any break or hesitation and without the change of a word, though 
 he had no notes. (During the hymn, windows behind the pulpit 
 were broken by stones thrown from the street. He stopped after 
 a verse, and told the audience the evil would soon be remedied 
 by the police.) After the hymn he said he would depart from 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 119 
 
 his practice, and call upon some one to pray, and so called upon 
 one of his deacons, who offered a very appropriate and fervent 
 prayer. Then another hymn, and then the sermon. Before the 
 text, he begged the people about the pulpit and in the aisles to 
 keep quiet as possible, saying that " he had felt himself so oscil- 
 lating to and fro with the surge that he had become quite dis- 
 concerted, and had wellnigh lost every thought out of his head, so 
 that he was not in condition to lead the devotions of the congre- 
 gation." He then announced his text, Hosea ii. 16 and 17 : " And 
 it shall be at that day, saith the Lord, that thou shalt call me 
 Ishi, and thou shalt call me no more Baali. For I will take away 
 the names of Baalim out of her mouth, and they shall no more be 
 remembered by their name." He should draw three or four les- 
 sons from this text, and should proceed to them without preface 
 or prelude. The first lesson rested upon the words thou shalt 
 and thou shalt no more call, etc. ; and exhibited in its stiff est 
 Calvinistic form the doctrine of God's electing grace. It was 
 quite apart and independent of men's wills that they were sanc- 
 tified and saved. The Bible talked of God's sovereign will, not 
 of the human will ; of what God would do and what He would not 
 do. Your will may be shut up against God, but He has the key to 
 open it ; your heart may be hard and desperately set on mischief 
 and wickedness, but God has a hammer with which to break and 
 soften it to humility and love ; your knee may be stiff and stout, 
 and you may say you will not bow and pray, but God can bend 
 it and bring you to his feet in lowliest penitence. It 's of no 
 use for you to say you are not willing, and therefore can't be 
 saved, God will make you willing. What, you ask, when I am 
 unwilling ? No, not in your unwillingness will you be converted, 
 but God's spirit will make you willing. You may come in here 
 to-night all set against God, and determined you won't love and 
 serve Him, and " nilly-willy," if He has the sovereign purpose to 
 save you, you will go home humbled and renewed in heart and 
 mind. And this was a glorious doctrine for which the preacher 
 blessed God, and for which Christian people could not too much 
 adore and praise Him. 
 
 The second lesson was this : when God's spirit sanctifies a 
 man, he makes thorough work of it. When God says to a man, 
 Thou shalt caU me no more Baali, but shalt call me Ishi, then, 
 after that, the man becomes one of God's children, — no longer a 
 sinner without hope, but a saint blessed by the renewing grace of 
 
120 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 God. And his renewal will be thorough, continuous, and will go 
 on to the day of his entrance to the courts of heaven. What an 
 elevating, consoling thought, that thus the whole human character 
 shall by God's grace be renovated till it becomes free from every 
 stain or blemish. The preacher remarked that the Jews, after 
 being called of God to the service of Jehovah, were as a nation 
 no longer idolaters. They became thoroughly quit of the sin of 
 idolatry, and never could abide the idolatrous practices of the 
 Gentiles. So he had noticed that a Christian after his conversion 
 became especially set against any particular form of sin to which 
 he had been addicted. If he had been intemperate, he could not 
 be tempted to touch or tolerate anything that would intoxicate ; 
 if a Sabbath breaker, he would become a most punctilious rigid 
 Puritan the world ever saw. And now to think that thus God's 
 people will be sanctified thoroughly ; not freed from one sin only, 
 but every form of sin ; not only made pure, but they could never 
 become impure ; so without spot or stain that they could never 
 become stained or spotted by sin. He had often thought that a 
 saint's first day in heaven would be one of utter wonder and 
 amazement. We shall be amazed that there is now no sin to 
 fight with, no spiritual enemies to guard against ; to find every- 
 thing holy, and God's service a pure delight with nothing to mar 
 or blemish. So will it be, you poor Christian, who art now trou- 
 bled with sin ; if God's grace sanctify you it will sanctify you 
 wholly ; God's grace will make clean work in the renovation of a 
 human soul, and heaven will receive you holy and pure, free from 
 all sin. Is n't this something to bless God for ? What love in 
 such redeeming grace I Bless God for all this, and be assured 
 He will carry on to perfection his work of grace. 
 
 The third lesson the preacher wished everybody to listen to, 
 and especially the young and young Christians, viz. : Many things 
 not had in themselves must he shunned hy a good nian^ hecause 
 associated with had things. Nothing wrong in itself in the word 
 Baali ; God had used it himself in several places as a title for 
 himself to be used by his people. But the heathen had used it 
 for idol gods, and so it became associated with bad things ; and 
 so a good Jew could not use it of God, though he might perhaps 
 not hurt his own conscience, because it was connected with idol 
 worship, and might lead others astray. So now with many things 
 not bad per se, but bad in their associations and consequences, in 
 their influence by example upon others. A young man says card- 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 121 
 
 playing don't hurt me any ; I am just as good a Christian if I 
 have a nice little game of whist with my friends ; of course this 
 is n't wrong, and of course I shall do it. But card-playing is the 
 world over connected with gambling, which is a very bad vice, and 
 you, young man, who call yourself a Christian, and want to do 
 good in the world, — you had better not talk about the innocence 
 of this thing for you, when it has led to the ruin of thousands. 
 (Gambling always reminded him of the shocking scene at the 
 foot of the cross, where the soldiers shook their dice in gambling 
 for Christ's raiment. He always fancied he saw those soldiers 
 and heard those rattling dice, while above them hung the Son 
 of God, dying to take away the sins of the world.) And so of 
 going to horse-races, of opera-going, and theatres, etc. You may 
 argue that ])er se they are not bad, but they are connected with 
 bad things, and you must shun them. Suppose a Jew in the tem- 
 ple, and a heathen standing near him. The Jew calls upon God 
 as Baali. What ! says the heathen, that venerable Jew yonder, 
 he calls upon Baali and worships him as his God ; certainly he 
 can't call me an idolater, or call idolatry wrong and a bad thing. 
 My dear fellow, replies the Jew, you don't understand my wor- 
 ship at all ; I don't worship idols. Yes, but you call your God 
 Baali, and that 's the name of my God, too. But, my dear sir, 
 you don't distinguish ; I don't worship that wooden thing you 
 have stuck up in your temple and call your god ; I worship Jeho- 
 vah, the Almighty, and the one God of my fathers. But the 
 heathen goes away without understanding. The Jew had better 
 shun the name Baali and call upon Jehovah. Shun all things 
 that lead to what is bad, even if they are not of themselves bad. 
 He spoke of the case of Rowland Hill hearing that some members 
 of his church went to the theatre, and following them there, and 
 hailing them in one of the boxes, and said he should do the same, 
 and turn them out, too, after he had got home. Also an anecdote 
 of a lady who wanted a coachman ; three came in succession, and 
 she asked each how near he could drive to danger. The first said. 
 Why, madam, I think within a yard of it, and go clear. Ah, 
 said she, you are no coachman for me. The second said, I can 
 come close upon it and yet suffer no harm. You will never do for 
 me, said she. The third replied. Why, madam, that 's something 
 I never tried ; when I see danger ahead, I just shun it and keep 
 as far away as possible. You are the coachman for me, she said, 
 and took him at once. 
 
122 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 The fourth and last lesson rested on the distinction between 
 the names Ishi and Baali, as synonyms for husband^ and unfolded 
 the love shown by God to his chosen people. Ishi, a term of en- 
 dearment, which a wife would use " as a fondling term in softer 
 moments of conjugal life ; " Baali, meaning lord, master, when 
 the husband had been rather sharp in his words, and had practi- 
 cally claimed in his demeanor something of the lordship belonging 
 to man. Jehovah, therefore, in his condescending love, says, " Thou 
 shalt call me Ishi, and no more Baali." I will be a loving hus- 
 band to you, not a despotic master. And so may the Christian 
 especially, by the redeeming love of Christ, draw nigh to God as a 
 God full of love, and call Him by endearing names, having no 
 more the spirit of bondage unto fear, but the spirit of adoption, 
 awakening love and fullest confidence. 
 
 The sermon closed with an impressive and glowing exhibition 
 of the privileges of a renewed soul in this near and affectionate 
 relation, and the fearful condition of a sinner who can look to God 
 with no feelings but those of fear and terror. And if such be the 
 contrast here on earth, how infinitely greater wiU it be in the 
 other world ! 
 
 The whole sermon was preached without any notes ; with entire 
 fluency and self-command, and kept the interested attention of 
 the crowded audience to the very close. A great preacher for 
 uneducated masses, who have no tastes to offend, no sense of de- 
 corum and propriety of manner or language to make them obser- 
 vant and critical, and who are willing to take, along with the hon- 
 est and well-applied truth, telling anecdotes and illustrations, and 
 even striking jests, that will entertain as well as instruct, even if 
 they make them smile or laugh. But not a first-class pulpit ora- 
 tor, in my judgment ; culture quite insufficient, even very moder- 
 ate ; but great energy and force ; great natural gifts for speaking, 
 and apparently much sincerity and love for the gospel and the 
 business of preaching it ; though certainly these not ^unmixed — 
 so far as one's impressions are a standard — with a kind of profes- 
 sional feeling ; a feeling that he has a certain place to keep, and 
 a fame to make and keep as a great preacher. I am sure I should 
 not take so much pains to hear him a second, as I did this first 
 time, and should decline decidedly having him for my minister, 
 whom I must hear every Sunday. 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 123 
 
 QUIET IN LONDON. — ENGLISH POLITICS. 
 
 Monday, March 30, 1857. Strolled about Fleet Street, and 
 went into the Middle Temple and Inner Temple, near Temple Bar, 
 through alleys and courts innumerable ; some of them quite large 
 and extended, and all clear and perfectly quiet, though so close by 
 the stir of the great babel of the city. 
 
 Took a cab and called on Sir Charles Lyell, 53 Harley Street, 
 and delivered a print of Professor Wyman, handed me by Dr. 
 Gould. Had a pleasant call. Sir Charles Lyell, a man about 
 sixty, gray hair, and stoops a little, but full of intelligence in his 
 conversation, though rather passionless, and wanting in vivacity. 
 Inquired about Dr. Gould, Professor Wyman, Professor Agassiz 
 and his work ; also about the " Dred Scott " case. Was very 
 much pleased with Mr. Dallas, as he had been with Buchanan, 
 whom he had known very well. Thought the elections looked bad 
 for England, as Palmerston, he thought, had missed it, especially 
 in bringing the Russian war so soon to an end. I have been very 
 much interested in England in observing the usage at elections, 
 and the sensible and also rapid way in which such business is ad- 
 justed. The Saturday before we landed at Liverpool (March 21) 
 Parliament was dissolved, and decrees issued for new elections 
 throughout the kingdom, and the week we have been in London 
 the elections have all come off, and in many parts of Great Brit- 
 ain. Palmerston appealed to the country from Parliament rather 
 than resign, having been in a minority on the Chinese war, a vote 
 of censure having been passed for the conduct of it by the minis- 
 ters. Thus far the country goes for Palmerston, and against those 
 who censured, and he is likely to come in again as premier, with a 
 large majority. The party for peace, Cobden, Bright, etc., are all 
 down with the people, and both these famous leaders are ousted 
 by new men, quite unknown. There will be a large number of 
 quite new members in Parliament, a thing to be regretted, as 
 there is to be a new speaker. Lefevre had been speaker sixteen 
 years, admirably fitted for his duties, by universal agreement, by 
 long experience, as well as natural abilities and tact and know- 
 ledge of parliamentary rules. He retires to a peerage (Viscount 
 Eversly) and a large pension. Dispatched Everett's Discourses 
 to Dr. Whewell, Dr. Hawtrey, and Sir John Herschel, by mail, 
 sending a letter with them. 
 
124 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 CROSSING THE CHANNEL. 
 
 Tuesday, March 31. Left London at 8.15 for Folkestone and 
 Boulogne and Paris. Got nicely located ; four of us in a first- 
 class car, very comfortable in all respects, so that if it had been 
 night I could have slept the whole way. Reached Folkestone at 
 11.30 ; a queer old place, but it rained, and I kept close. Low 
 tide, and we waited till 12.45, when we got under way in the steam- 
 boat for Boulogne, by the Channel. Rainy, cloudy, sleety, foggy, 
 and everything else disagreeable, and the boat pitched and rolled 
 about like a cockle-shell. Wrapped in shawls and sailor's India- 
 rubber clothes, I sat by the smoke-pipe again (though not so nice 
 a one as the Niagara's) all the way, with no fear of rain or storm 
 before my eyes, though it was cold and uncomfortable, but better 
 than down below. When two thirds the way across, and England 
 was therefore quite behind us, the fog and clouds disappeared, 
 and the sun shone out bright, and the air was most refreshing and 
 exhilarating. So England vs. France ; fogs and damps and rains 
 for sunshine and fresh air. We landed at three P. M., and were 
 marched off the wharf to the custom-house, between two lines of 
 ropes, behind which were lots of people, some looking for friends, 
 and others only gazing for fun ; and then in a cue went in and 
 showed passports, and then had luggage examined. We had an 
 agent with us accustomed to the business, who drove us through 
 all the paces at double-quick time, and then got us to a Hotel 
 Bedford, just in time to get " a hasty plate of soup " and a bit of 
 roast chicken for supper; and then a rush for the cars again, 
 which we reached in season for the train for Paris. Got into nice 
 cars again, though not quite equal to the English ; and here began 
 at last, in good earnest, French voices and French speaking. We 
 had in our car an English gentleman who was very communicative 
 and interesting in conversation, well acquainted, too, with Amer- 
 ica, and we found at last that he was the head of the house of the 
 Barings, — Sir Francis Baring. 
 
 SUNDAY IN PARIS. 
 
 Sunday, April 5, 1857. Sunday in Paris ; but my Bible here 
 and God here, and access to Him by meditation and prayer. I 
 thought of all at home. Especially the Sunday-school was in my 
 thoughts and my heart, and I felt myself there in spirit at least, 
 as, too, I did with my own dear family at different hours of the 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 125 
 
 day. Blessings be with them all this day, and on the teachers, 
 officers, and all the members of the school from the oldest down 
 to the youngest in the infant class. I love and think of them all, 
 and pray God to shed upon them ever the selectest influences of 
 his grace and love. In the evening went to Evangelical Chapel, 
 54 Rue de Provence, to hear Rev. Dr. Kirk. A neat, commodious 
 chapel, quite back from the street, and deliciously quiet, though 
 in the midst of noisy thoroughfares. Was surprised to find so 
 small a congregation, certainly not over a hundred; the seats 
 were but thinly taken, and the tout ensemble had a very cheerless 
 aspect. The service was in part the Episcopal, as the evening 
 prayer service was read, and afterwards singing, then an extem- 
 pore prayer, hymn, sermon, and closing prayer. The sermon 
 excellent, adapted to the season of Easter, from Christ's words, 
 " My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me ! " Some points 
 very impressive and affecting, and fitted to lead one in renewed 
 penitence and faith and love to Christ the Redeemer. I was 
 never so much pleased with Mr. Kirk, though he is so much 
 changed that I should not have recognized him, except by some- 
 thing peculiar in his voice. I could not but think, though, his 
 manner is not exactly what I like, — a little finical, I think, for a 
 minister of Christ. How much better I liked his whole sermon 
 and preaching than Mr. Spurgeon's. 
 
 VERSAILLES AND IMPERIAL PARAPHERNALIA. 
 
 Saturday, April 11, 1857. Versailles to-day, and on the whole 
 a great day for it ; with the exception of an hour or two, fine 
 weather all the time. The railroad ride delightful, the air so soft, 
 and the country pleasant around us. At the Versailles station 
 came across a commissionaire, Marchard by name, who turned out 
 a trump of a fellow, familiar with the whole place, talking English, 
 and quite polite and reasonable withal. We took him, and he 
 put us through everything very handsomely. Was amazed at the 
 splendor of this splendid Versailles, its marble halls and floors, 
 and its rich galleries of art. What a brilliant history of brilliant 
 France is sculptured, painted, and inscribed here in paintings, 
 busts and statues and tablets, from Louis XIII. down to the 
 reigning Napoleon III. What a wonderful history of Napoleon's 
 career does one read here in all these battle-scenes, coronations, 
 victories, and triumphs, in his portraits as First Consul and Em- 
 peror and those of all his great marshals and admirals. And 
 
126 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 what lessons of the changeful and evanescent character of all 
 earthly glory, the great battles fought and won, the civil glories 
 attained, the brilliant court and great country he made and ruled ; 
 and then his fall and St. Helena, and his wretched last life there 
 in mortification and despair. And so of the Louis before him, and 
 Charles the Tenth, and Louis Philippe after him. And now this 
 nephew emperor here, and his portraits and statues bringing up 
 the close to this day, and himself ruling and appointing and con- 
 trolling all this splendid place. Our whole day was taken with 
 the Palace, and we had but little time to wander over the gardens, 
 and none for the interior of the Trianon. We looked in and saw 
 the state carriages, massive things enough, and all brilliant with 
 gilded work. The most splendid of them was used the last time 
 for the baptism occasion of the Prince Imperial. Strange that a 
 Christian ordinance, so simple in all its original character and 
 circumstances, should require for the child of a Christian ruler 
 such a gorgeous carriage as this, with all the other brilliant train 
 behind it, on the way to the church and the baptismal font ! 
 Would not the Saviour and his apostles, the early Christians, 
 would not John the Baptist, denounce such proceedings with holy 
 indignation ! 
 
 EASTER. — MUSIC VS. RITUAL. 
 
 April 12th, Easter Sunday. Went to St. Roch Church, which 
 was filled with people of all classes and ages, who seemed at least 
 to be there in the spirit of worshipers. At least I felt that God, 
 who knows and sees the heart, could alone distinguish among us 
 all who in the church sought Him in truth and loved his services 
 and who cared for his day, his word, and all his commandments. 
 Such music as I heard there seemed full of devotion in its influ- 
 ence. I am sure that, although I knew not at all what was 
 chanted and sung, yet the music lifted my thoughts to God 
 and good things, to heaven and its praises and its holy services. 
 The bell-ringing, kneelings, etc., were utterly void of signifi- 
 cance to me as acts of worship. I had no comprehension of it 
 any more than if I had been in a heathen temple, ancient or 
 modern. 
 
 Afterward went to the Notre Dame, which was also well filled, 
 though high mass was over. Walked about it and looked again 
 at its grand old nave and aisles and chapels, which I had not seen 
 for years. Rained hard most of the morning, and I wondered 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 127 
 
 how I should have felt in Providence a month ago walking about 
 in the rain. 
 
 BY RAIL WHERE HANNIBAL'S ARMY CROSSED. 
 
 Tuesday and Wednesday, April 14 and 15. En route for 
 Marseilles via Lyons. Left Paris at 11 A. M., dined at Dijon, 
 and reached Lyons at 9.47 p. m., after a very pleasant ride. 
 Wednesday left Lyons at 8 a. m., had a nice lunch at Valence, 
 the old Valentia (how many times I have gone through it in my 
 Livy studies in my classes). Reached Marseilles at 4 p. M. The 
 ride far pleasanter than from Paris to Lyons. The Rhone on our 
 right a large part of the way; quite narrow for two thirds the way, 
 but broad as we neared Marseilles. Thought of Hannibal and his 
 army, and their crossing here, and fancied many a point, which 
 seemed to correspond with the description, might have been the 
 spot where he got over by charging the Gauls on the other side, 
 while the detachment he had sent up the river to cross at a higher 
 point fell upon their rear. 
 
 BY SEA AND LAND TO ROME. 
 
 Friday, April 17. On steamer from Marseilles to Civita 
 Vecchia. 
 
 A wonderfully fine day on the Mediterranean, sky cloudless, 
 and the sea calm as a lake, and the air soft as summer. We 
 were under an awning all day. I was up early and on deck all 
 day. The late hour of breakfast, half past nine, a great incon- 
 venience, at least to me, and then, too, nothing till the dinner at 
 five P. M. One can have a cup of black coffee early, but nothing 
 is expected to be given with it. It works very well with the 
 company, especially in this Italian line, as they stop at the ports, 
 Genoa, Leghorn, Civita Vecchia, in the morning early, and people 
 go ashore at about nine, and the company make all their breakfasts 
 clear. But, however, these cuisine arrangements did not rob me 
 of my enjoyment of this exquisite day in the Mediterranean. 
 How I lay about, and strolled around the deck, and gazed at sky 
 and sea, and the French and Ligurian coast on the one side, and 
 the Corsican on the other. I thought how all these waters had 
 been historic ground from the earliest periods of history, traversed 
 by how many fleets, peaceful and warlike, of how many nations, 
 ancient and modern, and the scenes of how many voyages, disastrous 
 and successful, how many engagements, victories and losses and 
 
128 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 disgraces. A day I can never forget, and if those I love best had 
 only been with me, to drink in that balmy, genial air, and muse 
 together with me over all of the past of the world's history ! 
 
 Saturday, 18th. Slept well, and in the morning rose early 
 from my berth, looked through the little window upon the sea, 
 and saw the glorious sun rise above it and the Etruscan shore 
 behind it. It was yet early and we were coming into Civita 
 Vecchia, a place dreaded by me most intensely from my re- 
 membrance of my last visit to it, when we had rows with vetturini 
 and loss of time and patience and money. But this time from 
 the French steamer we got through with no great difficulty. On 
 disembarking we had given us a printed paper, stating the fixed 
 prices for boatmen, then for faccMni^ then for a commissionaire 
 if we wanted one, one franc for each, a tariff quite high enough. 
 At the landing an agent of the company was there to receive 
 us, and see that the boatman made no extra charge, and to tell 
 us where to go next; and then a fellow came up and asked 
 me if I wanted to go by diligence to Rome, whom I found to 
 be a commissionaire, or a servitore de piazza. He got us our 
 tickets for the diligence, paying in advance himself, while we 
 were going through the custom-house examination, which was 
 a farce (and no fee at all necessary to hurry them) ; then went 
 about and got our passports vised by two or three different people, 
 the American consul, among the rest, charging one dollar for 
 the vise ; got our baggage plomhed for Rome, and ourselves 
 landed at the Hotel Orlandi, for a breakfast ; for all which 
 I thought he earned one franc per head. We got off for Rome 
 at ten o'clock, and as good luck would have it, I had a seat 
 in the coupe and the boys on the banquette or coachman's box. 
 We had another superb day ; nothing could have been finer for 
 a drive on our way to Rome. Only the importunate postilions 
 at the end of each station, — and it was forty-seven miles, about 
 four posts, — and then the conductor at the end, were begging 
 for huono mano. I found everybody paid, even a poor-looking 
 monk who sat in the coupe, five baiocchi or cents to each postilion, 
 and so I fell in with the rest, though vexed at such a usage. 
 But we were going to Rome and it was glorious weather, and 
 who would care for postilions, or buono mano, or any such like 
 imposition. Only the people at the city gates who looked in at 
 the windows and took my passport I could n't be induced to 
 give anything to ; it was too bare a humbug for them to hold 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 129 
 
 out their beggarly hands and ask for qualche cosa^ a detestable 
 expression. We had had St. Peter's looming up before us for 
 miles, and beyond the hills from Soracte, round to the Alban 
 Mount ; and there was enough food for thought without thinking 
 of the diligence and its humbugs ; and as we quit the Porta 
 Cavalleggieriandthe official with hand outstretched, we soon came 
 close by the colonnades and piazza of St. Peter's! What an 
 inspiring sight ! I saw that the piazza was thronged with people, 
 and on asking my monk neighbor what it meant, he told me 
 that the illumination was coming off questa sera, as it had been 
 postponed from Holy Week on account of the tempo cattivo. 
 And so I shouted to the boys, on the banquette, that they had 
 got there just in time for this great sight of a Roman Easter 
 Week. We got through the diligence office as soon as possible 
 and made for the Hotel d'AUemagne ; and there I was again, 
 crossing the Corso, rushing up the Via Condotti, and stopping 
 opposite Lepri's, and near the corner of the Piazza di Spagna. 
 We got rooms, and then, admonished by the gargon, who told 
 us we should be late, as it was near eight o'clock, we hurried 
 up to the Pincian Hill, it being quite too late to reach the Piazza 
 of St. Peter's. The silver illumination was already to be seen, 
 and then, at eight precisely, all at once the golden blaze of the 
 hundreds of lights broke out upon our sight, lighting up the 
 whole dome, and giving the utmost distinctness to all its lines 
 and contour, and throwing it against the dark sky, a great, gigantic 
 pile. What crowds were there to gaze ; what exclamations in 
 all tongues, expressing the common human surprise and delight ! 
 And yet this a religious ceremony, and a closing part of Holy 
 Week! 
 
 THREE SHORT DAYS IN ROME. 
 
 Rome, Sunday, April 19. Rose very early, and found it 
 another charming day. Went with the boys after breakfast to 
 the Capitoline and thence to the Forum, showing them the places 
 and objects of principal interest. All much the same as when 
 I was here before, save that excavations have gone on on the 
 south side of the Forum. At eleven went to the Palazzo Braschi, 
 the house of our minister ; and in a hall there heard the chaplain 
 to the American embassy preach. A very pleasant place, and 
 perhaps a hundred people there. An excellent sermon, " For 
 me to live is Christ," — very scriptural and faithful exhibition 
 of the worldly, compared with the Christian life. Very good 
 
130 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1867. 
 
 indeed, and though I missed somewhat in the devotional services, 
 which were Congregational, yet all was very edifying and most 
 agreeable, and I hope improving to me. I felt doubt as to my 
 duty with the boys to-day as well as myself, it being one of 
 only four days in Rome. But I walked with them, and could 
 not think it wrong to point out to them for their knowledge 
 and education all that, in locality, ruins, etc., we visited or saw 
 as we passed. The whole neighborhood of the Forum we walked 
 about, the arches, columns. Coliseum, Cloaca Maxima, and so on, 
 and in such a way that I think they will remember all. I was 
 more tried still in the evening, for the fireworks — the giran- 
 dola — were to come off on the Pincian, and it was out of the 
 question to say No to them. So I went with them to the Piazza 
 del Popolo, where all was yet more gorgeous, in better taste, and 
 better appointed than years ago when I saw them from the St. 
 Angelo. But I was glad to get away, and make to our hotel, and 
 to my room. And so ended this Roman Sunday. Oh, what a 
 different one from an American, a Providence Sunday. I 
 thought of our Sunday-school, our church, my own family circle, 
 and how my spirit was with them in all their services, from the 
 morning to night. I hope they may have passed their hours 
 better than I, and with richer fruits of such observance. God 
 bless you all ! 
 
 Monday, 20th. I got a carriage in the Piazza di Spagna for 
 the day, at twenty-five pauls (at first he asked me thirty-five), and 
 three for huono mano^ and we started for a drive which I had 
 made out beforehand as well as I could. Over the Quirinal 
 to the Sta. Maria Maggiore, thence to the Porta Lorenzo and 
 the remains of the aqueducts, then round to the Santa Croce 
 and to the St. John Lateran, after having explored all the sur- 
 roundings of the Porta Maggiore and especially the sjoecus of 
 the aqueduct. These splendid basilicas seen, we made our way 
 quite across the city to the Vatican, and till three o'clock, the 
 time of closing, saw the gallery and collections. I turned the 
 boys to the chief things, to the Demosthenes, Minerva, and a 
 few others in the Braccio Nuovo, to the bust of young Augustus, 
 then the Belvedere, the Stanze of Raphael, and lastly to the pictures, 
 the Transfiguration, and the Foligno, and the Communion. And 
 what a four hours were these we had there ! Then, for the first 
 time for the boys, we entered St. Peter's ; to me, how ever unchanged 
 and grand this church! We spent some time here, and then 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 131 
 
 drove through the city to the Capitol, but found it was too late 
 for the galleries, and so put it off till the morrow. Then to 
 the Forum of Trajan, and to the Fontana de Trevi, and then 
 to the Calcografia Camerale, and finally home. Afterward walked 
 a little on the Pincian, but returned soon, as it was six o'clock, 
 the dinner hour. What a crowded day ; how full of events and 
 great things to see and learn and try to know. But I doubt 
 the wisdom of trying to do so much in four days. My evening 
 and night and early morning hours I spent as usual, mostly by 
 myself ; but I am sure I can say " never less alone than when 
 alone," for how much have I to think of, how much to thank 
 God for, how much to resolve upon for the future, how many 
 thoughts of home, and so how full are all my solitary moments ! 
 
 Wednesday, 23d. A bad day for weather, this our last, and yet 
 the Appian Way was to be seen, which has been excavated since 
 I was here. But I was destined, alas, to lose this. We started 
 in a carriage for the day, and got three or four miles outside the 
 gate, but it rained so furiously, and with so little prospect of clear- 
 ing up, that we turned back, much to my sorrow. We rode about 
 the Capitol, and some of the Campus Martins, as it did not rain 
 quite so badly on our return ; and as we had no time for palaces 
 and their galleries, and the thousand other things to be seen, I 
 was forced to consider our Roman visit over. Much of the early 
 day was lost by my efforts to get conveyance for Civita Vecchia. 
 The diligence, the post-coaches, and horses were all engaged for 
 Thursday^ just our day, because the Empress of Russia was to 
 come that very morning to Rome. So I had to get a vetturino, 
 and pay an enormous price (80 francs), as of course they had all 
 the advantage, knowing the state of the case still better than we. 
 And we had to start Wednesday night at eight, instead of Thurs- 
 day at daybreak, as I had intended, by extra diligence or post. 
 And so we got off, after a capital dinner, into our vettnra^ with a 
 regular Italian-looking fellow for our driver, large, fine face, and 
 bright, black eyes, and himself all full of life. I had some mis- 
 givings about this night ride, for when I was here last it v;rould 
 not have been thought safe, but since the French occupation of 
 Rome the Papal roads are free of brigands ; those to Naples, I am 
 told, are still dangerous, even by day. We got through very well 
 indeed, and were very comfortable, and slept all night, with a stop 
 of an hour at Palo, and reached Civita Vecchia at about ten in 
 the morning. I had no written contract with the vetturino, but 
 
132 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 he only planked down at Rome a napoleon en gage^ and our hotel- 
 keeper told me that would be enough, as he knew him to be honest. 
 
 CIVITA VECCHIA, THE EMPRESS OF RUSSIA, AND NAPLES. 
 
 On Thursday, the 24th, we were back to this place, Civita Vec- 
 chia, and just inside the gate there was the same servitore de pi- 
 azza I had employed before, ready to get some more fees, and do 
 the work for it. All the town was in immense commotion, the 
 streets crowded to their utmost with men, women, and children, as 
 the Russian man-of-war was in port, and the empress was soon to 
 come ashore and start for Rome. Went to the Hotel de 1' Europe 
 and got our breakfast, and afterward came down to the wharf and 
 had a good view of the empress and her retinue as they came on 
 shore and were received by the authorities in a very gay, canopied 
 tent of silks and damasks made on the landing, passed through, 
 and entered their carriages and went off to Rome, amidst a long 
 lane of people and of soldiers on either side of the road. It was 
 the wife of the late emperor, a woman apparently over fifty, and, 
 as well as I could see, of no particular beauty, but a face which 
 showed some character. We got on board the steamer about noon, 
 and left at two p. M. It was very crowded, and we had indiffer- 
 ent accommodations the first night, on sofas and berths in the 
 stern, but I slept very well, and arose early on Friday, 25th, and 
 found myself coming down to the Bay of Naples. We got on 
 shore at about nine, and had a rush about the city in carriage and 
 on foot ; saw the Museum, though no time for long survey. The 
 artists in the halls of paintings were sadly importunate to have us 
 buy their copies of the Correggios and Raphaels of the gallery. I 
 quite pitied them, as they were evidently pressed for money ; but 
 their paintings were of quite ordinary merit, and besides I had 
 neither money to buy them nor place to put them. I found large 
 additions to the antiquities since I was here years ago, especially 
 of vases found in Campania and Apulia. We got back to the 
 boat at half past one. On the way to Messina we had good 
 weather part of the way, but towards night it grew windy and 
 squally, and the sea ran high, and I was glad to get to bed. 
 
 AN UN-SUNDAY-LIKE SUNDAY IN MESSINA. 
 
 Messina, Sunday, April 26. Here we are, to be in this ancient 
 island and city four or five days, to wait for the boat to the Pi- 
 raeus. Thought more than ever of home, church, Sunday-school, 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 133 
 
 and all to-day, while here amid scenes so different from a New 
 England Sabbath. Saw everything, indeed, with thoughts of our 
 First Baptist Sunday-school in my mind, and feelings of gratitude 
 that the lot of myself and family and all my friends was not cast 
 here amidst circumstances of government, religion, and whole civ- 
 ilization so unfortunate. The streets full of beggars, and wretched, 
 sick, degraded-looking people, children running wild, and appar- 
 ently uncared for physically even, to say nothing of religious and 
 social destitution. So in the churches, into some of which I went, 
 where the children, in rags and dirt, were running about from 
 chapel to chapel and show to show, for what else was there in the 
 services to them, or perhaps, indeed, to all the grown people ? and 
 of course with no possibility of being instructed and taught the 
 truths of the Bible. At half past six went to an English service 
 in a house near by the British consulate. Was shown into a 
 small room, lighted by a few candles^ and filled with an audience 
 of three women, two small children, and one man ; ourselves made 
 three more, quite a godsend in number to such a congregation. 
 The preacher was in the pulpit, a young-looking man, who went 
 through the service in a tone and manner that showed want of 
 real reverence or religious feeling, and scarce even intelligence of 
 what he was saying and doing. The sermon was quite a good one, 
 well written and devout in spirit, but delivered in such a way as 
 plainly showed that the man never wrote a word of it. A most 
 unedifying service ! But I found my room pleasant, with the Bi- 
 ble and good books, and read to the boys A. B.'s translation of 
 a sermon of Tholuck, and we all found it delightful and really 
 refreshing in such a dry place as this. 
 
 A SUNDAY LETTER WRITTEN TO THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL AT HOME. 
 
 April 26, 1857. 
 To the First Baptist Sunday-school of Promdence : — 
 
 I have been thinking of you with much affection, in connection 
 with all the strange people and scenes about me ; and it has oc- 
 curred to me that you might like to hear a few words of remem- 
 brance and love, written to you in a far-off land by your absent 
 superintendent. You observe that this letter is written at Mes- 
 sina, a large and old city in Sicily, an island famous in ancient 
 story, and in the history, both ancient and modern, of many na- 
 tions. The island, you know, is in the Mediterranean Sea, near 
 by the western extremity of Italy, from which it is parted by the 
 
134 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 narrow Strait of Messina, that takes its name from the place 
 where I am writing. From the window of my room I see across 
 the water the high rock of Scylla, on the Italian coast, just at the 
 head of the narrowest part of the strait, and opposite to this is 
 the whirlpool of Charybdis, both great objects of terror to naviga- 
 tors of olden times, and celebrated by the ancient poets, though 
 now not at all dreaded, as navigation is so much better under- 
 stood. I have been up to the very northeast angle of the island, 
 and ascended to the top of a lighthouse that is called by an an- 
 cient name, the Pharos, or Lighthouse, of Pelorum, and though 
 Scylla loomed up and projected far into the strait, yet it had 
 nothing fearful in its look ; and as the weather was fine and the 
 water very calm, I saw nothing at all that looked like the storied 
 whirlpool of Charybdis. In the distance, as I looked out from 
 the light, I saw the island of Stromboli, a volcanic island of the 
 group called the Lipari, called in ancient times the ^olian Is- 
 lands, because the pagan poets used to say that ^olus, the god of 
 the winds, lived there. Indeed, in old times, when science had 
 made little progress, there were many strange fables and stories 
 about the volcanic islands and mountains of Sicily. About fifty 
 miles south of Messina is Mount Etna, of whose dreadful erup- 
 tions you have probably heard, which the poets used to account 
 for by fabling that a huge giant was confined under the island, 
 and that Etna was on his head, and that all the terrible earth- 
 quakes and eruptions were caused by this gigantic creature trying 
 to move and get released. But though these volcanoes are better 
 understood in modern times, yet their effects are no less destruc- 
 tive. About seventy years ago this city was almost entirely de- 
 stroyed by an earthquake, and even now the traveler sees traces 
 of its desolating effects wherever he goes about the streets ; and 
 to-day I was in a gentleman's house here, and he pointed to a 
 place in one of his rooms where a part of the ceiling had fallen 
 down, and he told me it occurred last fall, when there was a slight 
 earthquake here. But the danger of earthquakes I have thought 
 very little of here, and indeed it is by no means the worst thing 
 in the life of the people. I could indeed tell you of many pleas- 
 ant things I have noticed here in Messina to-day ; its charming 
 situation and scenery ; its beautiful bend of shore ; and its fine, 
 secure harbor, with the delightful landscape all around, of blue 
 waters, and the long line of Calabrian hills opposite, and behind 
 the conical stretch of the mountains of Sicily. The skies, too, are 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 135 
 
 bright and clear, and the climate soft and genial, so that the peo- 
 ple are most of the time out of doors ; and here, to-day, in April, 
 the fields and gardens and trees are all in summer dress, and 
 oranges and lemons are ripe on the trees, and people have on their 
 table the fruits and berries and vegetables that we have late in 
 June and in July. But all these pleasant things are in sad con- 
 trast with the miserable life and character and condition of the 
 people themselves ; and it is this that I have thought of to-day 
 when I have been in the streets, and have observed especially how 
 poor and ill-clad the children were, and how much they needed to 
 be cared for, to be gathered into Sunday-schools, and taught the 
 Bible, and the way to be good and happy here and hereafter. 
 And then I have wished and prayed that you might all know how 
 blessed a lot has fallen to you in your New England homes, with 
 Christian parents and friends, with the Sabbath and the Sunday- 
 school and the Bible, and all the means of instruction you have so 
 abundantly given you. Here I have seen multitudes of wretched, 
 ragged children, running about the streets, many begging of every- 
 body they met, having no idea, apparently, of the Sabbath, of 
 God, of the Saviour, or the way of salvation ; and when I have 
 looked into the churches, there I saw some of them too, wander- 
 ing about, with nobody to look after them, and nothing like Chris- 
 tian instruction given them. I suppose there is hardly one of you 
 in any of your classes that could not tell these children more in 
 half an hour about the Bible and its tidings of a Saviour than 
 they have ever heard or seem likely to hear in their whole lives. 
 Then, too, I find on inquiry, that there are no schools here, or any 
 system of public instruction, so that the children are idle, and 
 grow up ignorant, without ever knowing how to read and write. 
 The religion here is the Roman Catholic, and a very bad form, 
 too, of that religion, if religion it can be called, and instead of our 
 free institutions they have a very despotic government, which 
 cares nothing for the people, and takes no means to educate and 
 make them prosperous and happy. The people do not have the 
 Bible, and have no instruction in it, and they have nothing in the 
 churches but outside shows and forms and superstitious rites, that 
 do not teach them to love and serve God, nor tell them anything 
 of Christ and the way to be saved from their sins. I will tell you 
 something in particular that came to my notice to-day. As I was 
 in the hotel where I am stopping, I heard the noise of music in 
 the street and the moving of many feet on the pavement. On 
 
136 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 going to the window a strange sight, especially for Sunday, met 
 my view. It was a great procession coming along ; and first of 
 all, little children in it I saw, hardly big enough to be in our in- 
 fant school, dressed in little black cloaks and hoods, and led along, 
 carrying candles which their little hands could hardly hold. Then 
 came a rushing crowd, and in the centre I saw, carried on a frame 
 supported by many men, a large figure in wood, apparently of 
 some saint, in a kneeling posture, covered over with a great deal 
 of gilding, and surrounded by an immense number of candles ; 
 and then a band of music, a troop of soldiers, a company of police, 
 and the whole town behind in throngs, men, women, and children. 
 Of course I asked what all this meant, and especially what those 
 little boys were there for, carrying candles and dressed like little 
 monks. And I found that this Sunday was the Festival of St. 
 Francis, and the procession to the church was its celebration. 
 These little boys had been vowed to his service, had been chris- 
 tened by his name, and they and their parents and friends consid- 
 ered them his children, under his protection, and always safe from 
 harm and danger. Perhaps I did not get a very full and correct 
 account of what I saw, but I could see enough myself to know 
 that there was a sad want of the knowledge of the Bible, of our 
 gracious Father in heaven, who alone can protect and bless us, 
 and of that divine Saviour, whom in his love He has sent us, that 
 we may all be saved from sin and be prepared for heaven. If our 
 Saviour were now on earth, and should go about these streets on 
 his errands of love, as He did once in Jerusalem, He would find the 
 people not only as ignorant of the true God and the Messiah, and 
 as much misled and deceived by corrupt priests, as He found them 
 there, but also just as many who needed his healing mercy, the 
 palsied, the halt, the dumb, and the blind, the wretched poor, to 
 follow his steps and supplicate his blessing. But how happy your 
 lot and mine in all these things, and especially in regard to our 
 knowledge of Christ and the way of salvation ! I have thought 
 to-day much of all this contrast, and it is my prayer to God for 
 all of us, as a school, as teachers, and as scholars, that we may 
 know how to be thankful, to be aware how much God has given us, 
 and what He requires of us, and that we may be sure to accept the 
 gospel of glad tidings He has brought to our ears from our very 
 infancy, and try to spend our lives in the service of Christ. As I 
 have sat in my room here and looked across the strait before me, 
 I thought of the great Apostle who once, in the course of his many 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 137 
 
 labors and sufferings for Christ's sake, came through these waters 
 and stopped at Rhegium (the modern Reggio), which is just op- 
 posite Messina, when, as a prisoner, he was carried to Rome to 
 plead his cause before Caesar. If only we might have something 
 of his heroic Christian spirit, and try to follow Christ as he did, 
 "counting all things but loss for the excellency of Christ Jesus," 
 that we might " win Christ," and at last " be found in Him." 
 
 SICILIAN SCENERY AND BEGGARS. 
 
 Tuesday, 28th. Sent for our passports from the police, and 
 set them going on the route for vises^ and a very tortuous one, too, 
 what with messages back and forth from the American consul, 
 police, and other authorities. Much American shipping here, and 
 at present six or seven ships and barks, which look better than 
 anything else in port. Mr. Behn, the American consul, gives a 
 shocking account of religion and education and morals here. No 
 schools and no attention to education, except for those intended 
 for the church. Girls often sent to convents but seldom well 
 instructed ; before marriage kept very rigidly with no company in 
 the house, but lots of intrigues and courting going on in the 
 streets and the churches. The priests often abettors and princi- 
 pals in vice, and procurers, too, as I was informed by one who 
 had heard them make overtures to English strangers here. 
 
 Wednesday, 29th. Went by carriage to the northeast corner 
 of the island. A beautiful drive all the way along the shore. 
 Ascended the light there, called Pelorum Light, and had a fine 
 view of island, Scylla, sea, and strait. We were sadly annoyed 
 by the troops of beggars, more so than at any place I ever vis- 
 ited. They were poor and wretched, many boys among them, 
 and some palsied and one man dumb. This last was frightfully 
 importunate and ran by our coach for a mile out of the village, 
 begging by all the natural language he could command that we 
 would aid him. I really had nothing myself, but should have 
 certainly given if I had. Finally I told the boys if they had any- 
 thing in their pockets to give it to him, as a man must be in need 
 to run such a distance for charity. And what looks and acts of 
 gratitude when the piece of money was flung to him ! We looked 
 back and there he stood in the road holding up both hands and 
 apparently blessing us and commending us to heaven. I thought, 
 as I had done during the whole drive, of Jerusalem in our Sa- 
 viour's time, and the importunate manner in which the wretched 
 
138 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 blind and lame besought his gracious aid. The aspect of Scylla 
 was less striking than I had expected, but still a commanding, 
 strangely projecting rock. Nothing like a Charybdis visible, but 
 the keeper of the light told us it was frequently so stormy that no 
 vessel could leave or enter the strait, — about a mile and a half 
 wide at its narrowest point. 
 
 A MILITARY BEGGAR. 
 
 Thursday, 30th April. Got on board steamer at two o'clock, 
 but left the port at four. At the wharf one of the perpetual gens 
 d^armes on hand, — I had seen him hanging about there for an 
 hour or more, — who stepped up and said "Z>o^ana," which 
 meant, of course, " a small fee and I am content." I gave him a 
 bit of silver, and we went onto the boat without further trouble. 
 
 ALONG THE GRECIAN SHORES. 
 
 Friday and Saturday, May 1 and 2. Golden, golden days! 
 Such a sky, such an air, and such wonderfully fine views and 
 grand old places to see, all clustered over with great historic 
 memories ! Never did I suppose that I should have been so 
 favored as to have such a voyage. Especially was Saturday a 
 great day. Early we made Cape Matapan, which brought up to 
 mind the Peloponnesus, Laconia, Sparta, and all ; then came 
 Cythera in sight on our right, and thence arose Venus Anadyo- 
 mene ; then we doubled the Cape Malea, and onward by Epidau- 
 rus with the Cyclades off on our right ; and at last passing Hydra, 
 we came up the Saronic Gulf, and then ^gina and Salamis, and 
 the Piraeus finally at about half past seven P. M. One succession 
 all day of glorious sights from sunrise to sunset, and all under 
 the finest auspices of sky and sea that could be imagined. 
 
 SUNDAY AT ATHENS. — A BIBLE READING VTHERE PAUL 
 PREACHED. 
 
 Athens, Sunday, May 3, 1857. Got ashore at seven a. m. Found 
 a carriage and made for Athens as quick as we could, a five-mile 
 drive over a dusty road, and with the sun already quite hot, but 
 we were near the Cephissus and the Groves of the Academy, and 
 soon caught a glimpse of the Acropolis and all the surrounding 
 hills. And what a strange Sunday morning it seemed ! Went 
 to the Hotel d'Orient, and at eleven to the Church of the Eng- 
 lish Embassy. In the afternoon went with Mr. Dickson to the 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 139 
 
 Areopagus, where we read together in the original and the Eng- 
 lish Paul's speech, Acts xvii. In the midst of such localities 
 and on the very spot we could feel the force and pertinence of the 
 words and thoughts he uttered. Would that a man of like spirit 
 and force might now appear here to turn the people to a simpler 
 and truer worship of God alone, and of the true God our Saviour ! 
 
 CLASSICAL SIGHT-SEEING IN ATHENS. 
 
 Monday, May 4. Up early with the boys and an American 
 who had come with us from Messina, and with our guide, George 
 Makropolos, and started for the chief localities and monuments 
 of the ancient city. Began on the southeast near by the Ilissus, 
 the Stadium, the Olympian Jupiter's temple ; then Hadrian's 
 arch and the monument of Lysicrates, to the southeast angle of 
 the Acropolis ; first the famous old theatre of Bacchus, which I 
 have studied so much in books; the Odeum of Herodes, where 
 we found excavations going on with columns found already and 
 amphorae, statues, etc. Then went around to the west and up to 
 the Propylsea, the Parthenon, etc. All my expectations fully 
 realized by a sight of these grand and beautiful ruins. Picked 
 up some bits of marble, also flowers and some crow-quills which 
 Pegasus-like had happened to fall in the Parthenon, and took 
 them along as souvenirs of my first visit here. Then the Mu- 
 seum, Pnyx, Areopagus, Temple of Theseus, and home through 
 the narrow streets of the modern city. Certainly I never before 
 had such a walk before breakfast. We got to the hotel at ten 
 o'clock, and were hungry enough to eat a famous Athenian break- 
 fast, of which the honey of Mt. Hymettus was not the worst or 
 the smallest part. My room has two windows, the one facing the 
 Acropolis and the other Hymettus ; and so clear is the air that 
 they appear close by me, as if I had only to take one or two steps 
 over those roofs below me, and at once stand on those famed 
 places. ^ 
 
 CARRIAGE AND HORSEBACK TO MARATHON. — THE CONSE- 
 QUENCES. 
 
 Tuesday, May 5. Another great day (though a hard one and 
 sore). Went to Marathon. Started at 4.30 A. M. (and how hard 
 it was to get up so early after the fatigue of the day before) and 
 by carriage to Cephissia. What a grand morning, — just like 
 yesterday, when I was out of bed long before the guide came and 
 
140 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 saw the early dawn on Mt. Hymettus, — and what a fresh, glori- 
 ous air as we drove out the city into the country. Dr. King had 
 spoken to me of the dangers from brigands anywhere out of the 
 city, and I had heard too of a recent act of a band who carried 
 out of Corinth to the mountains a wealthy citizen and his brother- 
 in-law, and sent back demanding a ransom of about $20,000. I 
 confess I was not without apprehensions in respect to journeying, 
 but Dr. Hill and others told me there was no danger whatever in 
 any direction, and I went accordingly, thinking I should regret it 
 if I should lose any such excursions now that I am here. Doubt- 
 less there is danger, but I reflected that just after such an act one 
 might be safer, and besides that, the brigands were now pursued 
 by soldiers and most apt to keep out of the way for some time 
 to come. And glad am I that I was not dissuaded. Everything 
 far surpassed my expectations, especially the natural scenery, the 
 mountains everywhere, the beautiful dells and plains and espe- 
 cially the grand gorge just above the ancient Marathon, from 
 which one has the plain spread out before him, and the sea 
 stretching beyond. Got to Cephissia at 7.15, and at Marathon at 
 ten A. M. Stopped at a khan, my first in Greece, mounted the 
 steps running along the side of the house, and there on a mattress 
 spread for us, and low round seat, filled with cotton or something 
 else, we took our breakfast, which the guide had brought along. 
 It was the festival of St. George, and the shepherds and their 
 families from all about came to Yrana, as the modern town is 
 called, to the church of St. George on the hillside, to celebrate 
 the day by religious acts, and then by dance and song. The 
 khan was full, and in a low building adjoining it, where our 
 horses were put, I saw parties of the people sitting down and 
 taking their simple meal. Seeing a woman with an infant and a 
 man by her whom I took for her husband, I could not but think 
 of Bethlehem and our Saviour and Mary and Joseph, of the 
 stable and the manger, " b|jpause there was no room in the inn.'^ 
 Our ride from Cephissia had been on horseback, and I had a very 
 hard trotting beast, and was terribly shaken up and made stiff and 
 tired ; but with so much to see and think of I got along very well. 
 We galloped across the famous plain to the Tumulus, where the 
 Athenians were buried, and rode to the top and thence looked at 
 the plain, the most perfectly level plain I ever saw. The whole 
 view around was not only inspiring from association, but beautiful 
 and grand from its natural character. Indeed, everlasting nature 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 141 
 
 may well divide the palm here with ever-changing man and his- 
 tory, and, indeed, perhaps carry it quite off. The ride back to 
 Cephissia I found a hard one and fatiguing, more than anything 
 for a long time, and at Cephissia how glad I was to dismount and 
 get into the carriage and in the corner just let myself go to sleep, 
 which I did in perhaps two minutes and a half ! Was refreshed 
 by nap, by the breeze, and the views of Athens and the neighbor- 
 hood, and felt tolerably well on reaching the hotel. 
 
 Wednesday, 6th. Had previously made arrangements for a 
 longer excursion to begin on the 7th, but this morning sent for 
 the guide and gave it up, and decided to lie by a day or two. 
 Kept my room all day, writing and reading. It was a wonderful 
 moonlight night, and I sat till late in my room, looking out at the 
 Acropolis and the other hills bathed in the serene light of the 
 moon, and with an air as soft as a June evening with us. 
 
 Thursday, 7th. Also quiet to-day and much better, — indeed 
 well again, I hope, and thus far without medicine at all. In the 
 evening ventured, notwithstanding my little illness of yesterday, 
 to go with Mr. Dickson and a party made up by him to the 
 Acropolis by moonlight, and glad was I that I went. Never had 
 such a magnificent sight as this hill, those grand old columns, and 
 ruins, all lighted by a moon of rare brightness, and in a still, 
 most delicious air. 
 
 ELEUSIS AND SALAMIS. — MODERN USE FOR ANCIENT SAR- 
 COPHAGI. 
 
 Friday, 8th. By carriage visited Eleusis and Megara. The 
 drive out of Athens at the early hour of five, when the air was 
 fresh and cool, was delightful, and the hills stood out again as I 
 have already seen them, in bold relief against the sky. The road 
 lay along the old Sacred Way to Eleusis, the path of the reli- 
 gious processions, until we reached the Pass of Daphne, a narrow 
 defile in Mt. ^galeos, a wild, picturesque place. At the end of 
 the pass we stopped to visit the Monastery of Daphne, an old 
 building reared upon blocks of marble belonging to some old 
 Greek structure, it is supposed a temple of Apollo. Hastening 
 away, we resumed our drive, and coming down the pass, we came 
 in sight of the bay of Eleusis with the island of Salamis close by, 
 and hills and mountains on the opposite coast. By this beautiful 
 bay, which was as calm as a lake, we drove nearly the whole way 
 till we reached Megara. But little did I find to see in Eleusis, — 
 
142 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 the site of the ancient city, the ruins of the Acropolis, and the 
 spot, at least, where was a temple of Demeter. We reached Me- 
 gara at noon when it was very hot, and the narrow streets and ill- 
 built houses, reaching up the hill on which the town is built, were 
 quite unpromising. But we got to the khan of the place, a very 
 neat one, and sat upon a rude balcony, but deliciously cool, and 
 there had our lunch. Our guide took us off a long stretch to see 
 sarcophagi, and when we got in sight of them, what should we 
 find but the whole female population washing any quantity of 
 clothes, — probably for the whole town, and from their looks 
 after a long interval, — and using these very sarcophagi for tubs. 
 A fountain close by furnished lots of water, and there they were 
 at work en masse, very scantily dressed and looking for the most 
 part as if they ought to be washed thoroughly themselves. We 
 got home at an early hour towards evening. Here, too, as at 
 Marathon, the chief impression left with me was derived from 
 the natural scenery, the mountains and the bay of Eleusis, rather 
 than from history and antiquities. 
 
 ARGOS AND MYCENJE UNDER DIFFICULTIES. 
 
 Wednesday, 13th. After many plans made and broken in upon 
 by various causes, we started off at last by steamboat to Nauplia, 
 to visit from there Argos and Mycenae. It was a pleasant day, 
 though warm, and the boat was crowded, the Greeks lying about 
 on the decks on their blankets in delightful disorder. For a part 
 of the way our course was over the same waters by which we 
 came to the Piraeus, until we reached the Gulf of Argos. The 
 boat was a very slow one, and we did not get to Nauplia till 6.30 
 p. M., several hours behind time. Nauplia from first to last 
 we found a shocking place, especially the hotel, the filthiest one 
 I was ever in. Still, it was full to its utmost, and so we had 
 to sleep in the salon or dining-room. Luckily for me, George had 
 brought an iron bedstead, mattress and all. The boys declined 
 having them bring beds for them, and I slept free from dirt and 
 vermin, from which they suffered terribly. What a fearful time 
 they had, as well as an inmate of a room which opened into our 
 dining-room-bedroom, — a professor from the University, as I 
 found, — who surprised me in the middle of the night by rush- 
 ing out from his room in his shirt, and with candle in hand, call- 
 ing for waiters and landlord, and making a terrible ado about his 
 bed and bedclothes, which last he hauled out and held up to the 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 143 
 
 candle with unmistakable demonstrations, and all the while scold- 
 ing in a great rage. At last he had a quasi bed on the floor and 
 lay down, and in the gray of morn, when I awoke, there he lay, 
 a huge great figure on the floor, with a bit of a candle burning 
 by him, and holding up a big book which he was reading ; " pur- 
 suit of knowledge under difliculties," I thought. Next day we 
 were off early in a carriage for Tiryns, Mycenae, and Argos, and 
 it was a great day for antiquities, — the huge Cyclopean walls of 
 Tiryns, a couple of miles from Nauplia, twenty-five feet thick and 
 probably more than three thousand years old, and still to be seen 
 to perfection. I could not understand the structure of the fort- 
 ress to which this stupendous masonry belonged, but I wandered 
 about the hills on which the walls yet are seen, in wonder at the 
 immense blocks of stone set down here ages ago for the citadel 
 by the Tirynthians. Then we went on over the broad plain of 
 Argolis, till we came to the village of Charvati, and near to the 
 ruins of the city of Agamemnon, Mycenae. Here we left the car- 
 riage, and by a long stretch of footpath ascended the rugged hills 
 till we came to the site of the ruins of the Homeric hero. We 
 climbed a steep hill, just under a still higher cliff, and between 
 the dry beds of two mountain streams, to the citadel, and came at 
 last upon the so-called Gate of the Lions, a grand specimen of the 
 Pelasgian (?) architecture in huge blocks of stone ; two, eight or 
 ten feet high, supporting a third fifteen feet long and seven feet 
 high. Above on a triangular block yet stand two lions in relief, 
 on their hind legs, their forepaws resting upon a round altar. 
 {Here the diary ends abruptly.) 
 
 AULD LANG SYNE. — A VISIT TO THOLUCK. 
 
 {From a Letter.) 
 
 Berlin, 17th June, 1857. I have had a delightful little visit 
 in Halle. I took Mrs. Tholuck entirely by surprise. On the 
 evening I arrived I went there, and was in the room just after 
 dark, before the candles were lighted, and went in without giv- 
 ing my name. She came in, and I stepped in and asked her if 
 she knew me, at the same time drawing her towards the window 
 where it was lighter. She recognized me directly, and then we 
 had a good laugh and a pleasant talk. I stayed and took supper, 
 and when Tholuck came in, he exclaimed, "You are just the 
 same as ever, only you 've mounted a beard ! " And so we sat 
 
144 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 down, and talked over a supper of honnyclahher, sausages, and 
 bread and butter. I was there several times, and one evening 
 lie made quite a little party for me. He thought nobody would 
 believe I had a wife and children, — and as to the children, I 
 should have to bring along the baptism-record (Taufschein) or 
 the idea would be incredible. 
 
 SUNDAY IN BERLIN. — HOLY-DAY AND HOLIDAY. — THE 
 UNIVERSITY REVISITED. 
 
 {From a Letter.) 
 
 Berlin, Sunday, June 21, 1857. I was rather late at the morn- 
 ing service in the cathedral church, and therefore lost some of the 
 best of the music from what is called the " Dom-choir," which is 
 the best church music here, and probably in Germany. As I went 
 in the organ was resoundiug through the great church, accom- 
 panying the choir and the many hundred voices of the congrega- 
 tion in one of the grand old church melodies so numerous in Ger- 
 man psalmody. Such music awakens the devoutest emotions in a 
 worshiper as he comes into the house of God, and I felt as if I 
 could lift my heart to God here in this distant land in profound 
 gratitude for the many mercies of his hand, and especially for the 
 gift of a Saviour and the gospel and all the services of the Chris- 
 tian church. All the pews in the church were filled below and 
 above, and people were standing about in all the aisles. The 
 officiating clergyman, who soon appeared in the pulpit, was Hoff- 
 man, one of the court-preachers, and one of the ablest and the 
 most evangelical of the Berlin clergy. The spirit of the whole 
 sermon was excellent, and the manner most affectionate and ear- 
 nest, and I felt that I was listening to one who had himself expe- 
 rienced the blessings of which he spoke and who desired to com- 
 mend them to the experience of all who heard him, and to win 
 them all to a participation in the glorious inheritance of the 
 saints. I had been told that the Communion was to be adminis- 
 tered after the service, and so I lingered behind, after the bene- 
 diction was pronounced, with a feeling that if I heard anything 
 like an invitation to strangers of another creed, that I should be 
 glad to partake of the ordinance. I was surprised to find that 
 but very few remained ; from the many doors of the church the 
 people streamed out, and as I drew near to the chancel I saw but 
 a scattered group of people, apparently of the humbler classes of 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 145 
 
 the parish, sitting about and waiting in silent devotion the admin- 
 istration of the Communion from the clergyman. Dr. Strauss 
 came in and the Communion service began. While all were unit- 
 ing with the minister in prayer, 1 heard near me a suppressed 
 voice as of one weeping, and turning around I saw a woman at 
 the end of the bench where I sat, kneeling on the pavement and 
 her arms on the bench and her head bowed and evidently strug- 
 gling with feelings I could only conjecture, till at last she wept 
 quite loud. From her dress and appearance I thought she was a 
 servant girl, and as she arose after prayer to the seat, her face 
 flushed and her eyes filled with tears, I could hardly refrain from 
 going to her and asking the cause of her weeping. Directly, how- 
 ever, I saw a lady approach her and at once enter into earnest 
 conversation in whispers, which lasted some time and seemed to 
 leave the woman in a happier mood. I could not help thinking 
 she might be in that temple of God, under the influence of the 
 service just closed and of that which was going on, just such a 
 penitent as our Lord himself had He been there in person (as once 
 in Jerusalem) would have approached and cheered and blessed 
 with his divine words of forgiveness and lasting peace. As I went 
 out of the church I saw just before me the lady who had conversed 
 with the weeper, and I wanted very much to ask her what was the 
 matter with the poor woman, but I thought it might seem im- 
 proper, and so I only dwelt upon my own conjectures. "The 
 heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not 
 therewith." Perhaps she had met with some sad affliction, was 
 suffering from some crushing bereavement ; or if already a Chris- 
 tian, was " weeping bitterly " like Peter over the consciousness of 
 grievous backslidings ; or perhaps, too, she had been enlightened 
 by the Spirit through the sermon we had all just heard to dis- 
 cover the sinfulness of sin, and was bowed in penitence and con- 
 trition. This little incident interested me still more in the Com- 
 munion service, and made me feel how much we all need to repent 
 afresh on every such solemn occasion, and turn to Him whose 
 blood was shed for us all, for the remission of sin. 
 
 It is strange what transitions and what different scenes one sees 
 in a German city on a Sunday, and in immediate succession. As 
 I went out of the church, where had been just now so large an 
 assembly of devout worshipers listening to most evangelical 
 preaching, I came down to the great street of the city, and as I 
 approached the grand guard-house, I heard the sound of military 
 
146 DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 
 
 music ; and on coming near, I saw a great crowd of people, mili- 
 tary officers and citizens of all ranks and ages, men, women, and 
 children gathered about the guard-house and in the grove behind 
 it, listening to the music, which is here played at noon on Sunday, 
 as on any other day, by the band of the regiment here stationed. 
 All was indeed quiet and orderly, and there was nothing you 
 could see or hear that you could find fault with, except the scene 
 itself, which, especially on coming from church, seemed so unlike 
 Sunday and so excellently fitted to do away with good impressions 
 received in the church. In the afternoon and evening all was 
 like any other day, except that there were more people in the 
 streets and all wending their way outside the city to the music- 
 garden, with their families, children, nurses, and all. All this is 
 very strange to an American, and indeed struck me so to-day, 
 familiar as I have been with German life ; and yet upon reflection 
 — you may wonder at my inconsistency, too — I am not sure that 
 this German theory and practice on a Sunday is entirely wrong, 
 and ours entirely right. 
 
 I have found a great deal to interest me and keep me busy in 
 revisiting the University and calling upon the people to whom 
 I had letters. Boeckh, the great classical scholar, now about 
 seventy-five, insisted upon it that he remembered my face, and 
 that I seemed to him quite like an old acquaintance, and this, too, 
 before I had told him that I once studied here and attended his 
 lectures. But / doTbt believe it. Probably he may have heard 
 from one of the professors here, that there was an American pro- 
 fessor in town, who had a letter of introduction to him. I had a 
 delightful talk with Ritter, the veteran geographer, and famous 
 all over the world. He received me with great kindness and 
 talked to me as a venerable father to a son. He is now seventy- 
 eight, but keeps working on, and making books and lecturing ; and 
 though he has some infirmities, yet, on the whole, looks hale and 
 hearty. I have not yet seen Humboldt, but have sent a note to 
 him. He is probably in Potsdam, as the king and court are there. 
 
 My health continues good, and I do wonders every day. And 
 yet I need to be careful, and I suppose always must be, and can 
 hardly expect to be wholly free from some annoying ailments. 
 But I have every reason to think that I shall be able to do all 
 that will devolve upon me, when I get home, without any inter- 
 ruptions, and I hope that years of active service of some kind are 
 in reserve for me. 
 
DIARY AND LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1857. 147 
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND. 
 
 {From a Letter.) 
 
 Paris, 30th July, 1857. Here you see I am safe back again in 
 Paris, and in my old quarters at the Hotel Bedford, writing to 
 you from the same table on which I wrote in April, only in far 
 better health, thank God, than then, and much nearer you and 
 home than I was then. Then I was going, and now I am com- 
 ing, — all the difference in the world, I assure you, especially when 
 the going is in search of health, and the coming in possession of it. 
 It seems incredible to me, the whole thing, a kind of dream, as I 
 sit here this summer morning in this snug apartment, writing to 
 you, and feeling myself (Z>eo volente) less than a month's time 
 distant from home. How I feel like rushing for Liverpool 
 straightway, and getting on board that steamer, and then begging 
 steam, wind, and wave to do their best to send us on to Boston 
 and Providence. 
 
SELECTIONS FROM 
 
 ESSAYS, 
 FRIDAY CLUB PAPERS 
 
 AND 
 
 OTHER WRITINGS, 
 
 OF 
 
 JOHN LARKIN LINCOLN. 
 
The HERKOMER PORTRAIT. 
 
 TEKUKS1 CO.. F-HIlA. 
 
AN INTRODUCTION TO GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, DECEMBER 4, 1868, AND PUB- 
 LISHED IN THE " BAPTIST QUARTERLY." 
 
 It was on the 22d of March, 1832, that Goethe came to his 
 earthly end. He had been seized with violent fever a few days 
 before, and was rapidly failing, though he himself had no idea 
 that the end was so near. Sitting in his easy-chair on that March 
 morning, he had been gazing out once more upon the face of na- 
 ture, which he had known and loved so long and so well, and had 
 cheerfully talked of the coming of another spring; but as the 
 hour of noon drew on, his sight and speech gradually became dim 
 and indistinct, till at half past twelve — his last words "more 
 light " having just escaped his lips — the Great Seer closed his 
 eyes forever on all earthly scenes. Strange opposition, in this 
 our double sphere of existence, that while the sun was high in the 
 heavens, and all nature was rejoicing in his light, there should 
 sink to his final setting that great luminary of the world of mind. 
 And so departed the greatest poet of his country and his age, 
 who, by the might of his genius, fully developed under the most 
 fortunate circumstances by the most assiduous and various cul- 
 ture, had held during his long career a sovereign rule over the 
 spirits of men. 
 
 Of all the great works of this remarkable man, the poem of 
 " Faust " is the most characteristic. It is a monument of his ge- 
 nius in all the periods of its development, the consummate result 
 of the poetic activity of his whole life. Only five days before his 
 death he wrote, in a letter to William von Humboldt, — and they 
 are his last written words, — " It is now more than sixty years 
 since the entire conception of Faust first stood before my mind." 
 But, as he says in the same letter, the poem was not composed 
 continuously, but at intervals, the manifold elements of the plan 
 being wrought out singly, according to the interest they had for 
 him at the time. Thus the composition of the first part covers a 
 period of more than thirty years ; it was published as " A Frag- 
 ment " in 1790, when the poet was about forty, and in its com- 
 
152 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 plete form in 1808. The third act of the second part appeared 
 as late as 1827, and the remaining four acts were written after 
 the age of seventy-five, and the whole was published after the 
 poet's death. On the day when he had written the last passage, 
 he said to Eckermann, " My remaining days I may now consider 
 a free gift ; and, indeed, it is all one to me, what I now do, or 
 whether I do anything more." What Horace said of his patron 
 Maecenas, may be said, therefore, in a still higher sense of Goethe's 
 Faust — it was the theme of his earliest and of his latest song. 
 Even in his boyhood his imagination was seized by the weird story 
 of Faust, as he read it in the then popular book of Meynenden, 
 and saw it in the puppet shows at that time so common in Frank- 
 fort. In his student life at Strasburg, when he was himself full 
 of aspirations for knowledge, yet ever unsatisfied with his attain- 
 ments, the character and career of Faust so fell in with his own 
 experience, that he then conceived the idea of its poetic treat- 
 ment. Three years later the conception had taken form within 
 him, and he began to give it expression ; and from that time to 
 the last of his life he was busied, though sometimes at long 
 intervals, in filling up the grand canvas which the conception 
 required ; the poem grew up into being even with his own spirit- 
 ual growth ; the manifold scenes of the great Dramatic Mystery 
 successively unfolded themselves and rose to the view along with 
 his own ever-widening observation and experience; and the last 
 scene of all, that scene which opens to us glimpses into the invis- 
 ible world, reached its consummation only a year before the poet's 
 own departure from the earth. 
 
 This poem, which thus represents Goethe's entire life, stands 
 also in closest relation to the life of his age, especially of the 
 German people. It entered into that life even as a vital force, 
 giving impulse and character to its higher manifestations in liter- 
 ature and art, and to the thoughts and convictions of the popular 
 mind. Appearing in a transition period of unrest and excite- 
 ment, it seemed to be a sovereign word which all were waiting to 
 hear ; it acted like a sudden inspiration on all minds ; all poets, 
 writers, thinkers, all departments of intellectual activity, felt its 
 influence ; all the arts of design united to reproduce it in impres- 
 sive forms ; music, too, gave it utterance in many-voiced song ; 
 and the stage exhausted its resources of scenic talent and skill to 
 bring to the eye and the mind of an enthusiastic public a living 
 representation of its pictures of life and manners. Probably no 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 153 
 
 poem of modern times has had so many readers ; readers of all 
 ages and classes in society, of every stage of intelligence and cul- 
 ture. It has been alike the favorite of the unthinking multitude, 
 and of men of the most thoughtful minds. The common people 
 never tire of those scenes which portray the griefs and the joys 
 of ordinary life ; they read the story of Margaret for the hun- 
 dredth time with an ever new interest, and her very face and 
 form seem to be present to their sight, even as one of their own 
 kindred, familiar to them in their homes, even as to the ancient 
 Romans the images of their ancestors and their household gods. 
 Not less marked has been its influence upon the profoundest 
 thinkers ; with whom it has been a cherished companion in their 
 hours of solitary meditation upon the ever insoluble and ever 
 fascinating problems of human being. Niebuhr describes it as a 
 book which touches the deepest springs of thought and feeling; 
 Hegel pauses, in the midst of one of his most abstruse exposi- 
 tions, to illustrate his doctrines by the words of Faust ; and 
 Schelling has pronounced the poem "an ever fresh source of 
 inspiration," and counsels all young and aspiring students to 
 draw from its perennial sources that force which emanates from 
 it, and moves the innermost soul of man. The secret of such a 
 popularity lies not alone in the poetic and dramatic power of the 
 work, marvelous as this is, but in the fact that all this marvelous 
 power is employed with infinite skill in representing truths of 
 surpassing moment in human life. It is more than a drama, 
 instinct though it is with the dramatic spirit, and though its char- 
 acters move before us like a human presence ; it is more than a 
 tragedy, though it answers the conditions of tragic poetry by 
 moving the passions through the agency alike of pity and of ter- 
 ror. It is a dramatic poem of human life and destiny ; its 
 themes involving all that is most momentous in man's being and 
 condition ; with a great poet's insight and utterance, it tells 
 through one form of human character and experience the story 
 of man's nature ; its relations to God and the world, the conflict 
 of its passions, its ideal longings struggling against the fixed lim- 
 its of necessity, its perpetual contradictions of strength and weak- 
 ness, knowledge and ignorance, truth and error; and above all 
 these, and underlying them all, that mysterious contest, that awful 
 antinomy, of good and of evil. 
 
 It falls in with what has now been said, that this poem, like 
 all the great poems of the world, rests, in its essential subject-mat- 
 
154 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 ter, upon the ground of fact. As in the old story of Antaeus, it 
 draws its strength from the soil of human experience. The basis 
 is real. With all the fables that have gathered about the name 
 of Faust, and formed a Faust Legend,^ as truly as that of 
 "Achilles' wi-ath," or of "Pelops' line" in antiquity, Faust is a 
 historical person. We have not space even to indicate the mani- 
 fold elements of the legend; nor need we narrate all that is 
 kno\NTi of the man. His career belongs to the sixteenth century, 
 the time of the Reformation, and of the revival of learning. He 
 was born at Knittlingen, a little town in Wiirtemberg, and a few 
 miles from the birthplace of Melanchthon. 
 
 Melanchthon himself knew him at Wittenberg ; and there are 
 writings extant of two of the Reformer's pupils, which record nar- 
 ratives they had heard from their master, in which he speaks of 
 Faust as a countryman and personal acquaintance, and mentions 
 facts in his student-life, and then denounces him in woiwis quite 
 foreign to the Reformer's usual gentle spirit and classic style, as 
 " a shameful beast," and " a cloaca of many devils." Faust studied 
 chiefly at Cracow, but for a time also at other universities. He is 
 spoken of as a Doctor of Theology, and well versed in the Scrip- 
 tures ; as a Doctor of Medicine, and a famous physician ; also, 
 as a mathematician and an astrologer. Melanchthon testifies of 
 him, in all sincerity, that he carried a dog about with him, who 
 was the devil in disguise ; also that he boasted that by his skill 
 in magic he had won for the emperor all his victoies over the 
 French. He speculated, it was said, day and night ; and in his 
 ambition for superhuman knowledge and power, gave himself to 
 magic arts, and leagued himself with the devil, and after a law- 
 less career came to a dreadful end. Such are the chief things 
 told of Faust by men of the time, celebrated for learning and 
 piety ; and it is no wonder that, in an age and among a people 
 where witchcraft was believed in with a more than New Ensfland 
 faith, the fame of Faust soon ran over all Germany and Europe, 
 growing ever larger as it ran, and tales were told without num- 
 ber of his conjurations and mighty magic. These elements, the 
 real and the fictitious, of the Faust story, Goethe has wrought, 
 by his genius and his art, into a new creation, a Faust of his own, 
 into Goethe's Faust; it is the old air with variations, but such 
 
 ^ The completest view that we have seen of the Faust Legend is contained 
 in Heinrich Duntzer's Goethe's Faust published at Leipsic, 1857. The work 
 contains, also, a very valuable commentary on both parts of the poem. 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 155 
 
 variations as could emanate only from an original genius ; the 
 conception of character is the same, but it is recast in a finer and 
 grander mould, ennobled and enriched by that faculty so rich in 
 Goethe, which Milton calls a " universal insight into things," and 
 set forth and adorned with a wealth of poetic beauty, " which has 
 in it everything of enchantment which a magician could either 
 give or desire." 
 
 We propose to take such a survey of the poem as may serve 
 to show its moral significance ; to endeavor to bring out the form 
 of character which it presents, and the several stages of its career, 
 together with the lessons it teaches. 
 
 At the outset we have the poet's guidance for the foreshadow- 
 ing, in the Prologue, of the moral conditions of the life of Faust. 
 It is called the Prologue in Heaven, and is constructed upon the 
 model of the Introduction of the Book of Job. We are lifted, in 
 imagination, to the courts of heaven, to the very presence-cham- 
 ber of the Lord. In those heavenly hosts that throng around in 
 shining ranks, and in Mephistopheles, who comes also to present 
 himself before the Lord, we seem to touch, at their very springs 
 in the invisible world, the powers of good and evil, which are to 
 invest with their mysterious conflict of agency the life of a hu- 
 man being on earth. The voices of archangels utter forth, in 
 adoring, jubilant song, the high praises of God ; the sun round- 
 ing his appointed course, and ringing out his rival accord in the 
 music of the spheres, the pomp of the swift revolving earth, its 
 brightness of day alternating with awful night, the foaming ocean 
 heaving up in its broad floods, — these, and all His sublime works, 
 past comprehending, are glorious as on time's first day. But this 
 celestial harmony is broken in upon by one voice of discord, the 
 voice of Mephistopheles, who draws near and addresses the Lord 
 in words which are his alone, as the spirit of scofling and contra- 
 diction, as the accuser and tempter of men. He has naught to 
 say of suns and spheres, he only sees how man is vexing himself, 
 the little god of the world, who is just as odd a creature as at the 
 first. Far better off would he be if he had not in him the glim- 
 mering light of reason, which he uses only to make himself lower 
 than the brutes themselves. " Dr. Faust " in particular seems to 
 him, if a servant of the Lord at all, to serve him in the strangest 
 fashion. He will have the brightest stars of heaven, and the high- 
 est joys of earth, and both together leave him all unsatisfied. 
 The tempter asks only that he may have him under his guidance, 
 
156 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 and he shall be utterly lost to the Lord's service. The Lord re- 
 plies, that Faust wanders now in perplexity ; he may be brought 
 out by and by into clearness ; the adversary may tempt him, so 
 long as he is on earth, since man is subject to temptation during 
 all his earthly probation ; this human soul he may drag down to 
 his own path if he can ; but at last baffled and in shame, he may 
 have to confess that " a good man in his dark strivings is con- 
 scious of the right way." 
 
 In the opening scene we are introduced to Faust, in his study 
 at night, in the midst of his books, where, in intellectual pursuits, 
 his life has hitherto exclusively lain. Conscious of the highest 
 powers of thought, and instinct with boundless desires, that yearn 
 after all, and more than all, that man can ever attain, he has been 
 striving with the vehemence of a character far less wise than 
 strong and noble, for the conquest of absolute truth. But alas ! 
 the tree of knowledge, always one of good or of evil, according to 
 the spirit of the soul that gathers its fruit, has yielded him only 
 vexation and disappointment. A generous avarice for intellectual 
 wealth has been his master passion ; but it was avarice still, and 
 left his soul in a sense of spiritual need, because he lacked the 
 virtues of content and moderation, and faith and love, and rever- 
 ent submission to the conditions of all human endeavor. He has 
 compassed the circle of university learning, has mastered philoso- 
 phy, law, medicine, and theology too ; he has won all titles and 
 dignities of scholastic life, he has enjoyed an enviable celebrity as 
 professor these ten years past ; but the result of all is no inward 
 satisfaction, no revelation yet of the secrets of the world ; and he 
 sits now brooding over the dismal conviction, that all knowledge 
 is vain, all knowing impossible. Gone, utterly gone, is the fancy 
 that he can know anything himself, or teach anything that can 
 better mankind. So it was once in the poet's own experience, as 
 he has himself recorded it : "I too had ranged through the whole 
 round of knowledge, and was early enough led to see its vanity ; " 
 and a wiser than either has told the same sad story ; " And I gave 
 my heart to know wisdom ; and I perceived that this also is vexa- 
 tion of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief, and he that 
 increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." With this despair of 
 knowledge, Faust painfully feels how he has, in the mean time, 
 lost all chance of earthly happiness. He looks forth from his 
 gloom, upon the brilliant arena of the world, and sees how men 
 have won its fair prizes of wealth and pleasure, and rank and 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 157 
 
 power, and it maddens him now to think that all these, which in 
 his eager pursuit of truth he has ignored and despised, he has 
 now sacrificed and lost. And this is the running over of his cup 
 of bitterness. 
 
 What now can he do ? It is not in his nature to succumb, and 
 make peace with his condition. No ; by some hitherto untried 
 means, he is still bent upon reaching the goal towards which he 
 has been striving ; he insists upon the absolute satisfaction of his 
 desires for knowledge. Despairing of this attainment by his own 
 faculties, he will call to his aid supernatural agencies. Extremes 
 meet; and this man of Promethean nature, who has aspired to 
 possess himself by his own intellectual force of the secrets of 
 heaven, will super stitiously invoke fancied powers of the spirit 
 world, who shall reveal to him, in open vision, the mysteries of 
 the universe. With this new purpose hope revives once more ; 
 the ardor of his passionate soul is all aglow again ; he plunges 
 into the books of magic, and studies its signs and spells. As he 
 gazes upon the sign of the Macrocosm, the mystic sign of the uni- 
 verse, he feels the presence of hovering spirits, on whom he calls. 
 The inward tumult is stilled, as the powers of nature seem to be 
 unveiling all about him. His poor heart fills with joy, as he dis- 
 cerns the harmony of forces, which live in the vast frame of the 
 world, the ceaseless energy of their reciprocal action, all weaving 
 themselves into the whole, and each working and living in the 
 other. But too soon he finds that all this is for him but a majes- 
 tic show, phenomena alone, brilliant as they are ; of these harmo- 
 nious forces he has himself no immediate apprehension; the 
 sources of life he cannot penetrate ; the spirits he invokes answer 
 not, for over them he has no power. Baffled here, he turns him 
 to another mystic sign, that of the spirit of the elemental world, 
 the spirit of the earth. To this he finds himself more nearly al- 
 lied ; of this spirit he may aspire to be a peer ; he is proudly con- 
 scious of entire manhood, strong to know all and brave all that 
 belongs to earth, to carry in him all its weal and all its woe. He 
 feels the spirit to be near, close at hand, scarce veiled from his 
 sight ; and in the hope that he is now to have pure insight into 
 the very being of nature, and with every faculty strained to wel- 
 come the revealing, he must call, he must be heard, though it cost 
 him his life. But at the very moment when what he has so hotly 
 wished appears, and the spirit stands before him in all its flaming 
 glory, he cannot bear the sight, and, horror-struck, turns him away 
 
158 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 and hides his face. Now he must hear the spirit's awful rebuke 
 for his arrogant pride, in defying the limits that bound man, and 
 in presuming to match himself with spirits. He must learn that 
 he is like the spirit he can comprehend, not that one he has sum- 
 moned as his equal ; man may not gaze into the inner heart of 
 Nature ; her mysterious being and force are hidden from his view ; 
 the ever-changing life of the world is only the vesture of the 
 Deity ; man may not see God at any time, only his manifestations 
 can he see and know. 
 
 Disappointed in these new hopes, and rudely thrust back upon 
 the dim lot of mortals, Faust sinks down in humiliation to his 
 own bitter reflections. He looks over all his career, and contrasts 
 this despair of his manhood with the glowing hopes of youth, 
 when his soul exulted in constant progress, when fair visions of 
 rising truth made all bright the horizon before him. The myste- 
 ries of man's double being, the material and the spiritual, the ideal 
 and the real, press upon his soul with aU their awful weight. He 
 is bitterly conscious how man finds his finest spiritual desires 
 humbled and withered by the earthly element that clings to him, 
 and is aU about him. The claims of every-day life press down 
 with rudest force our noblest aspirations ; the glorious feelings 
 that have made our inner life are deadened by contact with the 
 world, and our high ideals, that have risen so grandly before the 
 soul, melt and pass away at the touch of ugly reality. Such 
 thoughts as these possessing the soul of Faust, the sight of his 
 books, for so many years his chosen companions, is now odious ; 
 the study, where alone has been his home, is now a very dungeon ; 
 nay, the world itself only a prison, its walls bounding him on all 
 sides, so massive they cannot be pierced, so high he cannot scale 
 them. As he gazes in despair on all the objects around him, the 
 shelves of gloomy volumes, the ghastly array of instruments of 
 science, a bright shining phial of poison fastens his eye like a 
 magnet. He grasps it and greets it devoutly as the hope and de- 
 liverance of his perplexed soul. Those sweet, sparkling juices, 
 once mixed by himself with cunning hand, shall bear him in peace 
 to new shores and lasting day. By their friendly agency, more 
 potent than study or magic, he shall pass quietly out of his prison 
 limits, and, as a free spirit, range in the bright regions of pure 
 and perfect knowledge. He is raising the cup to his lips, when 
 from the adjoining church there breaks upon his ear the Easter 
 song of the angels, chanting the great theme of the resurrection, — 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 159 
 
 " Christ is arisen ! 
 Joy be to mortal man ! 
 Whom, since the world began, 
 
 Evils inherited. 
 
 By his sins merited. 
 Through his sins creeping, 
 Sin bound are keeping." 
 
 His rash hand is stayed, his purpose arrested, his soul deeply 
 moved as he listens. Strange power of music that so calms his 
 surging passions; strange the power of mental association, that 
 sounds, falling upon his ear, so strike the electric chain of thought 
 and feeling as to flash before him all the forgotten past, and give 
 such force to the memories of innocent childhood, when faith and 
 knowledge went hand in hand, and believing and doing were one. 
 He listens to the message of those Easter sounds, though they 
 speak to no faith in his own heart. No longer can he aspire to 
 those spheres whence those good tidings come ; but those old fa- 
 miliar strains, heard in his childhood, have power yet to call him 
 back to life. 
 
 "Now memories sweet, 
 
 Fraught with the feelings of my childhood's prime. 
 
 From the last step decisive stay my feet. 
 
 Oh ! peal, sweet heavenly anthems, peal as then ! 
 
 Tears flood mine eyes, earth has her child again." 
 
 Faust has now reached a crisis of great moral peril, when, for 
 a brief season, it is not clear whether he will go on in a path of 
 error or turn back to right. This transition stage Goethe repre- 
 sents in a series of scenes, which hurry us forward, with an ever- 
 heightening interest, awakened both by their poetic and their 
 moral power, to the catastrophe of the first part of the poem, in 
 Faust's fall, and the tragedy of Margaret. We are to see how 
 transient is the sacred stillness that has come from that Easter 
 hymn ; how soon come back upon him all the old, restless desires, 
 the dull, gloomy discontent ; how, with the extinction of all faith, 
 his before dormant passions awake, and assert their claims, till 
 turning his back upon all his high aspirings, he is ready to join 
 hands with Mephistopheles, the spirit of evil, with whom he has 
 been all the while unconsciously in parley. 
 
 We see Faust next, no longer in his study, but in the midst of 
 nature and of the moving throngs of men. It is springtime, when 
 Nature is renewing her glories ; it is the afternoon of the festive 
 Easter-day, and the common people, all strangers to the strivings 
 
160 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 which have so embittered the life of the recluse student, are hur- 
 rying forth from the haunts of daily toil and care, in quest of hol- 
 iday mirth and pleasure. Faust has at his side his famulus Wag- 
 ner, the very antipode of himself, a dry, plodding man, a disciple 
 of the letter, and not of the spirit, who has taken to books and 
 study as a means of getting on in the world, and who, in his dull 
 level of mediocrity, fancies himself a match for the Dii Majores 
 of the learned world. Goethe treats him with infinite skill as a 
 foil to Faust ; and it is one of the finest of the many contrasts of 
 the poem. Faust enters into the scenes of life about him with all 
 the deep-moved sensibilities of a strong nature. It delights him 
 to see river and rill all free again, to see the fields again green 
 with promise. He beholds, with a strange joy, the gay multitude 
 of men and women, straying in parties over garden and field, and 
 blithely basking in the sunshine to-day, and making the spring 
 air ring with their hearty glee of shout and cheer. Ah ! thinks 
 he, what pleasure is here ! How much wiser these simple people 
 than I, for they know how to be happy ! But by and by, while 
 he is gazing upon the setting sun, as he gilds the landscape with 
 his departing rays, and is speeding on to light up other scenes, 
 the sight reminds him how darkness has just set upon his bright 
 hopes, and starts into new life all his infinite desires, and he longs 
 for friendly wings, that he may strive after the bright god in his 
 glorious course. Then he might soar above this narrow spot of 
 earth to regions of serene air, night left behind him, day always 
 before him, and the heavens above all bathed in undying light. 
 But even while he dreams, the sun is gone. Another glorious 
 dream, a bright delusion, but of briefest possession, a type of all 
 our noblest aspirations ! The learned Wagner at his side cannot 
 comprehend his master's mood. He, too, he says, has had his 
 fanciful hours, but was never stirred by such impulses as these. 
 He soon gets sated at looking on fields and woods, and never in 
 his life did he covet a bird's wings, that he might fly away through 
 the air. His are the joys of mind, and he has his charmed hours, 
 when, in the long winter nights, he communes with books. Ah ! 
 when he can unroll a precious parchment, then all heaven comes 
 down into his soul. Faust tells him that he knows only the one 
 impulse of the human soul, let him never know the other. Within 
 his own breast are dwelling two souls, the one struggling to be 
 severed from the other ; the one cleaves to the earth, with organs 
 like clamps of steel, the other lifts itself from the mists of earth 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 161 
 
 to its ancestral skies. His longing desires are inflamed with the 
 more ardor by contact with so different a nature as Wagner's. 
 While Wagner describes the joy which his studies yield him, 
 Faust feels more than ever the weight of his own lot, in which, 
 despairing of knowledge, he hates the very thought of books. He 
 has in him already the rising desire to exchange " gray theory for 
 the golden fruits of life." He would fain range abroad in the 
 world, and musing no more over dull learning, restore his tortured 
 soul in the manifold interchange of enjoyment and of life. Oh, 
 that the spirits that float between earth and heaven would come 
 down and bear him on their pinions to new and varied existence ! 
 Oh, for a magic mantle to waft him away to far-off worlds ! 
 
 Next we find Faust in his study again, returned from his walk, 
 and bringing from it a frame of mind softened by the scenes he 
 has witnessed without, as well as by the gathering shades of 
 evening. The better soul seems to be awake within him; he 
 will persuade himself that his wild desires are now in slumber ; 
 that the love of man and the love of God are now rekindling 
 in his heart. Soon, however, he discovers this to be a delusion, 
 the influence rather of recollections than of present thoughts and 
 feelings. He must soon confess to himself that the wished-for 
 peace is not within him ; that strive as he may, it will never 
 more well up in his heart. In his extremity he will turn to 
 divine revelation, to the New Testament. He will translate a 
 passage from the original into his dear native tongue. He seizes 
 the book and opens to the first chapter of the Gospel of John. 
 But how can he, whose faith has disappeared, approach the Bible 
 with that humility and trust which are the necessary conditions 
 of its healing and saving powers? On the very first verse he 
 is at a stand, he is mastered by the spirit of contradiction, which 
 drives him to a downright denial of the language of Scripture. 
 " In the beginning was the Word f " No, " The Word " cannot 
 be put at so high a value as that; certainly it was not that 
 which was " in the beginning." And so, by a purely subjective 
 process of criticism, he sets himself to inquiring and establishing 
 for himself what was in the beginning, and finally writes, "In 
 the beginning was the Deed.^'' Thus the inwrought skepticism 
 of his mind, which has returned unsatisfied from all his investi- 
 gations, comes into fatal conflict with the childlike faith which 
 the Scriptures teach and require ; by and by the general convic- 
 tion that all human life is but a bitter jugglery seizes him more 
 
162 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 strongly than ever ; he is ashamed of the weak emotion that 
 kept him back yesterday from breaking away from such a world 
 as this. That, too, was only a delusion, which cheated the little 
 remnant he had of childlike feelings by memories of a happy 
 past ; and so with aU feelings that seem to promise satisfaction ; 
 they are only cozening and deceitful powers to bind us by their 
 mocking fascinations to this dreary den of the world. With an 
 awful desperation of soul he is now ready to break with everything ; 
 he utters curses on all the finest feelings of man's heart, all the 
 virtues and tender graces of life, hope, faith, love, and, above all, 
 patience ; and shattering with one blow the moral world, throws 
 himself into the companionship of the fiend, to make in his company 
 the perilous transfer of his strivings from those higher regions where 
 he has found no satisfaction, to the lower arena of sensual enjoy- 
 ment, where he is destined to a far more awful disappointment. 
 
 It is here that Goethe draws from the legend, and represents 
 according to his own conceptions, the league of Faust with Me- 
 phistopheles. Indeed, in the scenes over which we have now 
 been passing, he has represented Faust's gradual approaches to 
 evil by the presence of Mephistopheles in various fantastic forms ; 
 but now that the hour has come, and all is ready for the tempter, 
 he is made to reveal himself in human form, and talk with him 
 as man to man. Goethe's Mephistopheles is no mere poetic per- 
 sonification of evil in man, of the perverse tendency of the human 
 will ; such a creation were only an enlarged alter ego of Faust, 
 and a very tame and lifeless dramatic figure. He is made to 
 represent moral evil as a reality existing independently of the 
 poet's fancy, and only capable of personification because it has 
 such an independent existence ; he represents moral evil existing 
 as such a reality, not merely in man, but beyond man; moral 
 evil, as a real power, everywhere and actively existing, and only 
 to oppose, and disturb, and destroy all that is fair and true and 
 good in the world; in Goethe's own language, Mephistopheles 
 is the spirit that " evermore denies ; what is called sin, mischief, 
 in short, evil, — is his proper element." It is this dread power 
 we are now to see, not only personified, but in human form, in 
 closest union with the destiny of Faust; to tempt, and, if he may, 
 drag him down to perdition ; to be a chosen and sworn companion, 
 a guide and servant, through all his probation in the present; 
 whether at last, and in the endless future, to be his master, we 
 can only now divine from the intimations in the Prologue. 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 163 
 
 It is essential to observe how Goethe conceives the moral 
 condition of Faust through the scene of his contract with Me- 
 phistopheles. The decisive moment, when the contracting parties 
 come face to face, is that in which the imprecations upon all 
 good things have just come forth from the lips of Faust. As 
 a prelude to the offers of Mephistopheles, we hear the chorus 
 of evil spirits, mourning, with an awful irony of melodious song, 
 the overthrow of so fair a world, all its beauty now crushed 
 and lost, and calling upon the destroyer to build up a new world, 
 fairer and more glorious, to begin a career of action and pleasure, 
 on which all siren voices shall chime in his ears. Striking the 
 key-note of this fiendish song, Mephistopheles bids Faust no longer 
 sit here, a melancholy, despairing dreamer, but forth with him 
 into the living world of men. He will be his companion, his 
 servant, to bear him to a more congenial sphere than that of 
 dull, unsatisfying thought ; let him only bind himself to him, 
 and he shall have satisfying joys at last ; more shall be his than 
 eye of man has ever seen. Faust replies that he has, indeed, 
 too proudly dreamed, that he has soared too high, and that now 
 the chain of thought has snapped, and all knowledge is to him 
 a loathing. He is ready to rush into the tumult of passion, and 
 as he cannot pierce the mysteries of knowledge, he will fathom 
 the depths of feeling. He will experience all, whether of pain 
 or of pleasure, that can fall to the lot of universal man. Yet 
 of satisfying joys he will not hear ; least of all can such a one 
 as Mephistopheles, who cannot comprehend the strivings of the 
 mind of man, give him aught that can yield the satisfaction he 
 craves. Indeed, so confident is he in this conviction, that he 
 passionately lays the wager, that if ever he is lulled to security 
 by sensual enjoyments, if ever he says to the passing moment, 
 " Stay, thou art so fair ! " that day shall be his last, and the last 
 of Mephistopheles' service. 
 
 " The clock may stand, the index fall, 
 And time and tide may cease for me." 
 
 Thus, on the one hand, Faust will plunge into the tumult of 
 sense, as a new arena of activity for his restless desires ; he 
 ventures the perilous companionship with evil, proudly confident 
 that it shall never be his master, and excusing himself with the 
 delusive plea that in his extremity he has no other alternative. 
 On the other hand, Mephistopheles sees in Faust already a sure 
 victim ; he gloats over the assurance that soon he shaU bring 
 
164 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 down this high-soaring soul with him to his own place ; he shall 
 be whirled round and round in the eddies of appetite and passion, 
 and at last be drawn into the vortex, to be lost forever in the 
 abyss. With such a contract, signed and sealed with blood, they 
 go forth into the world together. 
 
 We do not propose to dwell upon the first scene in Faust's new 
 career, the Auerbach Cellar in Leipsic ; a famous drinking-place, 
 which has still a great renown for its traditions of the real Faust's 
 most famous feats of magic. Here Faust is to be addressed by 
 the coarsest forms of enjoyment, in a drinking-bout of German 
 students, where bad wine and worse wit make up the sorry enter- 
 tainment of the night. But he is ill at ease in all this wassailing, 
 he has no heart for it, and is glad when he has it all behind him. 
 We need also only touch upon the next scene, the Witches^ 
 Kitchen^ where witchery is to renew the youth of Faust, and 
 wake in him youth's wildest passions. Revolting as is this scene, 
 it has a rightful place in the drama. Even as the fatal temptation 
 of Macbeth is set forth by the prophetic greeting of the witches 
 on the blasted heath, so Faust comes into this den of sorcery to 
 be touched and tainted by spiritual impurity, and at last to be 
 seized and held spell-bound by its foul fascinations. Though at 
 first he expresses himself as disgusted at the loathsome creatures 
 about him, yet by and by he is infected by their atmosphere ; he 
 drinks the witches' potion, and it works on his brain like madness ; 
 he sees in the magic mirror the form of a beautiful woman, and 
 straightway desires blaze up within him he has never known 
 before. He hurries from the spot, Mephistopheles promising him 
 the sight in the real world of the fairest of women ; and directly 
 Margaret appears upon the scene, whose beauty and goodness are 
 destined to make her the object and the victim of his passionate 
 and unhallowed love. 
 
 We enter now the charmed circle of those scenes in which the 
 genius and art of Goethe have wrought, from the realities of 
 humblest human life, the moving tragedy of Margaret. On this 
 part of the poem we would gladly linger long, but we must re- 
 member that these scenes, for most readers, of paramount, and 
 for all, of such absorbing interest, while they are a tragic whole 
 in the narrower lot of Margaret, are only a tragic passage in 
 Faust's life, out of which he is to struggle into other spheres of 
 experience and action. Though we move here among forms of 
 ethereal poetic beauty, yet all is in spirit intensely, terribly real ; 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 166 
 
 the cbaracters, incidents, experiences, are all human ; so human 
 that they have readiest speech for every reader ; it is the music of 
 humanity that we hear, from its strains of ecstatic joy down to its 
 wildest wail of woe, all the passions in turn " snatching the 
 instruments of sound, and proving their own expressive power." 
 It is a story of love, seduction, and ruin ; ruin involving not only 
 Margaret herself, but aU that still peaceful world of her home, 
 with its priceless possessions of innocence, affection, and piety ; a 
 wide-spreading ruin, gathering, as it spreads, the quick following 
 horrors of her mother's death-sleep by a draught given her at 
 Faust's suggestion, the killing of her brother in a duel by her 
 lover, and, by and by, child-murder by the outcast and crazed 
 mother ; and, at last, her peace gone, her good name, her earthly 
 hopes, everything gone, save her penitence and her faith in the 
 divine mercy, — her own imprisonment and execution. No sweeter 
 creation than Margaret ever arose out of poet's imagination. Such 
 innocence is hers, such artless simplicity, such a sound, natural 
 sense, in short, such an exquisite naturalness of character; poor 
 in all worldly things, but rich in the charms of person and the 
 inner graces of woman's nature, pure instincts, all deep, true 
 feelings, — a sweet and virtuous soul; how can you imagine, as 
 you first see her issuing from the church on that fatal day, that 
 even now invisible evil spirits lurk for her coming, that the demon 
 of destruction has marked her for his own? She secures our sym- 
 pathy and affection at the very first, and, even to the bitter end, 
 loses them never. We are strangely touched, as we see the first 
 rising of love in her soul ; as we hear her ingenuous wonder, what 
 so great a man can see in so simple a creature as herself ; we joy 
 with her when she reaches the full consciousness that he is really 
 hers, and she is wholly his ; we can revere and bow before the 
 devotion of her love in her solicitude about her lover's faith, and 
 the fine sense of her heart, that makes her shrink with horror 
 from " that man he has with him," on whose very brow she sees it 
 written, " that he can love no living soul." And after her fall, 
 how we mourn with her in her unutterable sorrow ; we shudder at 
 the horrors of her remorse in the cathedral, when the terrible 
 words of the " Dies Irse " sound in her affrighted ears ; we bend 
 and must needs pray with her in the penitent, heart-rending grief 
 of that prayer to the Virgin which no one can read or hear with 
 dry eyes ; and when at last, in the dungeon, she submits herseK in 
 trusting faith, to the judgment of God, that voice from above, " is 
 
166 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 saved," gives us a sweet relief, in the assurance we were so ready- 
 to receive, that the weary one is forever at rest, where the wicked 
 cease from troubling. 
 
 But the spiritual history of Faust himself, as it is portrayed in 
 these scenes, awakens an interest no less powerful. Horace has 
 asserted that poets are better moralists than philosophers, that 
 men learn more ethics from the Iliad and Odyssey than from the 
 treatises of Chrysippus and Grantor. And certainly these fine 
 delineations of the workings of man's moral nature in conflict 
 with excited passion, and the impressive lessons they have fast- 
 ened in the minds of thousands of readers, go far to establish the 
 Roman poet's position. As in the thoughtful poem of Tenny- 
 son, we hear the " Two Voices " within the soul of man, in their 
 alternations of passionate longing and of awful remonstrance, 
 indeed, we may rather say, we see in action the conflict described 
 by an inspired pen, and we hear the lamentation extorted from 
 conscious weakness of humanity, " Oh, wretched man that I am ! " 
 And before we leave the first part of the poem, the story of which 
 we have now sufiiciently told, let us dwell for a brief space upon 
 one or two of the decisive moments of this contest within the 
 breast of Faust. 
 
 We select, for the first illustration, the scene in which Faust is 
 brought by Mephistopheles to the chamber of Margaret in her 
 absence. Faust has seen Margaret and is enamored of her. He 
 feels nothing, knows nothing but lawless passion, and clamors 
 with Mephistopheles for immediate possession. Mephistopheles 
 promises him all in the end, and meantime a visit to her room. 
 There he shall be by himself, and revel in dreams of pleasures yet 
 to come. But how these Satanic words fail of fulfillment ! What 
 a change comes over the soul of Faust, when he treads the pre- 
 cincts of virtue, and breathes the atmosphere of contented inno- 
 cence ! Like the mild shining of the sun and the soft sereneness 
 of the air after a furious storm, better thoughts and feelings steal 
 in upon him and hush to stillness the mad tumult of desire. As 
 he feels the spirit of order and purity that reigns in the place, he 
 is humbled to self-loathing, to think what a base impulse brought 
 him here. And if she were to enter now, how would he rue his 
 wanton sacrilege, how he should sink at her feet, dissolved in 
 shame ! He rushes out, with the purpose never to return. 
 
 We leave several passages which unfold, in successive meetings, 
 the mutual love of Faust and Margaret, and come to the scene of 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 167 
 
 the Wood and Cavern, and the next following dialogue of Faust 
 and Mephistopheles. Faust has now met Margaret again and 
 again, and is all conscious of the unspeakable worth of her good- 
 ness, of the preciousness of a true woman's love ; he has felt in 
 his own breast the power of love, but passion is stronger there ; 
 and in his dread of wrong-doing, so close at hand, and the fright- 
 ful evil it will work, he flees the presence of the loved one ; he 
 hastens away from the dwellings of men to the still and lonely- 
 woods. But the solitude of nature is no moral security for his 
 heart, so ill at ease, and not settled in truth ; and even in the deep 
 forest, in the dark cavern, he encounters the tempter face to face, 
 and is tempted beyond his strength. The adversary plies him 
 first with mocking laugh and sneer. He derides Faust's comfort- 
 less, owl-like moping in clefts and caverns, his lapping nourish- 
 ment, like a toad, from oozy moss and dripping stones. Precious 
 communion with nature ! A rare pastime ! There must be some- 
 thing of " the learned Doctor still sticking in his bones ! " Faust 
 urges what new life-power he gains by roaming thus among the 
 scenes of nature. With yet sharper sneers Mephistopheles ridi- 
 cules all Faust's transports about nature, all such swelling of a 
 poor human soul to take in the six days' work of creation ; how 
 charmingly consistent they are with a lover's raptures, how much 
 better after all the real delights that may be his than such ideal 
 vaporing. He then makes Faust feel the forlorn condition of 
 Margaret in his absence, how she sits lonely and despairing, his 
 image never out of her mind. Instead of lording it here over 
 the woods, far better that he should hasten to her comfort, and 
 reward her for her love. Faust feels the tempter's words, and 
 bids him begone, nor dare name her or bring her image to his 
 thoughts. But Mephistopheles insists that something must be 
 done ; that she thinks he has deserted her and gone forever. The 
 thought of desertion sets back upon Faust the whole tide of his 
 passion. He can never forget, he will never forget her. But 
 then the peril to her by his return, the ruin so imminent ! No joy 
 could he have in her love if he is to undermine her peace. And 
 yet she thinks him false, is disconsolate without him ; besides, is 
 not his own love a genuine, a natural one ? He must, he will go 
 back, whatever it may cost either her or himself. And so passion 
 triumphs over his better nature. 
 
 After Margaret's fall, Faust flees, driven by the tortures of 
 remorse. But he comes back to perpetrate an act, which he had 
 
168 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 never foreseen in all his dread anticipations of Margaret's ruin. 
 Her brother had meantime come back from the wars, a soldier of 
 rough manners, but of brave heart, who had tenderly loved his 
 sister, and felt her disgrace like a stab in the heart. He meets 
 Faust and forces him to a duel, and is himself slain. Faust must 
 now flee for his personal safety, and leave Margaret again, and to 
 aggravated wretchedness. The interval of flight the poet fills up 
 with the scene of The Walpurgis Nighty in which he represents 
 the Witches' Sabbath on the Brocken in all the fullness of the 
 superstitious ideas which prevailed in the age of Faust. Many 
 parts of the scene are difficult to understand, and the whole is 
 revolting to study, but it seems to be designed to show how the 
 tempter strove, though in vain, to sink Faust in licentious indul- 
 gence, and so drown his anguish, as well as his memory of Mar- 
 garet; to show how the excitements of a sensual life could no 
 longer attract him after his experience of Margaret's love ; and 
 how in that love, in spite of all his guilt, he had found a power 
 that was to lift him out of the low career into which he had madly 
 plunged. From all the foul orgies of the witch-night on the 
 Brocken, his thoughts must needs go back to the forsaken, un- 
 happy Margaret. As he is whirling in the mazes of the dance, 
 he sees in the distance a beautiful girl, of ghastly pale face, who 
 seems to be dragging herself towards him, like one with shackled 
 
 feet: — 
 
 " It cannot, cannot be, and yet 
 She minds me of sweet Margaret." 
 
 Mephistopheles tries to laugh him out of the idea ; it is only a 
 magic shape, no real thing. But Faust is riveted to the form, and 
 presently he sees, strangely adorning that lovely neck, a single 
 red cord, no thicker than a knife-blade ; such are the fancies that 
 trouble that guilty soul ; such are his presentiments of the evils 
 so soon to come. 
 
 From this frightful dreamland the poet brings us down to 
 earth again, and to a scene in prose, — the only prose scene in the 
 poem, — charged with awful realities. We find Faust and Me- 
 phistopheles, of a gloomy day, on an open plain. Faust has just 
 learned all that has befallen Margaret ; a crazed wanderer, and 
 now in prison, awaiting a criminal's doom. He curses Mephis- 
 topheles, that he has kept all this from him, all the while lulling 
 him with vapid dissipations, hiding her wretchedness and leaving 
 her to perish without help. He is conscious, as never before, of 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 169 
 
 the destructive power of evil, and bewails his fate, that has fas- 
 tened him to such fellowship of sin, and mischief, and shame. He 
 hastens away, — Mephistopheles compelled to follow and aid, — to 
 the rescue of Margaret. And here we come to the last scene of 
 the First Part, — the prison scene, — the pathos of which who can 
 describe ? Here Faust sees Margaret once more, and for the last 
 time ; but how changed ! and yet the same ! Crouching on her 
 bed of straw in the corner, wild of look, her reason wandering, 
 "like sweet bells jangled," uttering wild snatches of song con- 
 fusedly mixed with thoughts of her youth and beauty, and dim 
 memories of her love and her guilt, of her child and her mother, 
 whose death she raves through with horrible distinctness of detail ; 
 but shining bright through all the confusion, her sweetness of 
 nature, her love for Faust, and above all, with all her crushing 
 sense of shame, her faith in the mercy of a forgiving God. At 
 first, she knows not Faust at all, she thinks it is the jailer, and 
 complains that he has come too soon ; then as Faust falls by her 
 side in his distress, she gladly thinks that it is some one who will 
 kneel with her in prayer. At last she hears his own voice, and 
 rushes to embrace him, and in a brief, lucid interval, lives over 
 her love again, in the sudden joy of his presence. But when she 
 dimly discovers that he will rescue her, she cannot hear of it. 
 She will go out with him, if the grave is there, with him to the 
 eternal resting-place, but not a step other than that. Then her 
 reason wanders into the wildest, saddest confusion of thoughts and 
 memories, to come back in a brief last moment, at the sudden 
 appearance of Mephistopheles, in the utterance of her pious sub- 
 mission to the judgment of God, and of her trembling solicitude 
 for her lover. Mephistopheles hurries away Faust, with the omi- 
 nous words, " Come thou to me ! " But that last voice of this 
 First Part, — the voice of love " from within," calling after Faust, 
 and dying away, " Henry ! Henry ! " — is it a plaintive prophecy, 
 by and by to be fulfilled ? 
 
 We come to the exposition of the Second Part of this poem, 
 rather. from a feeling of necessity, than from an admiration for its 
 contents. Without a survey of it, our task would be unfinished, 
 and the view of Faust's career incomplete. But it must be con- 
 fessed that the Second Part is far inferior to the First in concep- 
 tion and in execution, and fails to take a strong hold of either the 
 understanding or the heart of the reader. It has, indeed, an 
 affluence of literary and poetic material, for Goethe has enriched 
 
170 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 it from the abundant stores of his various and lifelong studies, 
 and adorned it with all the refinement of his culture. But while 
 there is an onward and upward progress in the career of Faust 
 even to the consummation, there is a marked falling off in tragic 
 and in moral interest, and a decline also in the poetic, not so much 
 in respect to fullness of imagery, but, as it seems to us, in the 
 quality of the poetry. You miss that genial union of thinking and 
 imagining which belongs to genuine poetry, where the thought is 
 born in the soul together with the fancy, and comes forth into a 
 perfect oneness of image. You seem here to see the two pro- 
 cesses at first apart, the thoughts forming themselves in the mind, 
 and then the imagination clothing them in poetic forms. Hence, 
 with all the poetic that is here, there is so much that is unpoetical. 
 You are indeed in a poetical world, a world of the imagination ; 
 all is unreal, dreamlike ; but it is ungenial, it does not awaken 
 emotion ; you do not so much admire as wonder ; you are curious, 
 indeed, with wonder what all this is, where you are, and why you 
 are here at all. You are traversing a vast realm of allegory, 
 where ever flit about you mystic figures of thinnest aerial texture, 
 of all times and regions, indeed all forms of being ; shades from 
 Hades, creatures of mythology, Helen and Paris leading up all 
 classic antiquity, and all the classic myths following in their train ; 
 all engaged with sprightliest activity in many and complex per- 
 formances, the full import of which you may not quite clearly dis- 
 cover till after many close observations, and perhaps not even 
 then. These allegorical figures awaken no commanding interest ; 
 you do not feel drawn to them, nor do you long to recall them 
 when they are gone, or keep them with you in delighted memory ; 
 they are very brilliant, and sometimes they troop before you in 
 gorgeous splendor ; but they have more light than warmth, you 
 feel them to be cold and frosty, with all their glittering bright- 
 ness. It is also fatal to the popularity of the allegorical poetry in 
 this part of " Faust," that what it represents does not address the 
 sympathies of the mass of mankind. The " Faerie Queen " and 
 the " Pilgrim's Progress " draw the sources of their universal and 
 enduring interest from truths which are familiar to all human 
 experience. We love to journey with Christian, and to wander 
 with the Lady Una and the Eed Cross Knight, because we have 
 so much in common with them as human beings ; we fight with 
 them in their battles, we suffer their defeats, and exult in their 
 victories. But here the allegory symbolizes the fortunes of art, 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 171 
 
 literature, science, all learning, ancient and modern ; and these, 
 too, in their very culminations, as they are reached in apprehen- 
 sion and sympathy only by men of the greatest refinement and 
 cultivation. Not many readers can behold and enjoy the glorious 
 forms of classic letters and art in the imposing assemblage of 
 allegorical figures in the Classical Walpurgis Night ; and it is 
 probably the rare lot of only the choice and master-spirits of the 
 race to sympathize with the exalted Faust in his intuitions of ideal 
 beauty in the sight of the conjured Helen of Troy. 
 
 For reasons such as these, this Second Part of Goethe's great 
 poem has by many been summarily condemned to the regions of 
 the obscure and unintelligible ; but the evidence is inadequate 
 to such a sentence. There are doubtless some parts which have 
 never been satisfactorily explained ; but the labyrinth is not so 
 intricate and dark but that by some friendly thread of guidance ^ 
 we can trace the course of Faust through the windings of his peril- 
 ous way, and come out with him again into light and freedom. 
 
 Let us now go through with this Second Part, dwelling only 
 upon what is essential to a view of Faust's ever struggling but up- 
 ward career. We can take with us, as a guide, the significant re- 
 mark of Goethe himself, published in an announcement of the 
 " Helena," in his " Kunst und Alterthum," " that the composition 
 of a Second Part must necessarily conduct a man of Fausfs 
 nature into higher regions^ under worthier circumstances,''^ This 
 emerging into higher regions the poet represents in his best man- 
 ner, at the very opening of the first scene. Faust has resorted 
 to again meditative communion with nature, and this time has de- 
 rived the utmost good that this source of healing can yield. The 
 airy elves that breathe sweetest music over his unquiet slumbers, 
 at least soothe his troubled soul ; and he awakes to greet with a 
 fresh vigor and courage the coming of a new day, and to struggle, 
 though with calmer endeavor, in paths of better activity. Me- 
 phistopheles still goes with him, such were the terms of both the 
 contract and the Prologue ; and, according to his promise, is now to 
 conduct Faust to " the great world " of human life. So Faust is 
 now brought to an imperial court ; even as Goethe himself became 
 
 ^ We have been indebted for such guidance, in some parts of the poem, to 
 Dr. Karl Kostlin's book, entitled Goethe^ s Faust, Seine Kritiker und Ausleger, 
 Tubingen, 1860. Eckermann has also preserved for us, in his Conversations 
 with Goethe, much valuable exposition, from the poet's own lips, of some pas- 
 sages in the Second Part. 
 
172 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 the central personage at the small but brilliant court of Weimar. 
 It is a time most propitious for able and aspiring men ; for the 
 affairs of the realm are in the utmost disorder, and the emperor, 
 a weak sovereign, and fond of pleasure, will welcome aid from any 
 quarter. What position of influence Faust himself reaches we 
 are not informed ; but Mephistopheles becomes court-jester, and 
 very soon jests with the emperor and all his subjects in a very 
 reckless fashion. A grand council assembles ; and the emperor, 
 more impatient of business than usual, for it is now carnival-time, 
 is vexed beyond measure with the complaints that come in from 
 all departments of the disordered empire. The bottom-line of all 
 the evils from which the state is suffering seems to be the extraor- 
 dinary scarcity of money. There is absolutely none in the em- 
 peror's coffers, next to none anywhere, the revenues are all 
 clutched by the Jews before they come in ; all property is mort- 
 gaged to the top, all trade is dead-locked, and .bread comes on to 
 the table eaten in advance ; in short, the whole empire is on the 
 brink of ruin. In this exigency, Faust seems to think himself 
 allowed to do what other men have done of more experience in 
 statecraft ; he is drawn by Mephistopheles into quite hollow ex- 
 pedients for a supply of money ; apparently forgetting what once 
 he told Mephistopheles, that the devil's gold, like mercury, always 
 slides away from the hand. Mephistopheles unfolds to the em- 
 peror a plan for a new kind of currency, far more convenient than 
 specie, and just as good when you know where the specie is, and 
 are willing to wait till you get it in hand. He dilates upon the 
 vast subterranean treasures in the realm, which, of course, belong 
 to the emperor, as well as the brains and hands which are needed 
 to get them. He pictures to his fancy the gold and the jewels 
 that, ever since the days of the mighty Romans, successive genera- 
 tions have, in times of trouble, buried underground. What vaults 
 and cellars were waiting to be blown up, and reveal their riches 
 of gold, and silver plate, and coined money ! How often has mere 
 chance turned up to the peasant a pot of gold, as he plowed the 
 soil! Now let all these treasures be deliberately dug for and 
 brought to light and use. The emperor is at first incredulous, 
 but finally is full of faith in the new scheme. Here is certainly a 
 prospect of relief ; the scheme shall be tried ; but, meantime, let 
 the trumpet sound, and all celebrate the waiting joys of carnival. 
 As if in preparation for the golden days that are coming, the 
 emperor and court now take part in a superbly appointed masquer- 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 173 
 
 ade, in which Riches plays a prominent part. Without attempting 
 to describe this grand court-show, we need only mention that the 
 chief personages are Plutus, the god of riches, who is represented 
 by Faust, and Pan, the god of universal nature, who is repre- 
 sented by the emperor. Plutus appears in a chariot drawn 
 through the air by four dragons ; he scatters, as he passes along, 
 bright gifts upon the crowd below, who eagerly snatch them as 
 they fall. At length the chariot descends, and a huge chest, filled 
 to the brim with golden stores, is set upon the ground ; and as the 
 emperor Pan draws nigh, encircled by a chorus of nymphs, a 
 deputation of gnomes bear the chest, and with low obeisance lay 
 it at his feet. And so the emperor is symbolically declared lord 
 of the treasures hidden in the earth. A scene laid upon the fol- 
 lowing day, and appropriately called the Pleasure -Garden^ pic- 
 tures the carrying out of the scheme of Mephistopheles, and its 
 immediate result in a sudden plethora of the money market. It 
 appears that in a lucky interval in the masquerade, Mephistopheles 
 had contrived to secure a few pen-strokes of the great Pan's hand 
 to a certain bit of otherwise insignificant paper. These had been 
 multiplied, by clever hands, a thousand fold, signature and all, and 
 the blanks filled out ; and so had gone forth, to the unspeakable 
 relief of a distressed people, an abundant issue of Imperial Treas- 
 ury notes, of all convenient denominations ; the notes to be taken 
 up without delay when certain untold treasures buried in the 
 emperor's lands were raised up and put into the imperial vaults ; 
 and these, moreover, were to be raised up immediately. Great 
 were the mutual congratulations of emperor and heads of depart- 
 ments, and courtiers and common people, on that same Pleasure- 
 Garden occasion. The Commander-in-Chief announces that the 
 pay is settled in advance, and the army was never in such a loyal 
 mood. The steward of the imperial household is enraptured to 
 think that bill after bill has been paid, and that the claws of the 
 monster usury are dulled. The lord-treasurer brings word that it 
 is gala-day on 'Change, and all through the town ; that the people 
 have plenty of money, and without being plagued with big money- 
 bags ; and that one half of the world seems to think of nothing 
 but eating, while the other half is strutting about in brand-new 
 clothes. The emperor is strangely perplexed at these tidings. At 
 first he is in a rage. He remembers that he signed one piece of 
 paper last night, but these thousands he hears of must be forger- 
 ies. But when the treasurer explains it all, and when he learns 
 
174 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 how much good has been done, his emotion subsides through won- 
 der into a happy content. " And all this," he exclaims, " passes 
 with my people for gold ? Suffices with the army and court for 
 full pay ? Very well ; surprised as I am, I must let it pass." 
 The poet leaves the reader to imagine the final results of this 
 stroke of Mephistophelian finance; and if he be charged with 
 lightness in introducing such an episode into his great theme, it 
 may be said in defense that earnestness and humor are very near 
 together in human nature and in human life, and, moreover, that 
 wise men, no less than arrant knaves, have blown similar financial 
 bubbles in the real world. We have no theory to propose touch- 
 ing the meaning of this scene at the imperial court ; and we have 
 been somewhat perplexed by the ingenious but conflicting theories 
 of learned commentators ; but we may readily infer that Faust 
 must have soon discovered how hollow are often the ways of the 
 gi-eat world, how unsatisfying the life of courtiers, and how slip- 
 pery and perilous the paths trodden by statesmen and financiers. 
 
 But what has been now described marks only the introduction 
 and the transition to Faust's main career at the imperial court. 
 We have to confess, however, that it is very difficult at first to 
 know for certain what was really going on in Faust's own soul, 
 in his own inner life, for some time to come, from the two acts 
 which now follow. Gay and gorgeous as are all the scenes, they 
 are laid in far-off dream-regions of allegory; it is all phantom- 
 land, in figures, movement, all the shadowy goings-on, with Faust 
 himself seemingly the only veritable human element, and not a 
 word from any creature else, that seems to come out of real 
 human lips. But when we get beyond wonder, in all this mystical 
 world, and discern some significance in all these manifold forms of 
 brightness that flit in from all around, and unite in such harmony, 
 the Grecian Helen rediviva, brightest of all, courted and won by 
 the modern Faust, — we are sure that those " higher regions " 
 which the poet so dimly hinted at are the regions of ideal beauty, 
 and that thither Faust has now turned the strivings of his rest- 
 less soul ; to the love and pursuit of the beautiful, which he will 
 apprehend, and possess, and enjoy in all elegant letters and art, 
 and, most of all, in poetry. The love of beauty has been always 
 a strong element in his being. Beauty he has loved in nature, 
 for whom he has always had a true lover's devotion ; beauty in 
 woman, in form and in character, though there his love was mixed 
 with passion, and led to sin and sorrow. Now ideal beauty he 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 175 
 
 will seek and apprehend, and make a real possession, in all purely 
 intellectual spheres, where it may be embodied in lasting forms. 
 For this new career he has at court, where all else is so unpromis- 
 ing, ample and alluring openings ; even as it was with Goethe 
 himself in his court-life at Weimar. The emperor, with all his 
 weaknesses, will be a patron of art ; he is not without culture 
 himself, and in his coronation visit to Italy caught some glimpses 
 of the wonders of beauty in the ancient world. It is under such 
 fortunate circumstances, that in these scenes, so brilliant, so elab- 
 orate, and withal so very fantastic, Goethe represents the exalted, 
 but at last unsatisfying experiences of Faust in a life of the 
 widest and truest literary and poetic culture, or, as Goethe and 
 the Germans are fond of calling it, of highest aesthetic culture as 
 an artist. In the portraiture of such lofty experiences as these, it 
 were natural in any modern fiction, whether in prose or in poetry, 
 that the author should educate his hero not only by solitary study 
 at home, but especially by residence in the ever-enchanted lands 
 of classic literature and art ; where, on the sacred soil once trod- 
 den by the long departed great, and yet bearing everywhere the 
 precious weight of the monuments of their genius, he should 
 commune with the spirit of the past and ascend to the very sources 
 of all which makes life ideal. But for a hero like Faust, who 
 belongs to the opening of modern civilization, when the reviving 
 glories of classical learning were just reddening the horizon, and 
 whose image, from such a time, has on us a kind of glamour of 
 sorcery, with Goethe, too, for the poet, who heralded and ushered 
 in a later new era of literature and art, a more striking, — if we 
 may so say, — a more sensuous proceeding was no less natural. 
 So Goethe, in these scenes, seizes and moulds to his larger uses 
 those portions of the tradition in which Faust plays his magic 
 part before Maximilian, and, among other necromantic achieve- 
 ments, conjures up the beautiful Helen, and woos and wins her for 
 his own. It lies outside our present purpose, and we have neither 
 the ability nor the inclination for the task, to attempt a detailed 
 unfolding of these complex parts of the poem. We shall touch 
 them in the briefest manner, venturing hints, as we pass, at the 
 probable indications they give us of the progress of Faust in this 
 exalted region of his new endeavors. The emperor wills that 
 Faust summon up the Grecian Helen ; in her must be seen, in 
 distinct form, the ideal of beauty. The wondrous task is achieved, 
 but with small aid of Mephistopheles. Beauty, he confesses, lies 
 
176 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 beyond his realm ; those long vanished heathen heroines are safe 
 away in a select place of their own ; but still there are means 
 within Faust's own reach. Faust must first penetrate to the 
 abodes of " The Mothers " of all, — mysterious divinities, dwell- 
 ing in deep, untrodden solitudes, — with whom are the archetypes 
 of all things, and so the original form of beauty; from whom 
 they all proceed, to whom they return, from whom and by whom 
 alone they can come back to the light of day. So does the poet 
 seem to represent, by an image drawn from classic sources,^ the 
 idea of beauty as intuitive, resting in the inmost nature of man. 
 For Faust himself the apparition of Helen is far more than an 
 emperor's holiday show ; she rises to his awakened sensibility, like 
 a golden exhalation, in all her ineffable loveliness ; there suddenly 
 breaks into his spiritual atmosphere the vision of the beautiful, 
 out of that buried but ever-living world of ancient art, hitherto so 
 strange to him, and strange no less to all modern life, before the 
 new birth of classic antiquity. And, as in the experience of so 
 many men of fine spiritual nature, — of Goethe himself, in his 
 Eoman life, — he is overpowered by the vision ; he is transported 
 by that glorious form, so suddenly revealed for an instant's gaze ; 
 and he wanders half beside himself, haunted by the image, insen- 
 sible to all else, and sighing for a prolonged and perfect sight to 
 follow that ravishing glimpse. This longing must be stilled, if 
 not satisfied. Faust must find his way to the world of classic 
 beauty, the ideal Hellas, for there, if anywhere, is the vanished 
 Helen. But a guide is needed ; and he is furnished by an inven- 
 tion of the poet, which is one of the strangest of the many strange 
 phantasms of this part of his work. We are suddenly back in 
 Faust's study, where our old friend Wagner is installed, and has 
 been all these years, now more learned than ever, and a great al- 
 chymist. He has long been busy in his laboratory, trying to dis- 
 cover the principle of life, and has just succeeded to a charm ; and 
 now out of one of his mysterious bottles springs forth a little intel- 
 lectual creature, a tremulous, ethereal being, pure intelligence, — 
 Homunculus by name, — and he is to be Faust's guide. Under 
 
 ^ Goethe says himself in Eckermann's Conversations, that he "found in 
 Plutarch that in ancient Greece the ' Mothers ' were spoken of as divinities ; 
 and that all the rest was his own invention." The passage the poet referred 
 to is probably the one in Plutarch's Marcellus, c. 20. Duntzer also quotes Plu- 
 tarch, De defectu oraculorum, c. 22, and also Diodorus Siculus, iv. 80. Kostlin 
 cites also Plato, Phcedrus, c. 27. 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 177 
 
 such questionable guidance, — whether Homunculus be the spirit 
 of learning, of study, or the personification of Faust's own ideal 
 strivings, we know not, — Faust is brought to the classic Hellas, 
 and sees revealed to his gaze all her ever-living forms of beauty 
 and grandeur. Her gods and goddesses all pass before his 
 delighted vision, her heroic men and her fair women, all the 
 bright forms of her mythology, the beings that people the sea 
 and the air, denizens of wood, valley, fountain, and river, — all 
 are to him real presences, as if they had imperishably survived 
 the historical passing away of the ancient world. But for our- 
 selves, we have been unable to sympathize with the enthusiastic 
 praise bestowed by some of Goethe's admiring critics upon this 
 part of the poem ; indeed, we have had to wonder at Faust's 
 words of passionate admiration at the many marvels that were 
 thronging around him. The famous scene of the Classic Carni- 
 val is certainly affluent in its stores of learning, in some passages 
 most elaborately poetic, and everywhere enlivened with most 
 genial humor ; but the impression it makes is not noble, it stirs 
 no grand emotions ; it is a ghostly, nay, a ghastly, company you 
 are in all the while ; surely a winter at Rome, a month of study 
 in the gallery of the Vatican and of the Capitol, a single reading 
 of the Iliad, were better than a dozen such carnivals, for a repro- 
 duction of the genius of ancient life and art. 
 
 But this Scene of the " Classic Carnival " is only subsidiary to 
 the Act of the "Helena," Faust's wandering amidst the won- 
 ders of Hellas to the discovery and possession of Helen herself, 
 his upward progress in aesthetic culture to heights of attainment 
 which have been reached only by the few Goethes of modern 
 times. We presume not to dwell upon the great merits or the 
 equally great defects of this part ^ of the poem ; on the one hand, 
 the poet's masterly treatment, in diction and in numbers, of the 
 simplicity and dignity, and the stately march of the classic Greek 
 muse, and of the various grace and pomp and freer movement of 
 the modern Romantic ; and on the other hand, the perplexed 
 mixture of the most incongruous elements, the real and the imagi- 
 nary, history and allegory, which gives a radically artificial char- 
 
 ^ Carlyle wrote many years ago one of his most characteristic articles on the 
 Helena, which has been republished in his Miscellanies. If our readers are 
 not already familiar with it, and desire to pursue this subject further, they will 
 find in that article a very full and admirable exposition of this act of the 
 poem. 
 
178 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 acter to the total conception. It belongs to our plan only to indi- 
 cate its chief features and their probable bearings upon this stage 
 of Faust's career, and the mutual connections, which it seems 
 meant to illustrate, of ancient and of modern culture. 
 
 Like Orpheus and uiEneas, Faust makes the descent to Hades ; 
 and, more successful than the Thracian lover, secures the return 
 of Helen to the upper air. The Spartan queen appears, on her 
 return from Troy, before the palace of King Menelaus ; but though 
 she sees " Tyndarus' high house " standing there as erst in all its 
 grandeur, she is not destined to reenter as its queenly mistress. 
 New fortunes await her, such as Homer never dreamed of. A new 
 abduction is at hand. She must escape the wrath of her injured 
 lord, and be borne for refuge to a new world, which is to be made 
 bright by her beauty. Accordingly, with a truly romantic inde- 
 pendence of the unities, the poet transports her away from Sparta, 
 over sea and land, and lets her gently alight, herself and chorus 
 sadly bewildered, amidst worn, gray walls, in the court of a me- 
 diaeval castle, where the noble Faust, begirt with pages and 
 esquires, stands ready to greet her, and bid her knightly welcome 
 to his halls. With all homage of admiration is thus the beautiful 
 spirit of ancient art first greeted in the modern world ; and the 
 gallant wooing in these castle halls, not without happiest answer- 
 ing tokens, is most auspicious for Faust's onward progress, and for 
 the fortunes of the new culture which he represents. But the 
 course of true love never did run smooth ; and there is nothing 
 too strange for the errant course of this act aptly called by the 
 author " a Classico-Romantic Phantasmagoria." The wooing is 
 suddenly interrupted by the startling tidings that Spartan Mene- 
 laus is approaching, at the head of those heroic forces, once the 
 ruin of Paris and his sire, and of ill-fated Ilium. But the chival- 
 rous Faust, nothing daunted, goes forth with his gathered hosts to 
 the onset ; and, achieving a bloodless victory, the most renowned, 
 perhaps, of all the victories of peace, he proceeds with all seren- 
 ity to portion off conquered beautiful Hellas, with all her outlying 
 dependencies, among his brave followers, of hitherto unknown 
 speech and race, German and Goth, Frank and Norman. Yet 
 Sparta, Helen's ancient home, is enthroned over all ; and so Faust 
 and the world-famous queen of beauty now hie them to " Arca- 
 dia, near by Sparta's land," where they live in happiest union, 
 " thrones changed to bowers, and Arcadian-free their felicity." 
 With such marvels of invention does the poet shadow forth not 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 179 
 
 only the consummation of Faust's aesthetic culture, but also by his 
 union with Helen, the harmonious blending, in all the domains of 
 that culture, of the ancient and the modern, the classic and the 
 romantic ; and, moreover and finally, by a crowning phantasm, 
 which we have not the courage to encounter, the offspring ^ of 
 this union, — a peerless offspring, nobler than either parent, — 
 the genius of the poetry of the nineteenth century. But not even 
 Arcadian bowers can be a lasting abode for Faust's aspiring soul ; 
 culture, though it were the truest, and of the truly beautiful, is not 
 all of life, nor yet the highest ; out from it Faust must pass up to 
 something nobler and better, which shall at last yield him satis- 
 faction. Of this we get a poetic glimpse at the very close of the 
 act where Helen disappears. With parting words she vanishes, 
 her form melting into thin air ; but her robe and veil dissolve 
 into clouds, which lift up Faust, and bear him away far above the 
 world, to which he is to return anon, and enter upon a new and 
 the last stage of his unresting career. 
 
 Faust returns to earth, and now to the real world of action, a 
 contemplative, ideal life left behind him with the vanished Helen. 
 He now desires to quit forever a life of enjoyment, even in those 
 nobler forms in which he has sought it, even in enthusiasm for 
 high art and elegant letters. He will now employ all his powers 
 in a sphere of practical activity, where he will have at heart the 
 weal of his fellow-men, and labor with cheerful freedom in the 
 service of mankind. Even his refined culture has yielded him 
 only a higher kind of selfish enjoyment ; but now in a career of 
 active exertion for the good of others, he sees a moral dignity ; he 
 will be conscious of himself as only a part, as one member of the 
 whole body of his race, for which it was designed that he should 
 labor with the full vigor of his faculties. But he brings out with 
 him from his recent pursuits one great element of success in his 
 new career ; a sense for the high, and the noble, and the perfect, 
 and an antipathy to all that is common, and hollow, and unworthy ; 
 so that with lofty ideas in his mind, he will project and execute 
 plans which will be fruitful of beneficent results. Accordingly we 
 find him turning again to nature, but with a practical purpose. 
 He gains from the emperor a large tract of coast-land, hitherto 
 
 1 Goethe says himself, in Eckermann, that he intended " Euphorion " to rep- 
 resent Byron ! His words, in speaking of Byron, are as , follows : " I could 
 not make any man the representation of the modern poetical era, except him, 
 who undoubtedly is to be regarded as the greatest genius of our century." 
 
180 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 uninhabited, and seemingly uninhabitable ; and this waste wilder- 
 ness he recovers from the elements that have desolated it, and 
 makes a fruitful soil, on which by and by grows up a great, free, 
 and prosperous community, rich and happy, and useful in indus- 
 trial arts, thriving trade, and extended commerce. To such busy 
 and fruitful activity he devotes his last years ; an activity which 
 ever gives him new occupation and new satisfaction, always richer 
 means to larger ends, in which he has a conscious joy of having 
 gained great possessions by his own exertions, and which he is 
 assured is promoting the physical and moral well-being of multi- 
 tudes of men. But the poet is not unmindful that in all this life 
 of useful occupation Faust is not free from error and wrong, that 
 Mephistopheles is still by his side, and though having ever less 
 power over his intentions and acts, yet continues to involve him 
 in evil and trouble. One episode he here weaves into the drama, 
 to show the evils incident to a sense of increasing prosperity, and 
 an ambition for yet larger dominions. Faust has built a palatial 
 residence, from which he can see his ships, as they go out from 
 the near harbor to all parts of the world, and come back laden 
 with their rich cargoes. But near by, and on a little eminence, 
 and intercepting his view, is an humble dwelling, under the snug 
 shelter of a few linden-trees, where live in quiet content an aged 
 pair, who rejoice in the classic names of Philemon and Baucis. 
 That little estate he longs for, and must have ; exactly on that 
 eminence he would build a high look-out, whence he may have a 
 survey over all his broad acres, and far away over land and sea ; 
 the very sight of the little cottage and the lindens, not his own, 
 stings him to the heart ; it were enough to spoil the possession of 
 the world. It is the old story of Ahab and Naboth's vineyards, 
 and a worse than Jezebel is at hand, to bid him, " arise and eat 
 bread, and let his heart be merry." He summons Mephistopheles 
 and orders him to get the old people away to a better estate he 
 has ready for them. It is the order of a covetous heart, but it is 
 executed by a foul wrong, which that heart had not bidden, at 
 least in words. On that night the cottage is fired and the old 
 couple perish in the flames. Bitterly does Faust repent him of 
 the rash command, and indignantly disavow its rasher execution. 
 And feeling how sin still clings to him in all his endeavors, he 
 looks back with deepest sorrow to his compact with Mephistophe- 
 les, formed in evil day, when he madly strove to break through 
 the limits of man's being, and in his despair cursed himself and 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 181 
 
 the world, which he has since found so rich in beauty, and love, 
 and hope, and patience, such a wide and ever-widening arena for 
 free and ennobling and beneficent action. In this consciousness 
 and confession of his past errors, the poet seems to indicate the 
 final triumph in Faust of good over evil ; all magic arts of super- 
 human striving now abjured and renounced, he finds man's high- 
 est good in free activity within the appointed limits of his being, 
 for the general welfare. In such activity we see him employed to 
 the end, carrying forward his ever-widening, never completed 
 plans ; toiling under the burden of growing cares, and bearing up 
 under the increasing pressure of age ; even in outward blindness, 
 the inward eye undimmed, and the spiritual force unabated ; till 
 at last, in the joyful assurance of having created a space for the 
 home of millions of men, a free people on a free soil, he utters 
 that word of satisfaction to the passing moment, " Stay, thou art 
 so fair," and his earthly career is ended. On coming at last to 
 this conclusion, the reader may well have the greatest doubts, 
 whether this departure of Faust's was a Christian's death. And 
 with such doubts in his mind, he will approach that last scene, in 
 which Faust's destiny is revealed, with a wonder, if indeed such a 
 death is to be an entrance to a Christian's heaven ; and at the 
 same time he may have some perplexity at the thought that such 
 a man after such a probation should wander with Mephistopheles 
 and his like in all the endless hereafter. But the concluding scene 
 of the poem, which opens to us the unseen world, and brings us 
 quite to the verge of heaven, leaves no doubt as to the poet's own 
 conceptions. Like Dante and many other poets, Goethe avails 
 himself of the image in the epistle of Jude, of Michael the arch- 
 angel contending with the devil about the body of Moses, and so 
 describes a contest over the grave of Faust between the powers of 
 good and evil. But Mephistopheles and the rebel crew are awed 
 away by the throngs of descending angels and redeemed spirits, 
 who strew roses as they come, and make the air radiant with light 
 and vocal with their heavenly song. Then upwards the angels 
 soar, bearing the soul of Faust, higher and higher ascending, met 
 in the air by other hosts of heavenly ones, the glorified fathers of 
 the church, choirs of blessed Magdalens, among them the once 
 named Margaret, and still ever upwards they move, the heavens 
 all melodious with their song, till at last we hear wafted down 
 from the highest regions of air the words of the angels as they 
 bear into heaven itself the new redeemed soul : — 
 
182 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 *' Delivered is the noble soul 
 
 From evil's dread dominion ; 
 Who toiling ever struggles on, 
 
 Him it is ours to ransom ; 
 And if indeed 't was his to share, 
 
 A part in love celestial ; 
 Then hastes the blessed host to meet 
 
 And crown him with their welcome." 
 
 We have given this passage, though in an unworthy rendering, 
 because it contains the poet's solution of the salvation of Faust. 
 It is this onward striving of a ceaseless activity which Goethe has 
 made a chief characteristic of Faust's career. In all the stages of 
 that career, we see wrought into living practice the word of the 
 " Preacher, the son of David," " Whatsoever thy hand findeth to 
 do, do it with thy might." In all action, Faust has struggled with 
 difficulties, obstacles, temptations, evil, making them subserve yet 
 higher strivings and higher living ; and for him, while engaged in 
 this noble strife, have heavenly powers of love ever watched and 
 warded, and lent their celestial aid. Such, at least, is the poet's 
 own interpretation of the passage as he gave it to Eckermann. 
 We quote his words, as we leave the poem, only premising, that 
 we think every reader wiU find in them a far more distinct utter- 
 ance of Christian truth than he has discovered in the poem itself. 
 " These lines," he says,^ " contain the key to Faust's salvation. 
 In himself an activity becoming constantly higher and purer, eter- 
 nal love coming from heaven to his aid. This harmonizes perfectly 
 with our religious view, that we cannot reach heavenly bliss through 
 our own strength, unassisted by divine grace." 
 
 We have been so long occupied with our survey of the contents 
 of this poem, that we have but the briefest space left for any re- 
 flections on the lessons it teaches ; but perhaps these have been 
 anticipated in the course of our remarks. It may be enough to 
 add, that what has won for Faust so many willing ears and hearts 
 is the voice it has given to the longing of the human soul, im- 
 planted in its innermost being, for some all-satisfying good ; to its 
 restless and yet weary strivings to reach such a good, and the 
 manifold disappointments and despair with which it has so often 
 come back from its wanderings to and fro, nowhere finding rest. 
 How full is the world of such spiritual experiences, in the history 
 of the humblest and of the most exalted souls ! They enter into 
 
 1 Eckermann's Conversations (translated by Margaret Fuller), Boston, 1839, 
 p. 409. 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST. 183 
 
 the most real life of men, in all times, under all skies ; they are 
 embodied in the truest literatures in every form of human speech. 
 And as we find the clearest witness to the divine source and true 
 destiny of the soul in this aspiration for real and lasting good, in 
 this restless craving for the satisfaction of vast and immortal 
 wants, so do all its dark struggles, and all its humiliating and de- 
 basing errors and delusions, and the unrest and unhappiness they 
 create, testify no less clearly to its present fallen state. The 
 " dream " of the poet thus becomes the experience of the race : — 
 " An infant crying in the night, 
 
 An infant crying for the light, 
 
 And with no language but a cry." 
 
 This cry of the soul for light has nowhere found a clearer utter- 
 ance in modern literature than in the " Faust " of Goethe. It is 
 this infinite longing for some true and all-sufficient good that 
 makes the central force in Faust's being, and furnishes the never- 
 ceasing press of motive to all his career. It is this which drives 
 him from one sphere of activity to another, from unsatisfied spec- 
 ulation to unsatisfying magic, from theory to real life, and through 
 all scenes of life, the highest and the lowest, sensual pleasure, 
 worldly ambition, intellectual culture. In the " vanity and vexa- 
 tion of spirit " of which Faust has constant experience in all these 
 scenes of endeavor and labor, the poet has clearly taught, at least 
 on its negative side, the great truth of the soul's high destiny. 
 Indeed, only in that sad but most instructive Book of Ecclesiastes 
 are we taught more impressively how vain is all earthly good, how 
 inadequate all human wit and travail, to the satisfaction of the 
 human soul. Like the Eoyal Preacher, Goethe has also inculcated 
 the wisdom of resignation and of strenuous activity within our 
 allotted sphere ; yet he has failed to bring us to that grand " con- 
 clusion of the whole matter. Fear God, and keep his command- 
 ments : for this is the whole duty of man." But only from the 
 experiences of those who have learned in the school of Christ, and 
 have been enlightened and renewed by divine grace, do we reach, 
 in its positive form, the great truth that man was made for God, 
 and only in Him can find fullness of blessing and peace. How 
 does this truth shine out in the writings of Augustine, who, after 
 having traversed the whole world, and consulted all its oracles, 
 and found them dumb to his anxious question, " Who will show 
 us any good," heard at last a voice ^ as from heaven, speaking out 
 1 Aug. Cmf. viii. 29. 
 
184 GOETHE'S EAUST. 
 
 of " the lively oracles " to his stricken and contrite spirit, " Not 
 in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, 
 not in strife and envying; hut put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ;'''' 
 and in that voice found entire response to the cravings of his soul, 
 and by its guidance reached the crowning experience of perfect 
 and enduring peace, in the knowledge of God as revealed in 
 Christ and by Christ, and in His love and His service. How sim- 
 ply is this truth declared in that golden saying of his,^ " Our ra- 
 tional nature is so great a good, that there is no good, wherein we 
 can be happy, save God ; " and how is it summed up in that brief 
 prayer,^ the utterance alike of true wisdom and devout piety: 
 '''•Fedsti nos ad Te, Domine, et inquietum est cor nostrum, donee 
 requiescat in Tel " 
 
 1 Aug. de Nat. Boni, c. 7. ^ Aug. Conf. i. 1. 
 
GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, DECEMBER 31, 1869, ALSO 
 PRINTED IN THE "BAPTIST QUARTERLY." 
 
 Mr. Gladstone's rising political honors, crowned now by the 
 highest distinction of an English statesman's life, have not weaned 
 him from his Homeric studies; from their renewal and further 
 prosecution he has not been withdrawn by the engrossing cares, 
 incident to his exalted position, as the head of the British govern- 
 ment, and the leader of its parliamentary councils. His intervals 
 of rest from public affairs he has devoted to the composition of 
 a work which in one volume embodies in a new form, by con- 
 densation and important modifications, the results of the three 
 volumes of his Studies on Homer and the Homeric age, which he 
 gave to the world in 1858. We are all so familiar with his 
 commanding person on the most recent fields of English parlia- 
 mentary strife, that we wonder at first, as we discern him in those 
 far-off times of Homer, the early morning of our race, gazing 
 with the spirit of a student of human nature and society upon 
 the poet's immortal pictures of the "Youth of the World, the 
 Gods and Men of the Heroic Age of Greece." Nothing but the 
 consideration of such a spirit in Mr. Gladstone, and of the estimate 
 it has won for him of the greatness of Homer's genius, and of his 
 unrivaled influence in the purely human culture of the world, 
 coulS sufficiently explain to us such a diversion from the absorbing 
 offices of public life to the various and profound studies which are 
 contained in this volume. It is not enough that we recall from 
 history examples like that of the great Roman orator, of men who 
 have sought relaxation from the harassing influence of public 
 affairs in literary or philosophical pursuits as remote as possible 
 from their daily avocations. Nor is it enough that we remember 
 the tenacious hold upon the mind in after life of the associations 
 of classical study in earlier years, the abiding force of those tastes 
 for all that is beautiful and ennobling in ancient letters, which 
 grew up insensibly in the season of youth, under the propitious 
 influences of place and books, and teachers and companions, the 
 
186 GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 
 
 lingering witchery of eloquence and song, which then first caught 
 the ear and led captive the soul, the enthusiastic admiration and 
 love for the great writers of antiquity which with so many scholars 
 was first awakened in that springtime of intellectual life, and 
 cherished in its subsequent periods, the grace of manhood and the 
 solace of age. All this doubtless belongs to Mr. Gladstone's 
 experience, but much more also ; far deeper sources it has, to feed 
 as from a perennial fountain the stream of his Homeric studies. 
 Such a source is his assured conviction that the works of Homer, 
 which form the delight of the scholar's boyhood, are designed yet 
 more for the instruction of his maturer years ; that coming down 
 to us from the earliest period of antiquity, and from the opening, 
 genial stage of culture in the intellectual life of its most highly 
 gifted people, they yield us most precious knowledge, fresh and 
 original, touching man's nature and life and destiny, founded 
 upon experience, and wrought into lifelike and living pictures of 
 human character and society, by a creative genius to whom has 
 been assigned, by general consent, the supremacy among poets. 
 The world's youth Mr. Gladstone sees in those creations of Homer's 
 genius ; but not in the sense in which Hegel uses the image, of the 
 entire life of the Greeks as it was opened by the fabulous youth 
 Achilles and closed by the youth of historic reality, Alexander the 
 Great; in that grand Homeric world, its Olympian heavens of 
 immortal gods overarching its earth, trodden by heroic men, he 
 beholds the youth itself of youthful Greece; when the Greek 
 mind was just exulting in the elastic play of its young energies, 
 unfolding its marvelous powers, and bounding forth into the 
 future, rejoicing in its strength to run the race of a great destiny 
 in the intellectual history of man. It is the consideration of this 
 destiny of the Greeks, not even yet all fulfilled, to be a chief and 
 original influence in moulding the intellectual education of the 
 world, which invests the poems of Homer with a quite inestimable 
 intrinsic value. For in these poems are the germs of that lofty 
 destiny; there are the sources of the power by which it was 
 achieved ; they had for the Greeks of all periods a place of honor 
 and influence, even as of sacred books ; they were an acknowledged 
 authority on all subjects of national concern, language, government, 
 letters, art, religion ; studied and quoted by philosophers in their 
 schools, listened to by the people in their solemn assemblies, their 
 preservation counted by statesmen a sacred trust, and made an 
 object of public policy, they entered as a vital and animating 
 
GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 187 
 
 force into that Greek mind which, by its literature, philosophy, 
 and art, has penetrated all modern culture and the entire civilized 
 life of Christendom. It is the impulse of such convictions as 
 these which has brought Mr. Gladstone before the public as an 
 interpreter of Homer ; .not so much in the interest of classical 
 studies and scholarship, to delight himself again in the surpassing 
 charms of Homer's poetry, and to make others sharers in his 
 renewed enjoyment, but in the larger interests of knowledge and 
 truth to held up the great poet as an appointed teacher of mankind, 
 and to commend the conclusions he has himself reached of the 
 vital connection of these poems with the whole history of human 
 culture and of the Providential government of the world. Some 
 of these conclusions Mr. Gladstone's readers will doubtless readily 
 accept ; from others, though the very ones which he himself deems 
 of essential moment, they will just as strongly dissent, as when 
 they first encountered them in his former writings; but all of 
 them must command admiration for the enthusiasm in Homeric 
 study which they display, and for the earnest spirit from which 
 they emanate, and which gives them an interest quite independent 
 of the consideration of their truth and importance. The present 
 work presents the results of Mr. Gladstone's Homeric studies far 
 more completely than the former quite too extended volumes ; the 
 repetitions which occurred in those three large volumes are now 
 withdrawn ; the minute particulars, which were sometimes tedious 
 and wearisome, are here wrought into general views ; and some of 
 his more peculiar opinions, to which exception was taken when 
 they first appeared, are at least toned down, with a manifest 
 improvement in the general effect. By the new treatment the 
 author's work has become a kind of manual which aims to furnish 
 practical assistance to the study of Homer in schools and uni- 
 versities, and also to " convey a partial knowledge of the subject 
 to persons who are not habitual students." 
 
 We propose, in this article, to touch upon some of the preliminary 
 topics discussed in this work, and to give special attention to the 
 subject of chief interest in it, — the Religion of the Homeric Age. 
 
 It is the surest of the results, that we reach anew, in reading 
 this latest of so many works on the poems of Homer, that not- 
 withstanding the unequaled influence which these poems have 
 exerted, the world has no definite knowledge of their author. It 
 is something which never ceases to be strange, that apart from 
 the poems themselves, the poet has for us no real existence ; and 
 
188 GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 
 
 for any real knowledge we have, the figure of Homer, even as of 
 Achilles or of Agamemnon, seems to be ever hovering on the 
 borders of an imaginary world. Where and when he was born, 
 who were his parents and kindred, under what influences of home 
 and society, of nature and life, he grew up, and developed his 
 wondrous poetic faculty, — on all such questions as these no light 
 is shed, save that which shines out from his own luminous poetry. 
 In antiquity itself, cities not seven alone, but cities without number, 
 contended for the honor of giving him birth ; and in the persons 
 of learned critics they are contending for it still, and the contention 
 no nearer its end ; and we must be content to leave this question 
 in the darkness in which we find it. 
 
 As little have we any external authorities to Bx the time of the 
 poet's life ; here, too, the poems themselves are their own most 
 trustworthy witness. But even if we rely alone upon internal 
 evidence, and admit the view that the poems depict a state of 
 Grecian society and manners far anterior to the earliest historic 
 period, we are hardly prepared for Mr. Gladstone's so quietly 
 dismissing, by inference, the opinion of Herodotus, which fixes 
 the poet's life so late as the ninth century before Christ ; for 
 certainly it were nothing improbable for a poet of Homeric genius, 
 an heir to a rich inheritance of traditions in story and song, to 
 fashion his material into such fresh pictures, even if he were 
 himself living long after the age from which those traditions had 
 come down. But yet where all is so uncertain, we may be inclined 
 to follow a writer of Mr. Gladstone's fine Homeric tact, and carry 
 back the poet to a period earlier than that of the ancient opinions, 
 and set him down in the congenial proximity of his own gods and 
 heroes. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone is inclined to put the fall of Troy earlier than 
 the received date of 1183 B. c, and it is his conjecture that 
 Homer may have been born before or during the war, and that he 
 was probably conversant with those who had fought in it. But 
 whatever date may be fixed for the poet's life, the poems themselves 
 have for Mr. Gladstone the highest historical character for the 
 age which they represent. Nowhere, either in the present volume 
 or in his earlier work, does he write with greater earnestness than 
 when he contends that the song of Homer is historic song. In 
 the sense in which the assertion is made nothing can be truer. 
 Not of course that he wrote history, and narrated and unfolded, 
 in the connection of time and of cause, events in the life of men 
 
GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDl. 189 
 
 and of nations ; admit, too, that lie used fiction, as indeed no 
 other writer before or since ; admit, too, the supernatural element 
 that enters so largely into the poetry ; still, as the Greek Strabo 
 contended long ago, the basis of the whole was history ; he was 
 historical in the representation of the ideas, manners, and customs, 
 characters and institutions of real men, and of a state of society 
 that had a real existence. Never ceasing to be poet, he is always a 
 historian. Far more than the great dramatists of his own country, 
 far more than any other epic or dramatic poet, it was his to 
 reproduce, in poetic form, the manifold life of an entire age and 
 people ; indeed, it is Mr. Gladstone's firm belief that he has told 
 more about the world and its inhabitants at his own epoch than 
 any historian that ever lived. It is clear from the concurrent 
 belief of the Greeks of all times, and from the whole economy 
 and texture of the poems, that the tales of Troy and the wanderings 
 of Ulysses, though unrivaled works of the imagination, yet have 
 in them the substance of historic truth; they are the record of 
 real events, during which and by which the Greeks were coming 
 into the reality and the consciousness of a united national life. 
 To adopt Mr. Gladstone's strong language, they make '' the first 
 and also the best composition of an age, the most perfect ' form and 
 body of a time,' that has ever been achieved by the hand of man." 
 Far less space than might have been expected has Mr Glad- 
 stone devoted to what has been called the Homeric question, — 
 that great controversy which has so profoundly agitated the 
 learned world for nearly a century, and has not yet wholly sub- 
 sided. Nothing in all the annals of criticism is more remarkable 
 or more fruitful of instruction than the history of this controversy. 
 Its very origin shows how the greatest results may come out of 
 the smallest beginnings, how the smallest seed of doubt or suspi- 
 cion may become the germ of a deep and universal skepticism. 
 For more than twenty-five centuries Homer had lived in the faith 
 of men, and the Iliad and the Odyssey, each as a great epic, one 
 and entire, had commanded general admiration as the works of 
 his genius. Through all the ages of Grecian letters, with all the 
 disputes concerning the time and place of Homer's life, there was 
 a general agreement on those fundamental points. The only note 
 that ever arose to break the harmony came from the so-called 
 chorizontes or separatists, who contended for a separate author- 
 ship of the two poems ; but this discordant note was effectually 
 silenced by the voice of Aristarchus, the Coryphaeus of the Alex- 
 
190 GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 
 
 andrine critics. For centuries after the revival of learning the 
 prevailing belief of antiquity was the unquestioned creed of all 
 modern scholars ; just as little doubt existed concerning the au- 
 thorship of those great epics which had arisen again as bright 
 as in that early morn of Grecian poetry, as of the great poem 
 which had heralded the day of English song, the Canterbury 
 Tales. But about the beginning of the eighteenth century there 
 were thrown out quite incidentally, by several writers, some sur- 
 mises touching the authorship of the poems, which led the way to 
 an entirely new view of their origin. In particular, the ingenious 
 Neapolitan thinker Vico, in his celebrated work, the "Scienza 
 Nuova," introduced into the illustrations of his great subject from 
 the Homeric poems the following passage : ^ — 
 
 " Homer left none of his compositions in writing; but the rhapsodists 
 went about singing the books separately, some one, some another, at the 
 feasts and public solemnities of the Greek cities. The Pisistratidse first 
 arranged, or caused to be so arranged, the poems of Homer into the 
 Iliad and Odyssey ; whence we may judge what a confused collection of 
 materials they must previously have been." 
 
 Out of the hint given in this brief passage was afterwards 
 elaborated the celebrated theory of Wolf, in his able and learned 
 Prolegomena to the Iliad. This work, by its destructive criti- 
 cism, founded partly upon the supposed impossibility, without the 
 aid of the art of writing, of the composition of poems of such 
 length by one mind, as well of their subsequent oral transmission, 
 and partly upon their acknowledged internal discrepancies, quite 
 overturned the old order of opinion. Wolf ascribed different 
 parts of the two poems to different authors, and assumed that 
 they were both for the first time arranged as well as committed to 
 writing by Pisistratus. Without attempting to narrate the con- 
 troversy which was opened up by this great critic all over the 
 learned world, and the manifold phases it assumed, it is sufficient 
 to note as the chief immediate results, that the two great epics 
 were variously divided up into rhapsodies or small songs, and so 
 in the multitude of Homers that arose on the field of view Ho- 
 mer himself was quite lost out of sight and out of being. But 
 now, after these many years, the sequel has shown, and is still 
 showing, that Wolf conferred a real service, not only to Homeric 
 criticism, but to the cause of classical and literary criticism in 
 general ; a real service of skepticism not unlike that rendered by 
 1 Quoted by Mure, in Hist. Gr. Lit. vol. i. p. 196. 
 
GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 191 
 
 Hume in the domain of philosophy. This indeed is the lesson of 
 chief value taught by this great critical contest, the lesson that 
 the work of demolition of long-established human opinions may 
 be followed by their reconstruction upon new and more solid 
 foundations ; that the processes of an honest skepticism reestab- 
 lish the old faith on a basis of clearer and larger intelligence and 
 of enduring truth. The whole field of Homeric learning has 
 been explored as never before, and by hundreds of sharp-sighted 
 observers ; the text of the poems has been subjected to the most 
 searching scrutiny ; all the evidences, external and internal, that 
 bear upon their origin and history have been brought in from 
 all sources and rigorously applied to the questions in issue ; and 
 the result has been a gradual reaction, a progressive tendency of 
 return to the old view of the substantial unity of each poem and 
 of their common authorship in Homer. Such is the position of 
 Mr. Gladstone in the present volume, as in his earlier work ; such, 
 too, before him was the position of Mure, the author of the " His- 
 tory of Greek Literature," and the ablest of all English writers 
 on the subject. The most signal illustration, indeed, of the result 
 of the new examination of the whole question is found in the 
 experience of Mure, who began his career as a zealous disciple of 
 the Wolfian school, and after twenty years' diligent scrutiny of 
 its doctrines reached a thorough conviction of their fallacy, and 
 gave himself, with great success, to the duty of establishing that 
 conviction in the minds of others.^ The chief foundation of the 
 position which has been thus secured lies in the subjective evi- 
 dence furnished by the poems themselves; and this has been 
 allowed by all critics, during the more recent stages of the con- 
 troversy, to be the only valid basis on which the question can 
 be treated. The objections urged against the unity of authorship 
 of each poem by itself, and of both together, which are founded 
 on internal inconsistencies, signally fail of reaching their mark. 
 If they do not, when rightly considered, lend direct support to 
 the opposite view, they prove far too much ; they may be urged 
 with like success against modern works, the single authorship of 
 which is unquestioned and unquestionable ; indeed, most strikingly 
 has it been said by Mure,^ that if the principles of Wolf's school 
 were enforced against his own Prolegomena, that great essay 
 could not possibly, in its integrity, be considered the work of the 
 same author. 
 
 1 Hist. Gr. Lit. vol. i. p. 222. 2 £f^;. q^^ m^ vol. i. p. 198, note. 
 
192 GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 
 
 But we are not left to such a negative view ; there is an affir- 
 mative one still stronger. The unanswerable argument for unity 
 of authorship is derived from the general agreement of each poem 
 in itself, and of both with each other, in all that is vital in their' 
 character, in the marvelous consistency in conceptions, manners, 
 and institutions, and, most of all, in the delineations of character. 
 In nothing is the creative genius of Homer so great as in the 
 astonishing variety of his original characters, and in the unity 
 and individuality, no less astonishing, with which all these char- 
 acters are sustained, not by description, but by dramatic action, 
 as they live and move before us, under all diversities of situation. 
 Now, how were it possible for such conceptions of character, so 
 rounded into harmony and oneness, to have emanated from vari- 
 ous minds, each contributing by one or more minstrel lays his 
 share of the whole ? How, for instance, could the Achilles of the 
 Iliad, and the Ulysses of the Iliad and Odyssey together, be the 
 offspring of more than one mind? Nor is the difficulty of belief 
 entirely given in the well-known remark of Professor Wilson : ^ 
 " Some people believe in twenty Homers. I believe in one. Na- 
 ture is not so prodigal of her great poets." It is worse than 
 this : you have to believe, not merely that nature is so prodigal 
 of her great poets, but that she cast them all in the very same 
 mould, and that their spiritual life, in itself, and in everything it 
 produced, carried on it the same identical stamp. Indeed, we must 
 all agree in the conclusion that if there is anything in the world 
 more marvelous than the existence of one Homer, that certainly 
 is the existence of more Homers than one. But whoever wrote 
 these poems, and wherever and whenever they first became vital 
 and vocal with their wondrous life and melody, one thing is sure, 
 here they are before us. Let learned critics settle at their leisure 
 the questions of authorship and integrity of the text ; we have 
 the poems themselves, — a rich legacy bequeathed to us, and 
 sacredly handed down from the earliest ages ; literary records of 
 antiquity, later than the Vedas, indeed, but far more valuable ; 
 second in time and value only to the earlier books of Scripture. 
 Here they are in our hands, to charm and delight us with their 
 transcendent poetry, to instruct us with their precious stores of 
 wisdom and knowledge, to bring before us, in speech and action, 
 the whole life and character of the Greeks in that early period of 
 their own history and of mankind ; how and for what they lived, 
 1 Blackwood's Magazine, 1831, p. 668. 
 
GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 193 
 
 in the family and in the state, in peace and in war, what were 
 their thoughts and conceptions of nature, and of human life and 
 destiny, and of the nature and power of God, and his govern- 
 ment of the world. 
 
 The religious aspect of this ancient Greek life has justly had 
 for Mr. Gladstone far greater attractions than any other. He 
 has devoted more than one third of his work to the gods of the 
 Heroic Age, or, as he has entitled the theme, the Olympian Sys- 
 tem. All thoughtful minds must sympathize with the writer in 
 his sense of the profound interest which belongs to this theme. 
 With what and how much spiritual vision those heroic Greeks 
 were wont to look into the unseen world ; what were their concep- 
 tions of deity; what and how they believed; whom they wor- 
 shiped ; and what power their faith and worship had upon their 
 conduct in life, — these are inquiries of paramount and of uni- 
 versal and permanent concern. Mr. Gladstone's discussion has 
 also a special value at the present time ; for though not conducted 
 in the interest of the comparative study of the religions of the 
 world, it is nevertheless an important contribution to that study, 
 which, following close upon the track of comparative philology, is 
 now rising to the rank of a science, and is engaging the profound 
 attention of many distinguished writers. It is evident that Mr. 
 Gladstone has elaborated this part of his work with the most stu- 
 dious care, and with a certain fondness of mental application. It 
 exhibits best his characteristic qualities as a scholar, as well as a 
 thinker and a writer, his patient and unwearied toil in the study 
 of the Homeric text, and his fine sensibility, as well, for all that 
 is beautiful and noble in Homeric poetry ; his pure and elevated 
 sentiments, and his forcible and brilliant expression ; and yet, with 
 all his moral earnestness and sincerity, a strange turn of mind for 
 something close akin to a sophistical mode of reasoning, a tendency 
 to make his wish father to his thought, which sometimes issues 
 only in ingenious speculations and the most laborious building 
 up of favorite views upon a basis too slender for their support. 
 
 In his first chapter on this subject, which exhibits the great 
 features of the Olympian system, Mr. Gladstone claims for Homer 
 the unique distinction of having been " the maker of the reli- 
 gion " of his country. It is a bold form of assertion, and quite 
 characteristic of the author ; but it contains in it a great truth, 
 designed, as it is, to express in a single word the creative power 
 and immense influence of Homer's poetic genius in the realm of 
 
194 GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 
 
 spiritual ideas. Not that it was the poet's conscious purpose to 
 make a religion for his countrymen, or even to teach them religion, 
 or to exercise among them and for them any prophetic or priestly 
 office. He was preeminently a singer, the prince of singers, in an 
 age and a nation wh6re minstrelsy was a kind of national gift ; 
 and he sang of the manifold life of his people out of the fullness 
 and freedom of a musical soul attuned to all melodies of sound and 
 all moral harmonies of thought and feeling ; but in giving true 
 utterance to that life in song, he had such a knowledge and 
 mastery of the national heart, that by his poetical faculty he com- 
 bined, in a musical creation of his own, all those religious senti- 
 ments to which its many chords were wont to vibrate. We may 
 not suppose that Homer created " the gods many and lords many " 
 that peopled the Greek Olympus, or that he invented their various 
 and often conflicting attributes, with all that is in them of the 
 grand and the little, of the noble and the base ; it were a sole- 
 cism to suppose that he himself made the manifold elements that 
 entered into the Greek religion ; all these were already there in 
 the heart and life of the people, in affluent store, — actual beliefs, 
 inherited traditions emanating from different periods and diverse 
 races, original human sentiments, all apprehended with more or 
 less distinctness by the popular mind, and controlling its convic- 
 tions with more or less practical force ; but in his poetic represen- 
 tation of the heroic age of Greece, it was his, by his insight and 
 imagination, to give body and form to all this mass of material, 
 and to breathe into it a living soul. In this sense was he the 
 maker of the Greek religion ; thus it was that he set up once for 
 all in the firmament of Hellenic life the Olympian system, that 
 creation of marvelous splendor and of long-enduring influence to 
 which was drawn and fixed the upward gaze and faith of more 
 than thirty generations of the most thoughtful and most vigorous 
 races of the world, and destined to dissolve away only before that 
 religion from above, of divine beauty and divine power, which 
 was enthroned upon the mountains round about Jerusalem for 
 the spiritual sway of universal man. The material out of which 
 the poet constructed his system necessarily derived the variety of 
 its elements from the heterogeneous character of the Greek nation 
 itself. The successive streams of emigration which had flowed 
 into the peninsula had brought with them the most various and 
 often diverse conceptions of deity, with their corresponding names 
 and attributes and forms of worship. All these materials, as they 
 
GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 195 
 
 were now settling down in the real world, on the same soil, into 
 permanent relations of compromise and union, so in the world of 
 poetry were shaped by the hand of the master " into that intellec- 
 tual and ideal whole which we know as the Greek religion." The 
 ethnic origin of this material of religion Mr. Gladstone ascribes 
 chiefly to the Pelasgians, and to the Hellic families and tribes. 
 He claims, however, an important influence for the Phoenicians, 
 and the full development of this Phoenician element distinguishes 
 his treatment of the subject in this work from that which belongs 
 to his earlier volumes. Some influence, also, he allows, though 
 only a very limited one, to the Egyptians. The view which, on 
 the authority of some statements in Herodotus, once referred to 
 Egypt the chief origin of the Greek religion, is not sustained by 
 Homeric evidence. Scarcely any traces of Egyptian influence in 
 Greece are found in Homer, and such analogies as exist between 
 the mythologies of the two nations are easily explained without 
 the supposition of any direct connection of the one with the other. 
 In describing the manner in which Homer reduced to unity the 
 elements derived from all these sources, Mr. Gladstone dwells 
 upon the nature-worship of the Pelasgians which prevailed in 
 Greece before the poet's time, and was now in its decline, and 
 presents his view of the different modes by which, through the 
 application of the anthropomorphic principle, the poet fashioned 
 and shaped his own Olympian scheme. But we can rightly under- 
 stand neither the nature-worship nor the Olympian religion, with- 
 out recurring to that earliest conception which inheres in the very 
 heart of each, the primitive conception of the Greek religion and 
 of all religion, the conception of one supreme being as the high- 
 est object of human faith and adoration. Nothing is older, in the 
 language of the Greek religion than ^cos and Zeus,^ nothing older 
 in Greek religious thought than God, and Zeus as the God, the 
 God of the heavens, the God of light. Even Kronos, time itself, 
 is later than Zeus, and contradictory as it may at first seem, also 
 the patronymics of Zeus, Kronion, and Kronides, the Son of 
 Time ; for these do not express time as the origin of Zeus, but 
 the duration of his being as the God of Time, even as our own 
 exalted expression, the Ancient of Days. This fundamental con- 
 ception, together with its very name, the Greeks had as an original 
 common possession with all their kindred of the great Aryan fam- 
 ily of nations ; a clearly established fact which we owe to the com- 
 1 Welcker, Gotterlehre, vol. i. p. 129, seqq. 
 
196 GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 
 
 parative study of language and of religion, and to the foremost 
 expounder of their principles in English, Professor Max Miiller. 
 For its origin, we must go back from the Greek to the San- 
 skrit, the earliest deposit of Aryan speech, from the Iliad and 
 Odyssey to the Vedas, the earliest records of Aryan faith ; far 
 back we must go to the heights of the Himalayas, as the primi- 
 tive Olympus, the original seat of Aryan religion. The names 
 of deity in Greek and in Latin, both the abstract, as Oeos, deus, 
 and the concrete, as Zevs and Jupiter, or Diespiter, are identi- 
 cal with the corresponding Sanskrit names deva and Dyaus ; and 
 they are all formed from the Sanskrit root div, which means to 
 shine.^ From the same root comes the Latin word dies, with all 
 its cognates; and thus all the former words signify, fundamen- 
 tally, brightness, light the divine, and the latter, the God of the 
 bright heavens, the God of light and day. A single passage, 
 quoted by Miiller ^ from the Veda, pours a flood of light upon 
 the common origin of all these nations themselves, and of their 
 languages and earliest religious ideas. It is this : " When the 
 pious man offers his morning libation to the great father Dyaus, 
 he trembles all over as he becomes aware that the archer sent 
 forth from his mighty bow the bright dart that reaches him, and 
 brilliant himself, gave his own splendor to his daughter, the 
 Dawn." In reading such words, we seem to be reading Homer 
 himself ; nay. Homer and the people who listened to his song are 
 transferred, forthwith, back to the old Aryan homestead, and are 
 sharing there the thoughts, feelings, words, the whole life, of the 
 yet undivided Aryan household. But we may widen our view, 
 with the wider range of this comparative study of the languages 
 of the world. The Sclavonic word Bog, which expresses the idea 
 of God, is also of Sanskrit origin, and is the same word as the 
 Bhaga of the Veda, and the Baga of the Zend-Avesta, which 
 means, originally, the sun, and is also a common name for God in 
 both those poems. Indeed, we may take an illustration of the 
 same philological fact from a different and quite remote family of 
 languages. In many Tatarian dialects the word tangri, which is 
 used for God, means not only the heavens, but also the great 
 Spirit of the all-compassing heavens; and this corresponds en- 
 tirely to the Chinese Thian, or Tien, which is used for the physi- 
 
 ^ Welcker, Gbtterlehre, vol. i. p. 131 ; also Miiller in Edinburgh Review for 
 1851. 
 
 2 Edinburgh Review, 1851, p. 335. 
 
GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 197 
 
 cal heavens and for day, and also means the " Great One that 
 reigns on high and regulates all below." ^ Indeed, is not in the 
 human mind everywhere, and in all tongues, the transition easy 
 and natural from light and heaven to God ? Consider our com- 
 mon expression, " Heaven knows," and from the Psalms, " The 
 heavens are the Lord's," and from the New Testament the confes- 
 sion of the prodigal, " I have sinned against heaven ; " nay, does 
 not this strange touch of comparative philology make all Chris- 
 tendom kin with the whole heathen world, when we remember 
 that comprehensive word of Scripture, " God is light, and in Him 
 is no darkness at all " ? 
 
 But we may not linger on this earliest stage of the Greek reli- 
 gion. With the Greeks, as with all ancient nations, this primitive 
 idea of God came in course of time, we know not how and when, 
 to suffer disintegration ; out of ^co? grew Oeot; with Zeus came 
 sons and daughters of Zeus, also parents and ancestors of Zeus ; 
 and so, with the sense of the divine still remaining, there arose 
 out of the conception of the one God a belief in the plurality of 
 gods. Mr. Gladstone has said that " the unaided intellect of man 
 seems not to have had stamina to carry, as it were, the weight of 
 the transcendent idea of one God." The truth of this remark is 
 best seen in the perpetual turning to idolatry even of God's chosen 
 people, blessed though they were with direct revelation, and fenced 
 in and isolated from all other nations. Witness the single humil- 
 iating instance of the whole people worshiping a golden calf, and 
 that, too, under the very shadow of the awful mount ; into such 
 an abyss of spiritual folly the Greeks never sank, with all the 
 corruptions of their polytheism in its corruptest eras. This poly- 
 theism in that earlier form, the receding traces of which we see in 
 Homer, consisted, as is well known, of the worship of nature by 
 the deification of its manifold phenomena, and of the ruling 
 forces which produce them. Under 'the bright skies of Hellas, 
 and amid the enchanting scenery of its streams and hills and 
 vales, the susceptible and imaginative Greeks yielded themselves 
 willing captives to the potent spells of nature, even as their Aryan 
 kindred in India, when they had crossed the Himalayas, and had 
 come down into their new homes along the great rivers and the 
 fertile valleys of the Penjab. A recent writer ^ has aptly quoted 
 a passage from the book of Job, which shows how other Asiatic 
 
 ^ Julius von Klaproth, as quoted by Welcker, Gotterlehre^ vol. i. p. 130. 
 2 Hard wick, in Christ and other Masters, vol. i. p. 176. 
 
198 GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 
 
 souls in those distant times and regions felt the same fascinations, 
 but could better resist them, through the control of a loftier devo- 
 tion : " If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking 
 in brightness, and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my 
 mouth hath kissed my hand, this also were an iniquity to be pun- 
 ished by the Judge; for I should have denied the God that is 
 above." But no such reverence for the God that is above kept 
 back the Greeks from deifying and worshiping the manifestations 
 of his power as they presented themselves to the senses in the nat- 
 ural world around them. Those great lights set up in the firma- 
 ment to rule their daily life and the on-going life of the world ; the 
 earth about them, with its ever-renewing wonders of growth and 
 decay ; the alternations of day and night and the changing seasons ; 
 the dewy freshness of the dawn and the warm glow of the west- 
 ern sky; the elemental air and fire and water, in all their varied 
 phenomena of storm and shine, of tempest and calm, of rain and 
 drought, — all these were for the Greeks endowed with a divine 
 life and exalted into objects of adoration. Thus, as in the Veda, 
 we find with Dyaus the names and worship of Indra and Surya 
 and Mitra and Agni and Varuna. So, too, among the Greeks, 
 come to be associated with Zeus, though always in subordination, 
 Here as the goddess of the earth, the sun-god in Helios and in 
 Apollo, the moon in Selene, the fire-god in Hephaistos or Vulcan, 
 Poseidon the sovereign of the ocean, and the other gods many in 
 this Greek Pantheon of nature-worship. 
 
 But in the world of Homeric poetry this elemental worship no 
 longer holds sway ; in the Olympian religion we behold and feel 
 the presence of divine personages, of human form and appearance, 
 however august, and of a human nature, however idealized. It is 
 a strange transition, but no less perfect and manifest. How those 
 gods of nature have passed out from their shadow-like figures into 
 persons of definite human form and quality, inner and outer, is a 
 subtle process, no less so than the actual processes in the material 
 world. As Welcker ^ has conceived it, the nature-god seems to 
 have fashioned for itself a kind of chrysalis of golden mythic 
 threads, and to have come forth in due time a divine human per- 
 sonality. But the accomplished result is that which gives the 
 Olympian system that distinctive character all its own, which, as 
 Mr. Gladstone has expressed it, " is the intense action of the an- 
 thropomorphic principle which pervades and moulds the whole." 
 1 Gdtterlehre, vol. i. p. 230. 
 
GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 199 
 
 " Its governing idea of the character of deity is a nature essen- 
 tially human, with the addition of unmeasured power." It is 
 obvious that such a system gave expression to the most exalted 
 conception of humanity ; and though it necessarily debased the 
 divine idea by taking into it the lower along with the higher ele- 
 ments of the human, it nevertheless embodied a worthier concep- 
 tion of deity than the elemental system which preceded it. It 
 may be said to have presented, by a strange inversion, God formed 
 in the image of man, instead of man formed in the image of God; 
 but on the other hand it must be granted that it created gods in 
 the image of man, because it recognized the divine in man ; recog- 
 nizing in the gods the original source of the moral and spiritual 
 in man, it incorporated deity into an idealized manhood, as the 
 most adequate known expression of the divine nature. Thus the 
 creation of this Olympian system reveals a stronger and higher 
 spiritual tendency in the people whose religion it became, and a 
 more advanced stage of their culture, than those which gave origin 
 to the earlier nature-worship. A new inner world of thoughts 
 and conceptions must have arisen, a high sense of the greatness 
 and power of man's spiritual being, before the phenomena and 
 nature of forces so lost their influence that these new humanized 
 deities were formed, moving free and separate among the elements, 
 their true being and sphere no longer in the natural but in the 
 spiritual realm. A lofty consciousness must there have been of 
 free will and reason and intelligence in man, of all in his nature 
 that is truly akin to the divine, so that the religious sense could 
 no longer be satisfied with nature, or find its appropriate objects 
 in her manifestations. But it was the muse of Hellenic poetry, 
 as it culminated in the song of Homer, which finally spoke into 
 being this Olympian system, and reared it up over Hellenic life, 
 at once to reflect and to rule it in all its relations. It was con- 
 ceived not merely as consisting of individuals, but also as forming 
 a divine community both as a family and a state, with Zeus for 
 the father and the sovereign. Here, too, as in every stage of 
 Greek religion, is illustrated that line of Virgil : — 
 
 " Ab Jove principium Musse ; Jovis omnia plena ; " 
 
 and yet more the loftier verse of Horace, when he sings of the 
 parent : — 
 
 " Unde nil majus generatur ipso, 
 Nee viget quidquam simile aut secundum." 
 
 Indeed, the pure light of the idea of one God, which had so broken 
 
200 GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 
 
 into many rays through the action of the nature-worship, seems in 
 the atmosphere of Olympus to be struggling to recover its integ- 
 rity in the tendency to the union of all the principal Olympian 
 deities with Zeus under the form either of direct descent or of 
 other relationship derived from human analogy. Thus Poseidon, 
 the ruler of the sea, and Aidoneus, the Zeus of the lower world, 
 are his brothers ; and Here is at once his sister and spouse ; Ares, 
 Hermes, and Aphrodite are his children ; as also and especially 
 Athene and Apollo, who are inferior only to Zeus in power, and 
 in moral tone superior to Zeus himself. Indeed, the exalted char- 
 acter and worship ascribed to Athene and Apollo give them a 
 marked preeminence in the Olympian religion. They are united 
 with Zeus in honor as no other deities ; as in the words of Hector,^ 
 " Were I held in honor as a god, Phoebus or Pallas," and the oft- 
 recurring form of prayer, " Father Zeus and Athene and Apollo." 
 Athene's relation to Zeus as his daughter is altogether unique in 
 the representations alike of her birth and her being and action. 
 She is his daughter without mother, begotten in the intelligence 
 of Zeus, and (though by a later representation than Homer's) 
 bidden forth into being from his head ; in the Olympian family 
 she is the father's favorite daughter, indulged at her will, and 
 restrained neither in word nor in deed.^ She is constantly named 
 with Zeus, as acting with him and for him, and directly declared 
 as in union with him, the highest and mightiest deity. In short, 
 the words of Horace give literal expression to the Homeric con- 
 ception of the goddess : — 
 
 " Proximos illi tamen occupavit 
 Pallas honores." 
 
 Similar is the relation of Apollo to Zeus. He is the son dear to 
 Zeus, addressed as such by him, ever the obedient son, in closest 
 union with his father, his organ, and, as the god of prophecy, the 
 revealer of his will. It is on the basis of the highest attributes of 
 these deities, together with their peculiar relation to Zeus, that 
 Mr. Gladstone has constructed that theory of tradition in the gen- 
 esis of the Hellenic religion which constitutes the peculiarity of 
 his treatment of the whole subject. 
 
 In the firm conviction that these conceptions of deity could not 
 
 have been the growth of the unassisted intelligence of the Greeks, 
 
 he ascribes them to a divine origin, in the form of a primitive 
 
 revelation made to man, and preserved in unbroken tradition to 
 
 1 Iliad, viii. 540. 2 jUad^ y. 875. 
 
GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 201 
 
 the time of the separation of the Semitic and Aryan branches of 
 the human family, and so by and by brought with them into 
 Greece by the Hellenic portion of the Aryan branch, and at last 
 wrought by Homer into his Olympian scheme. Thus he claims 
 for Homer's Athene and Apollo a truly divine ancestry. He com- 
 pares them with the child in Wordsworth's ode : heaven lies about 
 them in their infancy ; and the soul that rises with them " hath 
 had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar." In the no less 
 firm conviction that there are features traceable in these deities 
 which are in marked correspondence with Hebraic doctrine and 
 tradition, as conveyed in the books of Holy Scripture, and handed 
 down in the auxiliary sacred learning of the Jews, he believes that 
 Athene is the Hellenic adumbration of the Logos, the uncreated 
 Word, and Apollo of the Messiah, the seed of the woman, a being 
 at once divine and human ; and so by consequence, Latona, the 
 human mother of Apollo, is the woman whose seed the Redeemer 
 was to be. It passes comprehension how a writer of Mr. Glad- 
 stone's ability, and enlarged and elevated views, can build up a 
 theory with devoutest diligence upon so slender proofs, and liable 
 to the gravest objections ; which is so repugnant to every Christian 
 sentiment, and forces the explanation, from such foreign sources, 
 of conceptions in the Greek religion which can certainly be ex- 
 plained without it, and without traveling out of the records of that 
 religion itself. The view which he presents, notwithstanding all 
 the captivating enthusiasm with which it glows, unfortunately 
 lacks the elements necessary to gain for it an intelligent convic- 
 tion in the mind of the reader. As you yield yourself to his guid- 
 ance, while he spreads before you the minutest details of sugges- 
 tion and illustration, all skillfully interwoven with the cunningest 
 hand, and embellished with a very large border of the finest writ- 
 ing, you are conscious of admiration, and of something very like 
 persuasion ; but when you have looked away in another direction, 
 and then come back for a renewed and more independent view, 
 you discover that the texture of the whole work that has so fixed 
 your gaze is made up of the airiest of nothings. It is marvelous, 
 the ingenious facility and alacrity with which he can proceed upon 
 premises of mere assumptions, and rest, with calmest assurance, 
 in conclusions which only credulity can believe. If we should 
 admit his remoter assumptions, which are indeed scarcely discern- 
 ible in those far-off primeval ages where they are laid, it were cer- 
 tainly an incredible supposition that the Greeks had older Messi- 
 
202 GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 
 
 anic traditions than the Jews themselves ; and it is certain that 
 the Jews had no such developed traditions old enough to have 
 been borrowed and reflected by Homer. The Apocryphal Book 
 of Wisdom, and the Hebrew Targumim, on which Mr. Gladstone 
 largely relies, belong to a time centuries later even than Plato ; 
 and in the Bible there is nothing which by any possibility could 
 give substance to this theory but the Messianic promises in Gen- 
 esis and the personifications of wisdom in the Proverbs of Solo- 
 mon-; and out of these, forsooth, the poetic genius of Homer has 
 created Olympian persons who adumbrate the Incarnate Redeemer 
 of man. 
 
 But even if we should lean to the influence of such traditions 
 in the nobler attributes of these deities, how can we reconcile 
 other representations of their character which run directly counter 
 to any such supposition ? What a strange look for such a theory, 
 the league of Pallas with Here and Poseidon to bind in chains 
 the great father of gods and men ! And how may we account for 
 the opposition to each other of Pallas and Phoebus in the Trojan 
 conflict, the former the protector of the Greeks, the latter of the 
 Trojans? What a rude clashing with Messianic ideas Apollo's 
 words of sublime indifference to the fate of mortals, when he 
 declined to enter the lists where gods and goddesses were in 
 furious combat over Ilium's destiny : — 
 
 " Earth-shaking God, I should not gain with thee 
 Esteem of wise, if I with thee should fight 
 For mortal men; poor wretches, who like leaves, 
 Flourish awhile, and eat the fruits of earth, 
 But sapless, soon decay ; from combat then 
 Refrain we, and to others leave the strife." 
 
 And Minerva's wisdom descends to something more than craftiness 
 when she comes down from heaven purposely to break the truce 
 of the Trojans with the Greeks, and in the disguise of An tenor's 
 son tempts Pandarus to aim his stinging arrow at the breast of 
 the unsuspecting Menelaus ; and still worse when she cheats Hector 
 under the guise of his trusted brother Deiphobus, and so deludes 
 him to the fatal combat with Achilles. 
 
 But it is the most conclusive evidence against this whole theory, 
 that it is entirely gratuitous. The conceptions of these deities 
 are adequately explained within the range of Homeric ideas, 
 as emanations of Zeus, as he is conceived alike in the realm of 
 nature and of spirit; and these are the clearest illustrations of 
 
GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 203 
 
 the monotheistic tendencies of the Homeric system. Born of Zeus, 
 as the God of the ethereal heavens, Athene represents the physical 
 side of his nature as a feminine personification of the ether ; hence 
 her epithet yXavKw-n-cs, the blue-eyed, or more properly the goddess 
 of heaven-bright eyes. On the other hand, as Zeus is the supreme 
 intelligence, so as his daughter sprung full grown from his head, 
 she represents also the spiritual side of his being, which the name 
 Minerva expresses, from the Greek /txeVo?, and the Latin mens, 
 and the Sanskrit manas, as the goddess of mind or of wisdom. In 
 like manner all the attributes of Apollo are explained in accord- 
 ance alike with the Homeric system and with the earlier worship. 
 Apollo, as the sublimest appellation for Helios, the sun, finally 
 supplants altogether the common name ; he is a solar deity ; and 
 all his attributes, natural and spiritual, issue from this his original 
 character. As son of Latona, which means what is hidden and 
 concealed, he comes forth out of the darkness, and reveals the 
 brightness of the God of heaven, even as the sun reveals the day. 
 So is he the Phoebus, the bright one ; and as the God of the silver 
 bow, the far-darting and far-destroying, the arrows of his burning 
 and destructive rays bring pestilence and death, even as his milder 
 heat and radiance bring fruitful blessing to the earth, and deliver- 
 ance to the children of men. In short, like Athene, he is an 
 emanation of Zeus, and reveals both his natural and his spiritual 
 attributes as the lord of air and light, dwelling in the highest 
 heavens, and as the god of justice and right, the moral governor 
 of the world. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone's hypothesis is the latest and the very mildest of 
 all the various theories put forth since the revival of learning, 
 which discover in the nobler elements of Homeric theology traces 
 of patriarchal and evangelical truth, and quietly relegate all the 
 rest to obscure realms, which are conveniently named heathenish 
 fable or absurd superstitions or degrading idolatry and demon 
 worship. Mure touched upon some of these in an article published 
 some years ago on Archdeacon Williams' "Homerus," and it 
 would be a very curious and instructive labor to follow out his 
 hints, and to coUect together and to present in order the doctrines 
 of their authors and all the subtleties of their allegorical exposition. 
 Gerardus Croesius, a D^utch scholar, maintained, in his " Homerus 
 Hebrseus," that the two poems of Homer embodied a complete 
 narrative of the history of the Jews, the Odyssey embracing the 
 time from the departure of Lot out of Sodom to the death of 
 
204 GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 
 
 Moses, and the Iliad narrating the destruction of Jericho and the 
 wars of Joshua and the final conquest of Canaan. He clearly- 
 discovered Jericho in Troy, and Joshua and the Israelites in 
 Agamemnon and the Greeks, and the harlot Rahab in Helen, 
 while Nestor was Abraham, and Ulysses Moses. The English 
 scholar, Joshua Barnes, the friend of Bentley and Regius Professor 
 of Greek at Cambridge, convinced himself that Homer was Solo- 
 mon, a conviction which he established by reading Omeros back- 
 wards, in Hebrew fashion, into Soremo, and then by metalepsis 
 into Solemo or Solomon ! But Archdeacon Williams, in his 
 " Homerus," published only twenty-five years ago, carries the 
 principle of analogy into a far wider range of application. Be- 
 lieving to the full Mr. Gladstone's doctrine of primitive revelation 
 and tradition, he even traces in Homeric poetry (we use his own 
 words), " most of the essential principles by which the Christian 
 religion is distinguished ; " with him, therefore, the Iliad was 
 " constructed for the express purpose of vindicating the justice of 
 the Deity^, and displaying the inseparable connection between sin 
 and eternal punishment." The fate of " sinful and accursed 
 Troy," as he characterizes Priam's city and people, illustrates 
 atonement and retributive justice, and so foreshadows the fall of 
 wicked cities yet to come, and " above all, of Jerusalem itself." 
 In this last view, however, of Troy prefiguring Jerusalem, the 
 Archdeacon was anticipated by about two hundred years, by the 
 Italian writer, Jacobo Ugone, in his "Vera Historia Romana." 
 But we think that the writer or writers of the " Gesta Romanorum," 
 a work earlier by many centuries than those now mentioned, took 
 a much more fundamental view of this whole subject, for the 
 monk, in that celebrated collection, says that " Paris represents 
 the devil, and Helen the human soul or all mankind " ! 
 
 But is there not "a more excellent way" of accounting for 
 the origin of the Olympian religion than the method employed 
 by all these and many other writers, and in its latest and faintest 
 form by Mr. Gladstone, a way far more in harmony with all 
 right views of human nature and of the wisdom and benevolence 
 of the Creator, and also in accordance with the results of the 
 comparative study of all the "religions which have existed outside 
 the pale of divine revelation"? May we not find the original 
 source of all these religions, not in any primitive revelation or 
 tradition, but rather in what we may call a primitive faith; a 
 faith in God, in the true, even though unknown God, and in 
 
GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 205 
 
 his rightful and righteous government of the world ; a faith im- 
 planted in the very constitution of the human soul, and so not 
 only anterior to all religious knowledge, but also essential to the 
 appropriation of such knowledge, whether communicated by natural 
 or by supernatural means? Alike the truths and the errors of the 
 Homeric religion, the conceptions of deity, whether noble or base, 
 of the Homeric mythology may be carried back to that inborn 
 tendency of the human soul to search after God, which is taught 
 by the apostle Paul in his sermon to the men of Athens, when he 
 says of all the nations of men, " That they should seek the Lord, 
 if haply they might feel after Him and find Him, though He be 
 not far from every one of us." The same apostle was wont to teach 
 his heathen hearers that God had not left himself without witness 
 in the works of nature and in the human conscience, and that 
 from the one men might " clearly see the invisible things of Him, 
 even his eternal power and Godhead," and that through the other 
 they " showed the work of the law written in their own hearts." 
 And while we are taught that the pagan nations are without 
 excuse, who when they knew God, yet glorified Him not as God, 
 we can set no bounds to the spiritual elevation which they might 
 have reached, or which individual souls or communities may have 
 reached, by giving heed to such witness, when we remember the 
 words of another apostle, " God is no respecter of persons, but in 
 every nation he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness is 
 accepted of Him." 
 
 In the life of the Greeks, as we see it in the poetry of Homer, 
 it is this feeling after God of which we are constantly reminded. 
 There is no aspect so perpetually present as the religious, nothing 
 so constantly seen as this striving of the soul after the one, living, 
 personal God, its upward turning for care and blessing to a divine 
 Being like itself, but in all things superior, the righteous ruler of 
 men and all human affairs, and alone worthy of devout worship 
 and obedient service. And yet no less constantly do we behold 
 the actual failure of the Greek mind to satisfy these longing 
 aspirations, that continual contradiction between the real and the 
 ideal through which the Deity is debased to the level of humanity, 
 even in the very act of lifting the Deity far above all human 
 limitations. The distinguished German scholar Nagelsbach has 
 treated this point with remarkable clearness and fullness.^ The 
 gods are endowed with omniscience, and yet, in many a passage, 
 1 In his Homerische Theologie. 
 
206 GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 
 
 are ignorant of matters which most intimately concern them. The 
 gods are omnipotent, and yet Zeus himself is bound with fetters, 
 from which he is released only by the hundred -handed Briareus. 
 The gods are constituted as just and holy in the government of 
 the world, and invariably visiting punishment upon all wrong- 
 doing ; but in many instances they are patrons of the worst crimes 
 known among men, and are themselves the subjects of the fiercest 
 and most malevolent human passions ; and, indeed, in the Homeric 
 conception itself of the Deity, there is an utter absence of that 
 awful holiness which inheres in the Hebrew and Christian idea of 
 God. The gods also require and accept the worship of men, and 
 their favor is propitiated and their displeasure deprecated by prayer 
 and sacrifice ; in all the events and occasions of life, alike the small- 
 est and the greatest, the pious Greek approaches his God in prayer, 
 and in conscious dependence bows to the divine behests ; but yet 
 his gods are implacable to the last degree, and pursue the offender 
 with the most relentless hatred ; and nothing is so drearily indistinct 
 in the consciousness of the Greek worshiper as the prospect of 
 forgiveness and reconciliation. Human sin is certain, certain its 
 punishment ; but wholly uncertain, dependent on the arbitrary 
 will of his gods, is its forgiveness ; human life is a life without 
 any assurance of divine favor.^ 
 
 However we may differ from Mr. Gladstone in respect to the 
 origin of the Homeric system, we can heartily accept his state- 
 ment of the lesson which its history teaches, that it shows " the 
 total inability of our race, even when at its maximum of power, 
 to solve for ourselves the problems of our destiny ; to extract for 
 ourselves the sting from care, from sorrow, and above all from 
 death." By revealing this inability, the Greek religion and all 
 other religions of pagan antiquity have each proved themselves, 
 even as the written law of the Jews, a schoolmaster to bring men 
 to Christ ; they all belong, with Judaism itself, to a continuous 
 development of preparation for the coming into the world, in the 
 fullness of time, of Him who was the desire of all nations, for the 
 coming of Christianity as the one true and universal religion, to 
 meet and satisfy the wants of human nature as they appear in all 
 nations and in all times. It is a remark of St. Augustine, often 
 quoted by Miiller, that there is no religion which does not con- 
 tain some element of truth. We may accept, also, when it is 
 rightly understood, that paradox of the same father of the church, 
 ^ Nagelsbach, p. 355. 
 
GLADSTONE'S JUVENTUS MUNDI. 207 
 
 that " what is now called the Christian religion has existed among 
 the ancients, and was not absent from the beginning of the human 
 race until Christ came in the flesh ; from which time the true reli- 
 gion which existed already began to be called Christian." The 
 religious aspirations of the heathen world, however unsatisfied, 
 however misguided, the glimmerings of truth that appear amid the 
 manifold errors of that religion, all their observances of worship 
 in their best and in their worst forms, why are they not " uncon- 
 scious prophecies" of the human soul under the teachings of 
 nature, even as the written prophecies of the Jewish Scriptures, 
 under the teachings of revelation, of the grace and truth to come 
 by Jesus Christ for the redemption of universal man ? Such a 
 view at once gives true significance to the pagan religions, and 
 fixes their true relation to the Christian, and in turn the relation 
 of the Christian religion to them. Christianity is not clearly 
 discovered to be a universal religion till all the natural religions 
 are seen to be preparatory to it, till all those religions which 
 could not have existed but for man's religious nature, allied to 
 God and bound to Him even amid all its errors, are recognized 
 along with Judaism as presupposing the New Testament revela- 
 tion. Christ is seen as the divine deliverer of mankind only as 
 his redemptive work runs through all human history, "one in- 
 creasing purpose running through the ages." 
 
KOME AND THE ROMANS OF THE TIME OF 
 HORACE. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, DECEMBER 16, 1870, ALSO USED 
 AS COLLEGE LECTURES. 
 
 The late Dean Milman declared that no one could know any- 
 thing of Rome or of the Roman mind and manners who was not 
 profoundly versed in Horace. The remark is so true that one 
 may well be warranted in making Horace's writings the point of 
 departure for a view of the great city and of the life of its peo- 
 ple in those eventful times to which his career belonged ; so fitted 
 was he both by his genius and culture and by his fortunate posi- 
 tion in Roman society for the task which he executed of seizing 
 and interpreting in his poetry all that is characteristic in Augus- 
 tan Rome. By nature and by fondest habit he was a close ob- 
 server of the ways of men. He had also the amplest means of 
 observation through his connection, by his origin, with the hum- 
 blest orders of Roman society, and, by his rise, with the highest. 
 He was the son of a freedman and the intimate friend of the 
 emperor and his prime minister Maecenas ; he was vexed with no 
 aspiring that interfered with simple tastes and moderate desires 
 and a cherished sense of personal independence. He had no 
 cares of family, politics, or profession ; neither poverty nor riches 
 was given him, but that golden mean he loved and sung so well, 
 that brought him neither trouble nor anxiety. It was by such 
 means as these that Horace was qualified at once to study and to 
 teach his age, to apprehend and to represent it, to catch with a 
 poet's insight its living manners as they rose before him, and with 
 a poet's art to set them in imperishable literary forms. 
 
 It is in this attitude of Horace towards his country and his age, 
 in his clear and genial vision and knowledge of the Rome and the 
 Romans of the Augustan period, of the great city itself in all its 
 parts, and of all the life of its people, social, political, literary, 
 and moral, and in his ability to embody all that he saw and knew 
 in such perfect forms of poetic expression ; in these it is that we 
 find his chief distinction as a writer, and the secret of his fame 
 
ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 209 
 
 and influence. Of his distinctive poetic qualities in his lyrics, 
 satires, and epistles I have spoken in the " Life of Horace," in the 
 edition we have been using, and upon these I do not purpose now 
 to dwell. In such lectures as I wish to give you in a review of 
 Horace, we need specially to observe, that his poetry, like all gen- 
 uine poetry, had its roots in the life of its time and grew up under 
 its skies and in its air and light, and thus it represents what is 
 real and permanent in the ideas and events and characters of that 
 time, and thus it is that the writer is a truly national and Roman 
 poet. As you read you catch glimpses of the city, the yellow 
 Tiber, with its plains on either side and the hills that bound 
 them, the Capitol and its neighboring heights, the Palatine and 
 Esquiline ; the Forum with its Sacred Way, and the triumphal 
 procession coming down into it from the Velia, and all the town 
 following with their " lo Triumphe's ; " you see the thronged 
 Campus Martins, too, on election day, the noisy party-candidates 
 putting forth their claims to office ; and there, too, quite aside, 
 the brave, virtuous men, strangers to defeat, the real consuls of 
 all years. You visit the temples and hear the prayers there 
 offered ; also the places of amusement, the Theatre of Pompeius, 
 where you may, perhaps, regret the absence of PoUio with his 
 muse of severe tragedy, but yet may add " a good part of your 
 voice " to the rounds of applause which greet Maecenas after his 
 illness ; you may stroll out to the Circus with the lovers of the 
 races, and strain your eyes on the swift hot-wheeled chariots chas- 
 ing one another through the dust of the course, and at last you 
 may toss up your caps for the winners of the " ennobling palm." 
 Or you may share with the poet the life of Roman interiors, 
 whether the poor man's home, where are plain meals but no hang- 
 ings or purple ; or the rich man's palace, where you see costly 
 marbles and paneled ceilings of ivory or gold, but yet tables laden 
 with cloying stores, and black imps of fretting care flying about 
 the ceiling. But not alone these places and outward scenes of 
 Rome may you see in Horace's poetry ; you come to know also 
 the people themselves, the Romans of all classes, and in all their 
 occupations, whether peaceful or warlike; scholars and men of 
 letters, like Virgil, and Varus, and PoUio, in their studies ; states- 
 men in the senate ; orators on the rostra ; advocates hurrying to 
 meet cases at the courts ; or counselors at law rudely called up at 
 cock-crowing by impatient clients banging at their doors. Espe- 
 cially do you become conversant with the great political events of 
 
210 ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 
 
 the time and the great actors in them, whether on the republi- 
 can or the imperial side ; the recent civil wars, — so recent that 
 the fires of partisan passion, not yet extinct, may soon break 
 forth from the ashes which only seem to bury them ; — these, with 
 their sights and sounds, are all there in the poet's graphic verse ; 
 the murmur of martial horns, the glitter of arms, the fleeing 
 horses, the panic-stricken horsemen, and the chiefs soiled with no 
 inglorious dust. The battles are fought there before you with 
 their decisive, world-wide issues, in all of them, like that at Phi- 
 lippi, the old republic doomed and fallen in spite of the desperate 
 valor of its defenders, and the empire as the necessary outcome, 
 risen and established, with Octavian, the heaven-sent Mercury, 
 its august ruler. 
 
 With this general view of the relation of the poet Horace to his 
 time, I propose to give you in some lectures, Rome and the Ro- 
 mans as he has represented them ; the city in its extent, its exter- 
 nal appearance in its public works, its chief buildings, public and 
 private, and then the population and its different classes, and es- 
 pecially the Roman society, which is set before us in the Horatian 
 poetry. 
 
 The Rome in which Horace lived, and which now lives in his 
 poetry, had in its extent far outgrown the ancient limits of the 
 Servian walls ; these walls, indeed, then belonged as truly to the 
 antiquities of the city as at the present day, and their line could 
 scarcely be traced for the buildings that inclosed and concealed 
 them through their entire course. For the size and extent of the 
 Augustan city we have no immediate data, except those which 
 belong to the division of its area into fourteen regions or wards, 
 which was instituted by the emperor for municipal purposes. A 
 description of the municipal division, which has come down to us 
 in the ancient document called the " Curiosum Urbis," contains a 
 distinct enumeration of each of the fourteen regions, with its cir- 
 cumference in feet, a list of the principal buildings in each, so 
 arranged as to describe its circuit, together with much curious 
 information, such as the number of public establishments, the 
 granaries, the public baths, the heads of water for the aqueducts, 
 and also the number in each region of the private dwelling-houses. 
 Not only do the figures given under these heads all show how im- 
 mensely the Rome of the age of Augustus had extended beyond 
 the ancient boundaries, but also the enumeration of the principal 
 buildings in each region, which is made to mark its topographical 
 
ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 211 
 
 limits, yields an approximate view of its actual extent. These 
 buildings are for the most part familiar ones, and their sites dis- 
 tinctly known, and the line which they describe has been made 
 the subject of topographical study, and a plan of the city has been 
 constructed on the basis of their respective limits, by which the 
 extent of the whole city has been reached. It has thus been made 
 clear that the area of the city in the time of Augustus was sub- 
 stantially the same as in the reign of Vespasian, when its circuit 
 was exactly measured ; and as in Aurelian's reign, when the new 
 walls were begun. A passage in Pliny, which furnishes a very 
 particular account of Vespasian's survey, fixes the circumference 
 of the city, as ascertained by measurement, at 13|^ miles. As this 
 measure marks the extent of the outer line of the buildings of the 
 city, it agrees sufficiently well with the circumference of the Au- 
 relian and of the present walls. The line of the Augustan regions 
 was probably adopted by Aurelian when he conceived the purpose, 
 which revealed at once his own military greatness and the weak- 
 ness of his empire, of inclosing the city with a new line of forti- 
 fied walls. For nearly eight centuries (507 b. c. to 270 a. d.) 
 Eome had been a city without walls, but during all these centu- 
 ries, which include the periods of the rising and ever-extending 
 greatness of the republic, and the Augustan era of the imperial 
 universal dominion, the capital had never needed any outward 
 defense. Hannibal had been the last enemy that ever approached 
 it, and since the battle of Zama, Eome had never known any ap- 
 prehension of foreign invasion. But now that the imperial city 
 began to be in peril from the ever-nearing approach of the Ger- 
 man and other northern nations, it needed the protection of forti- 
 fied walls. The walls were commenced in 271, and rapidly carried 
 forward during the remaining years of Aurelian's reign ; but they 
 were completed by Probus in 276. This period of five years is 
 certainly a short one for so gigantic a work, and undoubtedly it 
 was carried through with undue haste ; and hence, 125 years later, 
 in the reign of Honorius (395-425), they were thoroughly re- 
 paired, and in some parts constructed anew, though without any 
 change of the line which they followed. Different ancient writers 
 have described the Aurelian walls, but only one, Vopiscus (300 
 A. D.), in his Life of Aurelian, has made distinct mention of their 
 extent, which he fixes, if we take his words in their usual sense, 
 at the fabulous estimate of about fifty miles in circumference. 
 Gibbon, in his eleventh chapter, speaks of this estimate as only 
 
212 ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 
 
 the result of popular exaggeration, and among eminent modern 
 writers it has found no defender except the Roman topographer 
 Nibby. The numerals of Vopiscus were long a vexed question 
 with the critics, but at length the Italian writer, Piale, hit upon 
 the happy conjecture that the word feet (^pedum) should be sup- 
 plied with the numerals quinquaginta millia, or 50,000, instead 
 of the usual word paces, or passuum, so that the passage would 
 read 50,000 feet, or between 10 and 11 miles, a very probable 
 estimate, and sufficiently near the result of Vespasian's measure- 
 ment, as well as the extent of the present walls of Rome. The 
 topographers had, however, still another difficulty to settle in the 
 account, given by Olympiodorus, of another measurement of the 
 geometrician Ammon, made in the reign of Honorius, just before 
 the first invasion of the Goths in A. D. 408. This measurement 
 would yield, according to the received reading of the text, a cir- 
 cuit for the city of twenty-one miles ; but this, too, is a number 
 quite improbable for belief and acceptance. Gibbon has, however, 
 adopted it in two passages, though in a third he has given, with- 
 out alluding to the preceding ones, another estimate, and undoubt- 
 edly the true one, of about twelve miles. Most ingeniously has 
 the text of Olympiodorus been conjecturally emended by Nibby. 
 The number is given in the text, as often, by letters of the Greek 
 alphabet, Ka, k standing for 20 and a for 1. Nibby conjectures t, 
 which stands for 10, instead of k, and so reads ta, or 11, and so 
 gains eleven miles for the result of the Ammonian measurement, 
 substantially the same result as that gained by the emended read- 
 ing of Vopiscus. From the reign of Honorius down to the pres- 
 ent, with the exception of the Vatican and St. Peter's, there has 
 been no essential change in the line of Roman walls ; and as the 
 line of the Aurelian walls was coincident with the outer limits 
 of the Augustan regions, we can have no doubt that the Rome of 
 the Augustan age had so far outgrown the old limits of the repub- 
 lic as to reach, with its streets and buildings, a circumference of 
 twelve miles. 
 
 In its external appearance, and in the splendor of its public 
 and private buildings, the city underwent far greater changes dur- 
 ing the reign of Augustus. Rome was not, indeed, wanting in 
 earlier times in great public works, as the Cloacae, the Aqueducts, 
 and the great highways ; but these, and such as these, ministered, 
 agreeably to the spirit of these times, more to utility than to adorn- 
 ment ; and even these, with the exception of the first, were con- 
 
ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 213 
 
 structed on a more magnificent basis in the earlier periods of the 
 empire. The most comprehensive fact on this subject is contained 
 in the well-known remark of Augustus (Sueton., Vita), that he 
 found Eome a city of brick,^ and left it one of marble. This is 
 hardly an exaggeration. By the large outlays of Augustus, and 
 under his auspices by the enterprise and skill of Agrippa and 
 other distinguished men, the work of improving and adorning the 
 city went on with inconceivable rapidity. Existing public works 
 were extended, and new ones constructed on a larger and grander 
 scale ; magnificent temples, halls, and political edifices arose on 
 every side, and far beyond the earlier boundaries ; and during the 
 forty years' peaceful rule of Augustus, a new Eome gradually 
 grew up, which far surpassed in external splendor the seven-hilled 
 city of the republic. Prominent among these improvements was 
 the new Forum, called the Forum of Augustus. In the war with 
 Brutus and Cassius, Augustus had vowed that if crowned with 
 victory he would build a temple in honor of Mars Ultor. With 
 the erection of this temple, which is reckoned by Pliny among the 
 architectural wonders of the world, Augustus united the plan of a 
 new Forum, the Roman Forum and the Julian being now inade- 
 quate to the wants of the city. At great expense in the purchase 
 of' private estates, space was gained on either side of the Temple 
 of Mars, and here were erected two semicircular lines of porticoes, 
 as places of exchange and of public business, which were adorned 
 with statues of distinguished Romans, and with other works of 
 art. The whole was surrounded with a high wall, so that, though 
 in the heart of the city, it afforded a quiet place for the transac- 
 tion of business. Other temples erected by Augustus were those 
 of Jupiter Tonans, towards the foot of the Capitol, and that of 
 Quirinus, on the Quirinal, the lattier adorned with a double row 
 of seventy-six columns. Still another was the celebrated Temple 
 of Apollo, on the Palatine, which was built of white marble, and 
 surrounded with columns of the marble of Numidia. Here was 
 deposited the Palatine library, founded by Augustus. The dedi- 
 cation of this temple Horace commemorated by one of his most 
 characteristic odes (Odes, I. 31, " Quid dedicatum," etc.). During 
 the sedileship of Agrippa immense sums were expended upon 
 public works, both useful and ornamental. The old aqueducts, 
 four in number, were repaired, and three new ones were built, two 
 
 ^ That is, peperino and tufa. In the time of Augustus burnt brick was not 
 in use, but peperino in opus quadratum, and tufa in opus reticulatum. 
 
214 ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 
 
 of which, the Aqua Virgo and the Aqua Marcia, are still in use 
 in modern Rome. In connection with these there were erected 
 massive distributing reservoirs, one hundred and thirty in num- 
 ber, which were adorned with columns and statues executed in 
 the highest style of art; of the columns there were four hun- 
 dred, all of marble, 'and of the statues three hundred, some of 
 bronze and others of marble. The public squares all over the 
 city were furnished with a great variety of ponds or heads of 
 water called lacus, and jets, salientes ; in all there were seven 
 hundred lacus and one hundred and five salientes. The public 
 places were also adorned with triumphal arches and Egyptian obe- 
 lisks ; two of the latter still remain and adorn two of the finest 
 squares of modern Rome, one the Piazza del Popolo, and the 
 other the Monte Citorio. The new buildings for the amusement 
 of the people far surpassed in splendor those of the republican 
 period. Of these may be mentioned the Amphitheatre of Tau- 
 rus, the Theatre of Balbus, and the Theatre of Marcellus, all of 
 them magnificent stone buildings, erected in the Campus Martins. 
 Ruins of the last edifice are discerned, as is well known, in one of 
 the meanest quarters of the modern city, and the gray, worn 
 arches of the lower story now serve the ignoble purpose of front- 
 ing the dirty shops of locksmiths and other artisans. Other fine 
 monuments of the Augustan time, which once adorned this part 
 of the city, have come to like ignoble uses. Witness the grand 
 Mausoleum of Augustus, whose massive walls, within which once 
 reposed the remains of Augustus and others of the imperial fam- 
 ily, consecrated once by the ashes of the young Marcellus, and 
 spite of all its subsequent uses, consecrated ever by the verse of 
 Virgil, now serve for the exhibition of puppet-shows and tight- 
 rope dancers ! These and other buildings of the Augustan age 
 stood upon the Campus Martins ; and it is indeed the new appear- 
 ance which this entire region gradually assumed that most distin- 
 guishes, in its outward aspect, Augustan Rome from the Rome of 
 the Commonwealth. Formerly a vast open space for the meet- 
 ings of the Centuriate Comitia, and for military and gymnastic 
 exercises, it was now changed, under the creative influence of art, 
 to a grand assemblage of architectural monuments devoted to the 
 worship of the gods, to public business, and to the comforts and 
 amusements of the people. To allude to some of these which have 
 not been mentioned, here were erected the Thermae, or Baths of 
 Agrippa, the first of a series of magnificent establishments belong- 
 
ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 215 
 
 ing to the time of the emperors. Intended from the first to fur- 
 nish to the whole population the luxuries and diversions enjoyed 
 by the rich in their own houses, these baths were built on an im- 
 mense scale, and contained not only every convenience for bath- 
 ing, but also, by means of gymnasia, porticoes, reading-rooms, and 
 libraries, every facility for the tastes of the people, physical, social, 
 and intellectual. Horace has a jest in one of his satires at the 
 expense of some of the conceited poets who go to the baths to 
 recite their poems, because there they hope to find a large audi- 
 ence, and also because the resonance of the vaulted ceilings de- 
 lights their vanity. They were built in the most superb style, 
 enriched within with precious marbles and paintings, and in the 
 areas without adorned and refreshed with fountains and shaded 
 walks. Some remains of these baths are extant, but the extensive 
 ruins of the Thermae of later emperors give us definite concep- 
 tions of the nature and extent of these establishments. Close by 
 the Baths of Agrippa was erected, and is still standing, the finest 
 of all these Augustan monuments, the Pantheon, a temple conse- 
 crated to Mars and Venus, and probably also meant to be sacred 
 to all the successive Divi of the Julian family. Next to its own 
 beauty, it is doubtless the wise policy of the Roman church to 
 which the world is indebted for the preservation of this pagan 
 temple ; for its consecration as a Christian church, in 608, by Bon- 
 iface IV., then Bishop of Rome, is the chief circumstance which 
 has kept it from destruction during all the changes of time in this 
 ever-changing part of the city. Yet not even this circumstance 
 has saved it from the plundering hands of civil and ecclesiastical 
 rulers. It was one of the latest of these spoliations, achieved by 
 Urban VIII., who carried off from it 400,000 pounds of bronze to 
 adorn his family's palace of the Barberini, that elicited from the 
 Roman Pasquin one of his best pasquinades : — 
 
 " Quod non fecere Barbari, fecere Barberini." 
 
 Let me now add to this account of the public buildings of 
 Augustan Rome a brief mention of the private houses of this 
 period. In these, too, both in extent and costliness, there was 
 a great advance upon the architecture of the republic. Till 
 towards the close of republican times, the Roman dwelling-houses 
 were small, and made of wood or of brick, erected upon a stone 
 foundation. In one of Horace's odes, in which the poet laments 
 the prevailing luxury, when the estates of the rich left but few 
 
216 ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 
 
 acres for the plow, and their plane-trees and flower gardens 
 supplanted the elms and the olive-grounds, he dwells especially 
 upon the smallness and simplicity of the homes of the fathers of 
 the republic. Then, he says, private estates were small, the com- 
 mon wealth was large, and the laws, while they favored the 
 thatched roofs of private citizens, ordered the temples of the gods 
 to be sumptuously adorned at public cost. At about the middle 
 of the seventh century of the city the orator Crassus built a 
 house on the Palatine, which was severely censured for its ex- 
 pense, chiefly because it was adorned with marble columns (he 
 was nicknamed by Brutus " the Palatine Venus ") ; yet these 
 columns were only six in number and twelve feet in height ; this 
 then very extravagant house cost about 140,000. A like censure 
 was passed upon the Consul Marcus Lepidus (b. c. 78) for 
 using foreign marble in paving the threshold of his home. But 
 thirty years later these houses were inferior to at least a hundred 
 mansions in the city. The house of Cicero, for instance, on the 
 Palatine, cost about 1140,000, and that of Claudius, which was 
 much larger, cost nearly $600,000. But in the time of Augus- 
 tus the rich mansions of Rome, as well as the suburban villas, 
 far surpassed in magnificence even these instances of republican 
 luxury. Augustus himself led the way in his Palatine house near 
 by his temple of Apollo. Here, near the spot occupied ages 
 before by the humble abode of Romulus, stood the first Roman 
 imperial residence, called first domus Caesaris, then, by way of 
 eminence, domus Palatina, or Palatium, which was followed by 
 a succession of gorgeous palatial structures, which rose and had 
 their brilliant days and fell in turn, and still stretch over the hill 
 in massive ruins, but which, by their grandeur, have passed down 
 to the language of wellnigh every civilized nation the fitting 
 word for the dwellings of nobles, and kings, and emperors. An- 
 other princely Roman house, and more familiar to the writings as 
 to the person of Horace, was the house of Maecenas. This, as 
 Horace often reminds us, stood on the eastern side of the Esqui- 
 line hill. The grounds of the estate covered a part of the site of 
 the former Servian walls, and stretched out to the east and south 
 across the plain of the Esquiline. Formerly the gloomy burial- 
 places (Sat. I. 8, 14-16) of slaves and of the poorest classes of 
 citizens, they were now changed by the wealth and taste of Maece- 
 nas into an extensive and elegant park, laid out with walks and 
 gardens, and adorned with fountains and statuary. On one of 
 
ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 217 
 
 the highest points was erected the palace, one part arising above 
 the rest, in tower-like form and in several stories, in Horatian 
 phrase massive and nearing the clouds (Odes III. 29, 10), and 
 commanding a view of the whole city, and especially of the plain 
 of the Campagna, and over and beyond this, of Tibur and Tuscu- 
 lum, and the entire line of delightful hills which bound the hori- 
 zon to the east of Rome. The way up to this place was a well- 
 worn one to the often hastening feet of Horace, and the interior 
 was consecrated in his own mind, as well as in the minds of Virgil 
 and Varius and the other choice spirits that formed the circle of 
 Maecenas, to the most elevated and cherished associations of art, let- 
 ters, friendship, and social intercourse. It is probable that some 
 of the ruined walls and chambers which still cover this part of the 
 Esquiline are remains of this classic residence ; and the traveler, 
 as he gazes upon the massive ruins, gladly believes that he is 
 standing within the spaces once graced by the presence of Virgil 
 and Horace and their brother poets and men of letters and their 
 common friend and princely patron Maecenas. 
 
 What has now been said of the private houses of Rome illus- 
 trates only what were called the domus^ the separate mansions of 
 the richer citizens. These, however, though they formed the 
 court parts of the city, crowning the summits of the hills, yet 
 formed the homes of but a small portion of the population. But 
 in the lower districts, such as the Subura and the Velabrum and 
 along the sides of the hills, were large houses, called insulce^ 
 which were, however, not insulated single houses, but blocks of 
 houses, isolated from other similar blocks or other buildings, and 
 containing numerous tenements for the abodes of the poorer 
 classes. These were built in ordinary style, and many stories in 
 height, and were rented by floors or chambers to families or in- 
 dividuals. The height of these insulce was limited by Augustus 
 to seventy feet ; they had often six or seven stories, called tahu- 
 lata or contignationes, and sometimes even ten stories, and so 
 gave accommodation to a very large number of inmates, many of 
 the upper rooms or attics being used only as lodgings. The base- 
 ment on the street was generally occupied by shops which had no 
 immediate connection with the tenements above, these having 
 their own entrance by a flight of steps from the outside. Of these 
 insulce there were in the city in Augustus' time upwards of 46,000, 
 while there were only about 1,700 domus. The domus^ when 
 compared with the dwelling-houses of modern cities, was lower 
 
218 ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 
 
 and deeper, and covered a much greater area. It generally- 
 opened through the vestibule and the ostium or entry-hall, into 
 the atrium or family room and reception room for guests ; this 
 was roofed over with the exception of an open space in the centre 
 called the compluvium; around the atrium were the chambers, 
 dining-room, and other apartments, which varied, of course, with 
 the taste and means of the owner. In large houses, however, 
 there was beyond the atrium a similar hall called the cavum 
 cedium or heart of the house, and still beyond sometimes another 
 called the peristyle, which was surrounded by porticoes and had 
 a large area open to the sky, and planted with trees and flowers. 
 These domus^ as they were detached houses and often surrounded 
 by gardens, must have had a more isolated appearance than the 
 so-called insulce themselves. 
 
 Of the population of the city, the appearance of which I have 
 now sketched only in outline, we have estimates by different 
 writers who vary from one another in their figures not only by 
 hundreds and thousands but even by millions. We have no 
 accounts of any Roman census instituted like a modern one to 
 reach a full numerical estimate of population. If Augustus 
 among his many wise measures had taken such a census of his 
 capital, embracing children as well as adults, women as well as 
 men, and foreigners as well as citizens, and slaves as well as free 
 Romans, and its results had been preserved, authenticated from 
 official sources ; or if any Augustan writer had recorded and 
 sent down to us the actual number by count only of the slaves 
 that lived in Rome in his time, many writers and their readers 
 would have been spared some very laborious calculations, which 
 have started on conjectural premises and reached widely different 
 conclusions, and all alike uncertain. Of these many estimates 
 the largest and the smallest are easily set aside. One of the 
 largest, for instance, that of Lipsius, who sets down the popula- 
 tion at 4,000,000, doubtless grows out of a confounding of the 
 population of Italy, or perhaps of the empire, with that of Rome ; 
 while that of Bureau de la Malle, which gives the number of 
 562,000, and that of Merivale, who for the most part follows de 
 la Malle, but goes up to the number of 630,000, are not only at 
 variance with some clearly established facts, but also rest upon 
 inferences from the capacity of the area of the city in compari- 
 son with that of Paris, which are quite inadmissible. Bunsen 
 and also Marquardt compute the population at 2,000,000 ; Dyer, 
 
ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 219 
 
 in Smith's " Dictionary of Antiquities," at 2,045,000 ; Boeckh, at 
 2,265,000: Gibbon, at 1,200,000, and Carl Peter, in the third 
 volume of his " History of Rome," recently published, at about 
 1,250,000. Of all these the last two seem to me by far the most 
 probable. Singularly enough the only sure data on this subject 
 are derived from an inscription on the so-called Monumentum 
 Ancyranum^ or Monument of Ancyra, a city in Asia Minor and 
 the capital of the Province of Galatia. Augustus, at the close of 
 his life, wrote himself a record of his chief acts during his reign, 
 and had them inscribed upon bronze tablets at Rome ; of this in- 
 scription the citizens of Ancyra had a copy made and cut upon 
 marble blocks and deposited in a temple dedicated to Augustus 
 and Rome. This Ancyran monument has fortunately been pre- 
 served to modern times; and the inscription, which was first 
 copied in 1701, contains, among other facts, the number of citi- 
 zens to whom the regular corn distributions were made, and also 
 on particular occasions largesses of money were bestowed by the 
 emperor. He mentions two occasions on which he gave donatives 
 to 320,000 of the common people of the city (^plehs iirhana)^ two 
 others when the donative was given to 200,000, and still another 
 when it was granted to 250,000. The largess was in all these 
 instances limited to the male population, but it included on these 
 occasions children of four years of age. The mention of the 
 200,000 is coupled with the remark that this was the number of 
 the citizens who received the corn gratuities. There can, there- 
 fore, be no doubt that this smaller number represents the poorer 
 citizens, and the larger, the entire population, male and free, 
 below the senatorian and equestrian ranks. If, therefore, the 
 number be doubled to comprehend females and children, we 
 should have 640,000 for the entire plebeian population. To this 
 sum must be added at least 10,000 for the senators and knights 
 with their families, 15,000 for the military of the city, and 50,000 
 for the foreigners, making a sum total of 715,000 for the free 
 population. In respect to the number of slaves there is more 
 difficulty in attaining any reliable result. In general we know 
 that in the Augustan times the number was immense. Some 
 senatorian and equestrian families had hundreds of slaves. Hor- 
 ace mentions one citizen who had 200, and in the same passage 
 intimates that ten was a small number. The praetor Tillius, 
 whom he satirizes for his meanness, goes to Tibur with only five ; 
 and the poet himself is waited upon at his bachelor table by three, 
 
220 ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 
 
 though he was at the time in very humble circumstances. From 
 the data we have it would be safe to reckon at least ten slaves to 
 each person of senatorian and equestrian rank, two to each of the 
 resident foreigners, and one each to the military of the city. To 
 these must be added at least 100,000 in the service of the state. 
 We have thus 315,000 slaves for the population exclusive of the 
 plebs urbana, A common estimate has been to reckon one slave 
 for each of the commons, but this is certainly too high. We 
 have indeed the record of the estate of a rich freedman which had 
 belonging to it 4,116 slaves, but this was doubtless a rare in- 
 stance of wealth among even the richest freedmen. A large part 
 of the common people were dependent for their subsistence upon 
 government gratuities, and these certainly had no slaves. Hardly 
 more than a third had regular and sufficient incomes of their own, 
 and only these could afford to keep slaves. At the lowest calcu- 
 lation there was probably one slave for every three of the com- 
 mon people, which would give a proportion for the whole of about 
 200,000. This added to the numbers already given makes a total 
 of about 1,200,000 for the entire population, an estimate which 
 is the smallest of the many which have been made, with the excep- 
 tion only of de la Malle's and Merivale's. 
 
 Let us now come nearer, and try to get some view of the life 
 itself of this great population of Augustan Rome, and of the 
 physical and social condition and welfare of this assemblage of 
 human beings who thronged its streets and public places and lived 
 in its many homes when Augustus reigned and Horace wrote. 
 
 We have seen that the city contained within the circuit of 
 about twelve miles more than a million of souls. Of these about 
 500,000 were slaves, upwards of 700,000 were citizens, and 50,000 
 foreigners. The social relations of these portions of the popula- 
 tion were of the most diverse character. There was not only the 
 broad contrast between the free and the slaves, a large subject in 
 itself, which I do not propose to consider, but the free citizens 
 were parted from each other by rank, and still more by riches and 
 poverty to a degree and extent which have no parallel in modern 
 life. Of the free citizens, the higher or privileged classes were 
 the senators and knights. The old patrician nobility was extinct 
 in influence, well-nigh in being. A few ancient families still lin- 
 gered, dim and faded figures, about the haunts of their pristine 
 glory, and at set times in the year went through a dull round of 
 old curiate forms, out of which all vitality had long since van- 
 
ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 221 
 
 ished ; but the order itself had no more significance either in society 
 or in the state. Augustus, indeed, from a politic desire to adorn 
 the new regime with something of the lustre of the old, endeav- 
 ored to prop up the declining fortunes of some of the old families, 
 and to keep them from extinction ; but it was all in vain ; the 
 patrician order had no real life, save the little it drew from the 
 memories of the republic. The new nobility was one of no ante- 
 cedents ; it was the promiscuous offspring of imperial patronage, 
 and of cleverness of talent to discern and seize all opportunities 
 for gaining power and wealth, with no drawbacks of moral prin- 
 ciple to their fullest appropriation. But the senate, though de- 
 generate in character and power, still remained in entire form, 
 and its members had chief influence in society and some acknow- 
 ledged share in the government of the state. In the early years 
 of Augustus's reign the number of the senate had risen to a thou- 
 sand, but it was soon reduced to six hundred. It had been at 
 first the policy of Augustus, as of his uncle before him, to degrade 
 and debase the senate for his own surer elevation, by enlarging 
 its ranks and filling them with creatures of his own, who would 
 be subservient to his ambitious designs. It was thus that for- 
 eigners and common soldiers and freedmen had come to be in- 
 vested with the senatorian title and privileges. But when the 
 usurper's designs were accomplished, and the usurpation had in- 
 sensibly assumed the aspect of legitimate government, Augustus 
 took summary means to dispense with these unworthy instruments 
 of his elevation. In his function of censor, he cleared the curia 
 of this disorderly rabble which had thronged it, the new men, 
 who by their low character and coarse life had brought reproach 
 and disgrace upon it. He also took vigorous measures, which, 
 however, could only be partially successful, to revive in the sena- 
 tors themselves the old dignity of bearing and lofty sense of 
 character which had once been hereditary and well-nigh innate 
 senatorian qualities, and so to restore with the people the old 
 prestige of the body. He had so far at least a negative success, 
 that no senator whose merit lay in suppleness of limb or a natural 
 turn for theatricals any longer ventured to dance and act upon 
 the public stage, nor one whose forte was in muscle to fight with 
 wild beasts in the arena. By similar stringent measures he also 
 purified the equestrian order by a summary ejectment from it of 
 at least the worst of its bad members, who were beings of the 
 meaner quality, with no claim but ill-gotten wealth to the rank 
 
222 ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 
 
 and prerogatives of a knight. Horace lashes with cutting satire 
 one of this class who had often been flogged as a slave with the 
 triumvir's rods, but who now haughtily swept the Sacred Way 
 with his long trailing toga, and plowed his thousand acres, and 
 sat in the equestrian seats in the theatre. The number of the 
 equites at this time is nowhere, so far as I know, exactly stated. 
 Mr. Dyer cites a passage from an ancient writer which mentions 
 " that in the annual procession of the knights to the Temple of 
 Castor they sometimes mustered to the number of 5,000." But 
 we cannot be going too high in giving with Bunsen and other 
 authorities the number of 10,000 as the total of the two classes to- 
 gether of the knights and the senators. The property qualification 
 of the senatorian rank was fixed by Augustus at 1,200 sestertia, 
 about §48,000 ; that of the equestrian was the same as it had always 
 been, 400 sestertia, about $16,000. This sum was the minimum 
 for respectively the senatorian and the equestrian census, and 
 whoever possessed this amount might live in a manner not un- 
 worthy his rank. It is probable that the number of those whose 
 property did not exceed this minimum was not a small one. For 
 besides the general fact that the very rich always form the excep- 
 tions in the most favored circumstances, it is well known that 
 Augustus in many instances made grants of money to individual 
 senators and knights to keep their property at the amount 
 required for the census, and to enable them to support their rank. 
 But whatever may have been the difference in the fortunes of 
 different senatorian and equestrian families, there was concen- 
 trated in these two orders all the enormous riches which had 
 flowed into Rome from all parts of the world. The senate num- 
 bered among its members the generals and the proconsuls and 
 the propraetors, who, by the spoils of war, or by the plunder of 
 rich pro\H[nces, had accumulated immense fortunes. The pay 
 itself of the provincial governors was large, varying with the size 
 and importance of the province from 100,000 sesterces up to a 
 million, or from f4,000 up to $40,000. To the equites belonged 
 exclusively the privilege of farming the public revenues, a privi- 
 lege which in its legitimate exercise was always a fruitful source 
 of wealth, but now, by means of the numberless perverse devices of 
 extortion and oppression, was made a hundred fold more lucra- 
 tive. Into one or the other of these two privileged classes had 
 forced their way the numerous parvenus who had taken advan- 
 tage of the recent troubled times to enrich themselves by usury, 
 
ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 223 
 
 and especially by the reverses in families occasioned by the merci- 
 less proscriptions, had contrived to possess themselves of large 
 estates. The moneyed wealth of Eome and the landed property 
 of Italy were almost entirely in the possession of these senatorian 
 and equestrian families. It is chiefly the sentiments and tastes 
 of these two orders, their manners and style of living, which we 
 find delineated in the poetry of Horace. We gaze even to satiety 
 upon the pictures of their villas and city mansions, environed 
 without by porticoes and gardens and parks and fishponds, and 
 adorned within by costliest furniture and the finest works of art ; 
 but the glimpses that we get of their social life seldom suggest 
 ideals of nobleness of character or of dignity of manners. The 
 entertainments which they give to their friends are only luxu- 
 rious banquets ; and these, though often graced by the presence 
 of men distinguished for intellectual culture and tastes, and the 
 studious pursuit and liberal encouragement of letters, yet often 
 illustrate the prevailing idolatry of wealth and its coarser sensual 
 uses than any social intercourse informed by intelligence or en- 
 riched by kindly and generous feeling or enlivened by convivial 
 wit and humor. Cicero in his delightful dialogue on old age 
 makes the elder Cato boast with an old Roman's national pride of 
 the superiority of the Latin word for a feast over the Greek one, 
 because the former exalted the social element of the occasion, and 
 the latter the sensual ; the one was a convivium where men lived 
 together in rational intercourse, the other a symposium where 
 they were only boon companions in eating and drinking. Such a 
 boast was only just and true when made of old Cato's Sabine 
 suppers, where he feasted his rustic neighbors with small and 
 dewy cups, and with abundant cheerful conversation, protracted 
 till deep in the night ; but the conviviality of these Romans of 
 Horace's time was fully equal to that of the Greeks of any period 
 in its voluptuous devotion to the pleasures of the table. We 
 may hope that Horace and his literary friends were wont to have 
 the simple suppers (inundm coence) he so finely commends to 
 Maecenas, under poor men's roofs, where were no hangings and 
 purple, where they enjoyed together their plain living and high 
 thinking and cheerful mirth, not at least without the common 
 Sabine wine in moderate tankards, and the festive lamb of the 
 Terminalia, or the tender kid snatched from the jaws of the wolf. 
 But the high-life feast of Nasidienus, which the poet so elabo- 
 rately describes in one of his satires, at which Maecenas assisted 
 
224 ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 
 
 with several of his friends, was chiefly remarkable for the extrav- 
 agant and interminable biU of fare, and the ruinous drinking by 
 the nobler guests of their host's costliest wines. The host, a low- 
 born man suddenly become rich, his coarse nature and vulgar 
 manners unchanged and more conspicuous by fortune, was perhaps 
 a fair enough subject for Horace's light facetious satire ; but the 
 low jests which the gentlemen themselves indulged in at the host's 
 expense were a theme for satire of a graver tone, which only the 
 moral indignation of a Juvenal could have adequately treated. 
 Indeed at this feast, as well as at the festive scenes of the famous 
 journey to Brundusium, one is surprised not only at the absence 
 of anything like genial entertainment, but also at the low license 
 of manners displayed ; poets are there, men of letters, the choi- 
 cest wits, the first Roman gentlemen of the day ; but hardly a 
 good thing is said by any one in the company, not a wise thought 
 or a happy allusion or turn of festive wit, not a story or a song 
 from the guests to relieve the dull, heavy round of extravagant, 
 luxurious dishes. It seems most surprising of aU that Horace 
 himself could have been so easily pleased with the scurrilous con- 
 test between the two parasites of Maecenas, which with its one or 
 two good hits, was after all only a show of low buffoonery, turn- 
 ing on the grossest personalities. The truth is, in spite of the 
 boast of worthy Cato Major, the chief thing at these Roman 
 suppers was eating and drinking; the pleasures were those of 
 the senses indulged by the host with an extravagance in providing, 
 and by the guests with an excess in partaking, as unbounded as 
 it was wanting in reason and taste ; the palate and the stomach 
 were first excited and whetted, to be afterwards gratified and 
 gorged, and the most monstrous means taken to enjoy such a sup- 
 per twice and even thrice the same night, and at last to avoid the 
 dangerous consequences of such multiplied enjoyment. This 
 inordinate love and pursuit of wealth and its coarser pleasures 
 seems to have become the engrossing Roman passion, now that the 
 changed relations of the empire, the old honors of military and 
 civil life were no longer to be sought and won. Riches was 
 counted the chief good ; all men hasted to be rich ; for the 
 attainment and enjoyment of riches all things were made subser- 
 vient, all things were sacrificed. In a comprehensive satiric 
 passage Horace declares that virtue, fame, honor, all things divine 
 and human, are subject to beautiful riches ; whoever has riches, 
 he shall be illustrious, brave, just, wise, a king, whatever you 
 
ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 225 
 
 please. Poverty was no longer an evil, it was a positive reproach. 
 To shun this dread reproach, the poet says in another place, we do 
 anything and suffer anything, and quit the path of lofty virtue. 
 A single illustration of the vicious devices engendered in such a 
 state of society is furnished in the burlesque satire upon the so- 
 caUed legacy-hunters (the hoeredipetoe^ Sat. II. 5), a base class of 
 men, who had grown up in the general struggle for money, and 
 whose sordid trade — for a regular trade it had come to be — 
 consisted in courting the favor of wealthy people who had no 
 children or near relations, in the hope of being made their heirs. 
 Their easiest victims were rich old men who had arisen from a low 
 origin, and were flattered by attentions and professions of esteem ; 
 and these, to catch and hold, they descended to the meanest arti- 
 fices and shrank not from crime and infamy. These people Hor- 
 ace classes with the publicans and other sinners of the town, and 
 describes them (Epist. 1. 1, 76) as hunting down avaricious widows 
 with sweetmeats and fruit, and catching old men and sending 
 them to their fishponds. Hard was the task of Horace as poet- 
 priest, sacerdos musarum^ to teach and reform such a perverse 
 generation ; to expose in satire their vices and follies, and in ode 
 and epistle to inculcate temperance and sobriety and contentment ; 
 to condemn the vanity of social ambition and the cares and fas- 
 tidious discontent of wealth ; and to hold up the simplicity and 
 frugality, the integrity and bright honor of the forefathers of the 
 republic for the imitation of their degenerate sons. On dull ears 
 and duller hearts fell ever the ever-returning refrains of his 
 exquisite song, that true happiness is in nothing outward, but only 
 in the soul ; that wisdom is better than wealth and fame, and 
 virtue the only true good. No less difficult was it for Augustus 
 by his personal influence, and by his regulations and enactments as 
 censor of morals and as legislator, to eradicate these social evils. 
 Well aware that the elevation of the general tone of society could 
 only be secured by improvement in private and family life, he 
 endeavored by precept and example to restrain excess and culti- 
 vate frugal habits in domestic and social living ; himself abste- 
 mious and rigid in his own diet, and spreading for his guests 
 only a moderately furnished table. His sumptuary laws exceeded 
 in strictness all preceding ones. They allowed an expenditure 
 of 200 sesterces (circa $8.00) for a dinner party on ordinary days, 
 300 ($12.00) on holidays, and 1,000 (140.00) for a wedding 
 feast. But these laws were of no avail, and soon fell into disuse 
 
226 ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 
 
 and oblivion, like all the earlier enactments of this class. Hardly- 
 more effectual was the long legislative contest which the emperor 
 carried on against the prevailing licentiousness of the time. The 
 chief evil from which Roman morality and all Roman life was suf- 
 fering was the ever-increasing celibacy, and its shocking conse- 
 quences in the licentious habits of both sexes, and the frightful 
 increase in the number of illegitimate births. In the times of the 
 civil wars it seemed to many advisable and even a duty to live with- 
 out wife and children. But even when peace again established 
 security of life and property, the number continually increased of 
 those who were averse to the restraints and burdens of married 
 life. Even in republican times marriage was often considered a 
 burden in itself, but at the same time a tribute due to the state 
 from the citizen. The remark of Metellus was recalled and quoted 
 in Augustus' times, that " if men could be true citizens without 
 having wives they would gladly be rid of the burden." But in 
 these times, when sacrifices of any kind for the blessing of citizen- 
 ship were very rare even as they were rarely deserved, the number 
 of marriages was ever on the decrease. Augustus carried through 
 several laws which aimed to encourage matrimony by penalties 
 upon the unmarried and rewards to the married, and also to limit 
 divorces. The extent of evils which were suffered from the lax 
 morals of the time is easiest discovered by the provisions of the 
 laws. All Romans were required to marry, and to marry to raise 
 children to the state ; the requirement extending with men to the 
 sixtieth year, and with women to the fiftieth. Whoever violated 
 the law suffered certain penalties, which bore, however, harder 
 upon the unmarried than upon the married who were without chil- 
 dren. No unmarried person was legally capable of receiving an 
 inheritance or legacy, and a married person without children could 
 receive one half of what was willed to him ; in case there were no 
 other heirs, the property went to the state. If the person were un- 
 married at the time of the testator's death he could inherit pro- 
 vided he married within a hundred days. Also certain honors and 
 other advantages accrued to the married ; they had privileged seats 
 in the theatres ; of two consuls he had t\\Q fasces first who had the 
 most children ; they also had preference as candidates for office 
 at home, and also in the provinces. The having a certain number 
 of children made the parent exempt from certain duties, as, for 
 instance, serving on juries, or, in the case of freedmen, from any 
 service to their patron. These laws also aimed to check the ten- 
 
ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 227 
 
 dency to divorces which had begun to be common at the end of 
 the republic, and which were now still more easily and oftener 
 obtained. They affixed pecuniary penalties or losses upon the 
 party whose conduct caused the divorce, in the case of the hus- 
 band by requiring him to return his wife's dowry, in the case of 
 the wife by allowing the husband to retain one half of the dowry. 
 The divorce was also made more difficult by requiring certain 
 forms, without which the separation was invalid and another mar- 
 riage was illegal; the letter of divorce had to be given by a 
 freedman of the party who made it, in the presence of seven wit- 
 nesses, all Roman citizens of age. But these statutes failed of 
 securing their end. With the decline of interest in public life, 
 and the decline of public life itself, the advantages which were 
 offered the married in respect of civil offices acted as motives 
 upon very few persons, and the disabilities of the unmarried were 
 more than balanced by the consideration they had in celibacy. 
 
 If now we turn from these notices of the lives of the privi- 
 leged classes to the condition and welfare of the common people, 
 we are presented with a contrast in respect to all the means of 
 outward well-being of the most astonishing kind. Such a luxu- 
 rious life as that of the Roman nobles would in any modern city 
 open to the rest of the population a thousand sources of lucrative 
 business, and might diffuse general prosperity among the working 
 classes ; but in Rome such results followed only in the most lim- 
 ited extent. Hundreds of men were indeed supported by a single 
 opulent Roman ; but these were not citizens but slaves. Every 
 great establishment was independent by its numerous slaves of 
 free and hired labor. The slaves of a great family were not only 
 its domestics, but also its bakers and its shoemakers and tailors 
 and even its physicians ; the landed proprietor had also in his 
 slaves his farmers and shepherds, his fishermen and sportsmen ; 
 thus, too, the builders found their artisans and laborers. This 
 great evil, which thus cut off the poorer citizens from the ordinary 
 means of living, was still further aggravated by the policy of the 
 state, which not only had in its employ great numbers of its own 
 slaves, but also allowed the contractors for public works to make 
 use of slaves as their agents and workmen. We may thus readily 
 discover the condition of the citizens who formed the mass of the 
 common people. Real estate they owned scarcely at all. The 
 small estates of the commoners had, by the numerous wars and the 
 debts which wars entail, long since been alienated, and were now 
 
228 ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 
 
 absorbed in the villas and gardens or other possessions of the 
 great proprietors and capitalists. A part of these citizens secured 
 regular support by trade. But Rome was at no period, and now 
 less than ever before, a commercial city or a city of extensive 
 trade, and whoever was inclined to these departments of business 
 was sure to settle in the provinces. In the immediate surround- 
 ings of Rome and in all Italy very little was raised for export. 
 The republic even in its best days was unable to furnish its armies 
 with corn grown in Italy, and now that agriculture in the penin- 
 sula, by the withdrawal of regular labor through the civil wars, 
 and especially by the appropriation of the soil by the great pro- 
 prietors to the uses of luxury, had wholly declined, the little grain 
 that was raised was wholly inadequate to the home supply. Even 
 the wine and oil, which had always been staples of Italy, and in 
 earlier times were largely exported to the provinces, were now 
 never raised in sufficient quantity for Italy ; and the wines im- 
 ported from abroad far exceeded in quality and value those grown 
 at home. Italy now produced little and consumed much. It was 
 the provinces that were the producers, and it was the provincial- 
 ists and the Romans who lived in the provinces that grew rich by 
 commerce. It was thus, indeed, that the provincialists made peace- 
 ful retaliations upon Rome, and were receiving back the immense 
 sums they had lost by tribute and plunder. The carrying trade 
 of these and numberless other imports was also in the hands of 
 the provincialists ; and such trade as was carried on in the city 
 was conducted mostly by foreigners. To these adverse consider- 
 ations must be added another, and a radical one : the aversion 
 well-nigh innate in a Roman mind, and cherished and strength- 
 ened by long usage against trading in every form. Indeed the 
 only branch of business that was deemed respectable was banking 
 and money lending in all its forms ; and this, which was extended 
 and lucrative, was now in high repute and conducted by persons 
 of the highest consideration, though indeed the business had its 
 low grades as in modern times and its usurious and fraudulent de- 
 vices. The number of bankers and money-brokers who had their 
 offices and stands in the Forum and its vicinity was very large. 
 At certain hours of the day this entire quarter was one vast ex- 
 change crowded with borrowers and lenders and exchangers ; the 
 very atmosphere was redolent and well-nigh vocal with gold and 
 silver ; indeed, to borrow an image used by Horace (Epist. I. 1), 
 the grand arches of Janus, which looked down upon the busy 
 
ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 229 
 
 crowds, if they could have caught from Mercury the gift of 
 speech, would have proclaimed aloud the current doctrine of 
 young and old, " Get money above all things else ; rightly if you 
 can, but at all events get it. Get money first, virtue afterwards ; 
 get money in all haste, virtue at your leisure." There were, of 
 course, mechanics among the citizens, but very few, as their busi- 
 ness ranked among the so-called sordid arts ; and these few were 
 in little demand, because the rich employed their slaves for me- 
 chanical purposes. To a small portion of citizens the govern- 
 ment afforded means of support in the departments of public 
 business. These required scrihce or clerks, and other subordi- 
 nates, who had a salary from the public treasury. Horace him- 
 self before he became known to fame held the office of a quaestor's 
 clerk. So, too, the colleges of priests, and the offices for the 
 registry of deaths, and the care of funerals, gave occupation to a 
 small corps of salaried men. Still the number of those who in 
 these ways secured a subsistence was small compared with the 
 bulk of the commoners of the city. The great evil from which 
 Rome was thus suffering was the loss of that industrious and 
 prosperous middle class of citizens who had formerly been the 
 strength of the nation ; this evil was incurred partly through the 
 prostration of agriculture by the heavy tread of war, and partly 
 by the introduction of an immense slave population. The evil 
 had its earliest origin far back in the times of the republic ; its 
 beginnings were discerned just after the second Punic war ; it had 
 grown to a fearful height in the period of Tiberius Gracchus, and 
 its pernicious effects gave rise to the patriotic though rashly con- 
 ducted measures of that eloquent and fearless tribune ; but now in 
 the reign of Augustus it had reached a rank maturity. The bulk 
 of the Roman commons had now been changed from prosperous 
 citizens into state paupers dependent upon the state for their 
 daily bread. The monthly distributions of corn kept over 600,000 
 free Romans from starvation, and when the number was reduced 
 to 400,000, the reduction was made possible either by extraor- 
 dinary money largesses, or by shipping poor colonies to foreign 
 parts very much as European countries have sent to our own 
 shores ship-loads of their paupers and discharged criminals. It 
 was, however, a difficult task even to diminish or control the 
 influence of these social evils. Their causes lay too deeply im- 
 bedded in earlier political relations, and also in the usages and 
 spirit of the people. The sense of political importance stiU 
 
230 ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 
 
 lingered in spite of changes in government in the consciousness 
 of every free Eoman ; even the meanest citizen from among the 
 rabble of the city was inspired with a feeling of consequence and 
 honor characteristic of the people of a country which had been 
 for centuries the home of free institutions. Besides, the mildness 
 of his climate rendered the Roman more independent of physical 
 influences which press with so much force upon dwellers in colder 
 countries. Hence he could more readily keep aloof from the 
 necessity of daily labor, and doubtless many were the free Ro- 
 mans, genuine prototypes of the lazzaroni of Naples, who had no 
 home by day but the squares and other lounges of the city, and 
 none by night but the friendly shelter of the vestibules and por- 
 ticoes of the temples and other public buildings. To check the 
 general idleness, Augustus sometimes resolved to take radical 
 measures and to give up altogether the gratuities of corn or 
 money. But such a resolution he always abandoned, and things 
 went on as before. As long as slave labor rendered all labor 
 servile so that the free citizens preferred to be poor and dependent 
 rather than lose respectability by working with their own hands, 
 so long the efforts of the emperor to do away with idleness and 
 poverty were ineffectual. Indeed, he was obliged to do more than 
 feed his people ; he had to find them in amusements. The poor 
 of any people or country, when systematically fed, grow very 
 exacting. The more you cherish in them a sense and habit of 
 dependence, and so impair their character, so much the more 
 they require and seem to need ; and what once they took as a 
 favor they come to claim as a right. This familiar truth was 
 illustrated on a large scale in Augustan Rome. These beggarly 
 Romans came to be dependent upon the government not only for 
 their bread but also for their recreations, the only business they 
 generally pursued. Hence the systematic and costly measures of 
 Augustus for public games and holiday shows. The regular fes- 
 tivals now approximated over sixty days in the year, and to these 
 were added extraordinary spectacles of various kinds which ex- 
 ceeded in number and splendor all that had before been known 
 in Rome. In his records upon the Ancyran monument, Augus- 
 tus enumerates in a long list the gladiatorial combats and the 
 fights with wild beasts and mock naval engagements which he 
 gave sometimes in his own name, and sometimes in the name of 
 the magistrates whose means were inadequate to the outlay. This 
 whole system of holiday shows had come to be a kind of neces- 
 
ROME IN THE TIME OF HORACE. 231 
 
 sity. If conducted with a magnificent generosity on the part of 
 the state, it was a generosity of such questionable sort that a 
 shrewd policy could not withhold it ; and if it was met by the 
 people as a bounty, it was such bounty that the total withdrawal 
 would have aroused feelings akin to a sense of wrong and injus- 
 tice. The words of Juvenal of the " rabble of Remus " in his 
 time would as well apply to the Romans of the time of Horace, 
 " the people who once conferred the imperium and the fasces and 
 the legions, now anxiously longs for only two things, bread and 
 the Circensian games." 
 
THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, JANUARY 5, 1872, ALSO 
 PRINTED IN THE "BAPTIST QUARTERLY." 
 
 Mr. Jowett's translation of Plato ^ is probably the ablest con- 
 tribution made by any living English scholar to the literature of 
 classical philology. This work may be considered as an ample 
 discharge of a debt long due from English scholarship to the writ- 
 ings of the great master of the Academy, who held imperial sway 
 in the realm of Grecian thought and speech in the culminating 
 era of its splendor and power. The classical scholars of England, 
 though in more recent times they have risen above their traditional 
 devotion to Greek metres and their studious fondness for the 
 graces, the delicice litterarum, of classical studies, and have emu- 
 lated their learned neighbors of the continent in aspiring to the 
 comprehension and interpretation of those leading minds of an- 
 tiquity which, by their thinking, have to this day influenced the 
 thought of the world, have yet hitherto fallen far behind the Ger- 
 mans in penetrating and working the veins of wisdom and truth 
 which enrich the Greek 'of Plato, and in bringing forth to use 
 their precious stores, whether by translation or by criticism or by 
 commentary and exposition. It was one of the many distinctions 
 achieved by Schleiermacher, that, by his learned and enthusiastic 
 labors on Plato's works, he introduced early in the present century 
 by far the most fruitful of the many eras of Platonic research and 
 study which have arisen at different periods in modern times, and 
 given impulse and onward movement to the progress of human 
 thought. That many-sided German, who by his writings and his 
 lectures exerted a no less powerful influence upon the intellectual 
 life of his times than upon its religious character by his eloquence 
 and piety as a preacher, busy all the week, both at the university 
 with his lectures two hours every day, and in his study in writing 
 
 1 The Dialogues of Plato, translated into English, with Analyses and Introduc- 
 tions, by B. Jowett, M. A., Master of Balliol College, Regius Professor of Greek 
 in the University of Oxford. In four volumes, octavo. Oxford : At the Clar- 
 endon Press. 1871. Reprinted in New York, in four volumes, duodecimo, by 
 Charles Scribner & Co. 1871. 
 
THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 233 
 
 for tlie press, and crowning all this activity by preaching every 
 Sunday to crowded congregations of the most thoughtful and cul- 
 tivated people in Berlin, yet found time amidst all these labors 
 for a profound and thorough study of Plato, continued through 
 more than twenty years, the fruits of which he gave to the world 
 in a masterly translation, accompanied by special introductions to 
 the several dialogues, unfolding their plan and contents, together 
 with a general introduction to the whole series. This great work 
 of Schleiermacher affords a signal example of the quickening and 
 productive influence of an original mind, occupied with all its 
 powers upon exalted subjects of inquiry ; like the living voice of 
 Socrates and the written words of Plato himself, it planted the 
 seeds of germinant thought in many kindred minds ; it stimulated 
 to a new intellectual life, not only the classical scholars of Ger- 
 many, who by professional occupation were lovers and teachers of 
 Plato's Greek, but all thinking men among that intellectual peo- 
 ple who, through their interest in other studies, theology, or phi- 
 losophy, or morals, shared with these the love and pursuit of the 
 imperishable thought enshrined in that matchless diction ; and 
 thus it gave rise to a succession of able works, exegetical, histori- 
 cal, and philosophical, in themselves a copious Platonic literature, 
 which furnished ampler and better means than ever existed be- 
 fore, of gaining a comprehension and appreciation of the genius 
 of Plato, and of the great and manifold value of his writings. 
 This renewed ardor for the study of Plato was soon shared with 
 the Germans by French scholars, and, most of all, by Cousin, 
 whose residence and studies in Germany and intimate acquaint- 
 ance with Schleiermacher and Schelling and Hegel contributed 
 to prepare him not only for his after brilliant successes at the Sor- 
 bonne, but for the higher and more enduring honor of doing for 
 his countrymen the same noble service which Schleiermacher had 
 done for the Germans, in the translation and exposition of the 
 entire works of Plato. In England, too, the German Platonism 
 was felt, and, though later, yet with a no less quickening force 
 and with equally conspicuous results. The most general and most 
 notable of these results was the marked change which was made 
 in the plan of education at Oxford ; where the range of philosoph- 
 ical reading and study was so widened and liberalized that Aristo- 
 tle, who had so long had exclusive sway in Greek philosophy, now 
 came to hold a divided rule with the ascending influence of his 
 master ; and thus the hard logical discipline imparted by the Aris- 
 
234 THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 
 
 totelian ethics was blended with the far richer and more various 
 mental culture yielded by those masterpieces of Platonic dialogue, 
 in which poetry and philosophy join their forces in friendly con- 
 test of wit and reason, with all the muses assisting at the noble 
 strife. Mr. Jowett was the earliest and foremost, not only of Ox- 
 ford, but of all English scholars, in promoting this revival of the 
 study of Plato in England, and the great work which he has now 
 published is its latest and ripest fruit. It is a work which makes 
 an epoch not only in the history of Greek study in England, but 
 also, and far more, in the history of English literature, and in the 
 general history of philosophy. So eminently has the author suc- 
 ceeded not only in translating Plato's language, but also by his 
 introductions to the separate dialogues in translating the ideas of 
 Plato ; indeed he has created an English classic by reproducing, 
 in a form alike fitted for general readers and scholars of higher 
 culture, the entire works of the greatest literary and philosophical 
 genius of ancient Greece. The author's beautiful dedication to 
 his " former pupils in Balliol College who, during thirty years, 
 have been the best of friends " to him, makes a very suggestive 
 sentence on the first page of his book ; it suggests with many other 
 topics of thought on which one would gladly linger, the literary 
 history of the work, and the genial air and fortunate conditions in 
 which it gradually came into being. It is the mature production 
 not of a thinker and scholar who has passed his life in the seclu- 
 sion of lettered ease, in the solitary and luxurious enjoyment of 
 delightful studies, but of a lifelong teacher and educator of the 
 young, for whose training and culture all his own mental resources 
 have been both acquired and employed, — a richly gifted and as- 
 piring mind, possessed with a genuine philosopher's love of know- 
 ledge and truth, kindling in other and younger minds the same 
 noble passion, and feeding and enriching them out of the stores of 
 Attic wit and wisdom itself has so busily gathered. 
 
 Of Mr. Jowett's many qualifications for the great task accom- 
 plished in this work, his Greek scholarship, ripe and ample as it 
 doubtless is, is not the one which excites the most admiration. 
 The reader must infer that his mind is not one distinguished by 
 what we may call the philological quality ; it does not take kindly 
 to niceties of verbal criticism ; it certainly is not of the kindred of 
 that unenviable scholar who, at the end of a long life devoted to 
 the elucidation of two Greek particles, profoundly regretted that 
 he had not confined himself to one ; it is evidently rather impa- 
 
THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 235 
 
 tient of that study and appropriation of the minutiae of grammati- 
 cal knowledge which belongs to the highest order of faithful and 
 accurate translation. But whatever defects may perhaps be set 
 against Mr. Jowett's account in strict philological merits, espe- 
 cially in comparison with the elder English school of the Bentleys 
 and Porsons, or with his immediate predecessor in the Oxford 
 Regius Professorship, Mr. Gaisford, these are amply made up by 
 the presence of other merits never possessed by those classical 
 scholars, and which are especially required for the adequate trans- 
 lation and exposition of Plato. The chief of these, and that which 
 must awaken the grateful admiration of his readers, consists in 
 the fullness and fineness of his well-digested knowledge not only 
 of Plato's thought, but of the whole history of philosophic thought 
 in ancient and in modern times. During all his life a diligent 
 student in philosophy, not only of the Greek masters, but of all 
 who, in different countries in subsequent times, and especially the 
 German in our own, have illustrated its successive annals, he has 
 been able to avail himself of the lights of all the great philoso- 
 phies of the world in contemplating and exhibiting that of Plato, 
 his favorite and greatest master of all. This wealth of philosophic 
 culture Mr. Jowett has dispensed with like wisdom and liberality 
 in his admirable introductions, which for students of philosophy 
 will make the chief value of his work, and for all minds have a 
 surpassing educational value, and which will doubtless secure for 
 him a permanent rank among the ablest interpreters of Plato's 
 mind and philosophy of the present or of any age. But for a 
 larger circle of readers, for all scholars of whatever degree of cul- 
 ture, the great charm and distinction of the work will be found in 
 the rare assemblage of literary qualities which enrich and adorn 
 its pages, and which invest it with the character of an original 
 production of high literary art. Besides the fine gifts and large 
 resources of a broad and generous scholarship, of the possession 
 of which Mr. Jowett has given ample evidence in his former writ- 
 ings, he has here displayed the truly poetic faculty of conceiving 
 and appreciating, with the charming scenery of Plato's Dialogues, 
 his manifold moods of thought, and tones of feeling and sentiment, 
 and the varying hues of his many colored diction, and also of cre- 
 ating an English diction capable of bearing all this precious bur- 
 den of intellectual wealth. It is this dramatic power of entering 
 into and expressing in fitting English the subtleties and elegances 
 of Platonic thought and speech, which makes at once the boldness 
 
236 THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 
 
 and tlie success of Mr. Jowett's style of translation ; and for all 
 readers of literary taste and sensibility, and especially all connois- 
 seurs and lovers of Plato, it gives his performance an excellence 
 quite unattainable by the utmost accuracy and fidelity of a merely 
 verbal scholarship. It may be, indeed, that those who know Plato 
 best and love him most, may miss, even in this translation, the 
 great original ; but on these the translation must act even as Pla- 
 to's favorite theory of reminiscence ; these fair images must kindle 
 in the delighted memory the remembrance of those original forms 
 of beauty and truth they once directly saw, and bear them back 
 to that higher sphere where, as in a happy home, they may again 
 gaze upon them face to face. For it is Plato in English, Plato as 
 he lives in his Dialogues, who is here brought before you in liv- 
 ing reality ; Plato himself shines through the English as through 
 an aerial transparent veil, all bright and luminous. As you read 
 you seem to be transported to the days of Plato and to Plato's 
 Athens. You are by turns in the Palsestra, the Lyceum, the Acad- 
 emy, or out by the "cool Ilissus," reclining on the soft grass, 
 under the shading plane-tree ; or again you are within courtly 
 Attic interiors, as the house of Agathon or of Callias ; you have 
 the very atmosphere of Athenian society created about you, and 
 you feel all its Attic urbanity of bearing and language ; and there 
 you have reproduced before you those illustrious personages of 
 Platonic dialogue in all that exquisite dramatic portraiture and 
 grouping, and you may follow their high discourse on things of 
 profoundest spiritual moment, as under the supreme conduct of 
 reason, with all ministering aids of imagination, wit, humor, irony, 
 raillery, it is ever striving onward to the bright, alluring goal of 
 absolute truth and good. 
 
 A conspicuous phase of this richly appointed discourse, as it 
 thus goes forward in these Dialogues, is presented by the Myths 
 of Plato, a subject most fruitful in interest and instruction,^ of 
 which I propose to attempt, in the remainder of this article, some 
 unfolding and illustration. 
 
 The mythical form of discussion, though foreign to modern 
 
 ^ Hegel has touched on this subject in his Geschichte d. Philosophies Bd. II. 
 188-217; also Zeller, Phil. d. Griechen ; Bd. II. 361-363, and 384-387; also 
 C. F. Hermann, Gesch. d. Platon. Phil.; also B. F. Westcott has discussed it 
 in the Contemporary Revieio, vol. ii. The German work by Dr. J. Deuschle, 
 die Platonischen Mythen, I am acquainted with only through a notice of it by 
 Susemihl in Bd. 70 of Jahn's Jahrbiicher. 
 
THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 237 
 
 philosophical writers, is constantly employed by Plato ; it is no less 
 germane than the dialectic form to his philosophy and to his own 
 mind ; his genius, in its freest movement, is alike native and 
 familiar to the processes of the imagination and of the reason ; 
 and both it ever pursues with the same earnestness of spirit, and 
 for the same intellectual and moral ends. In reading his Dialogues, 
 you pass, by the easiest transitions, from the severest logical in- 
 vestigations to poetic representations of truth, which are fashioned 
 from sensible images or from analogies of human life ; from an 
 atmosphere where has reigned the light of pure thought, you 
 enter regions all aglow with various coloring through the prismatic 
 touch of the imagination ; the discourse of Socrates, or some other 
 leading speaker, glides into what he is pleased to call an old 
 world story, or a tale, or a narrative which he professes to have 
 heard from some sage priest, or a certain wise woman ; or into 
 a scene or a series of scenes, which under the cunning agency of 
 art gradually expand into the rich fullness of a grand epic, or of 
 a solemn drama. 
 
 All these varieties of mythical representation have this general 
 feature in common, that they give expression to ideas in the 
 language of sensible imagery; the substance is speculative, the 
 form is poetic. Of them all, too, it may be observed, that so 
 far from being, as some have supposed, mere outward adornments 
 of speech, or graceful embellishments of thought, or mere poetic 
 fancies, void of reality, they belong essentially to Plato's entire 
 manner of thinking and of expression,^ and are conceived by him 
 and directly affirmed as resting upon a substantial basis of truth. 
 " Listen," Socrates says, at the beginning of one of his mythical 
 narratives, " listen to a tale, which you may be disposed to regard 
 as only a fable, but which, as I believe, is a true tale, for I mean, 
 in what I am going to tell you, to speak the truth." And so at 
 the end he says, "There might be reason in your contemning 
 such tales, if by searching you could find out anything better or 
 truer." Such is Plato's language in regard to all his myths. 
 
 When, however, we make a comparative study of these poetic 
 representations, we find that, while they have these general features 
 in common, they are separated by marked distinctions in their 
 nature, and in the occasions and uses for which they are employed. 
 Some, and these among the best in substance of thought and 
 finest in form of art, are rather allegorical than strictly mythical, 
 ^ C. F. Hermann, Abhandlungen^ § 291. • 
 
238 THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 
 
 and in some instances rise into elaborately constructed allegories, 
 which illustrate the most perfect style of this kind of figurative 
 discourse. Here the thought is first present in its entireness in 
 the mind of the writer, and might just as well be expressed in the 
 language of the thinking faculty, but yet, by the profoundest 
 motives to the preference, is cast in an imaginative form. This 
 form is most congenial not only to the native bent of Plato's 
 genius, but also to his habitual and ever present view of the 
 intimate relation between the natural and the spiritual world, and 
 to the ethical and religious spirit of his whole philosophy. In all 
 the world of sense visible to the bodily eye, he beheld ever the 
 faint reflection of a world of spirit, visible to the eye of reason ; 
 in the changing, passing phenomena of the seen, he discerned 
 only images of the changeless realities of the unseen ; the sun and 
 moon and stars and the earth, with all their light and beauty 
 and glory, for him were shadowy imitations of original patterns 
 of perfection in the Divine Ideas. Thus to his habitual concep- 
 tion all nature and the whole life of man was one vast and vari- 
 ous allegorical emblem of spiritual truth; and so it was by a 
 natural and spontaneous choice that in discoursing upon such 
 truth, he should set it in pictures after the manner and likeness 
 of the universal picture by which he felt himself to be ever 
 surrounded. This form of teaching was also in harmony with the 
 ethical spirit of Plato's writings. It is this spirit which pervades 
 and informs, as an animating soul, the whole body of his writings. 
 The world affords no other instance of a philosophic writer of 
 such genuine speculative powers, concentrated upon such practical 
 moral ends, who so perfectly united and identified life with science, 
 action with knowledge, morality and religion with philosophy. 
 With him philosophy was not, as in the modern sense, a theory of 
 the universe, or of man ; it was not a methodical exposition of any 
 intellectual system already worked out in his own mind ; he was 
 from first to last an inquirer with other inquirers, bent with 
 utmost intent upon the pursuit and appropriation of truth, in all 
 the fair realms and forms in which it exists, which are accessible 
 to the nature of man. In his view, philosophy was first and pre- 
 eminently moral, in that, as its name imports, it is the love of 
 wisdom ; this noblest of human passions alone supplied the suf- 
 ficient and constant force to the scientific search and discovery 
 of wisdom in its ultimate principles, and then the due force of 
 motive for its reception and assimilation in the character and 
 
THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 239 
 
 the life. Excelling in science his great master, by establishing 
 the Socratic principles upon a broad and firm scientific basis, 
 he emulated his noble example as a teacher of virtue, in striving 
 to enlighten and inform his generation in all right sentiment 
 and action, in an age and society no less noted for refinement 
 of manners and literary culture than for looseness in the theory 
 and the practice of right living. When we remember that these 
 were the ultimate ends of all Plato's philosophical teachings, we 
 can readily understand why he laid under contribution all the 
 resources of the imagination in the illustration and enforcement 
 of truth. None knew better than he, nor better exercised the 
 moral functions of this creative faculty ; and never were they 
 more fitly employed than in the instruction of a people so alive 
 as the Greeks to its influence, and so susceptible of its educating 
 power. Finally, we are also to remember that in the religious 
 aims of his philosophy, in his purpose to reform such religion 
 as the Greeks possessed, he had to deal with conceptions of the 
 gods which, in the forms of mythology, were originally the off- 
 spring of the imagination, and which, notwithstanding the mix- 
 ture of false elements they contained, yet through the enduring 
 beauty of their poetic garb still lingered in the popular faith. In 
 re-creating the natural religion, of which Homer had been the 
 maker ages before, and whose poems had been the Bible of the 
 Greeks for succeeding generations, it was his far higher office, 
 himself a philosophical poet, to clothe in forms of like poetic 
 beauty, truer and better creations of the Supreme Being, as the 
 supremely true and good, and supremely worthy of man's know- 
 ledge, adoration, and service. 
 
 Let me now present some illustrations of these allegorical myths. 
 Out of the many I will select two, which are among the most 
 perfect of their kind and which also represent what is most char- 
 acteristic in the substance and manner of Plato's philosophical 
 teachings. 
 
 The first is the well known allegory of the Cave, in the seventh 
 book of the " Republic." Lord Bacon has drawn from it, to exhibit 
 in his " Idols of the Den " the wayward prejudices of individual 
 human character ; but in Plato, it is a picture on a broader 
 canvas, of the world of the truly educated philosopher, and of 
 that of ordinary men, with their imperfect education. Towards 
 the end of the sixth book, Socrates has declared his doctrine, that 
 only philosophers must be guardians of the ideal state, and has 
 
240 THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 
 
 touched upon the progressive discipline they must undergo to be 
 qualified for their high office. Of this discipline, the highest 
 stage of all is the study of the good. When asked what is the 
 good, he says that he can convey a notion of it only by a figure. 
 In the world of sense, he says,^ we have the sun, the eye, and 
 visible objects; in the intellectual world, and corresponding re- 
 spectively to these, there are the good, the reason, and the ideas. 
 The good, then, is the sun of the world of pure intelligence ; it 
 sheds the light of truth on all subjects, and gives to the eye of the 
 soul the vision of knowledge ; and as in the visible world light 
 and sight are like the sun, and yet not the sun itself, so in the 
 intellectual, truth and knowledge may be regarded as like the 
 good, but are not the good itself, which must be valued as more 
 precious than they. Then follows the allegory. It is too long 
 for direct quotation. It may suffice to present its principal phases, 
 which show the chief truths it teaches. 
 
 Imagine, Socrates says,^ to conceive our condition as educated 
 and as uneducated, imagine an underground cave-like dwelling, 
 having a long entrance open to the light, and in this dwelling 
 men confined from childhood, their legs and necks so bound that 
 they cannot move and can see only before them. At a distance 
 above and behind them a fire is blazing, and between the fire and 
 the prisoners runs a road, along which a wall is built up, just like 
 the screens which jugglers put up in front of the spectators, and 
 above which they show their wonders. Along this wall men are 
 passing, carrying vessels of all sorts, and statues and other images 
 variously wrought in wood and stone, aU which project over the 
 wall ; and some of the passers-by are talking and some are silent. 
 You see that these prisoners can see only the shadows of these 
 men and these objects as they are thrown by the fire-light on the 
 part of the wall which is in front of them, and if they should 
 talk to one another they would give names to the shadows just as 
 if they were the things themselves. And if the cave returned an 
 echo when a passer-by spoke, then they would suppose that the 
 shadow itself spoke, which alone they saw. In short, for them the 
 shadows of these men and these things would be the only realities. 
 So is it, Socrates teaches, with the life of ordinary men; they 
 live imprisoned in the world of sense, and contemplate its objects 
 alone, which are only the shadows of the realities of spiritual 
 truth. But suppose now, the allegory proceeds, that one of these 
 1 Republic, vi. 505-609. ^ Ibid. vii. 515-517. 
 
THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 241 
 
 captives were unbound, and made to rise and face the light and 
 gaze upon the objects themselves ; he would be dazzled by the 
 sudden splendor, and when told that he had been looking only at 
 shadows he would be sadly perplexed, and even believe that the 
 old shadows were more real than the substantial objects he now 
 beholds. But suppose further that he be snatched from the cave 
 and dragged by a steep pathway to some height on which he may 
 gaze upon the full lustre of the sun itself. At first his eyes will 
 be yet more cruelly dazzled by all this blaze of light, and he will 
 be unable to behold real objects at all. First he will discern only 
 shadows and images in the water, and then the moon and stars in 
 the heavens, and finally he will behold not only the images of the 
 sun, but the sun itself as it is and where it is. Such, now, is the 
 educated philosopher in comparison with uneducated men ; he has 
 escaped out of the world of sense, where only shadows appear, 
 and mounted, by the steep path of knowledge, to the upper world 
 of intelligence where are seen by reason the substantial realities 
 of being, and has gazed at last upon its sun, the supreme idea of 
 good, which once seen is inferred to be the cause of all that is 
 beautiful and good ; which in the visible world produces light, 
 and the orb that gives it, and in the invisible. Truth and Reason. 
 Yet further Socrates carries out his analogy. As it was necessary 
 for the prisoner, in order to see aright, not to have eyes given 
 him, for these he had before, but to have his whole body turned 
 round, that his eyes might look in the right direction, so it is the 
 task of the right education to turn the whole soul round, that its 
 eye, the reason, may be directed straight to the light of truth, 
 and endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of 
 being, that is to say, the good. Finally, to the question by what 
 agency this conversion of the soul is to be wrought, the answer is 
 given : By the agency of true philosophy, by those studies which 
 turn the mind from the things which are seen to the things which 
 are unseen, from shadows to the substance, from the transient and 
 phenomenal to the permanent and real, — in short by all pursuits 
 which bring the mind to reflect upon the essential nature of 
 things. Then is set forth the ascending series of these studies, 
 which culminate in dialectics, as the science of real existence. 
 The pursuit of these studies imparts the power of raising the high- 
 est principle in the soul to the contemplation of that which is best 
 in existence, just as in the figure the clearest of the senses was 
 raised to the sight of that which is brightest in the visible world. 
 
242 THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 
 
 There is another aspect of philosophy which is seen and exhib- 
 ited by Plato in allegory. As in the " Republic " the world of 
 sense is the exhibition of ideal truth and goodness, contemplated 
 on the side of intelligence by the eye of knowledge, so in the 
 " Symposium "it is the exhibition of ideal beauty, contemplated 
 on the side of emotion by the eye of desire. Hence arose out of 
 the imagination of Plato the allegorical representation of the phi- 
 losophical impulse in man as " the passion of the reason," the 
 Platonic Eros, or philosophical love. I shall not attempt a full 
 discussion of this subject. There we're needful for that an ex- 
 position not only of the whole of the " Symposium," the most per- 
 fect in artistic form of all the Platonic dialogues, and more pecu- 
 liarly Greek and Platonic in subject and style than any other, 
 but also of the Greek mind and society in Plato's time, and espe- 
 cially of some elements of Grecian sentiment and practice, which 
 need not here be touched, and which are hardly less strange to 
 Homeric than to Christian feeling,^ and in their relation to 
 humanity are scarcely intelligible to modern thought. I only 
 purpose, before adducing the allegory, to present some considera- 
 tions which may show the place it has in the teachings of Plato, 
 and how it is wrought by him into the general conception of the 
 " Symposium." 
 
 The Greek name for philosophy as the love of wisdom fur- 
 nishes in itself the thought which is the germ of the whole anal- 
 ogy. But absolute wisdom is identified with absolute goodness, 
 and so with absolute beauty, and thus wisdom as beauty is the 
 object of the emotion of love, which rises through its successive 
 stages to what in Platonic phrase is a pure and divine affection. 
 Socrates says in the " Phaedrus," God alone is truly wise ((to<^6<s) ; 
 but man may only be called <^tAocro<^o9, or lover of wisdom. And 
 in other places we are taught that ^ " to approach God as the sub- 
 stance of truth is science, as the substance of goodness in truth is 
 wisdom, as the substance of beauty in goodness and truth is love." 
 Thus, too, philosophers are called (/>iAoKaA.ot, or lovers of the beau- 
 tiful, or simply lovers (epwrtKot) 3 ; and in the " Symposium " So- 
 
 1 Schleiermacher's Einleitung zum Gastmahl, p. 380. Becker has a full 
 discussion of the subject in his Charides, Exc. ii. to Scene v. Jacobs, Verm. 
 Schr. iii. 212-254, had discussed it before, and more favorably. See, also, 
 Grote's Plato, ch. xxiv. ; also Jowett's Introduction to the Symposium. 
 
 2 Butler's History of Ancient Philosophy, ii. p. 277. 
 8 Phcedrus, 248, quoted by Butler. 
 
THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 243 
 
 crates declares that his whole science is nothing but a science 
 of love. Another element needs to be added to make the anal- 
 ogy more complete between love and the philosophical impulse. 
 This impulse is never thought of as limited in its ends to the 
 philosopher's self, but, in harmony with Plato's entire manner of 
 thinking, as directed to the production of knowledge and virtue 
 in others ; thus, in reference to the practical realization of truth, 
 it is a generative impulse. That we may be brought into proper 
 relation to our allegory we must also first bring into view some of 
 Plato's favorite thoughts from the " Phsedrus," which on this sub- 
 ject of love is a companion piece to the " Symposium." In the 
 " Phsedrus," Plato, in order to explain the origin of the transcen- 
 dental ideas, represents, also in mythical form, that preexistent 
 state of the soul in which she has directly seen, in the heaven 
 of true being, the divine ideas. With Plato, philosophy, as all 
 higher life, springs from madness,^ or the frenzy of inspiration. 
 As there is an inspiration of prophecy, an inspiration of poetry, so 
 in philosophy there is an inspiration of love. When the remem- 
 brance of those divine ideas which the soul has seen in the heav- 
 enly state is awakened by the sight of their earthly images, the 
 soul is rapt with amazement. She is beside herself, — borne away 
 by the enthusiasm of inspiration. It is this overmastering might 
 of the idea which causes that admiring wonder which Socrates says 
 is the feeling of the philosopher and the beginning of all philoso- 
 phy, so that, as he adds, that poet was a good genealogist who said 
 that Iris, the messenger of heaven, was the daughter of Wonder ; 
 hence, too, that excitement and irritation of feeling, those pangs 
 and pains described by Socrates with such truth of humor as 
 undergone by the soul to which has just come the boding of a 
 celestial message ; hence, too, the strangeness and awkwardness, 
 in sublunary matters, of the true philosopher, just as Alcibiades 
 wittily describes Socrates as now stalking through Athens like 
 a pelican and now standing in one spot fixed in abstraction of 
 thought all through the day, and all night long, and next morning 
 at sunrise seen standing there still. How that this ideal inspira- 
 tion takes the form of love is ascribed in the " Phsedrus " to that 
 peculiar splendor which distinguishes the images of the beautiful 
 beyond those of all other ideas, so that they make the strongest 
 impression on the soul. This passage shines with such a beauty, 
 as if a direct emanation from the primal source, that we will 
 
 1 Zeller, ii. 384. 
 
244 THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 
 
 quote it as a transition to the " Symposium." In quoting this 
 passage and other passages that will follow, we may be allowed 
 to offer a version which, without having such merit as belongs 
 to Mr. Jowett's English, seems to us to follow the original more 
 closely. 
 
 Plato says ^ in describing the superior force of the images of 
 beauty : — 
 
 " Of justice, temperance, or whatever else is dear to souls, the earthly 
 copies have no splendor ; but with our dull organs there are few, and 
 these with great difficulty, who on approaching the images behold the 
 model they represent. But beauty was then indeed resplendent to be- 
 hold, when with the happy choir of the blessed, we, following in the train 
 of Jove, and others in the train of other gods, gazed upon the glorious 
 sight and were initiated into what one may rightly call the most blessed 
 of all mysteries ; which we celebrated, ourselves all innocent and yet 
 without experience of all the evils which awaited us in the future ; ad- 
 mitted to visions innocent and simple and calm and happy, and look- 
 ing upon them in pure light, pure ourselves, and as yet unmarked by 
 that body, as we call it, which we now drag about, imprisoned in it just 
 like an oyster. All this out of grace to memory, for whose dear sake, 
 through a fond longing for the visions then seen, our speech has lingered 
 too long. But as to beauty, as I said, it shone there, as it went, among 
 those other forms ; and now that we have come to earth we have appre- 
 hended it through the clearest of our senses, itself shining clearest of all. 
 For sight is the sharpest of all the bodily senses, and yet by means of it 
 is not wisdom seen, for indeed all too mighty loves would arise if of her 
 and the other lovely ideas like brilliant images came to the sight ; but 
 now to beauty only has fallen the lot to be at once the brightest and the 
 most lovely." 
 
 Such is the view given in the " Phsedrus." But in the " Sym- 
 posium " love is not of beauty only, but also of the production of 
 beauty, or of " birth in beauty ; " and this is explained as the 
 striving of the mortal nature for immortality, the necessity of its 
 nature for self-preservation through the ever new production of 
 itself. The " Symposium " is, to be sure, a real Athenian ban- 
 quet, where wine is drunk in the largest Greek measures ; but yet 
 it is a feast of reason, and the whole entertainment is Love. Five 
 of the guests have spoken in lofty discourses the praises of Love, 
 and all with the approbation of the company, especially the host 
 Agathon, who has been heartily cheered, and pronounced to have 
 spoken in a manner worthy of himself and the god. Yet all have 
 
 1 Phcedrus, 250. 
 
THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 245 
 
 fallen short of the great argument. Socrates alone, who last of 
 all comes to his turn, is able to rise to its height, nor yet he of any 
 wisdom or knowledge of his own, as he says with the politeness 
 of a good guest, and with his usual confession of ignorance. He 
 has been instructed in the science of love by Diotima, a wise 
 woman of Mantineia, who is a priestess and inspired, and so 
 knows and can tell the truth ; and he will tell the marvelous tale 
 of Love as he has heard it from her inspired lips. It is quite 
 noticeable that in this company of the choicest wits of Athenian 
 society, Plato, through Socrates, exalts a woman to the chief place, 
 and makes her the teacher of all. Perhaps the simple reason is 
 that the theme of discourse is love. But to proceed. In his dia- 
 lectic way Socrates puts the questions to Agathon which Diotima 
 once put to him, and then he gives the answers just as they were 
 drawn out by her. The chief answers were these : As love is of 
 the nature of desire, what it desires is not what it is or has, for 
 no one desires what he already is or has. And love is desire of 
 the beautiful, and so love has not the beautiful, and as the beauti- 
 ful is also the good, Love in desiring the beautiful has not, but 
 desires the good. So, too, Socrates had said to Diotima, as Aga- 
 thon had just now said in his speech, that Love was a god ; but 
 Diotima had taught him that Love was not a god, but only a 
 being intermediate between divine and human. On this he had 
 begged to know the parentage of Love, and the wise woman had 
 told him the following tale of his birth : ^ — 
 
 "At the birth of Aphrodite the gods held a feast, and among the 
 guests was Resource, the son of Counsel. The feast over, Poverty came 
 to beg, as she knew of the good cheer there, and she lingered about the 
 doors. Now Resource, who was very much the worse for the nectar, — 
 for wine there was then none, — went into the garden of Zeus, and there 
 sank, overpowered, to sleep. Then Poverty, taking quite insidious 
 means, on account of her want of resources, to get offspring from Re- 
 source, lay down by his side, and conceived Love. So it was that Love 
 became the follower and servant of Aphrodite, because he was born on 
 her birthday, and because by nature he is a lover of the beautiful, and 
 Aphrodite is beautiful herself. Seeing then that Love is the child of 
 Resource and Poverty, he has corresponding fortunes in the world. In 
 the first place he is poor, and far from being delicate and fair, as most 
 people suppose, he is rough and squalid, and goes barefoot, and is house- 
 less, always lying on the bare earth, sleeping under the .open sky, at 
 1 Symposium^ 203, 204. 
 
246 THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 
 
 people's doors and on the streets, and according to his mother's nature, 
 always a mate of Want. But, on the other hand, taking after his father, 
 he pursues the good and the beautiful, he is courageous and hold and 
 intent, a mighty hunter, always weaving wiles, longing after intelligence, 
 full of resources, philosophizing his life long, a terrible enchanter, sor- 
 cerer, sophist. Moreover, by nature he is neither immortal nor mortal, 
 but in the same day he lives and flourishes and then dies, and then again 
 comes to life again by virtue of his father's nature. The resources he 
 gets flow away again, and so love is never without resources, and never in 
 possession of wealth. So also he stands midway between wisdom and 
 ignorance, for the matter stands thus : No god is a lover of wisdom or 
 desires to become wise ; for he is already wise. Nor when any one else 
 is already wise is he a seeker of wisdom. And just as little do the igno- 
 rant seek after wisdom ; for that is just the evil of ignorance, that with- 
 out being fair and good and wise, it yet is quite satisfied with itself ; 
 since whoever thinks himself not in need of a thing has of course no 
 desire for it. ' Who, then, Diotima,' said Socrates, ' are the lovers of 
 wisdom, if neither the wise nor the ignorant ? ' ' Why that,' said she, 
 * must be plain to a child ; for they are those who are between the two, 
 and of these, too, is Love. For wisdom belongs to the most beautiful, and 
 Love is of the beautiful, and so Love is a philosopher, or lover of wis- 
 dom, and as such stands between the wise and the ignorant. And the 
 cause of this, too, is his parentage ; for he is of a father who is wise and 
 wealthy, and of a mother who is poor and ignorant. Such, my dear 
 Socrates, is the nature of Love.' " 
 
 Thus it is that Plato allegorizes the genesis and nature of the 
 impulse of man to wisdom. It springs on the one hand ^ out of 
 the higher nature of man. It is a striving, in accordance with 
 this nature, after spiritual and everlasting good. In the figure, 
 Kesource, the father of Love, is the son of Counsel, or intelligent 
 forethought, and so Love is of a spiritual, immortal kindred ; and 
 as all acquisition, even of worldly good, is the result of intelli- 
 gence, so especially the acquisition of all higher good depends 
 upon the rational nature of man. On the other hand, it is only 
 striving, and not yet possession, and so presupposes want and 
 desire. So Love is the child of Resource and Poverty, and thus 
 a mean between having and not having, between aspiration and 
 attainment, desire and real possession. The other and higher 
 lessons taught by Diotima, which are not given in figurative form, 
 I will briefly add, but not in Plato's words. The object of this 
 striving of ,the human soul is the good, or, yet nearer, the pos- 
 1 Zeller, ii. 385-387. 
 
THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 247 
 
 session of the good, and its everlasting possession. The outward 
 condition of this love is the presence of the beautiful ; for it is 
 the beauty of spiritual good that kindles in the soul the desire of 
 its lasting possession. But this love varies in its degrees accord- 
 ing to the various manifestations of beauty. It reaches the ulti- 
 mate end towards which it is ever striving through a gradual 
 upward progression from the imperfect or less perfect forms to the 
 more perfect, and finally to the most perfect of all. The first is 
 the love of fair bodily forms, first of one, then of many and of 
 all, in every one of which will be discerned one and the same 
 quality of beauty. A higher is the love of beautiful souls, which 
 will reveal a more precious beauty than any of outward form ; 
 and such love will show itself in creating conceptions of wisdom 
 and virtue, and wise and virtuous character in education, in art, 
 in legislation. A third is the love which finds its wide sphere in 
 all aesthetic science, in the search and discovery of the beautiful 
 in whatsoever form. And finally the highest of all is love itself, 
 which is fixed upon true, absolute beauty, unmixed with aught 
 material or finite, formless, unchangeable, eternal, and so attains 
 its final end of immortal and blissful being. 
 
 " ' Here, my dear Socrates,' said the stranger of Mantineia,^ ' here, if 
 anywhere, is for man the life which alone is worth living, in contemplat- 
 ing the beautiful itself. If of this you once get a vision, it will seem to 
 you not after the kind of gold and garments and fair boys and youths, 
 which when you behold you are beside yourself for amazement, and are 
 ready, as also are many others, when seeing your loves and conversing 
 with them, neither to eat nor drink, if that were possible, but only to gaze 
 upon them and always be with them. What then if it were one's for- 
 tune to see beauty itself pure and unmixed, and not defiled by human 
 flesh and colors and other vain tinsel of mortality, — the divine beauty 
 itself in its simplicity ? Think you that man's life would be a poor one 
 who was ever looking at that and ever conversant with it ? Or do you 
 not suppose that only such a one, beholding beauty wherewith one must 
 behold it, will be able to produce not images of virtue, as he is not 
 attached to an image, but realities, because he is attached to the real ? 
 But whoever produces and educates true virtue, to him it belongs to be 
 dear to God, and to be immortal, if any man may be.' " 
 
 From this discussion and illustration of the myths of Plato 
 which are allegorical, I pass to speak of the nature and uses of 
 those which are genuine or proper myths. It is peculiar to these 
 ^ Symposium, 211, 212. 
 
248 THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 
 
 that in them the sensible representation is not, as in the allegory, 
 the embodiment of thought before grasped and fully appre- 
 hended ; but the thought and its poetic expression are coincident. 
 They come into being together, and are not only not separated, 
 but are inseparable; the story or the narrative is in itself the 
 truth which is taught. As in all genuine myths, so in these of 
 Plato, the imaginative form of presenting truth is not the choice 
 of a poetic and artistic nature, but a necessity ^ which is caused 
 by the limits of existing knowledge or by the limitations of the 
 human mind. Plato resorts to it when the subjects he would 
 treat are those which, as in some instances, transcend his own 
 knowledge and the knowledge of his times, and which, as in 
 others, transcend human experience and the logical processes of 
 human reasoning ; he employs it when he represents what for him 
 is reality and truth, but for which there has not yet been gained 
 or cannot be gained at all any adequate scientific expression. 
 
 Such Platonic myths are thus in their relation to matters of 
 science the strivings of a clear and far-seeing nature to peer into 
 the unknown, and to light up by the imagination its dim, undis- 
 covered regions; they are theories in the literal sense of that 
 word, sights of truth, descried by a kind of prophetic vision in 
 the dawn of science, to be verified by and by in the revelations 
 of its perfect day. But the , myths of this class, which treat of 
 scientific truth, are far inferior in interest and value to those 
 which set in truly prophetic scenes the great spiritual things that 
 lie outside the range of scientific knowledge, but are reached and 
 apprehended by the instinctive convictions of man's spiritual 
 nature. They are answers to the earnest questionings of the 
 soul, touching its origin and destiny, and the origin of the world 
 in which its present life is going on ; they are bold reaches into 
 that unseen world for which man was made, and which he is ever 
 nearing, representations, by sensible imagery, of great thoughts 
 that come to all human minds, like instincts, unawares. They give 
 at once utterance and assurance to the faiths which all men cher- 
 ish as their inborn and most precious possessions ; and though, as 
 affirmed by Hegel ^ as the modern hierophant of the absolute 
 Idea, they may be confessions of the impotence of philosophy, 
 they are yet truly philosophical as having in them that quality of 
 true wisdom which is content to confess ignorance in certain things, 
 but meets and sufficiently satisfies universal human wants. 
 1 Zeller, ii. 362. 2 Q^s^h. d. Phil ii. 188, 189. 
 
THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 249 
 
 I shall confine myself in illustration of this class of myths to 
 those, by far the most interesting and valuable, which shadow 
 forth in Plato's view the spiritual condition and destiny of man. 
 His thoughtful meditations on this theme of transcendent mo- 
 ment come in upon his mental vision in pictures, and, as they are 
 projected into form, unfold and exhibit so many successive scenes 
 or groups of scenes. In the '' Phsedrus," as already intimated, they 
 are scenes of the soul's preexistence ; in the " Symposium," of its 
 present condition ; and in the " Gorgias," the " Republic," and the 
 " Phaedo," where the judgment and its retributions are portrayed, 
 they are scenes of its future destiny ; and, taken together, they 
 form a kind of trilogy, after the manner of the Grecian drama, 
 representing in dramatic form the history of the human soul. 
 
 It is only these last to which we will now look, those in which 
 Plato, through the light of his intuitive moral beliefs, opens to 
 view the unseen world and its retributions. Let us remember that 
 it is these intuitive beliefs, — whether shining only through their 
 own light, or whether and how far yet more illumined by that true 
 light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, it is 
 not for me to say, — to which all these teachings of Plato are to 
 be ultimately referred. Remember, too, that these teachings all 
 presuppose Plato's faith, not only in the spiritual nature of the 
 soul, but also in its immortality. This faith in the soul's immor- 
 tality, whether a conclusion or an intuition, seems to have been 
 present in the consciousness of Plato clear and steadfast as now 
 in any Christian consciousness ; and it were well, indeed, if for 
 all Christian minds this faith had a like vital force and a like 
 supreme moral interest. These mythical narratives are too long 
 for entire quotation. They also differ from each other in contain- 
 ing more or less fullness of detail, and in being more or less per- 
 fectly elaborated in form ; and to some of the details Plato evi- 
 dently attaches no essential moral value. I must confine myself 
 to such portions as illustrate those central truths which they aU 
 have in common. 
 
 In all we discover the general view, that the condition of souls 
 in the other world, whether it be happy or unhappy, is of the na- 
 ture of retribution, and, moreover, a retribution which, though 
 assigned by judgment and sentence, yet is determined in the case 
 of each individual soul by the character it has formed during the 
 probation of its earthly life. It is remarkable with what clearness 
 the future of the soul is portrayed as only the carrying out of the 
 
250 THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 
 
 process of education begun upon earth. The soul, when unclothed 
 of the body, appears in the presence of its judges with its charac- 
 ter visibly stamped upon it, and goes straight to the lot and place 
 appointed for it by the eternal laws of moral being. Let us note 
 in the " Gorgias " the telling of this truth ; and let us remember, 
 while we read, in order to keep in mind the moral ends which 
 these myths subserve, those words of Socrates which immediately 
 precede it. He has just said : ^ " For death itself no man but an 
 utter fool and coward fears, but it is the doing wrong that he 
 fears, for a soul indeed to go to the other world loaded with many 
 wrong-doings, — that is the last of all evils ; and if you are will- 
 ing I will tell you a story to show that this is so." The story fol- 
 lows then on this wise : — 
 
 " In the time of Cronos there was this law which, as formerly, so now 
 also obtains, that whoever had lived justly and piously should at death 
 go to the isles of the blest, and dwell there in all happiness beyond the 
 reach of evil, but that whoever had lived in injustice and impiety should 
 depart to the prison-house of vengeance and punishment, called Tartarus. 
 And in the time of Cronos, indeed, and yet later when Zeus was holding 
 the rule, both the judges and the judged were still alive, and the judg- 
 ment of the former was given on the very day when the latter were to 
 die. So the judgments were ill given. Therefore Pluto and the author- 
 ities from the isles of the blest came to Zeus and said that men came to 
 both places undeservedly. Then, said Zeus, I myself will see to it that 
 this does not take place in future ; for the judgments are ill administered, 
 for they who are judged are still clothed, because they are alive ; many, 
 therefore, who have wicked souls are indued with fair bodies and with 
 rank and wealth, and when the judgment occurs, many witnesses come 
 forward and testify that these have lived well. The judges are put in 
 awe by these, and besides they, too, when judging, are clothed, their eyes 
 and ears and their whole bodies acting as a blind to their souls. All this 
 now stands in the way, alike the clothes of the judges, and the clothes of 
 the judged. In the first place, then, I must see that an end is put to 
 men's having a knowledge of death beforehand, and indeed Prometheus 
 has already been told to have this stopped ; then they must be judged 
 when unclothed, for they must be judged when they are dead ; and the 
 judge must be unclothed by death, so that with the soul itself he may be- 
 hold the soul itself of each one, immediately after death, when bereft of 
 all his kindred, and all that fair adornment left behind wherewith on 
 earth he was arrayed, in order that the judgment may be just. Indeed, 
 having come to know all these things earlier than you, I have made my 
 sons the judges, two from Asia, Minos and Rhadamanthus, and one from 
 
 1 Gorgias, 523, E. 
 
THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 251 
 
 Europe, ^acus. These, after their death, shall judge in that meadow 
 where three ways meet, and out of which two roads lead, the one to the 
 isles of the blest, the other to Tartarus. But to Minos I shall assign the 
 prerogative of arbitration in case the two others are in doubt, in order 
 that the judgment may be as just as possible touching the journey that 
 men must take." 
 
 Another passage may be quoted to illustrate what has been said 
 above of the character which the soul carries upon itself in the 
 other world : — 
 
 " When ^ these have come to the judge, Rhadamanthus places them be- 
 fore him, and gazes upon the soul of each, not knowing whose it is ; but 
 very often laying hold of the soul of the great king or of some other king 
 or ruler, he sees nothing sound in it, but finds it fouled by scourges, and 
 full of scars from perjuries, the stamps which each one's conduct has im- 
 printed upon his soul, and so he sees all crooked on account of lying and 
 vain-boasting, and nothing straight, because his life has lacked the train- 
 ing of virtue ; he sees this soul all full of baseness and deformity by rea- 
 son of license and luxury and arrogance and incontinence ; and having 
 seen it, he straightway sends it in dishonor to the prison where it is to 
 undergo the sufferings meet for it." 
 
 The general view given in these passages we find also in the 
 "Phsedo " and in the story of Er in the "Republic ; " but with dif- 
 ferences worth noting in the conceptions of the judges and of the 
 time and manner of judging, and especially in the description of 
 the abodes of the blest and the seats of torture for the wicked. 
 In the " Phaedo " Socrates adduces his story to enforce the same 
 truth as in the " Gorgias." " The soul," he says,^ " comes to Hades, 
 bringing with it nothing but education and nurture, and these 
 indeed are said greatly to help or to harm the departed at the 
 very outset of his pilgrimage thither." Then he tells Simmias ^ 
 that the story is that after death every soul is conducted by its 
 genius to the place where the dead are gathered together before 
 they go to Hades under the charge of the appointed guide. Now 
 the wise and well-ordered soul follows in the path conscious of 
 her position ; but the impure soul, yet turning with longing desire 
 for the body and the world of sense, is at length forcibly carried 
 away by the attendant genius. And when such a soul reaches the 
 gathering place, every one flees from it and shuns it ; without com- 
 panion and guide it wanders about in dire distress, till at last it is 
 borne to its own fitting habitation. But the pure and just soul 
 
 1 Gorgias, 524, E, 525, A. « pj^cedo, 107, D. s lUd. 108. 
 
252 THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 
 
 which has gone through life under the companionship and guid- 
 ance of the gods comes also to its own proper home. 
 
 But there is a more marked difference between the " Gorgias " 
 and the " Phsedo " in the conceptions of retribution they respectively- 
 present in the situation and character of the abodes of the good 
 and of the bad. While in the former these are only generally 
 mentioned as the isles of the blest and as Tartarus, in the latter 
 they are described with utmost distinctness even of geographical 
 detail, and are made all glorious and heavenly or dismal and awful 
 by the most affluent material imagery, so that they seem like dis- 
 tant pagan glimpses of apocalyptic vision. The heaven of Plato 
 is like and yet unlike the Elysian fields of Homer or Hesiod's 
 isles of the blest. Like them it is on the earth indeed, but not as 
 they in far-off land or ocean of the setting sun, but on some upper 
 supernal earth, in regions that come so near the heavenly world 
 that all nature in it shines with a celestial beauty, and its dwell- 
 ers walk with the gods. Socrates tells his hearers ^ that there are 
 many marvelous places of the earth, and very different from any 
 that geographers tell us of. He is persuaded that the earth is 
 very vast, and that those who live along the borders of the sea in 
 the region from the Phasis to the Pillars of Hercules are like ants 
 or frogs living about a marsh, and inhabit only a small part of it, 
 and that many others live in many other such places. There are 
 many other hollows like this of ours where the water and mist and 
 air gather, but the true earth is pure and lies in the pure heavens, 
 where are also the stars. But we who live down in these hollows 
 fancy we are on the surface of the earth ; very much as if creatures 
 down at the bottom of the sea were to fancy they were on its sur- 
 face, and that when they saw through the water were to think the 
 sea to be the heavens. If we could only take wings like a bird 
 and fly upward, like a fish who sometimes puts his head out and 
 sees this world for a moment, we should see a world beyond, and 
 that is the true upper earth. And then he goes on to picture that 
 upper realm. There the trees and the flowers and the fruits and 
 all other things that grow are all fairer than any here, and there 
 are hills and stones in them clearer and fairer than our most pre- 
 cious emeralds and jaspers and other gems ; there are hills, indeed, 
 which are solid gems, of which our jewels are only little frag- 
 ments. And there are animate beings, too, and men, some in a 
 middle region, others dwelling about the atmosphere, as we do 
 
 1 Phcedo, 109-113. 
 
THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 253 
 
 about the sea, and others on islands which the atmosphere encir- 
 cles; for our atmosphere is their sea, and their atmosphere is the 
 ether. Then, too, they have temples and sacred places where the 
 gods really dwell, and men see them and hear them, and commune 
 with them, and they see the sun and moon and stars, just as they 
 are, and all their other blessedness is like to this. From this 
 bright supernal heaven the seer now passes to the dread abodes of 
 the wicked, in the lower parts of the earth. In the earth are 
 deeper and vaster hollows, and vastest and deepest of all is Tar- 
 tarus, a huge chasm, which pierces its inmost depth, and thither 
 are ever flowing immeasurable rivers of fire and torrents of mud. 
 Then follows the description of the four rivers of Tartarus, a pas- 
 sage which I may perhaps give briefest and best from that kin- 
 dred one of Milton's,! which indeed the Christian poet seems to 
 have wrought from the pages of the pagan philosopher into his 
 picture of the lower world. With his fine sense for language the 
 poet gives, with the names themselves, their moral import : — 
 
 " Along the banks 
 Of four infernal rivers, that disgorge 
 Into the burning lake their baleful streams: 
 Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate; 
 Sad Acheron, of sorrow, black and deep; 
 Cocytus, named of lamentation loud 
 Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon 
 Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage." 
 
 Such in the view of Socrates is the nature of the other world ; 
 and to these upper or to these lower realms the dead are brought 
 after they have been judged and sentenced according to their 
 deeds. 
 
 Yet this general doctrine of retribution unfolds itself still more 
 in its applications to individual souls among the good and among 
 the bad according to the differences of their lives on earth ; in the 
 one class, higher heights of goodness and blessedness with some 
 than with others, and in the other deeper depths of sin and misery. 
 Both in the "Gorgias" and in the "Phsedo" some of the sinful are 
 represented as curable, such as have been neither very good nor 
 very bad, and for these a place of purgatory is assigned, and for 
 them punishment is corrective, and even as on earth suffering is 
 remedial. Their relief from suffering seems also to be conditioned 
 by the forgiveness of those whom they have wronged on earth. 
 ^ Paradise Lost, ii. 288, sqq. 
 
254 THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 
 
 Thus in the " Gorgias " ^ it is said : " But some are benefited in 
 the punishment they have received alike from gods and men, and 
 such are they who have been guilty of curable sins ; yet only by 
 pains and sufferings does the benefit accrue to them both here 
 and in the lower world, for it is not possible otherwise to be set 
 free from iniquity." And still more clearly in the "Phaedo:"2__ 
 
 "Those who are adjudged guilty of sins curable indeed but great, 
 as for instance doing violence in a moment of anger to a father or 
 a mother, and have gone sorrowing for it the rest of their lives, or 
 who in like circumstances have become murderers, these must needs be 
 cast into Tartarus, but after a stay there of a year the wave casts them 
 forth, the homicides into the Cocytus, the patricides and the matricides 
 into the Pyriphlegethon ; and when by way of these they have come 
 nigh the Acherusian Lake, they cry aloud and call upon those whom 
 they have slain or wronged, beseeching them to allow them to come 
 out of the river into the lake ; and if they prevail, they come out 
 and are set free from their evils; but if not, they are conveyed back 
 into Tartarus, and thence again into the rivers, nor cease to suffer these 
 things till they prevail by their entreaties over those whom they have 
 wronged." 
 
 But on the other hand Socrates teaches that there are souls 
 incurably sinful, whose sin has become by the force of evil habit 
 so wrought into the texture of their being as to be past all healing ; 
 for these suffering is remediless, and for themselves punitive, and 
 in respect to others, monitory. No words of Scripture teach more 
 clearly or vividly than Plato's, in respect to such souls, the doctrine 
 of everlasting punishment ; you seem to hear, as you read, a 
 distant prophecy of " the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is 
 not quenched." In the " Phsedo " ^ this is taught in a single sharp 
 sentence : " But those who are found incurable on account of the 
 magnitude of their crimes, by the commission of many and great 
 acts of sacrilege, or of unjust and iniquitous murders or the like, 
 — these a fitting lot hurls into Tartarus, whence they never come 
 out." But in the " Gorgias," and especially in the " Republic," this 
 teaching is drawn out with far more fullness and vividness of 
 statement and illustration. To quote first from the " Gorgias : " * — 
 
 " But those who have perpetrated the most unrighteous crimes, and on 
 account of such deeds have become wholly incurable, these derive no 
 longer any benefit from their sufferings, but others derive benefit from 
 them, when they see them hung up as examples in the prison-house in 
 Hades, as a spectacle and warning to all the unrighteous." 
 
 1 525. 2 113^ 114. 8 113, E. * 525, C. 
 
THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 255 
 
 And these souls of bad eminence in guilt Plato thinks are 
 usually those of tyrants and kings and public men ; for these 
 have the power of doing wrong, which is denied, fortunately for 
 themselves, to persons of humbler quality. He cites Homer for 
 the truth of this, if)v he always describes the sufferers of endless 
 punishment as the kings and potentates of the earth, such as 
 Tantalus and Sisyphus, while a Thersites, or a private person such 
 as he, is never so described. A far more fearful passage occurs 
 in the " Republic ; " but for its full understanding a preliminary 
 word is necessary touching the general conception of the story 
 there given of Er the Pamphylian. This story is the completest 
 in thought and form of all Plato's myths. It is the peculiarity 
 of it, that the souls of the dead are represented as passing after 
 the judgment a pilgrimage of a thousand years in the upper or 
 in the lower earth, and then returning to this world to enter 
 upon a new probation. Er had died in battle and had lain on 
 the funeral pyre twelve days, when he came to life again and 
 told all he had seen in the other world. He had gone with 
 many others to a strange place, where there were two openings 
 near together in the earth beneath, and two like ones in the 
 heaven above. Judges sat in the space between, and bade the 
 just ascend the heavenly way on the right hand with the seal 
 of their judgment set upon them in front, and the unjust having 
 their seal on their back to descend by the way on the left. And 
 then as he stood there he saw some coming down after their 
 thousand years from the other heavenly opening, and others coming 
 up from the other opening in the earth, and there they rested 
 on the meadow, and he heard them tell one another of all they 
 had respectively experienced. The spirits from heaven spoke of 
 glorious sights and of bliss beyond compare, while the spirits 
 from the lower earth told with sighs and tears their tales of 
 dreadful suffering. For every deed of wrong a tenfold suffering 
 had been endured, and all deeds of justice and goodness had 
 been rewarded in like proportion. And there he had heard one 
 ask another of the fate of Ardiaeus, the notorious tyrant of Pam- 
 phylia, who on earth had committed so many atrocious crimes ; 
 and the answer was, " He is not coming up, and he will never 
 come." And then he told in support of his words a terrible 
 sight he had seen. Just when he was nearing the mouth of 
 the cave, and was on the point of ascending he saw Ardiaeus 
 and other despots with him ; and when they approached, and 
 
256 THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 
 
 fancied they too were coming up, the mouth uttered a fearful 
 roar, as was usual when any incurable sinner tried to ascend, 
 and suddenly appeared some wild men of fiery aspect, and seized 
 Ardiseus and the others, and bound them hand and foot, threw 
 them down and flayed them with scourges, ^nd dragged them 
 along the road, carding them on thorns like wool, and telling 
 all passers-by what were their crimes, and that they were again to 
 be cast into Tartarus. 
 
 If finally we turn to the other side of this picture of the other 
 world, we notice as very remarkable the simple brevity with which 
 Plato treats the blessed lot of the righteous as they enter upon 
 their everlasting rest. In the " Gorgias " ^ he says of the judge 
 Rhadamanthus : — 
 
 " And sometimes when he has looked upon some soul that has lived in 
 holiness and truth, whether of a private man or some one else, generally, 
 as I should say, of a lover of wisdom, who in his life has done his own 
 work, and has not been a busybody in many matters, he is filled with 
 joy, and sends it to the isles of the blest." 
 
 Andinthe"Ph2edo:"2 — 
 
 " And those who seem to have been distinguished by the holiness of 
 their lives, these are they who are liberated from these places on earth, 
 and, set free as it were from a prison-house, rise upward to their pure 
 home, and dwell in that upper earth." 
 
 And then he adds ^ the thought that a yet fairer lot awaits the 
 select holy souls : — 
 
 " And of these such as have attained sufiicient purity by the love of 
 wisdom five henceforth without bodies, and in mansions more beautiful, 
 which it were not easy to make visible, and of which time now fails me 
 to tell." 
 
 With one or two remarks I will close this discussion of the 
 myths of Plato. 
 
 And first let us not fail to observe, as in accordance with all 
 that has been said of the tendency of Plato's teachings, the practical 
 conclusions which Socrates reaches and enforces at the end of 
 these narratives. Thus, for instance, he concludes the "Gorgias" 
 with these words : * — 
 
 " And of what I have said, supposing that all the rest were refuted, this 
 
 remains firm, that the doing of injustice is more to be avoided than the 
 
 suffering of it, and that above all else not the seeming to be good, but 
 
 the being good ought to be the zealous aim of every man in private and 
 
 1 626, C. 2 114^ B. 8 PhcBdo, 114, C. * 527, B, C. 
 
THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 267 
 
 in public life ; and that if a man have in any respect done wrong he is 
 to be chastened, and that the next best thing to a man being just is the 
 becoming so through the chastening of punishment. Be persuaded, then, 
 and follow me, where you will be happy alike in life and in death." 
 
 And so, though more briefly, in the " Phaedo : " ^ — 
 
 " On account of these things we have gone through with, we ought, 
 
 Simmias, to strive in all ways to be partakers, in this life, of virtue and 
 
 wisdom. Noble is the reward, and the hope great." 
 
 And how nobly he ends the more elaborate myth in the " Re- 
 public," 2 the noble ending, too, of that longest and greatest of all 
 the dialogues : < — 
 
 " And so, Glaucon, the story was saved and not lost ; and if we believe 
 it, it will save us, and we shall cross well the river of Lethe, and not 
 taint our souls. Yes, if we all follow these words, believing the soul to 
 be immortal, and capable alike of all good and evil, we shall ever follow 
 the upward way, and always practice justice and wisdom, that we may 
 be dear to ourselves and to the gods while we remain here, and also 
 when we receive our reward, even as the men at the games who carry 
 off the prizes and go round to gather the gifts, and that we may fare 
 well both here and in that thousand years' pilgrimage we have just 
 described." 
 
 It is also to be observed how these myths which pertain to the 
 hereafter have for Plato all the force of truth and reality, and so 
 as the utterances of his best wisdom and knowledge are taught in 
 the form of historical narrative. These things, or such things as 
 these, he believes to be facts ; and he tells them, we might almost 
 say he reveals them, as facts. Towards the end of the " Grorgias"^ 
 Socrates says : — 
 
 " For my part, Callicles, I have faith in these narratives ; and I look to 
 be found of the judge in that day with a soul all undefiled. Having 
 bidden farewell to the honors that most men covet, and looking at truth, 
 I shall make my best endeavors after the utmost excellence of being, 
 alike during life, and at death, when for me that time shall come." 
 
 These noble answers to the universal questionings of the human 
 heart touching the hereafter have not lost for us, though we are 
 blessed with a divine answer, their interest and value. Across the 
 chasm of ages of time, across the wide interval that parts the 
 religion of Christ from all religions of men, it is good to hold 
 converse with one who, like Plato, found in the very nature of 
 the human spirit and its instinctive aspirations the sure promise 
 of an immortal life ; who himself aimed and exhorted all others 
 1 114, C. 2 X, 621, C. 3 526, D. 
 
268 THE PLATONIC MYTHS. 
 
 to value the soul above all price, and so to inform and enrich it by 
 all knowledge and goodness as to fit it for its true and high des- 
 tiny. And these teachings find their peculiar and crowning inter- 
 est as given by Plato the disciple in the last words of his master 
 Socrates, in the last hours of that great master's earthly life, 
 when standing on the very border of that life and of the life to 
 come he was now to put to the crucial test the central truth of all 
 those teachings, " that no evil can happen to a good man in life 
 or in death." And well and worthily did he endure the test. 
 When all about him were troubled and in despair, he only was 
 serenely calm and full of hope. When as a criminal condemned 
 to die, and soon to meet his fate, he would have seemed to need the 
 comfort of others, it was his alone to comfort all that sorrowful 
 and sorrowing prison company ; and all his comforting thoughts 
 and words came from the very source of their grief, from that 
 death which in his view was no evil, but rather an unspeakable 
 good. All the noisy clamor of the outside world, the rude dis- 
 cords of unbelieving and gainsaying men he heeded not, he 
 scarcely heard, his ears already catching the notes of that celestial 
 harmony on which he was meditating and discoursing. And what 
 sweet and musical words are those which he uttered in that part- 
 ing conversation : — 
 
 " You seem to think me poorer in prophecy than the swans ; for these 
 when they are aware that they are to die, having sung all their life long, 
 sing then more than ever, rejoicing that they are to go away to the god 
 whose servants they are. But men, because of their own fear of death, 
 falsely say of the swans that, lamenting death, they sing out their life 
 for grief, not considering that no bird sings when it is cold or hungry or 
 suffering from any other pain, not the nightingale itself, or the swallow 
 or the hoopoe, which are said indeed by men to sing a song of lament ; 
 but it appears to me that neither these sing for grief, nor the swans 
 either. Rather, as I think, do these swans then sing and rejoice more 
 than ever before because, being Apollo's birds, they are gifted with 
 prophecy, and know beforehand the good things of another world. And 
 I too seem to myself a fellow-servant of the swans, and a consecrated 
 servant of the same god, and to have received from my lord no less than 
 these the gift of prophecy, and so to be departing from life just as 
 cheerfully as they." 
 
 " Such was the end " [and these are the last words of the *' Phaedo "], 
 " such was the end, Echecrates, ' of our friend, of whom I may say that 
 he was the best and the wisest and most just of all the men whom I 
 have known." 
 
THE EELATION OF PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY TO 
 CHRISTIAN TRUTH. 
 
 AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE ALUMNI OF NEWTON THE- 
 OLOGICAL INSTITUTION, JUNE 10, 1873, AND PRINTED IN THE 
 " BAPTIST QUARTERLY." 
 
 I HAVE read somewhere of a learned statesman of England, 
 that he was wont to call the Dialogues of Plato the most beauti- 
 ful book in the world, after the Bible. Some may count this only 
 the expression of a fond admiration; and yet, what uninspired 
 thought of man makes nearer approaches to the Bible, in its con- 
 ceptions of virtue and virtuous character, than that which shines 
 out upon us from these dialogues ? And when we think of the 
 writer, and of the principal speaker in them, what relation do we 
 recall of master and pupil outside the life of the New Testament 
 so luminous with moral beauty, and so fruitful of elevating influ- 
 ence, as that of Socrates and Plato? Memorable was that day, 
 when the youthful Plato, his fine genius just flowering into poe- 
 try and beautiful letters, was brought by his companions to So- 
 crates, and, when listening to the new teacher, was seized with 
 such a view of the true ends of Athenian and all human life, 
 that he straightway forsook all his young dreams of literary am- 
 bition, and followed his acknowledged master, drawn by an irre- 
 sistible moral attraction. That day determined for Plato the 
 course of his long after-life. It marked his conversion to philoso- 
 phy, and to philosophy in the Socratic sense — not as professed 
 wisdom, but as the studious love of wisdom. It was a lifelong 
 search for truth, and a search no less ardent in its moral aims 
 than intense in its intellectual effort. It is this devotion to truth 
 for the truth's sake, so religiously sought, so largely found, by 
 virtue of which, far more than by aught else, Plato was supreme 
 in Grecian thought during the forty years of his career as Master 
 of the Academy, and in all the ages since has ruled from his urn 
 the spirits of men. For us, too, in these later Christian times, 
 his writings have a like value and interest, which commend them 
 to our thoughtful study. 
 
260 PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 I propose, then, that we consider some of the relations of 
 Plato's thought to Christian truth. And let me state from what 
 point of view I wish to treat in a brief discussion so large a 
 theme. It is something familiar to the experience of the Christian 
 student, that he is wont to compare the teachings of those an- 
 cient writers to whom he owes so much of his culture, with the 
 words of Jesus, to whom he owes the incomparably higher debt 
 of his religious hopes and faith. In accordance with such expe- 
 rience, I wish only to offer some views of what we find in Plato's 
 thought, with which we can have sympathy as Christians, and 
 of what we miss there, and can find in Christ, and in Christ 
 alone. 
 
 As a first and preliminary view, I remark, that we find in 
 the spiritual character of Plato's philosophy a near and most 
 friendly relation to Christian truth. That is a noble conception 
 of Plato which Raphael has wrought into his grand picture of 
 " The School of Athens " — where the philosopher stands, the 
 central figure of that august group of Grecian sages, his lifted 
 right hand pointing to heaven. So, too, is he pictured by the poet 
 Goethe, as a genius ever tending upward, and striving to kindle 
 in every breast the same soaring love for the beauty of spiritual 
 truth. How true to Plato's nature and life are these conceptions 
 of art ! And even so on a broader canvas, on the larger page 
 of history, he stands there ever to the inward eye, pointing not 
 Grecian sages alone, but all thoughtful minds, above the world 
 of matter and sense, to a world of spirit, to a world of ideas 
 as divine and eternal things, and the true home of the soul as a 
 spiritual being. I know of no writer's thought in antiquity that 
 has in it so distinctively this spiritual quality so familiar to us in 
 the substance of Christian truth. Everywhere are you kept 
 aware of that contrast and union as well, at once so mysterious 
 and so real in man's double nature and life, of the seen and tem- 
 poral, and the unseen and eternal. However thinkers may differ 
 about Plato's theory of ideas, or his views of the origin of mat- 
 ter, yet all will agree that, as in his conception of the world the 
 divine intelligence and goodness are prior and superior to material 
 nature and to man, so in man is the soul superior to the body, 
 and the things of the soul to the things of the body, and parted, 
 too, in a difference of kind and worth by a distance " which no 
 geometry can express. " How nobly does he speak of the origin 
 and worth of the soul I 
 
PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY. 261 
 
 " The soul [he says] came from heaven, but the body is earth-born ; 
 and so the soul is the divine part of man, and to be honored next to God ; 
 nor does a man honor his soul, when he sells her glory for gold, for not 
 all the gold in the world is to be compared with the soul ; but a man can 
 honor his soul only by making her better." 
 
 Are we not at once reminded of the words of Jesus, " What 
 shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his 
 own soul ? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul ? " 
 Only such a spiritual philosophy can establish a real basis for a 
 spiritual religion. Recognizing the primary conceptions of reve- 
 lation, God, virtue, immortality, in the facts of consciousness, as 
 the intuitive faiths of the soul, it finds man able to apprehend and 
 receive the positive truths of Christianity, and to partake of its 
 renovating and redeeming power. Hence it is that Platonism has 
 had such strong attractions for so many great and good men in 
 the Christian church, from the days of Origen and Augustine 
 until now. Hence, too, in every great epoch, in every new mental 
 struggle, in all the conflicts of Christian faith with doubt and 
 error, Plato has reappeared, and always in alliance with what is 
 noblest and best in Christian thought and action. And in these 
 days of ours, when there is such a pronounced tendency in physi- 
 cal science to resolve all vitality into material force, all thought 
 into cerebration, and all mind into matter, and so to exalt mate- 
 rial phenomena as the only possible subjects of human interest, 
 there seems to be needed a new infusion of Plato's ideal thought 
 to preserve the equilibrium between physical and spiritual truth. 
 It is instructive to remember that Plato's philosophy was at the 
 beginning a protest against the skepticism engendered by the 
 physical speculations of his time. In a quite remarkable pas- 
 sage he describes a race of people living in his day — earth-born 
 giants, he calls them — who were ever dragging down all things 
 from heaven to earth, who would hear of nothing but body and 
 matter, and denied the existence of everything which they could 
 not hold in their hands. By some strange provision of " natural 
 selection " this race seems to have survived till now, and to ex- 
 hibit, with some variations, the characteristics of that generation 
 which grew out of the soil of Athens. Probably we all set far 
 more store by matter than Plato was wont to do ; and we have, as 
 Plato had not, a physical science, which in its discoveries and 
 applications has won the respect and admiration of mankind. 
 But the speculations of some of the leaders of this progressive 
 
262 PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 science have inherent in them the same material and earthly 
 quality as those of their predecessors in Plato's time; and the 
 doctrine that all positive knowledge is of the physical, and that 
 all the universe consists of matter, is no less repulsive now than 
 it was then. When we are expected, and indeed bidden, to keep 
 up with the march of such a science, so omniscient of matter and 
 so nescient of mind, we feel willing to linger yet awhile in Athens ; 
 and there, in the groves of the Academy, listen to that calm voice 
 which, with uplifted hand, discourses still of the human soul as a 
 separate being, endowed with reason, and destined to immortality. 
 From this general view let me pass to the remark that in the 
 spirit and substance of Plato's ethical teaching we find a still 
 nearer relation to Christian truth. In nothing else was Plato so 
 genuine a disciple of Socrates as in his ultimate reference of all 
 philosophic inquiry to the practical ends of a righteous character 
 and life. It is true that, unlike his master, he was wont to push 
 his inquiries into the highest and rarest regions of speculative 
 thought ; but the end of his speculation in its utmost reach and 
 bound was to see and possess those immutable ideas of moral 
 being which, wrought into ideals of character and realized in 
 action, might bring man into likeness to God, and his disordered 
 life into harmony with the divine government. Do not suppose 
 that in thus speaking I am interpreting Platonic thought by 
 Christian speech. Remember that utterance in the " Theaetetus," 
 " God is altogether righteous, and he of us is most righteous who 
 is most like Him." Remember, too, that word of Plato in the " Re- 
 public," when he had laid the foundations of the state in perfect 
 justice and virtue, and was asked where, then, was such a state. 
 " In heaven," he said, " there is laid up a pattern of such a city, 
 and let him who desires contemplate that, and live accordingly." 
 Fond as Plato was of speculation, and bent upon securing a meta- 
 physical basis for morality, yet he was never wont to present 
 moral truth in the form of abstract teaching. We are to look in 
 Plato for no doctrinal system, no inquiry into the nature of virtue 
 or theory of the moral sentiments, in the sense of modern ethics ; 
 these you find only in his commentators, never in himself. They 
 are not after his manner. You are made aware, indeed, in all 
 that he writes, of the ruling power of the truest theories of mor- 
 als ; you feel ever the presence of an assured conviction of right 
 and wrong as ultimate moral contradictions, which can be resolved 
 into no other principles ; you discover the supremacy in man of 
 
PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY. 263 
 
 that faculty which they address, and which itself intuitively dis- 
 cerns them ; and you see the paramount value in human life of 
 their unconditional recognition and observance. But Plato was 
 born for letters no less than philosophy, and his power of thought 
 was equaled by his marvelous skill in language ; and in the use 
 of these rare gifts in rarer union, he aimed to bring moral truth 
 close to human feeling, and into alliance with the common senti- 
 ments of men. He wrought it by the vital and plastic force of 
 his literary genius into all forms of beautiful and impressive con- 
 ception, and of gracious and eloquent speech, fitted to quicken the 
 sensibilities and kindle the imagination by visions of the beauty 
 of moral excellence, and to win and carry the will in purpose and 
 effort to its attainment in virtuous life. And here is the unspeak- 
 able charm of Plato's moral writings, and here the secret of their 
 power. They are living illustrations of the beneficent influence 
 of letters, when guided by wisdom and virtue in bringing the 
 principles of moral and religious truth close home to the common 
 thinking and living of men. All honor to the Christian thinkers 
 who have established great principles in ethical science, and have 
 taught them in didactic form. Their power is enduring and sure ; 
 but except in rare instances it is not felt by the general mind, and 
 only slowly and through " the fit audience, though few," whom 
 they address. When we study the works of Bishop Butler, which 
 perhaps many of us more dutifully praise than love to read, or 
 those of Jonathan Edwards, and try for instance to put to practi- 
 cal use that definition of " Virtue as a love to Being in general," 
 are we not apt to think how immeasurably the direct influence of 
 those profound writers would have been widened if, with their 
 power of speculation like Plato's, they had also had something of 
 his genial style, if their talent for communication had borne any 
 proportion to their talent for its investigation and discovery. 
 These ethical writings of Plato, then, are not treatises or disquisi- 
 tions; they are dialogues, conceived and composed not for the 
 few, but for the many; for the whole Athenian public, and 
 through them for the world of mankind. They are conversations 
 after the manner of Socrates, and hardly less lifelike and real 
 than those actually held by Socrates in the streets of Athens. 
 They are the conversations of the master idealized as the master 
 was idealized himself by the genius of the pupil ; cast in a larger 
 mould, and adorned with all the finish of consummate art, but 
 instinct with the same moral spirit, and^ever striving to the same 
 
264 PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 moral ends. They are all drawn out from real human life, and 
 have in themselves its vital quality ; not Socrates alone, but all 
 the speakers are real men, types of Athenian character, represen- 
 tatives of Athenian opinion ; and the places of discourse their 
 daily familiar haunts, the market-place, the palestra, the courts of 
 law ; but wherever or by whomsoever held, or starting out from 
 whatever natural incident or description, they soon leave behind 
 them outward and earthly things, and touch and pierce to the 
 quick the profoundest questions of moral being, uncoiling with 
 sure dialectic skill a chain of moral sequence that reaches on 
 through all the present world far away into the unseen and eter- 
 nal. This method of teaching by the sharp questioning process 
 of dialogue was eminently fitted to the need of Plato's time. His 
 life and career fell on an age and among a people marked by in- 
 tellectual force and activity, but no less by moral weakness and 
 confusion, when the leaven of immorality and irreligion had 
 spread through the mass of society. Alike the leaders of the 
 people and the people themselves were complacently content to 
 live only amid the shows and shadows of truth and good; the 
 conceptions of a divine superintending Power and a future retri- 
 bution were only outworn fictions of credulity and superstition ; 
 virtue was a thing of tradition or opinion, right only might, and 
 goodness and badness only conventional terms, changing with 
 changing circumstance ; and thus the substantial ideas of morals 
 and religion were only empty sounds to the ear, and flitted before 
 the eye ever as dim unreal figures amid the dissolving scenes of a 
 passing world. Now it is in Plato's teachings which aim at a 
 practical reformation of these radical evils that the Christian 
 reader discovers near approaches to revealed truth, bright gleams 
 of moral light, issuing from the law written on the heart of man, 
 which foretoken the perfect manifestation to be made in the full- 
 ness of time in the ethics of the gospel, and the perfect life of 
 Christ. You are ever conscious, it is true, that it is only human 
 teaching, sometimes wrong, always limited ; but often are you 
 startled at the enunciation of principles which in themselves and 
 in their expression approximate to what is most characteristic in 
 New Testament teaching. As the philosopher exposes the conven- 
 tional morality of his time, which rested only on a kind of Athe- 
 nian " tradition of the elders," and aimed only at social or civic 
 respectability, you are reminded of Him who spake as never man 
 spake, when He told his hearers that unless their righteousness 
 
PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY. 265 
 
 exceeded the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, they 
 could in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. By his dia- 
 lectic process in these Dialogues how does Plato sift to the bottom 
 all that perverse Athenian life, and bring up to the light its mon- 
 strous delusions, and how earnestly he seeks to establish in private 
 and public life the supremacy of moral ideas ! What solemn 
 words he uttered in the ears of Athenian youth who affected to be 
 superior to a belief in the divine existence, and the divine gov- 
 ernment of the world. " God moves according to his nature in a 
 straight line to the accomplishment of his ends. Justice follows 
 him, and is the punisher of all who fall short of the divine law. 
 To that law he who would be happy holds fast and follows in all 
 humility." And in respect "to the ways of Providence," he 
 says : — 
 
 " O youth, who think you are unheeded by God, boast not of having 
 escaped his justice. Never shall you be lost sight of by it. Not so small 
 art thou as to hide in the depths of the earth, nor so high that thou canst 
 mount to heaven ; but either here or somewhere else thou shalt pay the 
 penalty. So, too, shall it be with the wicked whom you saw in prosper- 
 ity, and made the mirror of divine justice, not considering their latter 
 end." 
 
 It were difficult in brief compass to mention those elements of 
 Plato's ethical teaching which have a likeness to Christian truth. 
 His fundamental thought is that of a living virtue, resting upon 
 knowledge, and pervading the inner being of man, and ennobling 
 all human relations. This he represents in some Dialogues in 
 individual virtues, as temperance, justice, piety, in others in an 
 ideal unity ; and in one work, the " Apology," the conception is 
 set in the real example of Socrates, the highest illustration known 
 to himself and the pagan world of a genuine human life. In his 
 Dialogues of a wider compass this conception is fashioned into an 
 ideal for the individual of a comprehensive rule of life, and for 
 society of a state founded in the laws of reason and virtue ; and 
 in each aspect, and in both together, the conception is bound to 
 the great and governing thought of a divine moral order of the 
 world. Let me try to illustrate these elements by some of the 
 chief thoughts of the two Dialogues, the " Gorgias " and the " Re- 
 public." The " Republic " is treated sometimes as only an inquiry 
 into the nature of justice, sometimes only as the construction of 
 an ideal state ; but the two unite in one — in the idea of justice 
 visibly embodied in the perfect state. So, too, we are apt to look 
 
266 PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 only at separate phases of the many-sided " Gorgias." Some look 
 only at the contrast between true and false rhetoric as suggested 
 in the conversation with Gorgias ; others only at the contrast be- 
 tween true and false statesmanship, as portrayed in the conversa- 
 tion with Callicles ; but in truth these and other minor contrasts 
 are only means to one great moral end ; they are employed with 
 most earnest aim and consummate art to set forth the larger an- 
 tagonism of the true and the false art of life itself, and to lift up 
 the conception of an all-comprehensive imperial moral art of life 
 which takes up into itself all arts, all knowledge, and all action, 
 and sways all individuals and society by the laws of justice and 
 virtue. But it is especially in the conversations with Callicles in 
 the " Gorgias," and with Thrasymachus in the " Republic," that 
 we have the best moral teachings of Plato. In these sophists he 
 combats the teachers of the selfish theories of morals of aU times, 
 and their willing pupils of all generations — the larger Demos of 
 a world loving darkness rather than light, hating truth and loving 
 appearance, and bent upon gain and pleasure rather than the 
 right ; against them all he vindicates the ideas of truth and virtue 
 as not only real, but born of a divine right to a supremacy in the 
 soul, and alone yielding supreme good. None of his other Dia- 
 logues unfold their lessons in more dramatic form than these. 
 You seem to see the great forces of right and wrong, good and 
 evil, moving on over the world's stage in human chai^acters and 
 scenes, and shaping the action and destiny of men for the life that 
 now is and for the endless hereafter. You are taught that in spite 
 of all cunning appearance truth and goodness are real things, and 
 the divinest and best that men can seek, and to be sought for their 
 own dear sake, with no side-look to what may come of them ; that 
 it is not essential to be happy, but that it is essential to be virtu- 
 ous, even as Socrates said when they begged him to escape from 
 prison, that the thing to be cared for was not to live, but to live 
 well. There, too, is maintained the noble paradox, that to do evil 
 is far worse than to suffer evil, and that the next best thing to 
 being just is to become just, and that if a man have done injus- 
 tice, it is better even for himself that he be punished for it. And 
 what impressive scenes you witness there of virtue triumphant and 
 made perfect in suffering, and of vice defeated and made wretched 
 in success ! The unjust man, though on a throne and master of 
 thousands, is beheld as his own slave, his heart haunted by pas- 
 sion and fear, and himself the unhappiest of men. And that other 
 
PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY. 267 
 
 picture, too, on which the world yet gazes even as on a master- 
 piece of Grecian art — the just man robbed by an unjust world of 
 all earthly good, and clothed only in justice, but clad in that even 
 as in truly regal attire ; defamed, stricken, and scourged, and 
 finally crucified ; but his virtue proof against all infamy, and his 
 soul serene even in excruciating death. In this picture Plato was 
 doubtless portraying the fate of his master; but the Christian 
 beholder may seem to see it transfigured into that unapproachable 
 scene of the Divine Sufferer who gave up his life for the life of 
 the world. 
 
 But yet other scenes with their living lessons pass before the 
 view. Not only have the just and the unjust men in themselves 
 the highest good and the worst evil, but even in this life they have 
 each their sure recompense. Men may waver about them for a 
 while, but they are at last fixed in a right estimation of both. 
 Look long enough, and you shall see that the clever unjust who 
 made so brave a start, now come in foolish at the goal, and with- 
 out a prize; while the just man, like the true runner, perseveres 
 to the end and wins and wears the crown, these words proclaiming 
 the coronation : " All things in life will work for the good man, 
 for the gods have a care of him who desires to be like God, so far 
 as one can be by the pursuit of virtue." " Yet all this is as no- 
 thing compared with what awaits the just and unjust after death." 
 With this language the last scene of all then opens before us, dis- 
 closing to view the unseen and eternal world and its recompenses 
 of everlasting rewards and punishments. You behold the dread 
 tribunal there, and there the judges seated; and before them come 
 the souls of the just and unjust all unclothed and bare, bright 
 with the visible stamp of justice and virtue, or all foul and scarred 
 by injustice and vice, and they severally pass when judged straight 
 to their appointed lot and place. And as you look with strained 
 eye and ear, you seem to hear, as the lost go down to their doom, 
 their swift beginning woes, even as of "the worm that dieth not;" 
 and as the just rise upwards to mansions so fair they may not be 
 described, you seem to catch distant sounds sweeter far than music 
 of the spheres as they enter their everlasting rest. Thus it is that 
 these remarkable representations of the future world which con- 
 clude these Dialogues lift us up to the highest moral idea which 
 they aim to teach, and in true accord with their dramatic tone 
 they form the epilogues even as of solemn tragedies of human be- 
 ing. The antagonism of the twofold life of man and its twofold 
 
268 PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 art which has moved on through all their scenes, comes out at last 
 in clear entireness, the laws of human morality merge in the moral 
 laws of the universe ; and herein run and blend together all the 
 threads of the manifold tissues of the dramatic action. 
 
 But when we pass from the ethical to the religious thought of 
 Plato, and seek to find there a solution of the disorder in man's 
 relations to God, and of the means for its cure, it is then that we 
 see how his philosophy is at best only preparatory to Christianity 
 and parted from it, even as reason from revelation. There runs 
 through it all, indeed, a sad undertone of conviction that man has 
 somehow fallen out of a sphere in which he was made to move ; 
 and this mingles with a yearning sense of the need of some influ- 
 ence to uplift him and restore him there ; but what that fall was, 
 and what the means of recovery, are questions it fails, and must 
 needs fail, to answer. Let me touch upon some of the elements 
 of Plato's answers to these questions of sin and redemption, which 
 have been so solved for us by the words and work of Jesus. How 
 far short does he fall of the Christian conception of God ! He 
 rendered, indeed, a great service in the preparation of paganism 
 for Christianity, by teaching, in opposition to polytheism, the truth 
 of one God ; and I think, too, in opposition to pantheism, of a 
 personal God. He purged the Hellenic mythology of its unworthy 
 ideas of deity, and banished Homer from his ideal republic, be- 
 cause he adorned them by his verse ; and those ideas he replaced 
 with the doctrine of God, as the only Good and True, and as will- 
 ing only good and truth. But I find no word in all Plato's afflu- 
 ent Greek for the revealed conception of the holiness of God. 
 Never had reached his ear and touched his soul such a voice as 
 that caught by Isaiah from seraph's lips, " Holy, holy, holy, is the 
 Lord of Hosts." Never in the utmost reach of his genius had 
 he won that height to which the servant of Christ was borne by 
 the Spirit, when he looked through the opened door into heaven, 
 and heard that strain which rests not day and night, " Holy, 
 holy, holy. Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to 
 come." 
 
 With this defect in Plato's conception of God is connected his 
 imperfect view of sin. Manifold are the aspects which he presents 
 of moral evil in man. It is described in general as a parting of 
 the soul from God, and, quite in Scripture language, as living 
 without God in the world ; as a moral discord, a disease of the 
 soul, and especially as a bondage of reason to desire, of the spirit 
 
PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY. 269 
 
 to flesh. The body, indeed, is always with Plato the soul's mortal 
 foe. So controlling is this element in his thought, that he seems 
 to teach in allegory even the present bodily state as resulting from 
 the fall of the soul from its pristine purity. Once the soul en- 
 joyed a winged being, and, in a triple form of charioteer and two 
 steeds, careered in some ethereal paradise, and gazed in open vis- 
 ion upon absolute truth and goodness. But while one of the 
 steeds was white and obedient to the rein, and ever tending up- 
 ward, the other was black of color and yet blacker of nature, and 
 always gravitating earthward, and so by and by quite dragged 
 down his nobler mate, all wing-broken and plumes draggled and 
 finally gone, and doomed the soul to earth and bodily form. But 
 in all these aspects, evil in man is unlike the revealed conception 
 of sin. Its root is made to be intellectual rather than moral — a 
 disease of the intelligence which blinds the eye of the soul to true 
 good. Seldom does it approach the view of the ground of the evil 
 as lying in a perverted direction of the will, or in alienation of 
 the heart from God by voluntary transgression. It seems strange 
 that with all the earnest religious feeling which Plato so often 
 expresses, we discover none of that sense of ill-desert and need of 
 repentance and forgiveness so familiar to the Christian conscious- 
 ness. We could well part with the whole of that exquisite myth 
 to which I have just alluded for one word that might resemble the 
 parable of the publican, who would not lift up so much as his eyes 
 to heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, " God be merciful to 
 me, a sinner." 
 
 And with all his effort of searching, how far does Plato fall 
 below a conception of the remedy needed for the fallen state of 
 man ! Yet some profound students of the philosopher think that 
 his speculations have in them the germs of the Christian doctrine 
 of redemption and atonement. Such a view wrongs Platonism no 
 less than Christianity itself. The philosopher, indeed, is ever 
 teaching the bitter need of a moral deliverance of man, and 
 striving to reach and realize it ; and in his teachings we are often 
 startled at the likeness of his language to that of Scripture. The 
 soul, he says, must be turned from darkness to light, must die to 
 sin by rising above earthly passion and desire, must now be loosed 
 so far as possible from the bondage of the flesh, and look with 
 hope to death as the only perfect release from its thralldom. But 
 yet the only redemption which he can reach is, like the evil, an 
 intellectual one. It is a salvation to be wrought by philosophy. 
 
270 PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the soul rising by its aid through contemplation to the intuition of 
 truth. In a remarkable passage he describes the upward course 
 of the soul through successive stages of purifying knowledge, 
 until it gains a sight of the idea of good dwelling in its fullness 
 only in God, and illumining even as a sun the moral universe. 
 And still this laborious process is not a merely intellectual one. 
 These ideas of truth and goodness are conceived as invested with 
 moral beauty, and thus fitted to awaken in him who beholds them 
 the feeling of love ; and this love, when awakened, exerts over 
 him a transforming power, by which he grows into their likeness. 
 When we study as Christians these upward strivings of Plato's 
 human wisdom, we cannot but think, What if to him had been 
 revealed, even as to us, the divine way of redemption, not by man 
 mounting on wings of contemplation to heaven and to God, but 
 by heaven bending to earth, and God himself condescending to 
 man, and the Son of God taking upon Him man's nature, and en- 
 tering as a personal living power into human life and history, that 
 God in Christ might reconcile the world unto himself. In the 
 personal divine Redeemer, as the Word made flesh, he might have 
 seen embodied and illustrated that idea of God which he strove to 
 contemplate, — that perfect beauty of virtue, that perfect rule of 
 life, — and he, intellectual Greek though he was, might have seen 
 that divine Redeemer in the form of a servant by the voluntary 
 humiliation of his sufferings and death, shown forth as the Lamb 
 of God to take away the sins of the world, and by the might of 
 that divine love set forth by such humiliation, touching the heart 
 of man as no ideal thought could touch it, and, by inspiring a 
 faith working by love, re-create the soul and bring it into the real 
 likeness of God. And here, too, he might have found that reve- 
 lation from God of which he once uttered a conjectural hope, 
 which could have given a religious basis of the morality which he 
 taught, and furnished a sufficient motive through a living faith 
 for its realization in a righteous life. And lastly, such a faith 
 standing in the power of God would have been discovered as ade- 
 quate to the calling and salvation — not as the wisdom of philoso- 
 phy, of the intellectual elite of the race, the wise men after the 
 flesh, the mighty, the noble, but of the foolish as well ; and yet 
 more, and the weak, and the base, and the despised — a saving 
 faith for all mankind. 
 
 This discussion of the moral and religious thoughts of one of 
 the most eminent of the writers of antiquity yields us as one les- 
 
PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY. 271 
 
 son an insight into the ultimate end of those classical studies which 
 enter so largely into all our higher education. Not alone to form 
 a basis for mental discipline and culture, by furnishing models of 
 consummate excellence in thought and expression, are those stud- 
 ies designed. The true and ultimate end is a moral and religious 
 one — the knowledge gained by a deeper and maturer study of 
 classical antiquity, of the place and function of all ancient phi- 
 losophy, letters, art, life, in the providential order of the world, 
 in preparing the way for the entrance of Christianity into hu- 
 man life and history. All that rich and fruitful culture was only 
 human, and wrought out, I may say, from below ; but it was to 
 form a human basis for a richer and far more fruitful culture, 
 when once there should descend a divine power from above, to 
 regenerate the soul of man and pour a divine life into the bosom 
 of a sinful world. Such a renewing, life-giving influence the 
 wisdom of cultivated Greece — even of Plato's philosophy, the 
 fairest and finest bloom of all that culture — could not reach 
 even in adequate idea ; it could only haply feel after it, and dimly 
 prophesy its coming by revealing the spiritual wants of man, as 
 severed from God and needing restoration. The prodigal race, 
 wanderers from the Father's house, were to be brought back as 
 penitent sinners, only by the anticipating and forerunning compas- 
 sion of the Father himself. Here is the lesson to be won from 
 our discussion, and to be wrought into all our thought and faith 
 and life. Consider Plato's rich gifts and attainments, his power 
 of speculative thought, his soaring imagination, his beautiful and 
 eloquent speech ; but even that intellect was blind, that tongue 
 was dumb to that greatest of all human questions, " How shall 
 man be just with God ? " — be delivered from sin, and set forward 
 on a new career of endless knowledge, holiness and happiness. 
 On these matters of supreme moment, that exalted intelligence 
 might sit as a learner at the feet of the humblest Christian disci- 
 ple, made wise unto salvation through the faith that is in Christ 
 Jesus. He that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than 
 he. And yet, let us not, as Christians, exalt ourselves overmuch 
 above the pagan philosopher. What we have that he had not is 
 not ours, or of us, but only God's ; and ours only by the conde- 
 scending grace of Christ. When I study Plato and Plato's life, 
 and think of our advanced position in respect to spiritual and sav- 
 ing knowledge, I am prone to recall the apostle's words, " Who 
 maketh thee to differ from another, and what hast thou that thou 
 
272 PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 didst not receive?" Nay, let me at least point to one lesson 
 which may be learned by us Christians from Plato's example. 
 We have seen with what a tridy religious earnestness he sought 
 for moral and religious truth, and wrought it, so far as he could 
 find it, into his own life and action. This truth he first learned to 
 love and seek from only a human teacher, whom, however, he 
 revered as the best and wisest of all men known to the ancient 
 pagan world. That truth he prized above all earthly good, and 
 its pursuit he counted as the one work worth doing under the 
 sun. And the truth which he gained and lived by himself he 
 inculcated with the same earnestness upon others ; he taught it, 
 he preached it for forty years, by word and by deed, by living 
 voice and written speech, against sophists who opposed it in the- 
 ory, and the world who opposed it in practice, and strove to con- 
 vince them, and to win them to see and receive and adopt it for 
 themselves. Be it ours, as disciples of the divine Teacher and 
 Saviour, to receive ourselves, and make known to others, that 
 revealed and only saving truth of the gospel — the truth as it is 
 in Jesus, which has been freely given us — with a religious ear- 
 nestness of like quality and of a greater intensity in proportion to 
 the immeasurably superior greatness of the gift. Let it be for us 
 not a meagre and pale thing of tradition, of custom, of inheri- 
 tance ; but in us, through the Word and Spirit of Christ, a living 
 and life-giving truth. So may it for us, and for those whom 
 we may bless by our labors, become the power of God and the 
 wisdom of God unto salvation. So may they and we be entered 
 as fellow-citizens, not into an ideal republic, — the fair creation 
 of a philosopher's imagination, — but into a real kingdom, the 
 pattern of which is in reality laid up in heaven, the City of God. 
 
PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, JANUARY 3, 1873. 
 
 My subject is Plato's " Republic," and I propose to give a gen- 
 eral view of the work, and then to look at it in some of its histor- 
 ical and its ideal aspects. 
 
 I fear that I may seem to be trespassing upon your indulgence 
 in asking you to go back again to classic antiquity and to consider 
 a subject suggested by that of my last paper, and derived from 
 the writings of the same author. But let me first plead the gen- 
 eral view, that in the papers we here present we may each in turn 
 probably contribute most to the general good by discussing sub- 
 jects drawn from our own professional pursuits and the studies to 
 which they lead us. Besides, we may certainly come very often 
 to Plato, and every time hold with him long converse, without 
 peril of sameness or repetition; a mind so comprehensive and 
 many-sided as his, and writings of such large and various scope 
 may yield us many distinct themes, as diverse in themselves and 
 their relations as if they were drawn from different authors, in all 
 respects widely parted from each other. It is also singularly true 
 of Plato that though he ran his earthly career in ancient Greece, 
 yet as a thinker and a writer he lived and reigned in a world that 
 knows no bounds of time or country or nation, but is universal as 
 the race and its entire life. Individual men and generations of 
 men may care naught for his metaphysics, may reject it as effete, 
 or as false in itself, but his philosophy, however little it may inter- 
 est or benefit the many as a speculation, has in it a life for all 
 men of all times ; his works by their prevailing spirit and the 
 great moral and spiritual truths they teach are fixed in abiding 
 relations to the human mind, and to all human society ; never of 
 a dead past, but always of a living present, they have for us, too, 
 a new and ever fresh charm and clear value in their great thoughts 
 and fine imaginations, expressed in the most perfect forms of lan- 
 guage. The habitually contemplative spirit which breathes through 
 all that he wrote, has in it something eminently conservative for 
 our own time and country. On the other hand, for one who now 
 
274 PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 
 
 reads his works, it is sometimes strange and startling to come 
 upon points of contact with some of the most practical issues of 
 our day in politics, education, and morals, as if his sagacious and 
 prescient mind had peered far down the vista of time and caught 
 some glimpses of events and forms of society destined only in far- 
 off ages to come into full being. 
 
 By the study of the myths of Plato, and especially of the two 
 celebrated ones contained in the " Republic," I have been drawn, 
 gradually but irresistibly, to a special study of the whole of this 
 remarkable work. It is one that gains ever upon you in respect 
 of interest and value the more you read and study it, the more 
 you yield it an attentive and willing mind, and especially the 
 nearer you come into sympathy with the spirit and aims of the 
 writer. For while that familiar word is true of Plato, that all will 
 see in him so much as they bring eyes to see, yet more true is that 
 higher word of Shakespeare, that " love adds a precious seeing to 
 the eye." Indifferent and therefore superficial readers may easily 
 make merry over some of his errors or seemingly visionary views, 
 and more thoughtful ones, and yet no more friendly, may all too 
 quickly warm with indignation over the offensive institutions of 
 his ideal state, and with a dogmatic hardness at once condemn 
 them as if they proved immorality or immoral aims in the author ; 
 but whoever will read him with an open eye and a kindly heart, 
 loving truth as he loved it, and as patiently and vigorously intent 
 upon its attainment, will be conscious not only of highest instruc- 
 tion and delight, but of an uplifting and purifying influence, such 
 as comes only from the greatest and best minds of the race. 
 
 The " Republic " is, by the suffrages of all students of Plato, 
 the greatest of his works ; it holds the supreme place among his 
 Dialogues, or, as his more enthusiastic lovers are fond of calling it, 
 it is the royal dialogue. All that went before were preparatory 
 stages of progress to this, and reached in it their goal and culmi- 
 nation. You have here his most comprehensive view of man's 
 life, the consummation of his philosophy ; you see on largest can- 
 vas the workings and results of all his various powers in their ripe 
 maturity, and especially that blending and fusion of gifts which 
 made him preeminent as a master alike of thought and expression, 
 at once philosopher and poet. 
 
 It seems necessary, first, to get some general view of the con- 
 tents of this Dialogue, that we may put ourselves in position for 
 those aspects of it which I propose to consider. Yet it is hard to 
 
PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 275 
 
 analyze Plato ; it is hardly possible, without doing him injustice, to 
 treat him merely as a thinker. This point has been well made by 
 some critics, against both Mr. Grote's and Mr. WhewelFs treat- 
 ment of the Platonic Dialogues, that by bringing into light only 
 the thought of the writer, and leaving all else in shade, they have 
 failed to exhibit fairly and clearly the thought itself. They have 
 rudely severed matter and form, theory and expression, body and 
 soul, which in Plato's conception and manner were one and insep- 
 arable, and so have given only Plato in part, not Plato entire. 
 And even an ordinary reader and student of Plato, who tries to 
 present in brief the thought of one of the Dialogues, is conscious 
 of the justness of the criticism. It seems like dissecting the liv- 
 ing man, in order to get out and exhibit the quality and volume 
 of his brain. As introductory, however, to a consideration of the 
 historical and the ideal elements of this work, I must endeavor to 
 give a general view of the whole. 
 
 The selections of time and place and circumstances, and of 
 personages in the Dialogue characteristic of the tendencies of the 
 times, together with the dramatic grouping and appointments 
 are all in harmony with the design of the work. The scene is 
 laid at the Piraeus in the house of Cephalus, and the immediate 
 occasion is the festival of the Thracian Artemis. Socrates and 
 Glaucon have assisted at the procession and the sacrifices, and 
 have turned their steps back towards Athens, when they are over- 
 taken by Polemarchus, the son of Cephalus, who constrains them 
 to go to his father's house, that, the festivities all over, Socrates 
 may discourse, as he was wont, with himself and his young com- 
 panions. There, then, the company is assembled in the court of 
 the house, grouped in a circle around the aged host, who is seated 
 on a cushioned chair, a garland on his head as he had just been 
 sacrificing. With Cephalus the discourse opens. He is an old 
 man of an intelligent, serene character, making no complaint of 
 the burdens of age, but rather rejoicing in it as bringing relief 
 from disturbing passions ; he is a pattern of the virtue of the 
 older and now receding times, that, without reflection, stands by 
 the laws and ordinances of the country, and does its duty with- 
 out question by the state and the gods. In the near prospect of 
 death he says that he looks with sweet hope into the retributions 
 of the world to come, untroubled by any consciousness of injustice 
 in withholding any dues to gods or men. Socrates is delighted 
 with the words and tone of the old man, but he takes him up on 
 
276 PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 
 
 his implied notion of justice and questions its correctness. But 
 Cephalus has no mind for dialectics, and so, pleading that he must 
 look to the sacrifices, he quietly slips away, bequeathing the argu- 
 ment to his son. Polemarchus represents a morality more reflec- 
 tive than his father's, but yet of a subordinate type, resting mostly 
 upon custom or the tradition of the elders. He is well read in 
 Simonides, and holds with him that justice, as rendering what is 
 due, looks to the good of one's friends and the harm of one's 
 foes ; and he is only slowly brought at last by Socrates to see and 
 admit that justice being in its nature only beneficent can do only 
 good to all men, even to one's foes. In Thrasymachus of Chalce- 
 don, who now enters the lists at a furious pace, we have exhibited 
 a type of the sophists of the time, a master in the art of making 
 a sensation, very eager of generalizing, but equally incapable of 
 the process, indifferent to truth, prone always to cut rather than 
 untie the knot of a question, egotistic, rude, and self-confident, 
 but when worsted in an argument, admitting with assumed grace 
 what he cannot rebut. His theory of justice and social morality 
 is the selfish and destructive one. Justice is only the interest of 
 the stronger — only might makes right, the sole firm bond of soci- 
 ety is the will of the stronger. Nothing can be more instructive 
 and amusing than the contrast in spirit and bearing between the 
 duelists in this dialectic combat ; the coarse violence of Thrasy- 
 machus, and the genuine Attic urbanity of Socrates, the helpless 
 throes and struggles of the sophist in the close and tenacious 
 hold of the philosopher. But the strife is soon over, and Thra- 
 symachus in a melting mood of perspiration, and for the first 
 time in his life blushing for shame, is forced to admit that injus- 
 tice can be a source only of weakness, and justice of strength, and 
 that the just man must be good and happy, and the unjust bad 
 and wretched. The two brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, who 
 next take part in the discourse, stand on a higher intellectual 
 and moral plane. They represent the best part of young Athens. 
 They have in them a native philosophical vein, which makes them 
 apt for thinking and averse to sophistry ; but seized and borne on 
 by the negative spirit of their times, they have broken away from 
 the current moral and religious views, and have reached a region 
 of honest but vigorous doubt. But their doubts, without invading 
 the integrity of their heart and life, are serving through their own 
 intellectual and moral action as the means of transition to con- 
 scious and established truth. The new world into which Socrates 
 
PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 277 
 
 is to usher them, finds them prepared to enter in ; with readiness 
 they apprehend the great truths he imparts, and with more inde- 
 pendence than most of his hearers work their way to their appro- 
 priation through his stimulating and alluring dialectic process. 
 The doubts which these brothers express go down to the nature 
 and being of justice and all virtue. Like many whose minds have 
 been illumined with a purer light, they cannot see how " wisdom 
 is justified of her children." They ask Socrates whether justice 
 is a good or no, and if it is, whether absolute or only relative, 
 whether indeed it is a thing of real being or only of cunning 
 appearance. They vividly depict the unjust man as prospering 
 by his shrewdness, and winning place, fortune, and esteem, and 
 the just man in his simplicity, as poor and homeless, as maligned, 
 and scourged, and crucified ; and looking on this picture and then 
 on this, they find it hard even with their best intentions to accept 
 the high view of Socrates, that it is a greater evil to do injus- 
 tice than to suffer it. They are also troubled by the conventional 
 teaching of morality. Parents and guardians and the poets too, 
 all inculcate justice not for itself but for what it will bring. Be 
 just and you will get rewarded; respectability shall be yours, 
 good name, high place, a wealthy marriage, houses and lands and 
 money, and by and by, too, you shall walk evermore in the Elys- 
 ian fields. In their perplexity these disciples of Socrates turn to 
 their master, and put it upon him to show them what justice is in 
 itself, and how of itself, and ap&rt from consequences, it makes 
 the just man happy. Through these subordinate persons of the 
 dialogue and these negative ethical views the way is now opened 
 for the chief role of Socrates, and for his own discourse of justice 
 on its positive side. Socrates accepts the situation with all its 
 acknowledged difficulties, and undertakes the task imposed upon 
 him. But assuming that all morality grows out of the relations 
 of men to one another in civil society he proposes to read the 
 great subject first in what he calls the " larger letters," and after- 
 wards in the " smaller." He means that the state is the indi- 
 vidual on an extended scale, or, to use Milton's expression, it is 
 the individual man " writ large," and so justice is first to be 
 sought and found in the state, and then it will be easily discerned 
 in the individual man. On this analogy he proceeds to the con- 
 struction of his ideal state. 
 
 It is needful for my subject to present only the chief elements 
 of this political ideal, and these as they belong to the aim of the 
 
278 PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 
 
 state, to its constitution and its essential social provisions. The 
 great aim of the state is in Plato's view the virtue of its citizens, 
 and so their well-being ; without this, all ordinary aims, physical 
 comfort, wealth, fame, external power, are all worthless. The state 
 is an institution of education, the true university ; nurture in 
 knowledge and morality, and through philosophy as the expression 
 of highest wisdom and truest culture, this is the essential mis- 
 sion of the state. Hence Plato's cardinal principle, the absolute 
 rule of philosophy, and so the rule of philosophers ; or as we have 
 it in his famous words ; " till philosophers are rulers, or rulers are 
 philosophers, there will be no end to the ills of states and of men." 
 With such an aim as this, the state is in its constitution aristo- 
 cratic ; but it is no aristocracy of birth or wealth, or of both to- 
 gether, but of virtue and knowledge, of men of largest native 
 and trained intelligence, and of noblest character. Every one is 
 to render the state the service for which by nature and education 
 he is best fitted, and to such service is he limited. The citizens are 
 divided first into those who administer public affairs, the guardians 
 of the state, and those who supply the common wants of life ; and 
 then the guardians are subdivided into those who govern, and 
 those who protect the state. Thus there are three classes, the 
 rulers, the soldiers, and the laborers. These classes are of the 
 nature of castes, inasmuch as each is wholly confined to its own 
 sphere. The government of the state belongs exclusively to the 
 rulers, and its protection to the soldiers ; and these two classes are 
 excluded from all industrial business, which is committed solely 
 to the third or laboring class. Thus the two higher classes having 
 absolutely no private interests and pursuits, are supported by the 
 commonwealth through the labor of the third class. These classes 
 constitute the many in the one state, and in the due observance 
 of the right relations between them lies the practical virtue of the 
 whole state. The wisdom of such a constituted state is in the 
 knowledge of the ruling class, its courage in the protecting class, 
 in their just and fixed conviction of what are worthy and what 
 unworthy objects of fear. Its temperance or self-control resides 
 not in one class, but in all classes, it is the common agreement, 
 practically and in theory, in recognizing who is to command, and 
 who to obey ; and finally, its justice is the fundamental quality of 
 the whole state, in which it lives as a moral atmosphere, and which 
 consists in each one having and doing only and just what belongs 
 to him without any interference with what belongs to others. 
 
PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 279 
 
 At this point, before proceeding to the special provisions of his 
 state, Socrates turns, and professes himself able after having read 
 the subject in the large letters, now to read it in the small, to 
 determine what is justice in men after having determined it in 
 society. In the man there are three elements corresponding to 
 the three classes of the state ; these are reason and desire as 
 respectively the highest and the lowest, and between \hQ^Q passion 
 or spirit^ which is the ally of reason unless it is corrupted by 
 bad training. Thus, as in the state, the individual man is wise 
 by virtue of the reason, courageous by virtue of the spirit, tem- 
 perate when the reason rules with the consent of spirit and de- 
 sire; he is just when each of the elements of his nature does 
 its own proper work with no interference with that of the others. 
 Justice is thus the moral harmony of the soul, its true health; 
 while injustice is disease and discord. Justice thus discovered 
 and explained through this assumed analogy of man and civil 
 society, Plato proceeds to fix the social provisions of his state. 
 Very briefly let me mention the chief of these. And first, as to 
 the education of the citizens : from Plato's absolute view of the 
 function of the state it necessarily follows as essential, that the 
 children of the state are to be educated by itself, and for itself and 
 for its own ends. No writer, ancient or modern, has put forth 
 more comprehensive views than Plato of the nature and scope of 
 the education of man, as covering his entire life and being, but 
 yet Plato's conception involves elements at variance alike with 
 nature and religion. Two things are to be mentioned as funda- 
 mental ; that the state, being absolute, has the entire control of 
 education, and that the education is limited to those destined to 
 be guardians. Children belong from their birth to the state ; when 
 born they are put directly in public nurseries ; they are not to 
 know their parents and their parents are not to know them. The 
 class in which each one is to belong is determined only by the 
 government, solely on the ground of native talent and character. 
 The education of all is planned and conducted by the state ; for 
 how, it is asked, can a matter so vital to the well-being of the 
 commonwealth be left to the caprice of individuals ? Plato keeps 
 to the traditional Greek curriculum in music and gymnastics, but 
 will have it pursued in no traditional, but in a wholly new way. 
 Music includes not only the science and art of harmonic sounds, but 
 all art and letters, and especially poetry. Gymnastics must look 
 to the training of the mind as well as of the body, and even more. 
 
280 PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 
 
 Music and gymnastics together are to secure an even develop- 
 ment of body and mind, a union of force and gentleness, of manly 
 vigor and moral grace and excellence. In all teaching of music 
 proper, and of art and poetry, the rulers must cultivate simplicity 
 and love of truth, and allow artistic creations only of the truly 
 noble and beautiful ; especially the old mythology must be purged 
 of all unworthy conceptions of the gods, and the Deity be repre- 
 sented as only and unchangeably good and true, and as willing 
 only good and truth. But to this earlier and ordinary training is 
 to be added for the rulers the higher and consummate education 
 of the philosopher. This is to be carried beyond youth into ripe 
 manhood, and to combine true knowledge with practical activity, 
 and to inform and possess the mind not alone with the harmonies 
 of sound, and with the beauties of letters, but with the ideas of 
 philosophy, for if the state is to prosper it must be governed by 
 philosophers. Through successive stages of knowledge and disci- 
 pline the soul is turned from changing phenomena to changeless 
 realities of being, to the apprehension and appropriation of gen- 
 eral ideas, and especially the highest of all, the idea of the good. 
 To touch briefly upon the stages of this education, — after the 
 more playful and unconstrained discipline of early youth, the 
 natural bent of all now discovered, the choicer characters from 
 the young men of twenty are to be trained more rigorously than 
 before, and all the sciences which they have studied as detached 
 they must now study as correlative ; at thirty the choicest of all 
 are to be picked from the rest, and for five years continue strenu- 
 ously devoted to philosophy ; then for fifteen years to get experi- 
 ence of life by holding subordinate offices in the state ; at length 
 at fifty they come to their task as rulers, and in their turn order 
 the state and the lives of men ; and so, after having trained up 
 others to fill their places, they finally depart to the Islands of the 
 Blest, and there abide in an everlasting home. Other provisions 
 followed from Plato's conception of the state, which are far less 
 easy to accept. The absoluteness given to the state made neces- 
 sary the annulling so far as possible of all private interests. 
 Hence the rulers and guardians must possess no private property ; 
 they live as in a camp, with messes and shelter in common, and 
 all that is needed furnished by the commonwealth ; mortal gold is 
 for them the accursed thing ; theirs is the gold of spiritual riches 
 and righteousness. Furthermore, as has been intimated, Plato 
 does away with aU separate family life ; and along with the rude 
 
PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 281 
 
 unsphering of woman's domestic life consequent upon such an 
 institution, he claims in accordance with the Socratic doctrine of 
 the equality of the sexes that women should have the same pur- 
 suits with men, alike in war and in politics, and for this end they 
 should have the same education. 
 
 Having thus established in the search for the nature of justice 
 the good state and the good man, Plato passes in review the types 
 of inferior states and inferior men in order to settle the question 
 of the necessary tendency of justice to happiness, and to show 
 that the just man is the happy man, and the unjust the unhappy. 
 This review makes a kind of philosophy of political history, 
 showing by what causes there is in successive downward stages 
 a gradual decline of public and private virtue and happiness 
 through timocracy as the rule of honor, oligarchy, where rules 
 the passion for wealth, and democracy, where all the passions are 
 in free play, down to the lowest depth of all, the tyrannical gov- 
 ernment and the tyrannical man, wherein all rule centres in an 
 all-absorbing selfishness. These pictures of social and individual 
 man are alike graphic and instructive, and have a fresco durability 
 of tone and coloring which is quite notable. Of them all, perhaps 
 that of the democracy and the democrat may be for us at least 
 the most entertaining. The democracy looks like the fairest of 
 all constitutions, it is so charmingly free and various, so embroid- 
 ered, like a gay spangled dress, with all forms of manners and 
 character. And what a place for one who is in quest of the right 
 sort of state ; for by reason of its liberty, it has in it a complete 
 assortment of commonwealths, and you can go to it as you would 
 to a bazaar, and pick out the one that suits you best. And then 
 look at the exquisite meekness and calmness of men in the demo- 
 cracy who have been tried in a court of laws and judged guilty 
 just for doing what they liked ! Did you ever notice in this very 
 flexible commonwealth how these gentlemen, who have been con- 
 demned to death or exile, just stay all the same and parade about 
 the streets, like heroes, as though nobody saw or cared ? And, 
 most of all, what a forgiving spirit the democracy has ! what a 
 sublime superiority to all petty considerations of aptitude in edu- 
 cation and character for high places of trust and power ! how 
 grandly does she fling away all thought of any preliminary train- 
 ing as needful to make a statesman, and delight to raise a man 
 to honor if he only says that he loves the dear people ! Truly a 
 charming parti-colored, lawless government, dispensing equality to 
 equals and unequals alike ! 
 
282 PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 
 
 But the picture of profoundest ethical interest is that of the 
 tyrannical government and the tyrannical nature. The despot of 
 the soul, as the despot of the state, is at the farthest remove from 
 the ideal man and the ideal state. Reason is dethroned and 
 trampled under foot, and passion and appetite reign with ram- 
 pant license ; " the state of man like to a little kingdom suffering 
 then the nature of an insurrection ; " he is at war with himself, in 
 constant fear of enemies without and worse enemies within, master 
 of others, not master but the slave of himself, though outwardly 
 and to superficial observers happy yet the most wretched of 
 men, — the pitiable spectacle of injustice and misery indissolubly 
 bound together. It appears, then, from these and other like con- 
 siderations, Plato continues, that to maintain through justice the 
 inward harmony of the soul is the first and highest of all human 
 aims ; and ever will the just man form himself upon the pattern 
 of the perfect commonwealth, which doubtless exists in heaven if 
 it be found nowhere on earth. And now that it has been shown 
 that justice is in itself the just man's exceeding great reward, we 
 may in conclusion speak of the blessings bestowed upon it alike 
 by gods and men. We may be sure that all circumstances, how- 
 soever untoward they seem, will yet promote his highest good. 
 And men, though they may waver about the just and unjust char- 
 acter, will finally hold to the one and despise the other. And 
 yet all earthly awards are as nothing in number and greatness 
 compared with the lot that awaits the just and the unjust after 
 death. And this is now described, that each may receive the full 
 complement of recompense, which the argument is bound to set 
 forth. In this way Plato glides from his description of the per- 
 fect earthly state into his vision of the future world, where the 
 just awake to everlasting life and the unjust to shame and ever- 
 lasting contempt. And so at last, on reaching the heights of the 
 great argument, we find philosophy fading away into religion, and 
 the broken, dim lights of earth into the perfect brightness of the 
 heavens. 
 
 The state as thus constructed by Plato has been often viewed 
 as an enthusiast's dream, full of fantastic ideas, or at best as a 
 fine poetical fiction, informed by no conscious practical purpose. 
 But no one who studies the work can be content with such views 
 as these ; he will reject them as intellectually false and morally 
 insignificant and insipid. Plato's " Republic " is no dream or chi- 
 mera or idle fiction. It is imaginary, but it is not visionary ; it is 
 
PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 283 
 
 certainly unreal, as it is no description of any political constitu- 
 tion, existing or ever existent, as the institutions of Lycurgus or 
 of Solon or the American Constitution ; it is also not only a world 
 of ethical politics all unrealized, but the reality of its existence is 
 improbable, relatively to any known state of man and society ; 
 but it is of the nature of a true ideal, in that it creates and sets 
 forth a pattern of political perfection, which, though never fully 
 attainable, is yet real in idea, and is ever to be striven after and 
 by approximation made as nearly as possible real in practice. We 
 conceive as Christians of a state of perfect peace on earth, when 
 men will turn their swords into plowshares and their spears into 
 pruninghooks ; but though we deem it highly probable that men 
 will ever go on perfecting and using their implements of warfare, 
 we never consider the Christian conception as visionary and im- 
 practicable. Nay, is Christianity itself a dream or a chimera 
 because it gives men ideals of an individual and social perfection 
 never attainable on earth ? It is the peculiarity of Plato's state 
 as an ideal, that it combines facts of human experience with im- 
 aginative conceptions transcending all that men had ever known 
 in actual life ; it looks before and after ; it is conversant with all 
 the past of Athens and Greece, but not content to abide there ; it 
 reaches in vision far into the future, not only of Greece, but of the 
 world ; it is Greek, but it is human and universal. He carries to 
 the very extreme the fundamental ideas of Greek politics and 
 society; but yet breaking over historical limits, he passes far 
 beyond all the received ethical and religious views. He lights up 
 and quickens the dark and dying political forms of antiquity with 
 the spirit and life of a new time, which he seemed to see afar off, 
 of a better city which he looked for as yet to come. Plato's Re- 
 public is thus ideal, but it is also real ; it is both historical and 
 prophetic, and when it is considered in these two aspects, or rather 
 in this twofold aspect, it is most fruitful in interest and influ- 
 ence. 
 
 The real elements of the polity which Plato constructed are 
 readily discovered in the prevailing political views of the Greeks, 
 and in their political history. While it is true of Plato, as it is 
 often said, that he was fond of flying in the air, it is no less true 
 that he walked the solid earth and trod his native soil of Greece. 
 His perfect state, ideal as it is, rested upon the real foundation of 
 a Grecian commonwealth. The absoluteness of his state in the 
 control, and if need be in the suppression, of all personal interests 
 
284 PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 
 
 is in harmony with the established principle of Grecian politics, 
 and some of its provisions, so repulsive to modern ideas, as the 
 doing away with property and with separate family life, have at 
 least their germs in the actual manners and institutions of some 
 of the Grecian states. According to the Greek political theory, 
 the individual was wholly subordinated to the state ; the state was 
 supreme, and to it the citizens subjected and sacrificed all per- 
 sonal ends, inclinations, and objects. This is especially true of 
 the Dorian states and most of all of Sparta, where the government 
 moulded the whole being of the citizens, their very sentiments and 
 thoughts, bending to its will all private, family, and social life. 
 There was at least an approximation to Plato's provision of com- 
 munity of goods, for the Spartan citizens were allowed in case of 
 need to use the property of others, just as if their own. As in 
 Plato, too, the citizens were prohibited the use of gold and silver ; 
 they lived as in a camp, and messed in common ; the education 
 was under exclusive state control, and with gymnastics was for 
 both sexes together ; and the arrangements for marriage and 
 family life allowed an exchange of children and of wives. So, 
 too, most stringent measures were taken against all innovations 
 upon national customs ; foreign travel was forbidden, poets and 
 writers whose influence was feared were banished the country; 
 and in music — so much was the Spartan world governed — a 
 performer was restricted to a certain number of strings for his 
 lyre. Such facts as these are sufficient to show that some of 
 Plato's political arrangements, which have for the modern world 
 so strange an air, were in historical relation to real institutions, 
 which were native to the soil of Grecian politics. And if Plato 
 embodied the spirit and principles of these institutions in bolder 
 and more sharply defined forms than had ever existed in reality, 
 this procedure may be readily explained by the facts of Grecian 
 history, and the influence which they had upon his views. Since 
 the beginning of the Peloponnesian wars the long and bitter ex- 
 periences of the Greeks had seemed to show him that the welfare 
 of states was periled most of all by the selfishness of individual 
 citizens, and in the tragic act of the Athenian democracy in exe- 
 cuting his revered master, he thought that he read the doom of its 
 dissolution as a government of wild individualism. Like many 
 modern thinkers and theorists, he turned to the idea of an abso- 
 lute state-rule as the only sure safeguard against such evils, like 
 Hobbes and Locke, who looked in their common aversion to demo- 
 
PLATO'S REPUBLIC. • 285 
 
 cracy, the one to an aristocracy as the surest adversary against 
 arbitrary power, and the other to the will of one man as the only 
 means of all men's happiness ; like recent reactionary statesmen 
 in Germany who would crush all excesses of liberty by crushing 
 all liberty itself ; so Plato aimed from like motives to absorb all 
 individual wills in the one wise absolute will of his aristocratic 
 government. The greatest good of a state, he argues, is unity, 
 the greatest evil is discord, but there will be unity and no discord 
 only when there are no private inclinations and interests. Thus 
 by doing away with property he would make impossible the strife 
 of private interests with the general good ; he would keep out, as 
 he thought, all covetousness by having nothing that men could 
 covet, and selfishness itself by having nothing that one could call 
 one's own. 
 
 But there are other elements of the Platonic Republic, and 
 these the most peculiar and controlling, which have no historical 
 connection with the institutions and legislation of Sparta or of 
 any other Grecian commonwealth. The chief of these, and that 
 which makes the corner-stone of Plato's political structure, is the 
 philosophical education of the rulers, and the absolute power of 
 rulers who by such an education have become masters, in theory 
 and practice, of true wisdom and virtue. By such an education 
 and power of the governing class, which was foreign to the whole 
 spirit of the Spartan system, he seems to have aimed to reinforce 
 the fundamental principle of all Greek politics which had been 
 tried and found wanting, and to construct an ideal state, which 
 should be made a well-ordered, harmonious whole, through the 
 perfected knowledge and character of absolute rulers. It has been 
 often suggested that Plato was indebted to Pythagoras, in part, at 
 least, for this idea, and certainly the celebrated society, or order 
 of brethren, which was established by that philosopher bears a 
 striking resemblance in some of its features to that of the ideal 
 guardians of Plato's Republic. The Pythagorean order was not, 
 it is true, in its nature a political body ; it was rather a religious 
 brotherhood, and, indeed, has been compared as such with the great 
 order founded by Loyola ; but it was kindred in its moral aims, 
 in its severe moral and intellectual training and its way of life, 
 to Plato's select class of philosophical sovereigns. Like Pythago- 
 ras in his order, Plato in his Republic aspired to a supremacy 
 of reason, and sought by such exalted control to form a human 
 state which might in its harmony be an image of the moral gov- 
 
286 • PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 
 
 ernment of the world. But far more than to Pythagoras was 
 Plato indebted to himself and to the ideas of his own philosophy, 
 to his own ideal theory, for the ruling principle of his common- 
 wealth. He looked upon all the objects of the world of sense as 
 only wavering images of unchanging realities in a world of intel- 
 ligence, the whole visible and temporal world itself as onl}^ an 
 imperfect appearance of a world invisible and eternal ; he believed 
 that it was for the reason of man to rise by reflection and contem- 
 plation from this lower world to that higher one, from the study 
 of phenomena to rise to the vision and perfect enjoyment of ideas, 
 and to God himself, as the supreme idea of all, and the One Being. 
 But as he taught in his allegorical myth, most men live only in 
 that lower world of sense, they are denizens of the cave, and dwell 
 amid its idols ; they walk in darkness, and see not the truth ; the 
 philosophers alone have been turned from darkness to light, from 
 empty shadows to substantial realities, and have risen through the 
 love and steadfast pursuit of wisdom to the world of intelligence, 
 and gazed ever upon its sun, the idea of good. It is only these 
 who by the fullest development of their individual personal freedom 
 in the higher philosophical education have reached the knowledge 
 of being, and of the laws of man's life, who are fitted to be the 
 teachers and guides of society, to descend from their heaven of 
 contemplation to the den of earth to promote the good of their 
 fellow-men; in short, by their absolute supremacy of rule, to form 
 the perfect state and administer its affairs. How could it be hoped, 
 he argues, that the mass of men would at first voluntarily submit 
 to this rule, into the reasonableness and necessity of which they 
 have no insight, and which they might consider an intolerable lim- 
 itation of their sensuous nature ? And, on the other hand, how 
 could the philosophers be adequate to their great office, except by 
 the renunciation of all lower occupations and pleasures, which 
 always act as disturbing agencies on man's higher life, and by the 
 abnegation of all private interests, which hinder the general good 
 and distract and rend the commonwealth? These are the chief 
 elements of Plato's state ; with some, which as we have seen were 
 historical, he sought to unite others only ideal, and difficult, per- 
 haps impossible, of such union ; requiring conditions not then ex- 
 isting, and since seen only in part, to be fully known only in that 
 ever future, the light of which even at this distance he seemed to 
 discern, which is ever alluring the hopes and drawing the faith of 
 mankind. With whatever errors it contains, whether the smaller 
 
PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 287 
 
 or the greater, when its far-reaching, general views are contem- 
 plated, and especially its lofty ethical spirit and aims, we may 
 well pardon its more enthusiastic students, who prefer to err with 
 Plato than to be right with some of the so-called practical states- 
 men and legislators of subsequent times. With Plato, the individ- 
 ual was to be nothing without the state, and yet the ruling citi- 
 zens were not to be content within the range of political activity, 
 but to aspire after far higher ends. The republic was to be a realm 
 of virtue ; but it was not the civic virtue of the Greek commu- 
 nities which had in view the attainment of political advantages 
 and objects, and so had a recompense out of itself ; but it was a 
 virtue of an ethical quality, which was the fruit of the deepest 
 and richest individual culture, which found its reward partly in 
 itself, and looked for it in its fullness in a future state of being, 
 where all the jarring moral discords of the present life were to be 
 completely harmonized. 
 
 Of this ideal state Mr. Jowett has made the profound remark 
 that Plato attempted a task really impossible, which was to unite 
 the past of Greek history with the future of philosophy. If we 
 take this remark as Mr. Jowett probably meant it, in the full Pla- 
 tonic sense of philosophy, this task seems yet more impossible, for 
 it was to unite all that past of Greece, so rich and yet so poor, 
 with all the future of religion as it was to be formed and perfected 
 by Christianity and the Christian church. By many writers, in- 
 deed, the analogy has been noticed between the conceptions of 
 Plato and those which gradually came into being and shaped 
 themselves into organic form and life in the earlier Christian 
 world, in church and state. When we remember the great influ- 
 ence of Plato's philosophy upon the whole course of philosophical 
 and religious thought in the first Christian centuries, we may 
 well expect to find traces of it in the theology and the gov- 
 ernment of the church in its earlier history. In the rise and 
 establishment of Christianity all the great thinkers and writers 
 on both sides were versed in Plato, and borrowed from him their 
 weapons, both of attack and defense. The names of Philo, of 
 Plotinus and Porphyry among the Neo-Platonists, and of the 
 church fathers, of Justin the Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, 
 Origen, and Augustine, afford eminent illustrations of this fact. 
 Indeed, the whole philosophy of the church fathers and a large 
 part of their theology exhibit a systematic and long-continued 
 effort to employ Greek speculation for the understanding and 
 
288 PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 
 
 propagation of Christian doctrine. When we recall these facts, 
 we are less surprised to discover upon a nearer comparison that 
 while the Christian religion is nowise indebted to Platonism for 
 its origin and its truths, yet that in the ecclesiastical form and 
 the theological views of the mediaeval church the ideas of Plato 
 in his " Republic " seem like prophecies to have passed over into 
 fulfillment. We have seen that in Plato the state is in its nature 
 an organized ministry of morality ; its very function is to train 
 its citizens to virtue and so to true well-being, to turn their eye 
 and their mind to a higher and spiritual world, and to conduct 
 them to that perfect happiness after death which, as taught in 
 the myth as the^ culminating end of Plato's ideal, is set forth 
 as the final goal of all striving and struggling of man's earthly 
 career. Is there not a resemblance in the idea of such a philo- 
 sophical state to the revealed truth in the Christian religion of 
 an invisible, divine kingdom, of which the church is the earthly 
 and visible form ? Further, as the rule in Plato's state was to be 
 exercised by philosophers, because they alone, through science, 
 were possessed of true wisdom, so in the mediaeval church a like 
 position was accorded to the priestly order, on the theory that to 
 them alone had been disclosed the world of revealed truth. The 
 Platonic guardians had some counterpart in the princes and 
 knights who were to protect and defend the church and execute 
 the orders of the priests ; and certainly Plato's third, or laboring 
 class, of whom we hear scarcely more than they were to till the 
 soil and be governed, gives no inapt type in idea of the mass of 
 mankind who made up the laity of the mediaeval church. 
 
 There are also points of resemblance presented by these politi- 
 cal arrangements of Plato, to which in modern times we are wont 
 to take exception. Even in the days of the apostles, as we learn 
 from Scripture, "all that believed were together, and had all 
 things common ; " and as Mr. Jowett has remarked, " this princi- 
 ple has been maintained as a counsel of perfection in almost all 
 ages of the church." The entire Christian monastic life in all its 
 various forms involves such an adoption of community of prop- 
 erty as was applied by Plato to his ruling and military orders ; 
 monachism, indeed, in its original meaning and form, as a solitary 
 life in the desert, necessarily presupposed a voluntary abandon- 
 ment of earthly possessions. It was also essentially the same view 
 and mode of life out of which, in both cases, this social provision 
 arose ; it was the old dualistic view of man's nature and earthly 
 
PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 289 
 
 being, and its consequent asceticism, which required the crushing 
 out of the sensuous element in man in order to secure the devel- 
 opment of the rational, and seclusion from the world as necessary 
 for nearness to God and divine things. In the one case it is a 
 philosophical asceticism, in the other a religious. Plato's ideal 
 philosophical ruler is in principle as truly an ascetic as was ever 
 the most real monk of the mediaeval church. His ideal goal is 
 something higher than the real one of Symeon, the celebrated Pil- 
 lar-Saint; it is nothing less spiritually than absolute self-abnega- 
 tion. On entering the class of guardians he renounces all rights 
 of property and person ; and as he goes up through the stages of 
 his elaborate education for government, he is so absorbed in the 
 contemplation of pure ideas as to be dead to earth and all earthly 
 good. Only by merging and losing individual will in reason does 
 he come to be spiritually free, and so by " having nothing " " to 
 possess all things ; " and only when thus he is master of self, and 
 the possessor of all things, is he fitted to teach and govern others. 
 There is still another feature of this analogy to which, with 
 some hesitation, I may call attention. Paradoxical as it may seem, 
 yet, as has been observed by an acute German writer, there is also 
 a resemblance in principle between Plato's arrangements for the 
 marriage relations of his guardians and the celibacy of the clergy, 
 as first instituted by Gregory Seventh, and yet existing in the 
 Roman church. These arrangements are utterly repugnant to 
 all modern and Christian sentiments, as involving to some extent 
 community of wives and children. But we must do justice to 
 Plato as not only a man of loftiest personal character, but also as 
 a writer who ever defended right against wrong and virtue against 
 vice. What is to be noticed here is, that Plato's strict regulation 
 touching the marriages of his guardians and the church prohibi- 
 tion to the priests of marriage at all rest substantially upon the 
 same grounds. Plato forbids separate family relations to his guar- 
 dians, in order that they may give themselves exclusively to the 
 state, just as Gregory imposed celibacy upon his clergy that they 
 might devote their lives undivided and entire to the church. In 
 both cases family ties and interests were deemed hostile to aims 
 which were constructively paramount. It is also most important 
 to remember that the Platonic provisions were most rigidly restric- 
 tive of sexual relations between the male and female guardians. 
 Indeed, personal inclination was reduced to the minimum, ideally 
 even to the vanishing point, and impulse put under the absolute 
 
290 PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 
 
 control of reason. In his own words, " all things were to proceed 
 in an orderly fashion, and licentiousness as an unholy thing to be 
 forbidden by the rulers." In the sexual functions, as in all others, 
 the citizens were organs of the state, marriage was not a matter 
 of desire or interest, but of duty ; it was regarded as holy, celebrated 
 only at certain appointed festivals, the ceremony originated, and 
 the couples selected by the government ; children were to be born 
 when and just as the state needed, and born only of those whom 
 the state chose, and chose distinctly with reference to the im- 
 provement of the race, or, to use Plato's expression, the purity 
 and nobleness of the breed. It was, then, not license which was 
 the aim of these provisions of the ideal state ; it was rather re- 
 nunciation and self-denial, just as the purpose of the church in 
 the institution and observance of clerical celibacy; and it is an 
 interesting question whether it might not have been quite as well 
 for the morality of the world and the improvement of the race if 
 Gregory and his successors had adopted a Platonic restrictive 
 marriage for their clergy instead of enjoining absolute continence. 
 If we come now to times yet farther removed from Plato, and 
 consider in the light of modern ideas and a pure Christianity 
 alike his ideal state and the form of the church with which it has 
 been compared, we find much to desire, much to object to in both, 
 and hardly more in the one than in the other. 
 
 Here it is easy for us to see that the capital fault of Plato's 
 politics lies in his narrow view of the relations and rights of the 
 individual in the state and in society. The personal freedom, the 
 personality itself of the individual and his capacity for utmost 
 improvement, was introduced by him into his state, but it was 
 limited to the first two of his three classes of citizens ; indeed, in 
 its complete application it was confined to the first class ; they 
 alone were capable of his high education, and so alone capable of 
 ruling. The third or laboring class, the multitude or the demoSy 
 were of little account ; they were there to work for their betters 
 and unconditionally submit to them ; to be cared for, indeed, but 
 by governing, and to be thus cared for and governed all too much. 
 In his myth of the earth-born men, these were the men of brass 
 and iron, made to be husbandmen and tradesmen, and by nature 
 subordinate to their brethren of gold and silver make, who were 
 born to be philosophers and rulers. Plato thus introduced in its 
 application to his higher orders a political and social principle 
 which was not only adverse to his historical one of the absoluteness 
 
PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 291 
 
 of the state, but was subversive of it ; in its nature and legitimate 
 consequences it looked to a form of society for which Plato himself 
 and the ancient world were unprepared, which should have its foun- 
 dation in the spiritual equality of all men. So, too, in the Christian 
 politics of the mediaeval hierarchy the common people of the laity 
 hold a like subordinate place and from a similar view; they are not 
 true citizens of the heavenly state, they are incapable of citizenship, 
 they are like the common people of Aristotle's state, they are 
 not so much members of the commonwealth, but rather adjuncts 
 to it, or at best a kind of Jewish proselytes at the gate ; they are 
 subject to the authority and direction of the select few, of the 
 priestly order, to whom alone has been opened the world of re- 
 vealed truth and who hold the keys of the kingdom of heaven. 
 Such a conception falls short no less than Plato's of the Christian 
 ideal of that divine spiritual community whose friendly doors ever 
 stand open to all who will enter in, wherein all men are not only 
 fellow-citizens but kings and priests unto God. 
 
 There are other ideal views of Plato's state which have been 
 partially realized in the modern world, and others which are yet 
 ideal and prophetic, still looking onward to some better future 
 to come. His view of a system of education as public and exclu- 
 sively under state control, and designed for all and of both sexes, 
 has certainly found its way in part in some modern states, and is 
 finding its way entire into all ; in some states even his provision 
 of such an education as compulsory has already been adopted. It 
 may be found as the centuries go on that his ideal anticipations 
 will be completely realized, and that such a lofty, intellectual, 
 and moral education as he sketched for only the best citizens of a 
 single state is by and by to be read in the " large letters " of an 
 education of like fine quality and extended range for all the citi- 
 zens of all states, for all mankind. And certainly the utmost 
 human wisdom and striving can go no farther than to make real 
 in the life of all men the thought which Plato was the first to 
 express, that the whole of man's earthly life is one great sphere 
 of education for another life, in which by a higher education he is 
 to make endless progress in knowledge and goodness. 
 
 But how will Plato's grand central idea be received in modern 
 politics, that the rulers of the state must be philosophers ? Per- 
 haps with the same derisive laughter which Plato himself said 
 would greet it on its first enunciation. In his best humor he says 
 to Glaucon, just as he was reaching this statement, " and now 
 
292 PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 
 
 comes the huge wave which is to deluge me with laughter and 
 infamy." And Glaucon tells him, when he has heard it, that all 
 the world will run at him might and main, and that he will only- 
 get well jeered for his pains and penalties. Nevertheless, when 
 rightly apprehended, is it not a true idea, and has not the pro- 
 gress of modern states kept pace with the process of its fulfill- 
 ment ? Plato might indeed search with a candle in modern states, 
 and never discover his philosophical rulers in the heads of govern- 
 ment, whether imperial, royal, or republican. And yet, in com- 
 parison with earlier times, it has come to be universally recog- 
 nized that all statesmen and great leaders in public affairs must 
 not only be educated men, but also by study and reflection have 
 attained to the mastery of general views and principles in all 
 departments of thought and action. What but this is taught by 
 the career of a Bismarck in civil and a von Moltke in military 
 affairs? And Plato was also well aware of the difficulty, so 
 familiar to the many and the few, the wise and the unwise, of 
 carrying theory over into practice, and of combining the two in 
 the character and lives of men, of uniting thought with action, 
 the pursuit of ideal truth with the exercise of practical influence 
 in government and society. He makes Adeimantus say, what has 
 been ever echoed by the multitude, that your philosopher-states- 
 men, and ever and most of all the best of them, are useless to the 
 world, and are made useless by the very thought and study which 
 they extol so much. But Plato reminds him that while the so- 
 called practical politicians may do well enough for ordinary times, 
 it is only the statesmen who are versed in general principles, the 
 philosophers who are masters of ideas, who show their superiority, 
 and are alone of any avail, when there arise, as arise they must, 
 great exigencies and crises in public life, the great and over- 
 whelming tides in the affairs of the states ; indeed, to use his own 
 figure, when the storm is up and the ship of state in imminent 
 peril they alone are the true pilots and captains, though in fair 
 weather and a smooth sea they are derided as babblers and star- 
 gazers. With a singular insight, too, does he penetrate to the 
 causes of this evil name which philosophy has with the multitude. 
 Partly, they have no knowledge of it, or taste of it, or sympathy 
 with it ; and so they dislike and deride it. Partly, too, they have 
 seen only bad specimens of philosophers in statesmen ; sometimes 
 these are mere counterfeits of the true coin, half-educated states- 
 men, who have been very clever in certain crafts, and aspiring to 
 
PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 293 
 
 something higher have made a leap from these crafts into phi- 
 losophy, rushing in, fools as they are, where finer and better 
 natures fear to tread. Then, too, these genuine natures have so 
 often missed their high destiny through the action of manifold 
 adverse forces ; they have been spoiled by contact with the world, 
 corrupted by public opinion, or borne down by temptations to per- 
 sonal or party issues. Most graphic is the picture here drawn 
 of these debasing and corrupting powers of the world, and very 
 striking the remark, that while things remain as they are, if even 
 one is saved and comes to good, it must be by the power of God, 
 and not by his own strength. But he tells his young friends that 
 they are nevertheless not to despair of philosophy. By and by. 
 Heaven only knows where or when, in some fair clime in some 
 golden time, there shall come upon the public scene the true phi- 
 losophers rightly and perfectly trained, and when men shall once 
 see them they shall straightway be of another mind, and then 
 shall our ideal polity come into being. 
 
 There is one more of Plato's views which is vital to his whole 
 system, to which I must at least briefly allude. This is the admis- 
 sion of women to his class of guardians, and to the discharge of all 
 its functions alike in peace and in war, and to all its preliminary 
 training and education. Of course this whole procedure grows 
 out of his opinion of the essential equality of the sexes ; and in all 
 his ideas on this subject he is not only far in advance of antiquity, 
 but even of all modern times, and of the foremost theorists in our 
 own day. Indeed, no modern advocate of this now much dis- 
 cussed doctrine of the equality of woman to man has put it upon 
 so square a basis as Plato. He contends that the restricting of 
 women to housekeeping and indoor occupations, or any separation 
 of the life and pursuits of the sexes, is unnatural, and that the 
 real order of nature is a similarity of training and all subsequent 
 pursuits. This he argues from the analogy of the sexes in other 
 animals. All male and female animals are put to the same uses, 
 why not, then, the two sexes in man ? or, as Mr. Jowett very 
 strongly puts it after Plato, " dogs are not divided into he's and 
 she's, nor do we take the masculine gender out to hunt and leave 
 the females at home to look after the puppies." Women are the 
 same in kind as men, with only a difference of degree in favor of 
 men. If women differ in capacity from men, so men differ equally 
 in capacity from one another. The only organic difference is in 
 the sexual function itself ; and apart from this, as Plato himself 
 
294 PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 
 
 puts it in a single sentence, " None of the occupations which com- 
 prehend the ordering of a state belong to woman as woman, nor 
 yet to man as man ; but natural gifts are to be found in both 
 sexes alike, and, so far as her nature is concerned, the woman is 
 admissible to all pursuits as well as the man ; though in all of 
 them the woman is weaker than the man." However much men 
 now may differ from Plato in this view of the equality of the 
 sexes, yet certainly all will agree that his conception of the posi- 
 tion due to woman in society and his demand for her highest 
 education, intellectual and moral, not only show his own remark- 
 able superiority to the ideas of his own time and country, but 
 also that they are singularly coincident with the spirit of Chris- 
 tianity and of Christian civilization. It would be interesting to 
 examine in comparison with Plato's " Republic " the many works 
 of a similar kind which have been written in subsequent times. 
 All these, such as the " De Republica " of Cicero in ancient and the 
 " Utopia " of More in modern times, are political ideals constructed 
 upon the model of Plato's work, and reproducing with more or 
 less fullness its principal features ; in some his supremacy of men 
 of science and learning, in nearly all his views of family life and 
 property and education. But Plato's polity is essentially distin- 
 guished from them all by its ruling ethical spirit, by its great end 
 to make the state an institution of virtue as well as intelligence, 
 of an education which should compass the whole life and being 
 of its citizens. In this its ruling ethical character Plato's " Re- 
 public " is not unworthy of comparison with the great Christian 
 ideal embodied by Augustine in his " De Civitate Dei." In 
 dialectic reasoning, in imaginative power, in richness and finish 
 of literary culture, the pagan philosopher far surpasses the Chris- 
 tian father ; in their relations to their times, and in their high 
 spiritual aims and motives as writers, they have much in com- 
 mon ; while in Augustine there is that superior elevation of con- 
 ception, a loftiness of prophetic vision, which he had reached in 
 passing from the domain of Greek speculation to the realm of 
 revealed truth, from the school of Plato to the school of Christ. 
 Amid the decaying fortunes of the Greek states, Plato reared 
 in imagination a commonwealth of finer and enduring quality, 
 where ignorance should be chased away by the light of know- 
 ledge, and all the strife of passion and moral evil be hushed and 
 subdued to the peace and harmony of reason and virtue. In that 
 commonwealth, as it rises into being at the touch of his creative 
 
PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 295 
 
 power, there shines the glad, bright, happy life of the olden Greek 
 times ; but all around and far beyond it there seems to be loom- 
 ing up to alluring view another and future life of endless and per- 
 fect being. So was it, but now in the clear vision of Christian 
 faith, with Augustine. He had just felt the shock of that great 
 event, the capture and destruction of Rome. As he dwelt upon 
 the fall of that city which had enthralled the world, and saw the 
 crumbling and dissolution of the vast Roman empire, and beheld 
 the instability of all earthly governments, he turned away from 
 the sight to gaze upon that heavenly kingdom which had been 
 established on earth, and was destined to be a universal and last- 
 ing dominion. And so he set himself to the sublime task of con- 
 templating and unfolding the progress and destiny of the true 
 theocracy, — that city which hath foundations, whose builder and 
 maker is God. 
 
EOMAN TEAVEL AND TKAVELERS. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, JANUARY 16, 1874. 
 
 Horace in his famous journey to Brundusium has made us 
 familiar with those aspects of traveling which the poet was fond 
 of taking in his writings, and which are very characteristic of 
 his good sense, his happy content of mind. The most distant 
 journey he ever made was to Athens, and that was in his youth 
 and for study and culture; but in all his after life he was no 
 traveler; he was fond, indeed, of rambling among his Sabine 
 hills and valleys, and sometimes went to the seashore or into 
 the interior to recruit his health, but for the most part he was 
 reluctant to get away from home and country, and never tired 
 of deploring the unhappy lot of some of his friends who were 
 always roaming abroad in quest of happiness, forgetting that 
 without wisdom and equanimity all they who ran across the seas 
 changed only their skies and not their mind. I have been fre- 
 quently drawn by a reading of these Horatian passages to some 
 inquiries into the general subject, and I propose to give you this 
 evening, as a contribution to our knowledge of ancient Roman life, 
 such notices and reflections as I have gathered in prosecuting 
 these inquiries. Let me ask you to observe with me (1) how far 
 traveling entered into the life and the culture of the ancient Ro- 
 mans, (2) what facilities they had for it, (8) what were the dif- 
 ferent classes of travelers among them, (4) what countries they 
 chiefly visited, and (5) what were the controlling motives under 
 which they pursued their travels. 
 
 We are greatly in error if we infer from the immensely im- 
 proved conditions for locomotion and intercourse with the world 
 peculiar to our times and country that traveling was an infrequent 
 and exceptional affair in ancient Roman life ; on the contrary, in 
 the Augustan age and the times immediately succeeding, it was 
 the habit, well-nigh the passion, of the Romans, and it was certainly 
 quite as common with them and as easy of accomplishment in the 
 first two or three centuries of the empire as for our people in this 
 nineteenth century before the introduction of railroads and steam- 
 
ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 297 
 
 ships. The peace which came in with the imperial rule, and 
 rested even as a gracious calm after a storm upon the whole 
 world so long rent and torn by war and battle, brought among its 
 many blessings the amplest security to every Roman citizen of 
 gratifying to the full his eager curiosity to see all parts of the 
 great empire which in some sense he could call his own, and even 
 of penetrating to the remotest corners of the earth. All men 
 sympathized with Virgil's shepherd in his grateful praise of him 
 who even as a god had given them this peace — " Deus nobis 
 hcec otia fecit, ''^ and with the prayer, too, of the Horatian muse, 
 that the day might be far distant when his peaceful rule should 
 end. All might go whither they would even as from one home to 
 another, carrying their property with them ; no more were they 
 disturbed by sound of arms, by fear of robbers on land, or of 
 pirates on sea. The majesty of Roman dominion had impressed 
 a friendly unity upon the entire globe, and the old Homeric fancy 
 of " the earth common to all " had passed into a reality. 
 
 To this general consideration of security may be added, as 
 another favorable condition for travel, the admirable widely ex- 
 tended system of military roads which belonged to this period 
 of Roman history. This system, which had its noble beginning 
 in the Appian Way (Regina Viarum), and which, keeping pace 
 with Rome's progress of conquest and dominion, had already be- 
 fore the end of the republic united with the capital all parts 
 of Italy, was now extended by Augustus and his successors over 
 all the foreign provinces, and reached the utmost boundaries of 
 the empire. The golden milestone set up by Augustus in the 
 Forum, a striking image of the centralization of Rome, was the 
 central point of a vast network of roads which kept the emperor's 
 palace and his departments of state in direct lines of communication 
 with all the provinces and subjects of his world-wide dominion. 
 Originally military roads, which had borne the weight of war in 
 the tramp of marching legions, they now became grand highways 
 of peace, along which troops of citizens securely wended their 
 quiet way, bent on their various errands of public or private 
 business. 
 
 There existed, too, all needful facilities in vehicles, inns, and 
 other appliances, for traveling on all these roads with convenience 
 and even with speed. Travelers of simple tastes and robust 
 health made shorter journeys on foot; and not infrequently do 
 we have pictures of vigorous Romans, their toga girt high, their 
 
298 ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 
 
 inconsiderable impedimenta at their back, striding along on some 
 Latin road. Others went on horseback or on the back of a mule, 
 like Horace, who, as he tells us, went on his cropped mule even 
 as far as Tarentum, his cloak bag galling the loins of the beast 
 and the rider his ribs. And vehicles there were of all sorts 
 and sizes, government post-chaises, passenger-coaches, like the 
 Italian vetture^ or the statelier equipages of private citizens. 
 Suetonius informs us, in his life of Augustus, that the emperor 
 established on all the great roads an amply appointed posting- 
 system for the purpose of securing an easy and rapid communication 
 with all the provinces. At the distances of a day's journey post- 
 houses were erected, furnished with accommodations for couriers 
 and travelers, and with buildings for horses and mules. Between 
 every two of these houses were placed smaller posts, each intended 
 only to furnish relays and having forty horses. The size and 
 capacity of the coaches, and the number of horses for each and 
 the number of persons to be carried, were all fixed by law ; four- 
 wheeled coaches carrying six hundredweight and furnished with 
 ten horses in winter and eight in summer, and two- wheeled coaches 
 limited to two hundredweight, and drawn by three horses ; the 
 number of persons in any coach was never more than three. But 
 as the government post was chiefly used only by those who were 
 more or less nearly connected with the public service, private 
 citizens embarked their capital and enterprise in stage companies 
 to supply the wants of the larger traveling public. These com- 
 panies made their posting arrangements upon the model of the 
 government system, and forwarded travelers by changes of coaches 
 and horses, or, like the Italian vetturini, accommodated slower 
 travelers with the same coach and team for a long journey. In 
 respect to the average speed of travel secured by these nwdes 
 of conveyance we have sufficient means of forming a sure esti- 
 mate. Gibbon in his account of the Roman roads says that it 
 was easy to travel by post about a hundred miles a day. Making 
 allowance for the Roman mile being shorter than the English 
 (480 feet, 5,280, 4,800), we find this statement agrees with no- 
 tices of journeys recorded in ancient writers. The average rate 
 was five Roman miles an hour. One might travel by government 
 post from Antioch to Constantinople, a distance of 750 miles, in 
 not quite six days. Julius Caesar traveled from Rome to the 
 Rhone, a distance of 800 miles, in eight days. The swiftest 
 Roman journey on record was made by Tiberius when he was 
 
ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 299 
 
 suddenly summoned to Germany by intelligence of the illness of 
 Drusus. With only one attendant, and with many relays of 
 horses, he made 200 miles in the 24 hours (probably horseback 
 — though Pliny says hy carriage). But ordinary travelers who 
 stopped over night of course took far more time for their jour- 
 neys. From Kome to Brundusium, a distance of 360 miles, the 
 journey generally took ten days ; Horace and his party traveled 
 very leisurely, and spent fourteen on the way. 
 
 The higher and richer classes of society were wont to travel in 
 their own carriages, and with a numerous attendance of servants, 
 and with all appointments which their wealth and luxury provided. 
 Suetonius tells us that Nero traveled with no less than a thousand 
 state coaches, the shoes of his horses and mules made of silver, 
 and his drivers and couriers dressed in scarlet liveries. People of 
 rank were not slow to follow these imperial examples, so that lux- 
 ury in traveling became general, and indeed so ruinous was the 
 extravagance that not infrequently, as in modern times, men 
 lived abroad like millionaires, and in the last stage of the journey 
 home went straight into bankruptcy. The equipages compared 
 favorably, in the convenience, elegance, and costliness of their 
 appointments, with those of modern times, the horses caparisoned 
 with purple and embroidered trappings, the carriages of the best 
 make richly furnished, and so capacious and their ample spaces 
 so arranged for various uses of reading, writing, and sleeping, that 
 the description of them reminds one even of the drawing-room and 
 sleeping cars on our rail trains. Suetonius records of the Emperor 
 Claudius, who was very fond of games of chance and skill, that 
 he had his backgammon boards set fast in his traveling carriage, 
 so that he could play his favorite games as he journeyed. Public 
 houses, and now and then well-appointed ones, there were in abun- 
 dance, especially in great commercial towns, or at the watering- 
 places. The Romans, indeed, like the Greeks, were fond of avail- 
 ing themselves, on their journeys, of the hospitalities of their 
 friends. So Julius Csesar, in Milan, stopped with his friend Vale- 
 rius Leo ; Verres, when traveling in Sicily, with Sthenius at Ther- 
 mae. So Horace and his party were entertained at Formiae, with 
 lodgings by Murena, and with table by Capito. And sacred and 
 piously observed as was the rite of hospitality with the Romans, 
 as with the Greeks before them, yet it is curious to find the shrewd 
 piece of advice by Columella when treating of the building of vil- 
 las, " Don't put your villa on the high road, lest your housekeeping 
 
300 ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 
 
 suffer by the everlasting turning-in of your traveling friends." 
 But where such convenient stopping-places were wanting the Ro- 
 man people of quality had to put up at the public house, like their 
 poorer countrymen, and content themselves with its indifferent 
 accommodations. Every village had its inn and its publican, and 
 in large towns the traveler had his choice among several public 
 houses. It was the custom, too, of landed proprietors to put up 
 an inn on some part of an estate which lay on the high road, and 
 have it kept by one of their freedmen or slaves. Here they had a 
 ready market for the produce of their estates, and especially their 
 wines, and often added largely to their income from the business 
 of the inn. The stations often derived their names from these 
 taverns, as, for instance, the common name of Tres Tabernse, also 
 of Ad Medias, Ad Novas, Ad Veteres. The inns had also their 
 signs, as in modern times, with their names upon them, and gayly 
 painted pictures and inscriptions setting forth the merits of the 
 house. Thus we find the names of the Eagle, the Elephant, the 
 Dragon, the Great Crane. The sign of a much frequented house 
 in Gaul read as follows : " Here Mercury promises gain, Apollo 
 health, Septiunanus lodgings and table. Stranger, look to it, 
 where you stop. Whoever turns in here will never regret it." 
 Yet the ordinary inns, like most of those now found in Italy and 
 Greece, were far from inviting ; they were crowded with the com- 
 mon people, hostlers, and drivers, were full of noise, smoke, and 
 vile odors, and, as at this day everywhere in Greece outside of 
 Athens, the indifferent beds and bedding swarmed with numerous 
 varieties of foul insects, flying, crawling, and leaping, which Pliny 
 groups all under the euphemistic name of the " summer creatures 
 of inns," cauponum cestiva animalia. The regular prices even 
 of good inns were not high, at least according to modern reckon- 
 ing. We have also preserved to us a day's hotel bill from those 
 times. On a bas-relief found at ^sernia, a traveler while hold- 
 ing his mule by the rein is settling his bill with the landlord, and 
 the conversation is given thus : " Landlord. You have had with 
 a pint of wine, bread one as, vegetables two ases^ three ases (an 
 as = 1|- cents, 4.5). Traveler. All right. Landlord. A girl, at- 
 tendance (^puellani)^ 8 ases (12 cents). Traveler. That 's all 
 right, too. Landlord. Hay for the mule, two ases (3 cents). 
 Traveler. This mule will ruin me yet." The whole reckoning 
 thus was about 20 cents. Polybius sets the daily reckoning at 
 only half an as. We may thus see that the two pence, or two 
 
ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 301 
 
 denarii (32 cents), given to the host by the Good Samaritan in 
 Scripture were a liberal allowance, and were meant to cover also 
 the expenses of medical attendance. In general, as we may infer 
 sufficiently from Horace's testimony, the innkeepers were on all 
 accounts in ill repute. Even as now, with the same class in Italy, 
 they were given to aU kinds of petty cheating, such as giving short 
 measure in the provender for the horses, and indeed in giving 
 none at all, and especially in adulterating the wines ordered by 
 their guests. I may mention in passing, as a curious little illustra- 
 tion in comparative philology, that the Greek verb KaTrrjXevo), which 
 means first to keep a crib or a manger, comes to mean both in 
 classic and New Testament Greek to adulterate, to cheat, in the 
 same way as our verb crib has come to have the like bad sense, and 
 even to cheating in the use of classic words, from the same word 
 used as a noun. 
 
 The ancient travelers also suffered no less than the modern 
 from the frauds and petty annoyances of tax-gatherers, or the 
 publicans, who were the custom-house officers of the Koman gov- 
 ernment. Cicero mentions in his times the complaints of the citi- 
 zens as directed, not against the duties themselves, but the injuries 
 which they suffered from the deputies in their collection ; and at 
 a later period Tacitus, in his "Agricola," awards praise to his 
 father-in-law, that when he was the governor of Britain he abol- 
 ished the tricky frauds of the publicans, which were felt by the 
 provincialists to be a far heavier weight to carry than the tribute 
 itself. Plutarch says in one of his Moralia, " We quarrel with the 
 collectors of duties, not when they examine the things which are 
 opened to their inspection, but when, in their annoying curiosity, 
 in searching after contraband goods, they rudely rummage over 
 our baggage ; " he adds, however, with his wonted honesty, " yet 
 the law allows them to do this, and if they fail to do it, they make 
 themselves liable." We get some items of information on these 
 matters where we might least expect it, among the themes set 
 down in one of Quintilian's " Declamationes." The theme is 
 given thus: "All things except those needful for the journey 
 must pay the quadragesima (the fortieth) to the publican. The 
 publican is allowed the right of search ; and whatever is dutiable 
 and has not been declared is forfeit. The publican may not search 
 a matron." Next to this last theme comes the following, which 
 shows that travelers then, also, and women, too, had their smug- 
 gling tricks as well as now. " A matron makes a journey, and has 
 
302 ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 
 
 with her four hundred pearls ; when she comes to the publican, 
 she hides them in her bosom. When the publican demands them, 
 the matron tells him to search ; the publican declines doing this ; 
 he puts his hand on the pearls stowed away, and declares them 
 his own." Such chance information we owe to a teacher of rhet- 
 oric, as he gives themes to the Eoman boys for their essays and 
 declamations. 
 
 From these notices of the security and various facilities of 
 ancient Roman travel, I pass to speak of the different classes of 
 travelers and of the motives and interests which governed them. 
 In general it is obvious that alike the great extent and the central- 
 ization of the Roman Empire brought about the necessity of con- 
 stant motion in traveling for a large part of its inhabitants. So 
 numerous and complex were the relations of life existing among 
 the members of so vast a community, that there were perpetual 
 streams of intercourse pouring in and out of the gates of the 
 capital, and flowing to and from all the regions of the world. 
 Ambassadors and couriers of the governments, senators and mag- 
 istrates of all grades, sent on various public missions, and private 
 citizens of all classes, bent on different errands of business or 
 pleasure, were passing to and fro between Rome and the provinces, 
 or in the provinces between different places and the seats of the 
 provincial governors. One writer remarks (Epict. Diss. III. 24, 
 26), " Senators cannot, like plants, be rooted to the soil; they can 
 give but little heed to their own homes and private affairs, but 
 must ever be traveling in the behalf of the manifold interests of 
 the state ; " and another mentions that the people of Byzantium 
 annually sent an ambassador with a large retinue to Rome to greet 
 the emperor, and also to the governor of the province of Moesia. 
 So, too, we find in illustration of the widely extended relations 
 of private and professional life, that Greek scholars lectured 
 and taught in Spain, Grecian artists and sculptors painted and 
 wrought in Gaul, and goldsmiths from Asia Minor found a mar- 
 ket for their wares among the women of a Roman colony in Swit- 
 zerland; so, too, Gauls and Germans served as bodyguards of 
 Herod at Jerusalem, and in turn Jews were wandering about in 
 all the provinces. 
 
 But if we endeavor to unfold this general view into some pai*- 
 ticulars, we can easily discover among the Romans, even as now 
 among ourselves, three classes of travelers, according as they 
 were chiefly influenced by considerations of business or amuse- 
 
ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 303 
 
 ment, or of information and general culture. Doubtless these dis- 
 tinctions might not always be sharply made any more than now, 
 and people might more or less have all these objects in view. 
 Shrewd men of business often would manage to derive some 
 amusement as well as knowledge out of their journeys, and men of 
 culture would not in traveling be without entertainment or busi- 
 est occupation, and travelers of the lighter calibre were as skill- 
 ful then as now in making a most absorbing business of pleasure. 
 Still we may with reason as well as convenience discuss our sub- 
 ject from this threefold point of view. I might occupy the re- 
 mainder of my paper with accounts of the journeys and voyages 
 undertaken by Komans and Roman subjects in the interest of 
 trade and commerce. The traders and merchants not only trav- 
 ersed all Italy and the provinces to the westward, but also crossed 
 the seas, and made their way eastward through Greece and Asia 
 Minor to the Euphrates, and to the south and southeast to Egypt, 
 and thence by the Red Sea to India, and to China. Horace, in 
 describing his vagus mercator^ speaks of him as exchanging his 
 wares from the setting to the rising sun, and running in his 
 busy haste even to the farthest Indies. Pliny says that im- 
 mense multitudes sailed in pursuit of gain on all waters, and 
 Juvenal declares that the ocean is so filled with ships that there 
 are well-nigh more people on sea than on land. We have it 
 recorded on an inscription that one Elavius, a Phrygian trader, 
 made the journey to Italy twenty-seven times ; and Horace de- 
 scribes his merchant as revisiting the Atlantic three or four times 
 a year. The merchandise of the East had in earlier times reached 
 Italy by northern routes, either through Media, Armenia, and the 
 eastern and southern shores of the Euxine, or else by the Eu- 
 phrates through Syria and the central parts of Asia Minor.^ But 
 after the conquest of Egypt the Romans shared with the Greeks 
 and Egyptians the lucrative trade by which the wares of Arabia 
 and India were brought by the Red Sea and the Nile to the 
 shores of the Mediterranean. This trade was also greatly en- 
 larged by the vigorous policy of Augustus, who restored to regu- 
 larity and efficiency the disordered condition of the kingdom of 
 the Ptolemies. Commercial intercourse was made secure ; the 
 transport of goods made easier ; and Alexandria became the great 
 commercial mart of the world. In the time of the Ptolemies the 
 
 1 Pliny mentions that one hundred and thirty Roman merchants had their 
 places of trade at Dioscuria (Iscaria) on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. 
 
304 ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 
 
 direct intercourse with India was inconsiderable, and hardly 
 twenty vessels a year ventured out from the Red Sea into the 
 ocean; but in Strabo's time six hundred and twenty made the 
 voyage every year. The entire journey by land and sea from 
 Alexandria to India and back generally occupied from six to 
 seven months. The muslins and silk goods, the spices and the 
 perfumes, and especially the pearls and precious stones which 
 were thus imported from the East drained Rome annually of im- 
 mense sums of money. A pound of nard cost in Rome about 
 twenty doUars, and a pound of the Indian malobathrum cost sixty 
 dollars. Sometimes single pearls sold for 1200,000. Pliny men- 
 tions an instance of a Roman lady, that she carried upon her per- 
 son in diamonds and pearls a fortune of a million and a half dol- 
 lars. The same writer declares that these Arabian and Indian 
 wares carried out of Rome every year a hundred million sesterces, 
 circa f 3,750,000. " So much," exclaims Pliny, " do our luxuries 
 and our women cost us ! " (" tanto nobis constant delicice etferai- 
 nee ! ") N. H. 12, 41. But it belongs less to my plan to speak of 
 these commercial travelers than of those who traveled either for 
 amusement or for information and culture. 
 
 Immense was the number of Roman tourists — of people who 
 roamed abroad from mere love of change of place or of sight- 
 seeing. Pliny says that man is by nature fond of wandering and 
 of seeing new things. Many such a roaming Roman was as care- 
 less as modern tourists of the sensible advice of an old English 
 traveler (Peacham's " Compleat Gentleman," 1622) " ne sis pere- 
 grinus domi^^^ not to be a stranger at home, a stranger to things 
 worth seeing and knowing in one's own country. "Numerous," 
 says Pliny, " are the objects of interest in Rome itself, which our 
 ramblers abroad are ignorant of even by hearsay, which they 
 would be sure to see with their own eyes, if only some foreign 
 land possessed them, about which they had chanced to hear 
 through some traveling countryman." In their shorter excursions, 
 such tourists visited other parts of Italy, or went over to Sicily. 
 Italy had many a summer resort for these rich and pleasure-loving 
 travelers, who hasted out of town for change of scene, or to get 
 rid of care or ennui. Sometimes they went to the seashore and 
 sometimes to the interior, as Horace in one passage well describes 
 them : " If our rich man says, ' No bay outshines the pleasant Baiae,' 
 then he makes for the Campanian shore, and lake and sea feel the 
 passion of the hasting lord ; soon a vicious fancy seizes him, and 
 
ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 305 
 
 straightway, interpreting that as a good auspice, he exclaims, ' To- 
 morrow let us be off to Teanum.' " Crowds of tourists struck into 
 the Appian Way. Here, says Lucretius, drove the wealthy Ro- 
 man, weary of the town out to his Alban villa, there to yawn 
 and fret and kill time for a while, and then turn back to Rome. 
 Here the upstart freedman showed off his dear-bought ponies. 
 Here, too, glittered in their equipages luxurious women, like the 
 Cynthia of Propertius, ostensibly going out to Lavinium to wor- 
 ship Juno, and herself worshiped on the way by her attending 
 lover. And here, too, as Ovid writes, other Roman women were 
 making their annual pilgrimage to the festival of Diana at Aricia, 
 there to fulfill their pious vows, garlands in their hair, and torches 
 in their hands, not, however, without the attendance of gay youths, 
 whose presence was, perhaps, to lead to yet other vows, to be paid 
 the following year. But the stream of fashionable travel flowed 
 on through Campania to the Bay of Naples, and the summer re- 
 sorts on its delightful shores, where the smiles of nature and the 
 charms of art, and all amplest resources of refined society, were 
 ready to minister alike to healthful recreation and to ruinous ex- 
 travagance and excess. Most conspicuous and famous among the 
 many attractive places which lined these sparkling shores lay 
 Baiae, the first watering-place of the ancient world, stretching along 
 by the side of a level beach, and yet at a short space from the 
 waters shut in by a circle of green hills. This little spot, called 
 by Martial "the golden shore of happy Yenus," was amply fur- 
 nished with magnificent establishments for the care of the sick, 
 and yet more brilliant ones for the amusement of the well, — 
 splendid with palatial villas of emperor and nobles, built, some 
 on the hills, others on the beach, and yet others on the water, 
 their owners, as Horace says, weary of the land and greedy of the 
 sea. Here went on in the Roman season a round of luxurious 
 life, the clear skies and mild air and blue waters all alluring to 
 the enjoyment of the passing hour. During the day gay-colored 
 boats and princely galleys might be seen everywhere on the wa- 
 ters of the bay, with merry rose-garlanded companies gathering to 
 festive banquets either on board or on the beach, the shore and 
 the sea resounding through all the hours with music and song ; 
 while the cool evenings and the starlight nights invited to new 
 excursions and feasts, and then later the sleep of the jaded guests 
 was disturbed by the sounds of serenading or reveling par- 
 ties. The voluptuous character of the life at Baise is proverbial 
 
306 ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 
 
 among ancient writers. Seneca calls it a harbor of vices. Spend- 
 thrifts, driven out of Rome by insolvency, here wasted in riot- 
 ous living their creditors' gold ; as Juvenal pithily says, they ran 
 from the Subilra to Baiae and the oysters. Here, of course, were 
 found gayest and most attractive women, and, as the poet Mar- 
 tial tartly says, many a guest came to be healed, and carried 
 away a new disease of the heart, declaring as he went, that the 
 salubrity of the Baian waters was not up to their fame. The per- 
 ils of Baiae to female virtue Martial has made the theme of his 
 epigram on Lsevina. " A chaste Lgevina, nowise below in virtue 
 the ancient Sabine dames, she came an evil day to Baiae's baths, 
 and there, alas ! while dipping oft in their warm springs, sudden 
 she fell into the flames of love, and quitting for gentle youth her 
 too stern spouse, even she who came as true as erst Penelope, as 
 false as Helen went away." Well might Propertius warn his Cyn- 
 thia against the corrupt shores of Baiae — shores, he declares, " all 
 unfriendly to chaste maidens." 
 
 " Ah ! pereant Baiae crimen amores aquae ! " 
 ("Ah ! perish the Baian waters, the source of guilty loves ! ") 
 
 But the Roman tourists who traveled from curiosity or love of 
 new and gay scenes were drawn across the seas to visit the attrac- 
 tive cities of Greece and Asia Minor. Horace enumerates some 
 of these in one of his odes (1, VII. 1) : — 
 
 " Some may favor'd Rhodes or Mitylene please, 
 
 Or Ephesus, to celebrate; 
 Or Corinth, with its walls between two seas, 
 
 Or Thebes by Bacchus rendered great. 
 Or Delphi by Apollo, or thy vale 
 
 Thessalian Tempe." 
 
 The value set upon a sight of Corinth is sufficiently shown by 
 the proverbial words of Horace in another place, " Non cuivis 
 homini contingit adire Corinthum : " Not every man is lucky 
 enough to get to Corinth ; very like the Italian word about 
 Naples, — Yedere Napoli e mori : See Naples and die. Cor- 
 inth was always, and now more than ever, a city full of strong 
 attractions for many travelers, — situation, climate, and various 
 scenery, and, especially in its society and life, so gay, rich, and 
 luxurious. Ancient and modern writers vie with one another in 
 celebrating its unique position between the ^gesm and Ionian 
 seas, and the extensive, magnificent view from its citadel, its 
 
ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 307 
 
 springs and fountains, its public games, its trade and commerce, 
 and all its busy and bustling life, as at once the gathering-place 
 and thoroughfare of the travel of the world alike for the East and 
 the West. For Koman travelers it had new attractions. Through 
 the active exertions of Julius Caesar and succeeding sovereigns, a 
 new and Roman city had here grown up ; it was a Roman colony, 
 and the metropolis of a Roman province, a chief element in the 
 population was Roman, and it gave a Roman complexion to the 
 prevailing manners of the people. The Romans who traveled in 
 Greece seldom failed to cross the JEgean and visit the cities of 
 Asia Minor. Most attractive stopping-places there were on the 
 way, as the voyage lay among the Isles of Greece, which tempted 
 the passing traveler to linger amid their " spaces of calm repose," 
 and have a nearer view of spots so bright with memories of the 
 past, and fairer still in the ever-present charms of nature. Les- 
 bos especially was such a spot, — the birthplace of Sappho and 
 Alcseus, whose capital, Mitylene, was praised by Cicero as well 
 as Horace for its delightful situation, the beauty of its buildings, 
 its fruitful soil, and lovely prospects and landscapes. But no 
 island in these waters attracted so many visitors as Rhodes, the 
 " clara RJiodos " of Horace, whose metropolis was during all this 
 period the chief Greek city of the ^Egean. The moles of its har- 
 bors, in which rode numerous merchant vessels, stretched far out 
 into the sea ; and above rose the city, in the midst of its fragrant 
 gardens and amphitheatre of hills, encompassed by strong walls, 
 having broad and regular streets, and with its buildings so sym- 
 metrical that the whole city is described as looking like a single 
 house. So fair was the climate of Rhodes, and so serene its skies, 
 that it was a proverb that the sun shone bright in Rhodes every 
 day in the year. The cities of Asia Minor which were most fre- 
 quented were Ephesus and Smyrna. Ephesus was the capital of 
 the province, a place of extensive trade, and pronounced by Sen- 
 eca one of the most beautifully built cities of the world. It was, 
 however, far surpassed in celebrity and beauty by Smyrna. In 
 its position and appearance it resembled Rhodes, its streets and 
 buildings rising above its harbors in the form of an amphitheatre, 
 and affording magnificent views both towards the sea and the 
 surrounding country. The city was, in its appointments and 
 resources, fitted alike to the wants of Greek and Roman, abound- 
 ing in gymnasia, piazzas, theatres, and temples, in baths and 
 pleasure grounds, and affording for the amusement of the people 
 numerous games and holiday shows of every kind. 
 
308 ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 
 
 The countries of which I have spoken, and yet others more dis- 
 tant, were also visited by many who traveled in the interests of 
 learning, or for purposes of study and culture. Owing to the 
 comparatively few and slender facilities in ancient life for study 
 by books and libraries, studious persons were probably more apt 
 than in modern times to rely upon observation and reflection, and 
 to increase their knowledge by the sight of foreign lands and the 
 personal inspection of their manners and customs, and direct in- 
 tercourse with their distinguished men. Nothing was more com- 
 mon than for young men to go abroad, as a means of education 
 and culture. Every province of importance had its seat of learn- 
 ing, to which aspiring youth were wont to resort as students. 
 Such places were Massilia in Gaul, Cremona and Mediolanum in 
 Cisalpine Gaul, Carthage in Africa, Apollonia in Epirus. In Asia 
 Tarsus had a like celebrity, and also Antioch in Syria, mentioned 
 by Cicero in his " Archias" as affluent in learned men and liberal 
 studies. Two places, however, eclipsed all these, and vied with 
 one another, even as now the chief universities of Germany, in the 
 frequence of their students and in their intellectual influence. 
 These were Alexandria and Athens, to whose schools young men 
 flocked from Eome itself, and all parts of the empire. Instances 
 of studious young men visiting Athens and traveling in Greece 
 are familiar to all readers of the classics, such as Horace, Bru- 
 tus, both Quintus and Marcus Cicero, and also the son of Mar- 
 cus. But not only students, professors too, and teachers of all 
 departments, were wont to make extensive professional travels. 
 Rhetoricians and sophists travelled to and fro among all the great 
 cities of the world ; they came with their lectures on science and 
 letters, just as Englishmen come now to us, and people flocked to 
 see and hear them, and paid liberal fees for the lectures, some- 
 times, too, as in modern countries, for very indifferent perform- 
 ances. Thus Lucian traveled in Gaul, and afterwards in Greece 
 and Ionia and Syria, and also in Egypt. It was not uncommon 
 for statues to be erected in different cities in honor of those who 
 had thus lectured in them ; thus Apuleius boasts that he had won 
 this honor in many places. Still more numerous and extensive 
 were the travels of artists and workers in the arts. They jour- 
 neyed from place to place, not only to see and study the many 
 works of art which were to be found in the different provinces, 
 but also to supply the ever-growing demand for such works. It 
 was the custom, too, for singers and for athletes of all kinds to 
 
ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 309 
 
 make the tour of the provinces in Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor, 
 and to give concerts and shows in different places, where they 
 were often received with enthusiasm and preseated with public 
 crowns. Cicero, after studying in Athens, made a voyage through 
 the ^gean, stopping at the islands of Cea, Gyara, Scyrus, Delos, 
 and Ehodes, and thence a complete tour of Asia Minor, and 
 formed a personal acquaintance with its illustrious orators and 
 teachers of rhetoric. The poets Ovid and Propertius also made 
 extensive tours in Greece and Asia. 
 
 The emperor Hadrian was a great traveler, and visited, during 
 his reign, every province in the empire, and not merely on errands 
 of state, but to gratify his love of knowledge, and, as Suetonius 
 says, to learn and know by personal observation whatever he had 
 heard and read about any regions of the world. But perhaps the 
 most interesting of all Roman travels were those of which we read 
 in Pliny and Tacitus of Germanicus, the nephew of the emperor 
 Tiberius, and brother of the emperor Claudius. Brief as was his 
 life and career, yet his is by far the most conspicuous and inter- 
 esting figure in the history of his time, the light of his personal 
 virtues, and cultivated mind and manners, and noble character, 
 shining out brightly from the dark atmosphere of crime and tyr- 
 anny which envelopes the pages of Tacitus' " Annals." Possessed 
 of studious tastes and a noble curiosity, he improved every oppor- 
 tunity to visit foreign lands, and commune in sight and mind with 
 the renowned places of ancient story, or of letters and art. When 
 he was entering upon his government in Achaia, he first sailed 
 over to the coast of Epirus, and there surveyed the field of Actium, 
 which had a double interest for him as a Roman and as a relative 
 both of Augustus and Antony. Thence he gladly hastened his 
 steps to Greece, which like all thoughtful Romans he honored as 
 the land from which all higher culture had come, for its various 
 fame, also for its antiquity ; all its past he revered, with its men 
 and its deeds and its events, and even its venerable myths and 
 legends. Every rood of its soil which he trod started to remem- 
 brance some storied scene of war or peace, and wherever he 
 roamed he lived over again all his earlier studies and thoughts on 
 the cherished spots whence they all sprang. With fondest delight, 
 however, he visited Athens, where he was welcomed with selectest 
 honors, and where, in turn, in compliment to the city, he went al- 
 ways attended only by a single lictor. Even now, with its politi- 
 cal power and glory gone forever, its crowded public life only a 
 
310 ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 
 
 great memory of the past, tlie city had for him in its stillness and 
 desolation unspeakable charms ; he wandered in its streets, by its 
 hillsides and its streams, as in an old and revisited home, gazing 
 with admiration upon the temples, the porticoes, the Academy, 
 the Agora, and the Parthenon, with their superb works of art, to 
 his cultivated eye yet green in their ruin. All these already five 
 centuries old, yet seemed fresh and new, as if endowed with an 
 ever-blooming life and a soul incapable of age. From Athens 
 our classical traveler passed to the plain of Marathon, and thence 
 across the Euripus to Euboea, and from Eubcea sailed across the 
 ^gean to the coast of Asia Minor, whence, after visiting the chief 
 southern and western cities, he proceeded northward to Perinthus 
 and Byzantium, and from there into the Euxine, full of desire, as 
 Tacitus says, to see and know all places ancient and celebrated by 
 fame. On his return, being hindered by adverse winds from 
 reaching Samothrace, he visited the ancient Ilium, and then again, 
 having coasted along the Asiatic shores, landed at Colophon. 
 From here he went to Claros, consulted the oracle of Clarian 
 Apollo, where the priest, with the wonted oracular style, darkly 
 foretold his premature end. In the following year, the last of 
 his life, Germanicus made extended journeys in Egypt. Egypt, 
 which for the Greeks as well as the Romans was a land peculiar 
 above all others, even as a new world, was much visited by Eoman 
 travelers. There was a regular line of vessels running to Alex- 
 andria from the Campanian port of Puteoli. In this port itself 
 the traveler had a foretaste of Eastern and Egyptian life. Here 
 about him were seen people in Oriental costume ; he heard their 
 various languages, he saw there on the wharves the wares and 
 products of the most distant lands. In the harbor the Alexandrian 
 ships were recognized above all others ; even as they came into 
 port they were easily distinguished, as they alone had the right 
 of keeping up their topsail Qsipariurri) between Capri and Cape 
 Minerva. These ships were of all sizes, from the fast sailers, or 
 clippers, to the large ships of burden. They were painted, and 
 carried at their prow a figurehead of the deity from which they 
 took their name. Their trade was a lucrative one, and sometimes 
 brought their owners an income of twelve Attic talents, about 
 il2,000. The average length of passage from Puteoli to Alexan- 
 dria was twelve days ; Conybeare, in his work on St. Paul, makes 
 it nine days, but this is mentioned by Pliny as the shortest passage 
 on record. The course was generally from Sicily by Malta, Crete, 
 
ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 311 
 
 and Cyprus. On the approach to the dangerous Egyptian shore, 
 land was signalled at night by the celebrated Pharos light, a sure 
 guide to the mariner at a distance of about three hundred stadia 
 (nearly forty miles), and even by day the bright shining of the 
 white marble above the blue sea betokened the nearness of Alex- 
 andria. Germanicus, however, of whose travels I was speaking, 
 did not begin his journey from Italy, as he was already in the 
 East as a provincial governor. He landed on the African shore 
 at Canopus, a populous city, whose crowded and most voluptuous 
 life had no attractions for a traveler of his spirit and aims. Sail- 
 ing up the Nile, he soon passed out from the splendor and the 
 noisy din of Canopus into stillness and solitude, all at once trans- 
 ported into the atmosphere of the distant past. Having visited 
 Memphis and the Pvramids, Germanicus sailed up yet farther, 
 bent upon seeing the famous ancient city of Thebes. There, doubt- 
 less, in gazing upon the mighty ruins of vanished power and glory, 
 the young Roman prince had occasion to learn a lesson for himself 
 and his own nation ; for one of the oldest priests, in interpreting 
 to him the Egyptian inscriptions, told him of a Theban empire 
 that once was no less great and powerful than the existing em- 
 pire of Rome. The king, Rhamses, had had under his command 
 700,000 fighting men ; he had conquered not only Libya and Ethi- 
 opia, but also Armenia and Syria, and the countries of Asia from 
 Bithynia to Lycia, and had exacted from these peoples revenues 
 fully equal to those won by Parthian or by Roman power. 
 
 As we read the records of these travels, and those of other 
 cultivated Roman travelers, we are struck with the prevailing his- 
 torical interest with which they were pursued. In this respect, 
 indeed, the Roman travelers were much like thoughtful men in our 
 own times who visit foreign lands. It was not so much the man- 
 ners and customs of existing nations, or other institutions or ob- 
 jects belonging to the present, which occupied their minds ; it was 
 rather the interest that belongs to the past, the fascinating in- 
 fluence of great historic memories, and the effort to reproduce 
 bygone times by seeing their famous places and yet existing mon- 
 uments. Indeed, the liveliest interest was felt in seeing even the 
 smallest remains of the life of distant heroic times made re- 
 nowned by the immortal song of Homer. In Athens and Sparta, 
 in Aulis, Argos, and Mycenae, Romans conscientiously followed 
 their guides as they traced for them the footsteps and the storied 
 lives of an Ajax, Telamon, or Ulysses, or even of mythical Icarus. 
 
312 ROMAN TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS. 
 
 An ancient temple, or a fountain or a grove, or a single plane- 
 tree or myrtle-tree, thus reproduced a whole period with its great 
 names and events. Hardly a step was taken, in a land rich in old 
 traditions, which did not reecho some memorable occurrence, and 
 not a stone was there but had some name upon it. So was it also 
 with places ennobled by recollections of historic times. The 
 graves of great men were visited, and the battlefields and camp 
 grounds of great armies like the Persian. " We looked," said 
 Arrian to Hadrian, — "we looked upon the Euxine from the same 
 spot on which Xenophon beheld it." With special satisfaction 
 travelers followed in the steps of Alexander the Great in his cam- 
 paigns in Greece and the East. Plutarch speaks of an old oak 
 on the Cephissus, under which stood Alexander's tent at the bat- 
 tle of Chseronea. The tomb of the great conqueror at Alexandria 
 was always religiously visited, especially by the Eoman emperors 
 themselves. And nearer home, in Italy and the western provinces, 
 the Romans, inspired by the same historical interest, were wont to 
 seek out the places celebrated in the earlier and the later times, 
 as, at Laurentum, the camp of ^neas ; at Liternum, olive-trees 
 planted by the younger Scipio; and, just as now with modern 
 travelers in Italy, the island of Capri, where Augustus and the 
 infamous Tiberius passed so much time ; and at Tusculum the 
 villa of Cicero, and at Tibur the house of Horace. The interest 
 in art and its numerous existing works was another influence 
 which either occasioned or directed the foreign travels of the 
 Romans. Cicero enumerates the costly works of art in Sicily 
 of which Verres had robbed the temples, or the houses oi the 
 provincialists ; every traveler, he says, was conducted to them to 
 gaze upon their beauty. So, also, Propertius at Athens, though 
 chiefly occupied with his study of Plato and Demosthenes, failed 
 not to study its great works in bronze and marble. In Cicero's 
 time, men went to Thespiae in Boeotia to see the Amor by Praxi- 
 teles ; and Pliny says that for a sight of the Venus of this artist 
 many made the voyage to Cnidus. Yet, if we take the testimony 
 of Pliny in other places, the appreciation of art by the Romans 
 was somewhat superficial and arbitrary, and chiefly determined by 
 the name of an artist and the fame of his works. Indeed, one 
 word of his strikes one as quite applicable to many a modern 
 traveler in countries enriched with fine creations in art. He 
 says : " As soon as one only sees a celebrated picture or statue, 
 he goes on his way quite content ; he never comes back to get a 
 
ROMAN TRAVELS AND TRAVELERS. 313 
 
 second look." The historical interest prevailed over that in art, 
 even with men of Cicero's culture. He says in one of his works : 
 "Places in which there are traces of men or events that we admire 
 or revere make upon us an enduring impression. Even my favor- 
 ite city of Athens pleases me not so much by its superb buildings 
 and the grand works of its artists as by the memories of its great 
 men, — where they lived, where they sat, where they wrote and 
 spoke, and where their sacred ashes now repose." (De Legibus, 
 ii. 2, 4.) 
 
 Let me mention one more source of interest in travel from 
 which the Romans like ourselves derived the utmost enjoyment, 
 and this is the sight of nature and natural scenery. It was a true 
 Roman as well as human word said by Atticus, " In all which has 
 to do with mental quickening and refreshment, and real inward 
 joy, nature has the first place in its influence over us." (Cicero, 
 de Legibus, ii. I. 2.) It has been often remarked of the feeling for 
 nature among the ancients, that it had in it a more marked reli- 
 gious element than with people in modern life. In the midst of 
 the beautiful and the grand in natural scenes, in mountain and 
 grove, and stream and ocean, they felt themselves in more direct 
 communion with a divine power, and with their wonder and delight 
 was associated more closely a feeling of adoration. This kind of 
 religious feeling of nature frequently finds expression in ancient 
 writers, and in those, too, who have loved the country at home as 
 well as abroad. On this account, places rich in natural beauty or 
 sublimity were sought out, not alone for the aesthetic delight they 
 yielded, but also for the worship of the deities to which tradition 
 and long usage had consecrated them. But still the immediate 
 feeling for nature and natural scenery was, with Roman writers 
 and travelers, a far more powerful source of interest than the feel- 
 ing for art. It finds ample expression in words in all their poets, 
 and a still surer expression in their love for the country and a 
 country life. Varro says, in words which remind us of Cowper : 
 " The country divine nature has given us, the town man's art has 
 built " (De Re Rustica, iii. 1, 4) ; far rather, he adds, would he 
 see the fruiteries at Scrofa's villa than the picture gallery of Lu- 
 cullus." Lucretius was "content to lie on the soft grass by a trick- 
 ling waterfall, under the branches of a lofty tree, when the sea- 
 son smiled and the meads glowed with flowers, while others were 
 banqueters to the sound of the cithara in their splendid halls, 
 which glittered with gold." And Seneca: " Who that has known 
 
314 ROMAN TRAVELS AND TRAVELERS. 
 
 real nature can delight in its imitations ? I can scarcely believe 
 that those who imitate in their houses forest, river, and sea 
 have ever seen real woods or wide, green fields into which a rush- 
 ing river pours, or through which quietly flows the noiseless 
 brook." And Horace, with whom I began this quite too extended 
 paper, let me end with him by quoting from his praises of nature. 
 There in the forest or by the brookside he found at last true 
 delight. There the winter was warm, the summer was cool, his 
 sleep undisturbed. Thence he writes (Ep. I. 10) to his friend 
 Aristius in the city : — 
 
 " You keep the nest : I praise the rural shade, 
 The moss-grown rock, clear brook, and woodland glade. 
 In short I live, I reign, when I retire 
 From all that you town-lovers so admire. 
 And, like some slave from priestly service fled, 
 Cloyed with rich cakes, I long for wholesome bread." 
 
THE POEM OF LUCRETIUS, DE RERUM NATURA. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, JANUARY 29, 1875. 
 
 To every one who has read Lucretius and has come to feel his 
 power as a writer, it must seem a quite peculiar thing that so 
 little is known of his personal history. The event of his death 
 in the year 55 b. c. we learn from Donatus in his life of Virgil ; 
 and it is there mentioned quite incidentally, as having occurred 
 the very day on which Virgil at the age of fifteen assumed the toga 
 virilis (" evenitque ut eo ipso die Lucretius poeta decederet "). 
 His age at his death we learn from St. Jerome in his additions to 
 his translation of Eusebius' Chronicle ; he there says that Lu- 
 cretius died in his forty-fourth year ; this combined with the Vir- 
 gilian date just mentioned puts the birth of Lucretius in the year 
 99 B. c. Jerome, however, adds the strange statement, that Lu- 
 cretius had been driven mad by a love potion, and that after 
 having composed several books in the intervals of his madness, 
 he finally died by his own hand. But certain it is that no ex- 
 ternal evidence exists in support of this statement, no mention 
 or hint of it by any writer of the poet's time or by any subse- 
 quent writer down to Jerome's own days ; it rests solely on his 
 authority, and was published by him at a distance of more than 
 four centuries after the poet's death. It has been supposed by 
 some scholars that St. Jerome took the statement from Suetonius' 
 lost work, " De Viris lUustribus," but there is no evidence for 
 such a supposition. Some have conjectured that the story may 
 have been an invention of some enemy of the Epicurean who was 
 contemporary with the poet ; and others have insinuated that it 
 was a pious fraud on the part of the Christian saint, as such a 
 fate may have seemed to Christians of Jerome's time a fitting 
 one for a writer associated in their minds only with impiety and 
 atheism. If we are indisposed to accept this story on external 
 evidence, we shall certainly find nothing in the poem itself to 
 make us more friendly to it. And yet a brilliant modern critic, 
 Mr. De Quincey, — whom in this connection we quite naturally 
 remember as the author of the " Confessions of an Opium-Eater," 
 
316 LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 
 
 — was very willing to accept this story ; he thought he discerned 
 even in the intense intellectual and imaginative action of the 
 work symptoms of a morbid tone of mind in the writer; the 
 poet, however, he admired, but as the first of poetic demoniacs. 
 But one can far easier agree with another English critic, Profes- 
 sor Sellar, that so remarkable a poem could never have been 
 written in the lucid intervals of insanity; but rather that its 
 " power of sustained feeling and consistency is the sure evidence 
 of a sane genius and a strong understanding." But, leaving this 
 point, let me proceed to say that we have not a solitary men- 
 tion of Lucretius' life which comes down from his own time ; and 
 only few notices of his poetry from contemporary or later Latin 
 writers. It seems hard to account for such silence in regard to 
 one who ranks in intellectual power with the most eminent Ro- 
 mans of his age, and in genius as a poet was inferior to none that 
 his country's muse can boast. We should suppose that a man 
 of such endowments must needs have been always a conspicuous 
 figure in Roman society, and that after the publication of his 
 poem and after his death, whatever might have been thought 
 of his opinion, all Rome would have known and acknowledged 
 him as a profound thinker and a great poet. Caesar, who was his 
 senior by only one year, might have found in him a combatant 
 fully equal in an encounter of wits in philosophy to any he was 
 wont to find in the conflicts of the senate or of the field, and 
 Cicero, also his contemporary, if he ever had conversations such 
 as he wrote in his " De Natura Deorum," could have found no man 
 in Rome more to his mind for deep and brilliant discussion ; and 
 though Lucretius was no statesman or soldier like Caesar, or orator 
 as Cicero was, yet he has left a monument in letters not inferior 
 to aught that was produced by either of those two great men of 
 whose fame all the literature of their time is full. Perhaps it is 
 the most obvious explanation of this silence about the poet, that 
 in accordance with his own tastes as well as his teachings he 
 probably kept wholly aloof from the great Roman world of his 
 time, and dwelt only in his own world of thought and study, illus- 
 trating by example the precept of his master in philosophy, " Pass 
 through your life unobserved." We may easily believe that in 
 that thronged and noisy Roman world filled with the strife of 
 tongues and the rude tumult of contending parties in politics 
 and war, the contemplative had no part or lot ; he was not of it, 
 not in it ; but rather, as he has it himself in a characteristic pas- 
 
LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 317 
 
 sage, looking down upon it from a serene height of philosophic 
 thought, content that he was exempt from all share in its passion- 
 ate struggles and errors. We must remember, too, that other 
 causes, unfavorable then as ever since to the poet's fame, lay in 
 his subject and in the kind of poetry in which he wrote ; in his 
 abstruse speculations, which though illumined by the light of his 
 genius, were yet uncongenial to the Komans, and at variance in 
 their results with the traditional faiths of the people, as well as 
 with the instinctive and most cherished convictions of mankind. 
 How alien to all that people and that age that a Roman genius 
 should fashion into a poem, with all cunning of a poet's art, the 
 most prosaic and most mechanical of all the old Grecian specu- 
 lative systems, should build up the universe out of the material 
 atoms of Democritus, and find in their endless clashings of motion 
 the principles of order and connection which ruled not only nature 
 but all human life ! 
 
 But with this silence, however explained, about the personal 
 history of Lucretius, there are clear and deeply marked traces in 
 the most eminent Latin writers of the profound impression made 
 by his thought and his poetic expression upon the mind of his 
 own and of the Augustan age. Cicero mentions him by name 
 only in a single passage of a dozen words (and that, too, of a 
 disputed reading) ; in this he accords to the poem many flashes 
 of genius and much art besides ; but there are many passages, 
 and especially in his First Tusculan Disputation and in his " De 
 Natura Deorum," which show that Cicero had carefully studied 
 Lucretius. Indeed, some critics believe, on the authority of that 
 notice by St. Jerome to which I have alluded, that Cicero was 
 the first editor of the poem (" Lihros^ quos postea emendavlt "). 
 Ovid, who was born ten years after the death of Lucretius, de- 
 clares (" Amorum," liber 1. 15, 22) that the poem will perish only 
 on that day which will bring the world to an end. Virgil evidently 
 alludes to Lucretius in that place in the " Georgics " (II. 490) 
 where he counts happy that poet who could discover the causes of 
 things, and put under feet all fear of inexorable fate ; but, as 
 Aulus Gellius long ago said, there are not only verses, but entire 
 passages of Virgil, in which he has studiously imitated Lucretius. 
 Horace, too, though he does not mention him by name, yet clearly 
 reveals in ^ many of his poems, how strongly and permanently he 
 had been impressed by the Lucretian diction and views of life. 
 
 1 (E. g. ) Odes, I. 26 ; IV. 2 ; IV. 7. 
 
 Satires, I. 1, lis ; I- 3, 99-112 ; I. 5, 101. 
 
318 LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 
 
 If now we turn to modern times, we find that this poem of Lu- 
 cretius has ever exerted a marked and continuous influence alike 
 on men of science and men of letters. This concurrence of men 
 of so diverse tastes and pursuits in the professional study of the 
 same writer is doubtless owing to that singular union in Lucre- 
 tius of the poetic nature with the impulse to speculative inquiry 
 which has made him so preeminent in all literature as a philo- 
 sophic poet. On the one side, amplest illustration is furnished 
 us in the sketch of scientific opinion drawn by Professor Tyndall 
 in his Belfast Address. It is curious to observe in that address, 
 and yet more in the pages of Lange's " History of Materialism," 
 of which it is in large part a skillfully condensed view, how the 
 whole structure of modern physical science has been gradually 
 built up on that ancient atomic theory which was unfolded by the 
 Roman Lucretius. Beginning with Giordano Bruno and Gassendi, 
 we see the atomic doctrine adopted and employed in whole or in 
 part by a long succession of writers of widely differing ethical 
 and religious views, such as Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Boyle, 
 Lamettrie, and Holbach, but with additions and modifications, 
 more or less materialistic, till we come down to our own century 
 and our own days, when the doctrine seems to stand as firm as 
 ever on the solid atoms, but with such a fundamental change in 
 the conception of matter and such a vast accession to its proper- 
 ties, that Mr. Tyndall now discerns in it "the promise and potency 
 of every form and quality of terrestrial life." It were easy to 
 trace in the annals of literature a like succession of eminent clas- 
 sical scholars who have interpreted the text and language of Lu- 
 cretius as a Latin writer ; and of poets and men of letters who 
 have been powerfully attracted by his genius. At the revival of 
 letters, the Italian scholars, ardent in the cultivation of all the 
 ancient writers, counted Lucretius second only to Virgil among the 
 Latin poets. Equally was he admired in the sixteenth century in 
 Holland and France by such scholars as Scaliger and Turnebus ; 
 and Lambinus, the most illustrious in learning and taste of the 
 Latin scholars who then studied and taught in Paris, published 
 an edition of his poem, which has remained till now, in its critical 
 and exegetical value, a standard work on Lucretian literature. In 
 the next two centuries Lucretius found successive annotators and 
 editors in Creech, Bentley, Havercamp, and Wakefield, and read- 
 ers and students far more capable of appreciating his merits in 
 Milton, Dryden, and Gray. Finally, in the present century, Lu- 
 
LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 319 
 
 cretius has been admired by poets of kindred genius, sucb as 
 Goethe and Wordsworth and Shelley ; while more has been done 
 by classical scholars for the textual and literary criticism of his 
 poem than ever before. The German Lachmann, who had already 
 won an illustrious name in philology by other great works, pub- 
 lished in 1850 his " Lucretius," which made a new era in the in- 
 terpretation of the poem, and especially in the history of the text, 
 which he succeeded in establishing upon a firm basis ; and sixteen 
 years later Mr. Munro followed, in England, with his edition, in 
 which, while he improved in some respects upon Lachmann in his 
 own peculiar province, he furnished an explanatory commentary 
 fully equal in importance, in relation to its period, to that of Lam- 
 binus, which had been published exactly three hundred years 
 before. This classical edition of Mr. Munro is indeed a classic 
 in itself ; as a contribution to Latin scholarship it is equaled by 
 nothing achieved in England in this century ; and it is more than 
 this, for as a satisfactory commentary upon the thought and the 
 style of Lucretius, it is an eminent and a lasting service rendered 
 both to science and to letters. 
 
 In its literary form this work is a didactic poem, de rerum na- 
 tura^ or, on the nature of things^ a comprehensive expression, 
 which, as used by the poet, expresses not only nature itself, or the 
 universe, but also the agency which the writer conceived as per- 
 vading all nature, even as if the soul of the world. It consists of 
 six books, composed in heroic hexameters, each book containing 
 about a thousand verses ; and it is dedicated to the poet's friend, 
 C. Memmius Gemellus, who was Roman praetor in the year B. c. 
 58. It is characteristic of Lucretius that he never tires of sing- 
 ing the praises of those writers to whose genial influence he has 
 felt himself most indebted as a thinker or as a poet, thus as Hor- 
 ace says of Lucilius, intrusting to his books as to trusty friends 
 the secrets of his own culture. In his poetic manner he is fonder 
 of the older Roman poets than of those of his own day, and Ennius 
 most of all he lauds for his " wisdom " and " his imnjortal verses," 
 " and as destined to bright renown throughout all Italian clans of 
 men." Of the Greeks, too, he is drawn most to the older and 
 classic writers, whom he calls " the chaste Greeks," in strong con- 
 trast with the " hollow Hellenists," a title with which he brands 
 the later Alexandrian school. Above all he forms himself as an 
 affectionate disciple upon the model of Empedocles, who had writ- 
 ten on the same theme and in the same form, finally extolling him 
 
320 LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 
 
 as the dearest and most glorious possession of the Sicilian isle, so 
 rich in all good things. The diction of Lucretius is quite marked, 
 as of the pre- Augustan time, less tempered and finished by art, 
 something in it even of the antique, but always noble, vigorous, 
 and concise, fashioned and even born with the thought, and some- 
 times in its very rudeness carrying with it the charm of original 
 force. If you come to it from Yirgil or Horace you will miss 
 their grace and elegance and felicity of expression, and their har- 
 mony of rhythm, but you will get thought and conception such as 
 they seldom reached, and also, in their own genuine Latin, fruit 
 not so rich or fragrant, but yet of the same Roman flavor, rustic 
 though it be, and of the same generous juice, drawn from its na- 
 tive Roman soil. In forming for himself the view of the world 
 which makes the substance of his poem, Lucretius seems to have 
 been a diligent student of most of the great masters of Grecian 
 thought. Even to Plato he was drawn by an affinity of nature, 
 though so widely parted from him in thought ; and some passages 
 show plainly enough that the Platonic manner had for him, too, 
 its fascinations. You may feel instantly assured of this, even by 
 a single passage, where the verse of Lucretius reproduces a concep- 
 tion of Plato which often appears, too, in modern writers. Lucre- 
 tius in speaking, as he is wont, of the waxing and waning of indi- 
 vidual life in men and nations, while life itself is ever passed down 
 through the generations, has these words : " And in a brief space 
 the races of living things are changed, and like runners in a race, 
 they hand on the torch of life," — a turn of expression evidently 
 caught from a place in Plato's " Laws," where he, in speaking 
 of marriage, describes man and wife leaving father and mother, 
 and in a home of their own " handing on the torch of life from 
 one generation to another." 
 
 But he is most familiar with the older philosophical writers, 
 and those who were given chiefly to physical speculations, as An- 
 axagoras and Heraclitus, though of the latter he is the pronounced 
 antagonist. And of these it is Democritus whom he, as a disciple, 
 studied and followed, speaking of him always with profound ven- 
 eration, and deriving from him, as has been already said, the ulti- 
 mate principles of his philosophical system. But it was Epicurus, 
 in his adoption of the Democritan theory, and his applications of 
 it to physics and ethics, who was the immediate master of Lucre- 
 tius. In philosophy Lucretius is an Epicurean, and, with all the 
 earnestness of a Roman nature, a Roman Epicurean. A modern 
 
LUCRETIUS' POEJSI, DE RERUM NATURA. 321 
 
 reader can hardly understand the language of enthusiastic admira- 
 tion which he uses in speaking of Epicurus. For him he is " the 
 glory of the Greek race," he is " the guide of human life out of 
 darkness into light ; " his genius " has ^ passed the flaming bounds 
 of the world and traversed the universe, and has returned as a con- 
 queror, to teir men of the origin of all being." Indeed, " he must 
 be ranked," he says, " as a god who alone can point out the path 
 of truth and reason." The philosophy which Lucretius derived 
 from these writers, and expounded in verse, must first of all have 
 our attention, if we would understand and appreciate him as a 
 writer. Whatever we may think about the atomic philosophy, 
 and however false or absurd may be its principles, it was very 
 dear to Lucretius. It completely satisfied that impulse of his na- 
 ture by which he must needs search out for himself the causes of 
 things ; in this philosophy he thought he found his search crowned 
 with success ; it put into his hands, as he thought, the key to the 
 universe, by which he could unlock and disclose all its secrets. 
 And yet his interest in it was not a speculative one. It was emi- 
 nently practical. He zealously used it, like his master Epicurus, 
 but in a noble spirit, for the attainment of ethical ends, to scatter 
 by its light the darkness of human ignorance, and to rescue man- 
 kind from all superstitious terrors, and especially from all un- 
 worthy fear of death and its lifelong bondage. And again, this 
 philosophy used for these ends is wedded by the genius of Lucre- 
 tius to genuine poetry ; and nature and human life and history, 
 the origin and various phenomena of which are set forth and ex- 
 plained by philosophic reason, are also touched and quickened 
 and adorned by the lively conception and the fine feeling of the 
 poet. It is this threefold aspect of Lucretius which meets us at 
 the very opening of this poem, and which is ever before us, as we 
 go through with it in such a survey as I now propose to make ; 
 and it is also this threefold view by which we linger on the criti- 
 cism which naturally follows such a survey. It is the poet and 
 the poet's conception of the world that rise before us, as in the 
 opening lines Lucretius invokes Venus as the sole mistress of na- 
 ture and symbol of her native force, and prays her to give an ever 
 living charm to his verse. Then as a philosopher he begs his friend 
 Memmius to lend him ready ear and a keen mind, as he shall dis- 
 course to him of the supreme system of heaven and the gods, and 
 shall open up the first beginnings of things. 
 
 1 " He passed the flaming bounds of space and time." 
 
 Gray's Progress of Poesy. 
 
322 LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 
 
 And lest his friend may be disturbed on the side of religion by 
 apprehensions of error and sin in thus entering the path of reason, 
 he assures him that by unfolding to him the true causes of all 
 phenomena he will deliver him from the tyranny of religion and 
 the terror-speaking tales of its seers. Lucretius now glides almost 
 insensibly into his unfolding of the principles of the atomic phi- 
 losophy. The exposition and illustration of these principles 
 occupy Books I. and II., and the remaining books their various 
 applications : — 
 
 III. The nature of the soul, and especially its mortality, with 
 the object in view of rescuing men from all fear of the hereafter. 
 
 IV. The nature and action of the senses, — taking them up 
 individually, — of the appetites, and of the passion of love. 
 
 V. In this he endeavors to explain the origin of material na- 
 ture ; then of life on the earth and the natural history of human 
 civilization. 
 
 VI. is occupied with such natural phenomena as men fear and 
 ascribe to divine agency, earthquakes, etc., and closes with a de- 
 scription of the Plague at Athens. 
 
 He first lays down the proposition that " no thing is ever pro- 
 duced from nothing by divine agency ^^ Q'' Nullam rem e nilo 
 gigni divinitus unquanC), Here, however, he is not intending to 
 reject the idea of creation by a divine fiat, though it is true that he 
 did not admit this idea, as he always assumed matter to be un- 
 created. In making this proposition, he evidently has in mind 
 nature as already existing ; and it is clear from all his illustra- 
 tions that he meant to assert that all things are produced in 
 orderly sequence by well-defined laws ; in short to assert, quite as 
 in modern phrase, the reign of law in all phenomena. Only he 
 was not content, as Democritus was, simply to assert that "no 
 thing is produced by nothing," but in accordance with the nega- 
 tive bent of his science he must needs add the words " hy divine 
 agency ; " like some of our modern thinkers, he considered the 
 idea of divine agency in the world to be in contradiction to the 
 action of law. This idea, too, he always ascribed to the ignorance 
 of men combined with their fears. Indeed, in this passage he 
 goes on immediately to say, " In truth all mortals are seized with 
 fear because they see many phenomena take place in earth and 
 the heavens, the causes of which they cannot understand, and so 
 they believe them to take place by divine power." The second 
 proposition is only a complement of the first, that " no thing is 
 
LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 323 
 
 ever reduced to nothing," but " that every thing suffers only dis- 
 solution into its first bodies." Here he means, of course, to as- 
 sert what is now a familiar truth in physics, that matter is inde- 
 structible, and that, whatever change of form it may undergo, its 
 quantity remains constant. But, thirds there is void as well as 
 body in things ; else there could be no motion^ or birth or growth. 
 Then, in the fourth place, all nature is made of body and void ; 
 these alone have existence, no third can we apprehend by sense 
 or reason. Deny body, and you take away the foundation of all 
 reasoning, and deny void, and you have no motion possible. The 
 next step, the ffth^ brings us into the very centre of the atomic 
 philosophy. " Bodies are either first-beginnings, or else they are 
 made by a union of first-beginnings." It is these first-beginnings 
 of things (^primordia reriim) which are the Lucretian atoms; 
 primordia rerum^ first-beginnings of things, the regular Lucretian 
 word for the aro/xot, or atoms^ the Greek word of Democritus 
 for things which cannot he cut, and so cannot be divided, individ- 
 ual things. Lucretius never Latinizes the Greek word, but in 
 one place he defines his first-beginnings as things which " cannot 
 by cutting be cleft in two " (" necjindi in hina secando "). These 
 first-beginnings, or atoms, he proceeds to say, are, it is true, invis- 
 ible, but so are very many things hidden from sight, of the exis- 
 tence of which we have no doubt. But they are themselves indi- 
 visible, and are solid and indestructible. Everything else in the 
 world, however strong it may seem, iron or brass or stone, may be 
 destroyed ; " but these no force can quench ; they are sure to get 
 the victory over it by their solid body." All other things have 
 void in them ; but these are without void, and so, admitting no de- 
 stroyer within them, as moisture or cold or fire, they are solid. So 
 they are single and everlasting, " strong," as he is proud of calling 
 them, — " strong in their everlasting singleness " (" ceterna pol- 
 lentia simplicitate "). Enter though they may and do into ever- 
 changing, ever new combinations, " stricken through ages by count- 
 less blows," they never change in themselves, are never worn ; they 
 are just as perfect, just as new and fresh to-day, as at the very 
 beginning. They must be so, Lucretius insists, else there could 
 be no constancy in nature ; else, in the perpetual wear and tear of 
 the world's life, they might in the end come to nothing. The first- 
 beginnings are also described as infinite in number, and the space 
 in which they move to be infinite in extent ; as only thus can we 
 explain the origin and preservation of all existing things. To 
 
324 LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 
 
 complete his conception of the atoms, Lucretius assumes in theifi 
 other properties. They are widely different in form. Some are 
 smaller and finer than others. Thus the fire of lightning is 
 formed of smaller forms, and so it gets through smaller openings 
 than the common fire which is born of wood. Light, too, of how 
 much smaller atoms is it made than horn, and so it can so easily 
 pass through it. So, too, atoms are smooth or rough, round or 
 angular. In general, things which are agreeable to sense are made 
 of smooth and round atoms, and those which are offensive, of 
 hooked and jagged ones, so that they tear their way into the senses 
 and do violence to the body. The different forms, however, are 
 yet limited in number, though the individuals of each form are 
 without limit. So we must believe, in order to account at once 
 for the variety and the regularity of nature. As to the size of his 
 atoms, Lucretius gives us no definite conception ; perhaps he never 
 formed one. He insists that they are not infinitely small, and yet 
 he makes them tiny indeed, and very far below the ken of human 
 sight or other sense. Perhaps he would have accepted, had he 
 known them, such calculations as are made by modern physicists ; 
 one of whom. Sir William Thomson, tells us that if a drop of 
 water could be magnified to the size of our globe, the molecules 
 comprising it would seem to be of a size varying from that of shot 
 to that of billiard-balls ; and another, Professor Clerk-Maxwell, 
 calculates that two millions of these atomies, placed along in a 
 row, would occupy as much space as j^q-q of an inch. Other 
 properties of the atoms, such as color, sound, and taste, Lucretius 
 describes as not essential to them, but only as secondary qualities, 
 which grow out of the modes of their combinations ; they be- 
 long oiily to what is perishable, and so cannot inhere in the origi- 
 nal elements of things. In like manner he attempts, but wholly 
 fails, to explain the relation of life and sensation to the atoms. 
 By his construction of the atoms he must needs deny them life 
 and sense, for if they had these they would be themselves liable 
 to death ; but he contends that by their union they give rise to 
 life and sense in organic bodies. Here, however, in such a princi- 
 ple of organism he seems unconsciously to be admitting the exis- 
 tence of something else in the world besides atoms and void. But 
 certainly in these days of modern science we need not wonder 
 that an ancient philosopher had some difficulty in accounting for 
 the origin of life. The views thus contained in this ^irst Book, 
 Lucretius considers so fundamental in his whole system, that he 
 
LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 325 
 
 concludes the Book with these words : " If you will thoroughly 
 come to know these things, then you will be carried on with very 
 little trouble (and will be able of yourself to understand all the 
 rest). For one thing shall grow clear after another, nor shall 
 blind night rob you of the road, to keep you from seeing to the 
 very end all the utmost ways of nature ; on this wise will things 
 ever be lighting the torch for other things." Lucretius opens his 
 Second Book with a brilliant encomium upon reason as the sole 
 guide of man through the dark mazes of life, the sole deliverer from 
 all carking cares and fears, and shows in a series of fine pictures 
 how superior it is in possession and use to wealth and birth 
 and rank and power and all the other worldly prizes that men 
 covet and toil for. From such a serene philosophic and poetic 
 height he then descends, as is his wont, to his task of philosophic 
 discussion, and proceeds to unfold what may be termed the kinet- 
 ics of the atomic theory, or- the motion of the atoms, which he 
 treats as " the only ultimate form of what is now called the en- 
 ergy of the universe." With a spirited Nunc age^ — a favorite 
 Lucretian spur of expression, by which the poet stirs anew at 
 once his muse and the perhaps rather languid attention of his 
 friend Memmius, — he promises to show " by what motion the be- 
 getting bodies of matter beget different things, and again break 
 them up, and by what force they are compelled to do so, and what 
 velocity is given them for traveling through the great void," — in 
 short, he will show how it is that all things ever wax and wane, and 
 yet the whole remains ever the same. The power which explains 
 such perpetual motion Lucretius finds partly in the inherent weight 
 of the atoms, and partly in their contact and clashiiig with one 
 another ; by such power it is that the atoms are borne with incon- 
 ceivable velocity through space. Swifter far than light, these 
 atomic first-beginnings, infinite in number, are ceaselessly pouring 
 down from infinite space above to infinite space below, and so they 
 have been ceaselessly pouring through aeons of time, and will ever- 
 lastingly pour through aeons and seons more. It is this conception 
 of eternally falling atoms which, as Mr. Tyndall remarks, created 
 in the imagination of Kant the nebular hypothesis of the origin 
 of the solar system. As you look at the Lucretian pictures of 
 this conception it well-nigh blinds your eyes and dazes your brain, 
 — this everlasting rain of primordial atoms falling down all 
 around you, and far away through the immeasurable spaces of the 
 universe. But Lucretius found a serious difficulty in the working 
 
326 LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 
 
 of his conception, for which, however, he devised a very curious 
 doctrine. One element of motion he had in the weight of the 
 atoms. But as these traveled down space in parallel straight 
 lines, how were they to come into contact and by their friendly 
 collisions unite into forms and bodies of matter ? So with a fresh 
 spur to attention, he bids his friend clearly apprehend this point : 
 " The atoms at quite uncertain points of space and at quite uncer- 
 tain points of time swerve a little from their equal poise ; you 
 just and only just can call it a change of inclination." This is 
 the doctrine of the Exiguum Clinamen or Minimum Declination 
 of the atoms which has brought down upon Lucretius' head a 
 rain of ridicule from Cicero's days to Bentley's, and from Bent- 
 ley's to our own. But let us do justice to our Roman poet-philo- 
 sopher. The doctrine is of course an assumption, but who ever 
 heard of a philosojAy from the time of Thales down which was 
 quite without some pet assumptions ; and I find a learned scientific 
 writer of our day, who seems to be quite at home in all the region 
 of Physics, vindicating the scientific value of Lucretius' doctrine, 
 and pronouncing it to be a simple and original solution of the 
 difficulty ("British Quarterly," October, 1875). Lucretius saw 
 that his atoms in their parallel straight movement were rela- 
 tively motionless, and but for declination could not change their 
 relative position or come into collision. The minimum swerve set 
 them in relative motion, and as the atoms were infinite, it pro- 
 duced innumerable collisions ; and in these collisions . the whole 
 velocity of the atoms came into action, and thus developed an 
 ample source of power. But Lucretius had another motive for 
 this power of a fitful declination in his atoms, than merely to get 
 them into contact. This, strange as it may seem, was no less 
 than to find a basis in these very first-beginnings of things for the 
 doctrine of free-will^ which he believed in most religiously, and 
 which he maintained in opposition to the inexorable Necessity of 
 Democritus. This power, he says, is the only principle which 
 avails to break the decrees of Fate (" quod fati foedera rumpat "). 
 Hence it is that he carefully says that the declination takes place 
 at " quite uncertain times and places." The atoms have a freedom 
 of action in the premises quite analogous to the action of free- 
 will in man ; and with Lucretius it is the cause of this human 
 free-will. " Else," he asks, " else how have we men and all liv- 
 ing creatures this free power, whence, I say, has been wrested 
 from the fates the power by which we go forward whither the will 
 
LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 327 
 
 leads each, and likewise change the direction of our motions 
 (declinamus motus, — the same word which he uses of the 
 atoms), and at no certain time or place, but when and where the 
 mind itself has prompted ? " " When some outward force is push- 
 ing men on, there is something in our breast sufficient to resist 
 it." " Wherefore you must admit that in the first-beginnings, too, 
 there must be a third cause of motions in addition to the weights 
 and the collisions, . . . and that the mind itself does not suifer an 
 internal necessity in its action is caused by a minute swerving of 
 the first-beginnings " (" exiguum clinamen principiorum^^^. Here 
 we have a defense of free-will worthy at least a poetic material- 
 ist. Mr, Tyndall, in remarking upon the process of Lucretius in 
 bringing a kind of volition into the region of physics, asks the 
 question, " Was the instinct utterly at fault which caused Lucre- 
 tius thus to swerve from his own principles?" He gives no an- 
 swer to his question ; but it would seem that any one would say 
 that Lucretius was unconsciously yielding to the human instinct 
 which rejects any sheer physical hypothesis for the explanation of 
 a spiritual truth. How could he in touching such a question as 
 that of will have missed at least the conjecture that there must 
 be something in the universe besides material atoms ? 
 
 The time would fail me to follow Lucretius through all the 
 applications of his theory in the remaining books of his poem. 
 I shall confine myself to those which are contained in the Third 
 and the Fifth Book. In the Third Booh he gathers up all the 
 force of his philosophy and his poetry for the explanation of 
 the nature of the soul, and for the refutation of the doctrine 
 of its immortality. And here his ethical point of departure is 
 the removal of the fear of death, which he thinks can be destroyed 
 only by the true knowledge of nature, or, as would be said in 
 modern times, by true science. I will endeavor to present in 
 brief his views of the souVs nature, and then his chief arguments 
 for its mortality. 
 
 Lucretius first distinguishes between the soul or the vital prin- 
 ciple, which he calls anima, and the mind, which he calls animus 
 or mens. Each is no less a part of man, and no more, than the 
 foot or the hand or the eyes. The mind and the soul, however, 
 are in close union and make a single nature ; but the mind as the 
 ruling and sovereign principle has its seat in the heart, while 
 the soul (amma) is spread throughout the body. But both the 
 mind and the soul are bodily, for they move the body, and they 
 
328 LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 
 
 cannot do this without touching it, and there can be no touch 
 without hody. Now to explain the consistence of the mind and 
 soul, considered as one nature, — it consists, like everything else, 
 of atoms, but of atoms very small and fine and round; hence 
 its mobility, as nothing else moves with such celerity, nothing 
 is so swift as thought. How fine and small these atoms are 
 may be shown from this, that when the soul is quite gone 
 from the body not a tittle of its weight is lost; just as when 
 the aroma of wine or of any perfume is gone, the thing itself 
 is not a whit smaller or lighter than before. Yet this one na- 
 ture, and of this consistence, is not to be conceived of as single. 
 It is in the first place threefold, made up of spirit or breath, 
 heat, and air : yet these all together cannot explain sensation ; 
 so a fourth substance must be added, nameless to be sure, a kind 
 of quartessence, something yet finer, smaller, smoother, rounder ; 
 this is the source of all sensation, this sends all sense-giving mo- 
 tions through the whole body ; this is, so to speak, the souFs soul 
 (^animce anima)^ yet it is to the soul what the soul is to the 
 body, and is supreme over both. Finally the soul or mind as 
 thus explained is held together by the body, and is in turn the 
 body's guardian ; the one cannot be torn from the other with- 
 out destruction to both, any more than perfume can be parted 
 from frankincense. 
 
 From such views as these of the soul's nature, the transition 
 is easy and necessary to its mortality. The poet goes on, therefore, 
 with a score or more of arguments, skillfully knit together by 
 prceterea^s or moreover' s^ and concluding with three rapidly follow- 
 ing denique^s ot finally^ s. These, though different, yet ultimately 
 rest alike upon the premise that there is no generic difference be- 
 tween body and soul, and so both must share from beginning to end 
 the same destiny. They are, in short, the stock arguments of 
 materialism, which have so often reappeared in philosophy and 
 science since Lucretius' time, and are not unfamiliar to these 
 days of ours. They have to do especially with the view now 
 often presented, that we know of no action and so no existence 
 of mind, except as connected with action and existence of body, 
 and thus when the body passes out of existence, we must infer 
 also non-existence of mind. Let me touch briefly the chief items 
 of this materialistic score. First then, as Lucretius says, it has 
 been shown that the soul is composed of the smallest atoms, even 
 smaller than those of mist or smoke ; now as these dissolve and 
 
LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 329 
 
 melt into air, so must the soul for a still stronger reason yet 
 sooner perish and melt away into its first-beginnings ; how, indeed, 
 when the body cannot keep the soul, could the air, which is 
 much rarer, hold it together? Moreover, when the body is ill, 
 the mind is ill too ; it wanders and becomes senseless ; reached 
 then as it is by disease like the body, it is liable, too, to death 
 like the body ; thus in drunkenness the mind itself shares all 
 the disorder of the body, and even if some cause yet more potent 
 get an entrance to it, it may perish just like the body. So, too, 
 the mind may be healed like the body; and, like the body, it 
 thus also gives mortal symptoms. 
 
 Again, as it has been shown that the mind is in the same 
 way a part of the man as the eye or the ear or any other sense, 
 and as we know that these do not exist apart from the body, 
 but decay at once, so we must believe it to be the case also with 
 the^mind. 
 
 Again, as life and sense are in the whole body, if some sudden 
 blow cleave the body in twain, then the soul must also be divided ; 
 but what is divided cannot be immortal. For instance, we read 
 how in war the chariots armed with scythes suddenly lop off 
 the limbs of soldiers, as the arm or the foot, and these limbs 
 lie there on the ground quivering, with something of the vital 
 principle left in them. Even the head when cut off retains for 
 a while as it lies on the ground the expression of life. Now 
 we cannot suppose that each one of these quivering parts had an 
 entire soul. If so, then one living being has many souls in his 
 body ; and if this is absurd, then the soul has been divided with 
 the body, and both are equally mortal. 
 
 But perhaps the gist of all these arguments is contained in 
 one passage, where Lucretius argues that so far as our observation 
 and experience go, the soul shares all the destinies of the body 
 to the very moment of death, and so that, by analogy, we must 
 suppose that it then perishes with the body. But one tires of 
 the manifold and minute details with which Lucretius argues and 
 illustrates his case. Yet the continuous illustration is ingenious, 
 often subtle in thought, and in the expression very beautiful to 
 read and gaze upon, though all so drearily chilling and even 
 icy cold. As you read, you recall Shakespeare's words, — 
 
 " Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ; 
 To lie in cold obstruction." 
 
 Measure for Measure^ Act III. Scene 1. 
 
330 LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 
 
 And yoH recall, too, that kindred passage in Byron's " Giaour," 
 and especially those two lines : — 
 
 " So coldly sweet, so deadly fair, 
 We start, for soul is wanting there." 
 
 And as to the arguing itseK, it is all conclusive, if only you admit 
 the premises. But of course it is the premises which are fatally 
 faulty. If all is matter to begin with, then all is matter to end 
 with, and end with it, indeed, all will. But the poet here breaks 
 down utterly, as elsewhere in his conception of the relation of 
 matter to mind. The atoms have in them, even by the Lucretian 
 construction, no sensation and thought, and so they cannot impart 
 them to their combinations in the ajiima and the animus. And 
 vain is it to refine away the soul into the finest possible atoms, 
 and yet more vain to postulate a nameless quartessence in the 
 soul, and call it the soul of the soul. It matters not, or rather 
 it matters quite too much, for all is matter and no mind; and as 
 the theory fails to account for the origin of mind, so there is no 
 ground to believe that death is its end. Nay, the argument from 
 analogy, of which Lucretius is so fond, brings us to the very con- 
 trary result, as Bishop Butler has so conclusively shown in his 
 chapter on the " Future Life." That shows, as he expresses it, 
 " the high probability that our living powers will continue after 
 death, unless there be some ground to think that death is their 
 destruction." And let me conclude this part of my theme by 
 quoting one sentence of the bishop on this head, which in thought 
 and in language is in his most characteristic manner. " For if 
 it would be in a manner certain that we should survive death, pro- 
 vided it were certain that death would not be our destruction, it 
 must be highly probable we shall survive it, if there be no ground 
 to think death will be our destruction." Thus we may put in 
 contrast with the teachings of Lucretius better teachings even 
 from the natural religion which was accessible to him ; while for 
 ourselves we may rest secure in the faith of that revealed religion 
 which never shed its light upon his mind, and we may recall here 
 the words of Him who revealed it to us : " He that believeth in 
 me, though he were dead, yet shall he live : and whosoever liveth, 
 and believeth in me, shall never die." 
 
 We come now to Lucretius' Fifth Boolc^ which, in its compre- 
 hensive applications of the atomic theory, makes the most impor- 
 tant part of the whole poem. For this is the book of the Lucre- 
 tian Genesis — or, to use the now current word, of development 
 
LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 331 
 
 or evolution of the world, in which the poet unfolds his views of 
 the formation of the universe and all that is in it out of the first- 
 beginnings and their combinations. In a series of preliminary 
 illustrations Lucretius shows that the world, like all else made 
 of atoms, is of course mortal ; it therefore had a beginning, as it 
 will some time have an end. This previous question disposed of, 
 the main question is then proposed and answered, how the world 
 came into being, and what were the successive stages of its devel- 
 opment. In the answer which he gives, he will first of all have 
 his friend Memmius clear his mind of the mistaken view that 
 " the gods, for the sake of man, have set in order the glorious 
 nature of the world." What could induce those blessed beings 
 to come forth from their remote seats of sweet and lasting repose, 
 to take in hand such a work, which could yield them no possible 
 advantage from men ? Indeed, how could they know beforehand 
 what nature's atoms could produce, unless nature had given some 
 models for forming things ? Nay, apart from our knowledge of 
 atoms, one might know from the imperfections of the world in its 
 make that it was not the work of any divine artificer. No ; this 
 world and all that in it is has been formed by nature alone out of 
 the elemental atoms; and "not by intelligent design did these 
 atoms station themselves each in its right place ; but after trying 
 unions of every kind by their motions and collisions in infinite 
 time, they at last met together in just such masses as became the 
 rudiments of great things, earth, sea, heavens, and the races of 
 living things." In these words we have the chief text of the Lu- 
 cretian evolution, and it occurs, with some slight verbal changes, 
 in three different places in the poem. I will by and by ask you 
 to consider the principle (or rather the no-principle) of the pro- 
 cess of evolution ; but just now, as we go through with the book, 
 let us see how the poet describes the successive stages of the 
 process itself. 
 
 In the beginning all was chaos, or, as Lucretius says, there was 
 " a strange stormy crisis and medley," because of the wild, battle- 
 like disorder of the clashing atoms of every kind. Gradually 
 those which had mutual affinities parted off from the rest, and 
 joined with one another. The earthy particles massed down to the 
 centre ; and as these pressed closer together they forced out the 
 lighter ones, which were to make sea and stars and sun and moon. 
 The fire-bearing ether broke forth, bearing with it ample stores 
 of fire wherewith to light up the firmament ; this ether, so light 
 
332 LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 
 
 and expansive, swept round, and, widely expanding, " fenced all 
 other things in with its greedy grasp." Then sun and moon 
 formed themselves of particles, neither heavy enough to sink to 
 earth nor light enough to mount up to highest heaven. Then the 
 liquid particles were pressed out from the earth, and made up the 
 sea ; and at last earth, ether, air, and sea were all left unmixed, 
 the ether highest of all, the empyrean, the air below, and the 
 earth in the centre supported by the air, even as our body by the 
 vital principle. It is interesting to compare with these concep- 
 tions of the Roman poet a passage of Milton where the Christian 
 poet's imagination is expanding and unfolding the conceptions of 
 the biblical Genesis. 
 
 " I saw when at his word the formless mass, 
 This world's material mould, came to a heap ; 
 Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar 
 Stood ruled, stood vast infinitude confin'd ; 
 Till at his second bidding darkness fled. 
 Light shone, and order from disorder sprung ; 
 Swift to their several quarters hasted then. 
 The cumbrous elements, earth, flood, air, fire ; 
 And this ethereal quintessence of heaven 
 Flew upward, spirited with various forms, 
 That rolled orbicular, and turned to stars 
 Numberless, as thou seest, and how they move ; 
 Each had his place appointed, each his course ; 
 The rest in circuit wall this universe." ^ 
 
 Having discoursed of the movements of sun and moon and 
 stars, the poet at length descends, and tells how earth in its in- 
 fancy produced from herself all forms of vegetable existence, then 
 all animals after their kind, and finally man with all his progres- 
 sive life. It is easy to follow the poet, as in highly poetic lan- 
 guage he tells how the earth put forth all kinds of herbage, how 
 all the hills and plains glittered in their green hues, and how the 
 trees, all emulous of each other, shot up into the air " with fuU 
 unbridled powers." But though we have been taught before that 
 all living, sentient beings came forth out of " lifeless and senseless 
 first-beginnings," yet we are startled at the extraordinary devel- 
 opments of animal and of human life, as they are soon described. 
 The earth, just now fashioned out of material atoms, suddenly, 
 
 ^ A curious fact that this last line reads like a translation of Lucretius : — 
 " Omnia sic avido complexu cetera sepsit.^^ — v. 470. 
 The rest of the universe (the ether) shut in with its greedy embrace. 
 
LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 333 
 
 no one can imagine how, becomes a vast reservoir of throbbing, 
 pulsing, productive life, and Mother Earthy as she is in truth as in 
 name, gives birth to all manner of living things. In one sense, 
 it is true, the description is similar to Milton's, when he essays 
 to enumerate the " innumerous living creatures, perfect forms, 
 limbed and full-grown," which " teemed at a birth from out the 
 fertile womb of earth ; " but with him the earth is obeying the 
 Supreme Will, " when God said, Let the earth bring forth soul 
 living in her kind, cattle and creeping things, and beasts of the 
 earth, each in their kind." Most strangely of all, however, is 
 told by Lucretius, and with a veracious tone, even as of an eye- 
 witness, the story of the origin of human life. In the fields 
 where then heat and moisture abounded, infants of human kind 
 would grow up into the borders of light, and be cradled in suitable 
 spots by Mother Earth, who also would feed them from her opened 
 veins with a liquid very like to milk. AU other environments 
 were congenial; the warmth of the soil would furnish raiment, 
 the grass a bed of down, and the world then in the innocence of 
 youth would know no severe colds, nor excessive heats, nor violent 
 gales. The infants were thus tenderly cared for. To such strange 
 ideas did an exclusive faith in the primordial atoms bring a great 
 thinker and a great poet ! We wonder, perhaps we are shocked, 
 at these ideas, and this may be natural and even necessary with 
 the better knowledge and the better religion of our times, with 
 our theistic Christian beliefs inwrought from childhood into the 
 very texture of our being. But suppose we should try to put our- 
 selves back to the times of Lucretius and into his surroundings of 
 thought and belief, when science was in its infancy, and when the 
 national religion, polytheistic at its best, was then in the decrepi- 
 tude of age, and suppose, too, that like Lucretius we had well- 
 nigh a devout faith in nature's ever-fruitful, productive power, 
 and in the earth, as the mother of all living things, is it probable 
 that then we should find this account of man's origin so very irra- 
 tional and irreligious ? We must remember that to the mind of 
 Lucretius this idea of Nature, as having in herself a prolific source 
 of life and of life-giving power adequate to the production of all 
 things, was just as familiar through all annals of philosophy from 
 Thales to his own time as is to us the idea of the creation as given 
 us in the book of Genesis, and repeated or implied throughout the 
 whole canon of Scripture. So, too, among the Greek and Latin 
 poets nothing is more common than the expression for men of 
 
334 LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 
 
 " sons of earth," and " indigenous to the soil," which in their 
 earliest sense had a literal signification. In one respect, indeed, 
 we may say that Lucretius is in accord with Scripture, in that we 
 are taught that man was " formed of the dust of the ground ; " 
 but in all else, in all that is essential, how different the Scripture 
 teaching ! " And God said. Let us make man in our image, after 
 our likeness." " And the Lord God formed man of the dust of 
 the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life ; and 
 man became a living soul." 
 
 It is in reading this part of Lucretius' poem that we sometimes 
 come upon the mention of natural phenomena and inferences from 
 which are put forth also by modern and living naturalists, and 
 are treated as the outgrowth of modern science. Thus it is that 
 Lucretius dwells upon eccentricities, or imperfections in nature, 
 such as " rudimental organs," or abnormal forms of being. Such 
 views are quite in the Lucretian line of thought, as the process 
 he is describing is always from the lower to the higher, the less 
 perfect to the more perfect. Nature is at her earliest now, in 
 the first-beginnings of her productive energy, and needs to pass 
 through many successive stages of development ere she reaches 
 her consummate works. Thus the earth produced things coming 
 up with strange face and limbs, monstrous things, creatures two- 
 fold, androgynous, neither the one nor the other, and widely dif- 
 ferent from both, creatures without feet, without hands, without 
 mouths, or with limbs cleaving to the body, and the like. But all 
 such, he says, had in them a natural unfitness ; they could not 
 grow, or long live, and so they soon perished off. Such phenom- 
 ena Lucretius elsewhere uses, as do materialistic writers now, to 
 disprove final cause and all design in nature. But in regard 
 to creatures that were fitted for growth and continuance, Lucre- 
 tius discourses of the preservation of species and of the final sur- 
 vival of the fittest, quite in the modern Darwinian manner, and 
 he seems to have a theory of the origin of species in some respects 
 quite like that of Mr. Darwin. Many species, he says, must have 
 died out, because they lacked the needed powers of self-protection, 
 such as fleetness or craft or courage, or because they could not be 
 turned to use by man, and be protected ; hence they fell a prey 
 to other species, and, unable to endure the struggle for existence, 
 they disappeared, leaving the superior species masters of the situ- 
 ation. 
 
 In the remainder of the book we have from Lucretius a com- 
 
LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 335 
 
 prehensive survey of the natural history of human society and civ- 
 ilization ; the gradual rise of man from a savage to a civilized 
 state, the birth of the arts, the useful and the fine, the growth of 
 social and political institutions, and the origin of language and 
 letters, and of religion and religious worship. The Lucretian end 
 of the whole survey is, of course, to show that all human progress 
 is natural ; it is of human development by the way of experience ; 
 it is nowise of divine guidance, no God in history. Only in a very 
 condensed way can I present here these views of Lucretius. The 
 primitive men were near akin to the beasts of the field. They 
 lived in the woods, or in caves and dens ; they fed on acorns or 
 berries; they drank from the springs and the streams. Gradually 
 with time they got themselves huts and skins and fire ; they built 
 towns; they joined ties of family, of neighborhood, of nation. As 
 to language, that was a natural thing — no invention, nothing con- 
 ventional. Nature taught all how to use the tongue, and use 
 struck out words for the names of things. On the language of 
 song, and music generally, Lucretius has elsewhere a curious pas- 
 sage, and in his best poetic manner. Only a hint of it can I now 
 give you. Song, men first caught from birds. The liquid notes 
 of the birds men imitated with the mouth long before they came 
 to sing smooth-running verses. Then the whistlings of the zephyr 
 through the hollows of reeds by the streams first taught peasants 
 to blow into hollow stalks. Then came the shepherd pipe, played 
 by rustic fingers, and accompanying sweet, plaintive ditties, filling 
 the air through pathless woods and forests. This was the culmi- 
 nating joy of all rustic festivals. This traditional music has come 
 down to us, the poet adds, though now by scientific study men are 
 taught to keep the proper time, and come to be more elaborate in 
 their style ; but for all that they get not a jot more enjoyment 
 than erst the rugged sons of earth received. 
 
 After abundant and exhausting experience of a life of brute 
 force, they settled by policy upon the even rule of law and equity 
 and right. At this point occurs a passage in the book of striking 
 moral force : " Thence," he writes, " fear of punishment mars the 
 prizes of life, for violence and wrong inclose as in a net all who 
 commit them ; and they mostly recoil on him from whom they 
 began ; and it is not easy for the man who, by his deeds, violates 
 the peace of the community to lead a tranquil life. For though 
 he eludes God and man, he must needs have a misgiving that his 
 guilty secret will not be kept forever." Mr. Munro says of this 
 
336 LUCRETIUS' POEM, DE RERUM NATURA. 
 
 last sentence, that there is probably some " sarcasm in the use of 
 the word ' God ; ' " but is it not rather said in soberest earnest, 
 the poet's moral and religious instincts getting the better, for the 
 moment, of his materialistic theories? Finally, we have in this 
 book a passage in which Lucretius endeavors to explain the cause 
 of divine worship, of temples and altars and all their services, 
 The passage, though very impressive in its descriptions, is some- 
 what obscure. At first the writer seems to be tracing religion to 
 a vague and yet theistic view of the world, which sees in the move- 
 ments of the heavens and the orderly succession of the seasons 
 the presence and guidance of a divine Being. But, after all, he is 
 rather describing what he considers a superstitious fear of some 
 hidden power, perilous to human welfare, in the phenomena of 
 storm and lightning and earthquake, which men, in their igno- 
 rance of natural causes, suppose to be divine, and which they there- 
 fore seek to propitiate by worship and sacrifice. The truth is, the 
 idea of Deity is out of place in the theory of Lucretius, as it is 
 in any materialistic theory. He speaks of gods, it is true, as im- 
 mortal and blessed beings, precluded from all care and rule over 
 the world ; but his theory must assign to them a material origin, 
 just as much as to men and to animals, or to gross matter itself. 
 
THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 
 
 A COLLEGE LECTURE, WRITTEN IN 1875. 
 
 The theory of Lucretius is, as Lange has said, one of the 
 earliest attempts of philosophical speculation to explain the origin 
 and manifold life of the world. As expounded by Lucretius, 
 it professes to be a complete materialism, as it aims to explain 
 the universe solely by matter, and by matter moving in obedience 
 to purely mechanical principles. This Lucretian materialism is 
 also atomism, as it represents the gross matter, of which all bodies 
 are composed, to be ultimately resolvable into atoms. This mate- 
 rialism of Lucretius is the materialism of subsequent times and 
 also of our own times. It is not always called materialism; it 
 is often called naturalism, sometimes pantheism, and sometimes 
 also theism. We hear, too, from the modern materialism less 
 of atoms and atomic impulsions than of molecules and of molecular 
 forces; but then the molecules come from the atoms, and the 
 molecular forces play into all bodies very much like the atomic 
 impulsions; and so just as with Lucretius, so now with some 
 physicists of more or less pronounced materialistic principles, 
 matter is the beginning and source of all things. I say here 
 some physicists, because, of course, these physicists are material- 
 istic in their principles, not from being physicists as such, but from 
 being such physicists. Certainly they are in error who suppose 
 that the progress of materialism is identical with the progress 
 of physical science, and that those who represent the one represent 
 also the other. Doubtless men have been drawn into materialism 
 by too exclusively dealing with the physical side of things ; but 
 it might also be urged that other men have been drawn into 
 idealism by too exclusively dwelling in the realm of metaphysics. 
 Not all the vast reach of progress in modern physical science 
 need bring any one a single step towards materialism ; on the 
 contrary, it may lead all men to an ever widening spiritual view 
 of the material universe, and an ever profounder adoration of 
 its Creator. And in fact, notwithstanding the marked material- 
 istic tendency of much of the scientific speculation of our times. 
 
338 THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 
 
 some of the foremost of living scientific thinkers and writers 
 are pronounced theists. With this passing explanation, let me 
 proceed to say that modern materialism rules out of nature all 
 intelligent design just as much as the ancient divine intervention 
 is rejected by Lucretius as " the meddling of the gods," and 
 by a well-known modern writer is called in hardly less pagan 
 phrase "the intrusion of a supernatural artificer." One is also 
 conscious in reading some of our scientific writers, that their 
 science takes an attitude to religion not less unfriendly than was 
 the philosophy of Lucretius. Under the open opposition of the 
 one to superstition and of the other to theology, there seems to be 
 in both alike a lurking opposition to religion itself. Yet Lucretius 
 believes in gods, though as we have seen they seem to be of 
 a questionable divine quality. So Professor Tyndall has at least 
 a suggestion of Deity in his "inscrutable power manifested in 
 the whole process of evolution." He also asserts his belief in 
 " the facts of religious feeling," but he assigns them a place not 
 " in the region of knowledge," over which, he says, it holds no 
 command, but "in the region of emotion," which, he says, "is 
 its proper and elevated sphere." With Mr. Tyndall's construction 
 of knowledge and of science the statement may be admitted ; but 
 apart from such a construction it is not easy to perceive why 
 religion, which in the history of the world and in the life of mil- 
 lions of men is a reality, an objective fact, just as much as nature, 
 may not legitimately have place in the region of knowledge ; 
 and why there may not legitimately be a science of religion just 
 as much as a science of nature. 
 
 In reflecting upon this materialistic view of the world as pre- 
 sented by Lucretius, it is one's first thought that it all rests, in its 
 construction of matter, only upon hypothesis. The atomic doctrine 
 is something certainly not proved, not capable of proof by the 
 methods of positive science, by sense and experiment. As de- 
 scribed by Lange and others, it is at best a convenient hypothesis 
 for working use, and not sure in its value for that. No one will 
 assert of it that it belongs to that class of things which lie within 
 that select region of knowledge, where physical science, as we have 
 just seen, is said to reign supreme. Still, this theory is accepted, 
 as we have it on the best authorities, and ought to be and must 
 be accepted in explanation of the constitution of gross matter. 
 Lucretius' reasoning is admitted to be just, that there are such 
 things as atoms, ultimate, indivisible particles of matter. There is 
 
THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 339 
 
 a passage in Newton's writings which gives the general principles 
 very much in the ancient Lucretian manner, but with the radically 
 qualitative exception that they put it on a theistic basis. " All 
 things considered," says Newton, " it seems probable to me that 
 God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impen- 
 etrable, movable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with 
 such other properties and in such proportion to space, as most 
 conduced to the end for which he formed them, and that these 
 primitive particles being solids are incomparably harder than any 
 porous bodies compounded of them, even so very hard as never to 
 wear or break to pieces." "While the particles continue entire, 
 they may compose bodies of one and the same texture in all ages ; 
 but should they wear away or break in pieces, the nature of 
 things depending on them would be changed." It is also stated 
 by a recent scientific writer. Professor Jenkin of Edinburgh, that 
 " if matter in motion be conceived as the sole ultimate form of 
 energy, Lucretius must be allowed great merit in haviug taught 
 that the motion of matter was as indestructible as its material 
 existenceJ^ " If energy (he adds), as he believed, be due solely 
 to motion, . . . though this last point has not been proved, then 
 his (Lucretius') doctrine is true ; and his proposition (on this 
 head) foreshadows the doctrine of the conservation of energy." 
 It is interesting in reading Lucretius in the light of these testi- 
 monies of modern science to see how ardent was the curiosity of 
 the ancient mind, Koman as well as Greek, to pierce the veil that 
 hid from it the secrets of nature, and how in the absence of just 
 and wide observation, and of the resources of method and experi- 
 ment, its subtile insight and intellectual strength were able to 
 achieve, as by a kind of creative act, such great and lasting 
 results. If only the writings of Democritus, Epicurus, Empedo- 
 cles, and others had come down to us in their entireness instead 
 of the mere disjointed fragments which are now extant, we might 
 have the means of tracing a continuous progress of the physical 
 science of the ancients, and be able to form a more correct judg- 
 ment of the investigations and results of those masters of Lu- 
 cretius of whom he always speaks with admiration and affection. 
 But Lucretius would have cared little for men's praise of his 
 physical doctrines for their own sake ; it was their ethical applica- 
 tions which interested him, and which he longed with even a 
 passionate desire to have men accept, and make practical to their 
 own lives. He longed to show that the atoms and their properties 
 
340 THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 
 
 accounted as cause for all existence, and that Nature was sufficient 
 of herself for all phenomena to the end that he might rid the 
 world, as he says, of her haughty lords, and men of all their 
 superstitious terrors. 
 
 If we consider only the theology and the religion with which 
 Lucretius had to do, we may say that this end was no unworthy 
 one, as I will try to show more fully by and by ; but the means 
 which he employed in his atomic system were wholly inadequate 
 to his end. Granting the doctrine of the atoms and their proper- 
 ties to be fully proved, it might explain the ultimate constitution 
 and perhaps the mechanical motions of physical things as already 
 existing, but by the very Lucretian construction it does not ex- 
 plain the existence itself even of these, much less of all else in 
 the world, and, least of all, the origin and continuance of all this 
 world's order and manifold life. The atoms, powerless themselves, 
 can produce nothing; as first-beginnings they are just as inade- 
 quate to production as the element of water in Thales' system, 
 or of fire in Heraclitus, or the four elements together in Empedo- 
 cles. Especially conceived and described as they are by Lu- 
 cretius as lifeless, senseless, without intelligence, how can they by 
 any conceivable process of development produce beings endowed 
 with life, sense, and intelligence? Indeed, it is curious to see how 
 Lucretius, who sets such store by the working of cause and effect, 
 can (II. 973-990) most naively make himself merry over his own 
 solecisms of causation. People, he says, try very hard not to 
 believe that sense and consciousness can come from what is insen- 
 sible and unconscious. But if sense, he argues, must be in the 
 elements of all living beings in order that these beings may have 
 sense, why then the elements from which men come must them- 
 selves have the same powers of passion, reasoning, and speech 
 that men have; and then, to be sure, the human atoms would 
 laugh and weep and reason, and talk cunningly about the nature 
 of things, and indeed inquire, just as we men do about their own 
 first-beginnings. All this, he continues, you see at once is very 
 absurd, and so, as in this special case men can feel and laugh and 
 cry and reason wisely, though not made of laughing and crying 
 and reasoning seeds of things, you must, of course, believe that, in 
 general, all things which we see to have sense and life must come 
 of things wholly devoid of sense and life. It is difficult to under- 
 stand how Lucretius explained to himself such assertions. It 
 would seem that he thought life and consciousness to be modes 
 
THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 341 
 
 of matter or the results of combinations of matter ; but certainly 
 his theory in itself gives no rational account of their origin. The 
 truth is, however, that perhaps unconsciously, certainly inconsis- 
 tently, he supplements his theory with some provisions which are 
 not germane to it. We have seen, indeed, from his singular view 
 of the minimum declination of the atoms that he ascribes to them 
 the power of swerving at will, even though it be but the least pos- 
 sible swerving ; so far forth he makes them intelligent, at least as 
 good as intelligent ; for, the theory notwithstanding, they act in- 
 telligently, just as men do, who, he himself strenuously insists are 
 endowed with free-will. Then, too, if the atoms have volition in 
 them, they may just as well have reason, too, and creative power, 
 and thus they would have less difficulty to encounter in producing 
 this world and all that is in it. But do not modern scientific 
 writers fail as signally as Lucretius failed in trying to solve, on 
 materialistic principles, the problem of the origin of life and 
 mind f They differ from Lucretius, in that with a larger and 
 truer knowledge, they feel, and feel intensely, the difficulty of the 
 problem, and in that they either pronounce it to be insoluble or 
 leave it unsolved. The insoluble alternative has been given in 
 respect to the explanation of m,ind from matter in a statement 
 very powerfully conceived and expressed by Professor Tyndall. 
 " The passage," he says, " from the physics of the brain to the 
 corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted 
 that a definite thought and a definite molecular action in the brain 
 occur simultaneously, we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor 
 apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to 
 pass by a process of reasoning from the one to the other. They 
 appear together, but we do not know why. Were our mind and 
 senses so expanded as to see and feel the very molecules of the 
 brain, . . . and were we intimately acquainted with the corre- 
 sponding state of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever 
 from the solution of the problem, ' How are these physical pro- 
 cesses connected with the facts of consciousness ? ' The chasm 
 between the two classes of phenomena would remain intellectually 
 impassable." If this statement is true, it certainly does not make 
 for any system known in history by the name of materialism ; on 
 the contrary, does it not carry with it the necessary inference, that 
 these two classes of phenomena, so wholly unlike in character, 
 spring from sources equally unlike in their nature ? 
 
 In respect to the problem of the origin of life^ I think it must 
 
342 THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 
 
 be conceded that recent scientific discussions and experiments 
 touching its origin from matter have thus far left the problem 
 unsolved. Intensely interesting, however, and ever fascinating, 
 all must allow, are the experiments which Mr. Tyndall cites as 
 suggesting such an origin, and very forcible, though far from 
 convincing, the reasoning by which, as he says, he crosses the 
 boundary of experimental evidence, and " discerns in matter the 
 promise and potency of all terrestrial life." I think we all share 
 with him, and in exact proportion to our own knowledge, the 
 admiration which he so nobly feels and expresses for all the phe- 
 nomena of crystallization, — the wonderful way in which the 
 atoms seem to hold themselves together, — the wonderful play of 
 force by which the molecules of water build themselves, as he 
 beautifully says, into the sheets of crystals which every winter 
 roof all the ponds and lakes. We go just as far as he goes, but 
 no farther^ when he says that all "this play of power is almost as 
 wonderful as the play of vitality itself." Almost as wonderful ! 
 Of course it is ; but for all that we are not convinced ; and judging 
 from his words he is not convinced himself that there is vitality in 
 the ice, form though it does these crystals so wonderful alike in 
 "their outward form and their inward texture." And we are 
 conscious of a yet higher emotion than admiration when Mr. Tyn- 
 dall puts the question, perhaps anticipated by all, " Can it be there 
 is no being in nature that knows more about these matters than I 
 do ? " And we give the heartiest assent when he declares that " the 
 man who puts that question to himself, if he be not a shallow 
 man, . . . will never answer the question by professing the creed 
 of Atheism." In like manner we must all feel the full force of 
 Mr. Tyndall's question, " Where is life to be found, divorced 
 from matter ? " But is it not fair to ask. Does not matter exist in 
 forms in which, so far as we know, there is no life, where it has 
 had not yet any union with life, and so where divorce is quite out 
 of the question ? And if so, do we not need to begin there, and 
 then be taught by experiment, which alone can give us scientific 
 knowledge, that matter evolves life, and intelligent, conscious 
 life? But Mr. Huxley teaches us that "the present state of 
 knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the 
 not living." And Mr. Tyndall also admits " the inability to 
 point to any satisfactory experimental proof that life can be de- 
 veloped save from demonstrable antecedent life." Is it legitimate 
 procedure, then, in the absence of all experimental evidence, " to 
 
THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 343 
 
 trace the line backward," — as the expression is, — from non-liv- 
 ing matter, and project the so-called continuity of nature beyond 
 the continuity of experience, — is it safe to take this leap across 
 the void which may prove a salto mortale, — to some unseen, fan- 
 cied point, where living matter may emerge from dead matter? 
 But Mr. Tyndall considers himself compelled to this procedure, 
 because otherwise there is left him the only alternative of opening 
 "the doors freely to the conception of creative acts." It has been 
 acutely remarked by one of Mr. Tyndall's critics, that there is a 
 fallacy in that statement in the use of the word freely. It carries 
 with it the supposition that one must believe in a succession of 
 mediate or special creative acts to account for the appearance 
 of the organic forms of life in the world. But that supposition is 
 not at all necessary, — only is it necessary to believe in a creative 
 act at all, — and the act may be one and immediate. Men may 
 differ here as they do differ, and yet agree in accepting the idea 
 of creation itself. One distinguished writer, to whom I have be- 
 fore referred, the late Professor Clerk-Maxwell, who was one of 
 the most eminent inquirers in the realm of molecular physics, 
 inferred directly from the nature and properties of matter the 
 existence of a First Cause, their Maker. 
 
 Mr. Darwin's conception is, that the Creator introduced into the 
 midst of dead matter one primordial living form, capable of self- 
 development into other living forms. Mr. Tyndall mentions that 
 " Mr. Darwin quotes with satisfaction the words of a celebrated 
 author and divine who had gradually learned to see that it was 
 just as noble a conception of Deity to believe that He created a 
 few original forms, capable of self-development into other and 
 needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of crea- 
 tion to supply the voids caused by the action of his laws." But 
 he adds as his own view, that " the anthropomorphism, which it 
 was Mr. Darwin's object to set aside, is as firmly associated with 
 the creation of a few forms as with the creation of a multitude." 
 In this case Mr. Tyndall does in theory what Lucretius did only 
 practically, when he represented his atoms as endowed with voli- 
 tion, that is, he supplements the conception of matter with proper- 
 ties not known to belong to it. Indeed, he says distinctly, " let us 
 radically change our notions of matter." This would seem to be 
 materialism in a development transition ; it is already materialism 
 and something else. Indeed, he proceeds to ask, " Is there not a 
 temptation to close to some extent with Lucretius, when he affirms 
 
344 THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 
 
 that Nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself ? " 
 or with Giordano Bruno, when he declares that matter is not " that 
 mere empty capacity which philosophers have pictured her to be, 
 but the universal matter, who brings forth all things from her- 
 self." But this mention of Lucretius and Bruno makes us ask 
 him the question, whether matter, then, is created. This question 
 he does not answer, so far as I know. But if matter is uncreated, 
 and yet the belief in the existence of God is retained, as it is re- 
 tained in the writings of Professor Tyndall, then we cannot avoid 
 the conclusion of the eternity of matter, and of its identity with 
 God. This is materialism already developed into pantheism, and 
 this is the position of Bruno ; and Mr. Tyndall also declares Bruno 
 to be " not an atheist or a materialist, but a pantheist." Nor is 
 this strange, for as Lange has said, and also when he is speaking 
 of Bruno, " The materialist who defines God as the sum of ani- 
 mated nature becomes at once a pantheist without giving up his 
 materialistic views." 
 
 There remains to be examined in Lucretius the principle, if 
 that word we may use, by which in the denial of all intelligent 
 design he represents the world to have come into being. We have 
 seen, in passing from his Second to his Fifth Book, how from that 
 strange scene of the atoms whirling and clashing in wild chaotic 
 disorder we at once pass into all the order and beauty and glory 
 of the material universe, and into the midst of all living things 
 produced from the earth, now suddenly transformed into a prolific 
 source of universal life. When we ask how these atoms have com- 
 bined so as to secure all this production, how they have arranged 
 themselves into this wondrous order, and how they are keeping up 
 such a regularity of movement, we have ever that passage to con- 
 sider which I quoted in the last lecture, and which with slight ver- 
 bal changes occurs four times in Lucretius' work. Not to translate 
 it again in full, it is in substance thus : Not by the gods, but by 
 nature was the world made ; not by intelligent design, but after 
 trying motions and unions of every kind in infinite time by chance 
 collisions, they at last fell into those arrangements out of which 
 this world is formed and by which it is preserved. It is needless 
 at this late day to spend time and words in refutation of this 
 Lucretian doctrine, generally known by the name of the fortui- 
 tous concourse of atoms. But it is worth while to gain from the 
 context of the passage, wherever it is declared by Lucretius, a 
 distinct idea of how it lay in his own mind. It is evident that he 
 
THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 345 
 
 thought the working of chance, as a kind of causation in mat- 
 ter, could not go on always, producing variations of disorder; 
 given infinite time to the variability, some time or other the disor- 
 derly variations would come to an end, and then, at last, chance 
 itself would bring in a stage of orderly organization as a happy 
 coincidence. Thus it was that he came to rest his faith in jpure 
 variability acting at random in infinite time, as the cause of the 
 heavens and the earth and man and all living beings, that with 
 their manifold orderly arrangements are luminous with the evi- 
 dence of supreme intelligence. Strange that a great thinker, 
 who was construing the world by mind, could deny mind in its 
 construction ! With reason, however, it was that Lucretius put as 
 the alternative concerning the final explanation of things either 
 design or chance ; and the wisest and best thought of the world, 
 both in ancient and in modern times, while it discerned and 
 accepted no other, has rested with confidence in the explanation 
 from design. That argument from design, coupled with a belief in 
 causation, which rises from the contemplation of the innumerable 
 facts of arrangement and system in nature looking towards defi- 
 nite ends, to the conception of an intelligent author of the uni- 
 verse, has ever formed, from times long anterior to Lucretius, the 
 secure basis of Natural Theology. Indeed, five hundred years be- 
 fore Lucretius, and a hundred before his master Democritus, the 
 fundamental idea of this argument first emerged in Greek thought 
 in Anaxagoras' doctrine of the Noi)? or Intelligence as the de- 
 signing and upholding principle of the universe. Of this Grecian 
 thinker, who was thus the first to introduce into philosophy the 
 conception of final cause, Aristotle has left on record the remark, 
 that " this man, who first announced that Intelligence was the 
 cause of the world and of all orderly arrangement in nature, ap- 
 peared like a man in his sober senses in comparison with those who 
 had heretofore been speaking at random and in the dark." After 
 him Socrates adopted this idea, and wrought it in the mould of his 
 own moral genius into a practical proof for the existence of one 
 Supreme Being as the framer and preserver of the entire Cosmos 
 (Xenophon, Mem. 4, 3, 13) ; and Plato, following his master, 
 but in his own idealistic manner, strove ever to show that all phe- 
 nomena presupposed eternal ideas, and that these gradually led up 
 to the Supreme Idea — the highest Good — to God. If we trace 
 the fortunes of this argument in scientific thought, we find it 
 maintained by the last word of that thought, " The Reign of Law," 
 
346 THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 
 
 uttered so decisively by the Duke of Argyll, even as by the 
 utterances of Lord Bacon made in the very first beginnings of 
 modern science which we are wont to associate with that great 
 name. Bacon, from his insisting upon the use of efficient causes 
 in their proper spheres in physics, has sometimes been repre- 
 sented as unfriendly to the argument from design. But he de- 
 clares himself as follows : " When Democritus and Epicurus 
 asserted the fabric of all things to be raised by a fortuitous con- 
 course of atoms, without the help of mind, they became universally 
 ridiculous." " I had rather believe," he adds, " all the fables in 
 legend, and the Talmud, and the Koran, than that this universal 
 frame is without mind ; . . . for while the mind of man looketh 
 upon the second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest on them 
 and go no farther ; but when it behold eth the chain of them con- 
 federate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and 
 Deity." And the Duke of Argyll in the far-reaching scope of his 
 argument, which comprehends the operations alike of nature and 
 of the minds of men, all the history alike of the world's preserva- 
 tion and its creation, fixes the idea of everywhere reigning law in 
 order produced by contrivance and for a purpose of will. So 
 essential is this principle of design to the final explanation of all 
 things, that the theories of modern naturalists which exclude it 
 seem, with all the truth which may belong to them, yet to be as 
 essentially imperfect as the ancient theory of Lucretius ; indeed, 
 if pushed to a last analysis, they must fall back upon the Lucre- 
 tian alternative of chance. Is it not so with regard to the theory 
 of natural selection in explanation of the origin of species ? This 
 theory proceeds, if I understand it, exactly upon the Lucretian 
 conception of variability and variation in infinite time. As we 
 read Mr. Darwin's intensely interesting narratives of his laborious 
 and patient experiments in trying to make species, if I may use 
 this expression, we may readily admit that nature selects even as 
 in those experiments man selects, and that both processes proceed 
 by manifold variations with all their marvelous results. But after 
 all, the natural selection, just as the artificial, is at best only a re- 
 sult, it is no agent. Do not all the experiments point unerringly 
 to the sole natural conclusion that back of all the variation and all 
 the selection, back of all nature, as of man, there is intelligence 
 acting with design, and bringing about, not like man, what has 
 been called an "astonishing amount of divergence from an existing 
 species," but also producing new species as well. But just as Lu- 
 
THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 347 
 
 cretius construes all supernatural agency in the genesis of things 
 into " a meddling of the gods," so it is now said that the idea of 
 the presence of intelligence in nature, acting from design, is " an- 
 thropomorphism, or a supernatural artificer acting after human 
 fashion." All conclusive, however, is the remark on this head of 
 M. Janet, in his work on " Final Cause," that " the slippery and 
 perilous point in Darwinism is the passage from artificial to natu- 
 ral selection ; it is to establish that Nature, blind and purposeless, 
 is able to reach the same result by accidental circumstance, which 
 man obtains by deliberate and purposed diligence." 
 
 So, too, the theories, whether the ancient or the modern, which 
 insist so much upon natural laws, or natural causation, fail to 
 reach any rational view of the origin of the world, so long as they 
 leave out of view the idea of design. It is laws and their unbend- 
 ing, persistent course, which Lucretius is ever teaching with a 
 passionate earnestness. In his thought, as in modern thought, 
 law reigns supreme ; chance itself is ultimately resolved into neces- 
 sity ; seu casu, seu m, he says, call it chance or force, law is in all 
 nature, and in nature all is law. It is this conception of law which 
 gives his thought such stately grandeur as it marches through its 
 story of the world ; it is this which makes a sure repose of order 
 amidst the changing phenomena of nature and of man's life, and 
 fixes an equilibrium of opposing forces in the ever ongoing pro- 
 cesses of renovation and decay, of birth and death. It is this faith 
 in law which he upheld in opposition to a faith in the gods of the 
 ancient mythology. But he failed to see that natural laws with- 
 out a Supreme Lawgiver made another mythology more rational 
 only in seeming, — a kind of philosophical mythology quite as in- 
 consistent with reason as the older poetic one. And without the 
 conception of an ultimate source of law in a Supreme Intelligent 
 Will, does it fare any better with the laws of modern science? 
 One might as well accept the poetic mythology made up of Nep- 
 tune and Ceres and Dryads and the like as a theory of the origin 
 and government of the world, as the philosophic one of motion and 
 gravity and impulsion, or the modern scientific one of atoms and 
 molecular and polar forces, and the rest, which haunt the top 
 and the sides of this newest upheaved Olympus. And what help 
 is given us by resolving the many laws into the one law, and one 
 law acting with an unbroken continuity — as in the ancient theory, 
 the law of inexorable necessity, or in the modern, the law of evo- 
 lution or development. The one law presupposes the Lawgiver 
 
348 THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 
 
 just as much as the many laws, and the one law expressing every- 
 where intelligence must just as much emanate from the Supreme 
 Intelligent Will. 
 
 As the Duke of Argyll so distinctly says, " the laws of nature 
 come visibly from one pervading mind, and express the authority 
 of one enduring kingdom." Indeed, by the luminous interpreta- 
 tion given to natural phenomena by the scientific thought unfolded 
 in this writer's " Reign of Law," we may apply to natural laws 
 that fine word of the Greek poet which was applied by him to the 
 laws of the moral world : — 
 
 (These) " laws are set on high 
 Heaven-born, their only sire Olympus ; 
 
 For these there lives a mighty God 
 Who ne'er grows old." 
 
 And here let me put in a plea for Lucretius, in explanation of 
 his attitude to religion in his time. We can far more easily accept 
 his procedure in combating a form of polytheism which was at 
 variance with all philosophy, than that of any modern naturalist 
 who, in contending for an exclusively natural causation, is in con- 
 flict with a pure monotheistic religion, which furnishes a truly 
 religious basis for the existence and growth of science. Lange 
 has a very instructive thought on this head. He is speaking of 
 the influence of Christianity, as a complete monotheistic religion, 
 upon the history of materialism. With a polytheistic religion, a 
 philosophy which teaches law in nature has difficulties to contend 
 with as thousand-fold in its ranks and orders as is the mythologic 
 system itself. But when you assume the grand thought of one 
 God, and of his one uniform agency in the universe, then is the 
 connection of things by the law of cause and effect not only think- 
 able, but it is a necessary consequence of the assumption. What 
 the historian of materialism here says of opposition of a pagan 
 philosopher to a polytheistic religion applies with fullest force to 
 Lucretius. And yet more, and far more. His opposition was 
 caused quite as much by moral as by intellectual motives. He 
 was zealous to overthrow the gods of the popular religion, not 
 only because they were conceived as wrong in violation of the 
 truth of nature, but because they were conceived as capricious 
 and cruel and revengeful, and because they held men in the spell 
 of superstition, or under the sway of a terrible tyranny. Who 
 can believe such gods, he says, who torment here and hereafter^ 
 
THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 349 
 
 not injustice and crime alone, but innocence and goodness too. 
 He would hear nothing of augury and divination, — all the num- 
 berless presages and omens in men's dreams and fancies, in na- 
 ture's phenomena, — in lightning, wind, and rain, the flight of 
 birds, and in the rustling of leaves, he would away with them all, 
 as foes to human peace and well-being. He found not only the 
 crowd — the turba Remi — believing, or seeming to believe, all this, 
 but also men of intelligence and culture. They might rail like 
 old Cato at the augurs, but they felt in their hearts and their lives 
 the pressure of the augural faith. Think of poets, he might say, 
 embalming in pious verse these senseless and impious traditions ; 
 think of sober historians recording in good faith all the prodigies 
 and omens of the successive years, and as for our public men, 
 think, for instance, of Sulla, so sensual and atrociously cruel, styl- 
 ing himself the Felix, and ascribing his felicity to these gods, 
 thanking Yenus for his victories alike in battle and in love, — think 
 of him stealing the image of Apollo from off the Delphic altar, 
 and then devoutly kissing and doing it homage in prayer. In the 
 name of Epicurus, let us be rid of these gods many and lords 
 many ; let us by teaching the true doctrine of nature and man 
 deliver the world from unreason and superstition, and so bring 
 into it light and peace and happiness. We may have some char- 
 ity for this Lucretian unbelief, though we may feel and know it 
 to be unbelief still. He did not, and perhaps he could not, see 
 that he was combating errors with error ; that in ridding men of 
 superstition he was robbing them of religion ; that in overcoming 
 fears of the gods, he was destroying the fear of God, which a 
 writer a thousand years earlier than himself had declared to be the 
 beginning of wisdom. But the primal beliefs of man's nature will 
 ever have their supremacy over false theories, let them be wrought 
 out with whatsoever cunning of the mind. Democritus, in spite of 
 his material atheism, believed and worshiped the gods ; he counted 
 as truly happy only the man whom the gods loved ; he called the 
 soul, too, because of the finest atoms, the divine part of man. 
 Epicurus, too, as we have seen, adored the gods, and deemed the 
 idea of their divine power the most elevating of all ideas ; though 
 they had no place in his system, they certainly, as Lange puts it, 
 had a subjective relation to himself and his own life. 
 
 This noble inconsistency we see everywhere in Lucretius ; and 
 in him the human instincts are strengthened and quickened by 
 the fine force of his poetic genius. His imagination lifts him out 
 
350 THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 
 
 of his blind and dead materialism into conceptions of an all-ani- 
 mating life in nature, and a power even creative and governing, 
 which are out of all keeping with the doctrines of his system. 
 Such conceptions appear even in the names which he has for the 
 Democritan atomi. He never uses atoms from the Greek dro/xoi, 
 or aro/xa, individual things, nor always primordia, but often sem- 
 ina rerum, genitalia corpora, — terms which carry with them the 
 notion of a creative capacity. So, too, he says that the first-be- 
 ginnings must have, in producings things, some latent, unseen 
 power. Thus he seems to be striving and feeling after a power of 
 a diviner quality, even a Presence and a Power pervading and rul- 
 ing the whole world. Such a view in the heathen philosopher was 
 certainly better than that of the polytheistic religion of his own 
 age. It may, it is true, be called no better than the one I have 
 mentioned as put forth in these Christian times of " an inscrutable 
 Power manifested in the whole process of evolution," but I think 
 it is to the honor of Lucretius that his view is at least quite as 
 good as this. 
 
 We may now pass by an easy transition to the many concep- 
 tions of nature and also of human life which enrich this poem, 
 and which disclose the writer's poetic genius. Never in all the 
 manifold processes of the argument through which Lucretius 
 moves does the genius of the poet altogether desert him. He 
 diffuses its genial glow through his most speculative thought, his 
 most abstruse reasoning. But most of all does it appear in spe- 
 cial passages, digressions into which the poet is ever sliding and 
 wandering, as pauses and resting-places in his arguments, like the 
 quiet nooks in woods, or haunts by streams or by the seaside, or 
 solitary mountain spots where alike in his life and his poetry he 
 loved so much to linger. 
 
 The feeling which we so often call the love of nature we find in 
 Latin poetry to be better illustrated and more fully possessed by 
 Virgil than by Lucretius ; but Virgil never rose to that tone of 
 philosophic contemplation of nature's aspects and life which was 
 so habitual with the poetic genius and manner of Lucretius. As 
 Virgil was a diligent and in some ways a ' congenial student of 
 Lucretius, and in that remarkable passage in the " Georgics " ^ 
 where he seems to be comparing himseK with his predecessor, he 
 looks up with admiration to that poet who was happy indeed that 
 he could discover and set forth the causes of things in the uni- 
 
 ^ Book III. 475-494 : " Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas," etc. 
 
THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 351 
 
 verse, and would gladly have the Muses reveal to himself, too, as 
 to that poet, the secrets of nature ; but if that lofty gift be denied 
 him, then may it be his to love the woods and the running streams 
 in the valleys. I do not care now to discuss Mr. Tyndall's motive 
 for finding a close to his Belfast Address in that noble passage 
 from Wordsworth's " Tintern Abbey " which pictures to us the 
 modern poet's love and worship of nature. But I sometimes feel 
 in reading Lucretius that he was touched even as was Wordsworth, 
 in his selectest lines, by the presence of Nature ; even so did he 
 give himself up to the sense and the utterance of her majesty and 
 power, her sublimity and beauty; he never tired of holding com- 
 munion with her visible forms, or of pondering and piercing the 
 mystery of her subtle, all-pervading life, and of apprehending and 
 expressing her innermost meaning. How finely and richly does 
 all this appear in the very opening lines of his poem, where he 
 addresses Venus as the source of all the manifold life and glory 
 of the world. Let me give a translation : " It is thou, increase- 
 giving goddess, — Alma Venus, — who fiUest with life the ship- 
 carrying seas, the corn-bearing lands, through thee every living 
 thing after its kind is conceived and rises up to the light. Before 
 thee and thy coming flee the winds and the clouds ; for thee earth 
 manifold puts forth her sweet flowers ; for thee the propitious 
 heavens shine, and the levels of the sea do laugh. With every 
 day that opens anew, the fowls of the air show signs of thee, and 
 the wild herds boimd over the glad pastures ; yes, throughout all 
 seas and mountains and rivers, the leafy homes of birds and grassy 
 plains, aU living things feel thy reviving power and follow thee 
 whither thou leadest on." 
 
 With the same poetic feeling quite as much as with the phi- 
 losopher's thought, Lucretius is fond of contemplating the grand- 
 est processes of nature in all the changing phenomena of decay 
 and restoration in outward things. Plants and trees are ever 
 growing up and passing, and out from the winter of their death 
 come forth into ever new springs and summers manifold forms of 
 new life and beauty. And far beyond these visible changes his 
 imagination ranges into far-off space, and contemplates with yet 
 profounder awe entire worlds with all that is in them moving 
 through the same processes of change. So, too, individual objects 
 and scenes in nature — the coming of day and of the spring, the 
 quiet running brooks and the vast rushing sea, the rippling of 
 waves by the shore, the heavens in all their aspects of storm and 
 
352 THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 
 
 shine, and the ever-changing shapes and hues of their clouds — 
 are contemplated with the observant eye and the quickened and 
 quickening sense of the poet. But everywhere his feeling is 
 drawn to things which reveal most fully and freshly the life and 
 power of nature, and his descriptions have in them a like living 
 active quality. How life-like as a picture of Homer is Aurora 
 as she comes ! " When the dawn first sheds fresh light over the 
 earth, and birds of every kind, flitting over the pathless woods, 
 through the yielding air, fill all places with their liquid notes, 
 how suddenly the rising sun overspreads and clothes all the 
 world with his light ! " Out of many like passages which I had 
 selected from the Sixth Book let me give only one which describes 
 the movements of clouds. " Observe when the winds carry the 
 mountain-like towering clouds through tile air on the mountain 
 sides, and piled one above the other in rest, the winds being 
 buried in calm, then you shall be able to observe their huge 
 masses, caverns as it were, of hanging rocks. And when on the 
 gathering of a storm the winds have filled all these, how they 
 chafe and bluster in their dens like wild beasts ; how they growl 
 through the clouds, and, bent upon finding their way out, how 
 they whirl together their fire out of the clouds, and gather them 
 together and roll the flame in their hollow furnaces, till at last 
 they burst and shine forth in their forked lightning flashes." 
 
 The mystery of man's being and destiny he feels as powerfully 
 as the mystery of nature, and represents it in like poetic manner, 
 but with no less variety and freshness. The tone of his descrip- 
 tion is never morbid or austere, but it is grave and even solemn. 
 Materialist as he was, he never betrays the frivolity and flippancy 
 of some modern materialistic writers. Nor is there aught in his 
 poetry that is akin to a sensual and licentious materialism. In 
 this respect, nor in this alone, it seems to me that Tennyson's 
 poem on " Lucretius " fails to represent aright his subject. It is 
 powerfully conceived, and like everything that Tennyson writes 
 is executed with artistic finish of style. But the conception, em- 
 bodying as it does the incredible story of his madness and suicide, 
 and also some added elements of empty tradition, is not the con- 
 ception of the Lucretius of the poem, and I think not of the real 
 Lucretius. Besides, it introduces sensual and degrading thoughts 
 and fancies, which nowhere appear in the poem ; and the poem 
 is, after all, the sole biography we have of the man. Tennyson's 
 poem makes upon a student of Lucretius a disturbed and discord- 
 
THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 353 
 
 ant impression. That awful image of the philosophic poet tearing 
 passion to tatters under the maddening influence of a love-philtre, 
 and at last gasping and dying in horrid agonies, and an imaginary 
 wife Lucilia standing there the while wringing her hands in woe 
 over the work of a fatuous jealousy, — it is all a wild fiction just 
 as unworthy as it is elaborate. There is nothing in the Lucretius 
 of the poem that savors aught of all this. He writes of the passion 
 of love and of its relations in his Fourth Book, but in a love 
 which is scientific and didactic, never sensual and licentious. 
 Here and wherever he touches and delineates human life it is 
 with a sober and thoughtful tone. Not more thoughtful in his 
 contemplative views of life is Young himself in our English 
 poetry ; the modern poet is more sombre, and as inferior in sus- 
 tained elevation of feeling as he is in refinement of taste. Lucre- 
 tius entered with a truly human sympathy into all that is noble and 
 all that is depressing in human life. Whatever is cheerful and 
 whatever is sad, all in it that moves admiration and joy, or pity 
 and grief, men's hopes in all their glow of expectation and in their 
 bitterness of disappointment, the fears and ills that men bring 
 upon themselves, or which their mortal destiny brings upon them. 
 Their follies and weaknesses never move him to mirth or ridicule, 
 though sometimes to a disturbed and indignant tone that reminds 
 one of the satire of Juvenal. Not without a sense of human great- 
 ness and dignity does he look upon the fasces and purple robe 
 of civil power and all the pomp and circumstance of war, but with 
 dimmed eyes he sees the scenes of faction and bloodshed, the mis- 
 erable strifes of worldly ambition and all its corroding cares and 
 fears, the rush and tumult of human passions and lusts which 
 make men destructive foes to one another and foes to themselves. 
 And with a true tenderness of pathos he feels and describes the 
 real ills of man's feeble race from the first wail of the infant as he 
 comes into life to the funeral knell that tolls the going down to the 
 grave. In one brief passage he thus transforms by a single crea- 
 tive touch his ever-recurring primordial law into a most, impres- 
 sive image of this ever-recurring universal lot of man. " Here, 
 too," he says, " goes on ever with even issue the war of the first- 
 beginnings ; now here, now there, the vital elements overcome 
 and are overcome in turn ; with the funeral lament is mingled 
 the cry of children as they first come to the light ; and no night 
 has ever followed day, nor day followed night, which has not heard 
 sickly infants' cries blended with the lamentations that follow 
 
354 THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 
 
 death and the black burial train." And all his solemnity of feel- 
 ing, awakened by these vicissitudes of human destiny, all his 
 sympathy with whatever is sweet and endearing in affection and 
 bright in prosperity or dark in adversity, with the natural iUs men 
 must bear and the worse unnatural ills they suffer through a bad 
 heart and life, — all these appear in their fullness just when he has 
 taught materiality of the soul, and is dwelling upon the thought 
 of an eternal death. Here he teaches lessons of expostulation 
 with men's anxieties and fears, of solace for their grief, of a stead- 
 fast and heroic fortitude and submission amidst inevitable trials ; 
 and out of his very unbelief in future retributions he preaches his 
 doctrine of stern retributions of the present ; and all this resting 
 on the view of entire unconsciousness in death, and so of death not 
 to be feared or deplored. As to your worst fears of the future, 
 he says, they should rather be fears for the present. You are 
 frighted by the tales of Tantalus and Tityos, of Sisyphus, of 
 Ixion, of Cerberus and the Furies, and all else that makes up the 
 horrors of Acheron's deep. The awful things these all teach do 
 exist, but they exist in this life ; now and here in bad men's hearts 
 and lives. The hell is here on earth — in the life of fools. 
 " Hie Acherusia fit stultorum denique vita." 
 But with the truest pathos he touches the fears men have of 
 death robbing them of the good things of life. One says to him- 
 self, " Soon thy glad house shall no more welcome thee home, nor 
 virtuous wife and sweet children run to snatch thy kisses and 
 touch thy heart with sweet delight. Soon shall thy fortune no 
 more flourish, or thou be a safeguard to thine own. One disas- 
 trous day has taken from thee, luckless man, all these many prizes 
 of life." How finely has Gray in his "Elegy " turned these lines. 
 Familiar as the stanza is, let me put it by the side of the version 
 which I have given in prose : — 
 
 " For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, 
 Or busy housewife ply her evening care ; 
 No children run to lisp their sire's return, 
 Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share." 
 
 And how earnestly does he rally all the lighter and sicklier appre- 
 hensions against the coming of the inevitable hour. " Men say, 
 with cup in hand and garland on their head. Enjoy the pass- 
 ing moment ; soon it will be gone and come no more. Folly 
 indeed ! as if after death you could crave aught of all this. No 
 one wakes up to crave anything, when once the chill pause of life 
 
THE THEORY OF LUCRETIUS. 355 
 
 is come." " Nature herseK might on this wise rally men's morbid 
 laments : Why dread death if your life has been happy ? Why not 
 depart from the banquet like a satisfied guest ? If not, then why 
 not end your troubles ? And to an old man she might say, Why 
 fear now and moan ? I have nothing new to give, if thou wert 
 to live here forever. A truce, then, with your idle tears." " And 
 this remember, too, vain man, and be content : Good men have 
 died before you, far, far better than thou, even the greatest and 
 the best — the good Ancus, Scipio, and Homer, and Democritus, 
 aye, and Epicurus as well. Go, then, thy way, as all before thee ; 
 for one thing will ever rise out of another ; to none is life given in 
 fee-simple, to all in right of use." 
 
 But, hopeless of the future as the poet's doctrine is, hopeless 
 of best and dearest of human hopes, he is true to the last to his 
 theme and his task — he is true to the philosophic impulse to in- 
 quire, and to know, and to rest quiet and unmoved in the repose of 
 knowledge. In this unspeakably real scene of human life, where 
 individuals and generations are ever coming and going, passing 
 and repassing, and passing away, he would have each man leaving 
 all else, study to know the nature of things^ since the thing at 
 stake is the condition, not of one hour, but for eternity. 
 
THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, JANUARY 14, 1876, AND PRINTED 
 IN THE "BAPTIST QUARTERLY." 
 
 The comparative method of study which has achieved such 
 great discoveries in its own province of language is winning like 
 results in mythology, history, politics, and religion. It is truly 
 marvelous how it carries light wherever it goes, and illumines 
 whatever it reaches ; how it brings near to us the far distant, and 
 binds to the immediate present the primeval past; how it joins in 
 friendliest union the most diverse elements of speech, race, gov- 
 ernment, and society, and so by its touch makes the whole world 
 kin. In its progress it reveals to us the broad and goodly view 
 not only of languages united by closest family ties, which yet be- 
 long to nations parted hemispheres asunder, but also of the nations 
 that speak them as forming one brotherhood and sharing a com- 
 mon heritage of civilization. It takes us to that far-off primeval 
 Aryan home where the forefathers of these nations were one great 
 family, a yet unbroken household, living as one people, speaking 
 one language, subject to one rule, tilling the same fields, plying 
 the same arts, and looking up to the same bending and protecting 
 skies, and there seeing and worshiping one Supreme Being as the 
 God of light, as Father in heaven. We may look for grander 
 results to be achieved from the applications of this comprehensive 
 method of study. As we think of its onward career we seem to 
 see its studious followers in brilliant succession, even as the run- 
 ners in the ancient torch-race, handing along the lights of science 
 by the successive stages of their course of research, the eyes and 
 energies of all bent upon the ultimate goal — the knowledge of 
 one united race, of the vast and varied interests of our common 
 humanity. It is indeed the universal human interest inspired by 
 this method of study that makes at once its worth and its charm, 
 and gives it a hold upon all thoughtful minds like the spell of a 
 fascination. And as it is in the province of language, in which it 
 became first established, we have in its results a quite new proof 
 of the value and function of speech, of the spoken and the written 
 
THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 357 
 
 word, as the revealer of human thought and history ; and we may 
 claim for philological studies as a whole what has been long ac- 
 corded to the study of the Greek and Roman tongues, that they 
 are the true Humaniora^ truly humane and humanizing studies, 
 counting nothing foreign to themselves that belongs to humanity, 
 humani nihil a se alienum. In nothing do these many- voiced 
 studies so powerfully address the human heart as in what they 
 reveal to us of the religions of the different nations of the world, 
 or of the religion of some on« nation which has borne a ruling 
 part in its history. Here they have to do with what is most cen- 
 tral and distinctive in man, that religious nature by virtue of 
 which, as it was said in an old Aryan word, he is bidden to " look 
 heavenward," or, as we have it in more significant Semitic speech, 
 "is able to lift up his face to God and have his delight in the 
 Almighty." It is also one of the many services rendered by com- 
 parative to classical philology that inquiries into the religions of 
 classical antiquity are now conducted on a wider basis of truth 
 and reason, and with a larger intelligence and charity. To rele- 
 gate the Greek and Roman religions to the realm of superstition 
 and falsehood, and to conceive of those nations themselves, who 
 found and expressed in those religions their best life for long gen- 
 erations, as being before the advent of Christianity mere outcasts 
 and castaways, with no knowledge of God or hope of immortality 
 — these views and such views as these it would now be simply 
 impossible to entertain. We might as weU go back to the notion 
 that Greek and Latin were somehow developed out of Hebrew, 
 or indeed that Hebrew was the original language of mankind. 
 When we now enumerate the gifts bestowed upon us by those 
 foremost nations in their letters, art, and philosophy, in their 
 dominion and law, and remember that the Greeks by their speech, 
 and the Romans by their rule, handed down to us a yet richer 
 gift, their own only by adoption, the gift of the Christian religion, 
 then may we contemplate their religions, too, as having a place in 
 the providential ordering of the world, as preparatory to the true 
 and the universal religion, and as enabling them in the fullness of 
 time to receive this religion themselves, and to bequeath it to all 
 after times and peoples. 
 
 In a former essay I endeavored to set forth the religion of 
 the Greeks as it has come down to us from their mythical heroic 
 age in the poetry of Homer. I wish now to present some aspects 
 of that religion in the form into which it had passed in the 
 
358 THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 brightest historic times of Greece, as it was taught and inter- 
 preted by Sophocles, the poet of devoutest mind and of most 
 harmonious genius and culture in the age of Pericles, and also the 
 artist poet of Attic tragedy, which was at once the ministry of 
 the Greek faith and the sovereign crown of the Grecian Muse. 
 The Greek gave always his best and his greatest to his religion, 
 to his conception of spiritual existence and of that unseen, aw- 
 ful Power that ruled supreme in it all, as well as in all the world 
 of nature and the life of man ; and nowhere did he give it in 
 such large and costly store as in the gifts of his art, in those ex- 
 quisite revelations of beauty and grandeur which have ever been 
 and will never cease to be the marvel and the study of every age. 
 Athenian art were aU vacant and meaningless without the presence 
 and interpretation of religious ideas. It was from these came 
 the soul of its inspiration, these bodied forth its manifold forms. 
 The artists themselves and their enlightened patron, the citizen 
 sovereign of Athens, were all the willing servants and ministers 
 of religion. Their minds habitually dwelt in the yet cherished 
 traditions of the national faith, and these they sought to repro- 
 duce, but purified and informed with a truer meaning, in accord- 
 ance with the advanced spirit of their age. Through their con- 
 trolling influence it was religion that gave new consecration to 
 recovered freedom and rekindled patriotism, new sanction and im- 
 pulse to the fulfillment of vows, and to the offering of dedication 
 gifts to commemorate recent national triumphs and adorn afresh 
 places made sacred by the achievements of earlier times. Of 
 the exalted influence and rank of religion in all that world of 
 Attic art we have the best symbol and witness in the Phidias 
 statue of Athene Promachos, that masterpiece of painting, archi- 
 tecture, and sculpture combined, reared up under the open sky 
 and into the pure air of Athens, far above all its grand assem- 
 blage of works of art, crowning the Acropolis itself, the sanctuary 
 of Athenian religion, ever looking down upon the city she had 
 always protected, ever looked up to by its citizens as the goddess 
 of the Athenians' home. Of this religion, to which all Athe- 
 nian art ministered, Sophocles was himself a chosen minister, in a 
 form of Greek poetry, which, as I have said, was in its uses a 
 religious one ; he was consecrated to its service by the Muse of 
 Attic tragedy ; in the tragic drama he was during all his life the 
 religious teacher of the Athenian people. Remote as we are 
 from that ancient Greek life, and prepossessed with the ideas of 
 
THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 359 
 
 the modern drama, we are not always apt to discern this character 
 of the Attic tragedy. That tragedy was in its origin a religious 
 solemnity, and was true to that origin during all its history ; the 
 play was an element of public worship, the building in which it 
 was represented was a temple, and its centre appropriated to an 
 altar ; all who took part in the representation were devoted to a 
 divine service ; the stage itself was the national pulpit, our word, 
 indeed, being the Latin name for it ; the poet was the preacher, 
 and his poem was in truth a sermon designed for the religious 
 instruction of the people. How well does the writer remember 
 the first living impression he received of this character of Greek 
 tragedy, when years ago, in his student-life at Berlin, it was his 
 fortune to see the " Antigone " exhibited, and then for the first 
 time, at the Eoyal Theatre. This representation of a Greek play 
 on the German stage was the idea of the late Prussian king, Fred- 
 erick William IV., a sovereign who in intellectual gifts and in 
 liberal patronage of letters and art was not unlike Pericles him- 
 self. He laid under contribution all the resources of his capital 
 in learning and scholarship and musical genius for the transla- 
 tion of the play and the composition of the choral music, and in 
 histrionic and decorative talent for its exhibition with all fitting 
 appointments of acting, scenery, and costume. It was an impos- 
 ing spectacle to behold. There was a wealth of Mendelssohn mu- 
 sic to delight the ear, and yet those sights and sounds have long 
 since quite faded from the mind ; but the moral impression which 
 the drama made by the truth it uttered, as it moved in solemn 
 march through the action, lingers yet fresh in the memory, an 
 abiding possession. Even now there seems to be seen that stately 
 figure of Antigone, and her voice seems to be heard pronouncing 
 her faith " in the unwritten and unchanging laws of God," and 
 her purpose to abide by that faith even unto death. When she 
 appealed to those unwritten divine laws as above Creon, above all 
 human decrees, what a noble utterance was that which rang out 
 so clear and commanding : — 
 
 " They are not of to-day nor yesterday, 
 But live forever, nor can man assign 
 When first they sprang to being. Not through fear 
 Of any man's resolve was I prepared 
 Before the gods to bear the penalty 
 Of sinning against these." 
 
 It was the appointed and the chosen mission of Sophocles to 
 
360 THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 fasten such moral impressions as these in men's minds, as through 
 his dramas he addressed his countrymen, assembled by thousands 
 in the great theatre of Dionysus ; yes, and as he has ever since 
 addressed, on the vast theatre of the world, all the succeeding 
 generations of men through the perpetual beneficent influence of 
 good letters. And how richly was he furnished for his mission 
 by nature and education, and by all fortunate environment of 
 time and place and circumstance. We have a brief biography of 
 him in Greek by an anonymous writer, which contains a very 
 significant sentence : " Sophocles was dear to the gods as no one 
 else ; " ^co</)tXr^9, Horace's Dis cams, one word, but a choice one, 
 and it strikes the key-note of all the prolonged harmonies of his 
 poetic life. The word was doubtless meant to express his sense of 
 reverence and piety, by which he was indeed highly favored, as 
 the best of all the good things which were his, and which by 
 it were made good things to others. But we may take the word 
 in a larger sense. Highly favored he was in his poetic genius, 
 Melpomene smiling upon him at his birth, in the sweetness and 
 serene calmness of his nature, and his fine aptitudes for all those 
 qualities and accomplishments of person, manners, and mind 
 which with the Greek entered into the ideal of manhood. Highly 
 favored, too, in the fortunate event when these gifts, then in their 
 early spring, first brought him into public notice. He was sixteen 
 years of age when the great victory of Salamis was won ; and on 
 the day of its celebration he was chosen to lead the chorus in 
 song and dance, as moving around the trophy they chanted the 
 battle-hymn in gratitude to the gods for the nation's triumph. 
 This was a select honor for an Athenian to win in the early years 
 of his education ; and the youthful Sophocles had won it by the 
 distinction he had gained in the pursuits of those years. Music 
 and gymnastics, in each of which he had carried off the garland 
 prize, had given him skill in song and lyre, and had rounded to 
 symmetry of form a person of native beauty and grace ; and his 
 studies in the epic and lyric poets had already touched and quick- 
 ened the susceptibilities of his aesthetic nature, and kindled a gen- 
 erous love of excellence in all that is good and noble in character 
 and action. Among the Fragments^ of his lost poems one has 
 been preserved, which perhaps embodies his own experience of 
 those years : — 
 
 ^ Fragm. IIQ ; referred to and quoted by Professor Plumptre in his Life and 
 Writings of Sophocles. 
 
THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 361 
 
 " Since we have rightly made our prayer to God, 
 Now let us go, my children, to the schools 
 Where wise men teach, and learn the Muses' arts, 
 And ever, day by day, take one step on. 
 Till we gain power to study nobler things." 
 
 Twelve years later came a greater day in Sophocles' life, when 
 that early promise, now amply increased, was to come to its first 
 fulfillment. It was the great Dionysia of the year 468, and a 
 dramatic contest of unparalleled interest was to take place. Soph- 
 ocles, then in his twenty-seventh year, was to appear for the first 
 time as a tragic poet, and in competition with ^schylus, who had 
 been the master of the Athenian stage for an entire generation. 
 In anticipation of the approaching contest, public expectation had 
 been wrought up to its highest pitch, and party feeling ran high 
 through the city, some eager for a new success of their old favor- 
 ite, and others desiring a maiden triumph for the young aspirant, 
 already known as a gifted poet. The archon, who had not yet 
 appointed the judges of the contest, in his fear that any arbiters 
 appointed in the usual way would fail to unite the people in their 
 decision, took, in a happy moment, the bold step of electing a 
 wholly new tribunal, whose decision he knew would carry all the 
 people. It so happened that Cimon and his nine colleagues — the 
 ten representing, as also the dramatic judges always did, the ten 
 tribes — had just come back from a sacred mission to Scyros, bring- 
 ing with them the bones of Theseus, to lay them in Attic soil. 
 They had come straight from the Piraeus to the Theatre of 
 Dionysus, and at the altar in the orchestra were making their 
 thank-offering for the success of their mission. The archon retains 
 them after their service was over, appoints them the judges, ad- 
 ministers the oath, and puts them in the judges' seats, amidst the 
 acclamations of the assembled citizens. By their votes the prize 
 was adjudged to Sophocles ; and so on that day they bade the ris- 
 ing poet be adorned with his first ivy crown — hedera crescentem 
 ornate poetani. This triumph, however, of Sophocles, never 
 caused any abiding unfriendly feeling between the older and the 
 younger dramatist. On the contrary, the relation of Sophocles to 
 -^schylus was by far the most important of all the influences of 
 time and circumstance which promoted his growth and culture as 
 a tragic writer. It was much that he was born into the world 
 with the nascent fortulies of liberated Greece, and that his youth 
 was reared and formed when these fortunes were firmly estab- 
 
362 THE LIFE AXD TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 lished ; it was much that when he had reached the full maturity of 
 his powers he lived and labored in the age of Pericles, and, be- 
 sides enjoying the friendship of that gifted orator and statesman, 
 received into himself all the inspiring influence of that era of in- 
 tellectual activity marked and known by that name. But these 
 advantages he had in common with all the eminent men of that 
 time ; for himself in his own art, in preparation for it, and in all 
 its after exercise, it was his peculiar felicity that he had ^schylus 
 for his predecessor, as a model to study and imitate in all noble 
 conception and execution, as a teacher at whose feet he might 
 dutifully sit, whom he honored and venerated as an elder master, 
 so long as that master lived, and whose memory he cherished with 
 filial affection to the end of his own long life. There is a strange 
 passage in a play of Aristophanes, that brilliant genius of the old 
 Attic comedy, which contains, where you might least expect it, a 
 discriminating testimony to the character of Sophocles, and his 
 relations to ^schylus. It is in the play of the " Frogs," which 
 was exhibited just after the death of Sophocles, Euripides having 
 died the year before, and -^schylus many years earlier. So the 
 great trio were all gone, and the future of Attic tragedy seemed 
 dark. The comic poet introduces Dionysus telling of a descent 
 he had made to Hades, to bring back to earth, even as Orpheus 
 went in quest of his lost Eurydice, the best tragic poet he could 
 find. He says that a noisy contest was going on there, a dramatic 
 one, too. j^schylus had long held the laureate place of tragedy ; 
 but Euripides, who had recently come, was winning favor by his 
 newer style, and there was some chance of his getting the tragic 
 throne. But some one asks in the play,^ " But how was it with 
 Sophocles ; did he put in no claim to the throne ? " " Oh no, not 
 he," was the reply ; " but as soon as he came down, he kissed 
 ^schylus, and slid his right hand into his, and ^schylus at once 
 would have ceded the throne to him ; but Sophocles wanted only 
 to be a looker-on ; and if ^schylus should win, he would stay 
 where he was ; but if not, he said he would himself enter the lists 
 with Euripides." In this comic conceit, Aristophanes reveals to 
 us not only the sweetness of Sophocles' disposition, but also his 
 place in Attic tragedy, and his relation to ^schylus. He was in 
 the eleventh year of his age when ^schylus won his first prize ; 
 he had reached his twenty-third year when ^schylus produced the 
 great drama of the " Persae," that one of his only two historic plays 
 1 Line 786, and following, Dindorf's ed., Paris, 1839. 
 
THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 363 
 
 which set upon the Athenian stage that great event in the strug- 
 gle between Europe and Asia, the rout of Xerxes and the down- 
 fall of the Persian power. During all this interval it was his, in 
 common with all Athens, to see and hear the tragedies which the 
 great dramatist exhibited at the successive annual festivals ; and 
 what an imaginative study of education and culture to think of 
 that genial Athenian youth looking on from some chosen place in 
 the vast assembly, and following those dramas through all their 
 mighty movements of action, and searching and piercing into all 
 their hidden and intricate springs in poetic and tragic art, feed- 
 ing soul and mind with their lofty conceptions and lessons of wis- 
 dom and truth, inflamed all the while by their excellence, and 
 stirred with high hopes of coming, by and by, to be himself a 
 great poet, and famous to all ages. Sophocles was heir direct to 
 aU that ^schylus wrought out for the Attic stage, to the improve- 
 ments he introduced into its inner economy as well as its outward 
 conduct, and especially the religious teaching with which he in- 
 formed it, in his new and nobler treatment of the myths and tra- 
 ditions from which its chief materials were always drawn. This 
 teaching Sophocles took up into his own, following on still farther 
 in the path opened by ^schylus as a reformer of the national 
 faith ; he was a follower and a pupil, but an independent one, 
 conceiving and working according to his own nature, a nature less 
 grand and majestic, but certainly more calm and sustained, and 
 more harmonious in itself and all its development, ^schylus is 
 described by scholars ^ who know him best as a sublime genius, 
 partaking of the tone and quality of that superhuman and heroic 
 realm he always dwelt in, amid beings and scenes which it is hard 
 for ordinary mortals to reach — a warlike and overwhelming na- 
 ture, dealing with the conflicts of men and gods with one another 
 and with destiny, grappling and closing, in the drama of fiction, 
 with the stout problems of fate and free-will, with the same impet- 
 uous and victorious force as in the drama of life he encountered 
 and vanquished the Persians at Marathon and Salamis. But in 
 reading Sophocles we seem to get near to the writer, and enter 
 into a human sympathy with him ; and yet he draws his subjects 
 from the same mythic realm, and in his interpretation of its life 
 deals with the same complex and perplexing conditions of man's 
 spiritual being and destiny. His art is no less ideal ; his charac- 
 
 ^ Especially by Dronke in Jahrbiicher fur Philologie, 4th Suppl. Band, pp. 1- 
 100. 
 
364 THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 ters, too, are ideal ; but they are human ; though of a divine kin- 
 ship, they yet are living and moving upon the earth, our habita- 
 tion ; ever under the control of a divine government, and subject 
 to its eternal laws, but yet freely acting out of human feelings, 
 impulses, and motives. Sophocles is ever so quiet and serenely 
 thoughtful, harmonizing so far as he may all opposing and jarring 
 forces, and when he cannot go farther, sure in his faith that there 
 is a remoter concord somewhere, if only man had the spiritual 
 insight and sensibility to see and feel it. In Sophocles, indeed, 
 we are aware of the presence, not so much of a sharp intellectual 
 apprehension, which seeks to fix in precise forms the knowledge 
 wrung from wrestling thought, but rather of the undimmed inner 
 sense,^ which sees and feels the truth as by immediate intuition. 
 We may apply to him words of his own, left in one of his brief 
 Fragments : — 
 
 " A heart of mildness, full of good mtent, 
 Far sooner than aeuteness will the truth behold." 
 
 And then what a perfection of art in aU his unfolding and ex- 
 pression of the truth he has thus seen ! We are craving in these 
 modern Christian days the fusion and union of religion and cul- 
 ture ; and how we miss it often in the best teaching of the pen 
 and of the voice, culture lacking the inspiration of religion, and 
 religion failing to take up into itself and master the resources of 
 culture. In " Sophocles," the great name of the pulpit of the 
 Attic drama, we find a well-nigh perfect combination of art and 
 religion, of the best culture of his age and its best religious ideas. 
 The wonder is that the thousands of the Athenian demos had 
 risen to such a high plane of culture themselves that they could 
 fully appreciate these dramas, and sit and listen to them with 
 delight for hours, and even entire days in succession. 
 
 But we linger too long on the prologue of the theme ; let us 
 come to the scenes themselves. These scenes belong to a career 
 extending over more than sixty years, during which the poet com- 
 posed ninety tragedies, and twenty times won the tragic crown. 
 Only seven of these tragedies are extant : the " Antigone," " Elec- 
 tra," " Trachiniffi," " (Edipus the King," "Ajax," " Philoctetes," 
 and "(Edipus at Colonos." Without attempting any analysis of 
 them, or adding to what I have said of their artistic character, 
 I wish to draw attention to some of the religious views which they 
 embody, and to illustrate them by a quotation of passages. It is 
 ^ See Dronke (as cited above), p. 62. 
 
THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 365 
 
 a subject which has been often treated ; ^ but the present tenden- 
 cies of classical studies may justify an endeavor to treat it again, 
 even if no new results are reached. 
 
 Perhaps the most fundamental of all the religious conceptions 
 of Sophocles is his consciousness of the insufficiency of man in 
 himself for the attainment of the ends of his life, of the vanity 
 of all unassisted human endeavor. This fundamental view is, 
 however, nowise impaired, but rather deepened, by the poet's like 
 constant sense of the dignity of human nature, and of all that is 
 great and noble in the origin and destiny of man. Hence the 
 marked vicissitudes that enter the action of his dramas — of good 
 and ill, of hope and despair, triumph and defeat, glory and shame, 
 which, like alternate storm and shine, chase each other across the 
 scene, and throw their swift succeeding lights and shades over all 
 the landscape. It makes, indeed, the strange irony of the drama 
 as of life, that in spite of what is bravest and best in man and 
 his doings, and even through his own purposed agency, the direst 
 evils befall him. The heroic might of Ajax makes the fatal 
 snare by which he falls ; it is the very love of Deianeira for Hera- 
 cles that brings mortal agony to him and suicide to herself ; Creon 
 in the very boast of his power utters his weakness ; the wisdom 
 of CEdipus, which solved the riddle of the Sphinx, is blind to the 
 riddle of his own dark life, and the swift steps he takes in his 
 zeal for justice only haste him to his own downfall. Hence the 
 words of the chorus,^ when the truth of CEdipus' life is at last 
 revealed. 
 
 " Ah ! race of mortal men, 
 How as a thing of naught 
 I count ye, while ye live ; 
 For who is there of men, 
 That more of blessing knows, 
 Than just a little while 
 To seem to prosper well, 
 And, having seemed, to fall ? " 
 
 1 The most recent work on the subject, and one of inestimable value for the 
 study and right understanding of Sophocles, is the essay (referred to above) 
 by the late Gustav Dronke. Professor W. S. Tyler has also discussed it in two 
 able papers on the Theology of Sophocles in the Bihliotheca Sacra, vols. xvii. 
 and xviii. ; also Professor E. H. Plumptre, in an essay prefixed to his admira- 
 ble translation of Sophocles ; from this translation we take most of the quota- 
 tions in this article. 
 
 « (Edipus the King, 1186-1192. 
 
366 THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 But this feeling in the poet, of human insufficiency, only lifts 
 him up to faith in a divine Presence and his divine order in the 
 world, in a Supreme Being, almighty and all-wise, to whose laws 
 it is man's highest wisdom to bow himself in reverent submission. 
 For this reverent disposition of the mind Sophocles uses the word 
 eva-i/Sita, corresponding to the Latin pietas ; it is piety thought of 
 and expressed as reverent fear ; it discerns in the acknowledgment 
 of man's weakness the divine wisdom and power, and gives the 
 grace of consecration to all human virtue, in that it joins it to the 
 devout fear of God. Many passages illustrate this view. QCdi- 
 pus, in his greeting of Theseus, thus praises Athens : ^ — 
 
 " For I have found 
 Here only among men the fear of God." 
 
 So, too, the Chorus thus acknowledges the piety of Electra : ^ 
 " I have ever found thee, albeit thy lot unhappy, winning the vic- 
 tor's prize by loyalty to duty, through thy reverent fear of Zeus." 
 And of Zeus himself the Chorus also says to Electra : ^ " Cour- 
 age, my child, take courage ; in the heavens great is Zeus, who all 
 things oversees and rules." And both aspects of the truth are 
 presented in a remarkable passage in " QEdipus the King : " * — 
 
 " Would 't were my lot to keep 
 
 A conscience pure 
 In words and deeds, whose laws are set on high, 
 Heaven-born, their only sire Olympus ; 
 Not mortal man begot them. 
 Nor e'er shall Lethe lull them to repose ; 
 In these there- lives a mighty God, 
 
 Who ne'er grows old." 
 
 It is to these heavenly laws that Antigone appeals from the 
 decree of Creon ; and when at last the catastrophe has revealed 
 to the stricken and penitent king his error and guilt, the Chorus 
 utter in the last passage of the drama the great lesson of the 
 blessing that waits upon piety, and the sore penalties exacted of 
 impious pride. 
 
 As in obedience to these everlasting laws of right Sophocles 
 places man's virtue and happiness, so in their transgression he 
 sees the source of personal guilt, and all its sure consequences of 
 misery and ruin. And here, passing into the province in which all 
 tragedy moves, we are to observe how Sophocles exhibits, with 
 
 1 CEdipus at Colonos, 1125, 1126. 2 Electra, 1093-1097. 
 
 8 Electra, 173-175. "* (Edipus the King, 863-872. 
 
THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 367 
 
 moral ends in view, the mystery of human suffering, and tries 
 to set it in the light of truth. I shall point to the two chief 
 aspects in which he has presented it : the one, in which suffering is 
 retributive, as punishment for personal and willful transgression ; 
 and the other, in which it is disciplinary, and so is healing and 
 chastening. The idea of destiny, which Sophocles received from 
 ^schylus, he himself presents in close connection with the work- 
 ing of the human will. Man may choose between good and evil ; 
 but a transgression, a passing over of the fixed line between right 
 and wrong, puts him in the path of guilt and ruin. Sometimes 
 swift following, sometimes lingering and laggard ^ in its coming, 
 calamitous evil is sure to reach him as his portion. The evil, if 
 persisted in, passes ever to worse and to worst in character and in 
 lot. It works always, and nothing but evil. As the German 
 poet, Schiller, briefly expresses it, in illustration of the ancient 
 teaching : — 
 
 *' Das ist der Fluch der bosen That, 
 Dass sie f ortzeugend Boses muss gebaren." 
 
 A dire element of this fruitfulness of evil and its punishment 
 is the judicial blindness with which the transgressor is visited. 
 This is the Ate, or the Erinnys, which as an avenging Being 
 blinds the guilty one, and drives him on to moral madness. One 
 striking illustration of this view we have in the poet's Ajax. 
 This heroic soul fell a victim to his confidence in himself. In the 
 " pride of his heart he waxed haughty," and boasted his inde- 
 pendence of the gods. To his father's parting counsel, " that 
 with his spear he should strive to win, but with help of God," he 
 proudly replied : ^ — 
 
 "My father, with God's help, a man of nought 
 
 Might victory win ; but I, I trust, shall grasp 
 
 Without his aid that glory for myseK." 
 
 This insolent pride was his first sin, a pride "going before 
 destruction." Next, when the arms of Achilles were adjudged 
 to Ulysses, he yielded to deadly anger, and then to a purpose to 
 slay Ulysses, and also the Atridse, who had adjudged the arms. 
 Then is he smitten with madness, which brings him to disgrace 
 
 ^ The poet Horace has also a striking passage on this truth in O, III. 2, lines 
 31, 32 : 
 
 " Rare antecedentem seelestum 
 Deseruit pede poena elaudo." 
 
 2 Ajax, 764-769. 
 
368 THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 and humiliation before his foes. Most impressive is the way in 
 which the poet represents both the blinding itself and the lesson 
 which it teaches. It is in the dialogue between Athena and Odys- 
 seus. I give only a few lines ^ (and from Plumptre's translation). 
 Athena is speaking as from the sky, unseen by Odysseus : — 
 
 " Athena. Dost fear so much to see a madman's face ? 
 Odysseus. Nay ; were he sane I should not shun him then. 
 Athena. Though thou be near he will not see thee now. 
 Odysseus. How so, if he the same eyes has to see ? 
 Athena. Know, I will darken even clearest eyes.^'* 
 
 Then after Ajax has appeared, and so changed by his frenzy as 
 even to excite the pity of his adversary, Athena reads thus the 
 lesson to Odysseus : ^ — 
 
 " Do thou, then, seeing this, refrain thy tongue 
 From any lofty speech against the gods." 
 
 " The gods love those of ordered soul, 
 And hate the evil." 
 
 Another illustration we have in Creon, and here the downward 
 steps we can still more easily trace, as belonging to an inward 
 spiritual process. Creon, as we have seen, has uttered his decree, 
 which was in violation of religion and humanity. Antigone has 
 been arrested for violating this decree, and has been brought 
 before the king for judgment. But her defense has stirred 
 Creon' s anger all the more, and he has pronounced her doom and 
 sent her away. Hsemon, the king's son, and the affianced lover 
 of Antigone, comes in, and beseeches Creon as father, as king, as 
 man, by justice, by reason, and by the voice of all Thebes, to 
 relent and spare the condemned. But in vain, Creon's heart 
 grows harder, and he bids his son away, declaring that " the girl 
 shall die, and before the eyes of her lover." Now the Chorus 
 remonstrate, but only to push the king, in his yet more hardened 
 heart, to change the sentence to a worse doom — to be entombed 
 alive. Then Antigone herself passes across the scene, heroic to 
 the last in devotion to duty, but yet as human and as woman, 
 mourning that she goes on that last journey "unwept, unwed, 
 and whelmed in woe, — no more to look upon the eye of day." 
 Against all Creon stands unmoved, and his heart now hardened 
 to stone. Then appears the aged seer, Tiresias. Everywhere 
 about him he has read portents of coming disaster, and he comes 
 to beg the king to stop in his mad course. He recounts the por- 
 1 Ajax, 81, 85. ^ j^jax, 127. 
 
THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 369 
 
 tents, and then as teacher and prophet bids him heed his lessons 
 of warning : ^ — 
 
 " Think thou on this, my son, — to err, indeed, 
 Is common unto all ; but having erred 
 He is no longer reckless or unblest 
 Who seeks for healing, not persists unmoved. 
 Self-will brings on itself the curse of blindness" 
 
 The self-willed, blinded king, daring to heap upon the seer, as 
 the minister of religion, his words of scorn, must now hear from 
 his prophetic lips the ills that are soon to befall him. Hardly is 
 Tiresias gone when these ills are at the door, and beat thick and 
 fast upon him, now — but too late — beginning to relent; the 
 sight of Antigone hanging dead in her caverned tomb ; the sui- 
 cide of his distracted son, who curses his father as he dies ; and 
 then the tidings of his wife's death, who has slain herself in 
 anguish and despair. 
 
 But in Sophocles the consequences of the transgression are not 
 limited to the original transgressor. They are transmitted and 
 entailed as an hereditary evil to his descendants, the sins of the 
 fathers visited upon the children to the third and fourth genera^ 
 tion, and even ending only with the extinction of the whole race. 
 Thus Antigone, in the third generation from Labdacus, is repre- 
 sented as falling a victim to the curse that lay upon his house ; 
 and, indeed, all the woes of the ill-fated CEdipus and his family 
 are in one passage mourned by the Chorus in the " Antigone" as 
 springing from the same source. When Antigone is led out to 
 her doom, the Chorus break forth in the following strain : ^ — 
 " Blessed are those whose life no woe doth taste ! 
 For unto those whose house 
 
 The gods have shaken, nothing fails of curse 
 
 Or woe, that creeps to generations far." 
 
 And in a later strain,^ still more distinctly, thus : — 
 " I see the woes that smote, in ancient days, 
 The seed of Labdacus, 
 "Who perished long ago, with grief on grief 
 Still falling ; nor does this age rescue that ; 
 Some god still smites it down. 
 Nor have they any end." 
 
 It is to be noted that in this instance the poet makes no men- 
 tion of the original transgression; but in the other tragic in- 
 stance, that of Pelops' line, to which Electra, with the Atridae, 
 
 1 Antigone, 1023-1028. 2 Antigone, 582-586. » Antigone, 597-^02. 
 
370 THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 belonged, the first sin is directly mentioned, the murder of Myrti- 
 los by Pelops. The deed is so interpreted in a choral ode in the 
 " Electra." ^ Dronke has shown ^ that ^schylus had anticipated 
 Sophocles in the treatment of this subject, and had brought out 
 with singular clearness and force his view of the hereditary 
 nature of evil. He declares, indeed, that ^schylus, in tracing 
 back the moral curse that befell a whole family to its origin in 
 the sin and guilt of an ancestor, was the first and the last of the 
 Greeks who thus ventured upon the problem of original sin ; and 
 he adds the striking remark, that he " needed only to extend his 
 conception from one race of men to the entire human race, to 
 reach the full truth taught by revelation." 
 
 I have thus tried to show how Sophocles exhibited human ca- 
 lamity on its retributive side ; and as here he fully answered the 
 one moral end assigned to tragedy by Aristotle, of awakening ter- 
 ror at the punishment of the guilty, so also, as we shall now see, 
 he knew how for the other moral end to touch to the quick the 
 sentiment of pity, by representing the chastening and even the 
 glorifying influence of sorrow in the sufferings of the guiltless. It 
 is very characteristic of Sophocles to show how the good as well 
 as the evil are visited with calamity, and what ends of moral gov- 
 ernment are reached by such visitation. In opposition to the doc- 
 trine of the Temanite in the Book of Job,^ he taught that the 
 innocent also perished, and the righteous were cut off ; and this, 
 too, for some just and wise end of the just and wise order of the 
 world. This order as planned and carried out by Zeus embraces 
 the whole and each individual of the race. No one comes into 
 account for himseK, but as a part of the whole, as a single link in 
 an endless chain ; and so, when the plan of the universe demands 
 it, some evil may befall one without any guilt of his own. But 
 the duty lies upon man to submit himself to the laws of right and 
 truth, which are written on the heart ; he must cherish a pious 
 fear and trust in a divine superintending power. The poet thus 
 conceives and represents a man as brought to some crisis in his 
 life, where he falls into error, and then by successive steps com- 
 mits acts of wrong and crime, which he has all the while purposely 
 shunned ; and these involve him, of course, in heaviest misfortunes. 
 But the error or the crime is involuntary, and the suffering unde- 
 
 1 Electra, 504-515. 
 
 ^ In the essay (as above cited), p. 55. 
 
 ^ Plumptre, p. 81, and the note; also Dronke, p. 67, as re-cited. 
 
THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 371 
 
 served. But such an one, thus tried by a heavy lot, if only he 
 holds fast to his faith in a divine wisdom, which he may not com- 
 prehend, is ever under a divine protecting care ; and if he find 
 not a full moral satisfaction here, there must be a hereafter, where 
 the divine plan of the world will reach its consummation. We 
 may illustrate some of these views as they are exhibited in drama 
 by Sophocles. In the tragedy of " Philoctetes," the poet made to 
 pass on the stage before the Athenians scenes of sujffiering with 
 which they had been familiar in the poetry of Homer. Philoctetes 
 had been one of the suitors of Helen, and, bound by the oath which 
 the suitors had taken in common, he had joined in the expedition 
 against Troy. But on the way, while on the island of Chryse, he 
 was bitten and wounded by the fangs of a serpent ; and the wound 
 growing more and more painful, and the distress and sharp cries 
 of the sufferer in the camp making him a burden to his country- 
 men, at length, at the instance and under charge of Ulysses, he 
 was sent away to the island of Lemnos, and there treacherously 
 abandoned to his fate. There, far away from all companionship 
 and help of men, tortured and wasted from his wound, and de- 
 pendent upon his bow and arrows for a scanty subsistence, he wore 
 away months and years of a wretched life. With heroic patience 
 he bore all, conscious of no ill-desert, but bitterly feeling that he 
 was the victim of human cruelty, and also tempted often like that 
 other sufferer, and from physical ills, to " fling away his integrity 
 and curse God and die." The Chorus of the play in a wail of pity 
 at the lot of the hero finds it on that account worthy of compas- 
 sion, that he bears it for no guilt of his own. Meantime, nine 
 years of the Trojan war had passed away. Hector had died, and 
 Achilles and Ajax, and Troy was not yet taken. Now the prophet 
 Helenus told the Greeks that Troy never would be taken but by 
 Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, and with the bow of Heracles. 
 But Heracles had loved Philoctetes, and at his death had given 
 him his far-famed arrows and bow ; and these were with the suf- 
 ferer on Lemnos. So Neoptolemus and Ulysses were dispatched 
 to Lemnos to bring Philoctetes to the camp before Troy. As the 
 play opens these have just arrived on the island. But through 
 the wiles of Ulysses Philoctetes is doomed to new trials yet worse 
 than physical ones. Neoptolemus, yielding to the persuasions of 
 Ulysses, his ambition getting the better of his honor, has recourse 
 to stratagem. He wins the confidence of Philoctetes by professing 
 sympathy with his distresses, promises to take the exile to his dis- 
 
372 THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 tant home, and at last is intrusted with the weapons with which 
 he is to take Troy. These successful wiles slowly disclose them- 
 selves to their victim ; and now he is plunged into new griefs. 
 His confidence betrayed, himself again visited with cruel treach- 
 ery, he is ready to sink under his too heavy burdens, and to cast 
 himself into the sea. But his distresses now move the soul of 
 Neoptolemus to pity and penitence ; he confesses his meanness, 
 restores the weapons, and now gives the sufferer real sympathy 
 and aid. He tells him what he had been taught by the seer Hele- 
 nus, that aU his ills had befallen him by divine direction, as 
 means of good to himself and his country. He was " to be sure 
 of this and write it in the tablets of his mind ; " and that the ap- 
 pointed time had now come when he should " be healed of his dis- 
 ease, and then with the help of Neoptolemus lay low the towers of 
 Troy." But not by human lips, by a voice from heaven alone 
 could the sufferer be fully persuaded. Heracles speaks to him 
 from the sky and bids him hear his comforting and assuring words, 
 that confirm those of the seer, which he had just heard. Healing 
 is assured by Zeus through the skill of Asclepius, and then by his 
 hand Troy is to faU. And so with the pious assent of Philoctetes 
 and his words of farewell to the island where he had suffered so 
 long the tragedy ends, the curtain falling on " the voyage of the 
 homeward bound." 
 
 But the lessons of human misfortune are unfolded with far 
 more fullness in the two plays of " CEdipus." The words of the 
 Latin poet Terence, "iVoTi (^surn) (Edipus^^^ have made Roman 
 and perhaps most modern readers chiefly familiar with this name 
 as that of a cunning reader of dark riddles ; but in Greek tragedy, 
 this name, even as that of Job in Hebrew literature, is ever asso- 
 ciated with a mystery never read by man's wisdom — the suffer- 
 ings of the righteous. In CEdipus it is not so much the loss of 
 earthly good that makes his tragic story, that he must lose rank 
 and wealth and family, and that he must bear in his grief the 
 harsh judgments and evil tongues of men ; it was involuntary 
 errors and crimes that made the worst ingredients in his cup of 
 bitterness. A dark destiny was upon him from his birth. His 
 father had been warned by oracle of dire evil which needs must 
 come if a son were born to him. Yet the son was born ; and 
 after his birth, all in vain was it that the father sought to frus- 
 trate what had been foretold. Yet worse was it with CEdipus 
 himself. A righteous king, a father of his people, raised to the 
 
THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 373 
 
 throne by his goodness and wisdom, fearing the gods, and perpet- 
 ually warned by oracles he religiously believed, yet without intend- 
 ing it, without knowing it, he had fallen into the double crime of 
 slaying his father and marrying his mother. For years all goes 
 well with his family and his realm. Children are born to him, 
 Thebes and its people prosper, his kingly name and power seem 
 secure. But by and by all the dire horrors that underlie this 
 seeming prosperity come up to the surface in portentous evils. 
 The wrath of the gods falls upon city and people in a visitation 
 by plague, and an oracle declares that the murderer of Laius must 
 be discovered and punished. The plague smites the cattle, blights 
 the fruits of the earth, sweeps away the first-born of women, all 
 Thebes is full of the dead and the dying. With the description 
 of scenes like these the play of " QEdipus Rex " opens. We see the 
 palace of the Theban king, in front the altar of Zeus and priests 
 and attendants about it in attitude of supplication. They come 
 to tell their sovereign their tale of woe, and beg his succor as one 
 who had once saved the city, and who they believed by his wis- 
 dom can save it again. CEdipus comes forth with the state of a 
 monarch, but with the tenderness of a father of his people. He 
 tells them that, smitten as they are, one and all, yet no one is so 
 smitten as himself. " Each his burden bears, his own and not 
 another's ; but my heart mourns for the state, for you, and for 
 my self y How sadly ominous of what, far worse than direst 
 plague, is soon to break upon him ! This sore visitation is the 
 first motive to the action, and as the action solemnly moves on the 
 complex web of the intrigue is gradually unraveled in the unfold- 
 ing and discovery of all the dread history of the ill-fated king. 
 And through all, it is the king who, without a misgiving of him- 
 self, and in zealous obedience to the oracle, presses forward all 
 diverse and yet converging lines of inquiry straight to the final 
 catastrophe. In the midst of the testimony, sometimes accordant, 
 sometimes contradictory, a single word of a witness strikes upon 
 him, even as thunder from a clear sky, startling the sudden re- 
 membrance of a fatal encounter he once had in self-defense, and 
 instantly with that a suspicion that himself was the murderer of 
 Laius. The queen, who sitting by has heard the testimony, has 
 already foreboded all with a woman's intuition, but she shrinks 
 from further inquiry ; the king, however, is pushed on by the very 
 horror of the suspicion, till the storm of the whole revelation 
 bursts upon his head. That single word has proved the last fatal 
 
374 THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 impulse to the tottering edifice of his prosperity, and in a moment 
 all is in ruin. There can scarcely be a greater contrast in drama 
 or in life itself than in the fortunes of CEdipus at the beginning 
 and the end of this tragedy. As in that opening scene he came 
 forth from his palace at the call of his suffering people, by whom 
 he was remembered as once the savior of themselves and their 
 children from the destroyer, " the blessing of him that was ready 
 to perish came upon him, the aged arose and stood up ; men gave 
 ear, and waited and kept silence at his counsel." But now how 
 fallen! "his welfare passed away as a cloud," and "the days of 
 his affliction upon him." He feels that " men must abhor him 
 and flee from him," "he must be their song, their by-word." And 
 his family, his friends, what woes he brings upon them ! He 
 weeps for his daughters as he " pictures in his mind the sad and 
 dreary life that awaits them at men's hands in years to come, the 
 friendly gathering, the solemn feasts, to which they may go, and 
 yet, for all the joy, they will have to come back in tears." Nay, 
 he will look upon them no more ; and in his distracting anguish 
 he plucks out his eyes, uttering the strange words, that " as in see- 
 ing they never saw the ills he did, so no more shall they know 
 those whom he had ever loved to know." It must be, he thinks, 
 that some dread power is crushing him, he must be hated by the 
 gods. He prays to be sent out of the land, " to be led away, of 
 all men most accursed, most hateful to the gods." And so there 
 goes forth from the scene the now discrowned king, a bowed and 
 bending form, friendless, homeless, outcast, a blind wanderer into 
 the world, " bearing a burden of countless ills none can bear save 
 himself ; " and as he goes the Chorus thus point their moral : — 
 
 " From hence the lesson learn ye, 
 To reckon no man happy till ye witness 
 The closing day ; until he pass the border 
 Which severs life from death unscathed by sorrow." ^ 
 
 But " the closing day " of CEdipus's life the poet lets us wit- 
 ness in his " Coloneus," the last of the plays of his own long life. 
 It is a poem of deftly woven scenes, in which we see the sufferer 
 chastened, ennobled by his sorrow, and at last well-nigh glorified 
 in his mysterious end. Since he was thrust forth from his throne 
 and from Thebes, he has wandered we know not where or how 
 long ; yet not quite friendless and alone, for by his side has wan- 
 dered his faithful daughter Antigone, like the after Cordelia of 
 1 CEdipus R.J Plumptre's translation, last lines. 
 
THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 375 
 
 Lear, the staff and comfort of his blind and helpless age. In 
 the opening of the poem they are nearing the plain of Colonus, 
 though all unknown to themselves. But the spot seems to fore- 
 bode peace to the tired wanderer, for Antigone tells him " it is a 
 holy spot, as one may clearly see ; full of laurel, olive, and vine, 
 and many a nightingale singing sweetly within it." But soon they 
 are told that they have encroached upon sacred ground. It is the 
 grove of the Dread Powers ; they must quit it at once. But that 
 word, instead of terrifying, reassures the mind of QEdipus, for he 
 recalls an oracular promise he has long kept in his heart, that 
 after many years of suffering he should be " a suppliant at the 
 shrine of dreaded gods, and then should near the goal of his woe- 
 worn life." Dronke, with his profound insight into the nature of 
 Sophocles, has called special attention to the religious sense which 
 the poet had of the communion of man with a Divine Power, 
 whenever there is in his soul a spirit of reverent fear and trust. 
 The gods hear even inaudible prayer, the inward desires of the 
 pious soul ; they hear and guide by an inward voice ; such a soul 
 listens and follows, often all unconscious, whither and to what it is 
 to be led, but by and by learning and acknowledging it by a grate- 
 ful experience. So it is here with CEdipus. It is the promises he 
 has heard and has cherished, which in their gradual fulfillment 
 make the precious burden of the poem. Those Dread Powers are 
 now for CEdipus the Eumenides, the gentle ones, and their grove, 
 where other mortals might not set their foot, is for him the chosen 
 sanctuary of rest and peace. Of this he is soon also outwardly 
 assured by Theseus, the Athenian king, who comes out to meet 
 him with all the gracious courtesy of a soul as kingly as his per- 
 son, and proffers him hospitality and protection. Indeed, a 
 noble figure has Sophocles, as an Athenian poet, here made to 
 pass before his countrymen in Theseus, their ancient king. In 
 sympathy with the sufferings of the wanderer, he tells him that 
 he, too, has struggled through many a risk and peril in a strange 
 land, and even now, though a king, can count no more than other 
 mortals on what the morrow may bring. He accepts the privilege 
 accorded him, as the sovereign of Athens, to receive CEdipus and 
 bury him in Attic soil. No one but himself is to know, and he 
 is to tell no one where CEdipus dies ; and for this he is assured 
 Athens will be blessed with " a boon greater than many shields." 
 And now all seems nearing the weary wanderer's earthly end ; 
 and all, too, is strangely significant in the manner of his passing 
 
376 THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 away. The hallowed spot at length found, there takes place a 
 last ceremony of libation and cleansing. Sophocles may have 
 been familiar with it as belonging to the ritual of the sacred 
 grove of his native deme ; he may have administered it himself 
 in the functions of the priestly office he held in his later years. 
 First, libations from the flowing stream, poured thrice, turning 
 to the east, and with a lifting up of holy hands. Then prayers 
 to be offered, that he may be received and saved as a suppliant. 
 With singular minuteness of detail is the prayer described: 
 "Pray both thyself, and some one in thy stead, in low voice 
 speaking, not in lengthened cry." One other expression should 
 be noted, in illustration of the words some one in thy stead. 
 When CEdipus was bidden to go and perform this last service he 
 said to Antigone and Ismene : — 
 
 " I may not go. Two evils press on me, 
 My failing strength and loss of power to see ; 
 Let one of you go on and do these things, 
 For one soul working in the strength of love. 
 Is mightier than ten thousand to atoneJ' ^ 
 
 Then must be said the parting words to his daughters : " And 
 when they had wept and sobbed, and their wailing was ended," 
 there came a silence. " Then a voice called aloud to him and 
 filled them all with fear." This he perceived to be the call of 
 God, and so bade Theseus to come and alone, as had been ap- 
 pointed. So only the two went together, and what then came to 
 pass Theseus only knew ; and he told it not. Only he was soon 
 seen " holding his hand to shade his eyes, as one to whom there 
 comes a vision dread, he may not bear to look upon." " And so," 
 as the " Messenger " in the poem reports it, " he did not leave the 
 world as worn with pain and sickness ; but his end, if any ever 
 was, was wonderful.^' 
 
 We may readily accept the prevailing view, that this poem 
 belongs to the close of Sophocles' life, so fitting are all its scenes 
 to the contemplation of the poet himself, then awaiting at an 
 advanced age the inevitable hour. And how meet it was for the 
 poet to lay the scenes of such a tragedy in Athens, his birthplace 
 and cherished home for nearly ninety years ; to celebrate with his 
 last Muse all that he had so loved from childhood of the scenery 
 
 ^ CEdipus at Colonus, 495-499 ; quoted and translated by Plumptre (p. 86), 
 who adds : " We may well say with Dronke (p. 87), that the thought stands 
 out * with no parallel to it in the literature of antiquity.' " 
 
THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF SOPHOCLES. 377 
 
 of his native Colonus, casting a new glory by his poetry over its 
 groves and waters, to which nature had already given such an 
 enduring beauty ; to recall and fix in the memory of his country- 
 men the heroic virtues of their revered Theseus, and to consecrate 
 their city anew and forever as the refuge of the oppressed, and 
 the sanctuary of religion. There is a pleasant story told both by 
 Plutarch ^ and by Cicero,^ which gives a special interest to this 
 poem and to the personal history of Sophocles. His sons, declar- 
 ing that their father was incapable, from imbecile age, of managing 
 his property, appealed to the court to have it taken out of his 
 hands. The poet in his defense simply read to his judges part of 
 this play, which he had just written, and asked whether that were 
 the work of a man in his dotage ; when he was at once acquitted 
 by all the votes, and went out of court amidst such applause as 
 he had been wont to win in the theatre. Nor was it strange, for 
 the passage he read was that finest and most musical of the choral 
 odes ^ of the Attic drama, in which are sung the beautiful groves 
 of Colonus. We are reminded of the words Plato says* of 
 Apollo's swans, " who, when they are near to die, having sung all 
 their life long, do then sing more sweetly than ever, rejoicing that 
 they are about to go away to the god, whose ministers they are." 
 And so in such a song, having in it and upon it that double grace 
 of art and religion, which had adorned all that he had ever 
 touched, we may think of Sophocles as breathing out his life 
 tranquilly, cheerfully, full of years, crowned with honors, be- 
 loved by all men, and " dear to the gods." 
 
 The Old Comedy of Athens hushed its voice of license at the 
 tidings of his death, and in the " Muses " of Phrynichus thus 
 honored his memory : — 
 
 " Blest, yea, thrice blest was Sophocles, who lived 
 Long years, — of subtle wit and prosperous life, 
 Who many noblest tragedies did frame, 
 And passed away at last without a pang." 
 
 "^ An seni sit gerenda respuhlica, 3. 
 
 2 De Senectute, c. 7. But SchoU, in his Life of Sophocles, p. 345, considers 
 the story apocryphal, and thinks also that the (Edipus Coloneus was written 
 many years before the poet's death. 
 
 8 (Edipus Coloneusy 668-719. 
 
 * Phcedo, p. 84. 
 
KOMAN WOMEN IN THE FIRST CENTURY OF 
 THE EMPIRE. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, FEBRUARY, 18T7. 
 
 It was a pithy word of the sturdy Cato Major: "We Ro- 
 mans, it is true, rule aU the world, but we ourselves are ruled by 
 our wives." The old Sabine meant by it no compliment to the 
 sex ; it was a rough sarcasm, by which he aimed to sting his fel- 
 low-citizens into resistance to the growing influence of the women 
 at a time when a very singular but quite Roman contest was go- 
 ing on in public life. It was a contest for what would be called 
 in modern phrase women's rights. The great question which then 
 agitated all Rome was the abolition of the sumptuous Oppian 
 law which had put grievous restrictions on female dress, and espe- 
 cially the wearing of purple and of ornaments in gold. Livy 
 presents the whole scene in one of his most highly pictured pages. 
 In the college of tribunes, two were in favor of the measure and 
 two against it. Of the consuls, Flaccus was wavering, but Cato 
 inexorable in opposition ; and the nobles and the people were also 
 well-nigh equally divided. Pending the public discussion, the 
 women abandoned all their usual avocations, and gave themselves 
 with the utmost zeal to all the arts of canvassing. They poured 
 forth into the streets en masse ; they besieged all the avenues to 
 the Forum, intercepting the citizen voters as they came down 
 to the assembly and plying them by argument and entreaty to 
 vote for the abolition of the odious law. They even invaded 
 the judicial dignity of the praetors, and set aside the consuls' 
 lictors, to force their way to these higher magistrates and implore 
 their good offices. As might have been expected, when at last 
 the house came to vote upon the bill, the women were trium- 
 phant. They overcame the opposition of the recusant tribunes, 
 they carried the suffrages of all the tribes, and, except the inex- 
 orable Cato, they conquered and ruled all the Roman world. 
 " Cuncta terrarum subacta, Prrnter atrocem animum Catonis.^^ 
 And so old Cato's sarcasm proved true, in spite of himself and 
 his characteristic ungallant speech ; and the Romans, rulers of the 
 
ROMAN WOMEN. 379 
 
 world, were ruled by their wives. I have begun our discussion with 
 this remark, and the particular scene to which it belongs, because 
 it illustrates a general fact in Roman social and national life. Far 
 more than any other ancient people, and hardly less than any 
 modern one, the Romans accorded to woman a high position, 
 and a commanding influence in the family, in society, and in all 
 the great interests of life. Some of the oldest and the proudest 
 Roman memories are linked to the fortunes of women and their 
 services to the country, whether in the fortitude with which they 
 endured evils or the courage with which they encountered dan- 
 gers. In the deadly fight which followed the rape of the Sabine 
 women, it was the women themselves who by their bold interven- 
 tion stopped the unnatural strife and reconciled the combatants, 
 and by their courageous conduct they won grateful honors from 
 Romulus, who called the thirty Curies after the name of their 
 leaders, and instituted the celebrated Matronalia, a national fes- 
 tival, which survived the fall both of the monarchy and of the 
 republic. In the great Volscian war, when Rome was at the 
 mercy of her victorious foe, Coriolanus, the leader and soul of 
 the war, could sternly send back embassy after embassy of the 
 distinguished men of the state who came to sue for peace, but he 
 broke down all humbled and subdued at the coming of a suppli- 
 ant company of Roman matrons, his mother and wife at their 
 head, and immediately withdrew his army and went himself into 
 voluntary exile. Livy tells us that the Roman men grudged not 
 the Roman women the praise due them for this victory of peace ; 
 in honor of their service a temple was built and dedicated to 
 Woman's Fortune on the very spot where the conquering Cori- 
 olanus was conquered by his mother's words. It was Roman vir- 
 gins who were alone counted worthy to keep the sacred fire ever 
 burning in the Temple of Yesta, the national hearthstone. It was 
 only Roman matrons to whom was intrusted the sacred symbol of 
 the worship of Cybele, the great mother of the gods. Two great 
 national revolutions, the overthrow of the monarchy and the 
 abolition of the decemvirate, grew out of the avenging of the in- 
 vaded honor of woman, and consecrated forever in history the 
 names of Lucretia and Virginia. The heroic Cloelia shared with 
 brave Horatius the honors of the war with Porsena, winning 
 recognition alike from friend and foe, a war-horse adorned with 
 splendid trappings from Porsena, and from the Romans the quite 
 unique honor of a statue of a woman on horseback, which was 
 
380 ROMAN WOMEN. 
 
 set up in the Sacred Way, and which stood there during all the 
 ages of the republic, down to the empire, to perpetuate the 
 memory of her heroism. Not to extend farther these illustrations 
 drawn from the earlier Roman times, let me sum up the truth 
 which they all set forth in the words of the younger Seneca, who 
 lived and wrote in the first half century of the empire, and so 
 may bring me nearer to my immediate theme. In his letter of 
 consolation to Marcia he says, " Who, indeed, can ever assert that 
 nature has dealt ill with woman in respect to intellectual endow- 
 ments, or has confined her virtues within any narrow limits ? In 
 what city is it that we ask such a question ? In that one, for- 
 sooth, where Lucretia and Brutus overthrew the monarchy ; free- 
 dom we owe indeed to Brutus, but Brutus himself we owe to Lu- 
 cretia ; in that city, too, where we have put Clcelia in respect to 
 courage on a level with men. There in the Sacred Way she sits 
 mounted high on that noble war-horse, and rebukes our effem- 
 inate youth who are borne by her on their soft-cushioned litters, 
 that they dare to show themselves thus in a city where women 
 have been honored with an equestrian statue." 
 
 During the subsequent ages of the republic and the early 
 period of the empire, the relative estimation in which women 
 were held was never impaired. On the contrary, their position in 
 respect to freedom and independence, and the means of gaining 
 and exerting influence, was constantly rising, while they severely 
 suffered at first from the growing laxity of social morality, and 
 at last came to have their full personal share in the degeneracy 
 and corruption of Roman society. In the contemporary Roman 
 writers we have sufficient material for a delineation of the edu- 
 cation, character, and influence of the women of this period. The 
 poetry of Martial and Ovid and of TibuUus, Propertius, and 
 Horace, and especially the Satires of Juvenal and the historical 
 pages of Tacitus furnish lights and the darker shades of the pic- 
 ture of the sex as a whole, as well as full portraits of individual 
 women who figured more prominently in the brilliant society of the 
 imperial capital. To begin with their earliest years, we discover, 
 from the glimpses opened to us by these writers, fond and anx- 
 ious fathers there were in Rome, and mothers yet fonder and 
 more anxious, who followed their children even in their infancy 
 with their warmest hopes and wishes, and carried them on their 
 hearts and their lips when they went to the temples of the gods. 
 The Roman girls, like all other children, were fondled with caress- 
 
ROMAN WOMEN. 381 
 
 ing names and words; they had their nursery playthings, their 
 New Year and birthday gifts, and were guarded with superstitious 
 care by charms and amulets against the evil eye and other forms 
 of sorcery. Their eager minds were fed by nurses and mothers 
 with stories of virtue and wisdom drawn from the heroic and 
 golden days of their country, and their childish fancy quickened 
 and entertained by excursions into the wonderland of myth and 
 fable, Greek as well as Roman. When the years of education 
 came, they were first of all carefully trained to domestic labors ; 
 especially they were taught to spin and weave ; for at that time, 
 also, it was common for articles of clothing for the family to be 
 wrought at home by the daughters under the direction of the mo- 
 ther. We are told that Augustus himself had his daughters and 
 granddaughters trained to these useful occupations, and that he 
 was wont to wear tunics and togas that were manufactured under 
 his own roof. Even women that laid no claim to matronly dignity, 
 like the Cynthia of Propertius and the Delia of TibuUus, formed 
 no exception to these honest household labors. It is curious to 
 see in a poem of TibuUus a picture of busy female industry in 
 the interior of this Delia's house that reminds us of Livy's de- 
 scription of the home of the virtuous Lucretia. The lover com- 
 forts himself in the pains of absence by fancying the scene of 
 the next meeting ; how Delia is at work at evening by lamplight 
 in the midst of her spinning maidens, an aged nurse the while 
 reading aloud a charming story, when the poet breaks in upon the 
 group, and Delia springs forth to meet him with bare feet and 
 hair all streaming over her neck and shoulders. And though a 
 later writer living in Claudius' reign complains that the women 
 are growing luxurious and lazy, that they neglect even their do- 
 mestic spinning, the complaint itself only proves what was still the 
 Eoman custom, though in some cases it was honored more in the 
 breach than in the observance. The education by books and 
 teaching was usually conducted at home for the girls of the higher 
 classes, while the people in general were wont to send their chil- 
 dren to the common school, which, in Martial's words, the school- 
 master kept with a rigid discipline, his " head hated alike by boys 
 and girls," ^' invisum pueris virginibusque ca'puV Horace com- 
 plains that the Roman boys were drilled all too much in arithme- 
 tic, and always with an eye to its sordid uses in making money ; 
 however that may have been, the chief subjects of instruction for 
 the girls were the masterpieces of Greek and Roman letters, espe- 
 
382 , ROMAN WOMEN. 
 
 cially the poets. Sometimes the mothers themselves read Homer 
 and Virgil to their daughters, but generally they had teachers who 
 came to the house and gave lessons in the study of these and other 
 poets. Special attention was also given to the instruction of girls 
 in music and dancing. The poet Statins describes his step-daugh- 
 ter as a model of a well-educated Roman maiden. He assures 
 her fond mother that soon her daughter will find a husband, at 
 least that she deserves the best one alike for her personal charms 
 and for her mental gifts and attainments ; whether she plays on the 
 lute, singing her father's songs from melodies of her own compos- 
 ing, or whether she moves gracefully in the mazes of the dance. 
 " Yet," he adds, " her talents and her musical skill are far sur- 
 passed by the virtues of her character." It was the custom for 
 girls from the noblest families, three times nine in number, to pre- 
 cede the processions on holy days, singing in chorus the sacred 
 hymns. Horace, in a charming stanza, bids those who were 
 maidens at the date of his secular hymn to remember by and by, 
 when wedded wives, how then they " sang song dear to gods, song 
 taught by him, — Horace, the poet." Another picture of such a 
 well-educated girl is given by the younger Pliny, in his eulogy of 
 the daughter of the Consul Fundanus, who died just before the day 
 appointed for her wedding. " She was not yet quite fourteen," 
 he says, " and yet she united a maiden's modesty and grace with 
 womanly dignity. How fondly she hung upon her father's neck ! 
 How she loved her attendants and her teachers, each according to 
 his rank ! How diligent, how intelligent, in her studies ! With 
 what skill she played upon musical instruments ! And with what 
 patience and composure she bore her last illness ! " 
 
 Very early the parents sought to secure the future fortune of 
 their daughters by a suitable marriage. The Roman girl reached 
 her majority in respect to marriage at twelve years of age, and it 
 may be said that, as a rule, Roman women were married between 
 the twelfth and the seventeenth year. The completed nineteenth 
 year was looked upon as the quite late limit for marriage. In re- 
 gard to men, it may be said that the usual age for marriage was 
 twenty-five, the age which was fixed by law for entering the quses- 
 torship, the first in time of the civil offices. The historian Tacitus 
 married Agricola's daughter at the age of twenty-four, and when 
 the bride was thirteen. Agricola himself was married at twenty- 
 three. Ovid makes it the burden of a line in his " Tristia," that 
 he had a wife given him when he was yet a boy, and he adds that 
 
ROMAN WOMEN. 383 
 
 she was " neither worthy nor useful " (" nee digna nee utilis "). 
 The young Marcellus was married at eighteen, and Julia, the em- 
 peror's daughter, whom he married, was fourteen. Many other 
 similar instances might be cited. Girls were often betrothed in 
 childhood, but Augustus decreed that none should be betrothed 
 earlier than at ten years of age. The betrothal was always a fes- 
 tive occasion, celebrated in the presence of a large company of the 
 family and friends of the parties. I have not space to dwell upon 
 the preparations for the marriage, or the details of the wedding 
 ceremony. It is worthy of note that the bride took leave of her 
 childhood by a formal consecration of her dolls and other toys to 
 the deities who had hitherto watched over her, and that on the 
 momentous day she was dressed and adorned for the long-expected 
 hour only by the hands of her mother. Already at early morn the 
 houses of both parties were filled with relations and friends, who 
 also assisted at the signing of the marriage contract. Both houses 
 glittered in festive adornments, and the atria were hung with gar- 
 lands and branches of laurel. At the home altars, and also in the 
 temples, libations and sacrifices were made, and wherever the mar- 
 riage procession went, the streets were crowded with spectators. 
 In olden time the bride was conducted to the house of her hus- 
 band on the rising of the evening star, and though this custom 
 had long since passed away, yet it was always a torch procession 
 which brought her to her new home, with the accompaniment of 
 lute and song. Arrived there and lifted over the threshold, she 
 was escorted to the triclinium^ where was celebrated the marriage 
 feast. The luxury which had come to prevail at these feasts had 
 brought about a sumptuous law of Augustus, which restricted the 
 outlay to one thousand sesterces, about forty dollars, but the small- 
 ness of this sum makes it well-nigh sure that this law, like all 
 Roman enactments of this class, was never observed. 
 
 At marriage the Roman woman passed at once from a condition 
 of dependence and subjection to one of unlimited freedom ; to her- 
 self, especially considering her extreme youth, it must have seemed 
 an emerging into a new world, a sudden opening and widening all 
 around her of the horizon of her life. Hitherto confined and in- 
 deed immured within her father's house, hardly passing beyond 
 the bounds- of the nursery and the schoolroom, under the strict 
 custody of parents and attendants and teachers, she suddenly 
 found herself in a domestic realm of her own, where she was an 
 acknowledged sovereign by the side of her husband. And outside 
 
384 ROMAN WOMEN. 
 
 of this, her own peculiar sphere, if she bSlonged to a family of 
 rank, she had now the entree into the great and brilliant, though 
 most perilous world of imperial Roman society. In her own home, 
 never confined, like the Greek woman, to any gynceceum or wo- 
 man's apartments, she had always the free range of the whole 
 house, as materfamilias and as domina^ presiding over the house- 
 hold, and sharing with her husband, on equal terms, all its honors 
 at the table, in the atrium^ and at all entertainments. Tacitus' 
 brief description of the conjugal relations of Agricola and his wife 
 is an illustration in real life of the ideal of a genuine Roman mar- 
 riage. " They lived together," he says, " in wonderful harmony, 
 by means of mutual affection, and by each in turn preferring the 
 other." " With this exception," he adds, with a tacit allusion to 
 the corruption of the times, " with this exception in favor of the 
 wife, that a good wife always deserves the greater praise in propor- 
 tion as a bad one incurs the more blame." The Roman religion con- 
 secrated Juno as the guardian divinity of the conjugal union, who, 
 as the spouse of Jove and the queen of Olympus, was worshiped 
 as the presiding genius of woman and the protectress of her mar- 
 ried life. I may venture here the reflection that, if we may credit 
 Homer's description of the many quite serious disturbances in the 
 Olympian household which grew out of the imperious will of 
 Jove, we may well believe that Juno was eminently qualified, by 
 personal sympathy, to be the protectress of her sex in the house- 
 holds of earth. Be that, however, as it may, Juno had always a 
 cherished shrine on the Palatine, and as the Roman husbands 
 were not all like Agricola, this shrine was an asylum, whither an 
 injured wife was wont to betake herself to make known her griev- 
 ances ; and she would not return to her home till her repentant 
 husband sought her out and brought her back, with promises of 
 reparation and amendment. It is a good testimony which Plu- 
 tarch bears to Cato Major, that with all his sternness he was a 
 dutiful and humane husband ; and he quotes a golden remark of 
 his, " that men who maltreated their wives, laid violent hands on 
 the choicest sanctuaries of earth ; and that for himself he honored 
 far more a good husband than a wise senator." In other than 
 personal relations the position of the Roman wife was a very in- 
 dependent one. The old law, which gave to the husband as his 
 own the dowry which his wife brought and all else which she had 
 possessed, was now no longer in force, and the existing law vested 
 in the woman the right to her property. It was now only the 
 
ROMAN WOMEN. 385 
 
 dowry that came into possession of the husband, nor was the right 
 to this an unlimited one ; the rest of her property the wife re- 
 tained in her own right as possession as well as in use. In point 
 of fact, however, there was in the marriages of this period a com- 
 mon use of the property of both parties, and the legal division 
 took place only in case of death or of divorce. There were some 
 results of these legal and actual relations in ancient Rome of a 
 quite human sort, which we find sufficiently illustrated in modern 
 times. It was not uncommon for men who had been unfortunate 
 in business, and were unable to pay their debts, to make over to 
 their wives such property as they had left, and so the creditors 
 could lay no claim to it. Sometimes, too, the wife chose to have 
 her property managed by a procurator, or an attorney, instead of 
 by her husband. Such an agent not unfrequently proved dishon- 
 est, and squandered the property confided to him, or, what was 
 far worse, became, in a bad sense, the wife's confidential friend. 
 One of Martial's most pointed epigrams turns upon a relation of 
 this kind. Let me give a version of it. " Who is that curled lit- 
 tle fellow, my good Marianus, who always keeps so close to your 
 wife, who has his arm about her chair, and seems to be whisper- 
 ing something soft in her ear ? Who is the fellow, pray ? " " Oh, 
 that is my wife's attorney," is the reply; "he manages her affairs." 
 "Ah, an attorney ; yes, that is plain enough, I see ; but whose at- 
 torney, that 's the question ; let me tell you now, he 's your attor- 
 ney, not your wife's ; and not her affairs he manages, but your 
 own, my blind friend." 
 
 As another result of such an independent position, it sometimes 
 happened that women who together with riches could boast of 
 a long line of noble ancestors usurped the exclusive control of 
 household affairs, and ruled their husbands as well as their chil- 
 dren and servants. The poets are full of illustrations of this 
 phase of Eoman life. It was found that women who carried the 
 purse managed also to get and keep the reins in the house. Juve- 
 nal tells us that in such a case the " lioc volo^ sic juheo " of the 
 wife was the ultimate reason of all things. Horace counts it a 
 blessed thing in the barbarism of the Scythians, that there " no 
 dowered wife rules the husband ; " and Martial, when asked why 
 he did not marry a rich wife, answered, " Because I don't want 
 to become the wife of my wife." 
 
 Outside of her own home the position of the Roman woman of 
 this time was also one of great freedom. Though in earlier times 
 
386 ROMAN WOMEN. 
 
 the domestic virtues of a Roman matron were of chief value, yet 
 even then she was never kept in seclusion. Even in the last age 
 of the republic, Nepos, while comparing Greek and Roman man- 
 ners, asks, " What Roman hesitates to take his wife with him to 
 a party ? or what Roman matron do we not see holding the first 
 place in her own home, and also mingling in general society ? " 
 But the far freer manners of the empire widened to the utmost 
 limits the old usages, and women were not only present with men 
 at banquets and general parties, but visited all places of public 
 amusement, as the circus, the theatre, and the amphitheatre. In- 
 troduced thus at once at marriage under such conditions as these 
 into the great world of Roman life, the Roman woman of rank 
 was exposed to a moral ordeal always most perilous, and often 
 fatal to personal character. Allurements and temptations beset 
 her every step, and disturbing and corrupting influences poured 
 in upon her from all sides. In her own house, which of itself 
 was a little world with its extended possessions, its legions of 
 slaves, its numerous train of clients and dependents, she was 
 greeted and acknowledged as domina and even regina, and there 
 her will was absolute law. In society she saw men paying court 
 to her, young and old, scholars and soldiers, the wealthy and 
 the high-born, all vying with one another for her favor. What- 
 ever claims to admiration she might have, whether beauty, or 
 grace of manners, or talents, or culture, were sure to win brilliant 
 recognition. In the circles in which she moved, vanity, love of 
 pleasure, ambition, might be fully gratified ; intrigues had fullest 
 scope of opportunity, passion the strongest excitements, coquetry 
 th6 utmost variety of subject. " Nothing," says the philosopher 
 Seneca, " was secure in such an ordeal ; whatever and whoever it 
 may be is in some way and at some moment assailed and carried." 
 Let us unfold this general view into some particular illustrations. 
 The institution of slavery had now at Rome, as always and every- 
 where, a most pernicious influence on the morality of domestic and 
 married life. The prevailing low estimate in which the common 
 house slaves were held as beings hardly belonging to the human 
 race was so demoralizing that young and gentle women could 
 come to treat them, without compunction, with wanton and even 
 brutal cruelty. If we are to give historical value to the pictures 
 drawn by Ovid and Martial and Juvenal of every-day dressing- 
 room scenes in Roman mansions, we must believe that the poor 
 female slaves were liable, even for the pettiest mistake or over- 
 
ROMAN WOMEN. 387 
 
 sight in the grand business of the toilette, not only to be petu- 
 lantly abused by the sharp finger-nails and violent hands of their 
 mistresses, but to be lashed to blood and even to death by pro- 
 fessional scourgers and executioners. Ovid in one place begs his 
 fair readers never in a fit of ill-humor to scratch the faces of their 
 slaves, or to stick the hair-pins into their neck and breast ; and * 
 in another he praises the clemency of Corinna, in that her hair- 
 dresser never went from her with arms all swollen and bloody 
 from the cruel pins. But such treatment was only gentle when 
 compared with the atrocities described by other writers. Hadrian 
 is said to have banished a woman who shockingly maltreated her 
 female slaves. It was the class to which this criminal belonged 
 which Juvenal describes in his Sixth Satire. From this Satire, 
 \^^hich is devoted to the condition and life of the women of his 
 time, I give one passage, in Gifford's words : — 
 
 " There are who hire a beadle by the year, 
 To lash their female slaves, who pleased to hear 
 The eternal thong, bid him lay on, while they 
 At perfect ease, the silk-man's stores survey, 
 Chat with their female gossips, or replace 
 The cracked enamel on their treacherous face. 
 No respite yet. They leisurely hum o'er 
 The countless items of the day before. 
 And bid him still lay on ; till faint with toil, 
 He drops the scourge, when with a rancorous smile, 
 * Begone,' they thunder in a horrid tone, 
 ' Now your accounts are settled, rogues, begone.' " 
 
 But slavery ministered to other passions no less ruinous to 
 morals through the male slaves who served in various ways in a 
 Roman house as cooks and waiters, as messengers, and as lecticarii 
 or chair-men. These were often in great request, and brought high 
 prices for their beauty and their intelligence and accomplishments. 
 Slaves and freedmen were also attached to a house more or less 
 directly as moriones or jesters, or as musicians, or as pantomime 
 players, or athletes and gladiators. Already in earlier times the 
 conjugal infidelity of men was often a consequence of slavery, 
 and now with the growing license in morals the women claimed 
 and used the right of retaliation upon their lords. 
 
 Other influences there were no less corrupting in Roman society. 
 Perhaps among them might be reckoned the reading of some of 
 the literature of the times ; and yet such productions as Ovid's 
 " Elegies " and " The Art of Loving," poems no less vicious in 
 
388 ROMAN WOMEN. 
 
 their complexion and tone than exquisite in their finish of num- 
 bers and diction, were rather symptoms than causes of the pre- 
 vailing corruption. More direct and more general were the evil 
 influences of the fine arts in painting and sculpture, in interior 
 decorations, and in trinkets and domestic utensils of all kinds. In 
 %one of his elegies Propertius bitterly complains of " the hand that 
 was the first to paint obscene pictures and put base sights in a 
 chaste home." " Such an one," he says, " corrupted the ingenu- 
 ous eyes of virgins, and would fain have them versed in his own 
 iniquity." The Museum at Naples and the unearthed Pompeii 
 from which it was filled are a full, yet extant commentary of the 
 poet's words. Two prolific sources of immoral influence Tacitus 
 mentions in a significant passage. In his description of the wo- 
 men of the rude Germans he says, with grave reflection upon his 
 own countrywomen, " Thus then they live, their virtue guarded, 
 corrupted by no allurements of theatres, no excitements of social 
 banquets." The passion for public shows was a marked charac- 
 teristic of the Roman women of this time. Thither they came, as 
 Ovid says in an often quoted passage, " to see and to be seen," 
 " like thick swarming bees, our women crowd the theatre, all in 
 their gayest attire ; " and he adds in a comprehensive word, " that 
 place has always had its losses of virtue ever since the first shows 
 of Romulus and the rape of the Sabine women." Propertius con- 
 gratulates a female acquaintance that she is going into the coun- 
 try where she will be away from the seductions of the theatre and 
 of the circus. At the latter place, since Augustus' time, women 
 might sit with men, while at the theatre and amphitheatre the 
 sexes were obliged to sit apart. Indeed, Augustus excluded wo- 
 men entirely from the performances of wrestlers, and so punctili- 
 ous was he on this head, that in the great games he exhibited on 
 his accession to the office of chief pontiff, he put off till the next 
 day the fight of a pair of combatants which the people called be- 
 fore, and made known his will by proclamation, that no woman 
 should appear till after this part of the show was over. Probably 
 the circus, with all the excitements of the races, furnished more 
 innocent holiday shows than the theatre and the amphitheatre. 
 The bloody fights and encounters with wild beasts were no less 
 fatal to gladiators and martyrs than they were deadening and 
 deadly to the sensibilities and humanities, especially of woman. 
 But the low comedies and broad farces of the stage which were 
 the passion of the masses, and the more artistic but far more licen- 
 
ROMAN WOMEN. 389 
 
 tious pantomime dances, the pet delicice of the higher classes, were 
 full of motive to sensual excitements and passions. The allure- 
 ments of convivial occasions Tacitus coupled with those of the 
 public spectacles ; for at these luxurious scenes similar influences 
 prevailed, as music and dance and theatricals were the usual 
 means of entertainment. Here, as Quintilian says, chaste ears 
 must needs listen to unchaste songs, and things shameful to speak 
 of are see/i, dances of Syrian or Andalusian girls, which rival in 
 voluptuous wantonness the worst pantomime performances of the 
 stage. All writers agree in their testimony to a general tendency 
 to immorality of women as of men, as the results of such causes 
 as these which were at work in Roman society. The pathetic 
 verses of Horace, the sad complaints of Propertius, and the bold 
 jests of Ovid, all agree with the debates in the senate and with 
 the legislation of Augustus in bearing witness to the contempt 
 and violation of marriage ties, and the prevalence of licentious 
 living. Horace, coming to the aid of Augustus, declares that the 
 age fruitful in crime first polluted wedlock and offspring and 
 home, and from this fountain flowed a stream of poison over the 
 whole country and people. Propertius asks, " Of what avail are 
 temples of Chastity if it is allowed any wife to be whatever she 
 may please ? " And Ovid joins in with his sneer, " Chaste only 
 are the women who have never been wooed, and quite too rustic 
 are the men and innocent of Roman usage who fret over an un- 
 faithful spouse." The younger Seneca declares, " that it has now 
 gone so far that women have husbands only to attract lovers ; that 
 they divide the day among their lovers, and the hours of the day 
 are not enough. An affair with only one lover our women con- 
 temptuously call marriage, and she who does not know that is 
 styled simple and old-fashioned." It is a bitter taunt of Tacitus 
 against Roman vice, when he says of the Germans, " there no one 
 laughs at vices, nor is it called the fashion of the age to corrupt 
 and to be corrupted." Martial's epigrammatic word, " no woman 
 in the whole city says No," and Juvenal's descriptions in his Sixth 
 Satire, exaggerated as they doubtless are, must yet have rested on 
 a basis of truth. The levity with which the marriage tie was 
 joined and the frequency and ease by which it was broken in 
 divorce are of themselves a testimony to the immorality of the 
 times. Seneca declares that there were women who reckoned 
 the years, not by the successive consuls, but by their successive 
 husbands ; and Juvenal savagely says that " many a woman gets 
 
390 ROMAN WOMEN. 
 
 divorced before the laurel branches have faded that decked her 
 wedding threshold." The Julian laws, though they were designed 
 to repress looseness of morals, yet by their practical working were 
 sometimes the direct causes of these divorces and swift succeeding 
 marriages. Martial has a strange epigram on this head : " Since 
 the Julian law," he says, " was reenacted, it is either less, or cer- 
 tainly not more, than thirty days, and here is Madame Telesina 
 just married to her tenth husband. Whoever," he adds, " mar- 
 ries so many times does not marry at all ; she is an adulteress by 
 law." Such words may be either bitter or jesting exaggerations, 
 but the reality must have been signally bad. A long list, indeed, 
 might be easily made of the many divorces known in history in 
 the lives of persons of the highest rank, in imperial families, and 
 in court life. Augustus himself was twice divorced, first from 
 Claudia, Antony's step-daughter, whom he put away on account 
 of a quarrel with his mother-in-law. He then married Scribonia, 
 who herself had been twice married to men of consular rank. On 
 divorcing her, he immediately married Livia, then the wife of Ti- 
 berius Nero, first compelling Tiberius to divorce her. The old 
 and the new husband and their common wife sat down together 
 at the marriage supper. Antony, too, divorced Octavia, the sister 
 of Augustus, on account of his passion for Cleopatra. The Em- 
 peror Claudius was twice divorced ; I may add that his third wife, 
 the notorious Valeria Messalina, he murdered, a fate she richly 
 deserved ; but in his turn he was himself poisoned to death by his 
 fourth wife, Agrippina, who was his niece. Nero divorced his 
 young and virtuous wife Octavia in order to marry the infamous 
 Poppaea ; this second wife he killed by his brutal treatment ; he 
 then proposed to marry Octavia, the daughter of Claudius and his 
 sister by adoption, and on her refusal he put her to death. It is 
 refreshing to turn from such records of imperial profligacy to the 
 instance preserved to us by Dion Cassius of the long and virtuous 
 and happy married life of the Consul Lucretius Vespillo. We 
 have it in Vespillo's own words, written on the decease of his wife : 
 " Seldom are there marriages of so long continuance, and dissolved, 
 not by divorce, but only by death ; for to us it was granted that 
 ours continued without reproach to the forty-first year." I have 
 just alluded to the profligate example in married life of the Em- 
 peror Augustus, though what I have mentioned does not cover the 
 half of the profligacy of this example. But it belongs more di- 
 rectly to this part of my subject to remark, that it was the emper- 
 
ROMAN WOMEN. 391 
 
 or's doom to have in his only daughter Julia, and in her daughter 
 of the same name, signal and notorious instances of the profligacy 
 of the women of the time, "Even-handed justice thus commending 
 to his own lips the ingredients of his poisoned chalice." His 
 daughter Julia had been educated with the utmost strictness, under 
 the constant supervision of her father, her studies pursued under 
 the best teachers, alternating with the labors of the loom and the 
 needle. At the age of fourteen she was married to her cousin, the 
 young Marcellus, whose early death, consecrated by the verse of 
 Virgil, was a keen disappointment to Augustus, and the lamenta- 
 tion of all Kome. At the age of sixteen she was married to the 
 celebrated Marcus Agrippa, who was, in order to this marriage, 
 obliged by the emperor to put away his wife Marcella, the niece 
 of the emperor ; and eleven years later, on the death of Agrippa, 
 to whom she bore two daughters and three sons, she was married 
 a third time, when twenty-seven, and now to Tiberius, Livia's eld- 
 est son, who was also obliged, for this purpose, to divorce his wife 
 Vipsania (who was the daughter of Agrippa by a former consort), 
 and to whom he was strongly attached. Doubtless these mar- 
 riages, entered into from no choice of her own, but only from con- 
 siderations of family and policy on the part of her father, were 
 most demoralizing to herself. Distinguished for her beauty and 
 her winning and elegant manners, and no less for her mental gifts 
 and attainments, and especially her quick and lively wit, skilled, 
 too, in the now Roman accomplishments of song and dance, — with 
 these brilliant personal and social qualities, enhancing her claims 
 of birth and rank as the daughter of the emperor and the wife of 
 the first soldier of the time, she rose at once, a bright and glitter- 
 ing figure, into that elevated sphere of Roman society where she 
 was destined to move and shine for a while, and then to fall into 
 darkness and ruin. Young and full of spirits, fond of pleasure 
 and excitement, proudly conscious of the power she could wield 
 by her position as well as by her personal attractions, she courted 
 the admiration she could not fail to excite, and surrounded ever 
 by Roman youth as dissolute in heart and life as they were noble 
 in birth and accomplished in manners, she lapsed soon, through 
 easy transitions of levities and indiscretions in speech and conduct, 
 into intrigues and vices, which became known to all Rome, and 
 were talked of by every idle tongue, though they escaped the ob- 
 servation of her indulgent father. Sometimes, it is true, he would 
 chide her love of display and her too free style of dress as well as 
 
392 ROMAN WOMEN. 
 
 manners in company, but she knew how to ply him with flattering 
 arts and win back his favor. It is related, when she once ap- 
 peared in his presence most brilliantly attired, he gave evident 
 signs of his displeasure, though he said not a word. The next 
 day she appeared in the most decorous habiliments of a grave Ro- 
 man matron, when he at once exclaimed, that now she was adorned 
 as became the daughter of Caesar. She archly replied : " To-day 
 I am dressed to please my father ; yesterday I thought to please 
 my husband." When once she was told how far her manners 
 were removed from the simplicity of her father's, she replied: 
 " Yes, he forgets that he is Caesar ; I can never even remember 
 that I am Caesar's daughter." But too soon, by a steep descent 
 in vice, she reached the lowest excesses; and these, if we may 
 credit such writers as Seneca and Suetonius, were no less open 
 than profligate, and indulged in with companions taken indiffer- 
 ently from the lowest and the highest orders in Rome. With 
 such guilty companions she traversed the streets by night, and 
 even the Forum and the rostra were the scenes of her orgies. 
 When at last the revelations of her depravity burst full upon her 
 father, he visited upon her the utmost severity of retribution. 
 Passing all bounds of discretion, as well as of self-respect, he sent 
 in a message to the senate, openly proclaiming the guilty conduct 
 of his daughter, and declaring against her an act of banishment 
 to a barren island off the coast of Campania. There for five years 
 she was doomed to live, her mother, the long ago divorced Scribo- 
 nia, alone sharing her exile, and she was scarcely allowed the ordi- 
 nary comforts of life. She was afterward removed to Rhegium, 
 but kept still in close confinement and distress. Her father's in- 
 dignation against her continued to the last day of his life, his last 
 will and testament denying her all share in his estate, and his un- 
 fortunate but guilty daughter died soon after himself of a wasting 
 consumption, hastened by grief and want. It was an aggravation 
 of the grief of Augustus in his last years, that his daughter's 
 daughter, the second Julia, inheriting the evil blood of her mother, 
 followed her with a perverse emulation in her downward path of 
 vicious indulgence, and came to a like disgraceful end. Her loose- 
 ness of life became at last such a scandal to the imperial house, 
 that she was banished by the emperor to a little island off the 
 coast of Apulia. Suetonius relates that Augustus, on any mention 
 of these two Julias, was wont to exclaim in the words of Homer, 
 " Would I had died without a wife or child." A yet more noto- 
 
ROMAN WOMEN. 393 
 
 riously bad name of this time is that of Agrippina the second, the 
 granddaughter of the first Julia, the evil thus reappearing in the 
 third generation. After the death of her second husband, whom 
 she was believed to have poisoned, she became notorious for her 
 scandalous amours, no less than for her intriguing ambition. For 
 one of her intrigues she was banished by the emperor. She was 
 afterward restored on the accession of her uncle, the Emperor 
 Claudius, over whom she soon gained, by her fascinations, so pow- 
 erful an influence that he put his wife to death and married her, 
 having the marriage with her, as his niece, legalized by a decree 
 of the senate. Five years later, after a series of horrid murders, 
 she got rid of the old emperor by poisoning him, through the aid 
 of the notorious Locusta. She thus brought to the throne her son 
 Nero, who had been adopted by Claudius to the prejudice of his 
 own son Britannicus. She at last became so odious even to Nero 
 by her crimes as well as her state intrigues that by his orders she 
 was murdered. But even a worse woman than this Agrippina, 
 and the last of this class which I will mention, was Valeria Messa- 
 lina, who was the immediate predecessor of Agrippina as the wife 
 of Claudius. Alike by the pen of history and of satire is her 
 character drawn in the darkest colors. Avaricious, cruel, impla- 
 cable, ambitious, her vicious nature culminated in vileness not to 
 be described. But this dark side of the picture of the times is 
 relieved by eminent examples of female virtue. These are found, 
 too, in the same elevated circles, and often in the same families as 
 those I have mentioned. Such was Agrippina the first, the sister 
 of the second Julia, and the daughter of the first Julia. She was 
 the wife of Germanicus, a name honored and loved by the Romans 
 alike for his eminent virtues, talents, and services, and in his sad 
 and premature death illustrating what Tacitus finely calls " the 
 brief and ill-starred loves of the Roman people." Agrippina was 
 in all respects worthy of her noble consort ; gifted in mind and 
 endowed in character with all the qualities of a Roman matron, a 
 spotless chastity, a love for her husband sincere and lasting, and 
 a sympathy with all his great designs, and a true mother's tender 
 and watchful love for her children. The picture drawn by Tacitus 
 of her reception by consuls, senate, and the whole Roman people 
 when she arrived at the gates of the city, accompanied by her chil- 
 dren, and bearing in her arms the urn of her husband's ashes, is 
 one of the most touching and impressive in all his "Annals ; " and 
 what fastens to it most of all the interest of every beholder is the 
 
394 ROMAN WOMEN. 
 
 reverent love conspicuous in every face in that gathered crowd for 
 the bereaved widow, mingled with profound regret for the death 
 of her brave and virtuous husband. Such examples, also, were 
 Antonia, the sister of Marcus Antonius, and Octavia, his wife, 
 women of whom the dissolute triumvir was never worthy. The 
 fortitude and dignified reserve with which Octavia bore her hus- 
 band's infidelities and her tender, undying grief for her lost Mar- 
 cellus are only single traits of her noble character. Her beauty 
 vied with her virtue in winning and securing to the end of her 
 unhappy life the admiration of the Roman people. Plutarch char- 
 acterizes her as " the marvel of the sex." She had worthy succes- 
 sors in her own family in her daughters, the Antonise, and in her 
 niece, also named Antonia, and in Octavia, her great-granddaugh- 
 ter, all of whom were admired in their time for their exalted char- 
 acter. To these names may be added those I have already alluded 
 to as belonging to an humbler, but no less noble class of Roman 
 women, Domitia Decidiana, the wife of Agricola, and their daugh- 
 ter, the wife of Tacitus ; and others doubtless there were of the 
 same class in society, who, if they had become known to fame by 
 like fortunes, would now shine with like lustre as virtuous orna- 
 ments of their sex. 
 
 I have hardly left myself sufficient time and space to illustrate 
 the influence exerted by the Roman women of this time in other 
 spheres of life. In the freedom and independence which was 
 allowed them there was a temptation to some of a coarser nature 
 to strive for distinctions uncongenial to their sex, and to engage 
 in occupations at war with any just conceptions of womanly char- 
 acter. Such as these were doubtless few, though they are men- 
 tioned by Juvenal, — women who were ambitious of excelling 
 in feats of strength, as gymnastics or gladiatorial fights, or spent 
 their nights in carousing, or who as litigious women took kindly 
 to prosecutions, and themselves prepared the indictments and argu- 
 ments. But the ambition of women of eminent abilities took a 
 higher and nobler flight ; they coveted and often gained immense 
 influence in politics and public life. The destinies of the Roman 
 world were not seldom determined by such women, many an em- 
 press ruling in the name of her consort, and others of less exalted 
 rank having an active and most important part in the affairs of 
 state. Augustus himself was often controlled in his measures by 
 Livia, who was called by her grandson Caligula " a Ulysses in 
 woman's dress." In her early youth she easily won Octavian by 
 
ROMAN WOMEN. 395 
 
 her beauty and her fascinating manners ; and it may be said 
 of her, that, unlike many other Roman women of such personal 
 charms, she never tried to win any one else ; but the influence 
 which she thus gained was afterward surpassed in duration and 
 power by that which she acquired over him when he had become 
 the Emperor Augustus, by her force of intellect, her knowledge of 
 human nature, and especially her perfect knowledge of her hus- 
 band's character. Her ambition was bent upon securing the suc- 
 cession to her son Tiberius, and so to her own family ; but she had 
 formidable obstacles to contend with in the preference of Augus- 
 tus for his own family in the persons of his sister's children and 
 later the children of his daughter Julia. She shrewdly laid her 
 plans, and though often disappointed, yet never lost sight of them, 
 and retaining through all vicissitudes an unbounded influence over 
 Augustus, she at last got rid of all rivals, and secured the succes- 
 sion to her son Tiberius. On the death of Augustus and the suc- 
 cession of Tiberius, she was adopted by the emperor's will into 
 the Julian Gens, and received by consequence the name of Julia 
 Augusta. For several years she was the real sovereign, though 
 acting in the name of Tiberius, and finally the senate were propos- 
 ing to confer upon her extraordinary honors ; her son, however, 
 was now roused to jealousy of his mother's position and influence, 
 and commanded her retirement from public affairs. Still to the 
 last she maintained her ascendency over Tiberius, and only the 
 feebleness of age brought to an end her practical sovereignty. 
 She died at the advanced age of eighty-six, after having had for 
 more than sixty years, as the wife of Tiberius Claudius, the im- 
 perial spouse of Augustus, and the mother of the Emperor Tibe- 
 rius, a larger share of actual power in the Roman government 
 than any other individual in the state. In carrying out her ambi- 
 tious plans, Li via had long a powerful rival in the emperor's 
 sister Octavia, who was also a woman of conspicuous ability in 
 Roman politics. She defeated Livia in her two successive efforts 
 for the promotion of Tiberius, the first time when she gained 
 Julia as the wife of her son Marcellus, and the second time after 
 Marcellus' death by inducing Augustus to marry ^he young widow 
 to Agrippa rather than to Tiberius. In the earlier years of her 
 wedded life, before Marcus Antonius was infatuated by the Egyp- 
 tian queen, she rendered important service to the state by averting 
 through her intervention the misunderstandings which constantly 
 were arising between Antonius and Octavius. The strong hold 
 
396 ROMAN WOMEN. 
 
 which she had upon the admiring and even fond love of the 
 Roman people she kept to the end of her life, and at her death 
 her memory was honored by a public funeral, the first instance in 
 Koman history of such a distinction conferred upon a woman. 
 The name of Maecenas is familiar to all, not only as a patron of 
 letters, but also as the most influential of the emperor's ministers. 
 In a long course of years he gave direction in many ways to the 
 affairs of the state, but one is here reminded again of the word 
 of Cato, for Maecenas was ever under the domination of his wife 
 Terentia hardly less in all his state policy than in his personal and 
 domestic affairs. She had also by her personal charms and vig- 
 orous mind a commanding influence over Augustus himself, whose 
 intimacy with her was a perpetual source of jealous irritation to 
 her fond husband. His married life was a constant succession of 
 quarrels and reconciliations, a fact which elicited Seneca's witty 
 remark, that Maecenas married a thousand times, but every time 
 the same woman. But of the Roman women who moved in the 
 higher circles of society, far more were interested in the pursuits 
 of literature, and especially of poetry, than in political affairs. 
 Doubtless many only affected a love of poetry, and aimed rather 
 to shine, it may be, as some of the satirical writers declare, by 
 superficial attainments than to gain real acquisitions in knowledge 
 and permanent literary tastes. Thus Ovid writes : " Poems are 
 praised, but yet great fortunes are sought ; if only he be rich, a 
 very barbarian pleases. Yet lettered girls there are, though a 
 quite select set ; the crowd are not lettered, but they would fdJn 
 seem so." Plutarch mentions that a philosophical work was dedi- 
 cated to Octavia, the sister of Augustus, on account of her interest 
 in learned studies ; and Macrobius mentions among the attractions 
 of the emperor's daughter Julia " a love of letters and much eru- 
 dition." The wife of the tragic poet Varius is described as a 
 woman of high cultivation. 
 
 It was the fortune of Ovid to have a daughter who inherited 
 her father's poetic gifts, and who elicited from him glad words of 
 praise for her own efforts in verse. From his distant and lonely 
 exile on the shores of the Euxine, whither he was banished by 
 the Emperor Augustus, — for what cause the world never knew, — 
 he wrote her a poetical epistle which has come down to us, a bright 
 gem that throws its rays of light over the prevailing darkness of 
 his "Tristia." He tells her of his fancy that the letter will find 
 her at home sitting with her sweet mother, or in the midst of her 
 
ROMAN WOMEN. 397 
 
 books and the Muses. For himself he is still living, and from his 
 ever-enduring misfortunes he, too, turns to the Muses and weaves 
 his sad thoughts and his fond memories of home and family into 
 elegiac verse. " Are you, too, my daughter, still clinging to our 
 common studies, and singing your songs, now unheard by your ab- 
 sent father ? For Nature gave you with chaste manners rare gifts 
 of genius. So long as the Fates allowed, you were wont to read 
 your poems to me, and I mine to you ; often was I your critic, 
 oftener your teacher. It may be that your father's fate as a poet 
 is deterring you from poetry. But fear not ; be of good courage, 
 go on, devote yourself to beautiful letters ; all else, personal beauty, 
 riches, fortune are fleeting and pass away ; nothing do we hold 
 that is not mortal save only the good things of heart and mind. 
 I even, torn from you, from home, from country, have yet my 
 genius for company. Even Caesar could have no power over that ; 
 and when all my sad days are gone, my poetic fame shall live." 
 Strange that a poet who could write such high thoughts could 
 have ever descended to the " Amores " and the " Ars Amandi " ! 
 In a letter of the younger Pliny his wife is described as a woman 
 of literary culture, and though not an author herself, yet inter- 
 ested in all her husband's professional pursuits. " My books," he 
 says, " she reads again and again, and learns them by heart. She 
 sits by when I lecture, and if I get any praises, she drinks them 
 in with eager ear. If I argue an important case in court, she 
 awaits the result with utmost tension of interest ; she has even 
 her couriers set at intervals from the court-house, to pass on to 
 her from minute to minute bulletins of the progress of the case, 
 the looks and apparent disposition of the jury, whether I am likely 
 to win the day." Even the satirical onslaught made by Juvenal 
 upon the all too learned women of the time furnishes evidence of 
 the interest taken by the sex in literary pursuits. The satirist 
 especially makes merry with the fondness of women for talking 
 in Greek. " What more offensive," he exclaims, " than for no 
 woman to think herself fine till she has made herself a Grecian ! 
 Everything forsooth in Greek ! fear, joy, anger, care, all the 
 inmost feelings of the soul, they must pour forth in Attic Greek ! 
 All this, however, we will condone to girls, but just think of a 
 Roman woman, eighty-six years old, still talking Greek ; hear her 
 prate forth her endearing words, ^w^ koI Kf/vxrj (my dear soul, my 
 dear life) ! Verily that is no seemly speech in an old woman ! " 
 The satirist especially is full of spleen at the idea of a woman 
 
398 ROMAN WOMEN. 
 
 taking to literary criticism at a dinner party. " No sooner does 
 she get to the table than the aesthetic talk begins ; she lauds Vir- 
 gil, and pardons him for letting Dido burn herself to death ; then 
 how she weighs Homer and Virgil together in the scales, the one 
 now up, and then the other kicking the beam ; the grammarians 
 give way before her, the rhetoricians are beaten, all the crowd is 
 mum, not a lawyer nor a crier will dare utter a sound, even no 
 other woman will peep, — there falls upon all such a mighty power 
 of words, you will say all the basins and bells of the town are 
 beaten together." Nor were there wanting Roman women who 
 busied themselves with pJiilosophical studies. Plutarch relates 
 of Cornelia, the wife of Pompey, that besides her beauty she had 
 other attractions, — culture in literature, in music, in geometry, — 
 also, that she was fond of philosophical pursuits, and at the same 
 time was free from the pedantry which sometimes characterized 
 women of such tendencies. It was doubtless the case that some 
 women of deeper natures were wont to seek and find solace when 
 in trouble in the lessons of sages and moralists. So Livia, when 
 afflicted by the death of her son Drusus, sought refuge in the 
 teachings of Stoic philosophy. Also at a later day the Empress 
 Domna Julia gave herself up to philosophy and scientific studies. 
 The Theophila who was praised by Martial for her poetry was 
 also versed in the tenets both of the Stoics and the Epicureans. 
 But without giving other illustrations of this topic, let me rather 
 use these as an easy transition to the last one to which I shall call 
 your attention, but which I can only touch and not fully treat, — 
 the powerful interest awakened in women by the religious move- 
 ments of the time. With all the immoral influences at work in Eo- 
 man society, and perhaps, indeed, through their agency, there was 
 a prodigious activity in the sphere of religion. Classical pagan- 
 ism was in its decay, and yet there was in it some lingering 
 vitality; with its own impaired strength now reinforced from 
 foreign sources, it seemed gathering itself for its conflict with the 
 new spiritual power just emerging from a despised corner of the 
 empire, before which it was destined erelong to fall. Rome was 
 tolerant of all religions, if only they had in them no political aims 
 or ends ; indeed, the imperial capital swarmed with religions ; the 
 Romans were, as Paul said of the Athenians, quite too religious. 
 But it was religions and not religion which now prevailed ; sys- 
 tems of rites and ceremonies, not the beliefs and faiths in 
 moral and religious truth. With the decline of the national 
 
ROMAN WOMEN. 399 
 
 worship foreign cults of all sorts poured into the city; by the 
 side of the temples of the Koman gods, now falling into con- 
 tempt, arose temples of the gods many and lords many of all the 
 world, and in them their priests went through with their super- 
 stitious and debasing rites in the presence of crowds of worship- 
 ers of both sexes. Thus superstition was avenging religion, as it 
 is always sure to avenge it, in the life of nations as well as of 
 individuals. It was the forms of worship from the East which 
 drew the most followers. Their pomp attracted the senses ; their 
 ceremonial imposed upon simplicity ; lively and susceptible minds 
 that were longing for somewhat on which to rest their veneration 
 fancied in the symbols and mysteries which abounded in these 
 forms of worship the sources of some higher revelation, the 
 medium of some mystical communication with divine beings. It 
 was to these religions and their rites that women were most at- 
 tracted, and especially to the flattering promises they held out 
 that by penances and expiations they might get purification from 
 conscious and present evil. The same moral weakness which had 
 induced the guilt of an immoral life now readily rested in the 
 credulous belief that some outward rites would insure atonement. 
 Not only from Juvenal and Tibullus and other poets, but also 
 from Plutarch, do we learn that the divinities of Eastern super- 
 stitions had in women their devoutest worshipers, and their priests 
 found them their blindest and most obedient devotees. Some- 
 times by priestly direction they would bathe thrice at early morn 
 in the Tiber, or go on their knees a certain prescribed distance, 
 scantily clad and trembling with cold and with superstitious fear. 
 Juvenal declares that by command of Isis they will go on a pil- 
 grimage to Egypt to bring home waters from the Nile to sprinkle 
 them in the temples at Rome. The Roman Juno now shared 
 with the Egyptian Isis the worship of women as the guardian 
 deity of the sex. Twice a day they would sing her choral songs 
 in the temples, be sprinkled with Nile water, and punctiliously 
 observe the fasts imposed by priests, or if they failed in the ser- 
 vice would propitiate Osiris with offerings of money or sacrifices. 
 The worship of Isis had been proscribed at Rome in earlier times 
 on account of the orgies with which her festivals were celebrated, 
 but the worship was never destroyed, and now though subject to 
 government inspection was firmly established. But not the tem- 
 ples of Isis or of other foreign divinities alone, the Roman tem- 
 ples, all temples to which women were wont to resort, fell into bad 
 
400 ROMAN WOMEN. 
 
 repute as places of vice. One passage in Ovid recommends as 
 convenient for immoral purposes not only theatres and temples, 
 but also the sabbath festivals of Jews. Such a mention of the 
 Jewish service, while it is one of the many proofs in Roman 
 writers of the general suspicion and dislike with which the Jews 
 were regarded in Rome, yet proves at the same time the presence 
 of Jews in the capital as a religious community and the influence 
 which they had gained in Roman thought and life. The Jews 
 had first appeared in Rome as early as the time of Pompey and 
 his Eastern campaign, when they were brought thither in con- 
 siderable numbers as captive slaves to decorate the conqueror's 
 triumph. These were afterward freed, and being permanently 
 established in the city formed the community mentioned in the 
 New Testament as the synagogue of the Libertines. Afterwards 
 frequent accessions were made to their numbers, chiefly owing to 
 the mercantile relations subsisting between Rome and the East. 
 Though always looked upon with aversion by the Romans, espe- 
 cially of the higher classes, and at different times the victims of 
 fierce persecution, yet at this early period of the empire they 
 continued to be a numerous and wealthy community. The pas- 
 sages in Horace and in Juvenal and Tacitus which make mention 
 of the faith and rites of the Jews, though always expressive of 
 hatred and contempt, are yet a testimony to the religious influence 
 exerted by them upon the Gentiles by which they were surrounded. 
 Seneca significantly remarks, in obvious allusion to the influence 
 of conquered Greece upon her conquerors, that the vanquished 
 Jews gave laws to their conquerors. There can be no doubt that 
 with their wonted proselyting zeal they gained converts among the 
 Romans, and especially from Roman women. These, however, 
 were doubtless from the humbler orders of society, as we may 
 gather from notices in the New Testament and in Christian as 
 well as in pagan writers. It is very strange, however, to find 
 Josephus claiming the cruel and licentious Empress Poppsea as a 
 Jewish proselyte ; he says, employing the usual Jewish word for 
 a Hebrew worshiper, that she was " a woman who feared God ; " 
 one might rather have expected her to be characterized by that 
 other Jewish and New Testament word, as " one who feared not 
 God nor regarded man." Let me also remark in closing this too 
 extended paper, that there is reason to believe that the first Chris- 
 tian church at Rome, though chiefly composed of converted Jews, 
 yet contained in it native Roman men and Roman women who had 
 
ROMAN WOMEN. 401 
 
 been baptized into the Christian faith. These, too, like the prose- 
 lytes to Judaism, were mostly from the poorer classes of the 
 people. It was the sneer of the pagan writers of a later time, 
 also, that the new faith gathered its converts only from the hum- 
 blest and the simplest, from slaves and freedmen, from women 
 and children, a statement certainly which finds confirmation in 
 the teachings of St. Paul. Yet one or two instances of the Chris- 
 tian conversion of Roman women of the higher classes seem to 
 be given in history. Of the fortunes of one of these, Pomponia 
 Graecina, we have mention in a passage in Tacitus which belongs 
 to the year 57, only a year before the date of St. Paul's Epistle 
 to the Romans. She was the wife of Aulus Plautius, the bravest 
 and most successful soldier general in Nero's reign. She was 
 accused by the emperor, as Tacitus says, as being " guilty of a 
 foreign superstition," the word elsewhere used by Tacitus for the 
 Christian heresy. The accusation was referred by Nero not to 
 any government tribunal, but to her husband and his kinsmen ; 
 and after the examination, whether through the leniency or the 
 ignorance of this domestic tribunal, she was suffered to escape 
 without punishment. Tacitus adds that she withdrew from all 
 society, and passed the rest of her life, which was prolonged 
 many years, in the reserve of profound retirement. A clearer 
 instance of a Christian convert in the person of a Roman woman 
 is Flavia Domitilla. She was the niece of the Emperor Domitian, 
 and the wife of Flavins Clemens, who was consul in the year 95. 
 It is related by Eusebius that both her husband and herself were 
 convicted of attachment to the new Christian faith, and were ban- 
 ished to the island of Pontia. These names thus briefly men- 
 tioned, as well as those mentioned by St. Paul in his writings, we 
 are readily disposed to accept as precursors of the many women 
 not only at Rome, but all over the world, who were erelong to 
 become partakers of that divine faith which, in the spread of its 
 beneficent sway, was to know no distinction of sex or race or 
 speech, but to become the universal faith of mankind. 
 
TACITUS. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, FEBRUARY 1, 1878, ALSO USED 
 AS A COLLEGE LECTURE. 
 
 Tacitus is a writer who needs to be studied, and patiently, too^ 
 in order to be understood and appreciated ; those also who study 
 him thus, get nearest to him, and find him at his best in their 
 most thoughtful moods, and rather, I. think, in later than in 
 earlier years of life. He is no easy or attractive writer, so sober 
 are many of his subjects, and such the noble reserve of his tone 
 and manner, native to him as a man and Roman, and fixed in his 
 very being by the straitening education of the times of oppression 
 in which he lived. Popular he has never been, in ancient or in 
 modern times, — a favorite rather of the few, even with classical 
 scholars ; but in every age and country he has been admired by 
 these as a writer of original powers of thought and observation 
 and expression, who blended with the love of country a true feeling 
 for humanity, and who, though living in times of abounding evil, 
 was ever loyal to truth and virtue. By his insight and guidance 
 his readers have learned to pierce through the shams of men and 
 things to their inner realities, and especially to discern clearly the 
 nature and workings of government, and the awful responsibilities 
 of absolute power, as illustrated in that Roman empire which, 
 with all the wickedness wrought out in it by some of its earliest 
 rulers, was yet made by an overruling Providence to bring good 
 out of evil, and to prepare the way for the establishment of the 
 Christian civilization of modern times. We are doubtless always 
 swayed in our studies by the prepossessions which we have for 
 a writer of long-established and traditional fame, but for myself 
 I have reached a renewed conviction that with Tacitus it is a fame 
 which was reared and yet rests upon a basis of intrinsic worth ; 
 and this, too, though I have all the while had especially in view 
 the severe ordeal to which he has been subjected as a trustworthy 
 authority by the searching historical criticism of our own day. 
 I shall endeavor, after mentioning the little that is known of the 
 personal history of Tacitus, to present a view of the scope and 
 
TACITUS. 403 
 
 contents of his two chief works, the " Histories " and the "Annals," 
 and then to touch and illustrate those commanding mental quali- 
 ties, and especially those intensely cherished political convictions, 
 everywhere impressed upon these works, which give him as a 
 writer such a marked personality among ancient historians. Taci- 
 tus was born, as we have probable evidence for believing, in the 
 year of our Lord 54, an ill-omened year for a future annalist of 
 the early Caesars first to see the light in Rome ; for that was the 
 year when Nero, then only a youth of seventeen, climbed the impe- 
 rial throne over the body of the just-murdered Claudius, poisoned 
 by Agrippina, the mother of Nero, and both the niece and the 
 wife of the murdered emperor. The boyhood and early youth of 
 Tacitus thus fell in the fourteen years of Nero's reign ; but from 
 our ignorance of his parentage and family we may not discern 
 in what favored Roman home he may have been nurtured and 
 guarded amid the rapidly passing scenes of crime and calamity 
 which make up the profligate force of that Neronian principate. 
 As a boy of ten years of age he may have witnessed the frightful 
 scenes of that destructive fire which in the year 64 visited Rome, 
 as if a swift retribution of the guilt of its prince and people ; and 
 the yet more frightful scenes of the sacrifice by Nero of the little 
 band, in the city, of innocent though hated Christians, — spectacles 
 of misery and wickedness then seen by his own eyes, and after- 
 wards set by his matured genius in historic picture for the won- 
 dering, bewildered gaze of the world. In respect to the education 
 of Tacitus, we learn from letters of his friend, the younger Pliny, 
 that in his youth he gave himself assiduously to poetry and letters, 
 and especially to rhetoric, and probably under the teaching of 
 Quintilian, the accomplished rhetorical professor of that age. We 
 know also, from a delightful passage of his own, his " Dialogue 
 on the Decline of Eloquence," that, like other well-bred Roman 
 youth, he attached himself to distinguished lawyers of the time, 
 watching them, as he says, and studiously listening to their argu- 
 ments in court and their instructions at their homes, that thus, by 
 catching from them, if he might, the secrets of their professional 
 success, he might himself be fitted to enter the arena of forensic 
 and of public life. The younger Pliny, who at an interval of sev- 
 eral years emulously followed him in these pursuits, speaks of him 
 as having already attained distinction as a forensic speaker when 
 he was himself just commencing his career. He began his public 
 life in the year 79, the last of Vespasian's reign, having filled in 
 
404 TACITUS. 
 
 that j^ear the office of quaestor. Under the patronage of Titus he 
 was promoted to the office of tribune in the year 81. The follow- 
 ing tyrannical reign of Domitian, though it was not unfriendly to 
 his political advancement, yet pressed with heavy weight upon him- 
 self and his family, as upon the entire generation of Roman states- 
 men and citizens to which he belonged. In the year 78 he had 
 married the daughter of Julius Agricola, the very year in which 
 Agricola entered upon his proconsular province of Britain. Re- 
 called from that province, where he had won a great military 
 fame, by the envious Domitian, he was now living in Rome in a 
 retirement which, marked though it was by studied moderation of 
 life and conduct, was ever shadowed and darkened by the deadly 
 jealousy of Domitian. Yet Tacitus himself was, during this reign, 
 advanced to the praetorship, and also admitted to the college of 
 the quindecemviral priesthood ; and, invested with this twofold 
 dignity, he presided at the secular games which were celebrated 
 by the emperor in the year 88. In 93 occurred Agricola's death, 
 a sore bereavement to Tacitus and his wife, and aggravated by 
 the remembrance that they were not by the bedside of their re- 
 vered father in his last moments, — that they had lost him, indeed, 
 four years before by reason of their so long absence from Rome. 
 But we know, from a memorable passage that never loses its 
 value by repetition, that, in their experience of the reign of terror 
 soon inaugurated by Domitian, they found satisfying solace in the 
 thought that he, in whose passing away they had mourned the 
 premature extinction of a great light of genius and virtue, had by 
 a fortunate opportunity of death escaped all that impending future, 
 — escaped that last dread time when, not at intervals but by one 
 continuous blow, the life-blood of the state was exhausted. But 
 those weary fifteen years of the Domitian reign at last sank below 
 the horizon, and in the rise of Nerva, and soon after of his adopted 
 successor Trajan, Tacitus greeted and afterwards commemorated 
 the dawn of a most happy age, which witnessed, as he records it in 
 a passage glowing with a venial enthusiasm, the union of elements 
 hitherto impossible of fellowship in the Roman state, — liberty 
 and imperial sovereignty. In the beginning of this period Tacitus 
 reached the height alike of his public and his forensic honors. In 
 the year 97 he gained the consulship ; and while holding that office 
 he delivered a funeral oration upon the distinguished Virginius, 
 his immediate predecessor, which Pliny pronounces, in an epistle 
 of exquisite grace, as a supreme honor alike to the deceased and 
 
TACITUS. 405 
 
 his eulogist, — the felicity of a life full of amplest honors crowned 
 by a eulogy from the most eloquent of orators (" supremus felici- 
 tati cumulus^ laudator eloguentissimus,^^ II. 1). In the year 100 
 he undertook the last legal cause in which, so far as we know, he 
 was ever engaged, appearing for the government in the prosecu- 
 tion of Marius Prisons for maladministration of the province of 
 Africa. Here, too, we are indebted to Pliny, who was also en- 
 gaged for the prosecution, for our knowledge of Tacitus' part in 
 the trial. This part he describes in a single significant sentence : 
 " Cornelius Tacitus replied most eloquently, and with that excel- 
 lence which is peculiar to his forensic style, with a noble dignity, 
 — 0-6/X1/W? " (II. 11). But the happy era of Nerva and Trajan 
 was chiefly happy for Tacitus in that it was the opening for him 
 of his career as a writer. Withdrawing from all public and pro- 
 fessional pursuits, he now gave himseK to this true vocation, and 
 devoted to it the remaining twenty years of his life. He was now 
 thus past forty years of age. With distinction he had gone 
 through the entire course of public office, and by the part he had 
 thus taken in the conduct of affairs had gained the character 
 and fame of a statesman of experience and wisdom and influence. 
 Like rich results he had won as a lawyer and advocate. He was 
 high in favor with the emperor and with the best Roman society. 
 His house was the favorite resort of all men in Rome who were stu- 
 dious of learning. And, most and best of all, he was enjoying, as 
 he gratefully says in the first chapter of his first historical work, 
 " the rare felicity of the times when one is allowed to think what- 
 ever he will, and to utter whatever he thinks " (" rara tempo- 
 rum felicitate uhi sentire quce velis^ et quce sentias dicere, licet,^^ 
 Hist. I. 1). What a glad ring in those exultant words of the 
 Rome of Nerva and Trajan, in contrast with the wail of sorrowful 
 remembrance of the Domitian times of oppression ! " A great les- 
 son, indeed, of patience have we given ; and as our fathers saw the 
 farthest limits of liberty, so we have seen the utmost bound of 
 bondage, robbed as we were by spies and informers of all inter- 
 course of speaking and hearing. Memory itself also had we lost, 
 were it as easy to forget as to be silent " (Agr. 2). Full and 
 fresh in Tacitus himseK was the memory of that humiliating lesson 
 of patience, as the " Agricola," in which it is told, was written but 
 little more than a year after those Domitian times had come to an 
 end. That was his first work, given to the Roman world in the 
 beginning of the year 98. In it he set forth as a biographer, for 
 
406 TACITUS. 
 
 admiring and emulous study, the life of a good man and a great 
 statesman and ruler, and in the spirit of a historian opened to his 
 readers broad views which that life suggested of Britain and the 
 Britons, and their conquest by the Romans and their government 
 under Roman rule, and also sketched with a few master strokes, 
 in such passages as that I have quoted, the character of Domitian 
 and of his reign. 
 
 The " Agricola " was followed in the same year by the " Ger- 
 mania," the historical monograph in which was embodied all that 
 was known, from the most authentic sources, of the manners and 
 institutions of the ancient Germans, that great people whom the 
 Romans, after a struggle now going on for more than two centuries 
 had been unable to subjugate, and who were destined in the end 
 to be themselves the victors, and yet in their turn, even as the Ro- 
 mans by the Greeks, to be conquered and subdued by the superior 
 civilization of the nation and empire they had conquered in arms. 
 These two works, however, together with the brilliant " Dialogue of 
 the Decline of Roman Eloquence," were only the minor produc- 
 tions of Tacitus^ they were only historical studies preparatory 
 for the subsequent greater works which doubtless already lay in 
 germ in the fruitful mind of their author. In the third chapter 
 of the " Agricola " he had mentioned the plan he then had in 
 mind to write the history of Domitian's reign, and also of the 
 reigns of Nerva and Trajan, the one designed, as he expressed it, 
 as a memorial of former servitude, and the other as a grateful tes- 
 timony to present blessings. On the publication, however, of the 
 " Histories," the earlier of his two extant works, it appeared that 
 his plan had undergone important changes. In the introduction he 
 proposes to survey the course of Roman affairs from the death 
 of Nero in 68 to the death of Domitian in 90, reserving for the 
 solace of his old age the more grateful task of fulfilling the other 
 part of his early promise. The " Annals," though published later, 
 had to do with the preceding period extending from the death of 
 Augustus, A. D. 14, to the close of Nero's reign. In one passage 
 of the work he makes incidental mention of his purpose to write by 
 and by, as an introduction to it, the history of the Augustan rule ; 
 but he seems not to have lived long enough to execute this pur- 
 pose, nor yet the intended labor of love of commemorating the pros- 
 perous reigns of his patrons Nerva and Trajan. Unfortunately, 
 indeed, we have not entire the works which he actually wrote ; 
 time, which has saved many productions which the world would 
 
TACITUS.» 407 
 
 have willingly let die, has dealt rudely with these which so well 
 deserved to live. The sixteen books of the " Annals " comprised 
 the reigns of four emperors, a period of fifty-four years ; there are 
 extant nine entire books (i., ii., iii., iv., vi., xii., xiii., xiv., xv.), and 
 parts of three others (v., xi.,xvi.), covering about forty years ; we 
 have nearly all of the twenty-three years of Tiberius ; but all of the 
 four years of Caligula, almost half of the thirteen years of Clau- 
 dius, and also the last two years of Nero, are lost. A still harder 
 fate has befallen the " Histories." Of these, which originally com- 
 prised fourteen books, and embraced a period of twenty-eight years, 
 including the reigns of all the Flavian Caesars, there remain only 
 the first four books and a part of the fifth. This work must have 
 been projected upon a larger canvas, and have been wrought with 
 greater fullness of detail in the execution than the " Annals," as 
 the extant portions cover only the brief period of civil war which 
 just preceded the beneficent reign of Vespasian. So ill has it thus 
 fared with this work of the historic art from the rude touch of 
 envious time ; even as with some painting of an old master, its 
 brighter colors and finer lines dimmed and utterly gone past the 
 deftest skill of the restorer, and only its darker shades left on the 
 faded canvas to tantalize the eyes of the beholder ! If only we had 
 the vanished lights of the figures of Vespasian and Titus to relieve 
 those scenes of strife and horror yet grouped there with such awful 
 distinctness about the persons of Otho and Vitellius ! This inciden- 
 tal notice describes the prevailing aspect of all that Tacitus wrote, 
 for such is the aspect presented by the times, with their dominant 
 persons and ideas, which it was his task to put upon historic rec- 
 ord. As the historian of the Julian and the Claudian Caesars, it 
 was his not merely to trace the workings of the imperial system 
 in Roman history, as it was inaugurated by Augustus, and admin- 
 istered, virtual despotism though it was, under the forms of the 
 republic. That was the good side of Roman absolute power, if, 
 indeed, a thing essentially bad can have a good side at all ; it was 
 the good side afterwards illustrated by Vespasian, and still later 
 by Trajan and by Marcus Aurelius. But Tacitus had to do with 
 the imperial system as a despotism established by Tiberius in form 
 as well as in substance, administered by him and his Claudian 
 successors as an hereditary despotism, and, what was far worse, 
 administered in a tyrannical spirit, and with frantic excesses 
 of lust and cruelty for which we can scarcely find parallels in the 
 annals of royalty in any age or nation. It was such a system as 
 
408 .TACITUS. 
 
 this, illustrated in the persons and acts of the emperors them- 
 selves, and the instruments of their tyranny and their vices, the 
 informers, the favorite freedmen, and often debased senators and 
 magistrates, and sometimes a whole servile senate, with all the 
 poisonous influence it diffused through all channels of public and 
 private life, which it devolved upon Tacitus to unfold and exhibit 
 in narrative, in picture, in moral lesson, in philosophical reflec- 
 tion, for the instruction and warning of his countrymen. No 
 reader was so well aware as the writer himself of the sober nature 
 of his historic task. In several passages he deprecates a com- 
 parison of his own labors with those of the historians of the com- 
 monwealth. He seems to have had Livy in mind, as he mentions 
 the inspiring themes of earlier writers, wars prosperously waged, 
 battles fought and won, and conquests achieved, or the animated 
 contests, within the walls of Rome, of consuls and tribunes, pa- 
 tricians and plebeians, all of them struggles, whether at home or 
 abroad, in peace or in war, of citizens of a free state, rising ever 
 through all alike to increasing power and fame. For himself he 
 has only a straitened and straitening task, and void of glory, pro- 
 ceedings to narrate, sad and tragical, a continuity of cruel orders, 
 faithless friendships, endless accusations and trials, the ruin of in- 
 nocent men, — all these ever recurring, even to satiety (Ann. IV. 
 33). Yet in the spirit of a true historian he tells his readers that 
 it will fall within his province to point to contemporary examples 
 of virtue and wisdom and patriotism worthy of the best days of any 
 state. Early in the " Annals " he declares (III. 55) : " Our ances- 
 tors have not excelled us in all things; our own age has produced 
 many excellencies worthy of all praise and imitation." And in 
 the very opening of the " Histories " he writes : "Yet not so barren 
 of virtues has been our own age as not to furnish good examples, — 
 mothers following their children into exile, and wives their hus- 
 bands ; relations and friends constant in adversity ; the fidelity of 
 slaves, resolute against the tortures of the rack ; illustrious men 
 unjustly reduced to the necessities of death, and their deaths 
 equal to the glorious deaths of the patriots of olden days." To 
 the execution of such a task Tacitus came not without compre- 
 hensive and assiduous historical studies. Yet it cannot be main- 
 tained, as is sometimes asserted by ardent admirers of Tacitus, 
 that he conducted these studies in the critical spirit and method 
 characteristic of the best modern historical works. Such a scien- 
 tific procedure in the composition of history is quite foreign to 
 
TACITUS. 409 
 
 the Roman mind. Cicero, indeed, carrying to a characteristic 
 extreme the ancient conception of writing history, pronounces it 
 as mostly an orator's task (" opus maxime oratorium^^^ De Legi- 
 bus, I. 2) ; and though his countrymen, who were historians by 
 profession, might not have avowed this conception in theory, yet 
 no one of them ever forgot that it was the born vocation of a 
 Roman to be an orator. The younger Pliny, in one of those in- 
 teresting letters from which I have already several times quoted, 
 expresses the idea of the critical function of the historian which 
 probably prevailed in his time, and was best realized by Tacitus. 
 Pliny had been urged by many friends to write history himself, 
 and, in the ardent love of letters and of literary fame which glows 
 in every sentence he has written, he was at once fired with the 
 ambition of the noble service, as he conceives it, of rescuing from 
 oblivion what deserves the immortality of letters, and, as he adds 
 with entire simplicity, of perpetuating one's own name in perpet- 
 uating the names of others (" aliorumque famam cum sua exten- 
 c?ere "). But, he asks. What times shall I take for my theme? 
 The old, and those written of already by other men? In that case 
 the results of investigation are ready at hand ; but the collation of 
 the different writers is a burdensome labor (" parata inquisitio, 
 sed onerosa collatio^^'' V. 8). Thus we see that, for an adequate 
 view of past events, the process of the writer's preparation con- 
 sisted, not in original research in the public archives or other ulti- 
 mate sources of knowledge, but in the sifting and comparing of 
 his predecessors in the same path of historical study. Such was 
 doubtless in the main the method of Tacitus. From this labor of 
 collation, however, burdensome as it was in the age of Pliny, and 
 repulsive as it seemed to his fastidious literary tastes, we may be 
 sure that the more manly and robust genius of Tacitus never 
 shrank. We know, from his own words in respect to matters on 
 which there was a conflict of authorities, that he subjected the tes- 
 timonies and views of the many writers he had before him to a 
 searching comparison, instituted and carried out by his sagacious 
 judgment, and, having reached independent conclusions, set upon 
 them in his pages the stamp of his own mind. He has been 
 charged by recent writers with giving space in his pages to un- 
 founded rumors, and weaving into his narrative untrustworthy 
 anecdotes for the sake of illustrating his views of persons and 
 events. It is curious to note how Mr. Merivale, the chief one of 
 these disparaging critics, never fails to give even more space to 
 
410 TACITUS. 
 
 such rumors than Tacitus himseK, and sets in his own attractive 
 pages all the anecdotes retouched and embellished by his own 
 skillful hand. We need not be careful to answer such charges 
 with a total denial. It is quite probable that, in his summing up 
 of a less clear case against such notorious criminals as Tiberius 
 and Nero, Tacitus may have weighted the evidence with circum- 
 stantial matter in the shape of incidents and rumors which would 
 be thrown out in a modern court of justice. But we must bear in 
 mind that in the dark days of those imperial criminals, when even 
 the most nefarious acts, covered and hushed up as they were by the 
 infamous creatures and tools of the palace, could not, as in the 
 freer Ciceronian time, be dragged out from the foul haunts where 
 they were done to the light of truth and justice. Sometimes a pre- 
 vailing popular rumor had in it an element of surest proof, and 
 gave the directest clue to a right judgment, and even to the dis- 
 covery of facts. A marked instance may be cited, out of a multi- 
 tude like it, in the state of the public mind after the sudden and 
 ambiguous death of Germanicus. It was the prevalent rumor, 
 amounting to belief, that he had been poisoned by Gnseus Piso, 
 and this, too, with the connivance of Tiberius, to whom Germani- 
 cus was an object of jealous dread and hate on account of his com- 
 manding merits, and his well-nigh idolatrous popularity with the 
 Romans. The rumor, however, especially in its bearings upon 
 the emperor, only circulated in private, and was uttered only with 
 bated breath ; the people indulged only in what Tacitus describes 
 in one of those brief, terse, untranslatable utterances of his, — only 
 in occulta vox et suspicax silentium (Ann. III. 11), — murmurs, 
 though in secret, against their prince, and a silence which to him 
 was eloquent in its suspicion against himself. The emperor, with 
 his wonted perspicacity, saw the whole situation, and with his 
 wonted dissimulation ordered a trial of the suspected Piso. The 
 trial began ; the evidence, though damning, seemed not legally con- 
 clusive of guilt ; but the odium visible on all men's faces, and rife 
 in the very air of all Rome, was too much for Piso. On the night 
 before the day on which he was to make his defense, he committed 
 suicide ; and suicide, to quote a modern American utterance and 
 a match for Tacitus in terseness — "suicide was confession." 
 
 Whatever errors or sins may be laid to the charge of Tacitus 
 as a writer, every unprejudiced reader must believe that he was 
 animated by those high moral aims which in various passages of 
 his works he has distinctly professed. As a biographer it was his 
 
TACITUS. 411 
 
 purpose to transmit the remembrance of a good character without 
 partiality and without ambition ; and he counted a studious imi- 
 tation of such a character as the only genuine admiration. He 
 declares it to be the chief office of the historian never to be silent 
 in the praise of virtue, and ever to denounce vice, that men may 
 be deterred from it by the infamy which it incurs. Knowing 
 well that he is to treat of great movements and issues personal to 
 the experience of some of his readers, fresh in the memory or 
 knowledge of all, on which men had been parted by honest differ- 
 ences of opinion on conduct or by party strifes and struggles, 
 which by the words of the historian might break out anew, — the 
 old fires of passion only hidden by treacherous ashes, — he is bent 
 upon reaching a true and impartial judgment, and of giving utter- 
 ance to it without fear or favor. In the opening of the " Annals " 
 he declares that he will enter fully into the transactions of the 
 reigns of Tiberius and his three immediate successors, free alike 
 from the resentment or the party zeal which have infected earlier 
 works ; and in that of the " Histories " where he is to write of Ves- 
 pasian and of Titus, and also of Domitian, he will write in the 
 spirit of loyalty to truth, and not of love or of hate. As we go 
 back from the study of his works to these noble words of promise, 
 we feel that for the most part he has nobly fulfilled them. In all 
 great issues where the interests of virtue, truth, justice, honor 
 are concerned, touching the relations of public and of social life, 
 of rulers and subjects, his vision is clear, his heart in the right 
 place, his affinities go straight to whatever is just and noble and 
 exalted ; his antipathies are intense against vice of every sort, 
 against all that is mean and low and debasing, especially what he 
 deems unworthy of a Roman, whether emperor, magistrate, or 
 citizen, at home in Rome or in the provinces, in peace or in war. 
 In the spirit of an old Roman patrician, he has an intense aver- 
 sion to all sins against the Roman state and country ; against the 
 national character and traditions ; against all that is extreme and 
 radical in opinion, or boisterous in word and degrading in con- 
 duct ; he hates, even as a Scipio, the low wiles of adulation and 
 servility in the people, and shares the indignation, though not the 
 action, of a Brutus, against the insolent bearing and selfish cruelty 
 of a tyrant. Yet it must be owned that if Tacitus had these better 
 qualities of the old Roman character and breeding, he was not 
 free from the prejudices of the Roman nation and of the Roman 
 nobility. The blood of slaves and foreigners is in his eyes of 
 
412 TACITUS. 
 
 quite inferior quality, and of little worth in comparison with that 
 of a Roman, especially of a Roman or imperial or patrician family. 
 He counts it a special aggravation of the licentiousness of the 
 younger Livia that she, the niece of Augustus and the wife of 
 Drusus the second, should defile her ancestry by an intrigue with 
 Sejanus, who was only of equestrian rank in a municipal town 
 (" municipali adultero^'' IV. 3) ; and in another (YI. 27) place he 
 mentions as a matter of public sorrow that Julia, the daughter 
 of Drusus and Livia, had married Rubellius Blandus, who was 
 nothing more than the grandson of a Roman knight from Tibur. 
 We wonder, too, as he speaks of the delight which the elder 
 Drusus took in the gladiatorial shows, how with a real zest he 
 could see the blood of the combatants flow, that the historian 
 should so gratuitously add, that it was, however, only worthless 
 blood (" quamquam vili sanguine,^^ I. 76). When in the reign of 
 Tiberius four thousand Jews were banished for their religion to 
 Sardinia, he quotes the words of the senate's decree as if agreeing 
 with the sentiment they expressed, that if the bad climate should 
 destroy them all, the loss would be of no account (" vile damnum,^* 
 II. 85). But yet more does Tacitus betray his Roman prejudices 
 in the account which he weaves into his " Histories " of the origin 
 of the Jews and of their institutions and character. It is a serious 
 imputation upon him, both as a writer and a man, that having 
 access, as he had, to the works of Josephus, and living in a city 
 where were thousands of Jews, some of whom certainly could have 
 given him just and intelligent views of their nation, he should 
 have mixed up in a serious historical disquisition, with much, 
 indeed, that is authentic and true of Jewish faith and doctrine, 
 yet so much more of fable and falsehood drawn from Greek and 
 Egyptian sources. There gleams out, however, from this chaos of 
 matter a bright ray of light when the historian describes, and in 
 his own best manner, the Jewish spiritual worship of One God, 
 " The Jews," he says, " have only a spiritual conception of God, 
 and of One God only. Profane, they say, are those who fashion 
 images of gods with perishable materials after a human likeness ; 
 the Deity is supreme and eternal, neither possible of imitation or 
 liable to change." (" Judcei mente sola urmmque numen intelle- 
 gunt. — Summum illud et ceternum^ neque imitabile neque intet^ 
 tnrumr Hist. Y. 5.) Tacitus wrote, also, better than he knew, 
 when he detailed the signs and wonders that attended the destruc- 
 tion of the temple, and told of the voice more than human that was 
 
TACITUS. 413 
 
 heard, when its gates were burst open, uttering the fearful words: 
 " the gods are forsaking the holy place ; " when, too, he recorded 
 the cherished Jewish prediction that " men were to go forth from 
 Judaea who should rule the world." In this passage of Tacitus 
 which, though relieved by these few pure touches of truth, is yet 
 so grossly erroneous in substance and written in such a tone of 
 disparagement, we see reflected the sentiments of contempt enter- 
 tained by the Komans, especially of the higher orders of society, 
 towards the Jews, as an alien race living in the city chiefly as 
 slaves or freedmen, given up to idle and superstitious rites, intol- 
 erant in religious faith and practice, and fit only for sedition and 
 treason. It seems to have been an element of the fearful destiny 
 which waited on the guilty rejection of their own promised Mes- 
 siah that they were thus set forth to the scorn of the world in 
 the pages of a great historian, writing in the cultivated language 
 of that nation which had just trodden them down in war, burned 
 up their temple, and razed their city to the ground. But the 
 language of calumny used by Tacitus of the Christians in his 
 narrative of the Neronian persecution to which I have already 
 alluded cannot be adequately explained on any theory of national 
 prejudice. In that passage, indeed, Tacitus expresses a just sense 
 of commiseration and horror, as well as of moral indignation, at 
 the fate of these victims of imperial fury, sacrificed, as he says, 
 not for their guilt, but to glut the ferocity of a single tyrant. 
 And yet he speaks of these Christians as detested for their " mis- 
 chievous superstition," for their " hatred to the human race," and 
 so as " guilty " and " deserving the extremest punishment of death." 
 No adequate explanation of such atrocious language has ever been 
 given, so far as I know, by any interpreter. The Christians then 
 in the city formed but an inconsiderable body of people, and had 
 attracted but little attention, and so far as known had been con- 
 sidered and treated as unobtrusive and inoffensive, and wholly 
 innocent of political disturbance or disaffection. It may be that 
 from the ignorance or misapprehension or indifference of the Ro- 
 mans they were confounded with the despised Jews, and so drew 
 upon themselves such a horrible though wholly undeserved fate. 
 But before we quite leave this topic, let us call to mind that Taci- 
 tus was not always swayed by national feeling in his historical 
 allusions to foreign nations. Let us recall the spirit of admira- 
 tion which pervades his views of the ancient Germans, though 
 they were the most formidable and persistent of the enemies of 
 
414 TACITUS. 
 
 Rome, the occasional contrasts he presents between the virtues 
 of those rude barbarians with the vices of a cultivated people, 
 drawn with so much force and point, that some critics, confound- 
 ing in the work the incidental with the essential, have judged the 
 whole to be an intended satire upon degenerate Roman manners. 
 And what a fine eulogy does he pronounce upon Arminius (Ann. 
 II. 88), the German Hermann, whose prowess and bravery they 
 had learned to know and respect to their cost in more than one 
 hard-fought battle. Though composed in Latin speech, it rings 
 out in tone like a German patriotic song. " The liberator of Ger- 
 many," he calls him, " who assailed Rome, not in her first begin- 
 nings, but in the very blossom of her imperial power ; beaten some- 
 times in battle, never conquered in war. Seven and thirty years of 
 life he completed ; twelve of military command. And among those 
 barbarous tribes his name is still celebrated in song, albeit un- 
 known in the annals of the Greeks, who admire only their own 
 heroes, nor yet famous enough among ourselves, all careless as we 
 are of the new, while extolling the old." Nor let us forget how in 
 the " Agricola " the sympathies of the writer go with the oppressed 
 Britons, and with what a sense of humanity he describes, in the 
 speech of the Caledonian chief, the desolating march of the 
 Roman arms : " Plunderers of the world, after lands have failed 
 them in their universal devastation, they scour the sea. To carry 
 off, to plunder, to butcher, that they call by false names, — em- 
 pire^ — and when they make a solitude they caU \t peace.'''' 
 
 But the prepossessions of Tacitus for the old regime of the best 
 days of the commonwealth it is easy to honor and admire ; though 
 these, in the eyes of recent advocates or apologists of the imperial 
 sovereignty, are prejudices which give him a partisan spirit and 
 bias as the annalist of the Caesars. Undoubtedly he was a Roman 
 republican at heart and in theory, attached by sympathy and con- 
 viction as a thinker and student, as well as a patriot, to the consti- 
 tution of the consular government. From the days of the imperial 
 system in which he lived, when all the interests of society and 
 humanity hung upon the will of one man, who might, to be sure, 
 be a Trajan, but might also be a Domitian or a Nero, he looked 
 back with regret to those securer, better times when, with a gov- 
 ernment resting upon laws controlled and ever held by well-bal- 
 anced forces of patricians and plebeians, of senate and people, the 
 power tended naturally and straight to the best citizens, the optimi 
 — the apto-Toi in the true sense of these words, and by them was 
 
TACITUS. 415 
 
 exercised for the common good. Such a look of noble regret we 
 seem to see on the very face of the historian, when, at the opening 
 of the "Annals," after speaking of the first generation of the em- 
 pire, now nearing old age under one man^s rule, that Roman state 
 with all its precious interest, as if a private possession, he sadly 
 exclaims, " how few even of the old men were left who saw with 
 their own eyes the commoTi-wealth ? " And directly he adds : " in 
 such an inversion of the state, not a vestige anywhere remained of 
 the old, uncorrupt usage of our fathers, but equality now utterly 
 gone, the eyes of all looked only to the orders of the one sover- 
 eign." (Ann. I. 4.) A modern reader must be a worshiper of 
 absolute power who is not touched by such a genuine utterance 
 of a true Roman. Let me cite another passage which comes in 
 to relieve a long series of imperial inversions of Roman life, and 
 revives for a moment the glories of the republic, and at the same 
 time illustrates at once the sentiments of the historian and his 
 manner as a writer. It is the record of the obsequies of Junia 
 TertuUia, solemnized in the year 22, the eighth of Tiberius' reign. 
 This Junia was the sister of Marcus Brutus, and the wife of Cas- 
 sius, and she had lingered at an advanced age into the sixty-fourth 
 year since the battle of Philippi. She was the last surviving wit- 
 ness in imperial Rome of the glories of the ancient republic; 
 and it was a stirring spectacle to all Rome as she was carried in 
 solemn procession to the family tomb of her illustrious house. 
 Before her remains were borne the images of twenty of the no- 
 blest Roman families; but the clemency of the emperor, which 
 permitted all other solemn honors of the occasion, suffered not 
 the busts of her illustrious husband and brother, the republican 
 chiefs at Philippi, to be seen in the funeral procession; but the 
 historian furnishes his pictorial records with the words, quite his 
 own, that "Brutus and Cassius shone forth all the more from 
 the very absence of their images (" Sed prcefulgehant Cassius 
 atque Brutus eo ipso quod effigies eorum non visehanturJ* A. HL 
 96.) These republican convictions of Tacitus, often expressed in 
 his history, were never absent from it in spirit, as they never 
 were from his own mind and heart. He wrote it all by the light of 
 republican and senatorial traditions. Especially did he love and 
 cherish, and most justly, too, the memories of the Roman senate; 
 he venerated its august character, and the elevated and elevating 
 influence that had issued from it through the period of the com- 
 monwealth ; he looked back to it as the home and safeguard of 
 
416 TACITUS. * 
 
 Roman freedom, the source of Roman wisdom and virtue and pa- 
 triotism. These sentiments he shared, too, with the wisest and 
 best of his countrymen of all periods, those of the empire not ex- 
 cepted. Such were the pronounced sentiments of the elder Drusus 
 in the reign and within the household of Augustus, and they were 
 never visited by the emperor with any animadversion. Such were 
 the sentiments of the renowned Germanicus. 
 
 The memories of the republic lived, indeed, as a power far into 
 the empire, and long after its own life was extinct. The senate, 
 " the last shadow of the free state," had life enough in it even 
 under the empire to keep the respect of the good emperors of both 
 the Julian and the Flavian line, and to win from the worst ones, 
 as especially Domitian, the honorable testimony of their hate. We 
 find a signal instance of the long lingering influence of these re- 
 publican memories in the choice made by Galba, in his brief and 
 hapless reign, of his successor to the throne by adoption. Galba, 
 who illustrated in his character the finest class of Roman citizens, 
 made choice, on distinctly republican principles, of the Licinian 
 Piso, as the worthiest citizen, by personal merit, to fill the imperial 
 seat. " The best man of the commonwealth," — as Mr. Merivale 
 admirably puts it, — " thus choosing the next best for his son, his 
 associate, and his successor." The adoption was sanctioned by 
 the senate, by the army, and by the populace ; and but for the vil- 
 lainy of Otho, and the sudden desertion of the army, Rome had 
 seen the strange phenomenon of Piso invested with the purple as 
 a repuhlican emperor ! The speeches of Galba and Piso to the 
 senate and army, as they are recorded by Tacitus, clearly show us 
 that something of the vitality of the old Roman life had survived 
 the deadly malaria of the long Claudian tyranny. But yet our 
 historian was no visionary or impracticable republican ; he was ' 
 not the man, like the tender Germanicus, to dream of the restora- 
 tion of the commonwealth in the broad daylight of imperial rule, 
 nor like Thrasea to flaunt the worn republican banner in the face 
 of a Nero, and in Nero's reign to deck himself and his guests with 
 memorial garlands on the birthdays of Brutus and Cassius. Only 
 once after his description of that ill-fated Pisonian experiment, 
 and just before the recital of the battle of Bedriacum, he mentions 
 the transient purpose of the two exhausted armies, the Othonian 
 and the Vitellian, to defer to the senate the choice of a suitable 
 person for emperor, with the expectation that Suetonius Paulinus, 
 then the oldest of the consulars, and the greatest captain of the 
 
TACITUS. 417 
 
 day, would be the man of their choice. But he adds his belief 
 that neither Suetonius, in such a corrupt time, could have hoped 
 for the requisite moderation on the part of the people, nor could 
 the army suffer the elevation of any chief, unless he was first cor- 
 rupted himself, and fast bound to them by their services to him. 
 In a passage which immediately follows (Hist. II. 37), united 
 to two kindred passages in the "Annals" (I. 1; III. 25-28), the 
 historian presents in a few pregnant sentences his thoughtful ex- 
 position of that view of the necessity of the empire, and its long 
 working causes, which has been often expanded into chapters and 
 whole books by modern writers. The tendency to monarchy in 
 Roman affairs he traces back to its beginning in the civil contest 
 between Marius and Sulla, who both aimed at supreme power. 
 Pompey's aim was as surely the same though' more hidden, and 
 after Pompey nothing but the principate was thought of by chiefs 
 and their factions (" nunquam postea nisi de principatu qucesi- 
 tum;' Hist. II. 38). 
 
 The monarchical tendency was further developed in the two tri- 
 umvirates ; and while in the former the power of Pompey and of 
 Crassus was soon merged in Julius Caesar, and in the latter that 
 of Antony, and of Lepidus in Octavian, yet all these chiefs indi- 
 vidually aimed at that supremacy which the first Caesar attained, 
 and the second finally established in the empire. I may stay here 
 a moment to remark that Mr. Merivale most unfairly accuses 
 Tacitus of " unfairness " in attempting, as he says, to defend the 
 *' corrupt oligarchy of the senate under Pompey " as " the noblest 
 and strongest of governments." So far from this, Tacitus dis- 
 tinctly states that Pompey's rule was one of abounding corrup- 
 tion, though it abounded in laws (" corruptissima republica plu- 
 rimoe leges^^ Ann. III. 27). Pompey, he adds, "chosen to correct 
 abuses, was more grievous in his remedies then than the abuses 
 had been ; and at once author and subverter of laws, he finally 
 lost by arms what by arms he had won." Indeed, it was in the 
 misrule of the oligarchy of the last two generations of the repub- 
 lic that Tacitus finds one of the chief causes for the inevitable 
 necessity of that imperial polity to which all the great move- 
 ments in those generations were manifestly tending. A second 
 and a kindred one he found in the degeneracy and moral impo- 
 tence of the people, and the third in the enormous growth of the 
 Koman dominion, for the rule of which the republican consti- 
 tution was now inadequate. That strong and great government, 
 
418 TACITUS. 
 
 which under the old Latin word, senatus populusque Homanus, 
 had gradually advanced Eome to the supremacy of Italy, and 
 then in succession of all the countries and nations around the 
 Mediterranean, had now in either half of the grand unit which it 
 represented become incapable of exercising its high functions. 
 The successive senatorial chiefs had by the fierce strifes of their 
 faction deluged with blood the capital of the empire, and spread 
 the desolation of war throughout the provinces over the fairest 
 regions of the earth ; and these provinces, too, had been plundered 
 and oppressed by the misgovernment of extortionate proconsuls 
 and propraetors. And the people, who had once by their free votes 
 conferred the fasces of civil office and the insignia of military 
 command, had learned to sell themselves to the highest bidder, and 
 to follow in the train of any great chief who would find them in 
 bread and amusements. Then, too, apart from these abuses the 
 Koman municipal system, which worked so well for the city itself, 
 and by the extension of the franchise was not wholly inadequate to 
 the rule of Italy, quite broke down when it was tried upon an 
 empire which reached from the Alps to the farthest Africa and from 
 the ocean to the Euphrates. This truth was pithily told by Taci- 
 tus in the words which he puts into the mouth of Galba on the 
 choice of Piso as his successor. " If the immense body of the em- 
 pire could stand firm and be held in equipoise without a sovereign 
 ruler, then were it fitting that from me a republic should take its 
 beginning ; but to such a necessity did we long ago come, that 
 now neither my old age can bestow a greater gift upon the Roman 
 people than a good successor, nor your youth than a good prince." 
 (Hist. I. 16.) That necessity of the long ago, of which Galba then 
 spoke, was the necessity of the empire as Tacitus states it when 
 writing of the Roman affairs of just a century before ; when the 
 battle of Actium had at last put an end to the long course of de- 
 structive civil war, and it was for the interest of peace that all 
 power should be centred in one man, and so the exhausted Roman 
 world fell easily into the hands of the favorite Octavian, who now, 
 the last of his antagonists gone, quietly slid into an imperial throne 
 on the very last step to which his illustrious uncle had met his sud- 
 den, violent death. The events of a century had left this neces- 
 sity unchanged ; and Tacitus in his times accepted it as unchange- 
 able, and knew how to submit to it with resignation, and so to 
 write of it and all its momentous results as to be at once a loyal 
 subject and good citizen, as well as a lover of his country. It was 
 
TACITUS. 419 
 
 at the end of the Augustan reign that he began his " Annals." 
 Singularly and even pettily unjust to his fame are certain modern 
 writers who charge that he began with Tiberius and not with Au- 
 gustus, because as a Roman republican and aristocrat he was un- 
 willing to record on the page of history the manifold blessings of 
 peace and prosperity which the empire in its opening brilliant 
 era conferred on the whole world. But in fact Tacitus, in one or 
 two short incidental passages in each of his works, has himself fur- 
 nished these writers with the brief on which they have argued the 
 case for the empire. There he mentions that the empire brought 
 in at last the longed for peace and order ; and especially that the 
 provinces hailed it as giving them one and a common master in- 
 stead of the many masters of the senate and people of a distant 
 city. And at the beginning of his " Annals " he says himself 
 why he does not tell the story of Augustus' reign : he says that it 
 has been already told by men of the fitting genius, who lived in 
 that reign, probably having the work of Livy in his mind, and 
 intending to begin where his great predecessor had ended his task. 
 But if he had lived to write himself of the Augustan times, as 
 later in his career he purposed to do, he would doubtless have 
 illustrated what he has now only mentioned, how that welcome 
 peace — the ever vaunted Pax Homana — was nothing but the 
 exhaustion of wars begun and waged by chiefs ambitious of abso- 
 lute power, and came only when there were no chiefs left to wage 
 war, none with whom to wage it ; and that the fortunate Augus- 
 tus owed his imperial elevation to his own solitude and the lassi- 
 tude of the world. He would also have shown that the prosper- 
 ous Augustan principate chiefly owed its prosperity to the fact 
 that the politic Augustus exercised his imperial power through 
 the senate and the magistrates of the now bygone republic. But 
 in all that he wrote of the imperial government, as established by 
 the second Csesar, and administered by his successors, he taught 
 the great truth that its practical working for good or evil de- 
 pended upon the character and will of the reigning prince, and 
 that its true mission was to unite the possession of absolute 
 power with a liberal and beneficent sway. This idea was clearly 
 expressed in that wise speech of Galba, when he said to his 
 adopted successor : " You are to reign over men, who can bear 
 neither entire liberty nor entire servitude." It was realized by 
 Trajan as Tacitus so enthusiastically said in a passage I have 
 already quoted. It was the lot of the historian to write chiefly 
 
420 TACITUS. 
 
 of reigns during which the emperors were men of despotic wills, 
 and who ruled with despotic tyranny. While he speaks with 
 abhorrence of the vices and crimes of such princes, he condemns 
 alike the cringing servility and the contumacious resistance of their 
 subjects. With sadness he describes the subservience of senators 
 and nobles to Tiberius as not only humiliating to themselves, but 
 drawing upon them the contemptuous scorn and disgust of the em- 
 peror, who was wont to exclaim as he left the senate, " Oh, men, 
 fit only for bondage " (Ann. III. 65}. On the other hand, he loves 
 to contemplate the examples of men like Agricola and Arruntius 
 and PoUio, who, by the union of dignity and moderation with 
 loyalty, knew how to live as good men under bad princes. 
 
 I have had in mind in preparing this paper rather to present 
 the aims and views of Tacitus as an observer and judge of the 
 times of which he wrote, than his gifts and merits as a writer ; 
 but these, though so well known and familiar, I must not leave 
 untouched. In reading his works you are ever profoundly con- 
 scious of the presence and influence of his genius for writing his- 
 tory, and especially for that imaginative treatment of past and dis- 
 tant events which makes it historic painting ; and you are disposed 
 to yield yourself to it a willing captive, without stopping to study 
 the secret of its being and its power. But by reflection you are 
 aware of the rare union in him of the powers of thought and rea- 
 soning which belong to a philosophic mind with the gifts of creation 
 and vivid description which enter so largely into the rich endowment 
 of a poetic nature. His narrative is not only intelligent and clear 
 and strong; not only informed and enriched with thought and 
 wisdom, but also is picturesque and affecting. As you pass with 
 him through aU that vast moving world of the Rome of the Cae- 
 sars, you have one at your side who has mastered every new situ- 
 ation, and is ready with mind and eye and tongue to help you 
 master it yourself. By study and insight he has come to behold 
 so distinctly the persons and events of which he writes, in their 
 appearance and in their essential character, and the influences 
 which have made and shaped them, and he reproduces them so 
 vividly, and sets them before you sometimes in pictures, as so often 
 in the " Annals," sometimes in dramatic scenes, as in the narra- 
 tive of those tragic horrors of the civil war of Otho and Vitellius, 
 that all seems to be present to you as living reality. As you 
 read that narrative of the battle of Bedriacum, you seem to be 
 gazing yourself on the bloody field, to see the serried masses of 
 
TACITUS. 421 
 
 troops — Romans all on both sides — set against each in the 
 shock of murderous array by their chiefs, through the lust of 
 power, brothers slaughtering brothers, and even sons their fathers. 
 But what pathos is there in that scene of the next morning, when, 
 after a capitulation, the gates of the Othonian camp were flung 
 open, and the surviving soldiers, victors and vanquished, fell sob- 
 bing into one another's arms, friends and brothers tending each 
 other's wounds, and all denouncing the wickedness of civil war. 
 As you sit within doors and read that thrilling story of the great 
 Neronian fire, you get the impressions of the whole so fastened on 
 your mind, and carry them so in your eyes and all your senses, 
 the smoke and blaze and din, and the blistering heat, half the 
 population flung houseless into the streets, roaming ruflians add- 
 ing fuel to the devouring flames and hurling blazing brands into 
 houses yet untouched by the fire, temples and palaces and villas 
 with booths and cabin all merged together in one huge wild con- 
 flagration, — all is so intensely real to you that you shudder and 
 look about you as from the midst of all burning Rome yourself. 
 A picture of a far different subject, but in the best manner of 
 the same master, is presented, in the story of the funeral honors 
 done to Germanicus when his remains arrived at the port of Brun- 
 dusium and were borne thence in long solemn train along the 
 highways of Italy to the walls of Rome. You see in the fore- 
 ground the ship just touching the wharf, the adjacent shores and 
 the walls and tops of the houses fiUed with the multitude straining 
 their sad eyes at its coming. Agrippina descends its side, bearing 
 the funeral urn, her eyes cast down, and her two children by her 
 side, and is received in tender silence by the waiting mourning 
 throng, grief as for a personal loss visible on the faces of all, and 
 in the common aspect of sorrow citizens undistinguished from for- 
 eigners, relations and friends from strangers. Then begins to go 
 on its sad way the solemn funeral train, two praetorian cohorts 
 in advance, their ensigns all in mourning, and with the fasces 
 reversed, next all the magistrates of the surrounding cities and 
 towns, followed by crowds of people of all ranks, the knights in 
 purple and the populace in black. Onward it moves, stretching 
 far in the distance along the public roads, swelled ever by acces- 
 sions from the colonies and towns as it passes along, altars by the 
 wayside erected to the memory of the illustrious deceased, and 
 the fragrance of burning perfumes filling the air, till you discern 
 far away the procession coming out from the city, the consuls and 
 
422 TACITUS. 
 
 senate at their head, and a great multitude behind filling all the 
 road. The fitting salutations given and received, all join to- 
 gether, and enter through the city gates into the Forum, where, 
 after appropriate ceremonies, the precious remains are borne to 
 the Mausoleum and laid away in that last resting-place of the 
 Caesars. But I may not linger in further illustration of this as- 
 pect of Tacitus as a writer. I hasten to touch another and a 
 kindred one, his well-nigh unrivaled power in the delineation of 
 character. 
 
 The chief personages of his history are so seized by his firm grasp 
 of insight and so distinctly and strongly exhibited, as if painted 
 on the canvas or wrought into the solid marble, that whether you 
 meet them in groups or alone, they stand out each a known and 
 ever recognized individuality. Especially is this true of the em- 
 perors, the central figures on his pages, even as they were in all 
 the Roman life which they describe. When, after studying those 
 pages, we have become familiar with these imperial characters thus 
 conceived and represented by the historian, we ever after discern 
 and know them wherever they reappear in whatsoever situation, 
 with whatsoever ample surroundings, whether in the palace or in 
 the senate or in the throngs of people at the public shows in the 
 arena or in the theatre. It is much like the experience of one 
 who has passed a winter in Rome and has many a time walked up 
 and down the halls and galleries of the Vatican, where all about 
 him are ranged in such multitudinous array the busts and statues 
 of these men who in different times have acted a more or less im- 
 portant part in Roman affairs, and has come so to know by oft 
 repeated gaze the more strongly marked and individualized fig- 
 ures, that he always recognizes them and takes them out with eye 
 and mind from the wilderness of marble forms in the midst of 
 which he is wandering. So with these masterpieces of historic 
 sculpture, especially of the emperors of the Julian and Claudian 
 line. There are, indeed, certain family features in the historian's 
 delineations which they have in common, but you have a separate 
 sharply defined individuality of character in the dismal and dis- 
 sembling Tiberius, the well-meaning but weak and woman-ridden 
 Claudius, and the vain, profligate Nero. So is it with the figures 
 of the later emperors — of Otho the voluptuary, and yet not want- 
 ing in manly traits, chasing after pleasure up to the two or three 
 last years of his life, dissolving ever in sensual delights, yet, when 
 with the prospect of the throne before him, suddenly throwing 
 
TACITUS. 423 
 
 off, like Henry V. of England, all his old habits, and giving him- 
 seK strenuously to business and work, and when as suddenly, 
 disenchanted of his vision of power by his defeat in decisive bat- 
 tle, calmly laying himself down to die, his last expressed wishes 
 and thoughts for the peace of his country ; and Otho's rival, the 
 brutally sensual Yitellius, who yet in the extremity of death, when 
 shockingly maltreated by the soldiers, and cut down with many 
 wounds, forgot not that he had filled the imperial throne, and 
 in his last breath made answer to the last insulting soldier, "yet I 
 was once your emperor," the only word he ever uttered, as Tacitus 
 says, which could make good his claim to a not degenerate mind 
 Q^non degeneris anim%^'' Hist. HI. 85). And how, in few words, 
 how fully is Galba described, — of mediocrity of genius and rather 
 free from vices rather than possessed of virtues, a renowned sol- 
 dier, an able and just proconsul, — too great for a private man, so 
 long as he remained one, and by universal consent fit to hear im- 
 perial rule^ had he never ruled. But also in his profound obser- 
 vation and vivid descriptions of the inner life of men, in all the 
 manifold and complex workings of the soul, in the play and strife 
 of contending passions and desires and motives, Tacitus shows his 
 remarkable power as a writer. He was prone by nature to such 
 mental and moral studies into the vast inner world of human life 
 and character, but these natural tendencies were fostered and de- 
 veloped by the despotisms of those fifteen years of Domitian's 
 reign in which he lived, which, by dooming to silence all voice 
 and speech in ordinary intercourse, drove men in upon themselves, 
 and taught them to discern and know the presence of inward emo- 
 tions and purposes and habits by the outward look and bearing 
 and conduct. In a memorable passage in the "Agricola," Tacitus 
 describes the dark experience of the senate in their relations to Do- 
 mitian, as the misery of seeing and heing seen^ when their very 
 sighs were written down against them, and when that fierce red 
 face of the tyrant, so full of dread significance, was enough, with- 
 out aught of articulate speech, to spread paleness over the faces of 
 all the senators. He had become himself profoundly skilled in 
 such studies of the souls of men, and could trace home all outward 
 symptoms to the mental and moral states of which they were the 
 manifestation. Hence when he came to write and to follow and 
 narrate the course of Koman affairs, he unfolded their causes, so 
 often hidden from ordinary view, in the prevailing motives and 
 habits of thought and feeling of the actors in that great scene of 
 
424 TACITUS. 
 
 public life. He developed and manifested an extraordinary power 
 in piercing through the mists and clouds of caution and reserve, 
 or of deception and hypocrisy, which hung over the nature and 
 character of men, and bared to the light of day the inmost recesses 
 of their souls, and exposed their most hidden purposes and mo- 
 tives. When Agricola's dispatches came home from Britain, all 
 decked with laureled badges of victory, or within by the pomp of 
 boastful words, Domitian received them with a face of joy, but 
 Tacitus saw the dissembler's soul was vexed with jealous anxiety ; 
 and when Agricola, after his forced return from Britain, comes 
 into the imperial presence to ask to be excused from the command 
 of a higher province, because he knew he would not be allowed to 
 accept it, the historian sees quite through the grand air of favor 
 with which Domitian accepts the excuse ; " Domitian," he adds, " al- 
 lowed thanks to be paid him, nor blushed at the odious kindness." 
 (Agr. 42). Everywhere is illustrated in our historian this union 
 of insight into men's hearts with a pictorial force of description. 
 As in the instances I have given you see the secret jealousy of 
 tyrants, and the victims' dread fear in their looks, their whispers, 
 the pallor on their faces, so in many others jou see the wretched 
 misgivings which haunt the breasts of imperial favorites, hanging 
 so perilously on their princes' favors, the doubts and fears which 
 crowd the paths of ambition, the odious passions that lurk behind 
 the words of flattery and adulation, the servility of a shouting 
 populace, or of an assenting senate, and none the less the very 
 solitude of imperial greatness, the horrors that wait on a tyranni- 
 cal will and a licentious heart and life, the fires of remorse, the 
 worm of conscience. These last, the awful penalties of guilt, are 
 most vividly illustrated in Tacitus' description of the last days of 
 Tiberius. In his delineation of the character of this emperor the 
 historian has been severely criticised by modern writers of the im- 
 perial school, who see in Julius Caesar a grand prevailing aim for 
 the moral regeneration of the world, and who have words of ten- 
 derest charity for a Catiline, a Caligula, and a Nero. But unpre- 
 judiced readers must needs find in this delineation of the third 
 Caesar clearest marks of consistency and truthfulness. Tacitus ad- 
 mits that before Tiberius' accession to the throne he was an able 
 soldier and ruler. He accords him also wisdom and justice, as 
 well as ability in his imperial policy, during the first years of his 
 reign. But he discerns in him in remarkable degree the sullen 
 and despotic nature that marks the whole Claudian house, and 
 
TACITUS. 425 
 
 especially the tendencies to cruelty and lust, which, restrained by 
 his surroundings in the earlier years of his imperial rule, at last 
 broke forth into the most hideous excesses, when, after the death 
 of Livia, he was no longer restrained by her maternal influence. 
 How forcible and comprehensive are the historian's closing words 
 in his brief portraiture of Tiberius at the end of the sixth book of 
 the "Annals." "At last he abandoned himself at once to the rage 
 of tyranny and the sway of lust, for he had conquered the checks 
 of shame and fear, and thenceforth followed the bent of his own 
 spirit." We need no better commentary on these words than the 
 words of the emperor himself in a letter which, in that period, he 
 sent in to the senate. " What to write to you. Conscript Fathers, 
 or in what manner to write, or what at all not to write, if I know 
 myself, then may all gods and goddesses confound me worse, than 
 I now feel day by day confounded." " So," writes the historian 
 in the immediately following passage, " so did his own disgraceful 
 crimes turn to his own dire punishment." Then with an allusion 
 to a remarkable passage in Plato, the historian continues : " Not 
 in vain did that wisest of writers declare (Gorg. 524), that if the 
 hearts of tyrants were laid bare, there would be seen mental tear- 
 ings and tortures, since as the body is lashed by scourges so is the 
 soul by cruelty and lust" (Ann. VI. 6). The younger Pliny in 
 one of his letters (VII. 33) to Tacitus, writes : " I augur, nor does 
 the augury deceive me, that your histories will be immortal ; and 
 I will frankly confess that I desire my name to find mention in 
 them." But there is a passage in the " Institutes " of Quintilian, 
 the contemporary and also the rhetorical teacher of the historian, 
 which in far finer tone predicts a like fame to his works. With a 
 singular delicacy of compliment he does not mention his pupil by 
 name, preferring to have it elegantly understood. It is the last 
 sentence of the section on the Roman historians. After mention- 
 ing Sallust and Livy and others, he thus concludes : " There is yet 
 living and adorning the glory of our time, and worthy the remem- 
 brance of the ages, one who will, by and by, be named in the his- 
 tory of letters, but now is only to be under stood. ^^ Now, and how 
 fully and perhaps widely beyond the Roman professor's conception 
 of his own words, has this prophecy been fulfilled. About a cen- 
 tury after the death of Tacitus, the emperor of the same name, who 
 claimed descent from the historian, ordered his works to be placed 
 in all the public libraries, and ten copies to be made every year at 
 public expense, and deposited in the archives. At the revival of 
 
426 TACITUS. 
 
 classical learning these historical works found ardent students in 
 such men as Cosmo de Medici in Italy, and Grotius and Lipsius 
 in Holland; and these distinguished scholars and promoters of 
 letters have passed down their admiration to a long succession of 
 classical students of all countries and periods. Successive histori- 
 ans of Koman literature have taken up the word of Quintilian and 
 repeated it in more pronounced form, and in our own day that 
 prophetic Quintilian word may be sent on to coming times with 
 fuller meaning — " qui olim nominahitur vir sceculorum memoria 
 dignusJ^ 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, JANUARY 14, 1879. 
 
 The interesting paper upon Lessing, recently read to the club, 
 brought before us for discussion, among other important points 
 suggested by the career of Lessing, the alternative of free inquiry 
 or the authority of an infallible church. I was at first inclined to 
 ask the club to devote an evening in pursuance of that discussion 
 to a special consideration of the views and the consequent fortunes 
 of Lessing as a theological writer ; but on reflection it seemed to 
 me better to go back farther in the history of modern thought, 
 and to attempt a review of the career of Galileo Galilei and its 
 tragical fate as furnishing a signally instructive illustration of the 
 just mentioned alternative in its liberal form, and no less of the 
 larger issue which belongs just as vitally to our own days as it 
 belonged to the days alike of Lessing and of Galileo, — the issue 
 not so much between science, despotism of any ecclesiastical 
 authority, whether Catholic or Protestant, and religion, but be- 
 tween the freedom of scientific inquiry and theological authority, 
 whether Catholic or Protestant, Episcopal or Presbyterian or In- 
 dependent. 
 
 I was the more easily drawn to this theme for my paper from 
 having recently read a new book on Galileo, written in German 
 by Karl von Gebler, a work of great vigor and thoroughness, of 
 genuine German diligence as well as honesty ; and by the skillful 
 use made by its author of new material derived from original 
 sources, it made a new departure in the literature of Galileo's life, 
 and especially of his relations to the Roman Inquisition. Von 
 Gebler has the distinction of being the first to set in clear and 
 comprehensive narrative the abundant documentary material 
 which has only recently been drawn out from its long conceal- 
 ment in the secret archives of the Holy See, and published to the 
 world in the interests of truth and knowledge. For more than 
 two centuries after the trial of the great Italian astronomer no 
 official source of knowledge was accessible to historical writers 
 except the bare statement of the case contained in the final sen- 
 
428 GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 tence. During most of this long period the huge pile of manu- 
 script, containing all the documents belonging to the proceedings 
 of the trial, lay in the darkness of the Papal archives, unused, 
 unapproached, and persistently denied to all historical inquirers. 
 Singularly enough, it was reserved for the circumstance of war, for 
 the rude stir of French arms in the Italian campaigns of the first 
 empire, to dislodge the Vatican manuscript from its hiding-place, 
 and to let it forth into the air and light of the outer world ; for on 
 the taking and occupation of Rome by Napoleon's troops, this doc- 
 ument, together with other historical treasures, was seized and car- 
 ried away to Paris with the intention, as it afterwards appeared 
 from a learned report upon it found in the bureau of Napoleon's 
 Minister of Public Instruction, to have the whole published in the 
 original Italian and Latin, with an accompanying French transla- 
 tion. But on the fall and the exile of Napoleon the publication of 
 the Galileo Vatican manuscript was left behind him in Paris as one 
 of the humblest, perhaps, but certainly one of the best of his many 
 unfulfilled projects. It would far exceed my limits to recount the 
 history, most curiously detailed by Herr von Gebler in the Appen- 
 dix to his work, of the various diplomatic arts employed during 
 many years by successive Popes, through their Nuncios at Paris, 
 to get back their lost manuscript to the Vatican bureau which had 
 been for two centuries its prescriptive home, or of the counter arts, 
 no less diplomatic, practiced by the ministers of successive French 
 sovereigns to evade, without once or for an instant refusing, a con- 
 summation so devoutly wished. At last, in 1845, on an applica- 
 tion for the manuscript being made to Louis Philippe by Gregory 
 XVL, through Count Rossi, the French Ambassador at Rome, the 
 answer was immediately given that it should at once be restored on 
 the condition that it be published in Rome^full and entire; and 
 on the formal acceptance of this condition as a sine qua non^ the 
 manuscript was then restored to the possession of the Holy See. 
 The obligation which was thus assumed by the Papal government 
 in the person of Pope Gregory XVI. has, unfortunately for the 
 good faith of that government, never been discharged. Only one 
 official attempt to discharge it has ever been made, and that a par- 
 tial one in itself, and also partially made. This was a work pub- 
 lished in 1850 by Monsignore Marini, which, so far from being a 
 publication of the Vatican manuscript, y^^^ and entire, was only 
 an advocate's report of the trial, consisting of extracts from the 
 records so selected and arranged and annotated as to defend and 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 429 
 
 glorify tlie tribunal. This work once issued, as if in discharge in 
 full of all papal obligations, the manuscript went straight back to 
 its old sacred place in the Papal archives by order of Pio Nono, 
 and for nearly twenty years after was kept safe under lock and 
 key from the profane eyes and hands of historical inquirers and 
 writers. At last, however, more liberal counsels prevailed at the 
 Vatican, and in 1867 permission was granted by the Prefect of the 
 Papal Archives to Henri de I'Epinois, an eminent French scholar, 
 to examine the famous manuscript and to appropriate it as he 
 might choose in whole or in part to literary uses. The final result 
 of M. de I'Epinois' examination was the publication at Paris of a 
 valuable work in which he gave to the world, together with an ex- 
 position of the trial, not indeed the whole manuscript, but yet all 
 its most important documents printed entire and in the ipsissima 
 verba of the originals. In the year 1870, another collection of 
 Galileo documents was published at Florence by Professor Silves- 
 tro Gherardi, which embraced records of sessions of the Inquisi- 
 tion and of its Decrees, chiefly belonging to the period subsequent 
 to the trial. It is in the light of the full knowledge, now given 
 for the first time in these two works, of the entire proceeding of 
 the Inquisition against Galileo, that Herr von Gebler has written 
 his book. From the central point of view which he has reached 
 through a thorough study of the complete records of this cele- 
 brated trial, he has rewritten its history, treating it, however, not 
 as an isolated event in Galileo's life, but setting it in its proper 
 place and with all its surroundings in the larger history, out of 
 which it grew, of his whole personal and scientific career. All 
 fair-minded readers of his pages will allow that the author has 
 written his book with an impartial spirit, nothing extenuating nor 
 setting down aught in malice. They will see him acquitting the 
 Inquisition of some traditional charges of cruel treatment of Gali- 
 leo, but substantiating others of weightier import which come un- 
 der the same head ; vindicating its official conduct in some points 
 as most consistent, condemning it as in others most inconsistent 
 with the principles of the church which it represented ; but they 
 will find nothing in all his showings to beget admiration or ap- 
 proval of those principles themselves ; very much does the author 
 set forth in plain narrative to awaken indignation at the intolerance 
 of this Holy tribunal which laid such an iron pressure upon the 
 development of science ; and quite enough, too, in the shape of ar- 
 gument most difficult to answer, which goes to invalidate alike the 
 
430 GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 ecclesiastical and the legal basis on which it rested its sentence of 
 condemnation. Indeed, the story of Galileo's fate, as told again 
 in this book, is found to be wanting, in its aspect as to both of the 
 parties to the case, in those elements of powerful and commanding 
 interest which belong to other world-famous persecutions for the 
 sake of conscience and truth. Galileo himself appears in it in the 
 same strange contrasts as always before, of intellectual strength 
 and moral weakness, of freedom in following after and reaching 
 the most exalted views, and of servility in abandoning them in the 
 crucial hour of personal trial. On the other hand, in the Cardi- 
 nal Judges of the prosecuting Holy Office, with all their persistent 
 purpose to perpetuate the prestige of their church, there was 
 wanting that passionate earnestness which has sometimes given a 
 kind of demi-relievo to the frightful spectacle of religious fanati- 
 cism ; they evidently lacked that fierce faith in themselves and 
 their cause which can in any wise reconcile us to the intolerance 
 of a fanatical tribunal. But if the parties which were set over 
 against each other in this trial appear to have been thus wanting 
 in personal moral decision, the principles which they respectively 
 represented are clearly seen as joined in most decisive conflict. 
 It is the conflict of those principles which went on in the Gali- 
 leo trial — the principle of free scientific inquiry on the one 
 side, and on the other of compulsory ecclesiastical and theological 
 authority — which gives to the trial its chief interest for us who 
 look back to it now from this distance of more than two centuries. 
 The same principles, though under changed forms and changed 
 conditions, are in conflict in our day, and the conflict now enters 
 perhaps more vitally than anything else into the higher intellec- 
 tual life of the world. The conflict ended then, as end it needs 
 must, in the submission of one of the contending parties, and the 
 instructive thing to be noted is, that then it was a submission at 
 first wrested by force from the first philosopher and astronomer 
 of the time by the Roman Inquisition, and not many years after 
 won by the influence of truth from the Church represented in 
 that Inquisition. 
 
 The life of Galileo fell in a time when the movement for spirit- 
 ual freedom, which even in Italy had reached and won the best 
 minds in the first half of the sixteenth century, was now on the 
 retrograde. It was the 18th February, 1564, on which Galileo 
 Galilei, the son of a Florentine nobleman, Vincenzo Galilei, and 
 his wife, Julia Ammanati, was born in Pisa ; the very same day 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 431 
 
 on which Michael Angelo died ; so that one and the same day- 
 robbed Florence of her greatest artist, and gave her her greatest 
 philosopher. The very beginnings of a religious reformation in 
 Italy had been crushed by the Inquisitors of Paul IV., and in the 
 recently founded Order of the Jesuits the church had at its dis- 
 posal an army, admirably generaled and admirably trained in 
 rank and file, which counted as its life-work the suppression of all 
 opposition to Papal authority quite as much as the recovery of 
 heretics. The papacy began to reestablish itseK firmly in its 
 newly-fortified domain ; without, it labored by all methods of cun- 
 ning and violence to subject again to its sway the Protestant 
 churches ; and within, the fate of Giordano Bruno was a beacon 
 warning of what all those had to expect who might venture to 
 oppose their own opinions to the dogmas of the church, their own 
 will to the decrees of ecclesiastical power. Thus it soon came to 
 pass, that no theology, no philosophy might be taught or held 
 which deviated from sanctioned church standards, and that all in- 
 quiry in the realm of nature and of history was watched with sus- 
 picious eyes and kept subject to most rigid censorship. Yet the 
 church was too sagacious to renounce all science, partly because it 
 was indispensable to her own ends, and partly, too, because it was 
 quite too strong in its own indefeasible rights for such renuncia- 
 tion to be possible. It is in the light of this very general prelimi- 
 nary view of the situation that we may reach an understanding of 
 Galileo's relation to the church of his time. Profound and radical 
 as was the inner opposition of his scientific views to the dogmatic 
 theology of the church, it developed itself very gradually, and with 
 reserve on both sides, into an outward conflict. One must remem- 
 ber, too, that Galileo was no skeptic or free-thinker, but a sincere 
 Christian believer, and never considered himself an opponent in 
 opinion or word to the rightly interpreted teachings of the Bible. 
 After Galileo had once reached, through many a perplexed path, 
 his true vocation as a student of mathematics and natural philoso- 
 phy, he soon became known by his conspicuous merits, and in the 
 year 1589 was appointed to a professorship of mathematics in Pisa. 
 The appointment was only for three years and at an annual salary 
 of only sixty scudi ; but it gave him an acknowledged position in 
 the learned world, and a place for scientific study and labors in 
 which he might rise to higher usefulness and distinction. But 
 this brief period of three years was cut short by his brilliant suc- 
 cess in science joined to the envy of his colleagues, and the in- 
 
432 GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 trigues of enemies whom nothing but his merits had gained him. 
 In 1592, in consequence of the vexatious intrigues of his enemies, 
 Galileo left Pisa, the place of his birth, and its university, the 
 place of his education, and entered into the service of the Repub- 
 lic of Venice, as professor in the University of Padua. Opening 
 here his first course of lectures with a brilliant inaugural, he soon 
 gathered to his lecture room large classes of enthusiastic pupils, 
 and went on for many years in a series of studies and labors fruit- 
 ful of inventions and discoveries in many departments of science 
 and especially in astronomy. In a letter to Kepler, in whom he 
 had a faithful friend and ally, he declares that he had been con- 
 vinced for many years of the truth of the Copernican system, 
 while he was pained to find it so generally rejected both by the- 
 ologians and naturalists ; by the former on the authority of the 
 church fathers, and by the latter of Aristotle and Ptolemy. Yet he 
 adds in a remark, most significant of his own character as of that 
 of the times : " I have abundant proof of the truth of the new 
 astronomical views, yet I do not venture to publish it, through 
 fear of sharing the fate of our master Copernicus, who, great as is 
 his fame with a few, is yet to the many (for thus great is the num- 
 ber of fools) only an object of ridicule and scorn." At this time 
 he seems to have had no apprehensions of the charge of heresy. 
 Indeed, as Copernicus' work had been dedicated, by permission, 
 to Pope Paul III., and now for more than fifty years had gone 
 unchallenged by the church censorship, he might well believe that 
 he could confess himself as a convert to its doctrines, without 
 being stigmatized as an heretic. Still, with whatsoever reserve 
 and caution he might proceed, the time was surely approaching 
 when the opposition was to come, not directly from philosophy 
 and from theology, but from the tribunals of church authority, 
 and to nothing was the crisis so much owing at last as to his well- 
 earned success in scientific investigation, and to the force of the 
 truth which he gained and made known to the world. It was in 
 1610 that the astronomer secured for himself in the telescope, 
 which he made, the instrument of his great discoveries. Though 
 not, as some have maintained, the inventor of the telescope, yet he 
 vastly improved it by his inventions, and certainly was the first to 
 apply it to the observation of the heavens. Marvelous, indeed, 
 were the sights that through that, at best, very rude instrument 
 broke from the heavens upon Galileo's astonished eyes, and mar- 
 velous the knowledge it conveyed to the world through the 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 433 
 
 astronomer's bulletin of discovery, the so-called " Sidereal Mes- 
 senger." The hitherto so flat moon was seen to rejoice in moun- 
 tains even as the aristocratic earth herself ; the Milky Way was 
 all at once studded with innumerable stars ; the Pleiades, those 
 far-famed daughters of Atlas, instead of being only seven in num- 
 ber, multiplied to a bright clustering family of thirty-six, and the 
 giant Orion, instead of disclosing only seven stars, was covered 
 with them all over his heroic figure to the number of more than 
 five hundred ; the planets showed themselves as round disks, and 
 the fixed stars, though still only bright points, were yet no longer 
 fixed by the dictum of the great Stagirite, but moving, changing 
 ever with the ever-moving, ever-changing firmament itseK. Yet 
 more direct in their proof of the truth of the Coper nican doctrine 
 were the discoveries of the satellites of Jupiter, the ring of Saturn, 
 and the spots on the Sun. But Galileo contented himself with 
 simply publishing the facts, without bringing them into logical 
 relation to the Copernican system, leaving all such inferences to 
 his readers. While the common people greeted with wondering 
 admiration the man who had thus revealed to them a new heaven, 
 these revelations were met by the learned with incredulity or with 
 sneers of contempt or with the bitter hate of envious jealousy. 
 Some of the hottest Aristotelians even maintained that the astrono- 
 mer's telescope was purposely fashioned in such cunning way that 
 it showed things which had no real existence, and all in vain was 
 it that Galileo, in reply, offered a reward of ten thousand scudi to 
 anybody who would construct so cunning an instrument as that ! 
 Others stubbornly refused to look through the telescope, arguing 
 that it was simply impossible for any instrument to discover phe- 
 nomena in the heavens of which there was not a word in all the 
 books of Aristotle ! It was of one of these a priori philosophers, 
 Julius Libri, who spurned all Galileo's discoveries as " absurdities," 
 and who died in this same year (1610), and died without the sight, 
 that the astronomer wittily said : " That he hoped that Signore 
 Libri, who was never willing to see these absurdities from the 
 earth, had vouchsafed a passing look at them on his way to 
 heaven." 
 
 In marked contrast to all these was the true-minded and true- 
 hearted Kepler, who at once openly maintained the truth of Gali- 
 leo's observations, and published them himself as fast as they 
 were made known, and declared that Galileo " had given in them 
 the clearest proof of the divinity of his genius." In a letter of 
 
434 GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 this period to Kepler, Galileo thus writes: You are well-nigh 
 the only one who has given full credit to my statements, and that 
 from your own independent way of thinking. But let us not 
 care for the revilings of the great crowd, for against Jupiter once 
 fought even giants, to say nothing of the pygmies — and all in 
 vain. Jupiter still stands in the heavens, let these doggish peo- 
 ple bay and bark at him as they will. What say you to the first 
 philosophers of our Pisa Faculty, who, with a stupid stubborn- 
 ness, will not look at planets or the moon, nor even at my tele- 
 scope itself? Verily, they close their eyes against the light of 
 truth. This kind of people think philosophy to be a book, just 
 like the Odyssey or the ^neid ; and they must needs seek for 
 truth not in the world of space, not in nature but (to use their 
 own words) in the comparison of texts ! What is to be done ? 
 Shall we join Democritus or Herodotus ? Democritus, I think, my 
 good Kepler, and let us only laugh over all this distinguished 
 dullness." It was unfortunate for Galileo that at this period he 
 retired from the service of the Venetian republic, which would 
 hardly have refused him protection against the attacks of church 
 authority, and accepted a call which he received from his former 
 pupil, Cosmo II., the Grand Duke of Tuscany. In the autumn of 
 1610 he entered upon his duties as First Professor of Mathe- 
 matics at the University of Pisa, with the added title of First 
 Philosopher to His Ducal Highness, and with the stipulation, 
 made by the Grand Duke, that he should not be under obligation 
 to reside at Pisa, or to deliver academic lectures ; he might devote 
 himself, if he chose, exclusively to his scientific studies and writ- 
 ings. But great as were these advantages, which this position 
 offered him, it was a bad exchange which he made, when he left 
 the free soil of the republic, and trusted his fortunes to the pro- 
 tection of a prince, who, though his sincere friend, was neverthe- 
 less young and of an inconstant nature, and was under the com- 
 plete dominion of Rome. In Venetian Padua there was entire 
 and actual freedom in teaching, but in Tuscany it was only nomi- 
 nal ; in the former, science was secure from the intrigue and shuf- 
 fling tricks of the Jesuits, in the latter, the Jesuits were at home, 
 and their mighty influence lay heavy upon all that touched their 
 interests, and most of all upon scientific inquiry. Yet, for some 
 time after his arrival in Tuscany, his enemies found it not easy 
 to set in movement against him the ecclesiastical authorities; 
 and only from a distance and at intervals was heard the low 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 436 
 
 rumbling of the storm which by and by was to break upon 
 him. In 1611, on the visit which he made to Rome by the per- 
 mission and at the expense of his prince, he was received with 
 the distinctions of a veritable triumph. Pope Paul V. granted 
 him a lengthened audience, and gave him most gracious assurance 
 of his unchangeable favor. Cardinals and prelates and scholars 
 all vied with one another in doing him honor. The Eternal City 
 presented the strange spectacle of courtiers and scholars and even 
 Aristotelian philosophers and bigoted old school theologians gaz- 
 ing through the telescope upon the much talked of phenomena of 
 the new heavens, their doubts vanishing — if only they would let 
 them — in the overwhelming light of ocular evidence. And most 
 significant and important of all was the favorable official opinion 
 given in by four eminent men of science, appointed to the ser- 
 vice by Cardinal Bellarmin, who testified, as eye-witnesses, to the 
 correctness of the astronomical facts which had been discovered 
 and published by Galileo. But the Holy Inquisition, ever on the 
 watch against heresy, had their suspicious eyes upon Galileo, 
 while all else in Rome were paying him their homage of willing 
 admiration. In the " Records of the Inquisition," published in 
 1870 by Gherardi, appears the following curious little entry, 
 bearing date of May 17, 1611, the very time of the culmination of 
 Galileo's successes in Rome : " Let it he looked into, whether in 
 the trial of Dr. Caesar Cremonini, Galileo Galilei, the Professor 
 of Philosophy and Mathematics, is not named J^ This is the frst 
 time in which the name of Galileo finds place in the Inquisition 
 records. The Holy Office was thus in search of some clue of 
 evidence against this innovator, with whose praises the air of 
 Rome was now so full. How different was a sentence written in 
 the same month by Cardinal del Monte to Cosmo II. : " If we 
 were living in the days of the old Roman republic, I verily be- 
 lieve that a column would have been erected on the Capitol in 
 honor of the surpassing worth of Galileo." But the Inquisition 
 was under the influence of the ultra-conservatism of the time. 
 The Aristotelians and their cousins-german, the old school theolo- 
 gians, looked with horror upon this growing success of a system 
 which, in their eyes, was undermining the venerable foundations, 
 not only of physics and mathematics, but of philosophy and reli* 
 gion. Like the silversmiths of Ephesus, in Paul's reforming days, 
 they felt that not only their craft was in danger, but also the mag- 
 nificent temples of the deities they worshiped were like to be de- 
 
436 GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 spised, and so the}^ cried out, Great is Aristotle, great is Theology, 
 the sovereign empress of all the sciences ! The writer who was 
 the first to bring over the discussion, hitherto purely scientific, 
 into the region of theology, was a Florentine monk by the name 
 of Francisco Sitio, who, in a book long since forgotten, undertook 
 — as appears from his title-page — to prove, on plain evidence of 
 Holy Writ, " the emptiness of the rumor started by the ' Sidereal 
 Messenger,' about four (Jupiter) planets recently seen by the 
 mathematician Galileo Galilei through some kind of an optical 
 instrument " (" cujusdam perspicilli ") ! But this worthy monk 
 had coadjutors superior to himself in learning and position, who 
 were at work, however, in a less public way. In Florence, in the 
 palace of the Archbishop Marzimedici, a company of theologians 
 was wont to assemble " in honor of God and imperiled religion," 
 to take counsel in secret, not whether the discoveries of Galileo 
 rested on fact or no, but how this troublesome new teacher and his 
 revolutionary system could best be destroyed. But in the higher 
 ecclesiastical circles in Rome the astronomer had not as yet lost 
 favor. Even in 1613, when, in a controversial work against the 
 Jesuit Scheiner on the spots upon the sun, he for the first time de- 
 clared himself openly for the Copernican system, we find Cardinal 
 Barberini, afterwards Pope Urban VIII., and Cardinal Borromeo 
 thanking him for sending them his work, and expressing their ad- 
 miration of the results of his studies. It was the accident of a con- 
 versation at the grand ducal table, where were present several pro- 
 fessors of the University of Pisa, which led the way to the conflict 
 with ecclesiastical power. The Grand Duchess Dowager Chris- 
 tine had put the question to Boscaglia, the Pisa Professor of Nat- 
 ural Philosophy, whether the satellites of Jupiter were really to 
 be seen in the heavens, and the professor had answered, though 
 very reluctantly, in the affirmative. Professor Castelli, a good 
 friend of Galileo, was present, and he at once made the best of 
 the opportunity and discoursed to the company most earnestly 
 upon the great importance of Galileo's discoveries. Boscaglia, 
 who, being a peripatetic of the first water, could not suppress his 
 vexation at the turn the conversation was taking, kept up a commu- 
 nication in whispers with the dowager duchess, telling her that 
 though many of Galileo's views were without doubt true, yet that 
 the doctrine of the double motion of the earth seemed to him in- 
 credible, indeed impossible, since it was quite contrary to Scripture. 
 So the duchess at once began to attack the Copernican system on 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 437 
 
 Bible grounds. Castelli at first objected to draw the Bible into 
 a scientific discussion, but as his objections were of no avail, he 
 took at once a theological position, and from it defended the new 
 views with such force of conviction, that he brought over to his 
 side nearly the whole company, including the grand duke and 
 his wife. The duchess' mother, however, who was a woman of 
 narrow mind, held out to the last, and Boscaglia himself main- 
 tained a neutral silence. The information of this occurrence, 
 which was immediately given by Castelli to his friend, drew from 
 Galileo that celebrated letter, in which he first expressed those 
 theological opinions which rendered him obnoxious to church cen- 
 sure, and to the subsequent indictment and trial for heresy. 
 
 After protesting against the necessity to which he is brought, 
 of involving the Bible in a purely scientific discussion, he proceeds 
 to give his views of the relations of the Bible to scientific inquiry. 
 He says that, as a good Catholic, he fully acknowledges that the 
 Bible cannot teach what is false or erroneous, but that he can by 
 no means acknowledge the same of all the interpreters of the 
 Bible. These betray themselves into contradictions, and even 
 heresies and blasphemies, when they interpret Scripture according 
 to the letter. Thus they would ascribe to God hands and feet 
 and ears, and also human feelings, as wrath and hate and repent- 
 ance, and also ignorance of the future. Further, he teaches that 
 both Scripture and nature proceed from the Divine Word ; but for 
 Scripture it was necessary that, in accommodation to the common 
 mind, it should utter much that might seem contrary to truth ; 
 but that nature, on the other hand, was inexorable and unchange- 
 able, and quite unconcerned whether her hidden grounds and 
 agencies were comprehensible by men or not. Now as two truths 
 cannot contradict each other, it is the business of wise interpreters 
 of the Bible to interpret its statements in harmony with those 
 necessary conclusions touching nature which are made certain by 
 ocular demonstration, or by sure proof. Then, as to the mission 
 of the Bible, he says, " I am inclined to believe that the Bible is 
 intended to teach truths which are necessary to salvation, and 
 which get their sanction, not from science, nor from any other 
 source than their revelation through the Holy Ghost. But that 
 the same God who has furnished us with senses, understanding, 
 and reason will not allow us to use them, but will bring us by 
 some other way to a knowledge of those sciences which we can get 
 by ourselves, by the use of those capacities — this, I think, I am 
 
438 GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 under no obligation to believe ; least of all in respect to those sci- 
 ences of which we have in Scripture quite inconsiderable frag- 
 ments, as, for instance, astronomy, to which the Bible makes such 
 slight contributions that it does not even mention all the planets.^^ 
 The wily enemies of Galileo knew how to abuse this ingenuous 
 confession of a wise and good man to his own injury. They 
 noisily proclaimed that his assertion that Holy Scripture has no 
 place in scientific discussion was an assault upon its universal 
 authority. The respectable Bishop of Fiesole, Gherardini, to whom 
 the existence of Copernicus was apparently wholly unknown, fell 
 into such a rage over the system defended by Galileo, that he in- 
 dulged in indecorous abuse of the astronomer, and threatened to 
 represent the whole affair to the grand duke. But some of the 
 bishop's cooler friends managed to quiet him with the information 
 that the author of the system was not a living Tuscan, but only a 
 German, who had been dead seventy years, and that when he was 
 alive and published his book, he had dedicated it to Pope Paul III,, 
 and that His Holiness had accepted it in the most gracious man- 
 ner. But the first open and public assault upon Galileo and his 
 system came from the pulpit on the fourth Sunday in Advent, in 
 1614, in the Church of Santa Maria Novella, in Florence, in the 
 person of the Dominican monk Caccini. With a wit somewhat 
 profane in the pulpit, he opened upon Galileo with the text from 
 the first chapter of the Acts, " Viri Galilcei^ quid statis aspicientes 
 in codumf^ But this pun of the pious Peter Caccini was the best 
 thing in his whole performance. All the rest was simply shocking, 
 alike to reason and religion. He went on to teach that the doc- 
 trine taught by Galileo, of the revolution of the earth round the 
 sun, was inconsistent with the Catholic faith, as it was in flat con- 
 tradiction with Holy Scripture, the sense of which, as given by all 
 the church fathers, taught just the opposite doctrine. And inas- 
 much as nobody was allowed to deviate from the authority of the 
 aforesaid fathers, therefore this Galilean doctrine was heretical. 
 The preacher closed with an invective against all mathematicians, 
 whose science he denounced as an invention of the devil, and with 
 the pious wish, that the whole tribe, as all heresies proceeded 
 from them, might be expelled from all Christian states ! Another 
 Dominican monk, by name Lorini, secured a copy of the letter 
 to Castelli, and forwarded it, accompanied with a denunciatory 
 letter, to Cardinal Mellini, the President of the Holy Congrega- 
 tion of the Index. Never did wily priest weave together sophistry 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 439 
 
 and slander with more perverse ingenuity than Padre Lorini in 
 this letter of denunciation. After enumerating the scientific sins 
 of Galileo, and deprecating their destructive influence upon the 
 whole philosophy of Aristotle, upon the authority of the fathers, 
 and the holy Catholic faith, he delivers himself of a precious bit 
 of naive hypocrisy, as follows : " For myself, while I hold all these 
 Galileans to be orderly men, to be sure, and good Christians, 
 though a little overwise and obstinate, I beg to assure you, that 
 in all this, my proceeding, I am moved only by zeal for the holy 
 cause.''^ After this assurance, he begs that his letter may be con- 
 sidered confidential^ only a friendly communication from a servant 
 of the church, and not a judicial document. As a consequence of 
 Lorini's letter, the Holy Office at once instituted a secret investiga- 
 tion of the charges against Galileo. Various attempts were made, 
 but in vain, to get possession of the original of Galileo's commu- 
 nication to Castelli. The monk Caccini was summoned as a wit- 
 ness, but his testimony was loaded with statements so manifestly 
 untrue that the Inquisition gave up for the present all further in- 
 vestigation. But, on account of the excitement incident to these 
 recent attacks, it seemed to Galileo and his friends that he ought 
 now to make a public vindication of his opinions. Hence arose 
 the apologetic tract which he published in the form of a letter to 
 the Grand Duchess Christine. As this tract defines more fully 
 than the letter to Castelli the astronomer's position both as a man 
 of science and a Catholic Christian, and also contains views on the 
 relations of science and religion, which are again emphasized in 
 our own times, it seems worth while to give a brief sketch of its 
 contents. He opens by mentioning it as his misfortune that by 
 his astronomical discoveries he has aroused against him many phi- 
 losophers of the reigning school, as if he had with his own hand 
 set up those phenomena in the firmament, to bring general disor- 
 der into nature and science. These antagonists, however, instead 
 of meeting him, as in duty bound, with counter observations and 
 facts, had chosen to shield themselves and their unsupported dicta 
 by the pretext of religion and Holy Scripture. 
 
 Now as to personal charges of heresy, he begs to say that Coper- 
 nicus, his master, was not only a good Catholic, but also a priest 
 of the church, who stood in high favor with the Roman Curia for 
 his piety as well as his learning, and that his great work was first 
 published under the gracious sanction of the then Pope, Paul III., 
 and that until lately its orthodoxy had never been called in ques- 
 
440 GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 tion. For himself it had been the farthest possible from his in- 
 tention to say or teach aught contrary to the Bible, and that if on 
 account of his not being learned in Scripture he had been guilty 
 of any errors in religion, he was ready at once to abandon them, 
 so soon as they were proved to be errors. He then unfolds, with 
 more fullness than in his letter to Castelli, the relation of the 
 teachings of the Bible to scientific truth, and confirms them by an 
 appeal to earlier Catholic writers whose orthodoxy was never ques- 
 tioned. Especially, he quotes the memorable words of Cardinal 
 Baronius : " The Holy Ghost designed in the Bible to teach men 
 how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." This utterance 
 he backs by many passages quoted from St. Augustine. He then 
 puts in an exception to the view at that time so current, that The- 
 ology, as the queen of all the sciences, may in nowise demean 
 herself so as to adjust her doctrines to the teachings of the other 
 inferior sciences, but that all these, on the contrary, must be ever 
 subject to her sovereign authority, and shape their conclusions to 
 her traditions and decrees. He declares himself to be somewhat 
 in doubt, exactly on what grounds sacred Theology has been in- 
 vested with this title and rank of sovereign queen. It may be, 
 perhaps, ^rs^, because all which is taught by the other sciences is 
 contained and interpreted by Theology, only in a better way and 
 from higher knowledge, or, secondly^ because the subject which 
 busies Theology is far superior in worth and importance to all the 
 subjects of which the other sciences treat. Now if Theology is a 
 queen in the first sense, then, certainly, the claim to the title is not 
 valid, for nobody can maintain that geometry and astronomy and 
 music and medicine are more fully and better taught in Scripture 
 than in the books of Archimedes and Ptolemy and Galen. It 
 would seem, then, that Theology must rest her sovereign claims on 
 the second ground. On this head the writer utters this pithy sen- 
 tence: "If now Theology, occupied only with the supreme, divine 
 problems, keeps upon the queenly throne which belongs to her 
 supreme rank, without descending to the lower sciences, which 
 have not to do with the mysteries of salvation, then the professors 
 of theology ought not to presume upon authority to issue decrees 
 and statutes in other sciences, which they have never, ex professo, 
 pursued and studied. For this were as if an absolute prince, who 
 can order at will and exact obedience, without being a physician 
 or an architect should wish that the sick should be healed, or 
 buildings erected according to his direction, at the risk of death 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 441 
 
 to the patients, and destruction to the buildings." The writer then 
 applies the principles he has laid down to the Copernician system. 
 According to the opinion of many, he says, this system is to be 
 rejected because it goes counter to the letter of Scripture, and on 
 the other hand, that the immobility of the earth and the mobility 
 of the sun must be accepted de fide. Here he makes a sharp dis- 
 tinction, which he contends must also be observed, between mere 
 hypotheses and ascertained facts. In regard to the former, as, 
 for example, whether the stars are inhabited or not, one might, to 
 be sure, fall in with the literal sense of Scripture. But if, on the 
 contrary, the statement of facts in nature, which have been reached 
 by sure observation and proof, is not in harmony with the literal 
 sense of Scripture, then these physical facts must lead the inter- 
 preter to the study and understanding of the true sense, which 
 must certainly be in harmony with the proved results of science, 
 inasmuch as two truths can never contradict each other. One 
 other passage which bore hard upon him in his subsequent trial I 
 will quote. After declaring that he is willing to abide by the offi- 
 cial opinion of fair and wise and well-instructed theologians, he 
 thus addresses his enemies : " See to it that you refute the proofs 
 for the Copernican system, and leave the question of its heresy to 
 whom its settlement belongs ; but do not imagine that you will get 
 from those thoughtful and sagacious church authorities, and from 
 the absolute wisdom of Him who is infallible, the hasty decisions 
 to which you would wrest yourselves by your own personal inter- 
 ests and passions. For without doubt in reference to matters 
 which are not exactly de fide^ His Holiness the Pope has uncondi- 
 tioned power of approbation or condemnation ; hut it is not in the 
 power of any human being to mahe a thing true or to make it 
 false., or to mahe it any otherwise than it is, de facto, by its own 
 nature.^^ A tract like this, thrown suddenly by an astronomer 
 into the atmosphere of Rome in the year 1615, brought with it an 
 air quite too fresh and free for the constitutional habits of the Ro- 
 man church ; and the thought it uttered was of such uncanonical 
 sort, it was so very human, and yet so real and so true, that it 
 gave mortal offense to all genuine orthodoxy, both in science and 
 in religion. Galileo soon learned that his enemies were working 
 against him more busily and bitterly than before, and that a move- 
 ment was on foot to bring him under ecclesiastical censure, and to 
 put a church injunction on all Copernican teaching. With the 
 purpose of defending himself and his views against this movement, 
 
442 GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 he made a journey to Eome in December, 1615. The statement, 
 often made, that he went to Rome at this time in obedience to a 
 papal summons is disproved by the records of the manuscript now 
 published. The testimony there recorded shows beyond contro- 
 versy that he went of his own free will, and for the purpose just 
 mentioned. The event proved that he arrived in Rome not a mo- 
 ment too early for his purpose. In a letter written a week after 
 his arrival he writes thus : " I see every day how well it was that 
 I came here at this time, for I have discovered so many snares laid 
 for me that at a later period my personal safety might have been 
 impossible." So far, however, had the proceedings already gone, 
 that, while he had no fears for himself, he found it impossible to 
 get any favorable hearing in defense of his astronomical views. 
 His efforts, indeed, only hastened the hitherto lingering action of 
 the church authorities. 
 
 By a decree of the 19th of February, 1616, the Inquisition 
 charged its consulting theologians to prepare and hand in an offi- 
 cial opinion touching the two following propositions, as contained 
 in Galileo's writings : — 
 
 1. The sun is the centre of the world, and consequently without 
 motion. 
 
 2. The earth is not the centre of the world and not stationary, 
 but moves with a diurnal motion. On the 24th of February the 
 theologians gave in their opinion as follows : — 
 
 The first proposition they declared to be foolish and absurd in 
 philosophy and formally heretical, as being contrary to Scripture 
 according to the proper sense of many passages, and also accord- 
 ing to the general interpretation of the holy fathers and learned 
 theologians of the church. The second proposition they declared 
 to be subject to the same censure in philosophy, and in respect to 
 theological truth to be at the least erroneous in faith. At a ses- 
 sion of the Inquisition held on the next day, the 25th of February, 
 Cardinal Mellini announced that in consequence of this official 
 opinion. Cardinal Bellarmin had been instructed by the Pope to 
 summon Galileo and admonish him to give up (deserere) the 
 opinion contained in the propositions submitted to the theologi- 
 cal commission ; in the event of his refusal to obey, the Commis- 
 sary-General of the Holy Office was instructed to deliver him the 
 order, in presence, of a notary and witnesses, that he abstain 
 from teaching or defending the aforesaid doctrine and opinion, or 
 from treating of it ; in case of his non-acquiescence he was to be 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 443 
 
 imprisoned. We find it set down in the trial records that on the 
 following 3d of March Cardinal Bellarmin informed the Inqui- 
 sition that he had duly given Galileo the admonition, and that 
 he had acquiesced in the same, also that on the 26th May the 
 same cardinal had given Galileo, at his request, his written cer- 
 tificate over his own signature, to this effect : that formal abjura- 
 tion of his opinions had not been required of him or any penalty 
 inflicted upon him, but only that he had been informed of the 
 declaration made by our Lord (the Pope) (^fatto da Nostra Sig- 
 nore)^ and published by the Holy Congregation of the Index, that 
 the Copernican view of the immobility of the sun and the mobility 
 of the earth is contrary to Scripture, and so may not be defended 
 or held. According to a minute bearing date 26th of February, 
 and found or declared to be found in the trial records, but quite 
 inconsistent with all the other documents above mentioned, and yet 
 used as chief evidence against Galileo in the second trial, Galileo 
 had received the order from the Commissary-General, in presence 
 of notary and witnesses, to give up the obnoxious Copernican 
 opinion, and neither to hold it in any way whatsoever (jquovis 
 modo)^ nor to teach or defend it by writing or word of mouth ; 
 and that he had acquiesced and promised to obey this order. The 
 examination of this minute belongs, however, to a later stage of 
 the Inquisition proceedings. To a complete view of the authentic 
 acts of this period it remains to be added, that on the 5th of March 
 a decree was issued by the Holy Congregation of the Index, by 
 which the great work of Copernicus on the " Revolutions of the 
 Heavenly Bodies," and all other books in which the false and 
 unscriptural doctrine of the mobility of the earth and the immo- 
 bility of the sun was taught, were prohibited from publication, 
 until the errors in them were duly corrected. Thus had the Ko- 
 man court defined its position on the astronomical science of the 
 century. The motion of the earth around the sun was pronounced 
 by it to be an unscriptural doctrine and a formal heresy ; it might 
 not be defended or held by any Catholic Christian. It was still 
 perhaps possible for a believer in the Copernican system to evade 
 in some cunning way the letter of the interdict, so to hide his 
 opinions, or to put them forward in hypothetical form, as not to 
 be guilty of an overt act of its violation ; but even then he was 
 always at the mercy of power, he had ever over his head the sword 
 of church censure hanging by the slightest thread. Most of all 
 was it so with Galileo, the chief sufferer by these prohibitory pro- 
 
444 GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 ceedings. His life as a thinker and man of science was for a 
 time arrested at its sources, and all freedom and elasticity of step 
 and movement was gone. Whatever action now there was, was 
 only abnormal and morbid. How painfully does this appear in a 
 letter which he wrote soon after, accompanying the dedication of 
 a book which he had written on the subject of " The Tides," to 
 Leopold, the Archduke of Austria. He had written the book at 
 the request of Cardinal Orsini, during his last visit to Rome, and 
 in it had incorporated proofs of the truth of the Copernican views. 
 But now that the interdict was on such a book, he must needs in 
 some way bring about obedience to it as a faithful servant of the 
 church. " Because," he writes, " because it becomes me to obey 
 the decisions of my superiors, as they are guided by a higher intelli- 
 gence, to which my own humbler mind does not of itself attain, 
 therefore I look upon this book which I present to you, inasmuch 
 as it goes to prove the twofold motion of the earth, simply as a fic- 
 tion, or rather as a dream, and pray your Highness to receive it as 
 such. But even as poets sometimes value one or another of their 
 fancies, so I in like manner set some store by this fancy of mine. 
 I had intended to discuss this subject more fully, and to add other 
 proofs. But a voice from heaven has awakened me and dissolved 
 in mist all my perplexed phantasms.''^ What a humiliating 
 change is wrought here in this man of scientific genius by des- 
 potic authority acting in the name of religion ! Just before soar- 
 ing to the stars, and revealing to mortals a new heavens, and now 
 rudely struck down, and with wings all broken draggling on the 
 earth ! But as weeks and months wore away, the mind of the 
 astronomer seems to have somewhat recovered itself. There arose 
 in him with his revived studies the quickening hope that the deci- 
 sions of the Papal Congregations, if not taken back, might yet 
 be allowed to slide into forgetfulness. He especially grew more 
 confident in spirit and less cautious in action, when in 1623 Car- 
 dinal Maffeo Barberini, who had always treated him with marked 
 consideration and kindness, became Pope under the name of Ur- 
 ban VIII. On his visit to Rome the next year, he was received 
 by this Pope with the greatest distinction, and Urban, in a letter 
 soon after written to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, lauded Galileo's 
 scientific services, and no less his virtue and piety. Relying upon 
 the favor which had thus been shown, and fondly cherishing the 
 hope that he might unfold astronomical truth at least in hypotheti- 
 cal form, he addressed himself to the composition of a work which 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 445 
 
 was to embody the chief results of his scientific labors of more 
 than forty years. This work was his celebrated " Dialogue on the 
 Two Systems of the World, the Ptolemaic and the Copernican," 
 which was designed, as the title-page declares, to present the nat- 
 ural and philosophical reasons for each system, with no formal 
 summing up in favor of either. It is in reality a series of dia- 
 logues, conducted by three speakers, two of whom support the 
 Copernican system, and the third the Ptolemaic. The two Co- 
 pernican defenders are Galileo's two pupils, Salviati of Florence, 
 and Sagredo of Venice ; and the Ptolemaic was one Simplicius, a 
 pseudonym which had an ambiguous meaning. For the common 
 mind it might stand for the man of simplicity or the " Simpleton," 
 and for learned readers it might represent, as the author after- 
 wards declared it really did, the writer of that name of the sixth 
 century, who wrote a commentary on an astronomical work of 
 Aristotle. Salviati and Sagredo bring forward the arguments 
 for Copernicus with such clearness and force of conviction, and so 
 completely answer all the objections of the unfortunate Simplicius, 
 that the unprejudiced reader can hardly help giving the palm to 
 the new theory over the old. And inasmuch as the writer fur- 
 nishes Simplicius with all possible arguments for the defense of 
 his cause, and most conscientiously puts into his mouth all possible 
 objections against the idea of the earth's motion, the total discom- 
 fiture of Aristotle and Ptolemy seems to he turned all the more 
 decisively to a victory for Copernicus. And yet at every new turn 
 in that direction the asseveration comes in from one or the other 
 Copernican, that no ultimate decision on the doubtful question 
 can be reached by mathematics and physics or by logic and phi- 
 losophy, but only " by a higher intelligence ; " and Salviati re- 
 peatedly protests to Simplicius, that by no means will he maintain 
 the truth of the Copernican doctrine, on the contrary must declare 
 it as possibly only a fancy or a vain chimera. The manuscript of 
 this work when completed Galileo took with him to Rome, sub- 
 mitted it to the papal censorship, and obtained the formal permis- 
 sion to publish it. The work, though delayed in the publication by 
 many causes for nearly two years, at length was issued at Florence, 
 in 1632, bearing the Imprimatur both of the Florentine Inquisitor- 
 General and also of the papal censor at Rome. Once published 
 and circulated, its success as a scientific work was simply un- 
 precedented. It carried with it all truth-loving and independent 
 among the learned, and all intelligent ordinary readers, who were 
 
446 GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 not under the servitude of prejudice. But, on the other hand, 
 it had arrayed against it and its author, with the utmost bitter- 
 ness and fury of opposition, aU ultra-conservatives in science and 
 theology, and most of all the leaders of the Jesuit order in every 
 province of their manifold and all-penetrating influence. Pope 
 Urban himself was fixed in the conviction, whether of himself or 
 through the enemies of Galileo, that the interests of the church 
 and the authority of the Bible were in deadly peril from the newly 
 published heretical work. These motives were reinforced by a 
 strong personal one, which worked most mischievously against 
 Galileo's cause. This was the calumnious assertion, which he was 
 made to believe, that he himself was maliciously meant in Sim- 
 plicAus of the Dialogue. Whether or not the wounded vanity of 
 this high-spirited Pope thus entered as a factor into the prosecu- 
 tion soon to come, it is certain that the friendly disposition which 
 he had hitherto showed to Galileo now suddenly turned to an 
 apparent personal aversion. 
 
 Six months after the publication of the " Dialogue," the Pope 
 appointed a special commission for the examination of its doc- 
 trines ; and upon an unfavorable report which was made, Galileo 
 was summoned to appear before the Inquisition at Rome. Ill in 
 body and dejected in mind, the astronomer begged for a hearing at 
 Florence rather than at Rome, or at least for a delay. His ear- 
 nest entreaties, in which he was joined by his prince, were all in 
 vain, and at length, when the summons grew peremptory, and 
 looked towards force, he set out on his journey to Rome, and 
 reached the city, borne in a litter, in January, 1633. During his 
 stay in Rome he was treated as a prisoner of the Inquisition, but, 
 certainly it must be said, was treated as such with unusual clem- 
 ency. Twice, and in all seventeen days, he was in official cus- 
 tody, and then in a room in the palace of the Inquisition. He 
 was never in a prison. The trial continued from the 12th of 
 April to the end of July. The indictment ran, that he had de- 
 fended the Copernican doctrine, which in 1616 had been declared 
 false and unscriptural, and so had subjected himself to the charge 
 of heresy. To his reply, that in his " Dialogue " he had devel- 
 oped the arguments for the Ptolemaic and the Copernican system, 
 without teaching positively either, it was rejoined that he had at 
 least represented the Copernican view as probable, and that an 
 unscriptural opinion could not be probable. To the further plea 
 of Galileo, that his book had been submitted to censorship, and 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 447 
 
 had been approved, it was replied that he had gained the approval 
 surreptitiously, inasmuch as he had not informed the censor that 
 in 1616 he had promised never to enter into any discussion of the 
 Copernican system. Thereupon Galileo declared that he remem- 
 bered only that Cardinal Bellarmin had in that year forbidden 
 him only to defend the Copernican system, and that he thought 
 he had not acted contrary to that prohibition ; that he had no 
 remembrance of any order to enter into no discussion of the sys- 
 tem. At this stage of the trial there was put in evidence against 
 the prisoner the alleged minute of the Inquisition record, accord- 
 ing to which such a prohibition had been issued to Galileo on 
 the 26th of February, 1616, in the presence of the notary and 
 witnesses. The prisoner, however, protested that this prohibition 
 had never been made to him. The publication of the documents 
 of the trial clearly proves that on this head the prisoner was in the 
 right and the tribunal in the wrong. In the first place, the min- 
 ute has no "Signature to it nor any mark whatever of attestation, 
 and is, therefore, without any legal validity ; and it is incredible 
 how it could have been used as evidence by a tribunal professing 
 to be intelligent and honest. Besides, there is strong evidence 
 against its genuineness. It is in manifest contradiction to two 
 other documents, both unquestionably genuine, the one the proto- 
 col of the 3d of March, 1616, the other the certificate of Cardinal 
 Bellarmin of the 26th of May of the same year. It is also con- 
 trary to Galileo's repeated assertions during the trial and in his 
 written defense, and in his private letters. In addition, it is 
 wholly incredible that if such a prohibition had been issued, and 
 Galileo had promised to abide by it, the papal censors should have 
 been ignorant of such an important fact. This minute has there- 
 fore been pronounced on these grounds by Gherardi, and by von 
 Gebler and other writers, to be a forged document, fabricated after 
 the first trial to make a secure basis of evidence for the second 
 one. This questionable minute was, however, allowed to go into 
 the case against the prisoner, and it entered largely into the ground 
 of his conviction. Strong as are the above considerations against 
 the genuineness of this document, it is difficult to believe that it 
 was forged, and for the reason alleged, inasmuch as the Inqui- 
 sition might have condemned Galileo without the commissary's 
 prohibition, merely upon Bellarmin's admonition, as, by acqui- 
 escence in that, Galileo had promised to give up (deserere) the 
 obnoxious opinion, contrary to reason and nature though such a 
 
448 GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 promise certainly was. It may be that the document is the first 
 draft gotten ready by the notary, in expectation that Galileo 
 would not acquiesce in the admonition, and that, instead of be- 
 ing destroyed, it was preserved, and, whether by hona or mala fide 
 got into the record as a minute of a real and not an anticipated 
 transaction. That the prohibition, however, was never given, and 
 that Galileo never made the promise, and that the use in evidence 
 of the minute was an illegal proceeding, no unprejudiced mind 
 can entertain the slightest possible doubt. On the other side, the 
 publication of the Vatican manuscript has acquitted the Inquisi- 
 tion of the traditional charge that Galileo was subjected to the 
 judicial process of torture. The evidence clearly is that he was 
 threatened with torture, but that the threat was not executed. But 
 as we read this part of the record, we cannot but say, far better for 
 himself and his after fame had he been put to the torture, and 
 the truth of his real opinions thus have been elicited and even 
 wrested from him. It is a most humiliating page on the record. 
 He has just been examined on the question of his still holding or 
 not to the Copernican doctrine and has put in a solemn negative. 
 Then he was told that his " Dialogue " showed that he held to the 
 doctrine, and that if he did not confess the truth he would be 
 proceeded against by the fitting methods of law. The reply was : 
 " I do not hold and have not held this opinion since I was admon- 
 ished to give it up. I am here in your hands ; do with me as you 
 please." Then it was said again, and now plainly, that he must 
 own the truth or be put to the torture. His reply was : " I am 
 here to yield obedience ; as I have said, I have not held to this 
 opinion since the decision was made against it." The record then 
 ends thus : " And as nothing further could be had in execution of 
 the decree, he was remanded to his place, after subscribing his 
 name to the record." But these words, and many others like 
 them, which he had uttered, were too palpably untrue to be of 
 any avail. On the following day, the 22d of June, 1633, the sen- 
 tence of the Holy Office, bearing upon it the sanction of the 
 Holy Father, was read to him in the Church of Santa Maria so- 
 pra Minerva, the same church from whose high altar looks down 
 the " Christ " of Galileo's great countryman, Michael Angelo. 
 The sentence was for substance as follows : Galileo, in that he has 
 believed and taught the false and unscriptural doctrine that the 
 sun is the centre of the world and does not move from east to 
 west and that the earth moves, has subjected himself to the suspi- 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 449 
 
 cion of heresy ; the penalties, however, affixed to such a trans- 
 gression by the holy canons may be remitted, on condition that he 
 abjure and curse and abhor the aforesaid heresy, and all other 
 heresies. The " Dialogue " published by him is to be prohibited. 
 He himself is condemned to imprisonment for such time as may 
 hereafter be determined by the Holy Office, and moreover must 
 for three years utter in prayer once a week the seven penitential 
 psalms. Galileo's abjuration immediately followed. The form 
 accords with the sentence, and with unimportant omissions runs as 
 follows : — 
 
 " I swear that I have ever believed, and now believe, and with 
 God's help ever will believe, all that the Holy Catholic and Apos- 
 tolic Roman Church holds, preaches, and teaches. But because I 
 have been suspected of heresy by the Holy Office, for believing 
 that the sun is the centre of the world and is stationary, and the 
 earth is not the centre and that it moves, therefore, in order to re- 
 move this suspicion, I abjure, condemn, and abhor the aforesaid 
 heresy, and all other, and I furthermore swear that in future I will 
 never maintain by writing or word of mouth, what may bring me 
 under like suspicion, but that, on the contrary, if I shall know of 
 any one as heretically inclined, I will report him to this Holy Of- 
 fice. I furthermore solemnly promise that I will completely fulfill 
 all penalties already laid, or to be laid, upon me by this Holy Of- 
 fice. Should I ever violate these promises and oaths of mine, then 
 I will subject to all penalties affixed to such offenses. So help me 
 God, and these holy Gospels, which I here and now touch with my 
 hands." 
 
 This form Galileo pronounced upon his knees. That, however, 
 he was clothed in any dress of a penitent, or of a condemned male- 
 factor, is one of the many fictions which later traditions have flung 
 about this sad scene. Also, that on rising from his knees he 
 uttered the words, ^' Eppur si muove^^^ belongs to the same cycle 
 of legends. On the day after, Galileo was allowed by the Pope 
 to take up his abode in the house of the Tuscan ambassador. A 
 week later, permission was given him to live in Siena, with an 
 accompanying order not to leave that city without consent of the 
 Inquisition. On the 1st of December, 1633, he was allowed to re- 
 move to his country estate, not far from Florence, under the con- 
 dition that he was there to receive no visits. The petition which 
 he submitted, not long after, to go to Florence for medical treat- 
 ment, was refused, and he was bidden to refrain from any further 
 
450 GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 petition of that sort, on pain of being called back to his place of 
 confinement in the Inquisition building at Kome. Five years later, 
 in February, 1638, the inquisitor at Florence was charged to in- 
 vestigate Galileo's health, and to report upon the same, and also 
 whether his return to Florence might lead to a renewal of hereti- 
 cal discussion. The inquisitor replied as follows : " The astrono- 
 mer is quite blind, and is suffering from severe bodily ailment and 
 perpetual sleeplessness. The physician thinks he will never re- 
 cover. He looks more like a corpse than a living man." There- 
 upon Galileo had permission to live in his own house in Florence, 
 under the express condition that he was neither to make or receive 
 any visits. Another formal application needed to be made to the 
 Holy Office to procure permission from the holy apostolic Catholic 
 Church for this blind, feeble, dying old man to step out of his 
 house to hear Mass in a neighboring church. But let me linger 
 no longer on the sad details of the last years of his life. At the 
 beginning of the year 1639 he was borne back to his place at 
 Arcetri. There he died on the 8th of January, 1642, in the sev- 
 enty-eighth year of his age, in the faith and under the comforting 
 last offices of the church of which he had ever been a faithful 
 member. His son and his two pupils, Yiviani and Torricelli, were 
 with him in his last hours, and officers of the Inquisition saw him 
 close his eyes in death. But the ecclesiastical power which had 
 persecuted him when living, pursued him also to his grave. His 
 wish expressed in his will to be buried in his family tomb, in the 
 Church of Santa Croce, was denied him ; he was put away by him- 
 self in a side chapel, and by papal direction no stone was to mark 
 the spot where he lay. This church ban lay upon the dead astron- 
 omer for nearly a century ; tiU at last, in 1737, by the grace of the 
 Inquisition, his remains were deposited in the family tomb, and a 
 monument erected to his memory, and then, too, no inscription 
 might be carved upon it till it had passed the Inquisition's inspec- 
 tion. But long before this tardy honor was done to the ashes of 
 Galileo, the truths for which he had struggled and suffered had 
 passed quite victoriously far beyond the dictum of Pope or church, 
 into the knowledge and faith of the world. The church authori- 
 ties at last gave up all opposition to it, but only when opposition 
 was naught but a solecism. Not till the year 1757 did it seem to 
 the Congregation of the Index that the right time had come to 
 erase from the decree of the 5th of March, 1616, the general pro- 
 hibition against all books which taught the mobility of the earth. 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 451 
 
 The learned and enlightened Pope, Benedict XIV., gladly gave 
 his sanction to the proposition on the 11th of May of that year, 
 and so the prohibition was removed. Nevertheless, the special pro- 
 hibition of the original edition of Copernicus, of a book of Kep- 
 ler, and the " Dialogue " of Galileo, remained in full force down to 
 the present century. The last of these works appeared, indeed, in 
 Padua, in 1744 ; but it was allowed to be published only with the 
 sentence against Galileo prefixed to it, together with Galileo's ab- 
 juration. As late as 1820, Professor Settele of Rome wrote a book 
 on astronomy, but the imiwimatur of Padre Anfossio, the papal 
 censor, was refused him, because in it he treated the Copernican 
 views, not as hypotheses, but as ascertained facts. But the pro- 
 fessor appealed to Pope Pius VII., who referred the matter to the 
 Inquisition. The result was a formal decree, issued in 1822, under 
 the sanction of the Pope, by which permission of publication was 
 vouchsafed to all works which taught (I quote from the decree) 
 " the universal opinion of modern astronomers touching the mobil- 
 ity of the earth and the immobility of the sun." In the next edi- 
 tion of the " Index," published in 1835, the books of Copernicus, 
 Kepler, and Galileo were, for the first time, dropped out from the 
 prohibited works. Thus it was that the declaration of the two 
 congregations of the Inquisition and the Index, confirmed by the 
 Pope's sanction, was published to the world, that both the Popes, 
 Paul V. and Urban VIII., had been in error when they declared 
 the Copernican doctrine to be a heresy. This radical change 
 seems to bear quite decisively against the infallibility of the Cath- 
 olic Church, and of its papal head ; and it is of no avail to say that 
 the Popes whose decision was thus reversed by their apostolical 
 successor did not speak ex cathedra. The fact stands there, nev- 
 ertheless, that the very same thing which was declared in the sev- 
 enteenth century, by two Popes, to be a heresy, was declared by a 
 Pope in the nineteenth century to be allowable doctrine. Cardi- 
 nal Bellarmin, who communicated the admonition to Galileo, char- 
 acterized the declaration of the heresy (I quote again his own 
 words) " as a declaration given by our lord (the Pope), and pub- 
 lished by the Congregation of the Index ; " and after the condem- 
 nation of Galileo by a tribunal over which Urban VIII. presided, 
 the sentence was sent abroad, by papal order, to all the papal nun- 
 cios in Europe, and to all bishops and inquisitors throughout Italy. 
 Prom these can it be maintained that these two Popes acted in 
 these proceedings only as private persons, and not ex cathedra f 
 
452 GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 But if it can be maintained, then it necessarily follows that the 
 Copernican doctrine had never been pronounced a heresy, and so 
 the whole process against Galileo for heresy rested on no ecclesi- 
 astical basis whatever. Certainly no ecumenical council had pro- 
 nounced upon the subject, and neither the Inquisition nor the In- 
 dex Congregation, nor both together, were competent to make a 
 declaration of heresy, and so if Pope Paul V. did not, in this case, 
 speak ex cathedra^ then Galileo was tried and condemned con- 
 trary to the principles and usages of the Catholic Church. But 
 only an extreme Catholic or an extreme Protestant may care to 
 dwell on this part of this subject. For most students of ecclesias- 
 tical and scientific history, the great lesson taught here by the 
 whole melancholy transaction is the unwisdom as well as impo- 
 tence of any church authority in contending against the freedom 
 of honest inquiry in matters of science, and especially in contend- 
 ing against laws which are the legitimate expression of general 
 facts in nature. To use an Old Testament poetical expression, 
 which, so far as I know, even mediaeval theologians have never 
 taken literally, it will only be another illustration of the stars in 
 their courses fighting against Sisera. 
 
 But let us remember, in explanation, if not in excuse, of the 
 proceedings against Galileo, that his astronomical views seemed 
 to strike such a radical blow at the fundamental reigning concep- 
 tions of the Catholic Church, and indeed of Protestant churches 
 as well, as to render their acceptance or toleration scarcely possi- 
 ble. If, as all men and all good Christians had believed, the 
 earth was no more the centre of the universe, it seemed then 
 that Christianity and the Christian church was no longer the 
 centre of the world's history. If this planet were only a speck 
 in the infinite space of nature, it seemed hardly tenable or credi- 
 ble that the Deity had come down into such an insignificant corner 
 of creation, to become incarnate in man, and to live and die for 
 the salvation of the human race. One cannot help recalling in 
 contrast how such a view, put forward in later times by unbeliev- 
 ers, appeared to be so formidable an argument against the Chris- 
 tian system that its refutation was the occasion and the design of 
 Dr. Chalmers' magnificent "Discourses on the Modern Astron- 
 omy." Let it also be added to this fact of the prevailing Christian 
 conceptions at the time of Galileo, that the importance attached 
 by the Catholic Church to the authority of tradition, and the 
 proceedings against the innovating astronomer are further ex- 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 453 
 
 plained, though by no means justified. It was logically inconsis- 
 tent with the very principles and usages of this church to tolerate 
 a doctrine and its consequent interpretation of Scripture directly 
 opposed to the doctrine and scriptural interpretation which hith- 
 erto had always and universally obtained. Here, if anywhere, 
 was applicable, in fullest force, the dogma of quod semper^ quod 
 ubique, quod ah omnibus creditum est, for until Copernicus what 
 had been so universally and always and everywhere believed as 
 the revolution of the sun around the earth ? But yet is it not fair 
 to say that if this trial and condemnation of Galileo was thus in 
 logical consistency with Catholic principle and conduct, then so 
 much the worse for that principle and its consequences. A church 
 which, by its very constitution, must needs condemn the incon- 
 testible results of science, and cannot tolerate the unprejudiced 
 observation of nature, nor the maintenance and discussion of 
 physical laws, and yet must finally allow and concede by decree 
 what by decree it has denied and condemned, — how can it defend 
 its claim to be an infallible keeper of truth and the infallible 
 guide of mankind? But apart from all consideration of Catholic 
 principles, this condemning sentence of the Inquisition, considered 
 simply as a prosecuting tribunal, must itself be condemned alike by 
 law and by morality. In addition to the points which have been 
 incidentally made in the course, it is enough for the legal con- 
 demnation of the entire prosecution, that the book for which Gali- 
 leo was tried and sentenced had been previously submitted to 
 the papal censorship, and had received its formal approbation. 
 When the book was published in Florence it came into the world 
 fortified by the Imprimatur of the papal censor, of the Florentine 
 General Inquisitor, of the Vicar- General of Florence, and of 
 two other subordinate authorities. These were the constituted 
 authorities of the church, and it was their constitutional function 
 to attend to this very business of deciding upon the orthodox 
 character of books to be sent forth to the world. By giving their 
 formal approbation to Galileo's work, they took upon themselves 
 the responsibility of publication, and, through them as agents, the 
 church itself and its head as the principal assumed the same re- 
 sponsibility, and the writer thereby was relieved of such responsi- 
 bility. Further, it was simply an impertinence to say, as was 
 said in the indictment and in the examination, that the accused 
 had not told the censor that an order had been issued to him 
 not to write such a book, and that he had promised to obey it. 
 
454 GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 
 
 and therefore that he had gained the permission surreptitiously. 
 What an extraordinary idea, that the author should thus volunteer 
 information to the constituted censor, and to teach him what he 
 ought to know himself, if, indeed, it was a thing to be known at 
 aU ! But finally, on this head, it is decisively to be added that, 
 as we have already seen, the alleged order was never given to 
 Galileo at all, and so there was nothing of the sort to be told, or 
 to be known by Galileo or by any one else. It is manifest, there- 
 fore, that the offense of publishing the celebrated "Dialogue" 
 was chargeable upon the censorship of the church, and upon the 
 church itself, and not all upon the author of the book. The con- 
 sent once formally given by the church authorities and the respon- 
 sibility thus assumed, the utmost to be legally done afterwards, in 
 case the book were judged to be heterodox, was to retract the con- 
 sent and prohibit further publication ; but no punishment might 
 justly be inflicted upon the author himself. And yet this feeble 
 old man, broken down in body and spirit by trouble and disap- 
 pointment, was dragged through that tedious three months' trial, 
 and condemned and sentenced for heresy, and in penalty thereof 
 subjected to a restraint of all freedom of life and action, which lay 
 upon him for nine weary years, till at last it wore him into his 
 grave. But far more serious than all else are the moral grounds 
 on which the condemnation of Galileo is to be condemned. He 
 was sentenced by a Christian tribunal to abjure and curse as here- 
 sies in religion, truths in nature which he had reached by surest 
 proof, and which he as firmly believed as his own existence. Con- 
 sider in its bearings upon the members of the Holy Office the 
 moral character of that transaction, — Galileo's abjuration. Of 
 the seven cardinals who signed their names to the sentence, there 
 was assuredly not one who believed in his heart that Galileo had 
 changed his opinion touching the laws of the universe in conse- 
 quence of their sentence. And yet, in presence of that Christian 
 tribunal, the Pope its presiding head, and of an assemblage of 
 Christian cardinals and prelates, at the bidding of a Christian 
 ecclesiastical authority, Galileo kneels there in a Christian church 
 and asserts in form of solemn oath, his hand upon the Holy Gos- 
 pels, that the doctrine of the truth of which he had no doubt, after 
 the sentence any more than before, he abjures (abjured) ^ curses 
 (maledicat)^ and abhors (^et dete&tetur) with sincere heart (corde 
 sincero) and unfeigned faith (et fide non ficta). Thus, in honor 
 of God and of Christ's Church, in accordance with the bidding of 
 
GALILEO AND THE INQUISITION. 455 
 
 the Holy Catholic Office, was a formal perjury uttered by the most 
 learned man of Italy, who for more than forty years had achieved 
 more in the cause of science than any man of his time. 
 
 And in this transaction a sad part indeed it is which is done by 
 Galileo himself. From the very inception of the trial he aban- 
 dons every thought of defending his own convictions ; he feels 
 himself given over to a power against which he cannot contend ; 
 his sole weapon is submission. But one may not judge him 
 harshly, but rather try to see how such an end were possible of 
 such a career. By nature his impulse to the investigation of truth 
 was far greater than his moral courage ; his character fell far 
 below the endowments of his mind. We may compare him in 
 this respect with his contemporary, Lord Bacon, in whom moral 
 weakness and intellectual strength appear in a yet more marked 
 contrast. And as Bacon doubtless suffered from the corrupting 
 influences of the government under which he lived, so Galileo 
 from the narrowing and weakening influence of the Catholic 
 Church. So far from not being a good Catholic, as his enemies 
 declared, Galileo was only too loyal and faithful a servant of the 
 church. He grew up and lived and acted under far too submis- 
 sive a faith in its claims upon his obedience. From the time that 
 his discoveries and his convictions brought him into collision with 
 the church, he labored under the delusion that the church would 
 be won to the truth whith had won his own mind and heart, and 
 in this delusion he was ever striving to gain validity and adoption 
 for his views, while yet he shrank from direct conflict with the 
 church by endeavoring in all possible ways to render an outward 
 and formal obedience to its will. When at last he was brought to 
 the alternative of free inquiry and authority, he submitted to the 
 latter ; rather than defend the truth even to the death, he denied 
 and abjured it, submitting his reason and his conscience to the 
 will of an infallible church. 
 
DEAN STANLEY ON BAPTISM. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR "THE WATCHMAN," 1879. 
 
 American Baptists doubtless remember the gracious reception 
 by the Dean of Westminster of the address presented to him when 
 in this country by a delegation of Baptist ministers of New York 
 and Brooklyn, He was pleased to remark that " it was not too 
 much for him to say, that he regarded the great Baptist denomina- 
 tion with deep interest." With that courtly grace of speech with 
 which the very reverend dean adorns everything which he touches, 
 he then made mention of the " principal ceremony " of the denom- 
 ination, " that of immersion," saying, " We ought to be grateful 
 to you for having, almost alone in the Western Church, preserved 
 intact this singular and interesting relic of primitive and apostolic 
 times ; which we," added the church historian, with a quiet, 
 churchly dignity, " which we have, at least in our practice, wisely 
 discarded." We have been reminded of these words of Dean 
 Stanley in reading an essay of his on " Baptism," published in the 
 " Nineteenth Century " for October. It illustrates his character- 
 istic qualities as a theological writer, his learning, the charms of 
 his style, the catholicity of his spirit, and especially the exceeding 
 broadness of his views on matters of Christian faith and practice, 
 and most of all his facile manner of setting aside what he himself 
 declares to be the Scriptural mode of administering the ordinance 
 of baptism. In regard, however, to the " original form " of the 
 ordinance in apostolic times, and its inner and abiding significance, 
 nothing could be stronger on the Baptist side of the subject than 
 the views unfolded and illustrated by Dean Stanley in this essay. 
 We are glad to put on record in our columns an abstract of these 
 views, and to quote his words on some important points, as valua- 
 ble testimony to the truth. The apostolic baptism he describes as 
 expressive of a marvelous religious change, the greatest the world 
 had ever known. Men and women in great multitudes, seized by 
 a common impulse, acting from irresistible conviction, gave up all 
 former habits, their family, their friends, and associates, to enter 
 a new society. That society was one of " brothers," and yet bound 
 
DEAN STANLEY ON BAPTISM. 457 
 
 by ties closer than any earthly brotherhood ; a society, all whose 
 members were bound in remembrance and faith to One whom 
 they loved with a love unspeakable. Now the act by which they 
 passed into this new society was at once natural and expressive. 
 It was " a plunge into the bath of purification," a rite long known 
 among the Jews as a symbol of a change of life, and now retained 
 by the command of Him into whose name his disciples were " bap- 
 tized." The scene was sometimes a wayside spring, sometimes a 
 rushing river, or some vast reservoir. The water, so significant 
 of all that was pure^ " closed over the heads of the converts," and 
 " they rose to the light of heaven, new beings." It was an act 
 that was figuratively described as a burial, a regeneration, a resur- 
 rection, " a new creation." The writer then considers the essen- 
 tial meaning of the ordinance, which he thinks stiU lives in the 
 practice of the church, notwithstanding the changes in its form of 
 administration. Three things belong to this essential meaning. 
 And first, it is a sign of the purity which belongs to the Christian 
 disposition and character. By choosing water and the use of the 
 bath as the initiative Christian rite, the Saviour meant to teach 
 that the Christian was to be " clean and pure in body and in soul 
 and spirit." " Wash and be clean," was the prophet's command 
 to the Syrian. " Cleanliness next allied to godliness " was the 
 maxim of the Christian John Wesley. And this element of the 
 significance of the rite still remains, notwithstanding all changes 
 of its form. " Every time we see the drops of water poured over 
 the face in baptism," they are " signs to us of the cleanly habits 
 which our Master prized when He founded the rite." Second, 
 the act of baptism, as " an entire submersion in the deep water," 
 was a sign of a complete change of character. The apostles called 
 it " the burial of the old former self and the rising up of the new 
 self." " We are buried," said the Apostle Paul, " with Christ by 
 baptism." This lesson, Dr. Stanley tells his readers, is "one 
 which yet lives, though the essence of the material form is gone. 
 It is but the few drops sprinkled," he says,- but yet " the thing 
 signified still keeps before us what Christians were intended to 
 be." To a Baptist, the simplicity of this language is quite delight- 
 ful. But, third, " the immersion in baptism " was also a sign of 
 " the Christian profession," which was, " to follow Christ and be 
 like to Him." This was expressed by the early Christians in two 
 ways: 1, "when they came up from the waters," they were wrapped 
 round with a white robe, an emblem of the moral fact that they 
 
458 DEAN STANLEY ON BAPTISM. 
 
 were " wrapped with the righteousness of Christ in deed and in 
 truth ; " and 2, this was what " made baptism a sacrament in the 
 original sense of the word as an oath of allegiance,'''' As the Ro- 
 man soldier, on his enlistment, took the oath of fealty to the em- 
 peror, so the Christian convert bound himself by the sacrament 
 of baptism to follow his Master whithersoever He might lead 
 him. 
 
 So much for the significance of baptism and its spiritual lessons. 
 The learned writer thence passes to consider the changes in the 
 administration of the rite, and the lessons wljich he derives from 
 them. And here we are glad to give the dean's testimony, chiefly 
 in his own words. And first of the mode he says, that " for the 
 first thirteen centuries the almost universal practice was that of 
 the New Testament, and which is the very meaning of the word 
 'baptize,' that the baptized were immersed into the water. It 
 had, no doubt, the sanction of the apostles and of their Master. 
 It had the sanction, too, of the venerable churches of the early 
 ages. Baptism by sprinkling was rejected by the whole ancient 
 church as no baptism at all. In the Eastern Church, baptism by 
 immersion is still continued, the cold climate of Russia being no 
 obstacle to its continuance throughout that vast empire. In the 
 Western Church it still lingers among the Roman Catholics in the 
 solitary instance of the Cathedral of Milan, and among Protest- 
 ants in the austere sect of the Baptists. In a version of the Bible 
 which the Baptist church in America has made, it has been 
 thought necessary — and on 'philological grounds it is quite cor- 
 rect [the italics are ours] — to translate John the Baptist by John 
 the Immerser. With these exceptions the whole Western Church 
 has now substituted for the ancient bath the ceremony of sprin- 
 kling a few drops of water on the face." No one could ask for a 
 better historical view of the ordinance than this, and " the Bap- 
 tists " can well afford to be called " the austere sect " by the very 
 reverend the dean of Westminster, when he describes them as fol- 
 lowing in the footsteps of " the glorious company of the apostles," 
 and of the whole Christian church of " the first thirteen centu- 
 ries." And now how does Dr. Stanley explain and justify this 
 departure from the baptism of the New Testament and of the 
 early church ? His " obvious reason " is that " the practice of 
 immersion, so suitable for southern and eastern countries, was un- 
 suitable for the tastes and convenience of the countries of the west 
 and north." And what is the lesson to be learned ? Why, it is 
 
DEAN STANLEY ON BAPTISM. 459 
 
 " a striking example of the triumph of common-sense and conven- 
 ience over the bondage of form and custom. It shows the wisdom 
 of not imposing customs of other nations and climates on those to 
 whom they are not congenial." And yet it was " a great change ; 
 the change from immersion to sprinkling has set aside the larger 
 part of the language of the apostles regarding baptism, and has 
 altered the very meaning of the word." We quite agree with 
 Dean Stanley in his concluding remark on this head, that this 
 " substitution must have seemed to many at the time, as it now 
 seems to the Baptists, a very dangerous innovation." 
 
 But the change in respect to the subjects of baptism is next dis- 
 cussed, and in like manner. In the apostolic age, and in the next 
 three centuries, it was " the general rule that those who came to 
 baptism came in full age and of their own deliberate choice. We 
 find a few cases of the baptism of children, and one of the bap- 
 tism of infants. But such instances as Chrysostom and Augustine 
 and Ambrose prove that the rite was not only not obligatory (for 
 infants), but also not usual. The liturgical service of baptism was 
 formed entirely for adult converts. But since the fifth century 
 the whole Christian world have practiced infant baptism." With 
 like facility Dean Stanley justifies this new departure also. The 
 justification is obviously found in " the Christian feeling that in a 
 Christian household every member was consecrated." The apos- 
 tle taught in 1 Cor. vii. 14, " that the children were holy, because 
 the parents were holy." Of this passage the dean remarks, that 
 while it " is conclusive against infant baptism in the apostolic age, 
 it is a recognition of the permanent principle on which it is 
 founded. It is the acknowledgment of the Christian saintliness 
 and union of family life." But infant baptism, he contends, is 
 also " a recognition of the good which there is in children, as in 
 every human soul." In those little children of Galilee, on whom 
 the Saviour laid blessing hands, " He saw the likeness of the king- 
 dom of heaven. The substitution of infant baptism for adult bap- 
 tism is thus a lesson of Christian charity. It is a standing testi- 
 mony to the value and eternal significance of what Bishop Butler 
 calls natural religion. It is the expression of the proper place 
 (of children) in the Christian church and in the instincts of the 
 civilized world." We need not pass any judgment upon these 
 views. Their statement is their own best refutation. If this is 
 the best defense that the " Nineteenth Century " can make — and 
 in the person of so learned an ecclesiastical historian as Dean 
 
460 DEAN STANLEY ON BAPTISM. 
 
 Stanley — of "sprinkling" and of "infant baptism," we appre- 
 hend that they must continue to go undefended. But we fancy 
 that some of our pedobaptist scholars, as they see the Dean of 
 Westminster coming to the rescue with these weapons, will take 
 up the lament of Hecuba : — 
 
 " Non tali auxilio nee def ensoribus istis 
 Tempus eget." 
 
PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S BELFAST ADDRESS. 
 
 WRITTEN AS AN EDITORIAL FOR THE "PROVIDENCE JOURNAL." 
 
 The seventh edition of Professor Tyndall's Belfast Address, as 
 reprinted by the Messrs. Appleton, makes a volume of one hun- 
 dred and twenty pages, about one half of which, in preface and 
 appendix, consists of new matter. This edition contains also nu- 
 merous additions silently inserted in the body of the address. 
 In some of these Mr. Tyndall takes occasion to make still further 
 liberal uses of Lange's " History of Materialism," a work to 
 which he was indebted, as he very properly acknowledged, for a 
 large part of the material of the address as it was at first writ- 
 ten. We find one passage introduced (on page 58 of the Ameri- 
 can reprint), in the use of which we think that Mr. Tyndall has 
 mistranslated the German, and misinterpreted his author. We 
 beg to call attention to this new portion of the address, for the 
 view of Lange is one of great value, and ought to be brought out 
 with its unimpaired force of truth. Professor Tyndall introduces 
 the quotation (we give his words) " to say a few words on the 
 effects, as regards science, of the general introduction of mono- 
 theism among European nations." And here he draws — and no 
 one can object to his doing so — from an admirable passage in 
 Lange, which occurs on page 150 of the first volume of his work. 
 Mr. Tyndall first says, and, on the whole, very truly, " Referring 
 to the condition of the heathen, who sees a God behind every nat- 
 ural event, thus peopling the world with thousands of beings, 
 whose caprices are incalculable, Lange shows the impossibility of 
 any compromise between such notions and those of science, which 
 proceeds on the assumption of never changing law and causality." 
 " But," he continues with characteristic penetration (and now 
 Mr. Tyndall translates Lange), "when the great thought of one 
 God, acting as a unit upon the universe, has been seized, the con- 
 nection of things in accordance with the law of cause and effect 
 is not only thinkable, but it is a necessary consequence of the 
 assumption. For when I see ten thousand wheels in motion, and 
 know or believe thajfc they are all driven by one, then I know that 
 
462 PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S BELFAST ADDRESS. 
 
 I have before me a mechanism, the action of every part of which 
 is determined by the plan of the whole. So much being assumed, 
 it follows that I may investigate the structure of that machine and 
 the various motions of its parts. For the time being, therefore, 
 this conception renders scientific action free." 
 
 This translation is rather a free one throughout, as any one 
 may see by comparing it with the original ; but yet, in respect 
 to correctness, it is open to serious criticism only in one place, 
 and that is in the words "driven hy oneP Mr. Tyndall here 
 represents Lange as putting the case that the "ten thousand 
 wheels " are set in motion " by one " wheel ; whereas, Lange 's 
 supposition really is that " only one single heing " puts them all in 
 motion — words which of course give a very different aspect to 
 the figure, and to the truth which it is intended to teach. Lange's 
 words are as follows : " Denn wenn ich irgendwo tausend und 
 aber tausend Rader bewegt sahe, und nur einen Einzigen ver- 
 muthete, der sie zu treiben schiene, so wiirde ich u. s. w." 
 Every one at all acquainted with German sees at once that the 
 words " einen Einzigen " can mean nothing but one single being ; 
 and every reader must see also the bearing of the words upon the 
 monotheistic view of the whole frame of nature, and of its gov- 
 ernment, which the supposition is intended to illustrate. But lest 
 we may do Mr. Tyndall injustice by giving only his translation, 
 we will add his interpretation, which he gives in his next two sen- 
 tences, as follows : " In other words, were a capricious God at the 
 circumference of every wheel, and at the end of each lever, the 
 action of the machine would be incalculable by the methods of sci- 
 ence. But the action of all its parts being rigidly determined by 
 their connections and relations, and these being brought into play, 
 by a single self-acting driving-wheel (the italics are ours, not 
 Mr. Tyndall's), then, though this last prime mover may elude me, 
 I am still able to comprehend the machinery which it sets in mo- 
 tion." Now this interpretation, so far from relieving the transla- 
 tion of the mistake, makes the mistake still worse. The " self- 
 acting " is purely gratuitous on the part of the translator ; it is 
 not in the German at all. It is clear enough what view Mr. 
 Tyndall wishes to convey by the use of that word, as well as by 
 the words " though this last prime mover may elude me,'* but it is 
 just as clear that the view is his own, and not Lange's. Both in 
 the figure itself, and in the universe which it figuratively repre- 
 sents, Lange makes the agent not a mechanical, but a personal 
 
PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S BELFAST ADDRESS. 463 
 
 one ; it is a person, and only one person ; and that is the central 
 idea of the whole passage, and the idea which the translator quite 
 fails to give his readers. But whether Mr. Tyndall be right or 
 wrong in this matter, let us have Lange's idea in the full, undi- 
 minished force of its truth. He shows the unique relation which 
 Christianity, as a pure monotheism, sustains to science. In con- 
 trast with all polytheistic religions. Christian monotheism, by its 
 truth of one only God and his one uniform agency throughout the 
 universe, makes "the causal connection of all things not only 
 thinkable but necessary." It establishes the universal " reign of 
 law," and gives free, unlimited scope to the progress of science. 
 
FEOUDE'S C^SAE. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, JANUARY 30, 1880. 
 
 Mr. Froude has found a theme eminently suited to his liter- 
 ary genius in the Roman revolution and its master-spirit, Julius 
 Caesar. The period compassed by it is one of unrivaled historical 
 importance in its many swift following events of world-wide sig- 
 nificance with their rapid movement of affairs in politics, society, 
 and war; and with the great men of marked individual character 
 who figure in them in numerous and brilliant succession. It is a 
 period, too, which, in its chief features, is peculiarly rich in dra- 
 matic interest. The fall of the Roman republic closes a grand 
 drama of intensely real national life, the career of Caesar marking 
 the catastrophe, — his towering figure standing in conspicuous 
 solitude, but only to linger for a brief while on the before 
 crowded and tumultuous stage. Mr. Froude quickens his readers 
 to a full consciousness of the dramatic character of all that mem- 
 orable era by the power of imagination with which he conceives 
 and represents it ; it is all reproduced with such a vividness that, 
 as it moves on over his pages, it affects the imagination and the 
 passions, even as the scenes of some great tragedy which is in- 
 stinct with the truth of history and real life. Indeed, it is not one 
 tragedy alone that he puts upon his historic stage, but a series of 
 three, as it were, after the manner of the Greek Dramatists, a 
 trilogy of tragedies, as he takes into his plan all that in histori- 
 cal order prepared the way for Csesar, and so combines with his 
 fortunes those of the two Gracchi, and then of Marius and Sulla 
 into a threefold action as they all enter into one and the same cycle 
 of events which are moving on to a common catastrophe. Fortu- 
 nate, thus, in the characteristic features of the theme itself, Mr. 
 Froude is no less fortunate in the kindred character of authorities 
 on which he relies for the representation of the chief personages 
 and events. In the Commentaries of Csesar and the speeches and 
 letters of Cicero, he had access to full and authentic records which 
 are valuable not merely because these writers were consummate 
 masters of Latin prose, nor even because they were contemporary 
 
FROUDE'S CiESAR. 466 
 
 with the events they record, and were also the chiefest actors in 
 them ; their quite inestimable value lies in the fact that they were 
 written in such a spirit and with such ends and aims that they 
 reveal and bring to immediate view all that is most characteristic 
 of the period to which they belonged. The Commentaries of Caesar 
 on the Gallic and Civil Wars, though originally written as mili- 
 tary dispatches to the Koman government, yet themselves illus- 
 trate some of the highest qualities of historical composition. As 
 Cicero finely says of them in his " Brutus," they are straightfor- 
 ward and elegant, though divested of all needless ornaments. As 
 their author designed them, he adds, to furnish the material for 
 history, conceited writers thought to deck them out with the graces 
 of style ; but wise men discerned in them such models of pure and 
 brilliant conciseness that they despaired of writing history at all. 
 The conquests which the Gallic Commentaries narrate not only 
 enlarged the dominions and resources of Rome, but also won for 
 Csesar an army and a great military name and power, and so 
 opened the path before him more than aught else for the suprem- 
 acy which he afterward attained. In this work, too, and in his 
 work on the Civil War, Csesar adroitly endeavored to put himself 
 right with Rome and the world in respect to his conduct and its 
 motives; to justify his aggressive wars against the Gallic and 
 German tribes, and his attitude of hostility to Pompeius and the 
 senate as well as to the constitution of his country. From Cicero 
 no less than from Caesar has Mr. Froude drawn most valuable 
 material for the exposition and illustration of his theme. Cicero's 
 numerous speeches, master as he was of Roman eloquence in every 
 sphere of its exercise, the bar, the curia, and the rostra, touch 
 or unfold or fully discuss well-nigh every great matter which was 
 debated by the senate, every important movement set on foot by 
 the people, the career and character of every man who was promi- 
 nent in public life. But the letters of Cicero form an affluent 
 and ever fresh source of knowledge for all that important part 
 of the period in which Caesar and Cicero were the prominent 
 figures on the scene of Roman life. They furnish altogether the 
 fullest and best materials for the history of the time as well as 
 for the biography of Caesar, and also of Cicero and of every 
 notable Roman contemporary with them. We have here a cor- 
 respondence extending over a period of twenty-five years, carried 
 on perpetually and well-nigh daily, with all the chief statesmen 
 of Rome, and in which, as the letters were not designed for pub- 
 
466 FROUDE'S C^SAR. 
 
 lication, all measures and their promoters or opponents, all mo- 
 mentous events in every shifting phase of politics are most freely- 
 discussed, and the statements and opinions of their writers are 
 expressed with entire unreserve. In these disclosures of men 
 who, both by observation and experience, are best qualified to 
 write of the affairs of the country, you not only get views of all 
 that they have said and done in the air and light of public life, 
 but you may follow them from the Campus Martins and the Fo- 
 rum into the interiors of their own homes whether in their villas 
 or their city mansions, and see them there in their hours of seclu- 
 sion amid their fluctuations of hope and fear, of triumph and 
 disappointment, and listen to their most secret thoughts and pur- 
 poses which they scarce dare whisper to themselves, and yet ven- 
 ture to voice in their confidential communications to trusted 
 friends. One can readily imagine with what studious fondness 
 Mr. Froude must have lingered amidst his labors on these most 
 interesting remains of Koman letters, doubtless often turning 
 aside from his main course of inquiry to delight himself with the 
 exquisite diction of these writings or gaze upon the pictures of 
 social and private life, the studies of friendship or individual 
 character, and all the inner play of springs and motives of con- 
 duct which they constantly present. One cannot but notice the 
 evidence which this extensive correspondence gives us of the 
 highly cultivated Roman society of that generation, of the large 
 number of its well-educated and literary men, and of the genuine 
 urhanitas^ to use a favorite word of his, which adorned and 
 dignified their tone of conversation and their style of writing. 
 We have here the letters of many men who were constantly occu- 
 pied with professional and public business, and are not known to 
 us as authors; but they all write in the same pure diction as 
 Cicero himself. They have not, indeed, his copiousness and inim- 
 itable grace of speech, his absolute mastery of the Roman tongue, 
 whether for soberest discussion or for flexible play of wit and 
 fancy, but they all carry in their noble freedom of manner, their 
 apt and rounded expression of their thought, the genuine stamp 
 of literary training and taste. But it is, of course, the letters to 
 Atticus, making up about one half of the eight hundred in the 
 whole correspondence, which have the highest historical as well as 
 literary value. We take less to heart the loss of so many of the 
 "Orations," when we have this large collection of such letters 
 safe in our hands, and may possess ourselves of their rich instruc- 
 tion and entertainment. 
 
FROUDE'S CiESAR. 467 
 
 What makes these full memoirs of these times so interesting 
 and valuable is the fact that being written by Cicero, a man of 
 the liveliest imagination and warmest sympathies, to the receptive 
 and congenial Atticus, whom he loved and perfectly trusted, they 
 unfold and discuss the men and the measures, the plans and 
 the acts of the passing days with no cautious side looks towards 
 the public, but with the absolute abandon of one who feels only 
 that he is saying what most interests him in the ear and heart of 
 a sympathetic friend, and to whom he can say with entire confi- 
 dence whatever he will, whether grave or trifling, and whether 
 good or evil. Of the writer himself, and of the great part he 
 bore in all that Roman life, of his innermost thoughts and the 
 very secrets of his soul, these letters are self-revelations. Modern 
 writers who dislike Cicero use these revelations as testimony 
 against his character, but with all the weaknesses and faults they 
 disclose, fair-minded readers honor and love him still. We may be 
 sure that no contemporary statesman of Cicero could have borne 
 such a severe ordeal so well as he. He has well in hand, per- 
 fectly under his command, even as his Caesar mastered the situa- 
 tion in Gaul, all this mass of materials, which he had to mould 
 and marshal into effective form ; the gr.eat movements of the 
 time, whether of Rome itself, in the crowded streets, the noisy 
 Forum, or in far-off camps and battlefields, all pass before the 
 reader in liveliest action, and the actors themselves become real 
 and living persons to the mind. The story of the Gallic cam- 
 paigns has been often told in modern times, but never more 
 nearly after the original manner of the Commentaries themselves, 
 Mr. Fronde's noble English marching at no uneven pace through 
 all the clear, swift narrative of plans and battles and conquests 
 with the imperial Latin of Caesar. 
 
 When we come to the delineation of the lives and characters of 
 the leading men of that Roman period, there is room for diver- 
 gence of opinion touching the merits of Mr. Fronde's work. 
 While all will feel and acknowledge here, too, the artistic skill 
 with which his conceptions are wrought out, many will doubtless 
 dissent from the truth of the conceptions themselves. Not that 
 these views of Mr. Fronde are new with him, except so far as they 
 take new form and pressure from his own mind. They are the 
 views of the school of writers to which Mr. Froude belongs, and 
 of which Professor Mommsen has made himseK by his learned and 
 brilliant "Roman History" the acknowledged leader; writers 
 
468 FROUDE'S C^SAR. 
 
 who are pronounced in favor of the popular element in the repub- 
 lican government of this period as against the aristocratic, and in 
 favor of imperialism as against the republican government itself. 
 These views begin to appear in Mommsen's treatment of the ca- 
 reer of the unfortunate Gracchi, and, rising into greater promi- 
 nence through all the scenes of the conflict between Marius and 
 Sulla, at last find their highest and crowning illustration in Csesar. 
 Hence Mr. Froude, seeing in the uprising of the Gracchi the first 
 sparks of the coming revolution, has words of warning for the 
 tragic fate of Tiberius Gracchus, but no sympathy for Octavius, 
 who had been illegally degraded from the tribuneship by Gracchus, 
 and then well-nigh torn to pieces by the infuriated mob, or for 
 the murder of Scipio ^milianus, one of the ablest and best 
 men of any Roman time, whose only offense was that he was 
 honestly opposed to the Gracchian agrarian law. In his zeal, too, 
 against the aristocracy he tells us that in this contest they had 
 " made the first inroad on the constitution," forgetting that the first 
 inroad had been made by Tiberius Gracchus in setting at naught 
 the veto of Octavius as tribune. Mr. Mommsen, indeed, desig- 
 nates this act of Gracchus " as the first breach in the existing 
 Roman constitution." I have not space to show in full how these 
 leading opinions give complexion to Mr. Fronde's view of the 
 succeeding tragical scenes of the struggle between Marius and 
 Sulla. Very lenient he evidently is to Marius, though it was he 
 who instituted the protracted reign of terror in which Sulla 
 reigned, to be sure, more terribly than himself ; though he also was 
 the first to raise a standing army in place of the old citizen sol- 
 diery of Rome, an army, too, made up from the dregs of the peo- 
 ple, and so a ready instrument of their general's ambition, and 
 though in one thing he was certainly worse than Sulla, with all 
 Sulla's enormities, that he was willing to join to himself in his 
 treasonable plans even the enemies of his country ; but then Ma- 
 rius was the uncle of Caesar, he was the popular leader in his 
 day ; the leader of that populace of Rome which Caesar afterwards 
 manipulated though with far more adroitness and success. But 
 the delineations of these minor characters in Mr. Fronde's picture 
 of the Roman revolution are only foreshadowings of the boldly 
 drawn sketch of the chief actor in that great event, of the cen- 
 tral figure of his artistic work ; the ideas which we see there only 
 in germ and bud reach at length their " top and blossom " in his 
 brilliant panegyric of the imperial character and career of Ju- 
 
FROUDE'S C^SAR. 469 
 
 lius Caesar. It is very strange to note the change of sentiment 
 in recent times concerning the last defenders of the Roman repub- 
 lic and the triumphant founder of the empire. The time was, 
 and not so long ago, when the conspirators of the Ides of March 
 were extolled to the skies as brave men and true patriots, and 
 their victim, surprised in the senate house and stabbed to death by 
 three and twenty valiant daggers, was deemed to have met the 
 deserved fate of a usurper and tyrant. 
 
 But now most enlightened writers, and in some cases men of 
 liberal sentiments, instead of going back with Shakespeare to the 
 sentiments of Greek Plutarch, stop very far on this side to join 
 hands with the Italian Dante, and vie with him and with one an- 
 other in consigning Brutus and his friends to a select place in the 
 lowest round of the Inferno, while with like emulation they lift 
 Csesar not only to the highest pitch of human greatness and good- 
 ness, but even to divine rank and honor. It may be that this 
 great change of sentiment, the extreme of which, I confess, I have 
 just given, is due in part, and in its best part, to an improved 
 historical criticism, which has caused a more discriminating treat- 
 ment of the facts long known, and a more enlightened judgment. 
 But for the most part it seems to have come from the rise of im- 
 perialism, especially in Germany, or from modern Csesarism in 
 France, or through tendencies philosophical or scientific, or the 
 prevalence of material interests, from the worship of genius or of 
 force, or of mere success, apart from all moral considerations. 
 Not unfairly has the French writer, M. Boissier, said of Mr. 
 Mommsen that, " carrying into his studies of antiquity aU his mod- 
 ern prejudices, he assails in the Roman aristocracy the aspiring- 
 nobility of Prussia, and salutes in advance, in Csesar, the popular 
 despot whose strong hand gives Germany its fantastic unity J''* 
 And an English critic says of Boissier's remark, " This may be a 
 fair excuse for a Prussian Ccesarean^ but Mr. Froude, an Eng- 
 lishman who has made English history the study of his life — 
 ' What business has he on this galley ? ' " But whatever the ori- 
 gin of this historical school, Mr. Froude belongs to it, and gener- 
 ally second to its chief, and at no long interval ; and sometimes 
 leaping forward in advance of him. All will agree with Mr. 
 Froude in his exalted estimate of the genius and various accom- 
 plishments of Csesar. As a scholar, a writer, an orator, he was 
 preeminent among his fellows. In a nation born to command — 
 in a national senate called by an enemy of Rome " an assembly 
 
470 FROUDE'S C^SAR. 
 
 of kings," he was gifted above all others with the kingly nature. 
 He not only impressed men's minds by his greatness, but he could 
 easily win men's hearts, and yet more the hearts of women, by the 
 charm of his person and conversation, the kindliness of his dispo- 
 sition, and the courtesy and grace of his manners. He conquered 
 all enemies in war — many of them he conquered over again by 
 his clemencj'^ in peace. He founded the Roman Empire, and he 
 reigned over it supreme. But all this, though multiplied an hun- 
 dredfold, can nowise justify these Caesarean writers in importing 
 into modern thought the pagan conception of deification, and even 
 a worse one than that expressed by the Roman epithet of Divus 
 Julius. Mr. Mommsen vindicates Caesar's aspiring, not only to 
 the divine right of king, but even to the" kingly right of deity. In 
 very Teutonic manner he puts it in this wise : " Since the princi- 
 ple of the monarchy leads by logical sequence from its religious 
 side to the king-god, we must recognize in Caesar's procedure that 
 thoroughness of thought and action which always assures for him 
 his unique station in history." The late emperor of the French, 
 in his biography of Caesar, written all in the interests of French 
 CoBsarism, declared that the men of Caesar's time who combated 
 his imperial claims were as blind and culpable as the Jews in 
 crucifying their Messiah. Mr. Froude, while he nowhere gives 
 utterance to just these ideas, yet with his insidious rhetoric insin- 
 uates similar ones, in forms no less offensive, and in his closing 
 sentence, as though it were the culminating lesson of his theme, 
 institutes a parallel between the life of Caesar and the life of 
 Jesus. As he approaches, in his narrative, the event of the Ides 
 of March, he says : " The same evening, the 14th of March, Caesar 
 was at a 'Last Supper' at the house of Lepidus," — those words 
 written with capitals and in quotation marks. On the next page 
 he continues : " This familiar friend whom he trusted — the coin- 
 cidence is striking — was employed to betray him." Next we find 
 it written, after the assassination, " Caesar was dead. But Caesar 
 still lived. ' It was not possible that the grave should hold him.' " 
 And finally, he ventures upon what he truly calls a " strange and 
 Startling resemblance between the fate of the founder of the king- 
 dom of this world and the Founder of the kingdom not of this 
 world, for which the first was a preparation. Each was denounced 
 for making himself a king ; each was maligned as the friend of 
 publicans and sinners ; each was betrayed by those whom he had 
 loved and cared for ; each was put to death ; and Caesar also was 
 
FROUDE'S C^SAR. 471 
 
 believed to have risen again, and ascended into heaven, and be- 
 come a divine being." To dwell upon this passage were alike 
 painful and needless. To speak of the founding of the Roman 
 Empire as a great event, intended and employed by Providence 
 by its extent and its unity to be preparatory and subsidiary to the 
 extension of the kingdom of Christ, is to utter a truth which is 
 often illustrated and worthy of constant remembrance ; but such 
 a parallel of personal history as Mr. Froude has thus started is 
 repulsive to reason no less than to religion. One cannot compre- 
 hend how Mr. Froude could have written these words, when in 
 the same chapter he had described, in language I do not care to 
 quote, the extreme immorality of Caesar, and only adding the very 
 pale defense : " That Caesar's morality was altogether superior to 
 that of the average of his contemporaries is in a high degree im- 
 probable." What a contrast have we to this in those stern but 
 just words of Dr. Arnold, of only a generation ago, " If, from the 
 intellectual, we turn to the moral character of Caesar, the whole 
 range of history can hardly furnish a picture of greater de- 
 formity " ! 
 
 Quite apart from such gross exaggerations as these, Mr. Froude's 
 excessive admiration of Caesar's genius and work blinds him, in his 
 otherwise admirably clear view of Roman affairs, to the considera- 
 tion of any elements or influences in the times unfavorable to his 
 hero's claims to political and moral supremacy. His readers will 
 agree with him that all things in the Roman state, during that 
 period of about eighty years, were tending to the necessity of the 
 empire, and that if the empire must needs come, Caesar was pre- 
 eminently fitted for the imperial place. Three times in that period 
 had the effort been made to restore the old regime of the republic 
 under which Rome had won her robust internal strength and her 
 broad external dominion : twice in the interests of its popular ele- 
 ment, the first time by the Gracchi, and the second by Marius, 
 and once, in the interests of the aristocracy, by Sulla. But these 
 efforts had each in its turn signally and utterly failed of any abid- 
 ing success ; each time had Rome, though set upright for a while 
 from the one side or the other, fallen back and down again into 
 internal disorder and violence. The integrity of that grand unit 
 of government of the olden time, the Senatus populusque Roma' 
 nus seemed to have been sundered fatally into fractions, and either 
 half to have lost its wonted healthy capacity to exercise its great 
 functions. The very greatness of Roman dominion had been im- 
 
472 FROUDE'S CiESAR. 
 
 pairing, by its enormous temptations to corruption, that greatness 
 of Roman character, which, especially in the wisdom and patriot- 
 ism of the senate, had brought it into being ; and the people, who 
 had breathed in the corrupting atmosphere which settled down 
 upon them from their superiors, were fast becoming a rabble of 
 the comitia as well as of the streets. 
 
 After Marius and Sulla it was growing ever clearer that all 
 orders must erelong succumb to the sway of a military mon- 
 archy, and the quick coming contest between Pompeius and 
 Csesar pointed surely to the ascendency of Caesar. Pompeius, 
 during the most brilliant and every way best part of his career, 
 aimed at the union of supreme power with loyalty to the laws 
 and constitution of his country. This is as evident now as it was 
 then, by his procedure on his return home after his five years' 
 extraordinary achievements in the East, where he had secured the 
 Roman supremacy in Pontus, Armenia, Syria, and Palestine. 
 As he was on his way home and was nearing Italy, his coming 
 was looked to with ominous apprehensions by all parties, as if he 
 might reenact the part of Sulla. He was in reality the successor 
 of Sulla in the full possession of military sovereignty, at the head 
 of a victorious army, despotic power within his easy grasp. But 
 he no sooner touched Italian soil at Brundusium than he dis- 
 banded his army, and though his journey through Italy was one 
 continuous ovation, yet he entered the gates of Rome — and it 
 happened to be on his birthday — surrounded only by toga-clad 
 citizens, and only to claim and enjoy a well-earned triumph as a 
 citizen general. What would Csesar have done at such a moment? 
 Mr. Froude does not touch this comparison, but Mr. Mommsen, 
 in his worship of force and his indifference to right, sneers at 
 Pompeius' conduct in missing his opportunity and ascribes it to a 
 lack of courage. He says : " On those who lack courage the gods 
 lavish every favor and every gift in vain. The parties breathed 
 freely. Pompeius had abdicated a second time ; his already van- 
 quished competitors might once more begin the race, in which the 
 strangest thing was that Pompeius was again a rival runner." 
 But the truth is that Pompeius was not yet a " rival runner " at 
 all, if it is meant by that that he was already a rival with Csesar 
 for absolute power. Up to this time, though fond as a soldier of 
 military power and military honor, he had no thought of reaching 
 it by unlawful means ; he had not despaired of the republic, and, 
 what was even more, he had not despaired of himself. This 
 
FROUDE'S CiESAR. 473 
 
 double despairing came only to Pompeius by his coming into nearer 
 contact with Caesar, when, in a weak moment of disappointment 
 and mortification at the refusal of the senate to ratify his acts 
 in Asia, he yielded to Caesar's insidious offers, and entered into 
 the triumvirate with Caesar and Crassus. This coalition was a 
 private bargain between the three leading men of the state for the 
 promotion by each of his own selfish ends by the aid of his part- 
 ners. They pledged each other to put into a common stock their 
 influence and resources, and to do and say nothing in politics 
 except for the combined interests of the league, or, in modern 
 phrase, the " ring." Pompeius was to get from the people all that 
 the senate denied him ; Crassus was to have consideration at 
 home for himself and for the moneyed interests of the equites ; and 
 Caesar was to have the consulship and then the province of Gaul. 
 Caesar's share in the bargain came first and directly; and it 
 proved to be the lion's share. He won popular favor in the con- 
 sulship, and then military glory in Gaul, by the side of which 
 Pompeius' fame and popularity paled and waned. This connection 
 was in every way mischievous to Pompeius ; it led to all the after 
 misfortunes and faults of his life, involving him in " difficulty, 
 mortification, and shame." He found himself severed from his 
 old friends ; he saw, as Caesar's plans matured, that he was lifting 
 to greater influence a dangerous rival, and helping that rival cre- 
 ate a power which periled the life of the republic ; and, what was 
 worse, he felt in him the risings of envy and jealousy and open 
 ambition he had not had before ; for, as Lucan truly said, " Caesar 
 could not brook a superior, nor Pompeius an equal." The connec- 
 tion soon fell apart, for it had no moral cohesion, and Pompeius 
 went back to the constitutional party, and again became the 
 champion of its interests. Then came the inevitable break be- 
 tween Caesar and the government. Inevitable, too, the appeal 
 to arms in the civil war, and that once begun, the course of 
 events goes straight and swift, with but the single brief reverse 
 at Dyrrachium, to Caesar's victory at Pharsalia and himself the 
 undisputed military master of Rome. Mr. Froude's view of this 
 decisive contest, though strongly and on some points fairly put, 
 yet is too Caesarean for full acceptance for readers who are not 
 themselves disciples of his school. He well tells us here that the 
 senate undertook this war to evade the reforms which were in- 
 tended by Caesar if he reached his second consulship, and that 
 consul, of course, he must be if he comes home from his prov- 
 
474 FROUDE'S C^SAR. 
 
 ince. It might be enough, however, to say that nobody could 
 know before the event what reforms he intended or whether he 
 intended any at all, and that if he must be consul it must be by 
 votes of citizens and not by the sword. On the other hand, Caesar 
 could urge that the senate had wronged him by recalling him 
 before his term had expired, and by ordering him "to disband his 
 army by a certain day, on pain of being declared a public enemy ; " 
 and still further by carrying their order in opposition to the veto 
 of the tribunes. The truth seems to be that the lawful govern- 
 ment had not in this crisis of affairs itself kept the law, while it 
 was the irregular ambition of Csesar which had produced the crisis. 
 The senate had acted from a well-grounded fear of Caesar's ambi- 
 tious plans for his own elevation and greater power in the state ; 
 their decree was a virtual declaration of martial law : " that the 
 consuls should provide for the safety of the state." But if we can 
 waive all constitutional questions and look to the issue itself of this 
 war in its bearings upon Rome and the world, we certainly cannot 
 assert that " the safety of the state " would have been secured if, 
 to reverse Lucan's memorable line, Cato's had been the winning 
 and Caesar's the losing cause on the plains of Pharsalia. Cicero, 
 in his letters of this time, " speaks in the strongest terms of cen- 
 sure of the severities which would have followed the victory of the 
 Constitutionalists, and declares that they would have ordered a 
 general proscription as unsparing as that of Sulla." He is filled 
 with horror at the uncompromising and revengeful spirit which 
 he finds in Pompeius himself, and at the language he hears all 
 about him in the Pompeian camp, of retribution to be visited to 
 the utmost upon Caesar's rebellious soldiers and their partisans in 
 the state. The Pompeian army was not all composed of Ciceros 
 and Catos, and the ascendency of the profligate and corrupt wing 
 of the aristocracy might have been far worse for the world than 
 the victory of Caesar and the establishment of his despotic rule. 
 In this view of the subject Mr. Froude and his friends may well 
 point us to the clemency of Caesar to his opponents. This is in- 
 deed a noble feature in his policy, and, we may perhaps believe, 
 also in his character. But the most difficult article of acceptance 
 in all Mr. Froude's Caesarean creed is, that Caesar aimed to be a 
 reformer of the Roman constitution and a benefactor of mankind. 
 That it was possible to restore the old institutions and usages of 
 the republic, to renew the dignity and manly wisdom and patriot- 
 ism of the senate, and infuse a new and healthy vigor into the 
 
FROUDE'S C^SAR. 475 
 
 people, it is not necessary to assert. But it is certain that Caesar 
 never made any trial if it were possible. He simply appropriated 
 to himself all the powers and functions of government, aristocratic 
 and popular alike, secular and sacred. So far from elevating the 
 senate, he deliberately degraded it. With the purpose of putting 
 into it new elements and widening its basis of influence, he raised 
 the number of senators to nine hundred, introducing to its time- 
 honored benches freedmen and foreigners, and among them his 
 barbarian Gauls. The wits of the town made themselves merry 
 over these upstart senators, who could hardly find their way about 
 the city, and fairly lost themselves in the wilderness of columns and 
 statues about the Forum ; and placards were stuck up all around, 
 proposing that no citizen should show these egregiously new men 
 the way to the senate-house. What Caesar wished and what he 
 meant and what he secured was first revolution, then a military 
 monarchy, and himself the head of it. We may allow that a man 
 of his commanding genius, conscious of his superiority, might needs 
 follow the instinct of his nature and possess himself of supreme 
 power when it was within his grasp. It may he, too, that such 
 a rule coincided vdth the interests of Rome and the world, that 
 the sway of one man was at that crisis the best thing for man- 
 kind ; in this sense we might accept Lucan's famous words, quoted 
 and appropriated by Mr. Froude : " Victrix causa dels placuiV* 
 At any rate, we can allow that it pleased Heaven that Caesar's 
 should be the victorious cause ; but yet for all this we cannot 
 admit that the victor vindicated for himself a place among those 
 choice spirits who have lived not for themselves, but for the 
 human race. No ; we must hold that the career of Caesar was a 
 selfish one ; his ruling passion and motive was ambition, and 
 ambition of a like quality and proportion with his unique faculty 
 of command. And it was this — not his administration, not his 
 so-called reforms, as Mr. Froude declares, not his victories, not his 
 rule in itself, — it was his despotic use of his victories and handling 
 of his rule, it was his purpose to make himself a king in name as 
 in thing that brought him to his tragic end. I believe that Shake- 
 speare had the true insight into his great subject, though on his 
 genius had never dawned the new lights of our modern Caesa- 
 reans ; he saw and read all aright, where he makes Brutus say : 
 " Tears for his love, joy for his fortune, honour for his valour, and 
 death for his ambition.^^ With a more dazzling rhetoric than 
 even that of Shakespeare's Mark Antony, Mr. Froude may say : — 
 
476 FROUDE'S CiESAR. 
 
 « The noble Brutus 
 Hath told you Csesar was ambitious — 
 You all did see that on the Lupercal 
 I thrice presented him a kingly crown 
 Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition ? " 
 
 but we remember and believe the rather the plain prose of " honest 
 Casca," himself also a witness of what he tells : " I saw Mark An- 
 tony offer him a crown ; and he put it by once ; but for all that, 
 to my thinking, he would /am have had it. Then he offered it to 
 him again ; then he put it by again ; but to my thinking, he was 
 very loath to lay his fingers off it.^^ The great dramatist there 
 reads out what lay in the inmost heart of the best thought of the 
 last generation of republican Romans. They could not bear des- 
 potic rule ; the name and state of a king was hateful and intolera- 
 ble ; it was to them not only un-Roman by the cherished traditions 
 and sentiments of many generations, but it was illegal, for a Roman 
 law declared accursed and devoted the life of any man who should 
 attempt to make himself a king. A dictator they could bear, — 
 they were bearing, — but kingship never, for it meant for them the 
 degradation of personal and civil servitude. Whatever may be 
 said of the perverse folly and ingratitude of Caesar's assassina- 
 tion, it was just as much a necessity of the times from the one side, 
 as was from the other the empire itself. Shakespeare, following 
 Plutarch, makes Brutus say, " As he was ambitious I slew him." 
 Cicero said with equal truth, " It was Antonius who slew him on 
 the day of the Lupercalia, by offering him the crown, and letting 
 everybody see that even in his refusal he meant to have it." A 
 word of Plutarch lets us into a view of the sentiments of Brutus 
 and his party. Ligarius was one who had been pardoned by 
 Caesar for having been in arms against him at Pharsalia in Af- 
 rica; he had been reproached for want of gratitude. Plutarch 
 says that Ligarius did not so much feel grateful, as oppressed by 
 that power that made him need to he pardoned. But there is a 
 passage in Cicero (Epp. ad Att. XV. 4.) which, while it shows 
 the marvelous revelations he makes of himself to Atticus, and 
 also the egregious political error of the assassination, yet also 
 gives a truly awful illustration of the deep-seated hate even in a 
 man of so much moderation. He is writing of the doings of An- 
 tonius as worse far 'than Caesar's, and breaks out thus: "If 
 things run on thus, I like not the Ides of March. For either 
 Caesar should never have come back (after death), nor fear have 
 
FROUDE'S C^SAR. 477 
 
 compelled us to ratify his acts ; or else, so was I in favor with 
 him — and yet may heaven's curse light on him though dead 
 (jquem dii mortuum perduint) — that seeing the master is slain 
 and we are not freer, he was a master not to be rejected." And 
 then, as if in affright and shame at himself, he adds : " I blush, 
 believe me, but I have written it, and will not blot it out." Let 
 us remember, too, so wide and real was this feeling of oppression, 
 that after Caesar was slain some of the best of his party at once 
 came over to the republican party and now gave utterance to the 
 feelings they had kept stifled within them. There were among them 
 such men as Hirtius and Pansa, and Servilius, and Servius Sulpi- 
 cius, and also Asinius PoUio, who had been close attached to the 
 person of Caesar. Very striking are the words of Sulpicius, writ- 
 ten to Cicero, and written, too, in consolation, when Cicero had just 
 lost his daughter : " We have seen," he says, " snatched from 
 us those things which men should hold less dear than their 
 children, — our country, our reputation, our dignity, everything 
 which made life honorable. What can one blow more add to 
 our pain ? " And we might trace the remains of these sentiments 
 far down into the empire, through the reigns of Augustus and 
 Tiberius, in the lives of such men as Drusus and Germanicus, and 
 others less known to fame, and discover how the republic lingered 
 as a memory and a power long after itself was extinct. I have 
 not time to discuss with any fullness Mr. Fronde's delineation 
 of other secondary characters to which allusion has been made 
 in the course of this review of his book. But let me before I 
 close my paper make some remarks suggested by his treatment of 
 Cicero. It is with a real delight that we see Mr. Fronde here 
 following Mommsen only afar off. The extreme and quite un- 
 principled depreciation of the Roman orator's fame by Mommsen 
 is a misfortune only paralleled by that earlier one of excessive 
 adulation which it suffered from his biographer, Middleton. The 
 German historian denies Cicero excellence of any kind, political, 
 forensic, or even literary. 
 
 But such a judgment only damages the judge himself. Every- 
 body knows that in a time remarkable for men of great ability 
 Cicero rose to eminence by his talents, his various discipline and 
 culture, and his eloquence. It is a plain verdict of fact that Cae- 
 sar himself at every stage of his career studiously sought to win 
 and secure his influence, and that in this Caesar was only the high- 
 est illustration of what was sought by every great party leader. 
 
478 FROUDE'S C-^SAR. 
 
 And as to his great merits as a scholar and a writer, which have 
 been acknowledged in every civilized country since he ran his bril- 
 liant career, it seems a treason against the republic of letters for 
 Professor Mommsen to deny them, who has himself reached an 
 eminent literary position, and who derives his sole claim to the 
 world's notice from his learning and scholarship. Cicero's weak- 
 nesses are all obvious enough, and every one admits them ; but the 
 truth is, they would never have been known and talked about ex- 
 cept from his conspicuous abilities and virtues. It is refreshing 
 and reassuring in these times to hear Mr. Froude declare that, 
 after Caesar, " Cicero is the second great figure in the history of 
 the times," that his " splendid talents have bought forgiveness for 
 his faults, and have given him a place in the small circle of the 
 really great whose memory is not allowed to die," and "that his 
 literary excellence will forever preserve his memory from too harsh 
 judgment." But of course Mr. Froude, from his point of view, 
 condemns Cicero because he refused to be of Caesar's party, to 
 plant himself by Caesar's side, which he says was "his natural 
 place." He ascribes this refusal to Cicero's " want of political prin- 
 ciple," and also to his vanity, that having had " the first part as 
 consul," he " could not bring himself to play a second part." But 
 it is certain that vanity had nothing to do with Cicero's refusal to 
 go with Caesar. He was certainly willing to " play " a second part 
 to Pompey — why not to Caesar ? It was exactly his political prin- 
 ciple which kept him apart from Caesar. As to the first part in 
 Rome, he did not believe in it at all in the sense in which Mr. 
 Froude takes it. He believed, with all the strength of deliberate, 
 honest conviction, in a Rome where nobody could play the first 
 part except in loyalty to law and liberty, and where everybody 
 could play just that part to which he was entitled by his own in- 
 trinsic merits. There was no man of any prominence in Roman 
 affairs whose political principles were more pronounced than Cice- 
 ro's, or more consistently maintained. He laid them down in the- 
 ory in his writings, and he defended them by his tongue and his 
 life. He believed in the mixed constitutional government of con- 
 sul, senate, and comitia, which Rome had not so much formed by 
 written compact as reached by experience, in the early, long-con- 
 tinued struggles of the different orders in the state, which gradu- 
 ally came into fusion and union by concession and compromise, 
 and so agreed upon a practical constitution for all, and which, with 
 its imperfections, was yet the best and the most permanent one 
 
FROUDE'S CiESAR. 479 
 
 the ancient world possessed. We may say now that such a regime 
 belonged only to the past, that it was too good for the bad times 
 in which Cicero lived. That is probably true, but it was to the 
 honor of Cicero that he cherished its recollections, and clung to 
 the possibility of its reconstruction, and would go with no man, 
 with no set of men, who were trying to make such a reconstruc- 
 tion impossible. In his youth he looked with horror at the recent 
 wild excesses of the democracy under Marius, and then, on his 
 very entrance into public life, on the yet wilder excesses of the 
 aristocracy under Sulla. It is his adhesion to these political views 
 that alone explains Cicero's entire course through the great con- 
 flict between Pompeius and Caesar. At first he was pronounced for 
 Pompey, because he was then a pronounced republican. When 
 he joined Caesar in the triumvirate, Cicero lost confidence in him. 
 When he broke with Caesar, and came back to the constitutional 
 party, Cicero stood by him again, but yet with mistrust and ap- 
 prehension. When the crisis of civil war came, and while it was 
 coming, he was in sore perplexity (Mr. Froude calls it vacillation) 
 between his conviction that Caesar was wrong and his fear that 
 Pompeius was not right. It was really the perplexity of an honest 
 man who wanted and meant to do only what he thought to be 
 right. As his letters to Atticus show, he was indeed in a pitiable 
 condition. He saw good reason to believe that Caesar would use 
 victory with the more moderation, and that inclined him to him 
 and his camp. And yet he was ill at ease in the Pompeian camp 
 on account of the revengeful spirit which reigned there ; for his 
 own remonstrances, indeed, and his expressed aversion to joining 
 the Pompeian army at all, he narrowly escaped being killed by 
 young Pompeius and his friends, who called him a traitor ; and 
 finally, though he believed that the cause of Pompeius was more 
 nearly in the right, he left the camp at Dyrrachium and went back 
 to Italy. 
 
 After Pharsalia, Cicero submitted to the inevitable with as good 
 grace as he could command. Though treated with marked cour- 
 tesy, yet he kept aloof for some time from public life, and in re- 
 tirement found at once occupation and solace in his favorite liter- 
 ary studies. Yet he seems to have been not without something of 
 hope, that if Caesar did not restore " some kind of a free state," 
 yet he might perhaps make it possible, by his administration, for 
 public men to pursue a dignified and honorable career. In a let- 
 ter to one of his friends he says, " Supposing Caesar to desire the 
 
480 FROUDE'S C^SAR. 
 
 existence of a free state, he may yet lack the power to create it." 
 But such a hope was especially awakened by Caesar's pardon of 
 Marcellus, and was then expressed by the speech with which he 
 broke his long silence in the senate, of thanks to the dictator for 
 this signal act of grace. Marked as this speech is by dazzling 
 compliments, set in courtliest Latin, it yet contains some free ut- 
 terances worthy of Roman manhood. Addressing Caesar, he says, 
 " We read in your face a purpose to restore us to such remnants 
 of liberty as have survived the war." And in another passage : 
 "I grieve that the commonwealth, which ought to be immortal, 
 should hang on the breath of one man." And yet more plainly he 
 continues : " Should you leave the republic in the condition in 
 which it now stands, consider, I pray you, whether your career 
 will not seem famous indeed, but scarcely glorious. It remains 
 for you to rebuild the constitution. Live till this is done." De- 
 livered as this speech was, on the grateful impulse of the moment, 
 as we know from a letter of Cicero (Ad Div. IV. 4), it shows that 
 his tongue had not, by the silence of nearly two years, forgotten its 
 eloquence. Let me now touch finally upon that last memorable 
 year of Cicero's life, the one which followed the murder of Caesar. 
 There, certainly, in the contest with Antonius and the newly 
 formed Caesarean party, he showed no vacillation, no weakness, 
 no lack of courage, and there, too, appeared his old devotion to 
 his political convictions. He had left Rome, intending to join 
 Atticus in Greece ; but an ill wind drove him back to Rhegium. 
 There he met Brutus, who persuaded him to go back to Rome and 
 make another effort for his country. He reached Rome on the 
 last day of August, 44. On the next day the senate were to meet 
 at the consular summons of Antonius. Cicero did not attend, but 
 sent a messenger to the consul, excusing his absence. Antonius 
 was enraged at his absence, and declared that he would demolish 
 his house on the Palatine if he stayed away from the senate. On 
 the next day Cicero appeared in his place, but now the consul was 
 himself absent. Cicero rose to speak, the old fire kindling in him 
 by the genius itself of the place — the Temple of Concord, which 
 had been the scene years before of his speeches against Catiline. 
 He mildly alluded to yesterday's attack upon him by Antonius as 
 unjust, he wished the consul were present ; perhaps he was ill or 
 fatigued by his effort ; the senate would excuse him, though yes- 
 terday Antonius took no such excuse himself. He thus glided 
 into his first Philippic. He arraigned the lawless policy of Anto- 
 
FROUDE'S C^SAR. 481 
 
 nlus since the first of June — no consultation of the senate — laws 
 of his own forced through the comitia — his own creatures ap- 
 pointed to office, and for every new act of tyranny the will of the 
 dead Caesar pleaded. The attitude of Cicero was noble. He was 
 finishing his public life in his age, just as he began it in early 
 manhood, protesting alone against a dreaded power which brooked 
 no resistance. Then it was Sulla, now it was Antonius whom he 
 resisted. Courage is contagious. The senate listened at first with 
 surprise, then passed swift to admiration, and finally broke forth 
 into well-nigh continuous applause at the orator's telling words. 
 Cicero followed up his speech with action. He gathered about 
 him men of moderation of all parties, telling them that now there 
 was but one ship for all honest men to sail in. These were joined 
 by some of Csesar's generals, who found that they would lose less 
 in remaining citizens of a free state than in becoming subjects of 
 Antonius. 
 
 But though there were chiefs at hand, there was a lack of sol- 
 diers. Antonius had gone to Brundusium, where he was waiting 
 for the legions he had summoned from Macedonia. Furious at 
 the unexpected resistance he encountered, he threatened pillage 
 and murder. People were in terror ; they looked about for help. 
 Decimus Brutus was with his army in Gaul, Sextus Pompeius in 
 Sicily, both of them far off, while the danger was nigh. It was 
 at this crisis that the young Octavius appeared. The jealousy 
 of Antonius and the distrust of the republicans had kept him 
 aside ; but hitherto impatiently biding his time, he now judged 
 that time to have come. He traversed Rome and its environs, 
 appealing to his uncle's veterans. His name, his largesses, and 
 his promises brought many soldiers to his side. Then he applied 
 to the chiefs of the senate, offering them and their cause the sup- 
 port of his troops. They dared not refuse his aid, and Cicero 
 himself was at last won over by the young Caesar. Mr. Froude, 
 when writing of the affairs of two years before, has an admirable 
 remark which explains the readiness which Octavius showed for 
 this crisis, though only a youth of nineteen. He says : " In the 
 unrecorded intercourse between the uncle [Caesar] and his niece's 
 child lies the explanation of the rapidity with which Octavius 
 seized the reins when all was chaos." All that followed this 
 coming of Octavius upon the scene is too familiar for repetition. 
 But during most of this year Cicero was the soul of the republi- 
 can party. His words and acts filled all with energy. In the 
 
482 FROUDE'S C^SAR. 
 
 Forum echoed once more the well-nigh forgotten words of patriot- 
 ism and freedom. From Rome the ardor spread to the municipal 
 towns — all Italy was stirred. Cicero corresponded with the pro- 
 consuls in their provinces, with the generals of the armies. He 
 urges Brutus to possess himself of Greece, he applauds the efforts 
 of Cassius to master Asia, he excites Cornificius to chase from 
 Africa the followers of Antonius. He gives heart to Decimus 
 Brutus in his resistance at Mutina. The services he solicits come 
 in from all sides. Lepidus and Plancus protest anew their fidel- 
 ity to the republic. Even Asinius PoUio writes him that he is 
 an enemy of any man who shall attempt to be a king. Cicero's 
 thirteen Philippics following one another in rapid succession keep 
 the senate up to their duty, and inform the people of every move- 
 ment, and, with no time for the orator to polish and elaborate his 
 speeches, they are circulated just as they issue from his lips 
 throughout Italy and the provinces, awakening everywhere the 
 same emotion and action as in Rome. From distant countries 
 even came back to Cicero the testimonies of the admiration they 
 inspire. " Your toga is again more victorious than our arms," 
 says one of his generals. " In you," writes another, " the ex- 
 consul has outdone the consul." " My soldiers are all with you," 
 writes a third. On the day when tidings reached Rome of the 
 republican victory at Mutina, the people went in a body to Cice- 
 ro's house, and brought him out, and marched him in triumph to 
 the Capitol, and then listened with shouts of applause to his recital 
 of the events of the battle. "That one Capitol-day^^ writes 
 Cicero to Brutus, " has paid me for all my troubles in the past." 
 But success is sometimes more fatal to a coalition than failure. 
 When the common enemy is repulsed, then the different elements 
 in it assert themselves again. The sequel proved that the young 
 Octavius meant to weaken Antonius and to strengthen the repub- 
 licans, only through both to reach his own ends. When he saw 
 Antonius defeated and fleeing to the Alps, then he joined friendly 
 arms with him, and the two with their united forces marched on 
 Rome. Then it was left to Cicero, as to the worsted gladiators in 
 the arena, only to seek to die well. Livy says of him : " Of all 
 his misfortunes death is the only one which he bore as a man. 
 He might have saved himself by flight, and for a moment he tried. 
 He set sail for Greece, but after some days' sailing, suffering from 
 sickness, tormented by regrets, he disembarked at Caieta and 
 went back to his Formian villa, there to die. Much is it for a 
 
FROUDE'S C^SAR. 483 
 
 man of his nervously sensitive nature that he met with such calm 
 resolution the fate of a violent death. We forget his faults when 
 we imagine to ourselves that tragic end, — that litter in which 
 he was hurried away against his will by his faithful slaves down 
 through those oft-trodden walks of his Formian grounds, Anto- 
 nius' bloodhound assassins close on his track, when we hear him 
 order his slaves to set down the litter and make no resistance, and 
 then hear him, as he calmly offers his neck to the sword, bid the 
 centurion strike sure at his mark, and finally see the assassin, in 
 the clumsiness of his terror, hewing thrice at that venerable head 
 ere he can sever it from the body. Obedient to their savage 
 orders, the murderers hurried back to Home with the head and the 
 hands of their victim. They brought them straight to Antonius, 
 who was just then on his tribunal in the Forum. He greedily 
 gloated on the ghastly spectacle. He brought them to his wife as 
 if the most precious gift he could give her. With the fierce hate 
 of a revengeful woman, Fulvia took the head in her lap, and talked 
 to it, as if alive, in words of malicious insult. She dragged out 
 the tongue and pierced it through and through with her bodkin. 
 The head and hands were then taken back to the Forum and 
 nailed to the rostra, to be looked on with horror by the people 
 who had so often listened to the living orator from that very spot. 
 Such was the end of Cicero, of whom Julius Caesar said : " His 
 triumphs and laurels were so much the more glorious than those 
 of war, as it is of vastly greater significance to have extended the 
 limits of the Roman mind than of the Roman arms." 
 
MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, MARCH 11, 1881. 
 
 We find it recorded of Marcus Aurelius by Julius Capitolinus, 
 one of the writers of the " Historia Augusta," that on the day 
 of his funeral the people had such a veneration for the goodness 
 of their lost emperor, that they thought they ought not to mourn 
 for him, so assured were they all that he had been only lent by 
 the gods to bless mankind for a time, and now had gone back to 
 his home in the skies. The sense of the personal worth of this 
 Eoman prince, thus expressed by his earliest biographer, has been 
 shared with that biographer by all subsequent writers, ancient 
 and modern, pagan and Christian. The historian Niebuhr pro- 
 nounced him " the embodiment of human virtue ; " " no charac- 
 ter," he says, " so noble and spotless as his is known in all his- 
 tory ; " and M. Renan, in his brilliant " Conference " delivered in 
 London a few months ago, speaks of him as " the most godly of 
 men," and of his " Meditations " as " a book resplendent with the 
 divine life." I have then to ask you to contemplate with me for 
 an hour this imperial figure of ancient virtue — at once of an 
 emperor, the noblest of all the Roman line, and of a man, the 
 worthiest of all the Roman people. This fact, so unique in his- 
 tory, by a singular coincidence stands out just as unique in art, 
 in that grand statue of Marcus Aurelius which still crowns the 
 piazza of the Capitol at Rome, the only entire equestrian statue 
 in bronze which has come down to us from antiquity, and ad- 
 judged to be the finest equestrian statue in existence. It is also 
 fortunate that in the remains of ancient letters we have preserved 
 to us distinct images of this prince which show us what man- 
 ner of person he was in successive periods of his life, even as 
 there are extant in Italy so many busts representing him at 
 different ages, from a boy of ten years old down to his death. 
 We may see him in the " Augustan Histories " in his innocent 
 boyhood, then in his own correspondence with his teacher Fronto, 
 in that buoyant time of his youth when he was bounding forth to 
 the attainment of knowledge and truth, and in his own golden 
 
MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 485 
 
 book of " Meditations " as he was in mature manhood, grave but 
 yet kindly, and as cheerful as he might be in such a world as he 
 had now reached and had come to know, filling the throne of the 
 Caesars with the humility of his lowliest subject, discharging 
 the grandest human functions with the submission of a servant, 
 and keeping for his own share of the supreme power he pos- 
 sessed hardly more than its cares and pains ; and in that ex- 
 alted station which he filled in the eye of the world, and in the 
 midst of all its vast and exigent affairs, always having and cher- 
 ishing that solitude of his own, where as in a sanctuary was the 
 secret of his life, in which he daily strove by devout study and 
 self-examination to keep himself in willing allegiance of duty to 
 God and his fellow-men. Here is a picture at which we may look 
 many times and from many points of view, and always and from 
 every point with instruction and delight. The character itself of 
 the man it is always good to contemplate whose singular virtue sets 
 it apart amidst all the most conspicuous figures of that old Roman 
 world, and, bright with a lustre undimmed by time or distance, 
 inspires with every new sight of it a powerful interest. In 
 studying such a character as this we seek eagerly to know on 
 what basis of right thinking it rested, and what were the senti- 
 ments and principles which gave it form and pressure. Thus we 
 come to study Marcus Aurelius, the philosopJie7\ as he is usually 
 called, to see in him the last and the worthiest representative of 
 that Stoic philosophy which, with the Greeks, and still more with 
 the Romans, was of more service than any other philosophical 
 system in inspiring a love of virtue and a lofty sense of duty, 
 and which, as softened in its tone by the pious soul of its imperial 
 disciple and master, and enriched by the law of love to God and 
 man which he taught and strove to fulfill, seemed to pass into 
 the domain of religion and well-nigh to the borders of Christian- 
 ity. In Marcus Aurelius, too, we see this philosophy taught no 
 longer in theory in the Porch or other place of lecture and dis- 
 course, but illustrated in living practice in a broad open school of 
 experience; in him it rises to the throne of the Roman Empire, 
 and thence endeavors by its beneficent influence infused into all 
 the high offices of government to achieve that task of the regener- 
 ation of the world of which it was incapable, but which was to 
 be wrought out erelong by another spiritual force of divine ori- 
 gin and quality which was already on the earth, and far nearer 
 Aurelius, both as philosopher and emperor, than he was himself 
 
486 MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 
 
 aware. The remarkable man whose life and character we are to sur- 
 vey in the light of all these important relations was born at Rome 
 in the year 121 of the Christian era. His true name, as it came 
 to him from his father, was M. Annius Verus, though in his child- 
 hood he was called by a name derived from his maternal grand- 
 father, Catilius Severus. His ancestors on both sides had for 
 several generations, through their personal merits, as well as by 
 imperial favor, filled the highest offices of state. It is worth not- 
 ing that these his ancestors were of that class of Roman families 
 whose fortunes Tacitus is fond of illustrating, because alike under 
 good and bad emperors they were distinguished for their personal 
 virtues and their elevated political sentiments. As he lost his 
 father in infancy, he was brought up by his mother, with the ever 
 ready counsel of his grandfathers Verus and Catilius, all of whom 
 he afterwards gratefully mentioned in his " Meditations " when he 
 was recounting the good gifts of his early nurture and training. 
 As a boy he won all hearts by his simplicity and earnestness and 
 his eager love of knowledge and truth. By such qualities he very 
 early drew to him the marked favor of the Emperor Hadrian, who 
 bestowed upon him, when only six years old, a kind of Roman 
 knighthood, by giving him a horse to be kept for him at the pub- 
 lic charge. It was said of Hadrian that " his bad habits seemed 
 to fall off from him when he looked on the sweetness of this 
 innocent child." The young Marcus passed his boyhood under 
 the shadow of the temple, and amid the images of religion and 
 the teaching of philosophy. When only eight years of age he 
 was entered a member of the Salian priesthood, and in this office 
 was wont to chant the sacred hymns and figure in the solemn pro- 
 cessions. At the age of twelve he was drawn as by a native bias 
 to virtuous doctrine and practice to the strict tenets of the Stoic 
 school, which with a quite precocious self-discipline he sought to 
 apply to his own dispositions and manner of life, seeking the 
 seclusion of reflection, wearing the Stoic mantle, and sleeping on 
 bare boards or on the ground, rather than on the comfortable bed 
 he might have in his mother's luxurious home. These early ten- 
 dencies of the boy were by and by to be developed into what was 
 most characteristic of the man. Meantime, under the auspices of 
 his guardians, his education was conducted by the most eminent 
 teachers of the time, in all departments of study, — grammar, rhet- 
 oric, poetry, philosophy, and also painting and music. Probably 
 never had any teachers a pupil of finer instincts and aims, more fil- 
 
MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 487 
 
 ial and grateful, or yet more aspiring and independent. What a 
 touching passage is that in his book, written as he records it him- 
 self off in the wilds of Pannonia, where he was carrying on one 
 of his German campaigns, when, in one of those meditative hours 
 he always managed every day to get, he thankfully reviewed what 
 he owed to the gods for the education of his youth, and mentioned 
 in detail all the good services done him by his various teachers. 
 And he loved there to recall, not so much the knowledge he 
 gained from these teachers, as the abiding influence he derived 
 from their personal virtues and example. He gratefully remem- 
 bers what kind of men they were, and what kind of a man they 
 aimed to make of himself. Patience, firmness, gentleness, and 
 sweetness of disposition, benevolence, truthfulness, uprightness of 
 judgment and conduct, justice to men and fear of the gods — these 
 are the virtues he saw in them, these the lessons they taught him. 
 With like gratitude he recounts what he learned from parents, 
 — from his father to be modest and manly, from his grandfather 
 Verus to be candid, and from his mother to be religious, and to 
 abstain not only from an evil act, but from any thought of it. 
 The course of his education and culture, as it went on from youth 
 far into manhood, we may trace in his correspondence with Fronto, 
 his teacher in rhetoric. This collection of Latin letters, about one 
 hundred and twenty in number, and about equally divided between 
 the two writers, has been discovered and published only in recent 
 times. Angelo Mai, when at work in the Ambrosian Library, at 
 Milan, on a manuscript of the tenth century, found out one day 
 that under the writing which he was deciphering there was an- 
 other one. With a patient ingenuity of toil of which only such 
 learned manuscript readers are capable, he finally brought to light 
 from under the " Acts of the Council of Chalcedon " this corre- 
 spondence in seven books between Cornelius Fronto and the Em- 
 peror Marcus Aurelius. This discovery created at the time a 
 marked sensation in the learned world ; and since that time the 
 work has undergone several revisions, and in 1867 was published 
 by Professor Naber, a German scholar, in a tolerably complete 
 form and legible text. The literary merits of the work, however, 
 fell far below the expectations which had been awakened ; and 
 readers who now come to it from the letters of Cicero or the 
 younger Pliny are conscious of a descent to a much lower plane 
 of Latin literature in respect both to thought and to style. Fronto 
 was a man of erudition, and passed for the first rhetorician and 
 
488 MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 
 
 speaker of his day ; but lie was too mucli of a pedant and of a 
 martinet to achieve professional distinction of a high order. But 
 his character was more than anything which he wrote or declaimed, 
 for he was an unselfish and upright man and a faithful, pains- 
 taking teacher ; and we need not account it as strange in him, as 
 a Roman and a Roman rhetorician, that he judged eloquence to 
 be the worthiest pursuit of a great man, and that he was fired 
 with the ambition of making his pupil, as the heir apparent to the 
 throne of the Caesars, a great Roman orator. 
 
 The best testimony to his character as a teacher is found in the 
 lifelong veneration cherished for him by his illustrious pupil. 
 Notable, too, are the pupil's words of his teacher : " Fronto," he 
 says, " my master in rhetoric, gave me knowledge of men, teach- 
 ing me that envy, trickery, and dissimulation belong to tyrants ; 
 and that those who are called people of quality have commonly 
 not much nature in them." But the value of these letters comes 
 from the insight which they give us into the education and char- 
 acter of Marcus Aurelius, the compass and method of his literary 
 studies, and still more into that transition from rhetoric to philos- 
 ophy which was the critical and decisive event of all his life. I 
 have space for only a few notes on these points, which I have 
 gathered from these letters. It appears that under his teacher's 
 guidance Marcus Aurelius went through with a generous course 
 of reading, of both Greek and Roman writers, though of the lat- 
 ter, rather those of the older times than of the Augustan age. 
 Faithful disciple of his master, Marcus Aurelius diligently studied 
 these older writers, and in his letters praises the justness of their 
 sentiments and the manly energy of their diction. It is interest- 
 ing to observe on the one hand the scrupulous fidelity with which 
 Fronto criticises his pupil's Latin essays and declamations and 
 also his numerous exercises of translation from Greek writers, and 
 on the other hand the dutiful docility with which the pupil gener- 
 ally accepts his teacher's criticisms. At times, however, the pupil 
 defends the words and phrases which are censured, and goes into 
 a labored argument, accompanied with quotations from Latin writ- 
 ers, in support of his view. In one letter the pupil is profoundly 
 grateful for a piece of advice which had been given him ; that was, 
 that always in his speech, written or oral, he should keep to sim- 
 plicity and truthfulness of expression. He thus writes : " Happy 
 I have pronounced myself in having one at my side who teaches 
 me to write concisely and elegantly ; but, after all, the great thing 
 
MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 489 
 
 for congratulation is, that you teach me to say always what is 
 true. That," he adds, "the speaking of downright truth, is the hard 
 thing for all men, and it would seem also for the gods ; for I have 
 noticed, in my Greek reading, that there is no oracular response 
 but has something crooked in it, in which the reader gets entan- 
 gled unawares." Thus did this youth love the truth. Nor strange 
 was it that the Emperor Hadrian, who discerned in him this qual- 
 ity, was fond of playing upon his family name, Verus, and calling 
 the boy Marcus Verissimus. Great was the joy of Fronto in his 
 pupil's devotion to rhetoric ; but alas ! the worthy man was soon 
 to see that devotion transferred to other studies ; the glad dream 
 of his life, to see eloquence crowned in Marcus Aurelius, was not 
 to be fulfilled. With all his dutiful attention to rhetorical and 
 literary pursuits, the young Marcus had never lost out of his heart 
 that native love for philosophy which had shown itself with a pre- 
 cocious ardor in his boyish days, and now, with the growing 
 thoughtf ulness of early manhood, was to assert itself with the calm 
 confidence of reason, as the ruling and shaping force of his char- 
 acter and life. We can see and study him at this crisis of his 
 experience, both in his letters and in his " Meditations." We ob- 
 serve the influence of Fronto gradually giving way to that of an- 
 other of his teachers, Junius Eusticus, a Stoic philosopher. Unlike 
 Fronto, he was wont to dwell, in his instructions, more upon his 
 pupil's imperfections than upon his merits, penetrating in the dis- 
 covery of any fault and pitiless in exposing it to censure. Even 
 the praises he sometimes vouchsafed always had in them some re- 
 serve. Notwithstanding his docility and patience, Marcus was 
 sometimes repelled by this brusque style of teaching ; but his moral 
 instincts always carried him back to this honest master, who told 
 him the truth with such inexorable strictness. This moral quality 
 of his instruction 'Eusticus would at times carry also into lessons 
 on the subject of speech, whether written or oral, criticising with- 
 out mercy all artifices of ambitious rhetoric and everything that 
 looked like exalting expression above thought. " It was Eusticus," 
 he writes, "who put me on my guard against the delusions of 
 sophistry and the charms of rhetoric and poetry, teaching me to 
 cultivate honesty and veracity, first in thinking and feeling, and 
 then in all expression by language and conduct." But this teacher 
 conferred upon him his crowning service when he put into his 
 hands one day a then new and ever since memorable book, the 
 "Discourses" of Epictetus. The day when first he read that book, 
 
490 MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 
 
 so rich in the best vein of Stoic thought, might be set down in his 
 spiritual biography as the birthday of Marcus Aurelius the philos- 
 opher, so deep and fruitful was its influence upon his character 
 and life. Strange that a man who lived as a slave in a Roman 
 family, and who bore on his body lifelong marks of a brutal mas- 
 ter, yet carried in him a commanding, kingly soul, whose wise 
 thoughts and words made a willing subject of the master of the 
 world-wide household of the Roman Empire. The noble Stoicism 
 of the book had its nearest and best illustration in the writer him- 
 self. This man who taught so boldly that he is the slave of no- 
 body, who is master of himself, had already made convincing trial 
 of his principles. His readers could believe his word, that the 
 soul can, by its own force, deliver itself from all the humiliations 
 which an outward lot inflicts, for he himself had achieved this de- 
 liverance. But the book spoke to the condition of Marcus Aure- 
 lius, for most, by its warm religious tone, not merely discoursing, 
 like Zeno or Seneca, of conformity to nature, or the reason of 
 things, or the order of the world, but telling of a living Provi- 
 dence in all human affairs, of a personal and benevolent Being 
 who watches tenderly over men and never forsakes them. " When 
 you have shut to your doors," he taught, " and made darkness in 
 your closet, never think of saying you are alone ; for you are not 
 alone, God is with you there." In comparison with the studies 
 opened to Marcus Aurelius in this book, all others now seemed to 
 him of secondary moment. 
 
 He still corresponds with Pronto, and long after, when he was 
 already emperor, he consults him when he has anything to write 
 or to speak; but for the doctrines of Epictetus, of the govern- 
 ment of one's soul, of moral self-possession, of the knowledge of 
 God, and of man's destiny, he cared far more than for the choice 
 of words or the balance of periods, or any nice distinctions of 
 style in the older and the later writers. Doubtless he would have 
 put on the Stoic mantle in mature manhood, and become, like 
 Epictetus, a philosopher by profession, had not Hadrian destined 
 him to the purple of the Caesars and the imperial office. That 
 emperor marked him for distinction by betrothing him when only 
 fifteen years old to the daughter of Ceionius Commodus, whom he 
 had adopted as his successor. On the death of Commodus the 
 emperor took measures to secure the succession of Marcus by 
 adopting, in place of Commodus, Titus Aurelius Antoninus, with 
 the provision that Antoninus should adopt his nephew Marcus, 
 
MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 491 
 
 together with the son of the deceased Commodus. In conse- 
 quence of this adoption Marcus now assumed the name of Mar- 
 cus Aurelius Antoninus. We are told by his biographer that so 
 far from his being elated at his future on his entrance as a prince 
 into the family of Hadrian, that he exchanged with sadness and 
 dread his mother's house on the Caelian Hill for the imperial 
 mansion on the Palatine. We may well understand that a youth 
 of his tastes and principles, who had thus far kept the whiteness 
 of his soul, would naturally shrink from entering the perilous 
 precincts of the imperial mansion, from dwelling in a palace not 
 yet cleared of the foul airs of a Nero's and a Domitian's licentious 
 life. It may be, too, that now with the better and yet quite too 
 lax living of Hadrian's court, the young prince did not quite 
 escape the contagion. Where or when else could he have had 
 such an experience as he records in these words : " Thank the gods 
 that I got into no infamous correspondence with Benedicta, and 
 that after having fallen into some amours I was cured " ? But 
 soon there came a radical change into all that life on the Palatine, 
 when Hadrian died and Antoninus Pius came to the throne. With 
 this his adoptive father, Marcus Aurelius, now the heir-apparent, 
 stood in a relation of confidence and affection most honorable to 
 both, and perhaps without a parallel in the annals of rulers. The 
 virtues of the father are gratefully recorded by the son ; his mild- 
 ness and wisdom, united with justice and firmness, his piety free 
 from all mixture of superstition, and his vigilant efforts for the 
 elevation of the public morals ; the constancy of his friendships 
 and the liberal spirit which he showed to others in social inter- 
 course, together with his generous recognition of the personal 
 merits of all ; the magnanimity with which he bore unmerited 
 censure ; the sound judgment and feeling which he carried into all 
 relations, and his vigorous executive ability in all affairs whether 
 of his household or of the empire. These words reveal the 
 secret of the reverent love for Antoninus Pius which was always 
 so active a sentiment in Marcus Aurelius. He conformed him- 
 self, says his biographer Capitolinus, to the wishes of his father 
 in all actions, words, and thoughts ; so constantly did he attach 
 himself to his person, that during the whole reign he was only 
 twice parted from him for a whole day. Antoninus, on his side, 
 carried himself towards Marcus Aurelius with an affectionate 
 confidence seldom shown by an emperor to his own son. He 
 drew him in action into all affairs of government, heaped upon 
 
492 MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 
 
 him honors of every kind, and, to bind him to himself the more 
 closely, gave him in marriage his daughter Faustina. Of course, 
 creatures were not wanting in the court who tried by mischievous 
 slanders to sow discord between the emperor and the prince ; 
 but natural as it might have seemed, if the emperor had some 
 times been a little jealous of the youthful Caesar, his faith in 
 Marcus continued to the last as unshaken as was the filial regard 
 of the latter to the man to whom he owed so much. For twenty- 
 three years the Roman world had before it, in the relations of 
 these two men, the unexampled spectacle of an absolute sovereign 
 who lived with his successor in undisturbed harmony, and of an 
 heir to the throne who had no ambition for imperial dominion as 
 could tempt him to wish the day at hand when it should fall into 
 his own grasp. Too soon, indeed, for Marcus Aurelius himself 
 came the day when, on the death of Antoninus in 161, he assumed 
 as his successor the sole sovereignty of the Roman Empire. No 
 better successor, as was the universal testimony, could Antoninus 
 Pius have had. Marcus Aurelius was now forty years of age ; 
 under his father he had fully availed himself of an education in 
 the art of government which has seldom fallen to the lot of the 
 most fortunate princes ; and now, with a richly cultivated mind 
 and a matured noble character, he set himself to the task of ruling 
 the Roman world in the spirit and manner of his predecessor. He 
 improved, with the aid of able jurists, legislation and the adminis- 
 tration of justice, provided for the welfare of the capital by wise 
 municipal measures and by limiting the prodigality of public 
 shows and the barbarity of the gladiatorial contests. He carried 
 forward the plans of Antoninus in the promotion of morals and of 
 literature, and also in the enlarging and endowment of charity 
 schools and other benevolent institutions. Men of learning he 
 promoted to high positions, especially his old teachers, whose 
 merits he knew from his own experience. But while he was con- 
 scientiously devoted to the interests of the state and all its citi- 
 zens, he was singularly unassuming in aught that pertained to 
 himself. Towards personal offenses or treasonous designs he was 
 unusually mild ; and in cases where men were capitally condemned 
 for political crimes he was wont to substitute a milder penalty. 
 Unlike a Tiberius or a Domitian he gave special honor to the 
 senate, introducing into it only the worthiest citizens, preserving 
 its independence, and widening its range of business. He never 
 lost the conception, given him in his youth by his grandfather 
 
MARCUS AUflELIUS ANTONINUS. 493 
 
 Severus, of a monarchy which chiefly consulted the freedom of 
 the subject. So it was that he came to realize more nearly than 
 any other Roman emperor the ideal view ascribed by Tacitus to 
 Galba in his speech on the adoption of Piso, of being a republi- 
 can emperor, the best man of the commonwealth, the absolute 
 sovereign, and insisting as such upon no other prerogative than 
 that of being the faithful servant of all his subjects. 
 
 But the prosperity which fell to the lot of Antoninus as em- 
 peror was denied his successor. During the twenty-three years' 
 reign of Antoninus the empire suffered no serious commotions of 
 any kind, either within or without its borders, while during the 
 reign of Aurelius it was marked everywhere by a continuous series 
 of calamities. Lover of peace as he was, he must needs encounter 
 obstinate wars, not only in the distant East, with the Parthians 
 and Scythians, but also on the Rhine and the Danube with the 
 German tribes, who, though often repulsed, were yet slowly though 
 surely moving on to the catastrophe of the empire. While con- 
 ducting these wars, his best thoughts and energies were also occu- 
 pied in devising measures of relief from the ravages of famine in 
 Italy, and also of a deadly plague which, brought into Europe by 
 the army returning from Parthia, was spreading desolation from 
 land to land throughout the western world. These burdens of 
 government he bore with his wonted patience and fidelity, regret- 
 ting ever that he was denied the coveted leisure for his studies, but 
 consoling himself with the thought that he was fulfilling the du- 
 ties of his calling. One public calamity, however, fell upon him 
 like a personal grief, when his ablest and most trusted general, 
 Avidius Cassius, the governor of Syria, raised the standard of 
 rebellion, and aimed at the usurpation of the throne. This rebel- 
 lion, which was stopped by the murder of Cassius by his own sol- 
 diers as soon as they understood his designs, illustrates not only 
 the loyalty of the army to their emperor, but his own unselfish and 
 forgiving nature. When warned before the outbreak of the dis- 
 loyal spirit of Cassius, he replied that it would ill become him as 
 an emperor to proceed on mere suspicion against the best general 
 of the empire ; and when, on his way to the scene of the rebellion, 
 he was met by the tidings of the assassination of Cassius, he ex- 
 pressed his sorrow that the soldiers had robbed him of the plea- 
 sure of pardoning him. It was the lot of Aurelius to bear other 
 grievous personal trials, in the unworthiness of those nearest to 
 him and of his own family. An unspeakable burden he carried 
 
494 MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 
 
 in Lucius Verus, his adopted brother and a sharer of his throne, 
 who proved to be a luxurious, dissolute man, worthy only the 
 companionship of an emperor like Caligula or Nero. But in 
 his own home he had far bitterer sources of trial. His wife 
 Faustina, if we can accept the recorded rumors of the time, was 
 perversely emulous, in her loose life, of her mother, the elder 
 Faustina, indulging in excesses of vice which were the talk of 
 the streets and the jest of the stage. Strange, if true, that in 
 this mother and daughter were so soon reproduced in a Roman im- 
 perial house the vicious examples of the two Julias of the family 
 of Augustus ; and this time in the wife of Antoninus Pius and 
 the wife of Marcus Aurelius the philosopher. We may believe 
 the stories of the wife of Aurelius to be gross exaggerations, un- 
 worthy of her husband though she doubtless was ; but of the de- 
 pravity of his son Commodus, his successor on the throne, there 
 is unfortunately no doubt to be entertained ; he developed, even 
 from boyhood, a nature so brutally coarse and cruel that the peo- 
 ple believed him to be the son of some gladiator or pirate captain, 
 and no child of Aurelius at all. These circumstances which I 
 have mentioned as illustrating the trials of Aurelius' life, and the 
 patience with which he bore them, yet also illustrate the weaker 
 side of his character as a man and as a sovereign. With all his 
 commanding merits, and, one might say, to some extent on account 
 of these merits, he did not prove himself fully equal to the great 
 responsibilities of his position. If he illustrated all that is true 
 in the saying of Plato which was often on his lips, that states can 
 flourish only when kings are philosophers or philosophers are kings, 
 it must be confessed that he illustrated no less the fallacy of that 
 famous dictum. The kingly state was so little to his taste that 
 whenever he might he would gladly get away from it to the soli- 
 tude of his own studies. Philosophy, he once said, was his mother 
 and the court his stepmother, and he must be chiefly conversant 
 with the former if he would find the latter tolerable. He was of 
 a contemplative rather than a practical nature. While he gave 
 himself to his calling with conscientious fidelity, yet he lacked the 
 fondness and the energy for action which enters so largely into 
 the greatness and success of a sovereign. Great as he was in his 
 gentleness and mildness, in his generosity and philanthropy, fine 
 as was his principle, which he so often maintained, that we are to 
 pity bad men, not to be angry with them, yet he was better fitted 
 to endure wrong and to pardon it than with vigorous hand to 
 
MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 495 
 
 repress it. The worthless Verus he endured as a colleague for 
 eleven long years, and would have endured to his death had not 
 Providence interposed. The unworthiness of his wife he seems 
 to have borne at whatever cost of inward trial, yet so far as we 
 know with silence of word as of action ; either from a tenderness 
 which seems to border upon weakness, or from his reverent memory 
 of her father, Antoninus Pius, or in accordance with his principle 
 that we must patiently bear what we cannot change. A far more 
 serious reproach, however, is in his suffering his son Commodus 
 to come to the throne, painfully aware as he was of his incorrigi- 
 bly vicious nature. It is probable, too, that under a more rigid 
 government the rebellion of Avidius Cassius had never arisen. 
 
 Cassius was a man of marked military ability and inexorably 
 stern in his ideas of discipline ; but he was incapable of any sym- 
 pathy with the emperor's philosophy. But his words, as recorded 
 by his biographer, though uttered in a disloyal spirit, have in 
 them the ring of truth. " Marcus," he says, " though a very good 
 man, in his very goodness lets men live whose life he disapproves. 
 Where is Marcus Cato the censor ? Where the discipline of our 
 ancestors ? While our good emperor is philosophizing about vir- 
 tue and honor, bad men thrive and villains fatten on the em- 
 pire's treasury." These words, though from an unfriendly source, 
 may yet form for us now a fitting transition to a fuller considera- 
 tion of that philosophy which trained Marcus Aurelius to his excel- 
 lence of character and life, but hindered his undivided attention 
 to his duties as a sovereign. As we find it in his book of " Medi- 
 tations," it is the same in its essential principles as that Stoic phi- 
 losophy which, as first taught by Zeno and his successors, had 
 carried with it some of the noblest thinking and living of philo- 
 sophic Greece, and which, when transplanted to Italy, was adopted 
 by those men of Eome who, amid the civil wars of the declining 
 republic and under the tyranny of the earlier emperors, sacredly 
 preserved what yet remained of the old Koman manners and 
 political sentiments. Indeed, Stoicism seems to have had a kind 
 of elective affinity for the substance of Eoman being. Its ear- 
 nest view of the world, its rigid discipline, its aptitude for the 
 rule of life, was far more congenial to the Roman mind than the 
 idealism of Plato or the science of Aristotle. It was put to its 
 utmost strain of trial in that company of Roman nobles who could 
 not adjust themselves to the supreme power of Caesar, and there 
 it produced in Marcus Porcius Cato that example of unstained 
 
496 MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 
 
 honor and integrity which extorted the admiration of Caesar him- 
 self, and drew from Cicero that fine testimony that Cato was of 
 all Roman freemen the worthiest of Roman freedom (Phil. III. 
 4). And how many bright examples has Tacitus put upon his 
 historic pages of men bred in this school who kept their souls 
 upright and pure at the court of imperious and dissolute rulers, 
 and showed even to the bitter end how they counted dishonor far 
 worse than death. In his mention of the life and sad fortunes of 
 one of these noble Romans, Helvidius Priscus, Tacitus has briefly 
 stated the leading tenets of this school. " Helvidius followed," 
 he says, " those teachers of philosophy who count virtue or moral 
 good as the sole good, and vice or moral evil as the sole evil, and 
 count power, rank, riches, and all the other things which are exter- 
 nal to the soul as neither good nor evil, but indifferent." We 
 have only to expand these principles to reach the whole of the 
 Stoic philosophy. In relation to this only real antithesis of good 
 and evil, wisdom and folly, and the consequent happiness or mis- 
 ery, all other human distinctions of nation, condition, sex, family, 
 are of no account. All men are of like origin and nature, for all 
 are beings of reason, having the Deity as father of all ; they all 
 have a like destiny, and are subject to the same law ; all mankind 
 constitute one people, the world one state, the sovereign of which 
 is the Deity, its constitution the eternal law of reason. The more 
 unconditionally men subject themselves to this law, the more ex- 
 clusively they seek their happiness in virtue, so much the more 
 satisfied are they in themselves, and the more ready to cherish a 
 sense of fellowship with others, and more willing each, in respect 
 to the whole of which each feels himself a part, to do his duty in 
 all human relations. These the leading principles of Stoicism in 
 Greece and in Rome, as taught by Seneca and Epictetus, we find 
 also in the book of Marcus Aurelius which I have called his 
 " Meditations." Its literal title is " The Things of Marcus Aure- 
 lius to Himself," and it is thus of the nature of a private diary, 
 consisting of discourses to himself, his inmost thoughts in his most 
 secluded hours set home directly to himself in his cherished prac- 
 tice of self-examination and self-confession. Every sentiment in 
 the book is in the Stoic line of thought ; every day and hour the 
 writer seems to be reminding himself that he can attain to the 
 moral freedom of the wise man only by seeking his highest good 
 in submitting himself to the will of the Supreme Ruler of the world, 
 and then by ceaseless endeavors to promote the welfare of others. 
 
MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 497 
 
 Yet we find here nothing like a theory of ethics ; it is 'practical 
 ethics in the form of a rule of life ; and morality, as it is treated, 
 comes far nearer to the mildness and warmth of religious medita- 
 tion than in the philosophy of Zeno or even in that of Seneca or 
 Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius felt too deeply the nothingness of 
 earthly things, the moral weakness and helplessness of men, to be 
 able to set himself to speculative views of the world. With him 
 philosophy must bring rest to a troubled soul and healing to a dis- 
 eased will ; the philosopher, as a lover of true wisdom, must be a 
 physician of souls, a priest and servant of God among men. He 
 must show himself such most of all by a true love of men, so that 
 he may cheerfully, without reserve and with a free will, be doing 
 them good. On this head he thus discourses : " One man, when he 
 has done a service to another, is ready to set it down to his account 
 as a favor conferred. Another does not quite do this, but still in 
 his own mind he thinks of the man as his debtor. But a third, 
 in a manner, does not even know what he has done, but he is like 
 a vine which has produced grapes, and seeks for nothing more 
 after it has once produced its proper fruit." In another place he 
 says : " Do you seek to be paid for the service you have done 
 your fellow ? Why, it is just as if the eye asked a recompense 
 for seeing, or the feet for walking ? All men," our philosopher 
 teaches, " are related, all mankind is one body, and whoever cuts 
 himself loose from a fellow-man, parts himself like a severed limb 
 from the stock of humanity. Let us do good, not because it is 
 seemly and of good report, but because doing good of itself is a 
 joy." The erring, too, and the fallen, he tells himself to love, and 
 to pardon the unthankful and evil-minded. Men ojffend and wrong 
 others through ignorance of their true good, and we do not suffer 
 in our own selves by others' wrong-doing, and, besides, we ourselves 
 are not free from wrong-doing ; instead then of returning with spite 
 the spite of an enemy, let us rather overcome him with gentleness. 
 Yet we are not to think of this gentle sovereign as a kind of 
 quietist slumbering on the throne, or a dreamer of Utopian rev- 
 eries about perfecting himself and mankind. On the contrary, the 
 book is fresh and strong with the air of a wholesome good sense 
 and vigilant action. The philosophic ruler loves his solitude, 
 but he loves it for the strength it gives him for labor in the 
 world. He says : " Constantly give to yourself this retreat, and 
 there renew yourself ; meditate again upon your principles, and 
 they shall be sufficient to cleanse your soul and send you back to 
 
498 MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 
 
 men free from all discontent with daily work." And again : " Be- 
 think you every hour that you are to act as a Roman and a man ; 
 make offering of yourself as a manly citizen, an emperor, a soldier 
 at his post, and pursue the business in hand with vigor and appli- 
 cation." Life is short, and one fruit of it is a pious disposition 
 and the doing of what is useful to men. And so far from being 
 a Utopian in politics, he says to himself, "Never hope for a 
 republic like Plato's, that draft is too fine ; and the morals of 
 the world will not come up to it. Remember that a moderate 
 reformation is a great point, and rest contented. Do what God 
 requires of you, and trust for the issue and event." But it is 
 after all the inner life of the man which most interests us in 
 these "Meditations," the image it puts before us of that pagan soul 
 so enamored of his conception of moral perfection that in that 
 humble solitude of his into which he was as glad to retreat from 
 the height and glare of his throne, he ever was laboring to form 
 his soul after the ideal of virtue which his philosophy set before 
 him, even as an artist bent upon finishing his masterpiece, and 
 studiously retouching it without ceasing. " What," he asks him- 
 self, " are you to do with your soul to-day ? Remember that you 
 have within you something divine, that comes from God, and 
 that you must live in communion with him who has his temple 
 within you." In many passages you might think you were read- 
 ing the diary of a Christian saint. " Oh, my soul," he exclaims, 
 " when will you be truly good and simple in your goodness ? 
 Dress yourself in simplicity, in purity, and in indifference to all 
 that is neither good nor evil." Tacitus says that the love of glory 
 is the last of the passions which even a wise man puts off, a 
 thought which Milton, too, expresses in his " fame — that last in- 
 firmity of noble minds." This passion Marcus Aurelius felt like 
 other men, and well he might feel it as the sovereign of the world, 
 with ample scope for its exercise in peace and in war ; but this 
 passion, with all others, he strives to put under and subdue. 
 Sometimes he reminds himself how fallible and fickle are the 
 judgments of the world. " What ! " he exclaims, " is it in other 
 men's opinions of you that you put your happiness ? Why, you 
 will find that men will bless you as a god to-morrow who curse 
 you to-day as a beast." In other places he bids himself remem- 
 ber how fleeting is even the most durable renown, how the eulogist 
 and eulogized appear on the stage one day and are gone forever 
 the next day ; how that which comes effaces directly that which 
 
MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 499 
 
 has just gone ; that all things thus pass away, and then he asks : 
 " What, then, is this coveted immortality ? It is but vanity." 
 EecaUing, perhaps, his own wars and their victories, which taxed 
 his time and energies for more than half his reign, and how little 
 worth they all were and are, he says : " Consider how the ages 
 gone by have known you, and how you will be just as unknown 
 to the ages to come. Neither your power nor your fame has gone 
 far among those barbarians; how many that never heard your 
 name, and how many that laud you will soon blame you, or per- 
 haps forget you altogether. In short, glory is worth no man's 
 serious care, nor aught else external that men covet so much." 
 A recent French writer (M. Martha) has remarked that the Ro- 
 man philosophic emperor utters the same cry as the wise king of 
 Hebrew Scripture, "Vanity of vanity, all is vanities," but that with 
 Marcus Aurelius it comes out of a soul more pure, less uncertain, 
 and less troubled. The Jewish king, sated with selfish indulgence, 
 whether in sensual pleasure, or in power, or in knowledge, is disa- 
 bused at last, and in despair turns him to his religious conclusion 
 of the whole matter ; while the Roman emperor, without any pique 
 against pleasures, which to him have been ever indifferent, deems 
 lightly of the world not because he has abused it, but because he 
 knows something finer and better and less perishable, and so is 
 drawn to God by the light of reason and the instincts of the 
 heart. It seems to me that this is a sagacious and a just remark. 
 Solomon had from his birth and education what Marcus Aurelius 
 had not, the knowledge of Jehovah as the ever-living God ; but 
 ever the more for this difference between them must we admire 
 and revere in the pagan Stoic not only his sincere renunciation of 
 human grandeur and glory, but much more his submissive obe- 
 dience to the will and laws of the Deity, whether conceived as 
 god or gods, certainly as a divine power that ruled the world with 
 reason and goodness. It is not easy, however, to determine from 
 his writings what was really the conception of Deity which was 
 entertained by Marcus Aurelius. Sometimes he speaks in the 
 pantheistic terms of the earlier Stoicism of conformity to the 
 universal reason, or of being in harmony with the soul of the uni- 
 verse ; but for the most part, and especially when he speaks of 
 worship and prayer, his words carry with them a belief in the 
 personal existence of Deity as a moral Providence, and as the 
 Father and protector of all men. Thus in one place he speaks of 
 " that intelligent Being who governs the universe ; " and in another 
 
500 MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 
 
 lie says the particular effects in the world are all wrought by one 
 Intelligent Nature, the universal cause ; and again, " I adore the 
 Governor of the world, and am easy in the prospect of his pro- 
 tection." A peculiar interest belongs to those passages in which 
 this thoughtful and devout mind is turned to the subject of death. 
 His book seems to be a manual of preparation for death quite as 
 much as for the conduct of life, — if I may use the titles of Jeremy 
 Taylor's manuals, — for "Holy Dying" as for "Holy Living." 
 He seems often to anticipate the presence of death, to be training 
 himself to look it in the face, and to render to it a good account. 
 He makes haste to purify his soul, because he feels that he has 
 but little time to live ; he seeks to detach himself more and more 
 from the world, because he will offer to the Deity at the last 
 moment a complete submission void of all regrets. One must 
 fulfill, he says, with irreproachable rectitude all the obligations 
 which the divine reason imposes upon us, and not least that last 
 one of all, to die well. But it is painfully sad to observe how 
 with that act of dying well the Stoic faith fails him, with no 
 place in it for the hope he seems to crave, but dares not assert, 
 of a life beyond that act, and especially of a personal life. " How 
 can it be," he asks, "that the gods who have ordered all things for 
 the good of mankind have overlooked this alone, that men who, 
 during all their lives, have had communion with the Deity should 
 after all never live again, but be extinguished forever ? " He 
 straightway represses this murmur, and assures himself that how- 
 ever this may be it is all ordered for the best ; but he leaves the 
 impression that he is himself aspiring to a different future from 
 that promised by the pantheism of the earlier Stoics. 
 
 As we thus inquire into the ideas of Marcus Aurelius on the 
 great themes of God and immortality we cannot but remember 
 that his career as emperor and philosopher fell in what we now 
 call the second century of the Christian era. Exactly in all those 
 moral and religious views in which he passed beyond the old Ro- 
 man standpoint as weU as that of the earlier Stoicism he seemed 
 to come into very near relations to Christianity. That inward 
 piety, that deep sense of the vanity of earthly things, and that feel- 
 ing for human weakness and waywardness, that charity for aU men 
 which forgot not the thankless and unworthy, — all these marked 
 features in the character of Aurelius were the virtues of the early 
 Christians who were living in his time and in his dominions. 
 And yet so far from his holding any friendly relations to Chris- 
 
MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 501 
 
 tianity or having any sympathy with it, or indeed any knowledge 
 or even conception of its truths, we are confronted with the his- 
 torical fact that the Christians suffered more from persecution 
 under his reign than under any preceding reign since that of Nero. 
 We need not ascribe to the emperor the spirit of inhumanity or 
 of intolerance ; he was proverbially lenient in respect to penal 
 acts of every kind ; but there can be no doubt that in his reign, 
 and probably with his sanction. Christians in Smyrna and at 
 Lyons were visited as Christians with penalties of imprisonment 
 and of death. It must be conceded that Marcus Aurelius was not 
 above the Roman prejudices against the Christian faith which 
 showed themselves not only in the rage of popular indignation, 
 but also in the severe expressions recorded in their works by such 
 writers as Tacitus and the younger Pliny. Odious as were the 
 imputations laid to the charge of the Christians of spreading a 
 destructive superstition and of hating all mankind, it was never- 
 theless believed even by enlightened people that these imputations 
 were well founded. When we remember how very late it was in 
 the history of Christianity itself ere the idea even of toleration, 
 to say nothing of religious freedom, dawned upon the Christian 
 world, how for centuries down even to modern times Christians 
 persecuted one another even to the direst forms of torture and 
 death, we cannot be surprised that Marcus Aurelius, with all his 
 humanity and virtue, could not, through the prejudices of his time 
 and his race and his education, see Christianity as it really was, 
 and so in his opinion and his conduct he did it the gravest injus- 
 tice. But we must not forget that as emperor he could not but 
 proceed against it as hostile and treasonable to the state of which 
 he was the sovereign, and upon its profession as a crime, since 
 Christianity looked upon the Roman state as a kingdom opposed 
 to the kingdom of Christ, and destined with the pagan world 
 itself to a swift-coming destruction. Probably it was as far from 
 the conceptions of the Christians of that time, as of the Romans 
 themselves, that erelong Christianity was soon to become the 
 established religion of the Roman Empire. And how as a phi- 
 losopher Marcus regarded the new faith appears from a single 
 reference to the Christians in his " Meditations." It is a word 
 uttered only incidentally, but shows all the more clearly with what 
 a sad obliquity of vision he looked at the Christian character. He 
 is speaking of the approach of death, and says : " The soul must 
 be ready to meet it with dignity and fortitude, and not with mere 
 
602 MARCUS AUKELIUS ANTONINUS. 
 
 obstinacy like the Christians.^' How painful it is to contemplate 
 the errors of the most enlightened minds, the imperfections of the 
 most virtuous men ! That heroic Christian firmness which Mar- 
 cus Aurelius thought to be mere obstinacy, it was not for him or 
 his successors to withstand and subdue. That genuine Stoic word 
 which the philosophic emperor once uttered of the treasonable 
 designs of Avidius Cassius, " No prince ever destroyed his succes- 
 sor," had a larger significance than he could imagine in the rela- 
 tions of that then persecuted faith to the persecuting empire. 
 There, too, it was not possible for the present to destroy the pow- 
 ers of the future. Little as either Christians or pagans then 
 knew, the future of the world belonged in reality to Christianity. 
 That religion was triumphantly to outlive and to rise above the 
 Roman state and the Roman gods. Impotent as well as mon- 
 strously wrong was the attempt to extinguish it in the blood of 
 its confessors, and only a mournful impression does it make when 
 we look back and see the pure-minded Aurelius in fellowship with 
 an enterprise so unlike himself. But may we not say that he 
 " did it ignorantly in unbelief," even as was said of himself by the 
 great Christian apostle, himself also by his own confession "a 
 persecutor and injurious ; " nay, the Jewish was worse than the 
 Roman persecutor, for he in person " made havoc of the church," 
 " breathing out threatenings and slaughters against its disciples." 
 And may we not believe of the other what we know only of the 
 one, that he too " obtained mercy " ? He met the inevitable hour, 
 not indeed with the triumphant faith of the Christian apostle, but 
 yet with the composure of that Stoic belief to which he had been 
 true during all his life. In that supreme moment he was true to 
 the last Meditation he wrote in his book : " When the end comes 
 depart with a peaceful heart, for he who dismisses you means you 
 no harm." Even thus did he depart himself, Marcus Aurelius 
 the philosopher. Thus fulfilled his course, and finally went down 
 to his setting, that brightest of all the lights of the old Roman 
 world. And yet so enduring and so diffusive is all moral as well 
 as all physical light, that even now and in our own far-off horizon 
 there lingers yet something of the glow of that ancient Roman 
 goodness ; even as of late we have seen our western skies illu- 
 mined with the richest twilight hues long after the bright sun has 
 set. 
 
THE KELIGION OF THE EOMANS. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, JANUARY 13, 1882. 
 
 I AM to speak to you to-night of the religion of the Komans, 
 first, in its primitive and always characteristic qualities, and sec- 
 ondly, in the changes which it underwent in the progress of intel- 
 ligence, or, to put it in ancient phrase, through the influence of 
 philosophy. 
 
 We have a ready point of departure for such a discussion as 
 this in the deep and the general interest which is felt in our day 
 in the study of the various religions of the world, and in the study 
 of what is called comparative religion, as embracing the relations 
 of all these religions to one another and to Christianity. Certainly 
 in all the vast domain of knowledge there is no greater field, none 
 nobler, none more inviting to inquiry than that which is opened 
 to us by such studies as these. They have to do with what is 
 highest and what is deepest in human nature and destiny ; they 
 disclose to us in the thoughts and beliefs and hopes of human 
 souls of all races and ages, touching God and immortality, what is 
 most vital in the spiritual experience of mankind. It may be 
 that, living as we are in the full light of the Christian religion, 
 the heirs and possessors of its priceless blessings, we are apt when 
 we think of a pagan religion, as the Roman, to reduce it in our 
 thought to a hardly appreciable value, alike in what it contained 
 of faith or worship, and in the influence which it had upon char- 
 acter and life. Yet we cannot suppose that of all mankind only 
 Jews and Christians are religious human beings, or alone have 
 had or have a religious faith and life. We are taught by the 
 Apostle to the Gentiles that God is not the God of the Jews only 
 but also of the Gentiles. That same apostle also declared, and 
 when preaching to a pagan people, to the Athenians, " God hath 
 made of one blood all nations for to dwell on all the face of the 
 earth ; . . . that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might 
 feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far from every one 
 of us." Grant that the religion of the Romans was an imperfect 
 one, that it was a false one, and that whatever in it was true had 
 
504 THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 
 
 not the hold upon the heart and life which it ought to have had, 
 even as we must confess is the case with Christianity itself ; yet 
 it was the religion which they reached by what we call the light 
 of nature; to quote again from the apostle, and now from his 
 Epistle to the Romans, " God's everlasting power and divinity be- 
 ing perceived through the things that are made," and " the work 
 of the law being written in their hearts." It was also a religion 
 which belonged to Roman national life for a thousand years, and 
 belonged to it just as really as their language, their jurisprudence, 
 their eloquence, their dominion ; and I think there is nothing more 
 interesting in all the history of that wonderful people who have 
 ruled the world, and in a sense are ruling it now, than to know 
 how they conceived themselves and carried themselves as related 
 to the Supreme Ruler of all men and all things, that is, to know 
 what was their religion, the subject to which, without further in- 
 troduction, I now ask your attention. 
 
 The religion of the Romans, as of all their kindred of the great 
 Indo-European family of nations, was primarily a nature-worship ; 
 a worship of the invisible powers of nature, conceived as spiritual 
 beings, pervading and ruling the material world and all the life 
 of men. Above all others, it was the powers of light, the celestial 
 powers, which the Romans worshiped, comprehending these in the 
 supreme Jupiter, or, as the word literally means, the Father of 
 Lights the god of the bright heavens. In like manner they as- 
 cribed a divine power to the forces which they conceived as living 
 and ruling in all the phenomena of manifold earth, field and val- 
 ley, wood and mountain, spring and stream, and bringing to pass 
 in them all the reciprocal movements of production and growth 
 and of decay and dissolution. Much of this worship of earth the 
 Romans had in common with the Greeks, as of Ceres and Tellus, 
 corresponding to Demeter and Gaea, and so of many others. Oth- 
 ers, however, were of Roman origin, as Flora the goddess of flow- 
 ers, and Vertumnus the god of spring, and Pales of shepherds, 
 and most of all, and oldest of all, the worship of the earth under 
 the name of the Bona Dea, or Dea Dia. To this worship be- 
 longs the institution of the Fratres Arvales, a rural fraternity 
 or priesthood, that goes back to the mythic days of Romulus, 
 whose annual service it was to offer prayers and sacrifices for the 
 fruitfulness of the earth. This priesthood continued during aU 
 the Roman generations down to the fifth century of the empire, 
 and passed away at last in its pagan form only with the establish- 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 505 
 
 ment of Christianity. With such tenacity, indeed, did this ancient 
 service cling to the religion of the world that it was observed 
 throughout the Middle Ages in the so-called rogation ceremonies 
 of the Latin Church ; and in England, the rural processions with 
 prayers for the fruits of the earth went on annually, even to the 
 Reformation, the three days of Whitsunweek, Monday, Tuesday, 
 Wednesday, corresponding to the old Roman holy-days, the sixth, 
 fourth, and third, before the Kalends of June (May 27, 29, 30). 
 But these powers of nature reached a religious significance in the 
 thought of the Romans from their being conceived, not so much 
 as they were in themselves, but as they were related to human 
 life. These Roman gods are indeed personifications of the forces 
 of nature, but they become objects of worship only as they are 
 considered as having a beneficent or a destructive influence upon 
 human welfare. Thus we see that what was simply physical in 
 this nature-worship passed over into what is moral and spiritual, 
 and that it was these which invested it with a religious meaning. 
 To the Roman, Jupiter was not merely the god of the heavens, 
 but he was the ruler of human life and its destinies ; he it was 
 that shaped and guided all that was great and good ; he was in 
 himself and his government Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the best 
 and the greatest ; a name which at the first seems to have sprung 
 from an instinctive conception of one God ; and though it was 
 afterwards broken up into many gods, yet in the Roman mind was 
 ever getting back to the idea of the one all-ruling Deity. 
 
 Juno, a word of the same origin as Jupiter, was also the god- 
 dess of light ; she was the goddess of birth and marriage, of house 
 and home, and so the tutelar deity of women, the heavenly ideal 
 of the Roman housewife and matron, the materfamilias. Domes- 
 tic religion, however, had its special expression in the worship of 
 Yesta, the goddess of the hearth, as the word literally means, the 
 hearth as the centre of the Roman dwelling and all its home life ; 
 and the Vestal fire ever burning there was a visible symbol of the 
 purity and the preservation of the household ; an idea which was 
 gradually taken up into the life of the whole people as one na- 
 tional household, the eternal fire which was burning on the altar 
 of the Temple of Vesta, expressing both the nation's worship and 
 its integrity and perpetuity. No less ethical in its nature was the 
 worship of Mars. In the earlier life of the Romans, when agri- 
 culture was the most honorable pursuit. Mars was the god of the 
 pastures and the fields and the woods ; hence, the god of spring ; 
 
506 THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 
 
 and from him the first month of spring had its name as the Mars« 
 month, our March, and to him in early spring the first fruits were 
 brought, both from the fields and the flocks. But gradually the 
 thought of his presence and help was extended from the labors of 
 man in tilling the soil to all that was manly in human life ; and 
 so, just as the word virtus^ manliness^ came to be used by the 
 Eoman for civil or for military service, as virtue or as courage^ he 
 was for the citizen the god of peace, and for the soldier the god of 
 war. Thus it was that the place of all manly sports as well as 
 of warlike exercises was called the Campus Martius, or the Field of 
 Mars ; and the more the Roman genius for war and dominion was 
 developed, the more predominant became this martial significance 
 of the name and worship of this god. If we should follow out this 
 ethical tendency of the Roman faith, we should find it to become 
 a kind of moral Pantheon, taking into itself, as deities, personifica- 
 tions of all human virtues, personal and social. We may reach 
 this general result by contrast from a satirical passage of Juve- 
 nal, where in illustration of the national degeneracy he speaks of 
 the well-nigh divine honors paid by the Romans of his day to 
 riches: "Most sacred among us," he says, "is the majesty of 
 Riches ; although, destructive Money, thou dwellest not yet in a 
 temple, no shrines have we yet raised to thee, like those in which 
 we have ever worshiped Peace and Good Faith, and Victory and 
 Virtue, and Concord." (Sat. 1. 112 seq.) It is the existence of 
 such temples reared up in honor of exalted virtues, conceived and 
 adored as gods, which best illustrates the practical moral charac- 
 ter of the Romans, and goes far towards explaining their great- 
 ness and their power. In their eyes such virtues seemed to lift 
 up the human to a nearness to the divine nature, and to give to 
 human life something of a divine meaning and worth. So, too, 
 the living men who were the best patterns of these virtues, the 
 Manlii and the CamiUi, the Decii, the Curtii, the Curii and Fab- 
 ricii, these were the Roman heroes of their generation, and they 
 were the Roman saints for all after generations — sancti they 
 were just as truly in pagan Latin as good men since have been in 
 Latin of Christian times. 
 
 But in the worship of all these deities the Romans were given 
 far more to the outward services of religion than to its inward 
 beliefs and sentiments. A people born for action rather than con- 
 templation, for duty than devotion, for law and precept rather than 
 the free outgoings of emotion, they showed this legal practical 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 607 
 
 nature especially in their religion. It was a religion which cre- 
 ated no such mythology as that of the imaginative Greeks ; it had 
 no power to create a religious art like the Greek, and to fashion 
 the forms of the gods after human ideals ; indeed for centuries 
 the Romans, like the ancient Germans, used no images whatever 
 in the worship of their gods. Whatever may be the radical mean- 
 ing of the Latin word for religion (whether from leg ere or ligare^, 
 the religion itself, as you see it in action, is the observance of 
 ceremonies of worship which are prescribed by a binding sense 
 of dependence upon the will and rule of invisible divine powers. 
 So far as the Romans conceived of these powers as moral beings 
 to whom they had a conscious moral relation, the feeling awak- 
 ened was a sense of moral obligation, and carried with it that 
 conscientious regard for right which in the best days of Rome 
 was a chief trait of Roman character. But so far as they thought 
 of their gods only as supernatural powers, holding to them no 
 clear relation of law, but controlling in some mysterious way all 
 their fortunes, their religion always verged to superstition ; it was 
 a sense of painful restraint rather than of obligation ; a sense of 
 being obliged, from fear, to perform certain acts of worship. All 
 about them, they felt, were invisible beings in the heavens and in 
 the earth, on whom they were of necessity dependent ; they must 
 have their favor and their help ; and to this end they must be 
 scrupulously careful not only to keep their lives, public and pri- 
 vate, in accord with the will of these supreme powers, by the 
 observance of all that was required by their sacred books and 
 usages, but also to discern in the phenomena of nature indications 
 of the same divine will, and to follow them with a like punctilious 
 performance of appointed sacred rites. Hence we find in the 
 Roman religion, not only a ceremonial law, hardly less various 
 and strict than the Jewish, a ritualism not surpassed in compass 
 and minuteness by any Christian order of rites and forms, 
 whether Protestant or Catholic, but also a vast and cumbrous 
 system of divination, with all its details of auspices, portents, and 
 prodigies, with their respective sacrificial appointments. Quite 
 numberless were all these ceremonial appointments, and most 
 exacting their observance, as the Roman, with all the native ear- 
 nestness which he carried into every outward act of worship, yet 
 had not learned to measure the worth of divine service by the dis- 
 positions of the heart and by its influence upon the character. 
 All Roman life, private, domestic, and public, was thus strin- 
 
508 THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 
 
 gently bound and held in a vast and minute network of observ- 
 ance in prayers, libations, and sacrifices ; in domestic life, birth, 
 betrothal, marriage, death, as well as the daily recurrence of morn- 
 ing and evening, and the family meals ; and in public life, the 
 enacting of laws, the election of magistrates and their inaugura- 
 tion, the administration of justice, declarations of war, treaties of 
 peace ; all these, and no less the sports and games of the people 
 of every kind, ever went on as under the eye and sanction of the 
 gods, ahd were scrupulously observed by appointed supplications 
 and gifts and offerings. When we contemplate this all-penetrat- 
 ing ritual of the Romans, we can understand how their writers of 
 every generation were wont to celebrate the piety of their fathers, 
 and also how the early Christian writers, less conciliating, perhaps 
 less just than the Apostle Paul was to the Athenians when he 
 conceded to them an extreme " carefulness in religion," were ever 
 ready to denounce with vehement rebukes the excessive supersti- 
 tion of the Romans. In the performance of all these manifold 
 religious rites nothing was left to the disposition or the will of the 
 individual worshiper ; all was determined and sanctioned to the 
 last particular by precept and usage. The Roman sense for strict 
 order and for inviolable statutes, the conservative maintenance of 
 outward form and of inherited traditions, which we see in the 
 rigid discipline of their arms, in the orderly course of govern- 
 ment, and in the compact organism of the civil law, is no less con- 
 spicuous as a native controlling force in religion. Indeed, the 
 Roman religion was a positive system in itself and its applications 
 as truly as the Roman law ; and some of the most eminent chief 
 pontiffs in Roman history were also the most eminent judges and 
 jurists of their time. Thus the services of religion were as ex- 
 actly prescribed and as scrupulously observed as the rules and 
 statutes of law. For every relation and every event in life, for 
 every season, well-nigh for every day and hour, for every step 
 which one could take, there were the appointed prayers and sacri- 
 fices, or the consultation in due form of the proper auspices ; and 
 if in any way the worshiper failed to follow the prescribed form, 
 even if it were an involuntary violation or omission, the whole ser- 
 vice was not only nugatory, but might bring with it some dreaded 
 penalty. The sacrifice, whether for an individual, a family, or 
 for the state, in order to be efficacious, must be offered in exact 
 accordance with the pontifical law ; the prayers, which were as 
 formal as the formulas of jurisprudence, must be said in the very 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 509 
 
 words in which they were written in the sacred books ; the wor- 
 shiper must pray with the exactest recognition of the name of the 
 particular deity invoked and of his attributes and functions ; and 
 for the surer attainment of clearness in the prayer and of certainty 
 in the answer must often repeat the things prayed for with re- 
 newed emphasis ; and it was literally true that in his use of " vain 
 repetitions " he thought he would be heard for his " much speak- 
 ing." A ritual system so minute and so rigid as this was not 
 only a yoke that could not be borne, but it was simply imprac- 
 ticable in the real life of the people. Hence, in some of its parts, 
 it was directly abated of its severity by interpretations of the 
 priests; while in others, like all kinds of formalism and super- 
 stition which insist more upon the letter than upon the spirit, it 
 allowed various casuistic inventions of evasion to save, in name at 
 least, the integrity of a sacred ordinance, which in reality was 
 broken. An illustration of the former of these classes may be 
 drawn from the relaxation of the law in respect to holy time. 
 The Roman calendar abounded in holy seasons, /eHoe as they were 
 called, which sometimes lasted for several days, and together made 
 requisition upon nearly half the year. On such days not only 
 public business was suspended, but the people were enjoined to 
 abstain, under heavy penalties, from all work. Such an injunc- 
 tion bore so heavily upon the interests of daily life, the labors of 
 the field, and all kinds of trade and business, that it needed alle- 
 viating decisions from the pontiffs. The pontiff Scsevola, on being 
 asked what work might be done on a holy-day, replied, " AU that 
 cannot be neglected without injury or suffering," and another 
 pontiff declared that all work was allowed which was needful to 
 supply urgent wants of life. In particular the people were 
 taught that if an ox should fall into a pit on such a day the 
 owner might take it out, or if a house was liable to fall down it 
 might be propped up ; and so of many other cases of a similar 
 kind. Thus we may also see in literature that Virgil was no 
 heterodox poet when he taught in his " Georgics " that even on 
 holy-days alike human and divine laws allowed certain works to 
 be done. No religion, he says, forbids you to irrigate the fields, 
 to fence in the corn, to snare the birds, to burn out brambles, and 
 plunge the bleating flocks in the health-giving stream. (I. 269.) 
 But we find in Roman history the mention of incidents which show 
 us how scruples of conscience were sometimes removed by quite 
 evasive expedients. During the time of taking the auspices, it was 
 
510 THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS, 
 
 indispensable that absolute silence should be observed, and the 
 slightest violation even by the utterance of a word was enough to 
 vitiate the service. It is told of Cato the censor that one of his 
 attendants had broken the silence while he as augur had been 
 taking an auspice, and that he replied : " But I was not aware of 
 it, and so I am not responsible ; the auspice is a valid one." A 
 more singular instance, however, of an evasion of the augural law 
 is related by Livy of the consul L. Papirius. The Romans were 
 at war with the Samnites ; the two armies were near one another, 
 and the consul was confident of victory if there should be a battle. 
 The soldiers had caught the contagious enthusiasm of their leader, 
 and were clamoring to be led forth to the tight. Even the augur 
 shared the general ardor, and was so far carried away by it that 
 he dared to falsify the auspices, and to report a good omen to the 
 consul when he knew it was a bad one. With the utmost alacrity 
 the consul gave the signal for battle. Just as the army was to 
 march out, word was brought to a young officer, the consul's 
 nephew, that there was something wrong about the auspices, and 
 that he must report it to the consul. The youth, of whom the 
 historian says that he was born before it was the fashion to de- 
 spise the gods, was shocked at the intelligence, at once ascertained 
 the facts in the case, and reported them to the commander-in-chief. 
 He^ however, was not to be moved from his purpose. After 
 applauding his nephew's piety and fidelity, he decided the matter 
 thus : " That is now the augur's affair. If he has lied, he will 
 have to bear the penalty ; as for me, a favorable auspice was duly 
 announced to me, and I accept it as such." In the sequel, the 
 augur was the first man killed ; but the Romans carried the day, 
 winning a brilliant victory. This consul could appeal to a pontiff's 
 decision, who once said " that all days were good for saving one's 
 life and the honor of one's country," words which remind us of 
 Homer's Hector, who also when on the battlefield neglected a bad 
 omen, uttering at the same time the noble sentiment, " The one 
 best omen is to fight in defense of your country." (Iliad, 12, 243.) 
 A religion so ceremonial as the Roman, and entering so largely 
 into public as well as private life, might give to a modern state an 
 ecclesiastical character, through the predominance of the spiritual 
 over the temporal powers. But from any such tendency or even 
 its possibility the Romans were preserved by their native genius 
 for government and the consequent ultimate union of their reli- 
 gion with their state. The Roman was a state religion ; and it 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 511 
 
 was such in the sense that care for the worship of the gods was 
 just as much the business of the state as care for the administration 
 of justice or the enactment of laws. The life of the civitas, or com- 
 munity of citizens, comprehended in it things human and things 
 divine, — in Roman phrase, res humance et divince, — and the 
 government for both was one and the same ; and as the life of the 
 Romans knew no body of citizens as religious that was not at the 
 same time political, so their language had no word for any such 
 body. So the Roman state had no priestly caste and knew no dis- 
 tinction of laity and clergy. A citizen became an augur or a pon- 
 tiff, not because of religious knowledge or character, but just as he 
 became a praetor or a consul, on account of his abilities or his ser- 
 vices in peace and in war ; and he sat in the Senate or presided 
 over it, or sat on the bench of judges, or on the praetor's tribunal, 
 in the same way, and it might be on the same day that he had his 
 seat in a college of augurs or of priests, or was its presiding officer. 
 This practical union of religion with politics Cicero commended 
 as a marked illustration of Roman wisdom. " Our ancestors," he 
 says, " were never wiser or more inspired by the gods than when 
 they provided that the same persons should conduct the ceremo- 
 nies of religion and should govern the Republic. By this means 
 it is that our magistrates and pontiffs, discharging their functions 
 with like wisdom, unite together in the promotion of the welfare 
 of the Republic." Yet this Roman provision developed great evils 
 from which alike religion and government most seriously suffered, 
 as the Roman constitution was itself developed and the public life 
 became more complex in its relations. If it necessarily excluded 
 all such conflicts of church and state as are known to modern 
 times, it opened far worse conflicts of political parties within the 
 state. This was notably illustrated in all the stages of that mem- 
 orable contest of the plebeians with the patricians for civil and 
 religious equality. In all this contest it was the sanctions of the 
 national religion which the patricians employed, especially in the 
 taking of the auspices, to keep down their uprising opponents. 
 The religious as well as the civil offices were only held by the pa- 
 tricians ; thus from the augural and all priestly functions the ple- 
 beians were for generations excluded, so that they could not con- 
 duct any ceremonies of public worship ; a plebeian paterfamilias 
 might be a priest for his own household, but not for the people in 
 the temples. A very vigorous appeal on this head Livy puts in 
 the mouth of the plebeian orator Publius Decius : " On the behalf 
 
512 THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 
 
 of the gods, yet more than on our own, do we demand that we 
 who worship the gods in private may also worship them in pub- 
 lic " (X. 7). We have to remember that before this contest be- 
 gan the gods of Rome were the gods of the patricians alone, for 
 they alone were the Roman populus ; and for an alien plebeian 
 to hold office and as a magistrate to perform any religious service 
 or as augur to consult the divine will, was to the patrician no less 
 a profanation of religion than a violation of law. Hence, when 
 the plebeians demanded a share in the management of the state, 
 they were answered as in the name of religion : " How can you be 
 Roman magistrates ? You have not the right to take auspices," — 
 auspicia non habetis. And whenever any popular law was to come 
 up in the comitia, some augur was sure to find the signs in the 
 heavens inauspicious, and the comitia could not be held. Hard 
 was it for the plebeians to keep their respect for a religion which 
 in its working was a monopoly for their enemies, and the patri- 
 cians could scarcely be sincere in its service when they were con- 
 scious of using it for their own exclusive good. The whole plebe- 
 ian argument in this contest is given by P. Decius in the speech 
 from which I just quoted. The speech belongs to the year 300 
 B. c. The plebeians had already won all the civil offices and now 
 were striving for admission to the augurate and pontificate. De- 
 cius argued the plebeian cause against Appius Claudius, the most 
 patrician of all the patricians. He dexterously began by remind- 
 ing the people how his plebeian father had sacrificed himself for 
 his country in the Latin war. " Was not that sacrifice," he asked, 
 " just as pure and pious to the gods as could have been that of his 
 patrician colleague, Titus Manlius? And would the gods give 
 less attention now to my prayers than of my colleague Appius ? 
 Or does he worship the gods more religiously than I do ? " The 
 orator then ran through the list of plebeians who had well won 
 and worn the honors of curule office, and also the triumphal crown 
 and laurel wreath ; " and shall not such Romans as these add to 
 their honors the insignia of augurs and pontiffs? " Then address- 
 ing Appius he said: "Be not ashamed to have a man your col- 
 league in the priesthood who may be your colleague as a censor 
 or a consul. Remember, too, that the first Appius Claudius, the 
 founder of your house, was a Sabine, and an adventurer, and him 
 the patricians of that day admitted to their number ; do not then 
 disdain to admit us into the number of your priests. Have you 
 never heard it said that the men who were first created patricians 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 513 
 
 were not beings sent down from heaven, but were nothing more 
 than free-born men ? For myself I can say more than that ; for 
 my father was a consul. The truth is, too often have we heard, 
 and too often have we answered, this argument for the patrician 
 rights of ancestry, the patrician right of auspices ; now it is heard 
 again, and again refuted. Komans, I vote for this law which is 
 to give the plebeians a place among the augurs and the priests." 
 The law was carried — the so-called Apuleian law — and its pas- 
 sage made at last of the two orders one people, and united in their 
 devotion to the religious as well as the civil interests of their com- 
 mon country. 
 
 Such in its chief features was the religion of the Romans dur- 
 ing more than four centuries of their history. It was a polythe- 
 istic religion, as are all forms of nature-worship ; it was born with 
 the birth of the Roman people, it grew with its growth, it flowed 
 in the blood of the national life ; it was a religion of outward 
 ceremonial forms rather than of doctrines ; it was a state religion ; 
 it had in it a large mixture of superstition, as is abundantly 
 shown by the list of prodigies in Livy's annals, continuously re- 
 corded as religiously recognized and expiated ; it was not without 
 inhuman practices, as is manifest from the occasional offering of 
 human sacrifices. But yet it had in the heart of the people the 
 power of a real faith. They believed that there were beings in 
 the world higher and better than themselves, whom they called 
 and worshiped as gods ; beings to whom they were responsible, 
 and who bound them to a strict moral account. It was a faith, 
 too, that wrought itself into the life, in the nurture and practice 
 of virtues personal, domestic, and national ; first of all in that 
 comprehensive Roman pietas, or sense of dutiful feeling and con- 
 duct towards parents and country, and the gods, which unfolded 
 itself into filial affection, patriotism and piety ; and then in hon- 
 esty and good faith, in self-control and self-devotion, in frugality 
 and charity, and in that discipline of home life, so finely expressed 
 by the Roman word mos patrius et disciplina. In particular it is 
 worthy of note that such was the sanctity of the marriage bond 
 that for more than five centuries of Roman history not a single 
 example of divorce occurred. 
 
 In passing now to the changes which came in upon this old faith 
 of the Romans, I wish to indicate only those changes which it 
 underwent when the people, hitherto absorbed only in politics and 
 war, were now aroused and quickened to reflection by the stimulat- 
 
614 THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 
 
 ing influence of Greek literature, and especially Greek philosophy. 
 As early as the end of the first Punic war we discover among the 
 Eomans some knowledge of Greek letters ; but fifty years later, 
 after the decisive victory over Hannibal, and the subsequent wars 
 with Macedonia and Greece, began that extraordinary intellectual 
 movement by which in a short period the Romans came as entirely 
 under the intellectual sway of Greece as Greece came under the 
 ^way of Roman arms, when, as Horace has expressed it in verse, 
 
 " Captive Greece took captive by her arts her rude conqueror." 
 
 This dominant influence of Greek culture was profoundly felt by 
 the Roman religion in the new religious conceptions embodied 
 both in Greek letters and Greek art. In the Greek poets the 
 Romans became conversant with all the Olympic deities of Greek 
 mythology, and the names of old Roman gods were mingled with 
 those of the gods of Homer, and came gradually to take into 
 them those unworthy conceptions of deity which Plato had de- 
 nounced as unfit for any place in education in his ideal republic. 
 So too, Greek art represented Greek ideals of the gods, and the 
 Romans could not be familiar with the forms of the gods in the 
 masterpieces of Phidias and Praxiteles without losing something 
 of that superhuman idea which they were wont to attach to the 
 gods of their own country. But a far more direct and positive 
 way was it in which the philosophy of the Greeks acted upon the 
 old Roman faith. For purely speculative inquiries the Romans 
 had no native sense ; as has been wittily said by Mommsen, no- 
 body in Rome was given to speculation but the bankers and 
 brokers. The Romans measured the worth of philosophy, as of 
 all things else, by its practical uses ; attaching no importance to 
 philosophical opinions and systems which were remote from the 
 interests of real life ; they asked of philosophy, and asked in all 
 earnestness, to teach them what was needful for the formation of 
 character and the conduct of life ; what were the real blessings 
 (vera bona) needful to human welfare, and how these were to be 
 attained. And it was exactly this more practical direction which 
 philosophy had taken in the more recent Greek schools before 
 its introduction at Rome ; indeed, still earlier, by the teachings of 
 Socrates, as we find it in some of the Dialogues of Plato, it had 
 been brought into a close relation to religion and morals. In these 
 Greek schools, too, it had appeared how the results of such philo- 
 sophical inquiries were at variance with the ideas of the popular 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 615 
 
 religion. This religion held to the plurality of the gods and their 
 likeness to men ; but philosophy was ever tending to the doctrine of 
 one ultimate cause of all things, whether impersonal or personal, 
 nature or the Supreme Reason, or one Supreme Being the ultimate 
 cause, and, if personal, a being far above all human forms and hu- 
 man weaknesses. The religion as a positive system necessarily set 
 the utmost value upon ceremonials, upon offerings and sacrifices, 
 and the manifold modes of discovering the divine will ; but philo- 
 sophy had declared by Plato and his successors that all these were 
 of little worth, in comparison with moral dispositions and conduct. 
 But Greek philosophy made its way into Roman thought and 
 action not without serious conflict between those Romans who 
 were conservative in their national views and those who were 
 liberal, or, as we may distinguish them, the Romans of the old 
 and Romans of the new school ; the former represented by such 
 men as Cato the censor, and the other by the two Scipios, the 
 elder Africanus and the younger. A signal illustration of this 
 conflict is furnished by the reception at Rome of the Athenian 
 embassy in the year 186 b. c, composed of Carneades of the New 
 Academy, Critolaus the Peripatetic, and Diogenes the Stoic. 
 These men, though professed philosophers, yet had come only on a 
 political mission ; but this once executed, they took advantage of 
 their visit to the great metropolis to deliver lectures on philosophi- 
 cal themes. These lectures created in Roman society an immense 
 but a very divided interest. Young Rome was at once fascinated 
 and profoundly impressed by the strange eloquence in word and 
 thought of these learned Greeks, by the vigor and no less the 
 sophistries of their logic, and by the consummate finish of their 
 delivery ; but older and graver men looked on and listened with 
 misgivings and at times with ill suppressed mutterings of discon- 
 tent, and when at last Carneades, in the singular judicial style of 
 his skepticism, discoursed one day against justice, with no less 
 convincing force than the day before he had discussed in its favor, 
 when he proved that justice was no virtue, but only a matter of 
 social compact, the sturdy Censor Cato employed all the authority 
 of his office as of his age and experience against such pernicious 
 teaching, and carried a decree by a large vote in the senate, that 
 these " philosophical ambassadors have an answer and a polite dis- 
 missal from the city as soon as possible." But right as was Cato 
 in the action, both in patriotism and in morals, yet he was behind 
 the times in the resistance he had hitherto made to all Greek cul- 
 
516 THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 
 
 ture ; and it is the best of all evidence of this truth, that he him- 
 seK at length gave up his resistance with as good grace as his 
 rough but honest nature allowed, and became in his old age a 
 zealous student of the Greek language and its great writers. 
 There were three schools of Greek thought, which through their 
 native masters and their Roman disciples gained a decisive hold 
 upon the Roman mind — the Epicurean, the Academic, and the 
 Stoic ; the last two represented in the Athenian embassy just 
 mentioned, the Academic by Carneades and the Stoic by Dioge- 
 nes ; and these schools, though holding different views, were yet 
 all adverse in their influence to the Roman religion. 
 
 The Academic school had undergone many revolutions of opin- 
 ion since the time of Plato, its original founder ; and it counted 
 now among its adherents men of different views. Plato, through 
 his strong bias to a monotheistic faith, had insisted that the popu- 
 lar religion needed a radical reformation, which should purge it of 
 its immoral influences. $ But Carneades, carrying to the utmost lim- 
 its the principle of his school, that nothing could be comprehended 
 and nothing could be known, subjected to a negative criticism not 
 only the conceptions of popular faith, but all the theological proofs 
 of the philosophers for the existence of the gods. More positive, 
 however, and nearer to Plato, were later masters in this school, as 
 Antiochus and Philo, who were favorite teachers of Cicero and 
 other distinguished Romans in their youthful studies. It is in the 
 writings of Cicero, who more than any one else brought the Ro- 
 mans into acquaintance with Greek philosophy, that we have the 
 best illustration of this return in the later schools to the teachings 
 of Plato. While in some of his dialogues Cicero presents in all 
 their force the objections which the masters of the New Academy 
 had raised against all positive theology, yet for himself he utters 
 in clearest tone his faith in the existence of God, as the Supreme 
 Creator and Ruler of all beings and all things, and in the immor- 
 tality of the soul. Faith in God, he contends, is implanted in 
 the spirit of man; it is taught by all the phenomena of the 
 world in nature and in history, it is also practically indispensable, 
 as alone forming the moral basis of human society. Difficult was 
 it for Cicero, with his enlightened views, to uphold, though a 
 statesman, the state religion of his country ; quite impossible for 
 him, though a leading member of the august augural college, to 
 lend even the show of a belief to the Roman theory and practice 
 of augury. We cannot doubt that in the merciless denunciation 
 
THE KELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 617 
 
 by one of the speakers in his Dialogues on " Divination " of all 
 forms of soothsaying, he meant to record his own belief that the 
 whole system had quite lost out of it the old faith in indications 
 of nature of the divine will, and now was subserving the pur- 
 posed ends of politics, or with the many to satisfy the blind crav- 
 ings of superstition. Like Cotta in the Dialogue on the " Nature 
 of the Gods," he was attached to the popular faith not by religious 
 but only by patriotic and political considerations. It was the 
 Roman religion, the national religion ; it was the religion of the 
 people, and whatever there might be wrong or false in it, better 
 was it for the people than irreligion or no religion at all. The 
 opposition to superstition which Cicero and other Romans brought 
 with them from the Academy was extended by the Epicureans to 
 all religion itself, through their denial of the fundamental beliefs 
 of religion, a Divine Providence and the immortality of the soul. 
 The Epicureans had a place in their system, hardly definable 
 however or intelligible, for beings whom they called gods ; beings 
 not superhuman in nature, but rather human beings of an exalted 
 rank ; beings living in undisturbed repose far away from earth in 
 some unknown intermundial spaces, and having, as the very ele- 
 ment of their blessedness, exemption from all providential rule, 
 all oversight or even knowledge of human affairs. Such a deistic 
 view of the gods the Epicurean teachers deemed to be essential to 
 the welfare of men, inasmuch as it freed them from superstitious 
 fears of divine agency and of death and future retribution. Many 
 were the Romans who were attached to the Epicurean school, not 
 so much from a real knowledge of its teachings as from an indif- 
 ference to all higher human interests and from a fondness for a 
 life of ease and freedom from restraint ; but it found in Lucre- 
 tius a diligent and intelligent student, and in his poem a valuable 
 exposition and application of its principles, no less poetic than 
 scientific. Adopting the Epicurean physics, Lucretius conceived 
 the world in its origin and its government as only the result of 
 mechanical agency, and the soul of man as material and mortal 
 as his body, and bounded in its being by its brief earthly exist- 
 ence, and, true to the Epicurean ethics, he carried out his applica- 
 tions of his physical principles with a strict logical consequence, 
 and enforced them with a passionate earnestness, convinced that 
 only by such a philosophy could man be rid of his enslaving fears 
 of the gods and of death. Religion he deemed to be the chief foe 
 of man, and Epicurus he lauds as the greatest human benefactor. 
 
518 THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 
 
 in that by teaching the true knowledge of nature he wrought out 
 man's deliverance and happiness. How different in all his think- 
 ing and feeling is Lucretius' contemporary, the poet Virgil, — how 
 different all his poetry in its religious interpretation of nature 
 and human life ! Virgil is the worthiest illustration of his own 
 expression, the pius vates, and his poetry the best expression of 
 the best religious thought of his country and age. Endowed no 
 less than Lucretius with a poet's sense for all that is grand and 
 beautiful in the outward world, and with a poet's sympathy with 
 all the mystery of man's life and being, yet unlike the philosophic 
 poet he discerns in all natural phenomena a beneficent divine 
 agency, and in the nature and the world of man he recognizes the 
 superiority of the soul and all that is spiritual to the bodily and 
 the material, and above and in the midst of all human beings 
 and human affairs, the presence of the supreme Spiritual Power, 
 guiding and controlling all in the interests of truth and mercy. 
 While Lucretius breaks with the Roman and with all religion, 
 Virgil clings to the instinctive religious convictions of his country 
 and of mankind, while he seeks to unite them with the more en- 
 lightened sentiments of his own time. In his pastoral poetry he 
 is in sympathy with the piety of the shepherds which looks up- 
 ward in thankfulness for the protection of their flocks as they 
 wander by the woods and the hillsides ; in his " Georgics," while 
 he seeks to revive the old Roman love of the land and of the 
 toils of rural life, he aims to awaken in the struggling and hardy 
 tillers of the soil some devout sense of their calling by showing 
 how it is in the order of Providence that man, by his labor, should 
 have dominion over the earth, and how by such labor man best 
 fulfills his duty and promotes his welfare. And in his crowning 
 national poem he teaches his countrymen and their august prince, 
 at every stage of the Roman annals which he records in his verse, 
 that this great structure of government, though built up by the 
 human hands of many generations, was all appointed and guided 
 by divine decree for the peace and good order of the world. And 
 in the views disclosed in the sixth book of this poem, of the world 
 to come — of the Tartarus of the lost and the Elysian abodes of 
 the blest — how clear and impressive are the conceptions of the 
 immortality of the soul and of a spiritual life after death, of the 
 everlasting distinction between a righteous and an unrighteous life, 
 and of a final award to men of happiness or misery according to 
 the deeds done in the body. How Roman and how human are 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 519 
 
 the two classes of lives and characters to which are respectively 
 assigned everlasting punishment and eternal life ; in the one, haters 
 of brothers and fathers, men without natural affection, men guilty 
 of unnatural crimes, greedy and selfish misers, traitors, and be- 
 trayers of masters and friends ; in the other, such as martyrs for 
 their country's cause, holy priests, pious poets, and benefactors of 
 their kind. 
 
 We have now only to consider the relations to the Roman reli- 
 gion of the last of the three schools of philosophy which I have 
 named, — the philosophy of the Stoics. There was a religious 
 and theological tone in the Stoic philosophy which set it in marked 
 contrast to the Epicurean. While the Epicureans conceived of 
 gods removed from all concern with the world, the Stoics on the 
 contrary believed the world of nature and of man to be under 
 the continuous agency and the providential rule of a supreme 
 spiritual power; and in opposition to the polytheism of the 
 Greek as of the Eoman popular faith, they believed this supreme 
 power to be one divine being, whom they called, in the panthe- 
 istic spirit of their school, the Soul of the Universe; and so 
 far as they gave the name of gods to the forces of nature, they 
 thought of them only as single manifestations of the one Deity. 
 They also attached no worth to the rites and ceremonies of Roman 
 worship, insisting that the true divine service consisted in the 
 devout knowledge of God and in a pious and moral life. Yet 
 the Stoic teachers were far from rejecting with the Epicureans the 
 popular religion as mere superstition, or from fearing its influence 
 upon human welfare. They held, in the religious spirit that was 
 native to their whole manner of thinking, that a true fear of the 
 gods and a spirit of sincere worship might dwell in the most unen- 
 lightened and even ignorant minds ; and that an abandonment of 
 the traditional religion and its worship might carry away with it 
 all the sanctions of private and public morality. Generally and 
 briefly stated, these were the chief Stoic views which came into 
 close relation to the religion of the Romans, and they were 
 taught especially by Pansetius, who lived in Rome many years, 
 was the founder of Roman Stoicism, and counted among his dis- 
 ciples and personal friends such Romans as the younger Scipio 
 and his friend Lselius and the other choice spirits of that literary 
 and philosophical circle of which those eminent men were the cen- 
 tral figures. In his early years a contemporary of these men, but 
 in his illustrious public career belonging to the next generation, 
 
620 THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 
 
 was Quintus Mucius Scaevola, the first Roman who, as a thinker 
 and a writer, subjected the religion of his country to a free 
 criticism on the basis of Stoic principles. It was Scaevola who 
 originated at Rome the threefold view of religion which was 
 afterwards more fully unfolded and defended by the celebrated 
 Terentius Varro, known in Roman literature as the most learned 
 of the Romans. This view represented religion as the poetical or 
 mythical, the philosophical, and the political. Of the first his 
 negative opinion was as pronounced as that of Plato of the Greek 
 mythology ; it was full of unworthy conceptions of the Deity, in 
 that it ascribed to the gods in quality and in action what was 
 not only unworthy of men as such, but could be true only of the 
 worst and most contemptible. The philosophical was entirely 
 free from such faults, but it was unfitted for popular uses, and at 
 variance with the practical purposes of religion ; it contained in it 
 much that was either unintelligible or might easily be half under- 
 stood or misunderstood, and so hurtful in practice. The third 
 view, or the political, looked at the popular faith as a state institu- 
 tion, to be defended and upheld, apart from the truth either of doc- 
 trine or of worship, simply on the ground of political expediency. 
 As Varro put this view, the religion of the nation must be taught 
 and observed, however faulty and even false ; it is indispensable 
 as an institution of the state and for the stability and good order 
 of society. These opinions were doubtless derived from Panse- 
 tius, and are quite in harmony with Stoic utterances of the masters 
 of the school, both Grecian and Roman. But they had a quite 
 peculiar significance as taught by Scsevola. He was not only a 
 distinguished statesman, and, as Cicero describes him, the most 
 eloquent of jurists and also the most learned jurist of the orators, 
 but he was also the Pontifex Maximus, the ecclesiastical primate 
 of Rome, and so the chief authority as well as magistrate in all 
 matters of religious faith and practice. Yet by no one was he 
 ever charged with heresy or heterodoxy; he was unmolested in 
 his office and in all his public dignities, and to the end of his life 
 was in fame as he was in character a man of the highest integrity 
 and virtue. In substantial agreement with these opinions were 
 some of the best as well as the most enlightened of the Romans 
 in the last century of the republic ; as thinking men they had 
 lost faith in the national religion, but as conservative and patriotic 
 Roman citizens they could still defend it and practice its rites. In 
 the early empire, the Stoic thought, with its application to reli- 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 521 
 
 gion, drew to it more and more the ablest as well as the most 
 thoughtful and noblest of the Romans ; in the midst of the calami- 
 ties which fell upon Roman life, with the incoming of imperial 
 power and despotic rule, for such men Stoicism was the best reli- 
 gion they knew, and in its pure conceptions of Deity and more 
 liberal views of humanity they found sources of strength and of 
 consolation and hope. Their teacher, the representative teacher of 
 this Roman Stoicism, was the philosopher Seneca. The theology 
 of this philosopher was so pure and so true, his conception of God 
 so clearly and justly embodies the attributes of wisdom, goodness, 
 mercy, and love, and in the religion he teaches he dwells so ear- 
 nestly upon the pious dispositions of the heart and the subjection 
 of the will to truth and right, in short so Christian were his senti- 
 ments and language, that both in modern as well as in ancient 
 times it has been believed, though on no sufficient evidence or 
 reason, that he was directly indebted to Christianity for his ethical 
 and religious ideas. Hence, too, he was so often claimed as a 
 Christian by the early fathers, in the expression they used of him 
 as " noster Seneca.'''' The doctrines and spirit of Seneca were 
 quite at variance with faith in the prevailing rites and beliefs 
 of the Roman religion ; and this variance he expressed in his 
 writings with the utmost freedom. Especially did he condemn 
 the fables of the poets concerning Jupiter and the other Olym- 
 pian deities ; and he rejected with scorn the ignoble crowd of gods, 
 as he expressed it (ignohilis deorum turha)^ which had poured 
 into Rome from all parts of the world. In like manner he con- 
 demns the use of images in worship and of all the sacrifices in the 
 temples. " The images^'' he says, " people adore ; why not rather 
 adore the artisans who fashioned them ; people smile at the sport- 
 ive plays of children, but they are dealing with just such plays 
 all their life long, and in the most serious matters that can pos- 
 sibly concern mortal men." And thus he speaks of sacrifices: 
 " How are the gods worshiped ? With slaughtered victims, as if 
 the gods delighted in the blood of innocent beasts. The true wor- 
 ship is of the heart. You need not," he says, " go to the temples 
 to seek God ; God is near you, he is around you, he is in you. 
 Not temples of stone let us rear up to his service, but rather the 
 sanctuary of the heart ; let us not serve him with the blood of 
 victims, but with pure sentiments and right purposes. To know 
 and be like God, that is the best divine service." Similar were 
 the teachings of the later Roman Stoics, and especially of Epic- 
 tetus and of Marcus Aurelius. 
 
622 THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 
 
 From the historical sketch which I have thus drawn, however 
 imperfectly, it clearly appears that in the early period of the 
 empire, the enlightened and educated mind of Rome was now quite 
 estranged from the old fast-decaying national faith. But it was 
 an inevitable result of this estrangement that this faith should 
 gradually lose its hold upon the humbler and ignorant classes of 
 the people, and be unable to maintain itself in their life against 
 the manifold polytheistic beliefs and rites which were imported 
 into Rome from all parts of the East ; and all, incongruous and 
 contradictory as they were, became strangely incorporated into the 
 national worship. So it is that superstition makes willing cap- 
 tives and victims of individuals and nations who have lost or 
 abandoned their religion. Such a bewildering maze and confusion 
 finally came into Roman worship that we find the satirical poets 
 and even grave writers sadly complaining that it was impossible 
 for the people to know what gods to address in their prayers, and 
 that they were compelled to address many in succession, and some- 
 times at the end to add the saving clause, " and any other god or 
 goddess not yet named." And yet out of this chaos of " gods many 
 and lords many" there was emerging that monotheistic faith, in 
 its national origin also from the East, which, even while confined 
 within its rigid Jewish limitations, was already winning con- 
 verts in Rome itself, as in different parts of the empire, and was 
 erelong, in the Christianity of which it had been the prophet and 
 the precursor, to become the faith of the world. Not however 
 from Rome, with all its tendencies to universality, was the destined 
 being and sway of this faith ; not from the Roman race, not forth 
 from the proud Roman capital, was it to issue on its peaceful tri- 
 umphant career. Already from out the most despised of all the 
 Roman subject races, from the pettiest of all Roman subject prov- 
 inces, had it arisen into being ; it was coming onward, not like a 
 worldly power, with observation; but as the kingdom of God, 
 silently, gradually, but irresistibly as a divine spiritual force. 
 And yet, for the Christian faith erelong to be the established 
 faith of the empire, the Roman religion had been preparing the 
 way, alike by what was good in it and what was bad ; by the evil 
 that needed to be corrected or eradicated, and the good that 
 needed to be purified, and by the yearning for the true though 
 unknown God which it expressed, and which needed to be fully 
 satisfied. And a far greater service of preparation had it been 
 given Rome to render : by her genius for conquest, assimilation, 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE ROMANS. 523 
 
 and dominion slie had made one people of all the peoples of the 
 earth, so many, so diverse; and by her universal speech, and 
 law, and government she had united all nations in one world- 
 community, the one civilized world, of which Christianity was to 
 be the one universal religion. 
 
OLD AGE. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, APRIL 13, 1883. 
 
 I HAVE been reading this term with one of my classes Cicero's 
 " De Senectute," and I have been impressed more than ever before 
 with the worth of this Latin essay, in the justness of its senti- 
 ments and in the finish of its diction. The tone is cheerful and 
 genial, and yet calm and serious ; the argument for age moves on 
 at times with a moderate concession, but mostly with a happy in- 
 genuity and glowing fervor of defense. It is Roman in its good 
 sense and sober, practical spirit ; it is Ciceronian in the fullness 
 and richness of its ideas and illustrations, and it is human and 
 humane in all its views of man's life and destiny. I have been 
 so much interested in this reading of it, and more now than in 
 earlier years perhaps, from a rather natural increase of fellow- 
 feeling with the writer, that I have abandoned a subject in which 
 I had made some progress, and decided to bring to you now some 
 account of the origin and conduct of this work of Cicero^ with 
 some reflections on the theme which it discusses. 
 
 I need not unfold in detail the plan and contents of this Latin 
 classic, with which you are all probably familiar. Who indeed has 
 not read it ? Who can read without instruction and delight what 
 is taught in it on a subject of universal human interest by a 
 thoughtful and cultivated Roman, the greatest orator and the 
 most accomplished scholar of his country, and one of her chief 
 statesmen, when, at the close of an exceptionally long and hon- 
 ored career in the great Roman world, with the downfall of the 
 constitution and of liberty, public life in the old Roman sense 
 now no longer existing, and all the grand scenes of its ambitions, 
 its toils, and its honors now vanished forever, he betook himself to 
 the seclusion of his villas, to find diversion and solace in occupa- 
 tion of thought and composition, with themes of supreme interest in 
 ethics and religion. It was under these circumstances that Cicero 
 wrote in the last two years of his life his " De Natura Deorum," 
 " De Divinatione," " De Officiis," and the two companion essays 
 the " De Amicitia," and the " De Senectute." In dedicating to 
 
OLD AGE. 625 
 
 his life-long friend Atticus this last work, — with which we have 
 now to do, — Cicero mentions the disordered state of public af- 
 fairs as a cause of anxious distress to them both, for which at an- 
 other time he would offer his friend some consolation ; and then 
 gives as the immediate motive of the present work his desire 
 to lighten for both of them the burden of age, of the pressure of 
 which, or at least of its near approach, they were already con- 
 scious ; adding that when he first purposed to write on old age, 
 Atticus immediately occurred to him as one worthy of a gift 
 which both friends might use with common advantage. I might 
 perhaps, in bringing a discussion of this subject to the Club, plead 
 to some extent a like motive ; for some of us I suppose are already 
 at the mature age which Cicero and Atticus had then reached, and 
 others may descry it at least approaching from whatever distance ; 
 and the youngest of our number may be drawn to it, with even 
 some desire, by reading and- discussing Cicero's book, if Mon- 
 taigne's word of it be true, that " it gives one an appetite for 
 growing old" (il donne Vappetit de vieillir). 
 
 The setting of the discourse, in the choice of the principal 
 speaker and of his younger friends, was very happily conceived and 
 wrought out by the writer. In this respect the Roman improved 
 upon a similar work in Greek by the philosopher Aristo of Ceos, 
 to which he alludes in the introduction, though we have no means 
 of further comparison, as the Greek work has not come down to 
 us. Aristo, in his Greek fondness for the poetic, and perhaps 
 in his philosophic depreciation of age, had given his discourse in 
 the person of the mythic Tithonus, for Tithonus, as the poets 
 had sung, had been loved in his youthful bloom by the goddess 
 Aurora, who had prayed and won for him from Jove the gift 
 of perpetual life ; but, alas for her unwisdom ! she had forgotten 
 to ask for a life of perpetual youth ; so that when Tithonus had 
 passed far beyond his prime, he lived on, to be sure, but worn and 
 ever wasting in the decrepitude of never-ending age. But Cicero, 
 with a fine human and Koman sense, chose for his fittest speaker 
 to discourse upon age an historical person, a typical Roman, Mar- 
 cus Porcius Cato, who had been conspicuous in youth and in man- 
 hood for all high qualities and achievements of Roman character 
 and life, and in old age itself distinguished above all his fellows, 
 and who had died at 85, his faculties strong to the last year, " his 
 eye not dimmed nor his natural force abated." He was of an old 
 family of the Porcian gens^ but the first of that gens to be called 
 
526 OLD AGE. 
 
 Cato^ an old Sabine word for practical wisdom (catiis)^ a quality- 
 expressed later by the Latin title which was given him of Sapiens^ 
 and which Cicero says he always had as a kind of cognomen. He 
 is known as Cato Major ^ in distinction from his descendant the 
 inflexible Cato Minor or Uticensis, of Caesar's time. He had also 
 the title of Censor, from the fidelity with which he discharged 
 the duties of the censorship. Though averse in his earlier years 
 to Greek philosophy and culture, yet when past sixty he became a 
 zealous student of Greek and its great writers. At the age of 
 eighty-one, when accused by an enemy of some charge, the nature 
 of which is not recorded, he defended himself with full voice and 
 unbroken strength. In the last year of his life, he conducted a 
 prosecution against Sulpicius Galba for a flagrant breach of pub- 
 lic faith, delivering a powerful speech, which he afterwards re- 
 vised for insertion in a work on which he continued to labor till 
 within a few weeks of his death. 
 
 Such was the man by whose lips Cicero here utters his senti- 
 ments on age. The other personages in the dialogue are the 
 younger Scipio and Gains Laelius, contemporaries and intimate 
 friends, now about thirty-five years old, and both famous men, too, 
 in their generation ; Scipio, the son of ^milius Paulus, the son- 
 in-law of Cornelia the mother of the Gracchi, and grandson by 
 adoption of the elder Scipio Africanus, whom he followed as a 
 soldier with no uneven steps, completing in the destruction of 
 Carthage the work which his grandfather had begun ; a Roman 
 of Romans, Cicero's ideal statesman in his " De Republica," and 
 yet in scholarship and literary tastes the chief of the Hellenized 
 Rome of his day ; and Lselius, a good soldier, sharing with honor 
 in Scipio' s campaigns, and in the arts of peace his leader, an 
 enthusiast in literary studies, an accomplished writer and speaker, 
 and with Cicero in the " De Amicitia " a model for his country- 
 men in all higher culture. 
 
 These two friends come to Cato and begin the conversation by 
 telling him that they have often admired his wisdom in other 
 things, but most of all in his bearing old age so easily, a burden 
 which they had heard other people say was quite odious and in- 
 tolerable. The old man replies, that it is no such wonderful 
 thing ; men have only to follow the guidance of nature ; then 
 they will find old age no harder to bear than manhood or youth ; 
 nature has made all due provisions for the end as for the begin- 
 ning and the middle of human life, for she is no dull poet, know- 
 
OLD AGE. 527 
 
 ing how to order aright four acts of the play and then breaking 
 down in the last act. He, too, has heard some old men complain 
 of their lot, the decay of strength, the loss of pleasure, the vanity 
 of the world. The fault, however, of such complaints lies, he 
 thinks, not in the age, but in the character. The people who are 
 querulous and ever croaking in old age, were querulous also in 
 youth ; they are croakers by constitution and by habit, too. Old 
 age has, to be sure, its human troubles, but a wise man will know 
 how to bear them, even as he bore the troubles of other periods. 
 To complain of them is to fight against nature, and that were just 
 as senseless and hapless a fight as the war of the giants with the 
 gods. Here we have indicated the line of defense of old age in 
 this essay of Cicero. Put on the defensive by the questionings of 
 his young friend, our Cato Major, old in years but delightfully 
 young in spirit, is drawn into a courageous protest against the 
 view that old age is necessarily an unhappy season. He finds 
 four seeming grounds for this view ; the firsts that old age with- 
 draws men from active life ; the second^ that it weakens their 
 physical powers ; the thirds that it robs them of nearly all pleas- 
 ures, and the fourth^ that it is not far off from death. These 
 grounds he proceeds to show to be in his judgment untenable. 
 The manner of proceeding is not quite free from special pleading, 
 but on the whole is fair and just and quite as logical as need be. 
 All readers will agree, at any rate, that it is very entertaining and 
 instructive ; its manly thoughts and brave words and bright illus- 
 trations casting their relieving lights along the evening of man's 
 life on earth, and opening at last, through the passing shadow of 
 death, clear glimpses of an after immortal life, and the glad re- 
 unions and societies there of the good of all ages and climes. 
 From this general view of the plan and scope of Cicero's essay, I 
 pass now to some reflections upon its theme, not following directly 
 the train of thought, though often touching it at different points. 
 Without refusing to look at the darker aspects of the subject, I 
 purpose to dwell longest upon the brighter ones, and if I should be 
 rather discursive or say too much upon the whole or any one part 
 of it, I shall only prove what old Cato allowed for his own dis- 
 course, that age is rather given to rambling and loquacity, and 
 shall show, as he did, that I do not defend it from all faults. 
 
 It is an interesting preliminary inquiry, at what point old age, 
 as a period, is understood to begin, and, in accordance with this 
 understanding, what are the preceding periods, and where they 
 
528 OLD AGE. 
 
 begin and end. We are familiar v/ith some conventional divi- 
 sions of human life in literature as in popular speech, though the 
 main divisions exist in the nature of the case. There is the fluc- 
 tuation in the dividing line between manhood and old age as well 
 as between youth and manhood. As we naturally distinguish the 
 young and the old, we are mostly content with the general division 
 of youth and age, even as in the year we are content with the 
 broad divisions of summer and winter. Thus it is that Cicero in 
 this piece sometimes makes the whole of life to consist of adules- 
 centia and senectus. But soon an exacter division is a threefold 
 one, with childhood, the Eoman 2^ueritia, preceding youth and 
 age, even as we have spring before summer and winter. In one 
 passage of this piece Cicero has this division ; the pueritia^ end- 
 ing as late as 20 ; the adulescentia, at 45 ; and the senectus then 
 beginning. Thus, too, in one of his letters he speaks of Octavian 
 at 19 as puer, and Sallust calls Julius Caesar adulescentulus at 
 35 ; and in Livy (30, 40), Hannibal at 50 is called senex. But 
 further, as in the analogy the autumn comes in between summer 
 and winter, so in man's life the second period is subdivided by the 
 Romans into adulescentia and juventus, the latter the fruitful 
 autumn, and so making the fourfold division of pueritia^ adules- 
 centia^ juventus^ and senectus. This is Horace's division in his 
 well-known passage of the " Ars Poetica," only he calls the second 
 period juventus and the third cetas virilis. We do not have in 
 English convertible terms for adulescens Sind juvenis, the former 
 meaning one ^vho is growing up ; the latter one full-grown or 
 adult. But in Latin writers a still more common division is five- 
 fold, which is made by putting farther off the beginning of senec- 
 tus^ by inserting between it 2iiidi juventus the cetas seniorum ; the 
 senectus thus begins at 60. 
 
 But a still minuter analysis of man's life the Romans had in 
 seven ages^ the first three representing life as on the ascent as in- 
 fans^ puer^ adulescens^ the fourth juvenis, young man, as at the 
 highest point, and for a while at a standstill, and the last three as 
 life is on the decline, vir, senex, and silicernius, the last being the 
 " second childishness " of Shakespeare's " Seven Ages," though 
 otherwise the Roman and English divisions agree only in the num- 
 ber seven. But of old age, wherever in years it may be said to 
 begin, Cicero well says no one can fix the point where it is to 
 end ; he contents himself with adding, that it may go on so long 
 as one is adequate to his appointed work. He entered into no 
 
OLD AGE. 529 
 
 speculation touching the natural term of human life, a curious 
 question not infrequently discussed by modern writers, and for 
 the most part only with curious results. The naturalist Buffon 
 states as the conclusion of his investigations that the natural dura- 
 tion of man's life is " eighty or a hundred years," but he is far from 
 claiming for his conclusion the absoluteness of a physical law. 
 The French writer Flourens, in an elaborate work on " Human 
 Longevity," adopts the latter figure of Buffon's conclusion, and 
 determines, on what he considers a large induction, one hundred 
 years to be the natural period of human existence. But the ex- 
 perience of the world seems to rest with assurance on the term of 
 threescore and ten as set down in " the prayer of Moses, the man 
 of God," the 90th Psalm, the oldest in the Psalter: "The days 
 of our years are threescore years and ten, and if by reason of 
 strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor 
 and sorrow, for it is soon cut off, and we fly away ; " or, as we 
 have the last clause, and I think better, in Coverdale's version, 
 " so soon passeth it away, and we are gone.^' By the side of this 
 conception of the shortness, at the most, of the span of human 
 life let me give you a passage from Cicero, which in its truth is not 
 unworthy such a place. He has just said of the youth and the old 
 man, that " the one hopes to live Zo?^^, the other has lived long ; " 
 and then he exclaims, as if in rebuke of himself, " Although, ye 
 good gods ! what is there long in man's life ; for though our years 
 were extended to the extremest measure, let their length be even 
 as that of the king of Tarshish, yet naught may we call long 
 which hath an end ; and when that end cometh, then what has 
 passed away is gone forever J^ Not to go back to antediluvian 
 records, there are numerous recorded instances in different coun- 
 tries and generations of lives which have far exceeded the Psalm- 
 ist's term of threescore and ten ; but apart from the fortunate 
 ones, to some of which I may by and by allude, his pathetic pic- 
 ture of "labor and sorrow "is probably true to human life in 
 every time. The king Arganthonius, to whom Cicero alluded, lived 
 to be a hundred and twenty years old. The elder Pliny, in his 
 statistics of the census of Vespasian's reign, gives instances from 
 Cisalpine Gaul of fifty-four persons who had reached the age of 
 100, fourteen of 110, two of 125, and three of 140. Terentia, 
 Cicero's wife, long survived her husband, and lived to the age of 
 103. The actress Galeria appeared on the stage at 104 in Augustus' 
 time, and that was ninety-one years after her first appearance. 
 
630 OLD AGE. 
 
 A very interesting historic instance is recorded by Tacitus, of 
 Junia TertuUia. She was the sister of Marcus Brutus, and the 
 wife of Cassius ; she lived sixty-four years after the republican 
 battle of Philippi, which was fatal to both her husband and 
 brother, and she died at 107 in the year 22 A. D., the eighth of 
 Tiberius' reign, probably the last surviving witness in imperial 
 Rome of the downfall of the republic. I might add other in- 
 stances belonging to different countries in modern times, but what 
 I have already said is rather digressive, as longevity is not my sub- 
 ject. But whatever may be the conventional or the natural begin- 
 ning of age, whether in individuals it come, as come the preceding 
 periods, earlier or later, owing to a stronger or a weaker constitu- 
 tion, yet as life goes on, come at some time that beginning must 
 and does. Not always may it tarry ; it makes known its approach, 
 though oft unawares, by signs of its own, then erelong it is at 
 hand, and presently at the door, and within, whether as an invited 
 guest or an unwelcome intruder. Some men say, as Cicero truly 
 observes, " but age steals in upon us sooner than we had reck- 
 oned." To such he puts the sharp question, " Ah ! but who com- 
 pelled you to make a false reckoning ? " " For how does age steal 
 in sooner upon manhood than manhood upon youth ? " Such ques- 
 tioning may strike us as somewhat merciless, but probably it is 
 not more merciless than truthful. Yet in all times have men 
 been wont to give age at its coming an ill reception, accosting it 
 with reproaches and complaints. So was it with the Greeks in 
 their fondness for luxuriant life in nature and in man ; so at least 
 we may infer from some of their writers. Hesiod personifies age 
 as " the daughter of night," with the epithet of " destructive ; " 
 and Homer, too, uses such epithets for it as " dismal," " hateful," 
 and " grievous." With Euripides it is a burden " heavier than 
 -^tna," and even with the calm Sophocles it is " friendless, weari- 
 some, and hated by the gods." Like these last words are words 
 of the Hebrew Psalmist, " For we are consumed by thine anger, 
 and by thy wrath are we troubled," and the wise Preacher of Is- 
 rael describes age in contrast with youth as the " evil days ; " 
 " while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when 
 thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them." In Latin poetry, 
 too, Virgil seemed to share this darker view, for in his pictures of 
 the lower world he puts " sad old age " (^Tristis Senectus)^ at its 
 very gateway in the ominous companionship of pale Disease, and 
 gaunt Want, and shaking Fear, and furious Discord, and deadly 
 War. 
 
OLD AGE. 631 
 
 And in modern poetry, too, we find similar .conceptions, though 
 its general tone is nobler and truer. Witness the unlovely and 
 cheerless spectacle which Shakspeare put upon his stage of the 
 world in the last two scenes of his " Seven Ages " of man ! And 
 what more dismal than that refrain from a later poet, far inferior 
 to be sure, but never wanting in true pathos, " What can an old 
 man do but die ? " And so the poets sing of age on this minor 
 key, though the sentiment lacks the harmony of consistency ; for 
 certainly men desire to reach age, though they may be averse to 
 being old. For myself I listen rather to old Cato here ; his pitch 
 is on a higher and gladder note ; and though the movement be not 
 in measured verse, yet it has all the rhythm of Cicero's " numer- 
 ous prose." Let us catch, if we may, this cheerful tone, and hold 
 it too if we can. Let us be willing to look at the shades of the 
 picture of age, but the lights as well, the ills that attend it and 
 their kindly compensations. 
 
 It were unwise and idle to deny or to waive the enfeebling in- 
 fluence of increasing years upon the powers of body and of mind. 
 There is a natural significance of truth in the old Tithonus myth, 
 and this quite apart from any mistaken though loving Auroral 
 prayers. So it is, that we carry over from nature to the life of 
 man the familiar images of the " sere and yellow leaf," the fading 
 flower, and the withering tree. The natural force that is so ex- 
 ultant in buoyant youth and in manhood calmly rejoices in its 
 mature fullness, then begins, at first insensibly and slowly, and 
 later on consciously and visibly, to abate and decline ; the figure is 
 not quite so erect, the step is less strong and firm, the feet take 
 not so kindly as once to the upward grades of life's roads ; one 
 well on in the sixties is not so fond of mountain-climbing as he 
 v/as in his youth, and is sometimes conscious of a strain upon 
 him even when mounting hills in the town, aforetime so easy of 
 ascent ; the muscles and limbs are less pliant, less obedient to the 
 will, and an over-exertion is apt to induce something like a twinge 
 of pain or some ailment or indisposition, suggestive of a falling 
 off of wonted strength and power of endurance. One may be 
 reminded perhaps by a friendly jest or a reflection of the mirror 
 of some change of outward aspect in the quality or hue of com- 
 plexion, or of the color of the hair from black or blond to gray or 
 white, or of some wrinkle invading the smoothness of the cheek 
 or the brow. Men have to confess to some changes not for the 
 better in the senses outer and inner, the eye less bright and clear. 
 
532 OLD AGE. 
 
 and needing for its functions other lenses than nature's, the ear 
 losing its fine sharpness, getting less sensitive to the utterances of 
 sound, the melody and harmony of music, whether of song and 
 cunning instrument, or, sweetest music of all, the once familiar 
 voices of dear friends ; and alas ! such changes with growing in- 
 firmities sometimes utterly close these avenues to the soul, know- 
 ledge and " wisdom thus quite shut out." He might easily add 
 to this list of the penalties of age, in losses and weaknesses 
 from the other senses, tendencies to ailments of various sorts, and 
 the pains and disabilities they bring with them, all which with 
 some persons induce general discomfort and discontent, and even 
 a weariness of life itself. But let us remember, in the first place, 
 on this head, that it belongs to the course of nature and of human 
 life ; that if there is a falling off of strength in age, there is 
 strength enough for all that is required of age. If less is now 
 done or can be done, there is generally less to do or that is re- 
 quired to be done. Cato presently rallies his young friends with 
 the reminder that strong as they are in their manhood, they are 
 after all not so strong as the robust, burly centurion Titus Pontius, 
 — some Samson-like Roman captain of that time. Yet they do 
 not miss or require his strength any more than they do that of a 
 bull or an elephant. Then, too, in some repulsive descriptions of 
 old age there lurks ever the fallacy that all its possible ills and 
 ails come together and in troops, and especially that they descend, 
 falcon-like, in flocks, and at one swoop upon individual men. 
 Such a gathering of infirmities is in reality exceptional, and be- 
 longs only to extreme cases. Indeed, is it not seldom that any 
 persons suffer signal visitations of them in number or in kind ? 
 Then, too, consider that many of these bodily evils are not the 
 peculiar lot of age but are common to all periods of life. As to 
 the more violent attacks of disease, Cicero reminds us that the 
 young are more liable to them than the old; they suffer from 
 them more severely, and are healed with more difficulty. I am 
 not sure that this is true, but certainly with the young, their 
 keener sensibility and greater power of resistance must aggravate 
 the ills of sickness and pain. It is worth while, too, to think of 
 the compensations which lighten the burden of such of th6se 
 evils as age is wont to suffer. The poet Gray, in describing the 
 " Pleasure arising from Vicissitude," finely expresses the joy felt 
 by one on recovery from illness ; how the simplest things in nature 
 touch the sensibilities with a quite strange delight ; — 
 
OLD AGE. 533 
 
 " The common sun, the air, the skies, 
 To him are opening Paradise." 
 
 I am inclined to think that such a glad experience belongs to age 
 more than to youth. The lighter visitations of disease may come 
 oftener and easier, but in the lucid intervals, when the " lost vigor 
 is repaired," and one "breathes and walks again," there is a live- 
 lier sense of feeling and being well, and a purer, sweeter satisfac- 
 tion with all that the world offers again, the bounteous riches of 
 earth, air, and sky, the friendly sight of human faces, and the 
 greetings and intercourse of friends. We may think, too, of the 
 fact that in the sad evils of the loss or withdrawal of any of 
 the senses, as in the calamities of deafness or blindness, there is 
 an increase of activity and of perception through the other senses, 
 and also a greater capacity of mental concentration, the mind thus, 
 in its seclusion from the outer world, more intensely and fruitfully 
 active in its inner chambers of thought or of imagination. Cato 
 tells his youthful hearers of the achievements of the great Appius 
 Claudius, when he was blind as well as old ; how he found his way 
 to his place in the curia in a great crisis of public affairs, and in 
 a speech of burning eloquence dissuaded the Senate from consent- 
 ing to a treaty of peace with Pyrrhus. This event in the life of 
 a Roman statesman reminds us of the last oratorical effort of the 
 English Chatham, when, not blind indeed, but old and infirm, he 
 denounced in the House of Lords the treaty with France and the 
 separation from England of the American colonies. But Cato 
 might have cited from the domain of letters in antiquity a yet 
 more illustrious name, — Homer, the blind bard of Scio, who in 
 his sightless old age, yet as a poet and seer, produced those two 
 great epics of Greek verse which were destined to a perpetual 
 youth in the instruction and delight of men of all after times and 
 tongues. By this great ancient name we can put a like great name 
 in our English Milton, " cut off" by blindness for the last twenty- 
 one years of his life from the sight of nature and "the human face 
 divine," yet bating not one jot of heart or hope, but steering right 
 onward in the career of genius, and producing in those darkened 
 years his two illustrious English epics. 
 
 The mention of these great names and of the achievements 
 which thus made them great may give us an easy transition to 
 what may be said on the brighter side of the influence of age on 
 the intellectual powers. Alleviating conditions there certainly 
 are to the weakening pressure of years upon the inner and finer 
 
634 OLD AGE. 
 
 parts of man's nature. The memory is doubtless the first to suf- 
 fer, especially in losing its hold upon names, and also upon events 
 of more recent occurrence, while yet clinging with a fond tenacity 
 to the scenes and associations of childhood. But, as Cato well says, 
 the memory often suffers from sheer lack of use, or from a lack of 
 interest in the things to be remembered. He never heard, he 
 says, of any old man who had forgotten where he had buried his 
 treasures, or who his debtors were, and how much they owed him. 
 Our vigorous old Roman also affirms, with much truth, of the 
 higher faculties, that they continue in force and in quality if only 
 there be a continuance of their zealous and active exercise. Hence 
 he will hear of no premature exemption from work as a privilege 
 of age, and he illustrates his view by enumerating memorable in- 
 stances of poets, philosophers, and statesmen who preserved their 
 faculties to extreme old age by continuous and healthful occupa- 
 tion. Plato was at work on his " Dialogues " at eighty-one, Socra- 
 tes wrote the finest of his orations at eighty-two ; at ninety Sopho- 
 cles composed his best tragedy, and indeed it was the best 
 production of the Greek Tragic Muse, the "CEdipus at Colonus;" 
 and Pindar and Simonides wrote some of their noblest lyrics at 
 eighty and upwards. But instead of trying to exhaust Cato's list 
 of aged celebrities, let us take some nearer illustrations of his 
 point from names of men in modern times, who in letters and sci- 
 ence and public life have been conspicuous by a prolonged career 
 of usefulness and fame. Newton and Locke and Bacon produced 
 some of their greatest works after they had passed the age of 
 sixty ; the German philosopher Kant reached the maturest results 
 of his metaphysical studies after he was seventy, and Humboldt's 
 " Cosmos " was written and published in the last ten years of his 
 life, and he lived to be eighty-eight. The poet Goethe kept his 
 faculties unclouded till eighty-six, always intensely busy, and in 
 science as well as in art, finishing the last acts of his greatest poem 
 after he was seventy-five. Wordsworth lived to be eighty, and 
 Rogers to be ninety-two. We have all read Brougham's " Sketches 
 of Statesmen of the time of George IH." Nearly all the great 
 men of that illustrious generation who were great jurists and law- 
 yers as well as statesmen, maintained to advanced age at the bar 
 or on the bench, and in Parliament by the living voice, and by 
 their writings, the ability and the vigor and the capacity for emi- 
 nent public service which had distinguished the years of their 
 manhood. Sheridan and Burke were among the youngest, and 
 
OLD AGE. 535 
 
 F 
 
 they lived, the one to be sixty-six and the other sixty-seven ; Chat- 
 ham died at seventy, Erskine at seventy-five, Lord Thurlow at 
 seventy-four. Lord Mansfield at eighty-nine, and Brougham him- 
 self at the same age as Mansfield ; while Lyndhurst, after an active 
 career in law as well as in public office, died at ninety-one. Wel- 
 lington's name, too, may be added, eminent alike in war and in 
 peace, who died at eighty-three, of whom some one said at his 
 death that "he had now exhausted Nature as he had before 
 exhausted glory." 
 
 The French Talleyrand and the German Metternich may also 
 swell though scarcely adorn this roll, who died, the former at 
 eighty-four and the latter at eighty-six, after having played so 
 prominent a part for nearly forty years in European diplomacy 
 and politics, both of them in vigorous action at the front, on one 
 side or the other, or on both sides, in the many political revolutions 
 that marked their eventful times. Great American names there 
 are, too, which illustrate my present point. Of our first six 
 Presidents, the average age was eighty, the elder Adams reaching 
 ninety-one years, and the younger eighty-one ; and none of them 
 betrayed a marked falling off of intellectual vigor. In letters 
 also we may recall Irving, who began a new issue of his works 
 and enjoyed a new popularity after he was sixty-seven, and he 
 lived to be seventy-six. Bryant translated the Iliad at seventy- 
 five and the Odyssey at seventy-seven ; and Longfellow, who has 
 just passed away at seventy-five, the sweet light of his genius un- 
 dimmed, published his Dante at sixtj'^-four ; and for seven years 
 after he sang that poem, memory and prophecy too, his " Mori- 
 turi Salutamus^^'' still moved among men, " his garland and sing- 
 ing robes yet about him." Our historian Bancroft is yet with us, 
 at the age of eighty-two, vigorous in body and in mind, and still 
 fruitful as a writer ; and one of our number has just come back 
 from assisting at a service of honor done to Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes at an ovation given him in New York by his medical 
 brethren after forty years' professional usefulness and distinction, 
 which we shall doubtless hear was as grand a one, and certainly 
 as well earned, as that which was given him in Boston by his 
 brother poets and men of letters, when he reached two years ago 
 the age of seventy. 
 
 But let me pass now to speak of some of the prevailing dispo- 
 sitions and habitudes of mind and character which belong to age ; 
 and here I think we shall find that time brings with it some 
 
636 OLD AGE. 
 
 I 
 
 positive gains and blessings which overbalance any of the losses 
 and pains it inflicts. Cato says, people tell us that old men are 
 anxious and suspicious, they are irritable and morose, hard to 
 please and get on with ; if we seek for them, they are even ava- 
 ricious. We hear such complaints still, we read of them in lit- 
 erature, they are characters in plays. But is it not the truth that 
 these vicious qualities belong, not to old men as such, but to 
 such old men ? Nay, as Cato says, they belong to character in 
 general and to character in manhood and youth as much as in 
 later periods of life. Like some bodily infirmities which come 
 to age from a dissolute and intemperate youth, so these moral 
 vices are often the inheritance in age from a morally vicious ill- 
 disciplined youth ; and in all such cases it is so much the worse 
 for youth. If one have a sullen and peevish temper in early life, 
 and it be not checked and corrected, it must needs harden and 
 knot itself later into moroseness ; for, as the old proverb has it, 
 "The older the crab-tree the more crabs it bears." The truth 
 seems to be, that with the discipline of years, in overcoming diffi- 
 culties, bearing trials and burdens, in knowing men and the con- 
 ditions of life better, and learning gradually to adjust one's self 
 to all changes and chances, these faults rather abate than increase, 
 and often give way to corresponding virtues of character. Men 
 grow more kindly and tolerant, take their cares more lightly, learn 
 to be silent and patient under offenses, when once they would 
 have broken impetuously into angry words and acts. They may 
 grow less credulous, less lavish of confidence, but not of necessity 
 suspicious and irritable. If men and events are not as before seen 
 in the rosy colors of fancy and hope, they are contemplated oftener 
 in the white light of truth and reality. It is told of Theophrastus, 
 the pupil and successor in philosophy of Aristotle, that when he 
 was very aged — and he lived to be one hundred and seven — he 
 remarked that he was now beginning to be wise and to see things 
 just as they really are. As to avarice in age, we may well take 
 up the word of Cato, " What an old man will have avarice for, I 
 do not comprehend ; for can anything be more absurd than to be 
 gathering the more provisions for the journey, just in proportion 
 as there is less of the journey to travel ? " And yet this is per- 
 haps the passion which holds on in age with deadliest grasp to the 
 soul of the man who has yielded to it in earlier life, and all others 
 may fade and expire, but this dies only with life itself. Age 
 never grows wise enough to get free of this deep-rooted folly. 
 
OLD AGE. 537 
 
 But we may certainly reckon among the positive gains of increas- 
 ing years those prime qualities of character which fit men for the 
 conduct of life in all important relations, — such as foresight and 
 prudence, caution and judgment, the practical wisdom that comes 
 from reflection and experience. We are learning in our earlier 
 years, but only later are we truly qualified to teach. This is true 
 of teaching in the largest sense of the word, as it applies to all 
 professions, all matters of business. 
 
 If the young are better fitted for enterprise and execution, it is 
 to men in advanced years that we look for the counsel and instruc- 
 tion which are essential to success in everything which is to be 
 undertaken and done. The teaching of earlier life, alike in the 
 narrower and the wider significance of the word, is generally of 
 more value to the teacher than to the taught. The teaching the 
 world needs and wants on the education not only of youth but of 
 all mankind in the great schools of the world, in communities and 
 states, all institutions, civil, religious, social, is that of mature men 
 who have come to be familiar by thought and practice with the 
 general principles of being and action, and who know how to apply 
 them to the promotion of all great interests of society. Especially 
 is all this true in its application to the conduct of public affairs. 
 Old Cato says, "Judgment and reason and wisdom are in old 
 men ; and without old men there would be no commonwealths at 
 all." Hence, he continues, " it is natural that our ancestors called 
 the highest deliberative assembly of the state the Senate^ as the 
 Council of the Elders " — a good remark, which we may apply in 
 all its meaning to the fitting name of the supreme council in all 
 modern states. He bids his young hearers study history, and they 
 "will discover that the greatest states have been impaired by 
 young men and upheld or restored by the old;" and he quotes 
 them an apt passage from a play of Naevius : " Tell me," some one 
 inquires, " tell me how is it that you have lost so great a state as 
 yours ? " And the answer is : " There came forth orators, new, 
 foolish, youthful." As Cato said of ancient, so we may say of 
 modern history that it illustrates the supremacy of age in the gov- 
 ernment of states. The instances are comparatively few in ancient 
 or modern times of young men possessing supreme power, or ex- 
 erting a commanding influence in shaping the destinies of nations. 
 A notable one is Alexander the Great, who came to the throne at 
 twenty, conquered the world in twelve years, and died at thirty- 
 two. The Scipio of our book of Cicero was elected consul six 
 
638 OLD AGE. 
 
 years in advance of the legal age, and in his consulship reduced 
 Carthage and created the Roman province of Africa. William 
 Pitt is also an instance, coming to highest political power at 
 twenty-four, and ruling England like a dictator for nearly twenty 
 years ; but Pitt was never young ^ and he died at forty-seven. No 
 less remarkable is the case of our Hamilton, the peer of Pitt in 
 intellectual resources and his superior in wisdom, a member of 
 Congress at twenty-five and there inferior to none in influence ; 
 at the head of the Treasury in Washington's Cabinet at thirty- 
 two, and commander-in-chief at forty-two. It is a singular co- 
 incidence that Hamilton died at the same age as Pitt — forty- 
 seven. But these are the exceptional instances in the annals of 
 government. In general it is not till men are advanced in years 
 that they reach, by the knowledge and wisdom which time and 
 experience only can bring, the heights of political power; and 
 then, too, their influence increases rather than declines with in- 
 creasing years, the confidence in them of the world growing 
 stronger with the growth and strength of their own resources and 
 of their ability to employ them for the public good. The lives of 
 statesmen of the past, which I adduced under another head, 
 strongly illustrate this point also ; and recent and contemporary 
 history may readily furnish like signal illustrations. It was Thiers, 
 then seventy-four years old, to whom all France looked for help 
 in the time of dire extremity after the Prussian conquest ; and 
 who was chosen by Assembly and people alike as the chief of 
 the state ; and he by his abundant resources of political knowledge 
 and wisdom saved the country from impending ruin. Gladstone 
 was, perhaps, in some sense a stronger man twenty years ago than 
 he is now at seventy-three ; but he is far more fit to govern than 
 he was then ; and we have seen in all the congratulations and 
 honors that poured in upon him when he reached the age of sev- 
 enty and ever since that the people of England never had so much 
 confidence in his power to rule them wisely and well as they have 
 now. In general, the English statesmen who rank as leaders are 
 generally accounted young at fifty-five and sixty ; and at seventy 
 and upwards they can be trusted at length with the responsibili- 
 ties of sovereign power. Much that is said about old men being 
 too conservative, living only in the past, and averse to change, is 
 quite superficial and fallacious. Men that have lived long and 
 observed and experienced much, are certainly conservative about 
 things which are worth conserving ; they " hold fast that which is 
 
OLD AGE. 539 
 
 good." That fixedness of opinion which makes the evil of conser- 
 vatism in the bad sense of the word is a vice of constitution or 
 of circumstance, and is found in men at forty or fifty quite as 
 often as at seventy or later ; or if it exists in the old it is those 
 whose knowledge is limited, whose horizon has been circumscribed, 
 closing down a mile or two only beyond the place where they were 
 born or where they have lived ; but men that have moved in broad 
 ranges of thought and observation and action are in reality the 
 truest friends and promoters of conservative progress ; they are 
 willing " to prove all things," if only they are worth proving, and 
 they are fitted to prove them aright by the tests of intelligence 
 and truth. Thus we find in all the affairs of men, and not alone 
 in public life, it is really the old more than the young who from 
 their fuller knowledge of the past and their experience of the 
 changes which they have witnessed and shared in are quickest to 
 discern the new changes that are needed for the onward progress 
 of mankind. And from this point let me pass on to say what a 
 rich satisfaction falls to the lot of such men in their consciousness 
 of growth and attainment and the consequent means of influence 
 for the promotion of human welfare. Here is one source of sat- 
 isfying delight which may well be set over against the pleasures 
 they have lost in the loss of youth — for that we remember is one 
 complaint against age, that it deprives men of nearly all pleas- 
 ures. And though, as Cato says, not all men can be Scipiones 
 and Fabii and Appii in guiding the affairs of state, yet to all who 
 may have moved in less public, more retired paths of life there 
 are open like sources of quiet satisfaction. If for youth there are 
 the exciting pleasures of hope, the flush and glow of contending 
 struggle and effort, age can repose in the calmer joys of remem- 
 brance, of looking back over races already run, and goals reached, 
 and prizes won. 
 
 And as for even the pleasures of a more sensuous kind, to 
 which Cato allows the young are more keenly alive, he yet mildly 
 contends that age has some share in whatever of real good they 
 can bestow. " Age," he says, " though it cannot enjoy immoderate 
 feasts, yet can take delight in moderate entertainments." I sup- 
 pose he means the " simple refreshments " which belong to all 
 true club life ; and he says that he, too, belonged to a club, and 
 was wont to feast there with his fellows, but always with a mellow 
 moderation ; and then he gives us the golden word, that he meas- 
 ures his delight in such occasions, not by the pleasures of the 
 
540 OLD AGE. 
 
 body, but by meeting his friends and enjoying their conversation. 
 It is pleasant to listen to this old man of such a healthy nature, 
 when he tells how in his love of social discourse he likes the 
 usage of having the master of the feast appointed, and the inter- 
 course of speech that goes on round the table at his bidding, of 
 the small and dewy cups, as in the Symposium of Xenophon, and 
 then most of all the general cheerful conversation protracted till 
 deep in the night. The fine picture of Cato given us by Cicero 
 is perhaps surpassed by that one drawn by Plato of the aged 
 Cephalus in the introduction to the " Republic." The company 
 in that dialogue meet at Cephalus' house, and among others Socra- 
 tes comes in, and at once asks his host after his health and wel- 
 fare. Cephalus, in replying, tells Socrates he ought to come and 
 see him oftener, and talk with him ; for, he says, " I find that at 
 my time of life, as the pleasures and delights of the body fade 
 away, the love of discourse grows upon me," and when further 
 plied with questions after the manner of Socrates, about his feel- 
 ing concerning age, he says among other good things, " Certainly, 
 Socrates, old age has a great sense of calm and freedom ; when 
 the passions relax their hold, then you have escaped from the con- 
 trol of many masters." But the best ancient illustration of this 
 fondness for social discourse we have in Plato's Symposium. A 
 Greek symposium followed the supper, and was distinct from 
 it ; there was no drinking at the supper, but the symposium, as its 
 name denotes, was a drinking party, always united, however, with 
 conversation, or with music and dancing. Xenophon's symposium, 
 as Cato says, had " its small and dewy cups," and in Plato's more 
 famous one it was " agreed that drinking was not to be the order of 
 the day ; " for this alleged reason, however, it must be truthfully 
 added, that the guests had all had a bout the day before, and had 
 not yet recovered from it. But the pleasures of the feast were 
 intellectual ; it was " a feast of reason." Nowhere in letters, 
 ancient or modern, do we read of another such ; the guests, the 
 choice and master spirits of Athens, and their discourse, so large 
 and wise and witty, so profound and yet so delightful, and pro- 
 longed even to the gray of the morning ; and then, as it was ending, 
 Socrates was " insisting that the genius of comedy was the same 
 as that of tragedy, and that the writer of tragedy ought to be a 
 writer of comedy also." I am sure we shall agree with Cato and 
 with Cephalus and with those masters of Attic wit and wisdom, 
 that this love " of sweet discourse, the banquet of the mind," will 
 
OLD AGE. 541 
 
 be reckoned among the pleasures of age. Nor let us leave out of 
 account among the calm satisfactions of age the consideration ever 
 paid to it in the family, the community, the state, by children and 
 youth, citizens and people. Age is venerable in itself, and it in- 
 spires and receives veneration. This is a sentiment prompted by 
 the instincts of human nature, it is the unwritten law of the heart, 
 and it finds expression in the institutions and usages of nations ; 
 as Cicero aptly says, " it is observed in all states, just in propor- 
 tion to the excellence of its manners " (De Senec. 18). How fine 
 and how true is the old Mosaic precept, "Thou shalt rise up 
 before the hoary head, and honor the face of the old man." And 
 Cicero mentions the same thing as a part of the Roman common 
 law, " that one should rise up before the face of the elders " (De 
 Inven. I. 30, 48), and a good word of the poet Ovid illustrates it in 
 one aspect — " Who would dare to utter before an old man words 
 that would bring a blush to the face? " (Fasti, V. 69). And when 
 to age itself are added personal worth, great qualities of character, 
 and services in life, yet profounder and more marked is the vener- 
 ation felt and shown. " The hoary head is a crown of glory, if 
 it be found in the way of righteousness." That was a bitter 
 ingredient of the cup put to the lips of Macbeth by his own 
 murderous hand, that he " must not look to have " 
 " That which should accompany old age, 
 As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends." 
 
 Cicero enumerates the honors paid to aged senators and magis- 
 trates, that they were " sought after, yielded to, escorted to and 
 from the Forum, consulted, risen up to." In the college of augurs 
 age always had precedence in speaking and in voting, the older 
 augurs ranking not only the lower magistrates, but even consuls 
 and dictators. He tells, too, the story, never too often told, illus- 
 trating the Spartan reverence for age as superior at least in prac- 
 tice to the Athenian. An old man came into the theatre at 
 Athens, and in the assemblage no seat was offered him by his 
 fellow citizens ; but when he approached some Spartan ambassa- 
 dors who had certain reserved seats, they all rose up in a body and 
 received the old man to a place among them. The whole assem- 
 bly applauded the act with vociferous cheers. Whereupon one 
 of the Spartans quietly remarked, " The Athenians know what is 
 right, but they are unwilling to do it." I remember witnessing a 
 scene not unlike this, when I was in Berlin a few years ago. I 
 went with a professor of the university to a session of the Koyal 
 
542 OLD AGE. 
 
 Academy of Sciences. The place was a large, well-appointed, 
 quite academic hall, much longer than broad, and along the whole 
 length ran a table with chairs for the members of the Academy. 
 On one side over against the table was a dais for the President 
 and other officers, and by the other sides were raised seats for 
 guests. I had a seat given me near by the door, which was so 
 placed that a large part of the company had their backs to it. 
 While a member was reading the paper of the day, the door near 
 by me softly opened, and in walked or rather glided, so softly that 
 he was not at first heard or seen, the figure of a quite aged man, 
 stooping, and with not very firm step, but of impressively vener- 
 able aspect. Directly one of the members caught a look of him, 
 and he instinctively arose, then the President himself, and he rose 
 up, too, and so one after another, as the old man was making his 
 way slowly to his own seat, and before he reached it the reader of 
 the paper had stopped, and the whole learned company were on 
 their feet, all eyes turned respectfully to the aged comer, the patri- 
 arch of the Academy. It was Alexander Humboldt, then eighty- 
 seven years old, but still vigorous in mind, the facile princeps in 
 science of all these Berlin savans, who thus delighted to do him 
 honor. I may not close without touching the last theme of Cato's 
 discourse, — the complaint that old age is but one remove from 
 the end of all man's life on earth. Here culminate the moral 
 interest and value of Cicero's essay. The evil that seems to lie in 
 the complaint is transfigured by Cato's cheerful hope of an im- 
 mortal and blest hereafter into the crowning blessing of age. So 
 pleasant is to him this thought of the end approaching, that he says 
 it is, as it were, seeing land after a long voyage and now at last 
 fast coming into port. He rehearses to his young friends the argu- 
 ments for immortality he has often read in Plato's " Phaedo," 
 among others that from the capacities of the soul, as needing for 
 their development an endless future life. He delights himself in 
 recalling from Xenophon the last words of the elder Cyrus to his 
 sons. The dying man would not have his sons imagine that when 
 he had died his soul would cease to live, rather would he have 
 them believe, with himself, that when the soul was freed from all 
 connection with the body, then at length it would enjoy its own 
 independent life. Cato might also have quoted from Plato's 
 " Republic " the words of Cephalus to Socrates. " The man," he 
 said, " who is conscious of a good life has in age a sweet hope, 
 which, as Pindar charmingly says, is the nurse of his age and the 
 
OLD AGE. 643 
 
 companion o£ all his journey." And then Cato gives utterance 
 to his own long-cherished convictions. Always has he looked for- 
 ward into the future with the faith that when he should depart 
 from life, then at length he should begin truly to live. For 
 nature has, he says, given us here only a place for a sojourn, not 
 for an abiding home. And then he breaks forth into that exul- 
 tant cry, " Oh glorious day, when shall I set out for that divine 
 council and assemblage of souls, leaving behind me the crowd 
 and turmoil of earth ! " Such was the prospect of the hereafter 
 which opened itself to this aged Roman who walked in the light 
 of reason and trusted in the intuitions of the soul. With what 
 a serene assurance of faith may a Christian man await the inevi- 
 table hour, who walks in the light of revelation and believes in 
 Him who is the resurrection and the life ! To such an one old age 
 may be the best and happiest portion of man's days on earth, for 
 it is " quite in the verge of heaven." Of such aged men have we 
 read, such have we known ; it may be we remember and recall 
 them now and here. Of one such, I think, much has he been 
 in my mind while writing these pages, who used to be with us 
 in these our meetings, and who made so large a part of our club 
 life. How often have I heard him of an evening repeat his favor- 
 ite lines, as the reflection of another day's end, — 
 
 " Yet nightly pitch my moving tent 
 A day's march nearer home." 
 
 There was a happy and a truly venerable age, to the last both 
 enjoying and blessing life, but ready with heart and lips for the 
 last earthly word, Domine^ nunc dimittis ! I mourned him when 
 he died ; many times have I missed him since ; but I always chide 
 myself at such times with those words of Bryant, with which I will 
 close my paper : — 
 
 " Why weep ye then for him, who having won 
 The bound of man's appointed years, at last, 
 Life's blessings all enjoyed, life's labors done, 
 
 Serenely to his final rest has passed ; 
 While the soft memory of his virtues yet 
 Lingers like twilight hues, when the bright sun is set ? " 
 
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL.i 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE FRIDAY CLUB, JANUARY 4, 1884. 
 
 I HAVE to ask the indulgence of the Club that I venture, with 
 my very limited knowledge of physical science, to present a paper 
 on the life of a man of remarkable scientific genius, and who in 
 his brief but brilliant career placed himself in the front rank of 
 the men of science of our day. I may plead, however, that the 
 biography of Professor Maxwell, which I make the basis of my 
 paper, was written by a professor of Greek, Professor Lewis Camp- 
 bell, of the University of St. Andrews. Let it be said, too, that 
 it was not for men of science only that Professor Maxwell lived, 
 and for whom he lives still in his writings and his character. Rare 
 as was his genius for scientific research, he was also remarkable 
 for his literary gifts and attainments, a good classical scholar from 
 his earliest years, and especially a life-long student of Lucretius, 
 well versed by fondly studious reading in the best English poets, 
 and himself, though not a poet, yet a frequent contributor to 
 " Blackwood's Magazine " of serio-comic verses, full of close 
 thought, set in pointed diction, and sparkling with wit, verses 
 which are great favorites with English university men, both scien- 
 tific and literary. Indeed, whether in prose or in verse he is an 
 attractive writer, not only for scientific men but for all men ; ad- 
 mired by all, just in proportion to their capacity for appreciating 
 him. His great ability in investigating truth was united to a cor- 
 responding ability in communicating it in written speech ; the 
 truth, as it passed through his own mind on its way to the minds 
 of others, not only took clearness and vigor of form from his 
 strong intellect, but it caught vividness and warmth from his cre- 
 
 ^ Professor Lincoln took unusual pleasure in preparing this essay. In the 
 early life and in the character of Maxwell there were many things kindred to 
 his own experience and nature. Both had saintly mothers very early removed 
 by death, and fathers who were revered comrades to their sons; both united 
 exact learning with liberal ideas, aptitude for intellectual labor with outdoor 
 life, a serious turn of mind with a love of fun, marked tendencies to self-intro- 
 spection with genial good-fellowship, and most of all fixed religious convictions 
 with a charitable appreciation of others' beliefs. 
 
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 545 
 
 ative imagination and fine sensibilities, so that as with the ideal 
 writer of the Latin poet's criticism, who knows how to unite "the 
 sweet with the useful," Maxwell, too, carries the suffrages of all 
 readers. But above all it is the reverent spirit of the man, by 
 which he trod ever with even step, the path alike of science and of 
 religion, his unshaken faith in Christian truth so childlike in its 
 simplicity, so manly in its matured strength of conviction, and his 
 personal character, so unassuming and yet so conspicuous in its 
 excellence, which profoundly interest every thoughtful reader of 
 Maxwell's life. It is considerations such as these which have 
 drawn me to the task I have set myself in this paper, and it is 
 these which I will try to unfold and illustrate after I have drawn 
 from Professor Campbell's biography of Maxwell some connected 
 view of his friend's personal history. 
 
 James Clerk Maxwell came of Scotch blood and of gentle birth, 
 born in Edinburgh, June 13, 1831, the son of John Clerk Max- 
 well, Esq., of Middlebie. His father was the son of Sir George 
 Clerk, Baronet, of Penicuik, and was himself the Laird of Glen- 
 lair, Middlebie, an estate which he inherited together with the 
 name of Maxwell from his grandmother. Lady Dorothea Maxwell. 
 Though Maxwell was born in Edinburgh, where his parents spent 
 part of the year, yet the home of the family was the estate at 
 Glenlair, and there by the burns and amid the heathery braes and 
 dingles of that part of Scotland, his childhood was spent. Being 
 an only child. Master James was the pet of his parents, and his 
 every movement was watched with fond eyes ; and the prescience 
 of parental love discerned and noted in " the child signs of the 
 coming man." The father writes of him, when he was but three 
 years old, that, " had great work with doors, locks, and keys," and 
 that " show me how it doos " was never out of his mouth. Indeed, 
 all through his childhood, of every new thing he saw his inquisi- 
 tive Scotch question always was, " What 's the go of that ? what 
 does it do?" and unwilling to be put off with a vague answer, he 
 would follow up with the question, " But what 's the particular go 
 of it ? " On a page of the biography is a woodcut taken from a 
 sketch preserved in the family, representing a " barn-ball " at the 
 harvest-home of 1837, when the boy was six years old ; and there 
 you see him standing by the violin player, and without looking at 
 the dancers, only watching with curious eyes the movement of the 
 bow in the player's hand, as if he was bent upon finding out the 
 "particular go" of that stick. It is curious, too, to learn how even 
 
546 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 
 
 in early boyhood his mind began to go out towards nature, and to 
 take first impressions from all her forms, inanimate as well as liv- 
 ing ; how he would bring home from his walks with his nurse cu- 
 rious pebbles and grasses, and set them away till he could get his 
 questions about them answered, how in walking by the riverside 
 he would note the holes made in the banks and the lines worn in 
 the hard rock, and ask what made them so ; how he would catch 
 insects and watch their movements, no live thing in its flight or 
 jump or hop ever escaping his observant eye. Instructive, too, 
 is it to notice that in these opening years his moral nature was 
 tenderly nurtured by his mother, who was a woman of true Scotch 
 intelligence and Scotch piety. She taught her keen-eyed boy " to 
 look through Nature up to Nature's God." As he afterwards 
 gratefully remembered, it was under her teaching that he came to 
 know the Scriptures from a child, and with a knowledge both ex- 
 tensive and minute. He learned large portions of the Bible, espe- 
 cially from the Psalms, and could readily recite them ; and we are 
 told by his biographer that " these were not known merely by 
 rote ; they occupied his imagination, and sank deeper than any- 
 body knew." It was the boy's misfortune to lose his mother in 
 the ninth year of his age ; but this great loss had a kind of com- 
 pensation, for it drew his father nearer to him than before, and 
 brought the two into a relation of sympathy even as of older and 
 younger brother, which as you watch it in its after growth and 
 outgoings is charmingly unique. The boy's school education be- 
 gan at the age of ten years, when his father took him to Edin- 
 burgh and entered him at the Edinburgh Academy. His first day 
 in that academy, which has schooled many famous Scotchmen, 
 brought a strain of trial to his nature, to which, all new as it was, 
 he showed himself nowise unequal. His father, a plain man with 
 no care for outward appearances, had brought him up to the city, 
 and a city school, all in his country dress, a tunic of gray tweed, 
 instead of a city boy's round, cloth jacket, shoes very square-toed, 
 and fastened with brass clasps, and a frill about his neck instead 
 of a round collar. Such a rustic spectacle produced a sensation in 
 the Edinburgh schoolroom, and was too tempting to mischievous 
 fun for " a parcel of rude boys in their teens." At the very first 
 of recess they all came about the new comer like bees, and only to 
 sting and annoy. Many were the questions asked, but especially 
 this, "And who made those shoes ? " The country boy was at first 
 troubled, but he soon gathered himself and made good answer, ex- 
 claiming to the question in the broadest patois : — 
 
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 547 
 
 " Div ye ken, 't was a man, 
 And he lived in a house 
 In whilk was a mouse." 
 
 Just what else took place and how was the transition from 
 tongues to fists the biographer does not say, but only records 
 that Master James appeared at his aunt's house, where he was to 
 live, his tunic in rags, and minus the skirt, and his frill rumpled 
 and torn, but himself vastly amused by his new experiences and 
 with no sign of irritation. He had come off well from his first 
 school ordeal. But his first school months and even years seem 
 not to have been a time of progress. He took strongly to none of 
 the studies, and got no quickening influence from the teachers. 
 In the classes he was hesitating in his utterance, and strange in all 
 his ways, so that he got the nickname of " Dafty," which clung to 
 him ever after in the school. Out of school he was shy of the 
 boys, and seldom took part in any games ; but would wander 
 alone to any bit of woods or clump of trees he could find, or any 
 green spot away from the city streets, where he could get some- 
 thing of the nature life he had had in the country home at Glen- 
 lair. But in his own room at his aunt's house he was always 
 active in body and in mind. There in company with a cousin he 
 took to drawing, and also to wood-cutting, in which he so far suc- 
 ceeded as to make a series of rude engravings, of which he writes 
 with great interest to his father. The letters to his father at this 
 time are singularly interesting, not only from their confidential 
 tone, telling of everything he did, and of every thought or desire 
 or fancy he had, but also because of the quaint drawings he 
 wrought into them in illustration of all that he narrated, and the 
 illuminated letters at the beginning and end, and the borders he 
 traced around them. Facsimiles of some of these strange boy 
 letters are given in the biography. I will quote only three sen- 
 tences severally from three letters which give us a glimpse of the 
 boy at ten and eleven, in his work at school and at home. In the 
 first he tells his father, "As to my place in class I am No. 14 to- 
 day, but hope to get up. Ovid (whom we are reading now) 
 prophesies very well when the thing is over, but lately he gave us 
 a prophecy of a victory which never came to pass." In the second 
 he writes, " I have just cast three seals of lead from the life, or 
 rather from the death, one of a cockle and two of mussels ; with 
 one of these I shall seal this letter." In the third he says, " I 
 have made a tetrahedron, a dodecahedron, and two other hedrons 
 
548 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 
 
 whose names I don't know." As to this last feat the biographer 
 remarks that he had not yet begun geometry, and that he must 
 have seen some account of the five solids in some books, and had 
 so mastered them with his boyish imagination as to construct them 
 out of pasteboard with approximate accuracy. About the middle 
 of his school career, when he was thirteen, came a marked change 
 both in his interest and his success in his school duties. He found 
 Latin worth learning, and took kindly to his Greek Rudiments ; 
 and in English he won high rank and yet higher in Mathematics. 
 He showed cleverness in writing Latin verses, and was so success- 
 ful in English composition that he won the first prize in English 
 and also the prize for English verse. But what pleased him most 
 was the winning what was called the Mathematical Medal; of 
 which he wi-ites to his aunt in a tone of modest but undisguised 
 triumph. To the same correspondent he writes« a letter at about 
 the same time, the opening sentence of which seems to show that he 
 was fond of art as well as Mathematics. " I have drawn a picture 
 of Diana (from the antique), and have also made an octahedron 
 on a new principle and found out a lot of things in geometry." 
 But the great event of his school life, and that which was the 
 opening of his scientific career, we find in the fact that his father 
 began to take him when he had reached the age of fifteen to the 
 meetings of the Edinburgh Society of Arts and of the Edinburgh* 
 Royal Society. At that time a Mr. Hay, a decorative painter, 
 was attracting attention by his attempts to reduce beauty in form 
 and color to mathematical principles. These attempts strongly 
 interested Maxwell, and especially the problem how to draw a per- 
 fect oval. He had just begun the study of Conic Sections, and 
 he became eager to solve this problem. The result was that he 
 wrote a paper, amply illustrated by diagrams, on " The Descrip- 
 tion of Oval Curves, and those having a plurality of Foci," which 
 so pleased Professor Forbes of the University that he proposed 
 to his father to have it brought before the Royal Society. This 
 was accordingly done. It was communicated, however, by Pro- 
 fessor Forbes, as it seemed hardly suitable for a boy of fifteen in 
 round jacket to mount the rostrum of the Edinburgh Royal So- 
 ciety. The communication is printed in the " Proceedings " of the 
 Society for 1846, with accompanying remarks of Professor Forbes, 
 in which he compares Descartes' method of describing Ovals with 
 that of Maxwell's, greatly to the advantage of Maxwell's. He 
 left the Academy in 1847, when he was sixteen. In his last year, 
 
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 549 
 
 though he was a twelvemonth younger than his competitors, he 
 was first in English and in Mathematics, and came near to being 
 first in Latin. Thus far, though the bent of his genius was mani- 
 festly to science, still, to use Professor Campbell's expression, he 
 had not yet " specialized." The Professor adds that his friend 
 said to him often in later years that the study of the classic 
 writers he counted "one of the best means for training the 
 mind." He tells us, too, that he has found among papers some of 
 his exercises in Latin verse, and that like everything which he did 
 they are stamped with his peculiar character. In the last year 
 the class had lessons for the first time in Physical Science, and 
 here Maxwell had for a competitor his friend P. G. Tait, now 
 Professor of Physical Science in the University of Edinburgh. 
 The biographer remarks that Maxwell and Tait, who were the two 
 best mathematicians in the school, were thought by the boys to 
 know more about the subject than the teacher did. Doubtless 
 this was true, nor is it the only instance in the annals of educa- 
 tion of a pupil being wiser than his master. 
 
 Maxwell's student life began at sixteen at the University of 
 Edinburgh, where he spent three years, without, however, taking 
 a regular course for a degree. His chief occupations here, both 
 in lectures and in private study and experiments, were in Mathe- 
 matics with Professor Kelland, Chemistry with Professor Greg- 
 ory, and Natural Philosophy with Professor Forbes. By Profes- 
 sor Forbes he was at this time spoken of as a discoverer in Nat- 
 ural Philosophy and an original worker in Mathematics. His 
 letters of this period, especially those to Professor Campbell, who 
 was then at the University of Glasgow, are full of interesting 
 accounts of the lectures he attended, of his own experiments, and 
 also of his reading, which, to judge from the notes given to his 
 friend of the books he read, was exact as well as various and ex- 
 tensive. During all this period he was allowed to work in the 
 laboratories of physics and chemistry without supervision, and in 
 this way he taught himself much by experiment which other men 
 were learning with difficulty from lectures and books. Among 
 the results of these labors were two elaborate papers read to the 
 Edinburgh Royal Society, and printed in their " Transactions " of 
 1849 and 1850, the one on " The Theory of Rolling Curves," the 
 other on the " Equilibrium of Elastic Bodies." From other 
 courses of lectures, however, he gained both intellectual nutri- 
 ment and stimulus. He attended Professor Wilson in Moral Phi- 
 
550 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 
 
 losophy, but here he gained more advantage from his own reading 
 and reflection than from the lecturer, who certainly achieved more 
 in literature as Christopher North than as Professor Wilson in 
 Ethics. Maxwell's resume^ in a letter to Campbell, of his studies 
 in Moral Philosophy show what a firm grasp of the subject he 
 had made at the age of nineteen ; and his criticism of Wilson, 
 given in a single sentence, is one that would do credit to an older 
 head. He says : " Wilson's lectures on Moral Philosophy resolve 
 themselves into three things, the excellence of happiness, the ac- 
 quiredness of conscience, and general good humor, philanthropy, 
 and </)iAaya^ta." But he was profoundly and permanently im- 
 pressed by the lectures on Logic and Metaphysics of Sir Wil- 
 liam Hamilton, to whom he was strongly drawn, declared foe 
 though Sir William was to the mathematical science. His ad- 
 miration was excited by Hamilton's scholarship, and his curiosity 
 was fed by his exhaustless learning, and especially was his mind 
 quickened and stimulated by the Professor's speculative discus- 
 sions. The effect thus produced by Sir William Hamilton upon 
 the youthful mind of this one of his pupils well illustrates the 
 Professor's view of the study of Metaphysics as " the best gym- 
 nastic of the mind." It proved to be a very productive discipline 
 for Maxwell, as is shown by the exercises which he brought in 
 while a member of the Logic and Metaphysics classes. One of 
 these, a remarkable paper for a youth of seventeen, on the subject 
 of the " Properties of Matter," is given in full in the biography. 
 
 Maxwell's next three years, from nineteen to twenty-two 
 (1851-54), were spent in undergraduate life at Cambridge. He 
 was first entered at Peterhouse, and kept his first term there ; but 
 he then migrated to Trinity, with the hope, in which he was not 
 disappointed, that the larger college would afford him ampler 
 opportunities for seK-improvement. In his first year he was busy 
 in lectures and private study with Classics and Mathematics. 
 The college mathematical lectures he felt to be rather elementary ; 
 but he worked at hard problems with his friend Tait, and also his 
 tutor Mr. Porter. In the Classics he studied Demosthenes and 
 Tacitus ; also the "Ajax " of Sophocles, the choral odes of which 
 he translated into rhymed English verses. Towards the end of 
 the year he was a pupil of the celebrated mathematical tutor 
 Hopkins, and also attended the Physical Science lectures of Pro- 
 fessor Stokes. Early in 1852 he passed the little-go examina- 
 tion, and in April of the same year passed successfully his exami- 
 
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 661 
 
 nation for a scholarship. Now began his vigorous preparation for 
 the Mathematical Tripos, under his tutor Hopkins. But in the 
 midst of these occupations he contributed various papers to the 
 *' Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal," and also found 
 time to write two poems, the one the " Lay of King Numa," the 
 other the most serious of his poems, entitled, " The Student's 
 Evening Hymn." In this year, too, he became a member of the 
 Select Essay Club, composed of Cambridge choice spirits, a club 
 which was familiarly known by the name of The Apostles, because 
 limited to the number of twelve. Some of his contributions to 
 this club for this year and several succeeding years are printed in 
 his biography, and illustrate the activity and the fullness of his 
 mind, and also the firm grasp with which he seized upon those 
 great questions which hover on the borders of the physical and 
 the moral and metaphysical sciences. From the biographer's 
 words we readily see that Maxwell was in nothing behind the 
 very chiefest of these Cambridge Apostles ; he ranked indeed all 
 the Cambridge men of his times, as has been distinctly asserted 
 by one of his college contemporaries. Rev. Dr. Butler, the now 
 distinguished headmaster of Harrow School. He says of him ; 
 " Maxwell's position among us was unique. He was the one 
 acknowledged man of genius among the undergraduates " of our 
 time. But I may not linger on this undergraduate period, and 
 will only add what crowns its end, that at the Tripos examination 
 ^ in Mathematics he came out Second Wrangler, and in the yet 
 higher ordeal of the Smith's Prizes for excellence in Natural 
 Philosophy and Mathematics, he came out First Prize-man. Pro- 
 fessor Tait gives us to understand that though Maxwell had 
 Hopkins for his tutor, yet he always took his own way, and that 
 he at last got his position by sheer strength of intellect and not 
 at all by the usual technical training for prize work. Maxwell 
 remained two years at Cambridge after taking his degree, having 
 gained a Fellowship in 1855. These were years in which his 
 many-sided nature was in full activity. As Fellow he lectured on 
 Optics, and also had a large share in preparing undergraduates 
 for their degree and honor examinations. He read, too, more 
 widely than ever in Metaphysics and English Literature. He 
 was elected a member of the Ray Club, " without, however, for- 
 saking the assembling of the Apostles," contributing essays to 
 both clubs. He also renewed and carried on his physical re- 
 searches, especially in Electricity and Magnetism, and developed 
 
652 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 
 
 the germs of his future work on these sciences in a celebrated 
 paper on " Faraday's Lines of Force," which was printed in 1856 
 in the " Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society." 
 
 In the year 1856 Maxwell entered upon his duties as Professor 
 of Natural Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen ; and with 
 this event closes his preparatory student life, and begins that 
 career as professor and acknowledged master in physical science 
 in which he went on with increasing usefulness and honor to the 
 time of his death, in 1879, at the age of forty-seven. During this 
 period of twenty-three years his life was incessantly devoted to 
 the advancement of science by his teaching in the lecture-room, 
 by his original investigations in the laboratory, and by his writings 
 in the form both of scientific papers and treatises. For four years 
 he was professor at Aberdeen, and for the five next following 
 years he was professor in King's College, London. From this 
 latter post he retired in 1865, partly to give himself to the care of 
 his estate at Glenlair, but chiefly to get time to embody in perma- 
 nent works the results of his physical researches. Glenlair was 
 thus his home for ^ye years, but during all these years he was 
 either moderator or examiner in the Mathematical Tripos at 
 Cambridge, where his influence was more and more felt ; and his 
 work at Cambridge in this interval proved to be directly prepara- 
 tory to his appointment in 1871 to the chair of Experimental 
 Physics then just created at Cambridge, and to his return to the 
 place of his university education, and to those last eight years of 
 his most active and fruitful labors in this conspicuous and impor- 
 tant position. The reader pauses with the biographer at occa- 
 sional breaks in the otherwise continuous narrative of busiest 
 scientific work, which open to him views of Maxwell's personal 
 history in the mention of events sometimes bright, sometimes sad, 
 which throw their mingled lights and shades over the picture of 
 his life. The place at Aberdeen had had for him a chief attrac- 
 tion in the thought that it would please his father, and that by the 
 arrangement of term and vacation time he might be with him at 
 Glenlair during a considerable part of the year. His father was 
 equally interested in the plan, and in his declining years and in 
 failing health he " was roused by the thought of it to something of 
 his earlier vigor." But alas ! for human hopes ; when all seemed 
 sure, and in immediate prospect, just before the son's election to 
 the professorship, the father suddenly died. For the surviving son 
 it was a grievous shock to his whole being, — the second great grief 
 
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 553 
 
 of his life, second in time to the loss of his mother in his boy- 
 hood, hardly second, certainly more than equal, in the piercing 
 sense of bereavement it brought him. It was a loss incalculable 
 and irreparable. His letters of this time show how deeply it 
 moved him, how be lived over in thought and feeling all the years 
 of dear companionship with this father-friend, how he joined 
 the memories of him with the now quickened memories of his 
 mother lost long before, how in sleeping and in waking hours 
 their mortal forms seemed to be hovering about him, their faces 
 looking upon him, and bearing traces of the weakness and pain 
 they suffered in their last days. A few months after, when his 
 friend Campbell visited him at Glenlair, he put into his hands a 
 poem in which his feelings had found some relief of expression, 
 a few lines of which I will here quote : — 
 
 " Yes, I know the forms that meet me are but phantoms of the brain, 
 For they walk in mortal bodies, and they have not ceased from pain. 
 Oh, the old familiar voices ! Oh, the patient waiting eyes! 
 Let me live with them in dreamland, while the world in slumber lies. 
 They will link the past and present into one continuous life ; 
 While I feel their hope, their patience, nerve me for the daily strife, 
 For it is not all a fancy that our lives and theirs are one. 
 And we know that all we see is but an endless work begun. 
 Part is left in nature's keeping, part has entered into rest ; 
 Part remains to grow and ripen, hidden in some living breast." 
 
 While the sense of this loss was still fresh, there came another 
 in the death of a Mr. Pomeroy, an intimate friend in his Cam- 
 bridge student days, and whom he had nursed there in a severe ill- 
 ness, who died in India, whither he had gone but a year before to 
 take a position as magistrate in the East India Company's ser- 
 vice. Here, too, we see from his letters how keenly he felt this 
 blow, and what profound thoughts of human life and destiny it 
 awakened within him. But in our human life there comes at 
 times a bright summer after the sharpest winter, and so it was 
 with Clerk Maxwell. The old home at Glenlair, which for two 
 years had been lonely and sad through the death of the father, 
 became a new and glad one again for the son, when of a " rare 
 day " in tTune, 1858, he brought to it his wife, to whom he had 
 been married in Aberdeen early in that month. His wife was 
 Katherine Dewar, daughter of Principal Dewar of the Marischal 
 College at Aberdeen. He had made the acquaintance of Prin- 
 cipal Dewar and his family soon after coming to Aberdeen, with 
 whom he was brought into quick sympathy by the brightness of 
 
664 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 
 
 his social nature, his deep and varied knowledge, and also by his 
 religious views and character. In the September vacation of 1857 
 he had accepted an invitation to join Mr. Dewar and his daughter 
 in a visit to the Principal's son-in-law at Dunoon, near Glasgow ; 
 and it seems to have been there that Maxwell's acquaintance with 
 Miss Dewar ripened to mutual love. Let me stay here a moment 
 to note how the varied experiences of life, the saddest and the 
 brightest, make their own mark and find their own experience 
 in a nature rich with gifts both of thought and sensibility. On 
 my first taking up this volume of biography I opened upon a little 
 poem by Maxwell, entitled, " The Song of the Atlantic Telegraph 
 Company." From curiosity I read it through, to my amusement 
 as well as instruction. Hitherto I had thought of Clerk Maxwell 
 only as a grave man of science, always associating his name with 
 atoms and molecules and molecular Physics. But here I read 
 verses of his in a sportive and even rollicking movement, and yet 
 the force of the movement all in science, showing me how in that 
 mind there ran a vein of poetic feeling in the midst of all those 
 rich veins of scientific genius. But it was not till I read the vol- 
 ume in course that I found out that the immediate impulse of 
 these verses came from the heart, for they were written in the Sep- 
 tember vacation at Dunoon when there had just come to him that 
 new joy which was to prove the deepening and abiding joy of all 
 his after life. The poem occurs in a letter to his friend Campbell, 
 which unlike those other letters of this period to which I have 
 referred shows us Maxwell " in his brightest mood. " He brings 
 in the verses thus : I had been " writing," he says, " to Professor 
 Thomson about the rings of Saturn, and lo ! he Avas laying the 
 telegraph which was to go to America, and bringing his obtrusive 
 science to bear upon the engineers, so that they broke the cable 
 with not following (it appears) his advice." ^ 
 
 Maxwell's marriage was a true union of mutual affection, of 
 sympathy in all great and good things, science, literature, religion, 
 and in the personal experiences of life in joy and sorrow, in sick- 
 ness and in health. Twice when he suffered from " severe illnesses, 
 both of a dangerously infectious nature," Mrs. Maxwell was his 
 nurse, and in the first of these, when he was attacked with small- 
 
 ^ This jingle consists of four verses, in each of which occurs twice the 
 refrain : " Under the sea, under the sea." By way of combining algebra and 
 poetry this is printed in each case : " 2 (U) ; " i. e. U = " Under the sea," and 
 consequently "2 (U) " = " Under the sea, under the sea." 
 
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 555 
 
 pox, " she was quite alone with him ; and he has been heard to 
 say that by her assiduous nursing she saved his life." In the last 
 years of his life, when his wife was a sufferer from a painful and 
 protracted illness, he was in turn her nurse, at one period not 
 sleeping in a bed for three weeks, and yet conducting his work in 
 lectures and the laboratory as usual. His letters to his wife, when- 
 ever he was away from home, are abundantly illustrative of his 
 devotion to her, and, as his biographer says, of " the almost mysti- 
 cal manner in which he regarded the marriage tie." A single 
 passage touching these letters I quote from Professor Campbell : 
 " When attending meetings of scientific associations or conducting 
 examinations at other universities, and when ' most pressed with 
 the load of papers to be read,' he would write to her daily, some- 
 times twice a day, telling her of everything, however minute, 
 which, if she had seen it, would have detained her eye, small 
 social matters, grotesque or graceful, together with the lighter 
 aspects of the examinations, and college customs, such as the 
 * grace-cup.' . . . And sometimes he falls into the deeper vein, 
 which was never long absent from his communion with her, com- 
 menting on the portion of Scripture which he knew she was read- 
 ing, and passing on to general meditations on life and duty." Of 
 this last remark let me quote a single illustration from a sentence 
 in one of these letters : " I am always with you in spirit, but there 
 is One who is nearer to you and to me than we can ever be to 
 each other, and it is only through Him and in Him that we really 
 get to know each other. Let us try to realize the great mystery 
 in Ephesians v., and then we shall be in our right position with 
 respect to the world outside, the men and women whom Christ 
 came to save from their sins." It was in his home at Glenlair, 
 made happy by such a union in married life, that Maxwell spent 
 the six years from 1865 to 1871, busied with most congenial work 
 in experimental researches and in the composition of his scientific 
 books, especially the three treatises, " Electricity and Magnetism,'* 
 " Heat," and " Matter and Motion ; " in active correspondence, too, 
 with personal and scientific friends, older ones, such as Campbell, 
 and Professors Forbes and Fleeming Jenkins, and Sir WiUiam 
 Thomson, and others of later years, and especially Faraday and 
 Tyndall, as well as men in other professional pursuits. Thus was 
 he still occupied, and with no desire for any change, when in Feb- 
 ruary, 1871, the chair of Experimental Physics was founded in 
 the University of Cambridge. In October, 1870, the Duke of 
 
556 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 
 
 Devonshire, who was chancellor of the University, had signified 
 his desire to build and furnish a physical laboratory for Cam- 
 bridge ; and it was in connection with the acceptance of this offer 
 that the new professorship was established by the Senate. On the 
 question arising, who should be the first professor. Sir William 
 Thomson's name was the first one before the university Senate, but 
 on his declining to stand all interested in the question turned to 
 Maxwell as the best man for the post. At first he was quite 
 unwilling to leave his retirement for any academic position, but 
 was finally induced to be a candidate, on condition that he might 
 withdraw at the end of a year if he wished to do so. He was 
 accordingly elected unanimously on the eighth of March. He 
 was now within a few months of forty years of age, in the ripe- 
 ness of his powers and his fame, and of ample experience in lec- 
 turing and teaching and in experimental work ; and with such 
 resources he immediately entered upon those labors which resulted 
 in what has been called by Sir William Thomson " a revival of 
 physical science at Cambridge." By the enactment of the Sen- 
 ate it was made the duty of the professor " to teach and illustrate 
 the laws of heat, electricity, and magnetism ; to apply himself to 
 the advancement of the knowledge of those subjects, and to pro- 
 mote their study in the University." He began his lectures in the 
 following October term, opening with an inaugural in which he 
 set forth, to use his biographer's words, in luminous outline what 
 he considered to be " the meaning and the tendency of the move- 
 ment in the evolution of the University of Cambridge which was 
 marked by the institution of the course of Experimental Physics 
 and the erection of the Devonshire Laboratory." 
 
 This lecture and the lecture on "Color Vision "given by Maxwell 
 the same year at the Royal Institution are pronounced by Profes- 
 sor Campbell to be the happiest of his literary efforts. Thereafter 
 Maxwell gave annual courses of lectures on the subjects prescribed 
 in his commission, on Heat and the Constitution of Bodies in the 
 October term. Electricity in the Lent term, and Electro-Magnet- 
 ism in the Easter term. For some time after his appointment, an 
 important part of his work consisted in designing and superintend- 
 ing the erection of the laboratory, which was called by the Duke 
 of Devonshire the Cavendish, in honor of his great-uncle, Henry 
 Cavendish, and in commemoration of 'Cavendish's researches in 
 physical science. Maxwell inspected the laboratories at Glasgow 
 and Oxford, and embodied in the new structure the best features 
 
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 657 
 
 of both ; but its internal appointments, which are described as ad- 
 mirably adapted for physical investigations, are due to his inven- 
 tive skill and thoughtful supervision. The building finished, the 
 business of purchasing and then arranging a complete equipment 
 of apparatus was also performed by him. His work reached its 
 consummation in the spring of 1874, and on the 16th of June the 
 chancellor formally presented his gift to the university. From 
 this time forth Maxwell was regularly occupied, along with his 
 lecturing and his own experiments, in superintending in the labo- 
 ratory various courses of experiments undertaken by young men 
 who were aspiring to scientific distinction ; and many who were 
 then his pupils now rank among the most efiicient teachers of sci- 
 ence throughout the United Kingdom. But besides this distinctly 
 professional work, Maxwell's many-sided nature found occupation 
 during the Cambridge period in many other labors, both scientific 
 and literary. It was in 1873 that he delivered his discourse on 
 molecules, at Bradford, before the British Association, which has, 
 perhaps, become more generally known and is oftener quoted than 
 any other of his writings. In 1875 he read before the Chemical 
 Society a paper " On the Dynamical Evidence of the Molecular 
 Constitution of Bodies ; " in 1876 a lecture on thermo-dynamics, 
 at the Loan Exhibition of Scientific Apparatus in London ; and 
 in 1878 his Cambridge Rede Lecture " On the Telephone," illus- 
 trating it with the aid of Mr. Gower's telephonic harp, a lecture 
 which, if we may judge by the opening paragraph given in the bi- 
 ography, must have been highly entertaining as well as instructive. 
 During these years he also contributed numerous articles to the 
 ninth edition of the " Encyclopaedia Britannica," the most notable 
 of which are those on " Atom " and " The Constitution of Bodies," 
 and the article on " Faraday." In this later Cambridge period, 
 as well as in the earlier, he was a member of a club called Eranus, 
 differing little from "The Apostles," except that the men were 
 older and the discussions turned generally on more serious themes. 
 Dr. Lightfoot and Professors Hort and Westcott were among the 
 members of this Eranus circle. Some of Maxwell's contributions, 
 which are given in the volume, are discussions of speculative ques- 
 tions, which illustrate his ever-increasing soberness of spirit as the 
 years went on; and yet, as Mr. Campbell remarks, this spirit 
 made him no less bright as a companion, " but rather kept fresh 
 the springs of cheerfulness and mirth that were in him." We 
 may easily believe in this union in Professor Maxwell of earnest- 
 
558 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 
 
 ness and humor ; for we find that during these years, in intervals 
 of very grave occasions, he indulged most in the playful impulses 
 which gave birth to his most characteristic serio-comic verses. He 
 was a member of a club called the " Red Lions," composed of 
 members of the British Association who met for social relaxation 
 after the sober work of the day. On these occasions he used to 
 produce impromptu poems turning on the subjects just discussed, 
 condensing the very pith of a scientific matter into a few pithy 
 verses, and veiling sharp and witty satire of persons and opinions 
 under a delightful naivete of innocent admiration. Perhaps the 
 best illustrations of thesej'ewcc (T esprit are those which belong to 
 the meeting of the British Association (or as the " Red Lions " 
 called it, the British Ass. meeting) at Belfast, in 1874. Mr. Tyn- 
 dall was then president, and delivered his famous, somewhat mate- 
 rialistic address on the basis of the old atomic theory as treated 
 by Lucretius. At one of the sessions Professor Maxwell read a 
 learned paper " On the Application of Kirchhoff 's Rules for Elec- 
 tric Circuits to the Solution of a Geometrical Problem ; " but in 
 the evening, at the " Red Lions," when himself and his confreres 
 were off duty, he read another paper hardly less learned but very 
 much livelier, entitled "Notes on the President's Address." It 
 was a poem, in hexameter verses, which treated the doctrines of 
 the address with a wit which was very incisive but yet good-hu- 
 mored, and tempered with soberest truth. It was afterwards pub- 
 lished in " Blackwood's Magazine ; " and singularly enough it was 
 translated by an enthusiastic English Hellenist into Greek hexam- 
 eters, which are given, together with the poem itself, in the bio- 
 graphy. 
 
 But the chief literary work of Maxwell during the last seven 
 years of his life was the editing of the " Electrical Researches " of 
 the Hon. Henry Cavendish, E. R. S. Mr. Cavendish died in 1810, 
 leaving behind him twenty packets of manuscript on " Mathemati- 
 cal and Experimental Electricity." These manuscripts were com- 
 mitted to Maxwell by the Duke of Devonshire for editing and 
 publication. It was a commission which cost Professor Maxwell 
 protracted and exacting labors. He copied and prepared for the 
 press nearly all the manuscripts ; wrote numerous letters of con- 
 sultation about them to scientific men, repeated many of Caven- 
 dish's experiments ; and wrote an introduction and notes, which 
 we are told by an eminent scientific critic " evidence much labor, 
 patient investigation, and very extensive acquaintance with the 
 
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 559 
 
 literature bearing on the subjects." The whole was finally pub- 
 lished in a large octavo volume in October, 1879, only a few weeks 
 before the editor's death. The task thus executed by Maxwell 
 was acknowledged to be one of great service to science ; but the 
 thought cannot but occur, even to an unscientific reader of the nar- 
 rative of this part of his life, that those precious years might bet- 
 ter have been given to the prosecution of his own original re- 
 searches. Professor Campbell mentions, that on a visit to his 
 friend in 1877, Maxwell took out of his cabinet the manuscript of 
 this book, and talked with him about it with great interest. " And 
 what," asked Professor Campbell, " what of your own investiga- 
 tions?" "Ah!" he answered, "I have to give up so many 
 things ; " and the words, adds the biographer, were uttered " with 
 a sad look, which till then I had never seen in his eyes." Not 
 strange is it that the biographer thus recalled and ever remem- 
 bered that strange, " sad look " in those, to him, lifelong familiar 
 eyes, when -he afterwards learned that already his friend had felt 
 the first symptoms of that malady which erelong was to be fatal 
 to his earthly life. Maxwell's health had been good till the spring 
 of that year, 1877, when he began to be troubled with dyspeptic 
 symptoms, and especially a painfully choking sensation after eat- 
 ing. He gained temporary relief, however, and went on with his 
 work without seeking medical advice. But early in 1879 the trou- 
 ble had become too serious for longer silence, and he mentioned it 
 to his physician, who began to prescribe for it. By this time his 
 friends had begun to miss something of the elasticity of his step, 
 something, too, of his wonted energy. At the end of the Cam- 
 bridge spring term he went as usual to Glenlair, and during the 
 summer seemed there to be better ; but in September the symp- 
 toms returned with attacks of violent pain, he became dropsical, 
 and his strength was rapidly failing. That he might be nearer 
 his physician. Dr. Paget, it was decided to remove him to Cam- 
 bridge, where he arrived with Mrs. Maxwell early in October. 
 There his severer sufferings were somewhat relieved, but the dis- 
 ease made rapid progress. In answer to his question, how long 
 he would probably live, he was sadly told by his physician, " Not 
 longer than a month," words which he heard with entire compos- 
 ure, " the calmness of his mind," as his physician said, " being just 
 the same in illness and in the face of death as it ever had been 
 in health." Only one anxiety did he seem to have, and that was 
 to provide for her comfort whom he now saw that he must leave 
 
660 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 
 
 behind. Most touchiog is it to read how, in extreme bodily weak- 
 ness, his mind continued active about all that had most interested 
 him in health. A single little incident illustrates his habitual de- 
 vout spirit as still blended with his passion for inquiry. On one 
 of his last days, when he had been lying for some time with closed 
 eyes, he looked up and repeated slowly the verse, " Every good 
 gift and every perfect gift is from above and cometh down from 
 the Father of Lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow 
 of turning ; " and then, as if seized with a suggestion for discovery, 
 he said over the Greek of the first seven words, -n-acra Soon? ayadt) kuI 
 TTOiv Swprjfxa reXetov, with the question, " Do you know that that makes 
 an hexameter? I wonder who composed it so." In the ebbing 
 away of his bodily strength, his mind and memory remained clear 
 to the last. A day or two before he died the parish rector came 
 to administer the Lord's Supper to him ; and while he was putting 
 on his surplice Maxwell recalled and repeated to him George 
 Herbert's lines on the priest's vestments, entitled "Aaron." In 
 his last hour, when his voice was reduced to a whisper, he spoke 
 some words close in the ear of his physician, but these related not 
 to himself but to his wife. Those whispered words were his last, 
 and he soon passed gently away, on the 5th of November, 1879. 
 So ended his earthly life, an end in harmony in this as in all else 
 with the whole, from its first conscious beginning. 
 
 The sketch I have thus given you of this life from the biogra- 
 pher's narrative may readily suggest what I am incompetent fully 
 to discuss, the valuable services which Clerk Maxwell rendered to 
 the world in the discovery and the diffusion of knowledge, and the 
 precious gifts by the possession and use of which he was able to 
 render them, and also what is of yet greater worth to the world, 
 the character which illumined with its moral beauty all the bright 
 career of this gifted servant in science. On the Sunday after 
 Maxwell's funeral, in the university church of St. Mary's, it fell 
 to the lot of one who had known him well when both were schol- 
 ars of Trinity to give voice to his own and the general sense of 
 loss, — Rev. Dr. Butler, the headmaster of Harrow School. In 
 addressing the undergraduates he said : " There are blessings 
 that come once in a lifetime. One of these is the reverence with 
 which we look up to greatness and goodness in a college friend." 
 Very attractive and impressive is this truth uttered, so simply and 
 so nobly in the presence of the members of an ancient university, 
 " the home " for generations " of thought and knowledge," con- 
 
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 561 
 
 cerning one just passed away, who had been an ornament of that 
 university alike as an undergraduate and a professor. That sen- 
 timent of reverence possessed so early by the speaker had been a 
 cherished possession in all after years ; and what he then thought 
 of that college friend was the same as he drew of him now from 
 the ever enlarging experience of all those years. And all that 
 could be said of Clerk Maxwell by the most discerning student of 
 his now completed life and labors would be only an unfolding of 
 those comprehensive words — his "greatness and goodness." He 
 was born for science, endowed with rare powers for the investiga- 
 tion of the phenomena of nature and the discovery and teaching 
 of nature's laws, consecrated to such science by vocation and by 
 choice, and always constant in the keeping of his consecration 
 vows. But I find that by men eminent in the Mathematics, no 
 less than by men equally eminent in Physics, he was respectively 
 claimed as theirs, and by each as one of their chiefs. One writer 
 describes him as being in clearness of mental vision, and espe- 
 cially in his habit of constructing a geometrical representation of 
 every problem in which he was engaged, " a mathematician of the 
 highest order." In his aptitude for experimental work and his 
 success in it he has been ranked with Faraday, for whom he 
 always had the profoundest admiration and in whom he found a 
 mind of his own type. In his preface to his treatise on electri- 
 city and magnetism he says that when he began the study of elec- 
 tricity he resolved to read nothing on the subject till he had 
 worked through Faraday's " Experimental Researches," and he 
 always advised his students to pursue this course. Let me quote 
 here a sentence from the memoir of Maxwell published in the 
 " Proceedings of the Royal Society : " " It is seldom," says the 
 writer, " that the faculties of invention and exposition, the at- 
 tachment to physical science, and the capability of developing it 
 mathematically, have been found existing in one mind to the same 
 degree. It woidd, however, require powers akin to Maxwell's 
 own to describe the more delicate features of the works resulting 
 from this combination, every one of which is stamped with the 
 subtle but unmistakable impress of genius." I have noticed 
 many illustrations of this remark in criticisms of Maxwell's scien- 
 tific papers and treatises. It was said by Airy, the late astrono- 
 mer-royal, of Maxwell's essay on " Saturn's Rings," that " it was 
 one of the most remarkable applications of Mathematics to Phy- 
 sic which he had ever seen." His treatises on Physics are also all 
 
562 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 
 
 in the line of the application of Mathematics to physical inquir- 
 ies. These treatises are described as having as text-books the 
 great merits of being not only models of condensed and clear 
 exposition, but also as being original and fresh, containing the 
 latest accessions to knowledge of the subjects of which they treat. 
 Professor Tait says of them that they give the science of to-day^ 
 while most text-books in vogue give the science of twenty-five or 
 more years ago. In respect to this last merit, I find a curious 
 illustration of Maxwell's caution as well as readiness in setting 
 down " the last results of science," in a letter which he wrote to 
 Bishop Ellicott. The bishop had written to him, under date of No- 
 vember 21, 1876, to ask for the true scientific view of " the state- 
 ment made on the theological side that the creation of the sun pos- 
 terior to light involved no serious difficulty." Maxwell answers 
 by return of post, saying, firsts that there was a statement in 
 most commentaries that the fact of light being created before the 
 sun is in striking agreement with the last results of science, and 
 that he had often wished to ascertain the date of the original ap- 
 pearance of the statement, as this would be the only way of find- 
 ing out what " last result of science " it referred to. Then he 
 proceeds to say ; " If it were necessary to provide an interpreta- 
 tion of the text in accordance with the science of 1876 (which 
 may not agree with that of 1896) it would be very tempting to 
 say that the light of the first day means the all-embracing aether, 
 and not actual light." But this, he adds, he cannot believe the 
 idea meant to be conveyed by the author, as he uses light as rela- 
 tive to darkness. In the third place he suggests that " we natu- 
 rally suppose those things most primeval which we find least subject 
 to change," and as the aether which fills the interspaces between 
 world and world is one of the most permanent objects we know, 
 we should be " inclined to suppose that it existed before the for- 
 mation of the systems of gross matter which now exist within it." 
 Finally^ he says that he should nevertheless be sorry if an inter- 
 pretation founded on a scientific hypothesis should be fastened to 
 the text, even if it should eliminate " the old statement of the 
 commentators which has long ceased to be intelligible," because, on 
 account of the rate of change in scientific hypotheses, " the inter- 
 pretation founded on such an hypothesis may help to keep the 
 hypothesis above ground long after it ought to be buried and for- 
 gotten." 
 
 As a lecturer, Professor Maxwell was remarkable for placing 
 
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 563 
 
 abstruse principles in a new and clear light, and for illustrating 
 his ideas by most suggestive comparisons. When, however, he 
 spoke extempore^ he was too rapid in his thinking and expression 
 for most hearers ; while his written addresses shared the merits of 
 his treatises both in substance and in form. Of his distinctive 
 qualities as a teacher less is said in the biography than we could 
 wish ; but we learn that he was assiduous in promoting the pro- 
 gress of his pupils and generous in the time and labor he gave to 
 them out of class hours, and exact and exacting in his preparation 
 and criticism of examination papers. In his letters we occasion- 
 ally come upon sagacious practical remarks in regard to teaching. 
 One of these I will quote, which some of us can especially appre- 
 ciate just after a vacation. " I find," he says, " that the division 
 (of pupils) into smaller classes is a great help to me and to them ; 
 but the total oblivion of them for definite intervals is a necessary 
 condition of doing them justice at the proper time." With Max- 
 well, scientific pursuits, whether in lecturing or in writing, never 
 narrowed his mind in its range of interest ; as indeed I suppose 
 they are never narrowing oh a mind of so high an order as his. 
 Such was his mind that it could not be limited to a single depart- 
 ment of intellectual activity. So we find from his letters and his 
 other published writings that he loved to stray away into fresh 
 fields, literature, philosophy, and theology. I have already spoken 
 of his intimate acquaintance with English literature, and especially 
 English poetry. His favorite poets, from whom he was fond of 
 reading aloud to his wife, were Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, 
 and in sacred poetry, George Herbert and Keble. In one of his 
 letters, where he has been telling a friend of some recent literary 
 readings, he adds : " A little literature helps to chase away mathe- 
 matics from the mind ; " and in another letter occurs a similar ex- 
 pression, which also curiously shows his appreciation of Professor 
 Tyndall as a writer. He is speaking of being busy on some lec- 
 tures upon " Color," and he says in passing : " I have thus been 
 Tyndalising my imagination up to the lecture point." On this 
 head I will add only a remark made by a literary friend who 
 knew him well : " His critical taste, founded as it was on his 
 native sagacity and a keen appreciation of literary beauty, was 
 so true and discriminating that his judgment was in such matters 
 quite as valuable as on mathematical writings." 
 
 The interest in metaphysical studies which was first awakened 
 in him in his Edinburgh student days by the teachings of Sir 
 
664 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 
 
 William Hamilton he never ceased to cherish, and his writings 
 gave many expressions to his distinct views of the relations be- 
 tween Metaphysics and Physics. One such expression I have 
 read in his review in the English journal " Nature " of Professor 
 Tait's lectures on " Recent Advances in Physical Science." He 
 has been speaking of the contempt which Professor Tait pours 
 upon the a pi'iori Physics of non-experimental (transcendental) 
 philosophers, and then goes on thus in his best vein of irony : " The 
 study of this a priori Physics as found in Hegel and others is a 
 source of recreation to all who are engaged in the less amusing 
 researches of experimental Physics. In modern examinations, 
 some students try to conceal their ignorance by giving apparently 
 plausible answers (crammed from such pseudo-science), which 
 relieve by their felicitous absurdities the tedious labors of the 
 examiner. Only fancy instead of the weary examiner a vigor- 
 ous man of science, and of the timorous candidate some great 
 (absolute) philosopher before whose inner vision the whole world 
 of being and non-being lies open ; and then you will have some 
 faint idea of the way in which such philosophers are destined 
 to contribute to the merriment of the coming race." But then 
 he proceeds to say in sober earnest : " There is a true science of 
 Metaphysics which establishes the fundamental ideas of all know- 
 ledge in itself and its origin, and this, not by shutting out the 
 facts of science, but by calling in all the evidence obtainable from 
 the whole circle of science." In one of his letters he makes a 
 correlative remark on the side of Physics : " With respect," he 
 says, " to the ' material sciences,' they appear to me to be the 
 appointed road to all scientific truth, whether metaphysical, men- 
 tal, or social." ..." Here are furnished materials more than 
 anywhere else for the investigation of the great question, * How 
 does knowledge come ? ' " 
 
 In these times, when men's minds are often sorely tried by prob- 
 lems touching the relations of faith and knowledge, it is pro- 
 foundly interesting to observe how Maxwell's mind, so scientific 
 in bent and in habit, rested ever in the repose of sure conviction 
 in the truths of religion alike natural and revealed. His discourse 
 on molecules, to which I was first drawn by my studies in Lucre- 
 tius, is not only instructive for men of science by its rich scientific 
 matter, but also for all thoughtful readers in the belief which he 
 so clearly expresses in the origin not only of the material uni- 
 verse, but also of its ultimate constituents in the creative power 
 
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 565 
 
 of a Supreme Being. He agrees with Lucretius in believing in 
 the existence of the atom or the atomic molecule as the indivisi- 
 ble and unchangeable basis of matter ; like Lucretius, too, he 
 opens to us sublime views of the phenomena of nature, whether in 
 spaces near or in spaces immeasurably remote ; but he parts com- 
 pany with Lucretius when he tries to explain from matter the 
 origin of mind, and the origin of matter and mind, as one inde- 
 pendent of the agency of a Divine Intelligence. On the contrary. 
 Maxwell infers from the very properties of these units of all mate- 
 rial things that they cannot be explained by any causes which we 
 call natural, or by any theory of evolution ; and so that they must 
 have been created ; and thus he lifts us to the conception of a 
 Divine Creator of all worlds and of all beings in them. 
 
 But Clerk Maxwell was also a firm Christian believer. In his 
 biographer's narrative, in his own essays, and in his correspon- 
 dence, which frequently turns upon religious subjects, you find 
 nowhere any appearance of a break or a disturbance in the con- 
 tinuous, calm current of his Christian faith. The faith of his 
 mature age is the same as the faith of his childhood, only informed 
 by a larger intelligence and deepened by a larger experience, that 
 same faith which was born in him through his mother's instruction 
 in word and in example, so that it was given him to continue in 
 the things he had learned, knowing of whom he had learned them. 
 He was brought up in the Scotch church, and was always in har- 
 mony with its belief and practice, and so far as it appears in the 
 biography, never left its communion. But as his biographer 
 remarks, " his deep though simple faith was not inclosed in any 
 system ; " and he once said himself that he " could not hold his 
 faith in bondage to any set of opinions." Here as in science and 
 everywhere else his mind was free, independent, open in action 
 and in utterance. It would have been foreign to his whole nature 
 to set off any province of thought or belief from the free exercise 
 of his faculties. He said once in a letter to a friend that in 
 Christianity alone of all religions all is free, and that it disavows 
 any possessions except upon the tenure of freedom ; and that he 
 had no sympathy with any who would have what he called " ta- 
 booed grounds " in the Christian religion itself. He could always 
 worship in any communion where he found Christian teaching 
 and living. When he was at Glenlair or in any other part of 
 Scotland he usually attended the Scotch church, but so early as 
 his Edinburgh school days he often also attended the Episcopal 
 
666 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 
 
 church, so that he grew up under the blended influence of cate- 
 chism and preaching and services both of the Scotch and of the 
 English church. In his residence at Cambridge he was a com- 
 municant and regular attendant at the Trinity Church, Episcopal ; 
 but when he was professor in King's College, London, he was 
 wont to worship in a Baptist church. On this last fact I find a 
 rather unexpected passage in one of his letters from London : 
 " At Cambridge," he says, " I heard several sermons from excel- 
 lent texts, but all either on other subjects or else right against the 
 text. There is a Mr. Offord on this street, a Baptist, who knows 
 his Bible, and preaches it as near as he can, and does what he can 
 to let the statements in the Bible be understood by his hearers. 
 We generally go to him when in London, though we believe our- 
 selves baptized already." The freedom in all religious matters 
 which he exercised for himself he freely accorded to others. He 
 was unwilling to condemn men, hardly willing to judge them, for 
 their doctrinal opinions ; he always asked how they lived and be- 
 haved in their relations to their fellow-men. He used to say that 
 " he had no nose to smell heresy ; " and when the controversy was 
 going on at Cambridge against Maurice for supposed heresy, his 
 sympathies were with Maurice ; not that he held to his opinions, 
 but because Maurice was persecuted and deprived of his place for 
 holding and expressing them. But Maxwell was equally an 
 enemy to indifferentism, and did not believe in " ignoring differ- 
 ences or merging them in the haze of what was called a common 
 Christianity." The parish minister at Cambridge, the rector of 
 Trinity Church, who visited him and conversed with him almost 
 daily during his last illness, gives us in a single sentence the chief 
 elements of his Christian belief. Professor Maxwell's " illness," 
 he says, " drew out the heart and soul and spirit of the man ; his 
 firm faith in the Incarnation and its results, in the full suffering 
 of the Atonement, and the work of the Holy Spirit." But the 
 character of the man was more than all his doctrinal or his scien- 
 tific views, more than his intellectual gifts and attainments. His 
 Glenlair physician says of him : " He was one of the best men I 
 ever met, and a greater merit than his scientific attainments is his 
 being ... a most perfect example of a Christian gentleman." 
 Many were the virtues of his personal character, simplicity, sin- 
 cerity, humility, a thoughtful kindness for others, a gentleness of 
 spirit, and of charity and of tenderness for all living things ; but 
 underlying all these and absorbing them all was his spirit of 
 
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 567 
 
 piety. Not long before his death he said to a friend that he had 
 been occupied in trying to gain truth, and that it was but little of 
 all truth that man could gain, but that it was something to " Icnow 
 whom we have helievedy Clerk Maxwell has sometimes been 
 compared with Faraday, to whom he was akin as a Christian no 
 less than as a man of science. I have recently read a part of the 
 " Eloge " upon Faraday pronounced before the French Academy 
 of Science by M. Dumas, and I will close my paper by quoting the 
 last sentence of that " Eloge," as one equally applicable to Max- 
 well : " I met him often in private life when his brilliant discov- 
 eries in science were attracting universal interest; but in my 
 intercourse with him I forgot science in the scientist, my curiosity 
 drawn away from the marvels unveiled by him in physical nature 
 by my eager desire to discover the secret of the moral perfection 
 which he manifested in all the movements of his soul." 
 
THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE RHODE ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY, APRIL 
 
 16, 1889. 
 
 You will pardon me, I hope, if I open this lecture with some 
 personal allusions, as these make the real, introduction to it, and 
 explain my choice of its subject. When I was in Europe two 
 years ago, I spent some weeks in the city of Berlin, and revisited 
 its university, that central seat of German learning and scholar- 
 ship and education. It was with much feeling that I came back 
 to this university, where more than forty years before I had been 
 a student, and where, in attendance upon the lectures and instruc- 
 tions of eminent teachers, and in companionship with fellow-stu- 
 dents of kindred spirit and aims, I shared the stimulating influ- 
 ence of the intensely intellectual life of the place ; indeed, it was 
 with a quickened step and a quickened beating of heart that I re- 
 entered the gateway and the portal of the university building, 
 traversed again the halls and stairs so familiar in those bygone 
 days to my willing feet, and went into the old lecture-rooms and 
 sat among the youth of the present generation, listening to their 
 professors, from whom, in their day and in their turn, they were 
 deriving lessons of wisdom and knowledge. Ah ! with what a 
 subtle charm of association does grateful memory invest the place 
 which in our youth has been the seat of delightful studies, and 
 where, under the guidance of inspiring teachers, we have had al- 
 luring vistas opened before us all bright with ideals of effort and 
 attainment. And so it was that every time I found myself again 
 within the precincts of that place, my thoughts were in the past ; 
 as I sat in the lecture-rooms, familiar, unchanged as they seemed 
 to me, yet strange were the faces around me, and the voices from 
 the cathedras, were they never so eloquent, were strange no less ; 
 and as I looked and listened I insensibly recalled the forms and 
 features of the teachers of my own university days, and seemed 
 again to hear their inspiring words. But gone were all these from 
 the scenes of their labors, gone every one, most of them years be- 
 fore, as the philosopher Schelling, Neander the church historian. 
 
THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 569 
 
 aud Boeckh the prince of classical philology in that day ; but 
 one, the peer of them, Leopold von Ranke, had passed away only 
 in the preceding year, having lived on in his extraordinary intel- 
 lectual career past the age of ninety, and even at that advanced 
 age, with eye undimmed and mental force unabated, busied daily 
 till within ten days of his death in the labor of historical composi- 
 tion. So recent had been his departure, and so fresh the sense 
 of loss it had awakened, that his name was still often mentioned, 
 and his life was the theme of conversation in university circles 
 and of many memorial writings. With all that I thus heard and 
 read I associated the memories of Ranke's lectures, which I had 
 attended, so that soon after my return home I wrote the lecture 
 which I am to offer you this morning. My subject then is, the 
 historian Ranke' s life and labors, to a general view of which I ask 
 your attention this morning. Far from attempting the task of 
 Ranke's biography, or a critical examination, or even a complete 
 enumeration of his works, I purpose to speak of the decisive epochs 
 of his life as we find them in the period of his school and univer- 
 sity studies, and then in the stages of his career as an historical 
 student, teacher, and writer; .and to draw from these some lessons 
 which have value in their relation, not alone to historical criticism, 
 but also and yet more to literature and education. 
 
 Fortunate were the beginnings of Ranke's life in their auspi- 
 cious preparation for his illustrious career. He was born in 1795, 
 in the small but ancient town of Wiehe, in a valley of the river 
 Unstrut, picturesquely nestled amid the wooded heights of the 
 Kyffhaiiser, in the Saxon Thiiringen. The natural charms of the 
 valley and its historic associations Ranke described with a fond- 
 ness of family and patriotic pride, in some reminiscences of his 
 youth which he recorded in advanced age. The whole region was 
 full of traditions of the empire of the Saxon line. Wiehe itself 
 had been in the eleventh century an imperial fortress, and near by 
 was the cloister Memleben, where German emperors were buried, 
 where also Henry I. and Otto the Great ended their eventful lives. 
 Ranke came of a genuine Saxon family, which he traced back to 
 the seventeenth century, and of which he writes : " The ancestors 
 known to us were all clergymen." They were men of the best 
 clerical type of their time, sound and solid in body and in mind, 
 and no less in faith and character ; liberally educated and devoted 
 to their ministerial and pastoral labors. Ranke's father, however, 
 while at the university chose legal studies rather than theological. 
 
570 THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 
 
 and subsequently practiced law, though uniting with it the care of 
 a landed estate which he had inherited from his mother ; but, as 
 his son testified, his chief care was the moral and religious nurture 
 of his children. Of his mother he wrote that she was intellectual, 
 and with a " certain flush of poetry " in her nature, which, he 
 adds, was foreign to the father ; that she was of very kindly dis- 
 position, and indefatigable in her activity for her family. From 
 the home of such parents the boy passed out at the age of twelve, 
 to enter upon a seven years' course of classical studies, prepara- 
 tory to the university, a period of prime significance in his life ; it 
 was the spring-time of the scholar, when were implanted in him 
 the germs out of which blossomed and ripened in orderly growth 
 all his after intellectual character. We seem to see a foreshadow- 
 ing of the scholarly seclusion which was germane to his subsequent 
 life, that these studies were pursued in cloister-schools, that is, in 
 schools which at the Reformation were formed out of the secular- 
 ized estates of mediaeval monasteries ; and afterwards, from their 
 retired situation within their walls and gates, and from the tradi- 
 tional strictness of their discipline, had something of a monastic 
 complexion and quality. At one of them, the school of Donndorf, 
 only a few miles away from his father's house, he spent two years, 
 busied with the rudiments of learning, and making much progress 
 in Latin, and so much in Greek, he says, as to get some foretaste 
 of Homeric poetry, and some dim visions of its heroic figures. 
 But the most and the best of his early education he received at 
 Schulpf orta, that most celebrated of all the cloister-schools of Sax- 
 ony ; famed for its antiquity, for the beauty of its surroundings, 
 for the wealth of its endowments, and for its still better wealth of 
 generous discipline and humane culture. In his reminiscences he 
 has described in his best manner its natural and historic features, 
 the scholarship and teaching skill of its instructors, and the tone 
 and glow of studious occupation, which pervaded all its atmos- 
 phere as a place of education. A genial place it must have been 
 for a susceptible and aspiring youth, its venerable buildings tow- 
 ering up from among the hills and woods of Prussian Saxony, and 
 its inner life rich in resources of instruction and private study, in 
 regular commemorative services and cherished usages, and memo- 
 ries of generations of great and good men, once schoolboys within 
 its walls. To some of his teachers here he was indebted for their 
 reading with him, and interpretation of German poets, especially 
 Klopstock, Schiller, and Goethe. But during his five years' 
 
THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 571 
 
 Schulpforta residence, his studies were chiefly devoted to the an- 
 cient classics, especially the poets, Ovid and Virgil of the Latin, 
 and of the Greek, Homer and the great tragic trio, ^schylus, So- 
 phocles, and Euripides. The ^neid he read many times, and 
 committed it to memory. The Iliad and the Odyssey he read 
 through three times. Of the differences of excellence in the 
 Greek tragic poets his teacher had clear views, which he faith- 
 fully impressed upon his pupils. For Ranke himself, as he writes, 
 ^schylus remained a strange writer during his school days ; and, 
 while he found delight in Euripides, his favorite poet was Sopho- 
 cles, several of whose tragedies he translated into German Iam- 
 bics ; his translation of the " Electra " he sent to his father as a 
 birthday gift. " In short," he writes, " the horizon of the ancient 
 classic world compassed us about ; we lived in it, heart and soul." 
 But let me add, from his own testimony, that this young German 
 student made also in these school days a Christian scholar's study 
 of the Bible. "The Bible," he said at that time, "is the founda- 
 tion of all culture ; it breathes the air of the imperishable and 
 eternal." Such words from a pupil of the Schulpforta remind 
 one of the motto borne on the arms of its old abbey : " This is 
 none other but the house of God and this is the gate of heaven " 
 (the Pforta, porta). But not alone from the past, from the an- 
 cient, was his education in these years drawn. It derived, also, 
 some determining influence from the present, and the intensely 
 modern, the tumultuous movements and changes incident to those 
 wars of Napoleon, which in the end reconstructed the politics of 
 Europe. He saw and heard the array and tread of French regi- 
 ments and troops as they swept by the doors of his peaceful clois- 
 ter-school, bound on their march of devastation to the towns and 
 cities of Germany. He saw, too, the retreat of the French army, 
 now frightfully reduced, after the catastrophe of Moscow, and 
 swift thereupon the advance of the allied armies on their way 
 westward. When all Germany was aroused from its oppression, 
 and the air was full of the cry for liberation, the young Ranke 
 was reading in school the " Annals " and the " Agricola " of Taci- 
 tus ; and the patriotic speeches of the British chiefs and of Queen 
 Boadicea started in him the thought that that ancient conflict of 
 oppressed and oppressor was now reversed in the relations of the 
 Germans and the French; "and so," as he afterwards said, "within 
 the cloister walls and in the midst of classical studies there first 
 emerged to the view of my mind the modern world." 
 
572 THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 
 
 From the Schulpforta Ranke proceeded at the age of nineteen 
 to the university of Leipsic, entering as student of theology and 
 philology. In theology he studied the introductions to the Old 
 and New Testaments and the interpretation of some of the Paul- 
 ine Epistles, but it was a labor of love to which he gave himself 
 in a rhythmical translation of the Psalms, together with notes in 
 which he aimed to seize and express, as exactly as he could, the 
 thoughts of every one of these remarkable remains of sacred 
 Scripture. But he was not in sympathy with the then existing 
 Leipsic theology ; to his own positive faith its " rationalism 
 seemed superficial and hollow." His chief work was with the 
 professors of philology, and especially Daniel Beck and Gottfried 
 Hermann. Beck was a man of erudition in history and literature ; 
 he attended his lectures and was a member of his philological 
 seminary. But ever memorable for him were Hermann's lectures 
 on Pindar, whose lyric muse he came thus for the first time to 
 comprehend and love. Yet more was he occupied with the study 
 of Thucydides, whom he read through, and with thoroughness ; 
 making extracts and notes of his political teachings ; " a great and 
 mighty genius," he says, " before whom I bowed low, without 
 venturing to translate his words ; the full impression of the origi- 
 nal and its perfect understanding was what I purposed." From 
 two modern sources, however, there came in upon his studies at 
 this time a powerful influence. The one was Niebuhr's " Roman 
 History," " the first German book which made an impression upon 
 him." Niebuhr's skillful treatment of the early Roman annals, 
 and his narratives breathing a true classic spirit, drew from him 
 the hopeful word, " that in modern times, too, there might be 
 great historians." A like influence was derived from Luther, 
 whom he first studied, as he says, to learn German from him, and 
 to make his own the literary diction of his writings ; but after- 
 wards he was powerfully drawn to his historic personality and the 
 historic significance of his times. Von Ranke's university resi- 
 dence ended in 1817, when he took his degree of doctor of phi- 
 losophy. In the following year, at the age of twenty-three, he 
 began his vocation as a teacher in the position of upper master 
 in the gymnasium of Frankfort on the Oder. Here he labored 
 for the following six years, imparting to his pupils with enthusi- 
 asm and skill the resources of his own school studies. But in 
 such leisure hours as he could command he was devoted to re- 
 searches and literary labors for his first historical work, the plan 
 
THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 573 
 
 and scope of which he had already formed. For this his philolo- 
 gical studies had been gradually preparing him. Various and in- 
 timate are the relations of classical philology to history; the 
 philological sense is close akin to the historical, and the mental 
 processes and habits of a well-trained classical scholar are a good 
 preparation for the business of a student and writer of history. 
 Since writing this sentence, I have met with a signal testimony to 
 this opinion in words of the historian Professor Mommsen, ad- 
 dressed to Von Ranke at the commemoration of his ninetieth 
 birthday. " What I would fain say," Professor Mommsen re- 
 marks, " applies to you not merely as historian, but also as phi- 
 lologist ; for it is exactly this philological quality of critically 
 testing, and so coming to know every separate writing and every 
 separate writer, which is one of your finest and most prominent 
 characteristics." So it was that Von Ranke's extended and exact 
 reading of the ancient writers drew him, through the influence of 
 Niebuhr and Luther, to the study of the literature of mediaeval 
 and then of that of modern times ; there was stirring in him the 
 ambition to do some worthy service as a literary man ; and this 
 grew into a purpose to attempt a work which should set forth the 
 transition from mediaeval to modern Europe. So singular alike 
 was his love of work and his power to endure it, that within a 
 few years he achieved the mastery of all European literatures so 
 far as they had to do with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 
 and in 1824 his first work was completed and published, entitled 
 " The Romanic and Teutonic Peoples, from 1494 to 1535." This 
 work, published by the author at the age of twenty-nine, is the 
 introduction to his historical works, and this not only in time but 
 in the nature and bearings of the theme ; for in the unity and the 
 union of the fortunes of these two races he discerned and set forth 
 the beginnings of modern history. It is also a work of great value 
 for the study of Von Ranke as an historian ; for in connection with 
 the appendix, which is devoted to a criticism of modern writers of 
 history, it contains at once a statement and an illustration of the 
 principles and method of historical study and composition, which 
 he had already adopted, and which he afterwards fully developed, 
 as I shall have occasion to show by and by. He modestly con- 
 fesses in the first sentence of the preface that his "book had 
 seemed more perfect to him in manuscript than it seemed now in 
 print." He had misgivings especially about its literary form, and 
 felt that he had much to learn as a writer. He had read, with 
 
674 THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 
 
 admiration for their style, the works of Augustin Thierry, and 
 had said, " Such writing we Germans cannot yet achieve." But 
 he was positive and confident in his ideas of the mission and the 
 method of history. While he was making his investigations for 
 this work, he read the historical novels of Walter Scott ; and, while 
 he admired his creative genius, he took serious offense at his mix- 
 ture of fiction with fact, and with the freedom with which he 
 treated historical persons and events. For himself he determined 
 to accept for the material of history nothing but authentic fact. 
 From Niebuhr, also, he differed somewhat, in that he was more 
 reserved in making history minister to ethical teaching. Thus he 
 says in a pithy sentence : " It has been counted the office of his- 
 tory to judge the past, and to teach the present for the good of the 
 future ; this book of mine ventures upon no such lofty task ; it 
 will only narrate the past, just as it actually oecurredr But 
 Niebuhr' s critical principles, which he had employed in the treat- 
 ment of the Roman annals, were now applied, and more consist- 
 ently, to modern history, and indeed made available and essential 
 to all historical study. And thus this first work of Von Ranke's 
 was at once a sure prognostic of the rise of a great historian in 
 Germany, and with him of the beginning of a new era for the 
 scientific development of history. 
 
 Only a few months after the publication of this work its author 
 was appointed to a professorship in the university of Berlin ; so 
 soon had the Prussian government become aware of his abilities 
 and taken steps to appropriate them. It was a favorite remark 
 of Johann Schulze, who then had the chief influence in the ap- 
 pointment of Berlin professors : " Ranke I discovered, and this star 
 I drew into the orbit of our University." It was indeed a dis- 
 covery, and of a bright particular star which moved in that Berlin 
 orbit for a period of sixty-one years with unfading lustre. In 
 1825, March 13, Ranke entered upon his duties in Berlin as pro- 
 fessor extraordinary, or, as we should say, assistant professor ; in 
 1883 he was made professor in full. His career as professor went 
 on for forty years, till 1865, when at the age of seventy he was 
 relieved from lecturing, though retaining his office and its emolu- 
 ments ; but his career as historian continued without cessation or 
 break throughout all the sixty-one years, even to the last week of 
 his life. The transition from a remote provincial town to the 
 capital of Prussia, to the university of Berlin, and so to the 
 centre of German literary and scientific life, was a change of im- 
 
THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 575 
 
 mense moment for Ranke's culture and productive growth and 
 development. At that time, unlike the present, politics knew no 
 life or being in Berlin, no parliament to share with the university 
 intellectual stir and interest ; the German mind was actively busied 
 with science, letters, art, law, philosophy; and seldom has any 
 city had within its walls so many choice and master spirits in all 
 these pursuits as the then existing Berlin. Hegel in philosophy, 
 Schleiermacher in theology, Savigny in jurisprudence, William 
 von Humboldt in politics and history, Boeckh in philology, Bopp 
 in the science of language, and Karl Ritter in modern geography, 
 — it was with these, and such as these, then lights and ornaments 
 of Berlin, with whom he came into near intercourse at the uni- 
 versity. 
 
 This intellectual atmosphere in which he here lived and moved 
 wrought soon its genial influence upon a nature so susceptible and 
 comprehensive as Ranke's. Especially was this influence exerted 
 by Savigny and William von Humboldt, through their society and 
 their writings, and also by Hegel through his philosophy of his- 
 tory. Thus he came to widen and deepen, in theory and in 
 practice, his conception of the mission and aims of history, and 
 also to win flexibility and elegance in his style of composition. 
 Most of all, as some of his pupils have observed in criticising his 
 next following works, was his progress manifest in his proceeding, 
 from the mastery he had already shown in seizing and setting forth 
 individual events, to the effort of discovering and representing 
 the connections and ideal unity of things. In a passage written 
 at this period he says : " History must not be content to exhibit 
 the outward succession of events, each in its own figure and color- 
 ing, but it must pierce into the deepest and most secret move- 
 ments of human life, it must discover what in every age the race 
 has struggled for and attained ; and this not by the way of phi- 
 losophical speculation, but of the critical study of facts." But it 
 was chiefly the literary treasures of the Royal Library that made 
 his Berlin life so rich and fruitful, and which, indeed, along wdth 
 kindred treasures in other libraries, made possible for him the 
 writing of his historical works. Here he found and diligently mas- 
 tered the manuscript dispatches of Venetian ambassadors, which 
 were of inestimable value for the history of the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries, the period of his chosen historical labors. 
 In those centuries, so important were the political relations of Ven- 
 ice, that she sent ambassadors to aU the courts of Europe, who for- 
 
676 THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 
 
 warded their dispatches to the home government every fortnight. 
 These ambassadors were the best diplomatists in Europe, and 
 their dispatches contained the most trustworthy reports of politi- 
 cal events. Copies of these dispatches found their way into Ger- 
 many, and to the extent of forty-eight folios lay on the shelves of 
 the Berlin Royal Library. The first result of Ranke's mastery 
 of these sources of history was given to the world in 1827 in the 
 first volume of his work on the " Princes and Peoples of Southern 
 Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries." This work 
 deals with Ottoman and Spanish history, portraying the rulers 
 and leading statesmen who figured in them, and the administra- 
 tion of their governments. But it was a work which, in its prepa- 
 ration, only lured him on with an irresistible attraction to plans 
 of yet greater works ; those costly manuscripts of the Venetian 
 ambassadors awakened the desire to see for himself the archives 
 of Venice, and to see Venice itself, and not Venice alone, but 
 Florence, too, and, most of all, Rome ; to see and know Italy, and 
 not only for its collections of historic materials, but for all else 
 so attractive in that storied land, beautiful no less in art and 
 letters than its sunny skies. Like Goethe and many another poet 
 and scholar, Ranke also, with all the great plans struggling in his 
 mind, was not insensible to the fine refrain of Mignon's song, 
 " Know'st thou the land ? — know'st thou it well ? Oh, there ! 't is 
 there I fain with thee would go." Yes, Ranke too yearned to see 
 Italy, and he saw it and was glad. The government allowed him a 
 leave of absence for three years to pursue his researches in foreign 
 and chiefly in Italian and in Roman archives. Rich were the new 
 acquisitions made by Ranke during these three years ; and they 
 were as various as are the domains in the vast realm of learned 
 study open to the scholar in Rome ; but of all the Muses whom he 
 cultivated as rulers of these various domains it was the Muse of 
 history to whom he was most devoted and with the amplest re- 
 turns. He came back to Berlin in 1831, with ample material for 
 his work, and prepared now more than ever before to write history, 
 not from printed books, but from original documents in manuscript. 
 He now settled down to his twofold life-work, that of an academic 
 teacher and of an historical author. Ranke was not fitted in 
 person or in delivery to be an attractive and popular university 
 lecturer ; for some time his lecture-room was thinly attended ; but 
 gradually the numbers increased as it became known how original 
 he was in the method and results of his studies and in his talent 
 
THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 577 
 
 for communicating them in writing. At the time when I attended 
 his lectures his room was daily crowded with attentive and inter-- 
 ested pupils ; but the attention and interest seriously suffered from 
 his strange eccentricities of person and manner. You looked on 
 with a curious wonder as you saw his small and not well-propor- 
 tioned figure, his large massive head covered with black, curling 
 hair, his sharp features, and his great, piercing dark blue eyes. 
 But the wonder grew as he spoke, at first seeming so inwardly full 
 of his subject that the utterance was slow and scarcely articulate 
 or even audible ; but soon and suddenly, loud and swift, the words 
 at sadly uneven pace with the ideas, the sharp eyes with an up- 
 ward gaze towards the ceiling, the face and body in restless move- 
 ment, himself starting from the chair and then back again, as if 
 he were possessed, as he indeed was, with a frenzy of thought. 
 He had certainly the inspiration of the Sibyl, but her contortions 
 too, and these were a serious drawback upon the reception of his 
 lectures, finished though they were in preparation to the last 
 detail both in conception and execution. But it is the testimony 
 of his pupils, who are now the first historians in Germany, that 
 Ranke's best educating work was done in his library, in his 
 weekly historical exercises, with a select circle of those students who 
 had chosen history as their professional specialty. These exer- 
 cises, as he called them, and which he instituted in imitation of 
 Beck's philological seminary, of which he was a member in 
 Leipsic, proved to be the seminary of all the historical semina- 
 ries which have since been established in the German univer- 
 sities with such signal educating results. These favored students 
 were brought into immediate relations with their master, and 
 came to know at first hand his extensive knowledge, his many- 
 sided culture, his quickness of apprehension, and his genial pro- 
 ductive criticism. They saw him, as it were, in his own workshop, 
 and watched him in the processes of his own work. The work 
 there with the master himself and his pupils was the application 
 of the right method to historical investigation ; and this was 
 taught, not by abstract rules, but by practical exercises, whether 
 it was in going through some subject he was investigating himself, 
 or in subjecting their essays to his own criticism. The themes of 
 such essays were sometimes set by himself, sometimes chosen by 
 them, but the test rigidly applied to them was that of original inde- 
 pendent work, and any violations of critical laws were condemned 
 with merciless strictness. From two of his most distinguished 
 
578 THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 
 
 pupils, Heinrich von Sybel and Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, I have 
 gained a view, which I will here present, of Ranke's often men- 
 tioned method of historical criticism, and also of historical writ- 
 ing. He described it as no newly discovered secret ; on the con- 
 trary its principle is an old one, and, as soon as uttered, self-evident. 
 Only, like any scientific rule, the simpler, it is the more various 
 and the more difficult is its application. Whoever relates an 
 event, he says, at first relates not the event itself, but the impres- 
 sion of it which he has received. In this relation there is, as all 
 experience shows, a subjective element, and it is the business of 
 historical criticism, by the removal of this element, to get and 
 present the real picture of the matter of fact related. The sub- 
 jective element is increased if the narrator gets his knowledge 
 from several successive authorities ; and so the critical method 
 strives to get back to the first and original source of knowledge, 
 and to draw from such writings as are themselves part and parcel 
 of the event itself ; as, for instance, if it is a battle, to get the 
 knowledge, not out of the general's dispatches, but farther back, 
 out of his orders before and during the battle. All this earlier 
 historians have known, as Thucydides and Tacitus, but Niebuhr 
 and Ranke have made an era in it, because in their applications 
 they have raised the critical rule to a hitherto unattained mas- 
 tery, and Ranke to a higher grade than Niebuhr. Still further, 
 it is needful for the historian to reach an exhaustive knowledge of 
 the outward position and of the inward personality of the writers 
 who are his authorities ; and such knowledge can be gained, not 
 by the logical processes of science, but by the imaginative pro- 
 cesses requisite in creative art. So it is the dictum of Ranke and 
 of Ranke's historical school that true history is not merely a 
 science, it is also an art ; no great historian has ever lived who 
 was only a man of critical learning ; genuine historical writing 
 grows out of the general union of the methodical investigation of 
 the understanding with the reproductive energy of the imagination. 
 Hence it is that (as Von Sybel tells us) Ranke always impressed 
 it upon his pupils, in criticising their papers, that the critical 
 method of research was not the end of history; THAT with no- 
 thing else would only lay \hQ foundation for the historic structure ; 
 it was the means to the end, to the artistic representation of fact 
 and truth in man's life and the progress of the world. Von 
 Sybel adds yet another feature to the picture of Ranke's manner 
 as a teacher. When he was in the midst of his family circle, 
 
THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 579 
 
 rejoicing in his children and his grandchildren, he used often to 
 say : " But I have yet another family, my historical family, my 
 pupils and my pupils' pupils." Such he had during his long life 
 even to the third generation, eminent students and teachers and 
 writers of history all over Germany, and he followed their suc- 
 cesses in life with a fatherly and a grandfatherly affection. " In 
 short," his pupil says, " in short, Ranke was by God's grace a 
 teacher in head and also in heart." 
 
 During all these active labors in teaching, Ranke found time 
 for his great literary works. The chief of these only is there time 
 to mention, with brief remarks upon their character. First of all 
 he completed his history of the " Princes and Peoples of South- 
 ern Europe," by the work in three volumes which he published in 
 the years 1834-1837, entitled " The History of the Popes, their 
 Church and their State, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centu- 
 ries ; " which, of all his works, is perhaps best known and prized 
 by English and American readers. The finished art with which 
 the persons and events were portrayed, individually and together, 
 the force and brilliancy of the style, wrought upon the reader with 
 a peculiar charm ; " it seemed," as Giesebrecht has said of it, " as 
 if the brightness of the clear Italian sky rested upon its pages." 
 When he completed the history of the Popes he had already fin- 
 ished the collecting and sifting of his materials for his next work, 
 " German History in the Period of the Reformation ; " the publica- 
 tion of it followed, in five volumes, in the years from 1839-1847. 
 Here it was his purpose not to write the history of the Reforma- 
 tion, but the history of Germany in the reigns of Maximilian I. 
 and Charles V. ; but of necessity the Reformation came into the 
 foreground of his historical picture, and was portrayed as the 
 greatest event of all German history. This work was followed by 
 two, closely connected with it, and, in the judgment of the author, 
 necessary to its completion. These were his " French History in 
 the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," which appeared in the 
 years 1852-56, in four volumes ; and was closely followed in 1859 
 by the first volume of his English history of the same period, and 
 this by successive volumes, till the seventh appeared in 1868. 
 Other works he wrote during this period, but these are the princi- 
 pal ones, on which chiefly rests his fame. By the general consent 
 of critics, they illustrate in a stiU higher degree the excellences of 
 his earlier books. The researches on which they rest are always 
 the same ; exact, thorough, systematic, and with these the artistic 
 
680 THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 
 
 form of presentation keeps even pace in the conception and the 
 expression. They illustrate, too, what Ranke taught and practiced, 
 the objective procedure in the historical writers ; the representa- 
 tion of the truth of fact, pure and simple, without pronouncing 
 sentence, either of praise or of blame, upon the events and the per- 
 sons. Yet sometimes he must needs yield to the dictate of nature, 
 and mingle with the narrative expressions of sympathy, either of 
 admiration or of abhorrence ; and this, too, without impairing the 
 judicial impartiality of the historian. His pupil Von Sybel gives 
 us a fine criticism on this point. "When I read," he says, 
 " Ranke's ' Princes and Peoples of Southern Europe,' or his ' His- 
 tory of the Popes,' I experience a delight like that which one has 
 in going through a gallery of fine pictures and statues. Quite 
 otherwise is it with me in reading his ' German History in the 
 Time of the Reformation.' This work is thoroughly imbued with 
 the inspiration of the German patriot for the greatest act of the 
 German mind ; we see how this history was not only thought, but 
 lived through, in the heart and soul of the writer, and so it has a 
 warm tone, and a liveliness and grandeur, reached nowhere else in 
 the author's works." Till he was upwards of seventy years old, 
 Ranke had enjoyed uninterrupted soundness of health. But in 
 1867, when on a journey to Munich, he incurred, by taking cold, 
 a painful malady, which became chronic, and at intervals very 
 serious in its effects. At that time he gave up his university lec- 
 tures ; he also withdrew from society, where he had always been 
 sought after, the favorite of kings, princes, and scholars. His 
 home was now much changed, as his wife had died and his chil- 
 dren had grown up and left the paternal roof. But with these 
 changes, his desire for work, his joy in creative thinking and writ- 
 ing, was unchanged and the same. He then began a new edition 
 of his writings, with important revisions and improvements. New 
 works also he published, some biographical, as " Wallenstein" and 
 "Savonarola," "Frederic William IV." and " Hardenberg," oth- 
 ers historical, " The Origin of the Seven Years' War," " Origin 
 of the Revolutionary Wars in 1791, 1792," and the " History of 
 Austria and Prussia between the Peace of Aix la Chapelle and 
 Hubertsburg." In such labors his life went on till 1880, when he 
 was eighty-five years old. His published works now numbered 
 forty-eight volumes octavo. He had written, as Lord Acton has 
 declared, " a larger number of excellent books than any man that 
 ever lived ; " and it was the testimony of a German writer, quoted 
 
THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 581 
 
 by Lord Acton, that " he alone among prose writers had furnished 
 a masterpiece to every country." By critics of all countries he 
 was adjudged the greatest of living historians. The influence of 
 his writings pervaded the whole lettered world, and his pupils and 
 pupils' pupils were the masters in history in Germany as teachers 
 and as writers. But at the age of eighty-five, when, after the 
 achievement of such labors and such fame, his literary career was 
 supposed to be ended, it was discovered, to universal amazement, 
 that he had planned and was writing a more comprehensive work 
 than any he had written — a universal history. It seemed to him 
 necessary to bring his historical studies to a well-rounded comple- 
 tion in a great work, which should present as on one grand canvas 
 the entire course and progress of human development in historic 
 times. Some new researches he was obliged to make for some 
 parts of this vast undertaking, but for the most part he relied 
 upon material already in possession. He had once given a course 
 of lectures on universal history to King Maximilian of Bavaria, 
 and this was taken as an outline of his new work. In the treat- 
 ment of ancient history, it was a great joy to him to go back to 
 the results of his classical studies of early years, and work over 
 the materials gathered at Schulpforta and at Frankfort, in the 
 shape of notes and observations and essays and abstracts, so that 
 while he was living through the history of the world he was living 
 through again his own life. As another has said of him, " Classi- 
 cal culture was the fountain-head of Ranke's historical learning, 
 and it now came into full play." The first volume of this work 
 appeared in 1881 ; this was followed by a new volume every year ; 
 he lived to publish, in 1886, the sixth volume ; also to write seven 
 chapters of the seventh, but that was published from his notes 
 after his death, and it has since been followed by the eighth and 
 ninth, also written and published by his secretaries from his 
 notes. 
 
 During these last years Ranke was honored and revered in 
 Germany as no one had been since Alexander von Humboldt. 
 The German sovereigns vied with one another in bestowing upon 
 him titles of honor. In Prussia he had been raised to the rank 
 of nobility, and also made chancellor of the Prussian Order i^our 
 le merite. All the academies of letters and sciences in Europe 
 sent him diplomas. All academic Berlin celebrated in 1867 with 
 enthusiasm the fiftieth anniversary of his doctor's degree, and in 
 1882 also the semi-centennial of his entrance into the Academy of 
 
582 THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 
 
 Sciences. So, too, the day which in 1885 marked the sixtieth 
 anniversary of his professorship was made a municipal as well as 
 academic holiday, and the municipality presented him with the 
 honorary freedom of the city. But the culminating jubilee-day 
 of his long life, the most impressive, too, of all the literary occa- 
 sions Berlin has known, was that which commemorated the nine- 
 tieth anniversary of his birth. In order to spare him a con- 
 tinuous exertion and excitement during the day, it was quietly 
 agreed some time beforehand among his numerous friends that 
 not separately but together and at the same hour they would all 
 gather at his house and bring their congratulations and good 
 wishes. A distinguished company assembled at the appointed 
 hour, representing the university of Berlin and the Academy of 
 Sciences, and the universities of Leipsic, Jena, Gbttingen, and 
 Strassburg, and warmly greeted the aged historian, who gener- 
 ously welcomed them to his home and his family, his children 
 and grandchildren being gathered around him. Then followed 
 from gentlemen speaking in behalf of these learned bodies a 
 series of congratulatory addresses, the most notable of which were 
 those of Professor Mommsen and Georg Waitz and Heinrich von 
 Sybel. But the great feature of the occasion was Ranke's own 
 address in reply, in which he reviewed the stages of his studies 
 and labors, and the signal political movements of his life, and 
 their connection with German historical writings. Numerous 
 were also the written communications from all parts of the world 
 which reached the historian on this memorable day. It is inter- 
 esting to read among these a letter from George Bancroft, con- 
 veying the congratulations of the American Historical Associa- 
 tion, and announcing the election of Ranke as the only honorary 
 member of the association, which Mr. Bancroft characterizes as 
 "a special homage to Ranke as the greatest living historian." 
 Mr. Bancroft, himself at that time over eighty years of age, signs 
 himself, " Your very affectionate and devoted scholar and friend." 
 At the end of Ranke's address he expressed the ardent wish and 
 hope that his life might be spared to complete his Universal His- 
 tory. He little knew how near was the end of his life. He 
 labored on with well-nigh preternatural exertion, giving ten hours 
 a day to his work, dictating to one of his two secretaries in the 
 morning and to the other in the evening. So it went on day after 
 after day with no apparent loss of mental vigor, until the 13th 
 of May, when on awaking he discovered that effort either of body 
 
THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 583 
 
 or of mind was no longer possible. His long life-work was ended. 
 The remaining days were only a struggle with death. Mostly he 
 lay unconscious ; in lucid moments he took leave of his children 
 and friends, listened gladly to readings from the Bible, and 
 calmly awaited the inevitable hour. He died on the 23d of May, 
 1886. In his own life he lived long ; in his works he has lived 
 for all times. There was in him a rare union of literary with 
 scientific gifts, the capacity of large and exact research, with the 
 power to communicate its results with artistic skill, a master alike 
 in the art of observing sharply the individual and the particular, 
 and in weaving them into a harmonious whole. Nor may I close 
 without speaking of his character as described by those who knew 
 him best. The minister who spoke the word over his open grave 
 characterized him as a man of piety (^Pietat)^ taking that German 
 word in its large German sense, as drawn from the Latin sense of 
 the original word, the sense of dutiful affection for all to whom 
 one may sustain human relations ; such piety he had even to ad- 
 vanced age for his revered and loved parents ; piety for the schools 
 that nurtured and trained him ; piety, too, for that Thiiringen 
 soil on which had stood his cradle. Very touching are the tones 
 of this pious love for his birthplace and early home as in the last 
 pages of the last volume of his World-history he has occasion to 
 describe them in connection with his narrative of the Saxon em- 
 perors Henry I. and Otto I. These kings had lived there, and 
 they died there, and their names and fortunes, with the site of 
 their palaces and grounds, had been familiar to him in his boy- 
 hood, and it is with a singular interest that we find him at the end 
 of his long life coming back as a writer to its very beginnings, his 
 last words, his dying swan-song, uttered over his own cradle. But 
 also for the German sovereigns of his own days as well as of those 
 olden times had he ever in him this dutiful sense, this pious loy- 
 alty : for King Frederic William IV. and for his brother the 
 Emperor and King William I., both of whom were in turn proud 
 of him not only as a subject but also as a countryman and friend. 
 For his country, too, whose history he wrote, he cherished the 
 same dutiful spirit as a patriot. But piety was his also in its 
 highest sense, — piety towards God. " This," as was said at his 
 grave, "was the secret of his strength and his peace. He believed 
 in Christ as his Lord and Saviour." His son said of him : " My 
 father was a Christian not in name only, but in deed and in 
 trutho In his works the religious thought was the decisive one 
 
584 THE HISTORIAN LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 
 
 for the development of human history. In his personal and his 
 family life religion was the ruling and controlling influence." 
 Such he was in the judgment of his pastor and of his son. Such 
 was his character. Is there not as much to remember and to 
 prize in such a man^ as even in such a historian f 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 COLLEGE INCIDENTS AND ANECDOTES. 
 
 A HAZIXG THAT MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED. 
 
 An incident of Professor Lincoln's Freshman year at Brown, and 
 which is not mentioned in his diary, is thus told by his friend, Mr. E. 
 H. Hazard : — 
 
 I first met Mr. Lincoln at the fall term of Brown University, in 
 1832. I then entered on my Junior and he on his Freshman year. In 
 a few evenings commenced that proceeding which has always been a 
 disgrace to every college in the land. I mean the hazing of Freshmen. 
 The band of hazers on that evening was led by the late Hon. Nathan F. 
 Dixon, then a Senior. He entered the rooms first and I last, and locked 
 the door behind us. The first student we assailed roomed on the lower 
 floor of the north division of Hope College. He was smart enough to get 
 away from us, and never stopped running, I was told, until he reached 
 the Friends' School. John Lincoln's room was on the second floor of 
 University Hall, north division. When we were inside and I had locked 
 the door, I was struck with the nice manner in which his apartments 
 were furnished. He came up to me and gave me such a cordial greeting 
 as took all the nonsense and rashness out of me. I stepped up to Mr. 
 Dixon and said, " No hazing in this room. He is too much of a gentle- 
 man." After a few jokes, we bade him good-night. As my acquaintance 
 began, so it continued to the day of his death. 
 
 THE REBELLION AGAINST "PARTS." 
 
 The Class of 1835 became quite famous in the history of Brown Uni- 
 versity as " The Rebel Class." This " rebellion " was not against com- 
 pulsory attendance on college prayers nor against recitations on New 
 Year's Day, which have been grievances in more modern and degenerate 
 days. On the contrary, this class, in their Senior year, rebelled against 
 what they were pleased to consider the unholy and unchristian system of 
 " parts " adopted by the Faculty. By this system of " parts " each stu- 
 dent's standing was scrupulously kept and made known. Undergraduate 
 conscience was very rigid in those days, and the system of " parts " was 
 too flagrant an appeal to worldly ambition and too unworthy an incen- 
 
586 APPENDIX. 
 
 tive to study to be borne. Therefore the Class of 1835 stranded on this 
 rock of high principle, and, with but three exceptions, left without their 
 degrees. Of course the Class of 1836 could not be content with conscien- 
 tious principles less lofty than those of their predecessors. In some in- 
 stances this extra moral sensitiveness took the shape of neglect of study 
 by way of public notice to all concerned that the individual declined to 
 study for a " part." Class meetings were held on the " part " question, 
 and a petition to the Corporation was drawn up requesting them to abol- 
 ish the objectionable usage. This petition was, in the opinion of the 
 class, eminently respectful as to manner and quite unanswerable as to 
 matter. The class as a whole signed it, and Wm. L. Brown and John 
 L. Lincoln, with beating hearts, carried it to tlie house of Dr. Crocker, 
 who was at that time the Secretary of the Corporation. As he was not 
 at home, the document was handed to the domestic who came to the 
 door, and the deed was done. The Corporation met as usual, and gave 
 no sign that the petition had ruffled their composure. The Commence- 
 ment of 1835 came and passed without a word of reply ; the next term 
 ended, and no one presumed to ask Dr. Wayland the cause of his silence. 
 This wholesome neglect cured the excitement, and matters went on as if 
 there had never been such a thing as a petition until the college course 
 was completed ; then Dr. Wayland, with the grim humor characteristic 
 of him, showed his appreciation of the petition by summoning Mr. Wm. 
 L. Brown, who had been most prominent in the affair, and intrusting to 
 his hands the assignment of " parts " for the class. 
 
 THE YOUTHFUL TUTOR. 
 
 There is a legend of the time of the beginning of Professor Lincoln's 
 service as tutor at Brown, which will illustrate his extremely youthful 
 appearance at the time. It is said that two about-to-be Freshmen, meet- 
 ing him on the Campus with his books, naturally mistook him for a fellow 
 classmate. On asking some questions as to how to dodge the new tutor 
 and avoid excessive study, they were courteously informed that they were 
 talking to the new tutor, who hoped they would be prepared. Quite in- 
 credulous, yet considering him possibly old enough to be a mischievous 
 Sophomore, they are said to have asserted, in language more forcible 
 than elegant, the impossibility of hoaxing them. In some versions of 
 this story their verbiage is represented as being unduly ornamented, 
 probably for the sake of greater vividness of contrast in depicting the 
 chagrin of the young men when in the recitation-room they again met 
 the new tutor. 
 
 THE OLD COMMONS HALL. 
 
 In Professor Lincoln's student days and for some time afterward one of 
 the ground floor rooms of the " Old College " or University Hall was used 
 
APPENDIX. 587 
 
 for the Chapel, and another room for the " College Commons." Accord- 
 ing to the recollection of one of Professor Lincoln's classmates, " Com- 
 mons Hall " was quite a large room, with some six or eight long tables 
 with plain benches, and plain but abundant and wholesome fare. The 
 crockery was decidedly unornamental, and the silver knives and forks 
 conspicuous by absence. The students were expected to be somewhat 
 fond of boiled rice. There was no precise allotment of seats, but each 
 one generally had his own place. Conversation was free, and one joke 
 has been handed down as to the coffee : that the coffee-pot was slow of 
 delivery because the coffee was too weak to run. No great formality of 
 manners was required, but when mischievous students sought recreation 
 in throwing crackers at less giddy and more hungry comrades, the stern 
 authority of steward Elliott was felt, and the person suspected, whether 
 guilty or innocent, had peremptory leave to withdraw. Occasionally 
 some one who had, or thought he had, the gift of music, would stand up, 
 rap on the table with the handle of his dining fork to attract attention, 
 and sound out two or three notes of the gamut, in which quite a number 
 would immediately unite ; but the promptness with which this melody 
 would be quieted demonstrated " Pluto's " eternal vigilance and lack of 
 musical appreciation. At this time chapel prayers and the first recita- 
 tion came before the commons breakfast. 
 
 ANECDOTES. 
 
 In this connection Professor Lincoln used to tell of a somewhat fast 
 student who remonstrated against the change of time of the college 
 prayers to eight o'clock, giving as his reason that he did not mind sitting 
 up till six, but eight o'clock compelled him to keep too late hours. He 
 also told an anecdote of a student of High Church tendencies, who was 
 accustomed to study in chapel during prayer time, and on being taken to 
 task for irreverence, furnished the more or less satisfactory excuse that 
 it could not properly be considered irreverence because the building had 
 never been regularly consecrated. 
 
 Another incident which he was fond of relating occurred as nearly as 
 can be ascertained in his Freshman year. Some Sophomores locked the 
 Freshman class and their tutor into the recitation-room and proceeded to 
 squirt quantities of aqua pura through the keyhole with a syringe. The 
 tutor was a man of utmost nicety of dress as well as of manners and 
 language, and was somewhat discomfited at the consequences of an un- 
 successful attempt on his part to open the door. At this juncture a very 
 stalwart Freshman from some rural district at once cheered and horrified 
 the tutor by remarking, " Mister Tutor, if yew will permit me, sir, I will 
 yank that door open." The door was "yanked," the disturbers fled, 
 and the inelegance of the expression was condoned by the thoroughness 
 of execution. 
 
688 APPENDIX. 
 
 Professor Lincoln remembered an impromptu prank of two of his 
 classmates, who had received from home by stage-coach a large quantity 
 of " slip," or curdled milk, intended to eke out the college fare. This 
 on arrival was found to be completely spoiled by the long, rough jour- 
 ney, and was thereupon deposited all over the stairs and entries. This 
 practical pun on the name of the delicacy was sufficiently enjoyed by 
 the victims. Professor Lincoln's only comment on this nonsense was, 
 " Those silly fellows ! " 
 
 Another exploit which he recalled was perpetrated by a member of the 
 Class of 1834 upon one of the professors who was one of the kindest, 
 least suspicious men that ever lived. The student by way of bravado 
 rode down the college stairs on the professor's back, and then escaped 
 the consequences by profuse expressions of regret for the unfortunate 
 mistake. Tradition has improved this event by adding that on a wager 
 the same student took another ride and escaped again in the same man- 
 ner, but upon condition that no more mistakes should occur. Professor 
 Lincoln could appreciate the ludicrous side of this piece of impudence, 
 but he considered it a mean performance. 
 
 MOCK PROGRAMMES. 
 
 In speaking of the " mock programmes " which twenty or thirty years 
 ago were a prominent feature of the old time " Junior Exhibitions," 
 Professor Lincoln was often wont to remark, that they were the more 
 " inexcusable " because of their lack of wit and their abundance of scur- 
 rility. He was always severe against vulgarity, and often in his old age 
 repeated with appreciation the repartee attributed to General Grant, who, 
 when some officer, beginning an indelicate story, said, " I believe there 
 are no ladies here," was promptly silenced by the answer, " No, sir, only 
 gentlemen.''^ 
 
 REIilGION NOT GOODYNESS. 
 
 Professor Lincoln was fond of informal talks with his students outside 
 of the recitation-room and upon practical topics of personal interest. In 
 such a conversation with some members of the Class of 1870 the discus- 
 sion touched on the somewhat popular misconception that religion in a 
 college student presupposes a certain goody-goody disposition. Profes- 
 sor Lincoln had no sympathy with such a notion, and said that on the 
 contrary it seemed to him that the Lord had the most use for men that 
 had the most devil in them, so that the devil is put in subjection and 
 kept under. 
 
 IN THE CLASS-KOOM. 
 
 In the recitation -room it occasionally happened that some student, 
 anxious to be extremely correct, would give too literal a translation, 
 
APPENDIX. 589 
 
 following exactly the Latin idiom and order of words. In such a case 
 Professor Lincoln would put into practice the words of Horace — 
 
 " Nee verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus 
 Interpres " — 
 
 and the student would be requested to make his translations into the 
 English language. 
 
 Students who used " ponies " were never safe. The Professor was well 
 posted in the different texts and translations, and knew when the text 
 followed by the "pony" differed from the edition used by the class. 
 Without any change of manner or voice he would ask what was the 
 Latin word which the student had rendered according to " pony ; " or 
 perhaps he would ask some question relating to the correct Latin word 
 translated in the " pony," which of course was nowhere to be found in 
 the text used in the class. When the incautious student and the rest of 
 the class as well had searched unsuccessfully for the word, the room 
 would be pervaded by a sense that something or other had gone wrong. 
 
 In the old days of the English pronunciation some students had a pref- 
 erence for the Continental method, and when the attempt to pronounce 
 according to their preference ended in a sort of composite ad libitum 
 reading, they were glad to get off with the mild rebuke implied in the 
 query as to which kind of pronunciation, on the whole, they preferred. 
 
 Perhaps the most exasperating draft on his fund of patience was when 
 some blundering student, by a most unintentional anticipation of the 
 modern pronunciation, would persist in murdering the name of that dis- 
 tinguished friend of learning, and the patron of the poet Horace, Maece- 
 nas. " M^cenas ! M^/cenas ! " he would repeat, " why do you call him 
 that ? spell it for yourself I " 
 
 There was a tradition in college concerning " Lincoln's Livy," which 
 was more than half believed, that he himself and not Livy was the au- 
 thor of the Latin preface. Professor Lincoln was much amused when 
 on the class-day of 18 — one of the speakers at the tree, pursuing the 
 time-honored practice of raking the faculty, accused him of writing Livy's 
 preface, and remonstrated with him for inflicting on overworked students 
 a bit of Latin notoriously tougher than all the rest of the book. 
 
 A LATIN EPISTLE. 
 
 But although he did not write Livy's preface, a Latin epistle has been 
 preserved, written by him in reply to a request made in the same lan- 
 guage by the Class of 1864 for a change in the hour of recitation to en- 
 able them to see a base-ball match between Harvard and Brown. This 
 letter reads as follows : — 
 Domino Johanni Tetlow et Aliis. 
 
 Discipuli et commilitones carissim% Vestras litteras recepi quibus ut 
 ludo Sophomorico adsitis, recitationem Latinam die Mercurii hora post 
 
590 APPENDIX. 
 
 preces academicas prima habitam velitis. Cui vestraB voluntati libenter 
 obsequerer, si ilia hora vacuus essem. Quoniam eo tempore apud meam 
 scholam semper occupatus sum, vos crastino die nona hora (vel Anglice) 
 tertia post meridiem hora, conveniam. 
 
 Valete J. L. Lincoln. 
 
 Scribebam ix Kal. Jul. mdccclxiii. 
 
 FROM "brown university IN THE 'FIFTIES," 
 Written for the " Brunonian," by Rev. Daniel Goodwin, of the Class of 1857. 
 
 What most impressed us about the lately departed and dearly beloved 
 Professor of the Latin Language and Literature was his sheer earnest- 
 ness. He worked himself, and he expected work. There was no non- 
 sense about him. None others talked so little in the class-room, and 
 none others secured quite such perfect order and decorum. We all had 
 an utter belief in the absolute sincerity of the man. In his presence the 
 most volatile became temporarily sedate. Work began at the first mo- 
 ment of the recitation hour and lasted to the closing one. But nobody 
 fancied that Professor Lincoln, with all his gravity, was devoid of a 
 sense of humor. 
 
 " M. TuU. Cicero," began a student to translate, one day. " M. Tull. ! 
 M. Tull. ! " exclaimed the Professor. " Why not give the gentleman the 
 whole of his name ? " and, without moving a muscle of his face, demanded, 
 " How should I like to be called Line. ? " This was a little too much for 
 even the hushed atmosphere of the Latin room, and brought down the 
 house. Nine out of ten of the boys never called him anything else but 
 Line., and he knew it, too, and no doubt did not dislike it, for it was a 
 term of positive endearment. Woe, however, to the student who habit- 
 ually neglected his work. He might expect no mercy. In a few clearly 
 cut sentences he would be simply annihilated. 
 
 One day a youth, who loved his pony " not wisely, but too well," was 
 construing a passage. Perhaps it was the line of the -^neid, Deonissum 
 lapsi per funem, Aeamasque, Thoasque. At first he proceeded glibly 
 enough, — " Having slid down by the lowered rope," — then he began to 
 stumble, and appealed piteously to the Professor : " Please, sir, I have 
 forgotten what funem means." In the condition in which the poor fel- 
 low soon found himself, after receiving an expression of the Professor's 
 mind, " Acamas," or " Thoas," or even " dims Ulixes," had they shared 
 it, might well have wished themselves back in the " hollow horse." He 
 might aptly have been said to be " at the end of his rope." 
 
 " Too soon called " could seldom have been written so fitly as con- 
 cerning this most lovable and best of men. Of no one of the old Fac- 
 ulty will the memory be kept longer green. 
 
APPENDIX. 591 
 
 COLLEGE AND SEMINARY ESSAYS. 
 
 Quite a number of essays are preserved written by Professor Lincoln 
 when a student in Brown University. The titles of some of these are as 
 follows : — 
 
 Fancy Fairs. 1834. 
 
 Juvenal. 1834. 
 
 Education of the Senses. 1834. 
 
 Influence of a Devotional Spirit upon Taste. 1835. 
 
 Importance of Acquaintance with Republican Institutions. 1835. 
 
 Witchcraft. 1835. 
 
 On Declamatory Exercises (designed for the meridian of Brown Uni- 
 versity). 1835. 
 
 Is it Right to Administer an Oath ? 1835. 
 
 The Slow Progress of American Literature. 1835. 
 
 An Amiable Woman. 1835. 
 
 Poetical Writings of Thomas Moore. 1835. 
 
 Estimate of Intellectual Character. 1835. 
 
 Analyses of Arguments. 1835. 
 
 Civil Insubordination (for Senior Exhibition). 1835. 
 
 Has either House of Congress a Right to Expunge from its Journal 
 any of its Proceedings ? A Political Squib. 1836. 
 
 Economical Effects of the Invention of the Mariner's Compass. 1836. 
 
 The Result of the Use of Natural Agents upon the Lower Classes of 
 Society. 1836. 
 
 The Means by which a Government may Promote Production. 1836. 
 
 The Ultimate Success of Great Minds. (Commencement Oration.) 
 1836. 
 
 There are also in existence among his papers three written at Colum- 
 bian College in 1837, for the " Evangelical Society," on — 
 
 Missions in China. 
 
 The Connection between Colleges and Missions. 
 
 The Mutual Influences of Christians. 
 
 Also, Essays and Sermons written at Newton in 1839, among which 
 are, — 
 
 On Prayer in Colleges. 
 
 The Sacred Writers Inspired. 
 
 Man before the Fall. 
 
 God and his Attributes. 
 
 The Omnipresence of God. 
 
 No Passions in God. 
 
 The Existence and Agency of Satan as an Evil Spirit. 
 
 The Moral Influence of Charitable Fairs. 
 
 The Relation of Ethics to Theology. 
 
 Indecision in Religion. 
 
592 APPENDIX. 
 
 LATER WRITINGS. 
 
 In addition to the writings printed in this volume, Professor Lincoln 
 wrote many magazine articles, and editorials and letters for denomi- 
 national and secular newspapers, and also addresses on different occa- 
 sions, besides essays and lectures which have not been printed. Among 
 these writings are the following : — 
 
 A Review of Becker's Gallus, Bibliotheca Sacra. 1845. 
 
 On Roman Slavery, a Translation from Becker, Bibliotheca Sacra. 
 1845. 
 
 Roman Private Life, Bibliotheca Sacra. 1846. 
 
 A Review of Alschefski's Livy, Bibliotheca Sacra. 1847. 
 
 Anthon's Classical Editions, North American Review. 1850. 
 
 A Review of the Life of Francis Horner, Christian Review. 1854. 
 
 The Teacher's Preparation, printed for the Rhode Island Sunday 
 School Convention. 1859. 
 
 Historical Address, Fiftieth Anniversary of the First Baptist Sunday 
 School, printed 1869. 
 
 Commemorative Discourse, The Life and Services of Rev. Alexis 
 Caswell, D. D., LL. D., printed 1877. 
 
 History of the First Baptist Sunday School, at the 250tli Anniversary 
 of the Church, printed 1889 ; and papers which have not been printed : 
 
 Schiller's William Tell, a Lecture written in connection with the 
 Benefit Street School. 
 
 Iphigenia, a College Lecture. 1875-1877. 
 
 Roman Literature from 14 to 117 A. d., a College Lecture. 
 
 Professor Lincoln published editions of Latin classics : — 
 
 " Selections from Livy," 1847, new edition 1882. (44,000 copies 
 printed.) 
 
 " The Works of Horace," 1851, new edition 1882. (16,400 copies 
 printed.) 
 
 " Ovid," 1883. (About 4,200 copies printed.) 
 
 THE SNOW-STORM SUNDAY OF 1856. 
 
 Professor Lincoln was the superintendent of the First Baptist Sunday- 
 school till the year 1876, a period of twenty-one years. During this time 
 he kept a record of the attendance, collection, conversions, new scholars 
 and teachers, and also of his own remarks to the school. The following 
 is the record January 6, 1856 : *' This, the first Sunday of '56, deserves the 
 distinction of Snmv-Storm Sunday. All night it snowed fast and with 
 intense cold and with no wind, so that in the morning the ground was 
 covered about a foot and a half on a level. It was still snowing, together 
 with wind and drifting, when the first bell rang, so that there was no 
 chance for school. I was the first to be in the vestry, and there found 
 
APPENDIX. 593 
 
 Charles Burrlll (the sexton) trying to get the vestry and church warm. 
 He had been there since four o'clock and driving the fires all the time ; 
 had used up two feet and a half of wood in kindling and keeping up the 
 coal fire in the furnaces and the fires in the stoves. This comprises the 
 list for the day : Teachers and officers, 4 ; Bible class, 3 ; boys, 2 ; 
 total, 9." 
 
 Professor Lincoln adopted the plan of systematic Sunday-school lessons 
 for each year, thus antedating the present arrangement of the national 
 system by many years. 
 
 PROFESSOR Lincoln's views as to sundat-school teaching. 
 
 The following extract is from an essay entitled " The Sunday-school 
 Teacher's Preparation for his Class," written by Professor Lincoln in 
 1859. This is interesting because it embodies something of his concep- 
 tion of teaching in general, and also appears to recall his own early 
 religious thoughts : — 
 
 " In the proper business of instruction, it is all-important to communi- 
 cate clear and intelligible ideas of the truth. It is recorded in Nehe- 
 miah that the sacred teachers read to the people in 'the law of God 
 distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the read- 
 ing.' I do not know a better statement than this, of the point I am now 
 considering. We too, as Sunday-school teachers, must give the sense 
 of the passage, and cause the class to understand the meaning of what is 
 read. Here, even more than anywhere else all vague notions are not 
 only useless, but also most hurtful. All must be distinct and intelligi- 
 ble. And even when we have clear and accurate knowledge ourselves, 
 we may fail to impart it, by not adapting it to the comprehension of 
 a young mind. We may err, either in forms of conception, or of lan- 
 guage, or of both. We need to put ourselves, by thought and memory, 
 into the condition of a ' child ; to call up the remembrances of our 
 early life and experience, the wants of which we were conscious, the 
 difficulties we used to feel, and the ways in which our difficulties were 
 met, or failed to be fully met. I think we can all remember how, in 
 our early years, we were often puzzled and bewildered by expressions 
 of which we knew scarcely anything, except that they were very hard 
 words. Is it probable that a child generally understands us, when we 
 tell him that he must have ' a new heart,' or that he must be ' con- 
 verted ? ' And so of other expressions, such as ' regeneration,' ' redemp- 
 tion,' and the like. These and many others like them, familiar as they 
 are, are yet theological terms, or embody general or abstract conceptions, 
 or else are so remote from the mental associations of children that they 
 cannot comprehend them, except by special explanation. Such words, 
 indeed, we need not shun ; and if they are Bible words, let them, with 
 the verses that contain them, be fixed in the memory and gotten by 
 
594 APPENDIX. 
 
 heart : but let us teach their meaning as clearly as we can, that the young 
 mind may associate with them clear and correct ideas." 
 
 PROFESSOR LINCOLN AS A CHURCH-MEMBER. 
 By Kev. T. Edwin Brown, D. D. 
 
 For more than fifty years the life of Professor Lincoln and that of the 
 Old First Baptist Church flowed on together. It helped to form his 
 spiritual character. He helped to make its history of influence. During 
 his student days he sat in the gallery of the ancient edifice, and felt the 
 glittering eye, the penetrating voice, the vitalizing touch of Doctor Patti- 
 son. He was the companion and helper of the sainted Granger. For 
 twenty-two years he was a deacon, and for twenty-one years the super- 
 intendent of the Sunday-school. Of the untiring service, of the sym- 
 pathy for the suffering, of the brightness gladdening childhood and 
 youth, of the courage and patience infused into the hearts of his pastors, 
 which these years represent, only they can form due estimate who knew 
 the man and what gentleness, graciousness, persistence, thoroughness, and 
 entire self-devotement he put into his work. The contagious enthusiasm 
 of which his pupils speak characterized all he did. 
 
 Whenever he appeared in the prayer-meeting — and he was a faithful 
 attendant, busy man though he was — his pastor was sure the meeting 
 could not be dull. His very face was a benediction. How he opened to 
 us the Scriptures, making old history march and countermarch before 
 our eyes, setting forth psalm and gospel with new and living meanings, 
 out of the treasures of his affluent learning and the riches of his ripening 
 experience ! And his prayers, how spiritual they were, how felicitous in 
 expression, how childlike in temper, how suited to the occasion, how 
 brotherly in their embrace, as if ''the spirit of Thy most excellent 
 charity," which he so often invoked, had taken him and his fellow-wor- 
 shipers alike upon its broad and buoyant wings, and lifted us all into 
 the presence of the living God. Oh it was good to be there ! One, at 
 least, of the little company who gathered in later years in the old vestry, 
 felt that it was worth a long walk or a great sacrifice to hear Professor 
 Lincoln speak or pray. 
 
 On the death of George I. Chace, Professor Lincoln was called to the 
 vacant moderatorship of the Charitable Baptist Society, the legal corpo- 
 ration of the church. It was an honorable post. Such men as the 
 Nicholas Browns and Samuel G. Arnold had filled it. It was a respon- 
 sible trust. The very peace and prosperity of the church itself depended 
 much on the tact, energy, integrity, and executive skill of the society's 
 moderator. Everybody trusted the new leader. Everybody felt sure 
 that his keen eyes would discern needs, his enthusiasm carry measures, 
 his suavity reduce inevitable friction to the lowest point. He loved the 
 old building, from its foundations to the vane on the steeple. Its walls 
 
APPENDIX. 695 
 
 and timbers held for him as for others the sacred palimpsests recording 
 the hallowed memories of many generations, and he cared for it all as if it 
 were his own. He loved the spiritual body, whence he had drawn, into 
 which he had poured, so much of his own life-blood, and he gave to it, 
 gladly, this new service of his closing years. If a coat of paint was 
 needed for the house, and extra money must be had ; if an actual defi- 
 ciency in the treasury must be met or guarantee provided against one 
 possible, after consultation with his colleagues he started. Do you not 
 see him now ? The lithesome form, the springing gait, the cheery face, 
 skipping into offices and up door-steps as briskly as if he were a boy of 
 twenty, and were not wearing the silver crown ! You never would think 
 he had left his beloved Horace and Cicero and Livy behind him, that a 
 pile of Latin exercises or examination papers were waiting his corrections, 
 or that he was bent on the disagreeable errand of " collecting." Out 
 comes the little book from his pocket. The face beams with winsome- 
 ness. " For our dear church, you know." A few clear words of expla- 
 nation, and down goes your name for a good sum. You thank him for 
 the privilege. You wish he would not hurry. But the light-bearer is 
 off, leaving sunshine all around you, but carrying a plenty with him to 
 the next place. Did he drop that little book from his ascension chariot, 
 as Elijah did his mantle ? Or was the secret his own, and incommuni- 
 cable ? 
 
 There are places left empty by Professor Lincoln's departure which 
 have been filled. But no more than you can fill his place in the home 
 can you fill his place in the prayer-meeting and in the social and aggres- 
 sive life of the church, or in the heart of one he honored by his confi- 
 dence, cheered by his hopefulness, guided by his sweet reasonableness, 
 and who was so grateful and proud for eight happy years to know that 
 he was the friend and pastor of so rare and radiant a soul. 
 
 DE SENECTUTE 
 
 Some thirty years ago, or more. Professor Lincoln and his brother 
 Heman spent the summer vacation, with their families, in a little village 
 in the Massachusetts hills. As Rev. Heman Lincoln, although consider- 
 ably the younger, was the minister, and preached Sundays in the village 
 church, he was treated by the people as not only more reverend because 
 of his office, but was supposed to be the more reverend as to age. With 
 this mistaken impression the village pastor looked at Professor Lincoln 
 with considerable condescension, and said to the Rev. Dr. Lincoln, " And 
 this young man, does he know anything about Sunday-schools ? " 
 
 THOLUCK's anecdote of professor LINCOLN. 
 
 In the year 1868 Rev. Henry S. Burrage was in Halle, and Tholuck 
 spoke to him of the times when Professor Lincoln and Professor Hackett 
 
596 APPENDIX. 
 
 were students at Halle. He said they were among the first Baptists to 
 come to the University to study. Soon after their arrival they were 
 invited to an evening company at one of the professors'. In the course 
 of the evening, one of the company having heard that the two young 
 Americans were Baptists, turned to Professor Lincoln and said, " I 
 understand that you are a Baptist." " Yes," replied the Professor, " I 
 am." " Well, then," it was added, " I suppose you can tell us the hour 
 and the minute when you were converted?" "Yes," replied Professor 
 Lincoln, " it was the time when religion became no longer a duty but a 
 pleasure." Mr. Burrage said that he should never forget Dr. Tholuck's 
 face as he related the story. " Eh," he exclaimed, " that was a magnifi- 
 cent answer ! It made a profound impression on the company and a 
 most favorable one for the Baptists." 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF NEANDER. 
 
 Professor Lincoln seldom spoke of the professors under whom he had 
 studied in Berlin, with the exception of Neander, whose odd appearance 
 he was fond of describing. Neander was accustomed, when lecturing, to 
 stand behind a curious high desk, with an open framework and with 
 holes and pegs for letting it up and down. His costume was a very long 
 coat coming down to the tops of his great jack-boots, and with a collar 
 which reached almost as high as his head as he bent over his desk, and 
 with arms extended forward twirled in his fingers a quill pen. If this 
 quill dropped there was a hiatus in the lecture until some one would pick 
 it up and place it in his hands, and then the wonderful flow of learned 
 discourse would proceed. It is said that Neander's sisters, who watched 
 over him unceasingly, discovered one day that his trousers were safe at 
 home while he was en route for the lecture-room, but on their running 
 after him their anxiety was relieved, as, fortunately, he had on another 
 pair. Another story was that when Neander came to Berlin he hap- 
 pened, in going from his home to the University for the first time, to be 
 with a friend, who, for the sake of some errand, took a circuitous route, 
 and for years he pursued the same course, and only by accident dis- 
 covered that there was a shorter way. Neander, on one occasion, being 
 jostled on a sidewalk, in order to pass the crowd, stepped off into the 
 gutter with one foot, keeping the other foot on the curb-stone, and keep- 
 ing on in this curious, uneven fashion, when he reached home, complained 
 of being fatigued from the disordered condition of the streets. 
 
 TWO SUGGESTIVE LETTERS. 
 
 The following letters, written by Professor Lincoln, one in 1852, and 
 the other in 1858, throw light upon his incessant activity, and also afford 
 a hint of the advantages of a college professorship for amassing a for- 
 tune : — 
 
APPENDIX. 597 
 
 Providence, April 24, 1852. 
 
 As soon as I got back from Philadelphia J^ got directly into the college 
 mill again, and have been going round ever since, in the Mantalini 
 phrase, in one " demm'd [^sit venia verbo] horrid grind." Time gets on 
 most rapidly, and I can do hardly anything but attend to my class work, 
 and accomplish some reading and writing which are absolutely indis- 
 pensable. My work for the Review is all that I have done apart from 
 ray classes this term, and that I had to do mostly after 10 P. M. With 
 three classes, three text-books to teach, and about 70 Latin compositions 
 per week to correct, my hands are full enough. We are having just 
 now considerable religious interest in college. There have been six or 
 seven very interesting cases of conversion, and there is a marked serious- 
 ness and thoughtfulness in the demeanor of many, which we hope will 
 end in the best results. We are making a Triennial, and I want to have 
 everything right. If you have suggestions of any sort about the Cata- 
 logue, please let me have them as soon as possible. That is a thing 
 which we must help to make perfect. 
 
 Providence, Nov. 22, 1858. 
 
 I am glad enough to have a little recess. I have a private pupil this 
 term, a young lady, to whom I give two hours' instruction every day ; 
 and thus I have what amounts to at least three hours additional work 
 every day. The per contra, however, is good pay {one dollar per hour), 
 and some variety of study and occupation. But work seems to be what 
 we are here for, and we must do with all appointments as well as we 
 may. Life is a hard problem to solve, and without religion it would be 
 quite insoluble. 
 
 THE BENEFIT STREET SCHOOL. 
 
 During the years from 1859 to 1867 Professor Lincoln conducted in 
 the school building beside his home on Benefit Street a school for young 
 women. It was with no lack of loyalty to Brown University that he 
 undertook this school, but wholly that he might owe no man anything. 
 Then, as now, the income of the college was far behind the require- 
 ments. With characteristic devotion he proposed to the Corjjoration a 
 reduction of his salary and began the school. During these years he was 
 busy between the hours of nine and two in the school, with college recita- 
 tions during the afternoon, and with his studies and the correction of 
 mountains of school and college pupils' exercises often into the small 
 hours of the night. In 1867, by taking the German professorship in 
 addition to all the Latin classes, he was able to relinquish the school. 
 Thus for about fifteen years he followed in the footsteps of his father, 
 Ensign Lincoln, by doing two men's work. He had early in life acquired 
 the habit of a ten-minutes after-dinner nap, seated in his library chair, 
 and this seemed to give him a fresh fund of vigor and alertness. 
 
598 APPENDIX. 
 
 Throughout his life he retained the same power of application, and many 
 of his Friday Club papers and other writings were considered by him as 
 affording pleasurable occupation to be indulged in after the day's work 
 was done. These years of the school, although crowded with hardest 
 work, were among the happiest of his life. He felt great interest also in 
 the postgraduate careers of these alumnae, and carefully kept many of 
 their essays and compositions. His little memorandum book contains a 
 list of 255 pupils of this school. The Benefit Street schoolhouse, en- 
 larged and improved, is now occupied by the " Women's College con- 
 nected with Brown University." Thus this most recent enlargement of 
 the scope and policy of the college may be viewed in some measure as 
 following Professor Lincoln's example of more than a generation ago. 
 
 Of this school one of his pupils writes : " Never was there such a 
 teacher. Every girl who was so fortunate as to sit under his instruction 
 could not fail to take in something, no matter how stupid she might be. 
 He had the wonderful faculty of making us learn from a wish to acquire 
 knowledge for knowledge's sake. Every point was fully and clearly 
 explained, and dull must the pupil have been who could not understand 
 the matter under discussion. A gentle sarcasm was his only and severest 
 mode of reproof, for whatever he said was so neatly put that it hit its 
 mark each time. There was never an empty seat during the years he 
 taught the female ideas how to shoot, and the waiting list was always full. 
 The scholars were made to understand that the lessons to be learned 
 were for their permanent good and not merely to gain high marks. All 
 I know, and especially the power acquired over my memory, enabling me 
 to continue to learn ever since my school days ended, is entirely due to 
 Mr. Lincoln. Never do I stop to think of the whys and wherefores, but 
 some of his methods suggest themselves to my mind, helping me to solve 
 my difficulty." 
 
 A GOOD FATHER. 
 
 Professor Lincoln was always a kind father. To him may be applied 
 with most exact truth his own description of his own father, given in his 
 " Notes of my Life." He never once scolded and never was unfair ; so 
 that it seemed mean to disobey or grieve him. Even through the times 
 of hardest work and smallest income he was always most generous in 
 money matters to his children, and so cheerful meanwhile that they 
 never suspected how hardly the money was earned. His constant prayer 
 was that his children might " grow up in the nurture and admonition of 
 the Lord." It is doubtful if, during a period of more than forty years, 
 a single day passed when he did not utter the petition once, twice, or 
 thrice. During his last illness, when his step had become feeble and he 
 knew the time of his departure was at hand, he used often to shut him- 
 self in his little dressing-room, where his voice could be heard as he was 
 alone in prayer with his God. 
 
APPENDIX. 599 
 
 OUTDOOR LIFE IN THE LONG VACATIONS. 
 
 Probably in the minds of many of Professor Lincoln's pupils his 
 memory is associated with the recitation-room with its various maps and 
 photographs of Rome and other classic places. But those who met him 
 during the long vacations knew how he enjoyed outdoor life. Very 
 early in the 'fifties he began to spend his summers at Narragansett Pier, 
 when the " New Pier," now long since demolished by wintry gales, was 
 in all its glory of new granite, and when the only inns for " city 
 boarders " were two small farmhouses. Here he found unwearied 
 pleasure in his favorite sport of fishing. About sunrise he would start 
 to secure the best stations on the rocks, laden with tackle and menhaden 
 for bait. Standing on the slippery ledges, with the surf boiling up 
 around his feet, he would whirl the baited hook and throw the hand line 
 in the good old-fashioned way. In later years, when the Pier had be- 
 come a city of hotels and cottages, he often visited it, and enjoyed the 
 sunshine and sea ; but as for fishing, there was too conspicuous an ab- 
 sence of privacy on the rocks, in the presence of some hundreds of 
 fashionably attired people. 
 
 Professor Lincoln was also one of the old-time frequenters of the 
 White Mountains before the railroad whistle had echoed among them, 
 and when staging instead of a stylish fad was a long reality. His favor- 
 ite mountain home was Jackson, both before and after it had become 
 famous for levying war against the United States. Here during many 
 happy summers he climbed the mountains and waded the brooks. His 
 nearsightedness used to annoy him while fishing, especially as, for rea- 
 sons which those who feel the same way well understand, he rebelled 
 against spectacles which have the merit of staying on, and preferred eye- 
 glasses which dropped off. On such occasions the hook sometimes 
 would be entangled in the bushes, and unconsciously he would be seeking 
 the trout where his beloved Horace, in his Second Ode, puts the fish : 
 
 " Omne cum Proteus pecus egit altos 
 Visere montes, 
 Piseium et summa g-enus hsesit ulmc 
 Nota quae sedes fuerat columbis." 
 
 As he grew older his enjoyment of this outdoor mountain life increased, 
 his strength seemed not to fail, and his vexatious nearsightedness passed 
 away. Even after his hair had whitened he would take with glee the 
 occasional practical illustrations, afforded by the smooth stones and slip- 
 pery mosses of the Wildcat River, of the facilis decensus, and enjoyed 
 his favorite brooks with all the self-forgetfulness of a schoolboy. Once 
 when the morning's sport had been prolonged past noon, and in a friendly 
 farmhouse with healthful hunger he relished a dinner of phenomenally 
 knobby and unhomogeneous saleratus biscuits, all oblivious of the familiar 
 
600 APPENDIX. 
 
 phrase, '•'optimum condiTnentuin fames est,"" he wondered whether it 
 would be possible to have some just like them in the home at Providence. 
 
 He visited the top of Mount Washington a number of times, and once 
 rode down the rack railway on the tender of the engine, which is a much 
 more aerial experience than the usual ride in the car. On another occa- 
 sion he was ascending the mountain by the carriage road with a party of 
 friends in an open mountain wagon. His seat chanced to be on the 
 inner side where the view down into the Great Gulf could not be seen to 
 the best advantage. One of the ladies was sitting on the side next to 
 the ravine and found the dizzy depths anything but enjoyable. When, 
 however, it was proposed that they change seats, neither would yield to 
 the other in politeness, she thinking it selfish to compel him to sit so close 
 to the edge, and he not for an instant entertaining the thought of depriving 
 her of the best seat. Both were content to be uncomfortable, but when 
 the true state of things was understood the change was quickly made. 
 
 He also visited at different times other parts of the White Mountains, 
 and enjoyed the fishing in Israel's River and other streams at Jefferson. 
 At Moosilauke, too, he found inspiration in the wonderful view from the 
 top of the mountain, and found in his trouting expeditions in Baker's 
 River that, like the Valley of Baca in the Psalms, the rain filled the 
 pools. But Jackson was his favorite resort, and after his return from 
 his last visit to Europe, when his last sickness was upon him and wading 
 in brooks was given up, he took pleasure, and often in company with the 
 same genial landlord of over thirty years before, in the beautiful drives. 
 Even then he daily read a portion of the Greek New Testament, just as 
 he had for so many years been accustomed, except that he now used 
 Alford's Gospels with its larger print instead of the little Greek testa- 
 ment which he had kept since his Sophomore days. 
 
 Professor Lincoln was quick to appreciate the merits of the revised 
 version of the New Testament, but his criticism of it was that on the 
 whole it was better Greek than English. 
 
 THE HERKOMER PORTRAIT. 
 
 When the Alumni, at the Commencement dinner in 1886, presented 
 to the College his portrait by Herkomer, Professor Lincoln was deeply 
 moved by this unprecedented token of affection and respect. Standing 
 upon the platform in Sayles Memorial Hall, with the portrait just behind 
 him, and with a voice tremulous with emotion, he said : — 
 
 " But what shall I, what can I say, for this overwhelming kindness with 
 which you have received me. I would I could give sufficient return for 
 the gratitude that is in my heart. In all this long period of fifty-four 
 years since I have been in this University as tutor and professor, I have 
 counted among my chief delights the friendship of my pupils. Their 
 testimonies of grateful remembrance and affectionate esteem have been 
 
APPENDIX. 601 
 
 sources of unspeakable joy to me, cheering my dark hours and gladden- 
 ing my brightest, infusing new vigor and new strength. Here to-day my 
 grateful joy has found its culmination in this crowning distinction that 
 has found me worthy to be painted by a great artist and placed here on 
 this wall, I may say this family wall, of the academic household. I shall 
 cherish this among my choicest memories, and hand it down to my 
 children as a precious legacy, because a token that their father's life 
 work has not been all in vain. I must disagree with the gentleman's 
 estimate of my services to our Alma Mater ; but if they have made any 
 approach to what he declares them, it is only because they were rendered 
 to my Alma Mater ; and they have been rendered to her, and her alone. 
 I love the old college, and therefore it is that I have been able to do her 
 any service as an instructor. If I have done any good, it is because of 
 the subjects which I have been allowed to teach ; it is because of the 
 noble Latin, and in some part of my course the sister Greek; both 
 noble and belonging to the true nobilitas of the literature of all ages. 
 My faith in them remains unimpaired by time and by the adverse influ- 
 ence of other studies to which they have with all the grace that belongs 
 to them given way. I have been glad to hear our President say that we 
 shall give no less attention to Latin or Greek, but more attention. 
 
 " I want to say before I sit down, that whether or not such superficial 
 things as the Latin salutatory and the conferring degrees are deposed, 
 these languages and literatures are with us to stay, and the republic of 
 letters is safe. I am also glad because it seems to me, as we were told 
 by Dr. Murray, that these studies historically stand at the head. The 
 masterpieces of our English tongue are on these very models. 
 
 " Thanking you all for your attention — these occasions come only 
 once in fifty years — I hope that in the coming fifty years, and all 
 subsequent, our Alma Mater will continue to dispense the same nurture 
 that she has ministered so many years. These noble studies preserve, 
 and alone can preserve, unbroken the chain of learning that unites us 
 with remote generations." 
 
 HOW LATIN CAN BE TAUGHT. 
 From an Editorial in the New York Tribune, May, 1890. 
 President Andrews, of Brown University, in an article on " Improve- 
 ments in College Education," written for " The Christian Union," com- 
 plains because the study of Greek and Latin is usually made laborious, 
 dry, philological, and abstract. The revolt from classical studies, in his 
 opinion, is due to classical teachers themselves. " They have not sound- 
 ed," he says, " the depths of riches lying at their feet. Students have 
 asked for bread and they have given stones. Feed youth with classical 
 food which shall be meat indeed, and they will find it a feast, praising 
 you as a bountiful entertainer and never wishing to leave your table for 
 
602 APPENDIX. 
 
 another's." The new president of Brown, in contending that larger play 
 must be given to the elective system of studies if higher education is to be 
 thorough, is following the precedent established by Dr. Wayland rather 
 than continuing the policy of Dr. Sears and Dr. Robinson, his immediate 
 predecessors. When he explains, however, how classical studies ought to 
 be conducted at college, he is unconsciously drawing upon his own remi- 
 niscences of Professor Lincoln's class-room. One president after another 
 has had his own notions respecting the merits of the elective system and 
 the value of classical studies, but for half a century the teaching of Latin 
 at Brown has been ideal. 
 
 Very much has been said during recent years about the importance of 
 making higher education comprehensive, practical, and symmetrical. 
 Theorists have their pedantic phrases and academic contentions, but every 
 educated man knows in his heart that his largest debt of academic obliga- 
 tion is due to the teacher who succeeded in inspiring him with enthusiasm 
 for study — with a genuine love of good letters. It is, perhaps, the chief 
 merit of classical studies that they promote, under wise direction, the 
 growth of that ardor for good literature — that passion for learning, 
 without which higher education is unprofitable and disappointing. Stu- 
 dents at Brown for fifty years have fallen under the influence of a teacher 
 of the Arnold type, who, with one of these rugged, yet sympathetic 
 natures, alike strong and mellow, too seldom found in colleges, has im- 
 parted his own enthusiasm for classical culture to his classes. Professor 
 Lincoln has taught Latin, not as a dead language, with grammar and acci- 
 dence to be acquired by persistent drudgery, but as a literature vitalized 
 with profound thought and noble feeling, and containing all the assimila- 
 tive elements needed for intellectual growth. To read Horace's " Odes " 
 and the " Ars Poetica " under him was to sit at a bountiful feast, and, in 
 President Andrews' phrase, never to wish to leave his table for another's. 
 How his face was wont to light up when, at the close of the Latin course, 
 as his custom was, he would quote Byron's " Farewell, Horace, whom I 
 hated so ; not for thy fault but mine." He taught Latin as a literature 
 to be felt, as well as analyzed and understood — as a vital force which 
 would create an undying love of good letters. 
 
 PROFESSOR Lincoln's last visit to tholuck's home. 
 In the year 1887 Professor Lincoln visited Halle for the last time. 
 Here he found the widow of Professor Tholuck, with the same kind 
 heart as the " Frau Rathinn " of almost half a century before. Here 
 she received him and his friends, and the old days were remembered 
 when, on the Christmas Eve of 1841, Tholuck welcomed "the two 
 Americans," and the presents and cakes were given to the students. It 
 was inspiring to see how the good man's influence and memory had 
 been kept ever fresh and helpful by Mrs. Tholuck's life of kind deeds to 
 
APPENDIX. 603 
 
 deserving students. For their welfare she devoted both her income and 
 her time, continuing their friend after their graduation, and following 
 with gladness their success in the world. A singular example of the 
 steadfastness and kindliness of her character was seen in a bird, or what 
 appeared to be the same bird, which had made a nest in her garden and 
 had come to her window for crumbs for nearly thirty years. 
 
 GERMAN TROUT FISHING. 
 
 During this, his last European tour, Professor Lincoln found, in a 
 little out-of-the-way German town, a reminder of his White Mountain 
 fishing experiences. The landlord of the village inn, desiring to do 
 honor to his guests, asked if they would be willing to have trout for 
 supper, for if so, he would go and catch some. The travelers felt inter- 
 ested in the proposed sport and waited to see the landlord start out with 
 trout rod and flies and creel in the proper sportsman's array, and lead 
 the way to some brook tumbling down from the mountains. They were 
 amused to see him walk out to the centre of the village square armed 
 with a short-handled net, with which he dipped up from the basin of the 
 fountain two olive-brown fish quite different in appearance, and in flavor 
 as well, from White Mountain trout. 
 
 A RAILWAY ADVENTURE. 
 
 During this same journey he had a railroad adventure which he often 
 related with great glee. The party was traveling in one of the usual 
 little German railway carriages with the doors at the sides, when the 
 train stopped at a station where there seemed to be a restaurant. They 
 were told that the train would wait a few minutes, and so with American 
 independence two of the party stepped out, crossed another track, and 
 proceeded to the station. This infraction of German railway regulations 
 thus far was unnoticed, but on the return an obstacle was found in the 
 shape of another train between them and their car. The various rail- 
 way personages appeared stolidly ignorant as to time tables. The train 
 was too long to go around ; the cars were unprovided with our convenient 
 end platforms and steps, and the space beneath them was none too ample 
 for a cat to go under ; only one course remained — to go over the train. 
 This seemed to be a somewhat simple matter, as the German cars are 
 very small affairs compared with our own, and moreover are provided 
 with a convenient ladder on each side for the use of the man who climbs 
 up and puts the lamps down through a hole in the roof. Accordingly 
 the start was made and the feat about half accomplished before it was 
 noticed by the railway officials. Then began considerable commotion, 
 and gesticulation and commands to come down. But by dint of expla- 
 nations in the German language to the officials that coming down on the 
 farther side was just as well as to return to the station, and of sotto voce 
 
604 APPENDIX. 
 
 hints in the vernacular to his comrade to keep on going, the retreat was 
 successfully covered and the railway carriage safely regained. 
 
 MODERN LATIN. 
 
 During this same visit to Europe Professor Lincoln and his party 
 enjoyed a carriage ride up the valley of the Upper Rhine, in Switzerland. 
 Here he became interested in the peculiar language of a part of the 
 people, which is said to be Latin come down from the ancient Etruscans, 
 or at the very latest from Roman legions stranded among the mountains 
 in the times of Julius Caesar. Critics of a skeptical turn have explained 
 this Romansch language by the introduction of Latin words during the 
 Middle Ages from the Romish ritual. But the Professor, during some 
 five days' drive with a driver who spoke only this language, found it to be 
 an unintelligible jargon bearing no resemblance in sound to Latin, whether 
 comparing it with English, Italian, Continental, or any other system of 
 pronunciation, and as much " Dutch " to the Germans as German is to 
 us. Apparently there was but slender foundation for the oft-repeated 
 legends of a linguistic Pompeii ready to be exhumed from Swiss glaciers. 
 
 THE LINCOLN FUND. 
 
 Probably the successful raising of the $100,000 Lincoln Fund by the 
 Brown Alumni was the event in his life that excited his profoundest 
 gratitude. He kept a list of the contributors to this fund, which, during 
 the days of his sickness, he often studied, and he knew each individual 
 name by heart. Not many months before his death he made a careful 
 memorandum of the salary paid him each year, beginning with his tutor- 
 ship in 1839 at $400. And, just as his life work was about to close, he 
 writes against the year 1890-91 : " $3,000 by arrangement made with 
 the Corporation by the graduates in their $100,000 fund, namely, that I 
 should have $3,000 for the rest of my hfe, whether I should Gontinue to 
 teach or not.'' 
 
 DECLINING YEARS. 
 
 * 
 
 " Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, 
 Labuntur anni, nee pietas moram 
 Rug-is et instanti senectse 
 
 Afferet indomitsBque Morti." 
 
 Professor Lincoln was very slow to acknowledge or even to suspect 
 that he could be growing old. In February, 1887, the newspapers, in 
 giving an account of the dinner of the New York Alumni of Brown, 
 described him as " the genial old gentleman, with gray beard and frosted 
 hair," and his comment was that it was very strange that people should 
 call him old. Even during the last few years of his life, when declining 
 strength made it imperative for him to reduce the number of his recita- 
 
APPENDIX. 605 
 
 tions, he was very loath to do so. In reply to the argument that it was 
 only fair to give up the Freshmen and afford opportunity for some 
 younger professor to become increasingly useful to the coUege, he urged 
 the very ingenious argument, that it was always difficult at first for him 
 to become well acquainted with each class, and if he learned to know 
 them while they were Freshmen he was saved the labor of familiarizing 
 himself with the names and faces of so many new Sophomores. 
 
 In the earlier stages of his illness he found it very difficult to obey the 
 physician's advice and go upstairs slowly. He would run up several 
 steps, briskly as had been his lifelong habit, and then, recollecting the 
 new order of things, would proceed more deliberately, stepping up but 
 one stair at a time. During the last year of his college service his reci- 
 tation-room was changed to the ground floor, and when he hecame un- 
 able to walk or drive the short distance to the college he met his classes 
 as long as his strength permitted at his home. 
 
 He had always been fond of walking for pleasure and exercise, not in a 
 slow and meditative manner, but with alertness and with keen observation. 
 When increasing feebleness of body compelled him to give up his walks 
 he became almost as much attached to driving, and there were few 
 country roads near Providence with which he was not familiar. Like 
 his bi;other Heman, he took great interest in the students' athletic sports. 
 He regularly drove into Lincoln Field and watched the baseball games. 
 The students soon grew to expect his visits and keep their eyes on the 
 big gate. And when the carriage entered the grounds the Professor was 
 always greeted with a sound dear to his ears, the good old triple cheer of 
 Brown. No one was more enthusiastic when Brown came out ahead. 
 Even during the last weeks of his illness, when he could not leave his 
 bed, he would listen, as the afternoons would wane, and when he heard 
 the cheering would look up brightly and say, " Our boys are wiiining," 
 or, if all was quiet, he would say, " I 'm afraid our boys are not doing as 
 well as usual." 
 
 During the last summer of his life Professor Lincoln was able to en- 
 dure the journey to Petersham, Mass. Here he had the great pleasure 
 of seeing all his grandchildren together as he watched them at their 
 play. Here too he sat, well wrapped, upon the porch, as twilight came 
 on, gazing at the beautiful sunsets. With these bright surroundings it 
 seemed as if he gained strength of body as well as happiness of mind. 
 
 His favorite hymn, which he loved to join in singing to the good old 
 tune of " Boylston," was, — 
 
 " Welcome, sweet day of rest, 
 That saw the Lord arise ! 
 Welcome to this reviving' breast, 
 And these rejoicing eyes." 
 
606 APPENDIX. 
 
 LAST DAYS. 
 
 In his last sickness, when extreme bodily weakness made continuous 
 speech, and even consecutive thought difficult, he was troubled with what 
 he called " vagaries," or unbidden thoughts, and with difficulty in recall- 
 ing just the word he needed. As a refuge from these troubles, he would 
 often listen to hymns, or would himself repeat verses from the Bible. 
 Once, when he was seemingly exhausted and sleeping, he recited with 
 vigor and emphasis that beautiful psalm, " The Lord is my shepherd, I 
 shall not want," and making a slight mistake, would not be content until 
 he had corrected it, and so continued, " Yea, though I walk through the 
 valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," and repeated all of 
 the verses. Nothing but a lifelong love of the Bible could have brought 
 in this time of utter weakness these comforting words to his lips. Only 
 a few days before his death, when the old Sunday-school hymn, " There is 
 rest for the weary," was sung to him, he joined with feeble but glad 
 voice in the refrain, — 
 
 " On the other side of Jordan, 
 In the sweet fields of Eden, 
 Where the tree of life is blooming, 
 There is rest for me," 
 
 and the singers could hardly sing for realizing how near to him was that 
 rest. Again, the singing of the hymn, " O Paradise ! O Paradise ! " in 
 some strange way, through God's kindness, so lifted him above all sense 
 of the extreme weariness of exhaustion peculiar to the disease (pernicious 
 anaemia), that he broke out in exclamations of wonder and thanks, " O, 
 such rapture ! and the goodness of God that such a one as I should be 
 permitted to enjoy it ! " Among his last words that could clearly be dis- 
 tinguished were those from John's Gospel, " Let not your heart be trou- 
 bled, neither let it be afraid," and then to those who stood around him 
 the words, " Little children, love one another." He passed away very 
 early in the morning, long before daylight, October 17, 1891. 
 
 EDITORIAL FROM "HARPERS WEEKLY,' OCTOBER, 1891, WRITTEN BY 
 THE LATE GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 
 
 The death of Professor Lincoln, of Brown University, was anticipated, 
 for he had been long an invalid, but it brings a pang to a very widely 
 scattered circle of his old pupils, and to all who knew the generous, 
 candid, high-hearted, and accomplished man. He was in the true sense 
 a scholar, a lover of learning and of literature, not subdued by scholar- 
 ship nor by the conditions of teaching into a pedant or a formalist, but 
 whose vitality transformed his learning into character and life. 
 
 For nearly fifty years he had been the most familiar figure at Brown, 
 
APPENDIX. 607 
 
 his term of service, we believe, longer than that of any other teacher ; 
 and from the first to the last his influence and impression upon the stu- 
 dents were most liberalizing and stimulating, so that every year a large 
 body of young men passed from the college into every part of the coun- 
 try and into all active pursuits with hearts full of gratitude and affection 
 for Professor Lincoln. It is a great power which such a teacher exer- 
 cises, and no man can have a nobler monument than such a fond recol- 
 lection. 
 
 The freshness of his mind and heart was wholly unwasted by the 
 routine of daily duty. His interest in the classics which he taught, 
 especially Latin, which was his chair, kindled the minds of the young 
 men who had thought them hard and dry. His sympathy and humor 
 overflowed the hour, and many a man owes much of the purest literary 
 delight of his life to Professor Lincoln's kindly persistence and intelli- 
 gence. A happy literary allusion, an apt quotation, a flowing line, or a 
 noble metaphor gave him a pleasure which was inspiring to those of 
 similar taste, who instinctively found in his smile and approval their 
 happy reward. Professor Lincoln's health was never very robust, but 
 his attendance at his post was interrupted only by two or three excur- 
 sions to Europe, which he turned to the best account. Toward the end 
 he was obliged reluctantly to relinquish his chair, and cheered by the 
 tenderest affection his life tranquilly ended. But by one life how much 
 more than its own individual activity is quickened ! And a life like 
 Professor Lincoln's is inwrought in how many lives like a fine gold 
 thread in an endless tapestry ! 
 
 FROM THE ADDRESS OF PROFESSOR ALBERT HARKNESS, PH. D., LL. D., 
 AT THE NEW YORK BROWN ALUMNI DINNER, APRIL, 1892. 
 
 We come around this board to-night, my brothers, with mingled emo- 
 tions, with glad memories, and yet with sad memories. We greet our 
 iriends with joy and with grateful hearts, but we miss from our number 
 the genial countenance and joyous tones of one who in former years has 
 been the life of these annual reunions. We cannot forget at such an 
 hour as this that since we last assembled here the gifted and genial 
 Lincoln, the beloved teacher and friend of so many of us, has rested 
 from his labors. Even if our lips were silent, our hearts, I am sure, 
 would pay a grateful tribute to his memory. 
 
 But in the years that are past the name of Professor Lincoln has 
 been wont to awaken in our hearts only emotions of joy and gladness ; 
 so let it be here to-night ; so he would have it. Dismissing, therefore, 
 all thought of our own loss, we do well to think and speak only of the 
 joy and the blessing which he has brought into all our lives, and into the 
 lives of hundreds and thousands of his pupils scattered over the land, 
 filling positions of trust and influence, stronger and better and happier 
 
608 APPENDIX. 
 
 to-day because of the inspiring influence and the glad memories which 
 they carried with them into life from that well-remembered room in old 
 University Hall. 
 
 The name of Professor Lincoln, as instructor or professor, has adorned 
 our Catalogue for fifty years, a term of service entirely unparalleled in the 
 history of the University, and during this entire period he has given his 
 very best thought and his most earnest endeavors to the welfare of his 
 beloved Alma Mater. For her he has cherished the warmest affection ; 
 to her he has devoted his time, his talents, and his stores of learning. 
 
 Professor Lincoln was a born teacher. With quick and generous 
 sympathies that brought him at once into close contact with all the mem- 
 bers of his classes, he entered readily and heartily into all their youthful 
 feelings, appreciated their difficulties, and gladly furnished them the 
 needed encouragement and help. With a kind word of admonition for 
 the wayward and indolent, he was ever ready to recognize and reward, 
 not only marked success, but all honest effort. With high ideals and 
 aspirations himself, full of zeal and enthusiasm, he soon imparted to his 
 pupils something of his own love of excellence and truth. 
 
 Many of you remember, I am sure, what joy was wont to light up his 
 countenance in the class-room when you gave an especially felicitous 
 rendering of some striking passage in a favorite Latin author, and with 
 what emphasis and tones he would utter these words, so dear to the 
 faithful student's heart : "Very good, sir; bene, optime.'" 
 
 Among all the fortunate and auspicious events that have marked the 
 recent years of Profesor Lincoln's life, the organization of the Brown 
 University Alumni of New York deserves special and emphatic mention. 
 For many of the proudest and happiest days of his life he was indebted 
 to your kind and generous appreciation of his character and services. 
 These annual reunions were to him seasons of unalloyed happiness. 
 Here he felt himself, in the fullest sense, in the midst of brothers good 
 and true, brothers to whom he was bound by more than Brunonian. 
 bonds. Your generosity and your kindly interest gladdened his heart 
 when on that fiftieth anniversary of his graduation you aided in placing 
 his bright and genial face, in a masterly work of art, among the worthies 
 that adorn the walls of Sayles Memorial Hall. You again brought new 
 joy and a new blessing into the closing years of his life by erecting that 
 noble monument to his memory in the establishment of the Lincoln 
 Fund, which will carry to distant generations his name and yours linked 
 in perpetual brotherhood and associated with one of the noblest benefac- 
 tions that have ever blessed our Alma Mater. 
 
 EDITORIAL FROM THE "PROVIDENCE JOURNAL," OCTOBER, 1891. 
 
 It is no reflection on other highly regarded instructors who in times 
 past or present have been connected with Brown University to say that 
 
APPENDIX. 609 
 
 Professor Lincoln was the best beloved of all those who have ever sat 
 before the classes of that institution. Others have won respect for their 
 learning and character, gratitude for their assistance, and even that affec- 
 tionate regard which college boys are wont to bestow on their professors 
 much after the fashion of the tendrils of growing vines which must cling 
 around something, and naturally entwine the object that happens to be 
 nearest. But Professor Lincoln had that rare felicity which is given to 
 few men of inspiring a real, deep, and abiding love for himself in the 
 hearts of all who came into contact with him, even though the relation- 
 ship was not specially intimate nor the contact much more than passing. 
 He made loving friends everywhere ; he kept them always, and his death 
 will bring a sense of personal grief to men whose very names he may 
 have long ago forgotten, and of personal loss to those whom miles and 
 years have long separated from their old Latin professor. 
 
 He won, in this exceptional degree, the affections of his pupils and of 
 those who knew him in the social relationships of life, not by any unex- 
 plainable magnetism. What there was in his personality, his life, and his 
 work that drew men towards him was patent enough to any eye. There 
 was a broad humanity in his temperament and culture that opened out to 
 sympathy with all mankind and a sunniness of disposition which envel- 
 oped him in all his work, and which as easily drew to him for comfort 
 and advice the weak and discouraged as the strong and cheerful for good 
 fellowship. There was no one to whom the college boys so readily went 
 in their troubles and difficulties as to Professor Lincoln, and no one in 
 the cultured circles of Providence with whom established and self-poised 
 men more gladly associated in the pursuit of the pleasures of mental and 
 social intercourse. He was a social and humane man in the best sense 
 of these words — ready even as his own loved Horace was for gracious 
 converse on every proper theme for discussion, and able to say, like 
 Terence, " Homo sum ; humani nihil a me alienum puto." 
 
 The studies of his profession had not dried up the sweet juices of 
 humanity, nor had his deep knowledge of ancient life lessened the sym- 
 pathy he felt for the present life around him. It was this sympathy 
 which drew to him the love of others, and herein, too, was one of the 
 secrets of his success in teaching. He could lead pupils up the rough 
 road of knowledge by showing that he appreciated their difficulties. The 
 other secret of his success was his own boundless love of broad literary 
 culture and his abiding belief that in the study of Latin literature could 
 be found a helpful means toward attaining that culture. It was with 
 that belief constantly in mind that he read the Latin authors with his 
 classes. He read them as literature, not as mere agencies for teaching 
 boys to translate from one language to another, nor as pegs on which to 
 hang dissertations on grammar and philology. There was ever present 
 in his instruction the effort to bring to the perception of his pupils the 
 
610 APPENDIX. 
 
 literary beauties of the works they were reading, and so to cultivate taste 
 and inform the judgment. Many who had gone through the dry curri- 
 culum of classical and mathematical studies discovered in Professor 
 Lincoln's class-room for the first time that the ancient languages were 
 made for something more than for grammarians to analyze. 
 
 They learned there, if they used the opportunities offered, the first 
 lessons of a genuine literary culture ; they drew from the genial and 
 learned man who led them through the ever-delightful pages of Horace 
 something of his own love for the old-fashioned " Humanities," for sound 
 learning, and high morality ; they received an impress that made them 
 something more than builders and traders and professional men all the 
 rest of their lives. Professor Lincoln belonged,- of course, to a school of 
 classical instructors that is now fast giving place to a new generation 
 with new and presumably better methods of instruction, and he may 
 have put too high an estimate on the importance of classical studies in 
 modern liberal education. But there are a great many of his old pupils 
 who will recall with a sense of genuine gratitude that they learned some- 
 thing more than grammar in his class-room ; that they were led by him 
 to a knowledge and appreciation of the beauties of literature in whatever 
 language preserved, and that it was his hand that opened for them the 
 gates of an exceedingly pleasant land, whither, in intervals between the 
 cares and labors of active life, it is still the privilege of the educated mail 
 to steal away for refreshment. 
 
 Of his personal character and of the high position he occupied in the 
 esteem of the community it is needless to speak. For years that are 
 many to count he has lived and labored in this city, sympathizing with 
 all good works, though confining himself chiefly to the tasks of his own 
 position at the University, and now, after a continuity of service which 
 few men enjoy, he lays his armor down in the place where he put it on. 
 His fellow-citizens outside the college have watched his long career 
 among them with both admiration and pride. They have admired his 
 culture and scholarship, the grace with which he united to the learning 
 of the scholar the unfailing courtesy of the gentleman and the unaffected 
 piety of the pure-minded believer. They have been proud of him as 
 a citizen who reflected credit and dignity on the community. If they 
 have not shown their admiration and pride by public offices and honors, 
 it is because he himself was averse to receiving such manifestations of 
 regard and confidence. Yet a great many men in this land of ours 
 have been conspicuously honored and rewarded in one way and another 
 who never rendered a tithe of the good service to the country that John 
 Larkin Lincoln lendered while he was helping to fill the minds of fifty 
 classes of young men with high thoughts, pure morality, and an abiding 
 love of culture and sound learning of whatever kind or scope. " Quod 
 enim munus reipublicae afferre majus meliusve possumus quam si docemus 
 atque erudimus juventutem ? " 
 
APPENDIX 611 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 From the New York Evening Post, October, 1891. Written by Prof. William Carey 
 
 Poland. 
 
 John Larkin Lincoln, LL. D., professor of the Latin language and 
 literature in Brown University since the year 1845, was born in Boston 
 on the 23d of February, 1817. He was the son of Ensign and Sophia 
 Oliver (Larkin) Lincoln. He came of a good ancestry. His father was 
 a printer and publisher, a man of strong character, good education, ster- 
 ling integrity, and fervent, unaffected piety. He was a prominent Bap- 
 tist, and as a licensed preacher often officiated acceptably in the pulpit. 
 He was benevolent, philanthropic, and hospitable. The life of the home 
 of which he was the head was distinctly and firmly religious, and at the 
 same time pervaded by a genial, affectionate spirit. The children of the 
 family were interesting and intelligent and had the advantages of educar 
 tion in the excellent schools for which Boston even then was distinguished. 
 A younger brother of Professor Lincoln was the Rev. Dr. Heman Lin- 
 coln, a graduate of Brown University in 1840, and for twenty years a 
 professor in the Newton Theological Institution. 
 
 Professor Lincoln was prepared for college chiefly at the famous 
 Public Latin School in Boston. He entered this school in 1826, when 
 Mr. B. A. Gould was master. Among his classmates w^ere his brother 
 Joshua Lincoln, Henry Ward Beecher, Bishop J. B. Fitzpatrick, and 
 Francis Minot Weld. Other pupils of his time were Professor H. W. 
 Torrey, Rev. Dr. G. E. Ellis, John Lothrop Motley, William M. Evarts, 
 Dr. H. J. Bigelow, Judge Charles Devens, Judge C. S. Bradley, and 
 Edward Everett Hale. In 1832, when fifteen years old, he entered 
 Brown University, then under the presidency of the Rev. Dr. Wayland, 
 who had been four years in office. It was an interesting period in the 
 history of the college. Dr. Wayland had established himself fully as the 
 undisputed and admired head. The standard of scholarship had been 
 raised, and the influences to which the young undergraduate was sub- 
 jected were healthful and quickening. The faculty was not large, but it 
 included honored names. Dr. Wayland himself, then thirty-six years 
 old, was an inspiring teacher. The polished Goddard was senior pro- 
 fessor. Other professors during Mr. Lincoln's undergraduate residence 
 were Elton, Caswell, Peck, Chace, Gammell, and Hackett, all names 
 revered by the sons of Brown. 
 
 Immediately after graduation in 1836 Mr. Lincoln was elected tutor 
 in Columbian College, at Washington, D. C, where he remained during 
 the academic year 1836-37. In the autumn of 1837 he entered the 
 Baptist Theological Institution at Newton, Mass., where he remained 
 two years. In 1839 he was elected tutor in Greek in Brown University, 
 and held this office two years. In the autumn of 1841 he went abroad 
 
612 APPENDIX. 
 
 for study, in the company of the late Professor H. B. Hackett, afterwards 
 well known on both sides of the sea as a learned and skillful interpreter 
 of the New Testament. 
 
 Mr. Lincoln was absent from America three years, spending this time 
 to great permanent advantage in the German universities, in travel, and 
 in residence and study in several foreign capitals. It was a period of 
 rare and high enjoyment to him. It meant much to him and to those 
 whose good fortune it was to enjoy his instruction in after years. To 
 this period he always referred gratefully as a happy time, filled with 
 joyous memories of men whom he loved and honored as friends and as 
 teachers, and abounding in influences derived from nature, from science, 
 and from art, which had proved to be fructifying in his intellectual life. 
 To study abroad means a great deal now to an intelligent young Amer- 
 ican. In those days it was a rare privilege given to but few, and 
 opening to them opportunities which, in contrast with those then existing 
 at home, were even more strikingly superior than they would appear to- 
 day. 
 
 The first year of foreign residence, 1841-42, he spent at Halle, as 
 a student of theology and philology. He heard Tholuck and Julius 
 Miiller in theology, Gesenius in Hebrew, Bernhardy in classical philo- 
 logy. He lived in the family of Tholuck, who in July and August, 
 
 1842, made him his traveling companion in a vacation excursion through 
 Switzerland and northern Italy. Tholuck, in his diary written at this 
 time, in a part printed by his biographer Witte, says of the young 
 Lincoln, " O how I love that nervous, humorous, intelligent boy ! " In 
 later years he once said that of all the Americans he had ever met he 
 loved John Lincoln the most. The love which he felt, his pupil gave to 
 him also. When he finally devoted himself to philology, it caused a 
 moment of sorrow to Tholuck, who had hoped that he would become a 
 theologian. 
 
 His second academic year -abroad was spent in Berlin, where he 
 studied church history under Neander, Old Testament history under 
 Hengstenberg, and classical philology under Boeckh. After traveling 
 during the next summer vacation, he went to Geneva in the autumn of 
 
 1843. Here he spent some time in the study of French. The winter of 
 1843-44 and a large part of the following spring he spent in Rome, 
 studying classical literature and archaeology. He enjoyed the privilege 
 of attending the weekly meetings of the Archaeological Society on the 
 Capitoline HiU. Among his fellow students were Grote, the historian of 
 Greece, Preller, celebrated for his researches in classical mythology, 
 George Washington Greene, then American consul in Rome, Theodore 
 Parker, William M. Hunt, Francis Parkman, and other eminent schol- 
 ars. In May he went to Paris for a stay of a few weeks, and thence to 
 London, on his way home to the United States. 
 
APPENDIX. 613 
 
 He became assistant professor of the Latin language and literature 
 in Brown University in the autumn of 1844, and at the close of his first 
 year of service was promoted to the full professorship. This office he 
 held through the rest of his life! From the year 1859 to 1867, being 
 released from some of his teaching in the college, he gave a large part of 
 his time to conducting a school for young women in Providence. In 
 1867 he retired from this school, in which he had won the gratitude and 
 esteem of his many pupils. From 1867 to 1877 he added to his work in 
 Latin five hours a week of instruction in German. He was the senior 
 professor in the college faculty from the time of the retirement of Pro- 
 fessor Chace in 1872. He carried for the greater part of his professorial 
 life the burden of many hours of instruction. In the autumn of 1889 he 
 first reduced his hours from twelve in the week to six. In the academic 
 year 1889-90 an unusual honor was accorded him in the establishment of 
 " The John Larkin Lincoln Fund." This fund of over $100,000 was 
 raised in that year among the sons and friends of Brown University, in 
 sums ranging from one dollar to ten thousand, in order to do honor to 
 his name while he was yet living, to secure to him a full salary for the 
 rest of his life, whether he should teach or not, and to attach his name 
 forever to the college through a permanent endowment. Another testi- 
 monial of his pupils may be mentioned here. In 1886, at the annual 
 Commencement dinner, in honor of the semi-centennial of his graduation, 
 his portrait, painted by Hubert Herkomer, R. A., was presented to the 
 college by the alumni. The enthusiasm shown on this occasion spoke 
 eloquently of the love which he had won in his years of devoted and 
 faithful teaching. Four years later, at the Commencement dinner of 
 1890, when the fund in his name was completed, Sayles Memorial Hall 
 again rang with even greater applause, when he, though feeble with 
 illness, appeared for a few minutes among his brother alumni. 
 
 Twice in the course of his long term of service as professor he rested 
 completely from academic work during term time. He was ill in 1857, 
 and for this reason went abroad and was absent from his duties six 
 months. On this occasion he visited Athens, and found in that classic 
 city much to gratify the tastes which he so long had been cultivating. 
 Thirty years later, in 1887, he went abroad again and remained a year, 
 revisiting many of the places endeared to him by his residence in them 
 in his earlier years. He spent his time largely in Germany and in Italy. 
 The new archaeological discoveries in Rome gave him great delight, espe- 
 cially as he had the privilege of studying them in the company of his 
 friend. Professor Lanciani, director of the Museo Urhaiio, under whoso 
 direction much of the work of discovery had been accomplished. Though 
 absent from his lecture-room at Brown, he did not forget the needs of 
 the college. He performed at that time one service which deserves ever 
 to be held in grateful remembrance. He selected and purchased, as the 
 
614 APPENDIX. 
 
 agent of Mr. H. K. Porter, of Pittsburgh, Pa., a graduate of Brown 
 (Class of 1860), a large number of excellent plaster casts of celebrated 
 works of Greek and Roman art. These gifts of Mr. Porter were largely 
 the germ of the Museum of Classical Archaeology of Brown University, 
 and have proved to be of great use in illustrating the history of Greece 
 and of Rome. Professor Lincoln had been abroad once before, in the 
 time between 1857 and 1887. In 1878 he employed the long summer 
 vacation in a visit to England, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, 
 and France. For about half of this journey he was accompanied by one 
 of his younger colleagues, a man of little more than half his age, but 
 Professor Lincoln's enthusiasm and vigor were so indomitable that he 
 often wearied his junior by his long and late»-protracted walks in his 
 eager and unjaded search for sights to delight the eye and to instruct 
 the mind. At Rugby and at Cambridge in England, at Leyden in Hol- 
 land, he enjoyed the opportunity of visiting renowned seats of learning, 
 and of recalling the great names connected with them. In Germany he 
 attended the university lectures of Biicheler at Bonn, of Johann Schmidt, 
 Vahlen and Lepsius at Berlin, of Zarncke and Striimpell at Leipzig. 
 He also called on Ernst Curtius at Berlin, whom he found exulting in 
 the results of the excavations at Olympia, and on Georg Curtius at Leip- 
 zig, and was ready, on slight provocation, to begin a new career as 
 student. He visited Halle, and while greatly saddened by the recent 
 death of Tholuck, the friend and teacher of earlier days, he revived 
 delightfullj'^ the memory of the past by a call on the Frau Rathinn, 
 Tholuck's widow, who gave him her warmest welcome. The galleries 
 and museums of Cambridge, London, Amsterdam, the Hague, Berlin, 
 Dresden, and Paris gave him unending pleasure and refreshment. A 
 trip up the Rhine and a short rest among the Alps of Switzerland satis- 
 fied his fondness for the genial and picturesque in nature. 
 
 Amid the pressure of his many hours of pedagogical work Professor 
 Lincoln found the time for the preparation of three editions of the clas- 
 sics. The first of these was an edition of selections from Livy, published 
 in 1847. It was revised in 1871. The second was an edition of the 
 works of Horace, first published in 1851, and afterwards revised in 
 1882. In 1882 he also published an edition of selections from Ovid, 
 with a vocabulary. In 1884 he revised this work. AU these editions 
 were thoroughly annotated, and those of Horace and of Ovid contained 
 interesting lives of these authors. In general, while they possessed dis- 
 tinct pedagogic value, and were clear and discriminating on the philo- 
 logical side, they had a literary merit considerably above the ordinary 
 school or college edition of a classical author. For the drier side of his 
 science Professor Lincoln had less taste than for the study of the literary 
 and spiritual characteristics of the authors and the periods to which he 
 gave his attention. He was fond of literary occupation, and he wrote 
 
APPENDIX. 615 
 
 articles of interest for the " North American Review," the " Christian 
 Review," the " Baptist Quarterly," and the " Bibliotheca Sacra," besides 
 frequent contributions to the daily and weekly newspapers, and lectures 
 and addresses which he delivered before literary societies and other 
 organizations. For a number of years he wrote the necrology of the 
 alumni of Brown University for the " Providence Journal." Some of his 
 later articles in the " Baptist Quarterly " deserve especial mention, as 
 being the fruit of his riper years. These appeared at intervals from 
 1869 to 1877. The subjects were Goethe's Faust, Gladstone's Juventus 
 Mundi, The Platonic Myths, The Relation of Plato's Philosophy to 
 Christian Truth, Life and Teachings of Sophocles. Some of these, at 
 least, were prepared at first to be read before the " Friday Evening 
 Club," a company of the choicest men of his age in Providence. His 
 " Discourse Commemorative of the Life and Services of Rev. Alexis 
 Caswell, D. D., LL. D., delivered before the Alumni of Brown Univer- 
 sity, June 19, 1877," was a touching and eloquent tribute of affection to 
 one whom he had known intimately as his teacher, fellow professor, and 
 president of the college. 
 
 His work in connection with the church was earnest, long-continued, 
 and conspicuous. Early in life he possessed a warm faith which, as he 
 often devoutly said, he " thanked God that he had never lost." And 
 although he turned from the distinctively theological and ecclesiastical 
 career to which at one time he seemed to be destined, he was as eminently 
 and characteristically a Christian minister as if he had upon him the 
 vows of ordination. For twenty-one years he was superintendent of the 
 Sunday-school of the First Baptist Church in Providence, and conducted 
 a weekly meeting during a large part of that time for the teachers and 
 the young people connected with the school. He was a deacon of that 
 church for many years, president of the Charitable Baptist Society (the 
 corporation of the church), president of the Rhode Island Baptist Sunday- 
 school Convention, and prominently associated with nearly all public 
 religious and philanthropic movements in Providence. Besides all this, 
 he was ever ready to speak the affectionate and inspiring word of advice 
 or comfort to any one in the parish, in the college, or elsewhere, concern- 
 ing his highest spiritual concerns. His spirit, which was so marked by 
 native shrewdness, wise discrimination, and tender sympathy, found no- 
 where else a more spontaneous and characteristic expression than in the 
 varied phases of his religious life in his family, in the college, in the 
 church, and in all his converse with his fellow-men. 
 
 Honors came to him, of course, as he gathered strength with the in- 
 creasing years. In 1859 Brown University conferred on him the hon- 
 orary degree of Doctor of Laws. Twice he might have become a college 
 president — in the first instance, of Colby University; in the second, of 
 Vassar College. But though he considered the opportunities thus offered, 
 
616 APPENDIX. 
 
 he finally chose rather to serve to the end the college which had the 
 homage of his heart from first to last. Could the right moment have 
 come in season, it cannot be doubted that the alumni of his Alma Mater 
 whom he served with so unswerving a loyalty would gladly have seen 
 him placed in the presidency there. But better than all the rewards of 
 ofiice was the glowing love which his pupils felt and manifested towards 
 him. Mention has been made of the portrait and of the fund which 
 were so tangible tokens of this love. But all the way along and every- 
 where that a son of Brown could be found, the name of Professor Lincoln 
 was uttered with affection and veneration. It is not the lot of many 
 instructors of youth to win such reverence. 
 
 Professor Lincoln was an excellent instructor. He had a native gift 
 for interpretation which forms so important a part of the work of the 
 philologist. His knowledge of classical literature, in Greek as well as in 
 Latin, was large and constantly growing. He always liked to have an 
 author by him, even on his journeys. He felt the accuracy and the state- 
 liness of his favorite Latin authors and strove to make his pupils appre- 
 ciate these characteristics. With his love for accurate scholarship, and 
 with his quick, mercurial temperament, he often must have been tortured 
 by the work of slovens and dullards in his classes. In his earlier years 
 of teaching, as he used himself to remark, he was sometimes quick and 
 caustic with such youth. But he became more patient and enduring as 
 the years went on, and though he would let no error pass uncorrected, he 
 was content with rebuking carelessness with some dry, humorous criti- 
 cism, the sting of which did not rankle in the mind of the one rebuked, 
 though he might be careful to avoid a repetition of it. He was inde- 
 fatigable as a corrector of tasks. When he was teaching sections of all 
 four classes in college, his table often was piled with books of exercises 
 in Latin composition, which he corrected with unusual care, erasing, 
 substituting the right expression for the wrong one, and gladdening the 
 hearts of the deserving with his appended " Bene " or " Optime." No 
 one could be quicker than he to appreciate a pupil's merits. He never 
 failed to approve a task well done, with a " That 's well rendered, sir," 
 or with a merry applauding laugh, if some witty turn made it clear that 
 the pupil had caught the spirit of the author, in addition to divining his 
 meaning. He was quick to feel and to point out the deeper philosophical 
 ethical lesson which underlay the text that he might be reading with his 
 classes. To him the classics were the " Humanities," and he taught them 
 in that spirit, and used them as means to develop in his students a noble 
 and refined ideal of manhood. 
 
 He entered with genuine sympathy into the undergraduate life of the 
 college. He enjoyed seeing a good game of base-ball, and helped the 
 athletic students with his advice and his purse, too. He rejoiced in 
 all the victories of the college nine. He found delight in the perform- 
 
APPENDIX. 617 
 
 ances of the musi'cal societies, however crude. The earnest religious 
 men found in him their best friend and counselor. For some years 
 the annual reception of the college Christian association was held, as 
 a matter of course, at his house. He seemed in some way to have the 
 secret of perpetual youth. There was no one younger in heart than he 
 to the last. 
 
 His home was the centre of much generous and genial hospitality. In 
 turn he was one of the best of guests, for he had an exhaustless fund of 
 good spirits, his conversation was entertaining and interesting, and in all 
 his demeanor he was kindness and courtesy itself. Men and women, old 
 and young, were attracted to him. 
 
 He had a gift for public speech. All that he said was marked by an 
 exquisite taste in respect to thought and to diction. He had a poetic side 
 to his mind, which, though it never sought expression in the poet's me- 
 dium of verse, yet revealed itself in the sentiments to which he gave utter- 
 ance as occasion prompted. This was as true of his unpremeditated speech 
 as of his more formal public appearances. It showed itself in the edifying 
 words which he might be led to speak in some ordinary prayer-meeting, 
 in an after-dinner speech, or on some more select occasion. The power 
 of sentiment was strong with him, and yet he was practical and wise in 
 his speech, as well as in his judgments and actions. In all the inner 
 affairs of the college, whether in matters of routine or of policy, his advice 
 was sound and influential, and had great weight in determining the action 
 of the faculty. 
 
 In person he was spare and rather short of stature. He was cast in 
 the delicate mould of a gentleman, but his constitution was endowed with 
 great powers of endurance. For over fifty years he was an assiduous 
 toiler, teaching, studying, writing, serving in various official ways the 
 interests of his college, his school, his church, the community in which he 
 lived, or giving liberally his time, strength, and sympathy to all sorts of 
 persons who resorted to him for help. He walked quickly and with a 
 light, springing step until he passed into his seventy-third year. In the 
 summer of 1889 he overtaxed himself in his long vacation rambles, and 
 soon after his return to college he began to exhibit a lack of strength 
 unusual for him. The academic year that followed was one of great 
 anxiety to his family and friends. He felt his weakness, and though he 
 maintained his cheerfulness, he was greatly at a loss to know how to 
 accommodate himself to his changed condition. He continued to teach 
 six hours a week when not too feeble. In the following summer the 
 healthful air of the White Mountains gave him back much of his former 
 vigor, and he returned to college duties with the old spirit upon him. 
 
 Professor Lincoln was no pedant, but he loved to lace his speech with 
 a bit of sonorous Latin. A few words from his favorite Agricola of 
 Tacitus can hardly be amiss here in summing up his personal character- 
 
618 APPENDIX. 
 
 istics: "Quod si habitum quoque eius poster! noscere velint, decentior 
 quam sublimior fuit ; nihil metus in vultu ; gratia oris supererat. Bouum 
 virum facile crederes, magnum libenter. . . . quippe et vera bona, quae 
 in virtutibus sita sunt, impleverat, et . . . quid aliud astruere fortuna 
 poterat ? " Truly his colleagues and disciples may continue the ancient 
 eulogy and apostrophize their master with " Admiratione te potius quam 
 temporalibus laudibus, et, si natura suppeditet, aemulatione decoremus. 
 . . . Forma mentis aeterna, quam tenere et exprimere non per alienam 
 materiam et artem, sed tuis ipse moribus possis." 
 
 LINCOLN GENEALOGY. 
 
 In the first half of the seventeenth century si5£ Lincolns came to Hing- 
 liam, Mass., from Hingham and Wymondham, England : — 
 Thomas Lincoln, weaver, before 1635. 
 Thomas Lincoln, cooper, 1636, or possibly 1633. 
 Thomas Lincoln, Jr., miller, 1636. 
 Samuel Lincoln. 
 
 Thomas Lincoln, husbandman, and his brother 
 Stephen Lincoln, husbandman, 1638. 
 Professor Lincoln was a descendant of 
 
 (i.) Stephen Lincoln, husbandman, who came from Windham 
 (Wymondham) with his wife and son, Stephen, and died in 1658. 
 
 (ii.) Stephen 2d married Elizabeth, daughter of Matthew Hawke, in 
 1660, and died in 1692. There were three sons : — 
 Stephen 3d, 1665-1717, a bachelor. 
 David, 1668-1714. 
 James, 1681-1731. 
 (hi.) David married Margaret Lincoln, probably the daughter of 
 Benjamin Lincoln, who was the son of Thomas Lincoln, cooper. This 
 Benjamin Lincoln was great-grandfather of General Benjamin Lincoln 
 of the Revolution. David and Margaret had children : Elizabeth, Mar- 
 garet, David 2d, Matthew, Isaac (Harvard College, 1722), and Job. 
 
 (iv.) David 2d, 1694-1756, was married three times: In 1718 to 
 Lydia, daughter of John Beal ; she died in 1719. In 1721 to Leah, 
 daughter of Lazarus Beal ; she died in 1723, leaving one daughter, Mar- 
 garet. In 1734 to Mary, daughter of James Hersey ; to them were born 
 several children, including David, 1734-1814, and Nathan, 1738-1809. 
 (v.) David 3d married Elizabeth Fearing, 1736-1804. of Wareham, 
 in 1760, and had children : — 
 Elizabeth, 1761-1797. 
 Lydia, 1763-1855. 
 David, 1765, died in infancy. 
 David, 4th, 1767-1825. 
 Hawkes, 1769-1829. 
 
APPENDIX. 619 
 
 Noah, 1772-1856. 
 
 Christiana, 1774-1850. 
 
 Perez, 1777-1811. 
 
 Ensign, 1779-1832. 
 (vi.) Ensign married, in 1808, Sophia Oliver Larkin, 1786-1821, the 
 youngest but two of seventeen children of Ebenezer and Mary (Oliver) 
 Larkin. Samuel Larkin, father of Ebenezer, came from England about 
 the close of the seventeenth century, and six of his sons, including Eben- 
 ezer, were in the battle of June 17, 1775, and their houses were burned 
 by the British soldiers. 
 
 Ensign Lincoln had nine children : — • 
 
 Thomas Oliver, 1809-1877. 
 
 WiUiam Cowper, 1810-1832. 
 
 Sophia, 1812-1848. 
 
 Joshua, 1815- 
 
 JoHN Larkin, 1817-1891. 
 
 Henry Ensign, 1818- 
 
 Heman, 1820-21. . 
 
 Heman, 1821-1887. 
 
 ENSIGN Lincoln's autobiography. 
 
 Ensign Lincoln, the father of Professor Lincoln, was the youngest of 
 the nine children of David Lincoln, of Hingham, Mass. At the age of 
 nineteen, in the year 1798, he began an autobiography, or "Private 
 Memoirs." These " Memoirs," after some " Cursory Remarks " on the 
 necessity of " cherishing gracious exercises and opposing the vicious pro- 
 pensities of nature," contain " A Retrospective View of Childhood and 
 Youth," and a record of his early manhood to the year 1805. These 
 " Memoirs " are interesting both as illustrating New England life and 
 thought emerging from formalism, and before it had felt the slavery of 
 modern " liberalism ; " and also as throwing light on the sturdy character 
 of Ensign Lincoln, which influenced in so great measure Professor Lin- 
 coln's whole life. Ensign Lincoln, like his son, had very early religious 
 impressions. He was blessed with a good mother, of whom he says, 
 " From her I was early taught the duty which I owed |to my Creator, and 
 in very early life was led to ruminate on the happy condition of those 
 who were found in the exercise of religion." He also records that he 
 " almost envied the happy condition of a young man," whose story his 
 father related, and with whom David Lincoln had become acquainted 
 when they were both in the Revolutionary army in sight of the enemy ; 
 " who, by his pious disposition, was accustomed to frequent visitations to 
 the field, to adore and praise his Maker, and seek his divine direction. 
 I felt solicitous to emulate his worthy example, and frequently attempted 
 it when alone. The duty of prayer I had been taught in early childhood, 
 
620 APPENDIX. 
 
 and the practice of it became familiar. I found it convenient to dis- 
 continue the forms which had been learnt, that I might express particular 
 subjects." In describing his childhood he says : " On a certain occasion, 
 being in company with a person who was addicted to profanity, I concluded 
 I should initiate myseK in his esteem if I were to imitate his example ; 
 I accordingly made some small attempts, which, however, sounded so 
 awkwardly to myself, that I was convinced it was never a gift of nature, 
 but an acquired art. From this time I was ever studious to avoid every- 
 thing which bore the most distant appearance of the kind." Beside 
 this innate distaste for profanity or vulgarity, he had in boyhood another 
 trait which was also characteristic of his son. In describing himself at 
 the age of thirteen, at the Dover Academy, he says : " The confidence 
 which had marked my early life began to give place to timidity, which I 
 found impossible to overcome. I was not furnished with sufficient cour- 
 age for public speaking." At the age of fourteen he sought a position 
 as an apprentice in the trade of printing, but " it was, however, a serious 
 difficulty in my mind, as it was not customary in this business to be pro- 
 vided with cloathing, whether I should be capable of furnishing myself, 
 free from an incumbrance to my parents, seeing a longer pecuniary de- 
 pendence from that quarter was not my wish. I was, notwithstanding, 
 encouraged to pursue my intention, having received the promise of one 
 year's supply, hoping after that period I might by some means be able to 
 provide for myself." In carrying out this intention he worked at night, 
 earning as much as " six or eight cents of an evening " " to procure 
 cloathing," and he records, " I am singularly pleased in not having had 
 occasion to receive pecuniary aid from my parents, not even the first 
 year's supply which I had been tendered." In the seven years of his 
 apprenticeship he earned $287.08 in money, besides $112 worth of shoes 
 and small clothes which were provided in accordance with the terms of 
 agreement, and he had assets in hand an acknowledgment of $20 loaned 
 to his brother, half a church pew valued at $20, and $10 in good solid 
 cash, so that " cloathes," books, and pocket expenses had amounted to 
 nearly $50 each year. May 20, 1793, he began his apprenticeship with 
 Manning & Loring at Boston, then just beginning business, and the first 
 book printed was " the celebrated treatise of bishop Butler's Analogy of 
 Religion." He had been brought up a Unitarian, but on coming to 
 Boston he boarded with a Baptist family and " attended the ministration 
 of a Baptist preacher, whose manner of treating subjects was different 
 from that to which I had been accustomed, and whose word was with 
 power. So great, however, was my aversion to the denomination that I 
 sparingly expressed my approbation ; and in my first letter directed to my 
 friends I communicated my resolution not to attend upon his ministration. 
 But it was indeed true, that had a person inculcated sentiments from a new 
 Bible, they would not have appeared more strange and foreign to my 
 
APPENDIX. 621 
 
 former run of thought.^ For although I had ever maintained some con- 
 siderable respect for religion, yet I had never before considered that * the 
 carnal mind is enmity against God.'' I have no recollection that the 
 necessity of regeneration ever occurred to my mind till after I attended 
 Mr. Baldwin's preaching. I was then convinced that Christians had 
 experienced something to which the world at large were strangers. 
 Though I had often repeated the words of Christ to Nicodemus, yet I 
 never attached any idea to them. My attention to religion began to be 
 somewhat talked of among companions, and my attachment to the Baptists 
 was reprobated among friends. My preceptor at the academy seriously 
 advised me to avoid much intercourse with the '''•flying Babtists,'^ but I 
 had seen so much of sincerity and religion among them, that, as is the 
 common conduct with mankind, I had now adopted the opposite extreme, 
 conceiving them to be the only real Christians." 
 
 In many respects Ensign Lincoln's characteristics found repetition in 
 his son. Of his conversion he says : " While walking one evening in the 
 street and meditating with anxiety on my state as a sinner, and my 
 future prospects, a new and pleasing sensation was excited in my mind. 
 The world looked like nothing, and religion indescribably lovely, and 
 there seemed to be a revolution in my mind, leaving my heart indis- 
 solubly attached to godliness." 
 
 He had a great capacity for hard work : " During this winter I 
 probably exerted myself in work to the disadvantage of my health. It 
 was not uncommon to rise at 2, 3, and 4 o'clock in the morning, and in 
 the course of the day to perform double, and sometimes considerably 
 more, than what was allotted as a day's work." 
 
 He exerted a personal influence for good upon his companions : 
 " Eight apprentices now constituted our family, at all times to conduct 
 prudently with whom I experienced it exceedingly difficult. Many 
 obstacles presented to obstruct the plan of prayer which I had introduced, 
 and it was consequently relinquished." 
 
 He was in early life unduly introspective. Saturday night. May 19, 
 1799, just before his baptism, he writes : " I had many melancholy 
 reflections ; my sleep for some time departed ; my thousand wrong tem- 
 pers of mind seemed to be presented to view ; I was fearful that as the 
 time for my making a public profession of religion approximated, my views 
 of its importance and solemnity decreased. I at last reflected whether I 
 should not rather confide in God than indulge my uneasy sensations, and 
 whether it were not a subject of joy to have an opportunity of professing 
 Christ ; upon which I experienced greater serenity and calmly reposed 
 myself in slumber." 
 
 ^ It may be noted, however, that a boy of nineteen •who instinctively spells 
 "Bible" with a large " B," and " bishop" with a small "b," and " denomination" 
 with a small " d," would appear well adapted to become a Baptist. 
 
622 APPENDIX. 
 
 He had great longings for friendship and was a devoted friend. His 
 cousin, Deacon Heman Lincoln, was his lifelong friend ; they were 
 born on the same day, received infant baptism together, " and through 
 the mistake of an aged minister their names were exchanged, on infor- 
 mation of which the mistake was corrected ; " they were apprentices in 
 Boston at the same time ; related their experience at the same church 
 meeting, and together received Scripture baptism upon profession of 
 faith. 
 
 He was most scrupulously exact and honest. He abandoned an inten- 
 tion of entering " mercantile " life through fear that in business competi- 
 tion he might be tempted to " pronounce some article good which was 
 really indifferent." 
 
 He frequently meditated upon the possible nearness of death. *^ But 
 it is not, in itself, any gi'eat object to live long, nor unhappiness to die 
 soon ; the great point is to die well." 
 
 When Ensign Lincoln's end drew near, and he was told that his time 
 had come, he only said, " Well, if I had lived to be as old as Methusaleh, 
 I suppose there never could have been a better time to die than now." 
 
 ENSIGN Lincoln's letter to his children. 
 
 On August 15, 1821, a little more than three months after the death 
 of his young wife. Ensign Lincoln wrote a letter to his seven children. 
 This contained " a brief memoir of their departed mother," as a legacy 
 to them because she had been called from them by death before they had 
 " arrived at mature years particularly to notice her conduct, appreciate 
 her character, and enjoy the benefit of her instruction." It is " affec- 
 tionately inscribed " to them " with the prayer that they may inherit her 
 piety and virtues, meet her peaceful end, and hereafter mingle in her 
 society in the skies." Doubtless this letter had a marked effect upon the 
 boyhood of Professor Lincoln, as indeed may be traced throughout his 
 student diary, as when he longs for " growth in character " and fitness 
 "for the society of heaven." In this letter Ensign Lincoln tells his 
 children of their mother's graces and virtues, and of their first meeting, 
 and of their thirteen years of happy wedded life. "Her mind was 
 stored with knowledge of the most useful kind, and her manners were 
 formed to interest those with whom she had intercourse, to impart pleas- 
 ure to her friends. Her countenance was open and engaging, her com- 
 plexion fair, her movements moderate and graceful, and her mind calm, 
 sedate, and cheerful. My acquaintance with her commenced when she 
 was twenty years of age. I sought an interview with her, which was 
 enjoyed first at the house of Mr. Oliver Holden, at a meeting of singers, 
 in which pleasing gift Sophia much excelled ; and again at the house of 
 my friend Mr. Thomas Edmands. Her musical powers, cheerful dis- 
 course, and engagedness in religion apparent on this occasion much 
 
APPENDIX. 623 
 
 interested my mind, and fixed the wish and intention to seek in her a 
 companion for life. 
 
 " We were married on 12th of May, 1808, at which time I was 29 
 years of age, and Sophia 22. 
 
 " On entering the family state, it was our desire and aim to establish 
 and pursue a mode of life becoming a Christian family ; and our visits 
 and associations were formed with a regard to religious enjoyment. 
 
 " The succeeding years of life passed on smoothly. We never experi- 
 enced the least interruption of cordiality and friendship. The worship 
 of the Lord was regularly enjoyed in our domestic circle, and we cheer- 
 fully repaired in company to the house of God. 
 
 " At the time of our marriage I was a member of a Baptist church and 
 she of a Congregational church, but it was my intention to avoid naming 
 the subject of baptism to her. However, in about six months she ex- 
 pressed her own conviction that the baptism of believers by immersion 
 was the only baptism authorized in the gospel, and stated her wish to 
 unite with the Baptist church. This was a circumstance pleasing to me, 
 as I knew it resulted from her own conviction of duty, and would better 
 ensure family unity. She accordingly wrote to the church in Charles- 
 town, stating the change in her sentiments on this subject, and received 
 an affectionate dismission to the Third Baptist Church in Boston, and 
 was baptized in December, 1808, by Rev. Mr. Blood. 
 
 " In 1810 the Lord in his Providence called me to public labors in 
 the Christian ministry. In these services I was often absent from my 
 family on the Lord's day, which greatly increased Sophia*s labors and 
 anxieties in taking charge of our rising family. For a time she felt 
 much tried in relation to attending family worship in my absence ; but 
 appeared to obtain peace of mind on forming a conclusion not to omit 
 the service. 
 
 " She had a great reverence for the Lord's day, and was peculiarly 
 solicitous that the children committed to her charge should sacredly ob- 
 serve it, by abstaining from all employments inconsistent with its solem- 
 nity, by perusing the sacred Scriptures, and learning the great truths of 
 the Christian religion. These anxieties greatly multiplied her cares and 
 labors on that day, and probably lessened her personal enjoyment of its 
 sacred hours." 
 
 In her last sickness " the children occupied her thoughts most deeply. 
 She was always an anxious mother, and was industriously and persever- 
 ingly engaged for their good. She expressed much solicitude for them, 
 remarking that she had never been desirous for them to be great, but 
 only that they might be good. Her mind was calm and happy in the 
 prospect of dissolution. At favorable intervals of ease she was enabled 
 to converse affectionately and faithfully with each of the family, and 
 earnestly recommended to them that religion on which her own hopes 
 
624 APPENDIX. 
 
 rested. She particularly urged the children to ask of the Lord a new 
 heart to prepare them for heaven. On the morning of the day of her 
 death she awoke and said she was going, but that death had no terrors 
 to her. I engaged in prayer with her for the last time, and endeavored 
 to commend her to the Lord, in whom she reposed her trust, while I 
 cherished the consoling hope of again uniting in her society in the man- 
 sions of the blessed. I sat by her in company with our sisters and 
 children during the forenoon ; but said little to her, as I thought it 
 unkind to disturb an expiring saint with numerous questions when it 
 may be presumed the soul is committing itself to the blessed Redeemer, 
 who has promised his people to be with them through the valley of the 
 shadow of death, and be a light about them." 
 
 " Thus, my dear children, lived, and thus happily died, your dear and 
 honored mother, whose life was devoted to your welfare, and whose last 
 breath ascended in prayer for your immortal interests. 
 
 " As your affectionate mother is no more, and as the time of my depar- 
 ture is uncertain, let me most earnestly press on your minds the following 
 counsels : — 
 
 "1. The son of a king was once entreated to perform no mean action, 
 from the consideration of his honorable parents. So if any one endeav- 
 ors to entice you to sin, let this consideration deter you from it, — I am 
 the child of a pious mother, who is now in the heavenly world. 
 
 " 2. Be diligent to read, with frequency and care, the pages of the 
 sacred Scriptures. Remember that your departed mother loved the 
 sacred Scriptures ; and though she studied them much, yet she said on 
 her dying pillow, * I wish I had read the Scriptures more.' 
 
 " 3. Pay a sacred regard to the Lord's day. The Almighty appointed 
 a seventh part of time for religious use immediately after the creation ; 
 he has in all ages blessed the observance of it. 
 
 " 4. Never be absent from the public worship, unless detained by indis- 
 pensable necessity ; and attend where the gospel is preached with the 
 greatest faithfulness and fervency. 
 
 " 5. If sinners entice you to mingle in their society, consent not. Your 
 character will always be judged to correspond with your company. 
 Call to mind that your dear departed mother, when she supposed herself 
 to be summoned by death, expressed her deep solicitude that you might 
 be guarded from evil associates. 
 
 " 6. As you grow up into life be industriously engaged in some useful 
 and honorable calling. It is disgraceful as well as sinful to live to no 
 purpose ; and industrious habits are a safeguard from innumerable dan- 
 gers which beset the path of the young. 
 
 " 7. Cultivate kind and fraternal affections towards each other. It was 
 a wise admonition of Joseph to his brethren, ^ See that ye fall not out 
 by the way.' Thus may you assist and encourage each other on the 
 journey of life. 
 
APPENDIX. 625 
 
 " Finally, May the blessed influences of the Holy Spirit be granted 
 to renew your hearts, sanctify your affections, enable you to love the 
 Saviour and keep his commandments. In this way only can you hope 
 happily to pass through life, and meet your departed mother in heaven. 
 And consider what joy it may impart to her, to welcome you one after 
 another, to the felicities and joys of the upper world. There may the 
 parents who watched and prayed for your good, and you, the children of 
 their affections, meet in one assembly, unitedly to admire redeeming 
 grace and dying love, in a blessed immortality." 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Acton, Lord, his opinion of Von Banke, 
 
 580. 
 Adams, John, example of vigorous old 
 
 age, 535. 
 Adams, John Q., in United States House 
 
 of Representatives, 39; example of 
 
 vigorous old age, 535. 
 Address of Prof. A. Harkness, Ph. D., 
 
 LL. D., 607. 
 Address of Prof. Geo. P. Fisher, LL. D., 1. 
 ^schylus, competition with Sophocles, 
 
 361, 362; influence upon Sophocles, 
 
 363, 367. 
 ^milianus (Scipio), Froude's comments 
 
 on his murder, 468. 
 Agassiz, J. Louis R., visited by Prof. Lin- 
 coln at the Aar glacier, 65 ; spoken of 
 
 by Sir Charles Lyell, 123. 
 Agricola (Gnaeus Julius) his age at mar- 
 riage, 382 ; marital relations, 384 ; fa- 
 ther-in-law of Tacitus, 404; Tacitus' 
 
 comments on, 420, 617; Domitian's 
 
 feelings towards, 424. 
 Agrippa (Marcus Vipsanius), his public 
 
 works and buildings, 213, 214. 
 Alexander the Great, instance of youth- 
 ful maturity, 537. 
 Alger, Israel, early instructor of Prof. 
 
 Lincoln, 23. 
 Ammon, measurement of Rome, 212. 
 Ammon, Chr. Friedrich von, sermon by, 
 
 60. 
 Amsterdam, 614. 
 Anaxagoras, read by Lucretius, 320 ; his 
 
 argument from design, 345. 
 Andrews, Pres. E. Benj., LL. D., his 
 
 views as to classical studies influenced 
 
 by Prof. Lincoln, 601. 
 Anecdotes and incidents concerning Pro- 
 fessor Lincoln, or told by him : — 
 
 Benefit Street School, 597. 
 
 British postage, 81. 
 
 Brown University in the fifties, 590. 
 
 Carving turkey, 58. 
 
 Christmas Eve, 51. 
 
 Class-room incidents, 588-590. 
 
 Collection book, 595. 
 
 College prayers, 587. 
 
 Commons Hall, 586. 
 
 Continental vs. English pronunciation, 
 589. 
 
 Declining years, 604. 
 
 De Senectute, 595. 
 
 De Wette's doubts, 53. 
 
 Dinner party, 54. 
 
 Early rising, 587. 
 
 Financial shortage in European exciu*- 
 
 sion (1843), 102. 
 First attempt at teaching, 34. 
 First Latin lesson, 23. 
 First sermon, 47. 
 First Sunday-school class, 29. 
 Fishing adventures, 599, 600. 
 Gen. Grant's rejoinder, 588. 
 German trout fishing-, 603. 
 Greek hotel, 142. 
 
 Hazing that might have happened, 585. 
 How Latin can be taught, 601. 
 How should I like to be called Line. ? 
 
 590. 
 Herkomer portrait, 600. 
 Interest in college sports, 605. 
 Interest in outdoor sports, 605. 
 Last days, 606. 
 Latin fepistle, 589. 
 Latin poem, 4, 23. 
 Latin School medal, 24. 
 Lincoln Fund, 604. 
 Literal translation, 588. 
 Livy's Preface, 589. 
 Locked-in class, 587. 
 Mock programmes, 588. 
 Modern Latin, 604. 
 Mrs. Tholuck's bird, 603. 
 Old Commons Hall, 586. 
 Olshausen's conversion, 53. 
 Origin of German Baptist church, 80. 
 Outdoor life in the long vacations, 599, 
 
 600. 
 "Ponies," 589, 590. 
 Procession of St. Francis, 136. 
 Professor Lincoln as a church member, 
 
 594 ; as a father, 598. 
 Reasons for not giving up Freshman 
 
 class, 604. 
 Railway adventure in GJermany, 603. 
 Rebellion against " parts," 585. 
 Religion not "goodyness," 588. 
 Riding a professor, 588. 
 Recollections of Neander, 89, 596. 
 Sarcophagi wash-tubs, 142. 
 Slip, 588. 
 
628 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Snow-storm Sunday, 592. 
 
 Spurgeon's chapel on fire and stoned, 
 
 118. 
 Stolen sermon, 133. 
 Tholuck's anecdote, 595. 
 Tholuck's narrow escapes, 65, 66. 
 Tholuck's opinion of Goethe, 51. 
 Tholuck's opinion of Prof. Lincoln, 612. 
 Tholuck's serenade, 55. 
 Tholuck's tour, 612. 
 Unconsecrated chapel, 587. 
 United States' senate and house, 37. 
 Unknown penitent, 145. 
 Up and down Mt. Washington, 600. 
 Visit to Mrs. Tholuck, 602. 
 " Yankee Doodle " without words, 55. 
 Youthful tutor, 586. 
 'Angell, Pres. Jas. B., LL. D., his opin- 
 ion of Prof. Lincoln as a teacher, 9 ; and 
 of his character, 16. 
 
 Antoninus Pius, relations to Marcus Au- 
 relius, 491, 492, 495. 
 
 Antonius (Marcus), his stepdaughter 
 Claudia, 390; relations with Octavius, 
 395 ; monarchical tendency, 417 ; op- 
 posed by Cicero, 480, 481 ; Shake- 
 speare's delineation, 475. 
 
 Apuleius, Lucius, statues in honor of his 
 lectures, 308. 
 
 Archaeology, Prof. Lincoln a student of, 
 at Rome, 7, 109-111, 129, 130, 612, 613 ; 
 at Athens, 139, 141-143 ; Brown Uni- 
 versity Museum of Classical Archaeol- 
 ogy, 614. 
 
 Argos, visited by Prof. Lincoln, 143. 
 
 Argyll, Duke of, his " Reign of Law," in 
 connection with Lucretius' theory, 346, 
 348. 
 
 Aristo of Ceos, imitated by Cicero, 525. 
 
 Aristophanes, on the character of Sopho- 
 cles, 362. 
 
 Aristotle, contrasted with Plato, 233 ; his 
 opinion of Anaxagoras, 345 ; influence 
 on church fathers, 432 ; his teachings 
 contradicted by Galileo, 445 ; and un- 
 congenial to Aurelius, 495. 
 
 Arnold, Rev. A. N. ("A. N. A."), class- 
 mate of Prof. Lincoln in Sophomore 
 year, and held prayer-meetings with 
 him, 30. 
 
 Arnold, Samuel G., 594. 
 
 Arnold, Thomas, D. D. (of Rugby), his 
 opinion of Caesar, 471 ; Prof. Lincoln 
 compared with, 602. 
 
 Arrian, influenced in his journey by his- 
 toric associations, 312. 
 
 Arruntius, Tacitus' opinion of, 420. 
 
 Art, Prof. Lincoln's appreciation of, in 
 Berlin, 59, 64 ; in Genoa, 103, 104 ; in 
 Rome, '107, 109, 130; in Paris, 125, 
 126 ; in Athens, 139. 
 
 Ashburton, Lord, 82. 
 
 Athens, visited by Prof. Lincoln, 138 et 
 seq., 613. • 
 
 Atticus (Titus Pomp.), relations with 
 Cicero, 466, 467, 476, 479, 525. 
 
 Augustine, St., his experience compared 
 with Goethe's "Faust," 183, 184; 
 quoted in connection with Gladstone's 
 " Juventus Muudi," 206, 207. 
 
 Augustus (Caius Julius Caesar Octavia- 
 nus), (Octavius), condition of Rome in 
 his reign, 210, 231, 297 ; as a traveler, 
 297, 298 ; wore home-made togas, 381 ; 
 his laws as to marriages, 383, 388; as 
 to feasts, 383 ; as to women at public 
 shows, 388 ; twice divorced, 390 ; his 
 dissolute daughter, 391, 392 ; influenced 
 by Livia, 394, 395, by Terentia, 396 ; 
 banishes Ovid, 396; follows in steps of 
 Julius Casar, 417, 418 ; Livy, and not 
 Tacitus his historian, 419; republican 
 sentiments in his reign, 416, 477. 
 
 Aurelian, his walls of Rome, 211. 
 
 Aurelius (Marcus), an example of good 
 side of absolutism, 407; his life and 
 character, 484 et seq. ; similarity of his 
 belief with Seneca's, 521. 
 
 Aussig, 63. 
 
 Bacon, Lord Francis, imitates Plato, 239 
 adopts Lucretius' atomic theory, 318 
 accepts argument from design, 346 
 compared with Galileo, 455; example 
 of vigorous old age, 534. 
 
 Baise, 111. 
 
 Baldwin, Rev. Thomas, D. D., his influ- 
 ence on Ensign Lincoln, 621, 
 
 Bancroft, George, exam.ple of vigorous 
 old age, 535 ; his letter to Von Ranke, 
 582. 
 
 Baptism, of Prof. Lincoln, 24, 27, 30; 
 " baptism " of Prince of Wales, 54 ; 
 mode of, 80, 623 ; perversion of, 126 ; 
 criticism on Dean Stanley's views of, 
 456-460 ; James Clerk Maxwell's allu- 
 sion to, 566 ; Ensign Lincoln's, 621, 622 ; 
 his wife's, 623. 
 
 Baptist denomination and doctrines : — 
 Ensign Lincoln's connection with, 3, 24, 
 
 620, 621, 623. 
 Prof. Lincoln's connection with, 17, 65 ; 
 
 his defense of, 456 et seq., 596. 
 In Germany, 68-70, 80. 
 Spurgeon's statement of, 119. 
 Prof. Maxwell's opinion of, 566. 
 
 Baptist missions in Germany and Den- 
 mark, 68-71, 80. 
 
 " Baptist Quarterly," Prof. Lincoln's writ- 
 ings published in, 151, 185, 232, 259, 
 356, 615. 
 
 Baring, Sir Francis, met by Prof. Lincoln, 
 124. 
 
 Barnes, Joshua, on Homeric theology, 
 204. 
 
 Baronius, Cardinal, quoted by Gralileo, 
 440. 
 
 Bautzen, 63. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 629 
 
 Beck, Prof. Daniel, instructor of Von 
 Ranke, 572; his system of instruction 
 adopted by Von Ranke, 577. 
 
 Becker, Prof. Wilhelm A., work on Ar- 
 chaeology, 110 ; on Plato (note), 242. 
 
 Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward, schoolmate 
 of Prof. Lincoln, 4, 611. 
 
 Bekker, Prof. Immanuel, 88. 
 
 Bellarmin, Cardinal, connection with trial 
 of Galileo, 435, 442, 443, 447, 451. 
 
 Bellegarde, 101. 
 
 Benton, Col. Thomas H., personal appear- 
 ance in Senate, 39. 
 
 Bentley, Richard, on Lucretius, 318, 326. 
 
 Berne, Tholuck's sickness at, 65. 
 
 Berlin, Prof. Lincoln's studies at, 5, 6, 
 25, 596, 612 ; revisited, 614 ; description 
 of, 85-91 ; letters from, 143, 144; rem- 
 iniscences of, 568 ; Von Ranke's profes- 
 sorship in, 574, 576, 581, 582. 
 
 Bernhardy, Prof. Gottfried, Prof. Lin- 
 coln's studies with, 5, 25, 79, 612 ; at 
 dinner party, 54, 55 ; at a Gesellsehaft, 
 57 ; his works, 79. 
 
 Bible quotations and references, 19, 27, 
 33, 46, 49, 50, 111, 119, 125, 129, 137, 
 139, 140, 145, 156, 161, 182, 184, 197, 
 198, 205, 261, 265, 267, 268, 269, 271, 
 330, 333, 334, 398, 400, 457, 459, 502, 503, 
 504, 508, 592, 530, 541, 606, 621 ; a cure 
 to doubt, 49 ; Wegscheider's treat- 
 ment of, 54 ; Prof. Lincoln's study of 
 German, 77 ; Gesenius' jokes on, 81 ; 
 Italian children's ignorance of, 136; 
 Prologue of Faust modeled on Job, 
 155 ; Faust and first chapter of John, 
 161 ; Goethe's use of Jude, 181 ; his 
 failure to reach level of, 183 ; Old Tes- 
 tament compared with Homer, 203, 
 204 ; New Testament relation to pagan- 
 ism, 207; Plato and the Bible, 259, 
 261, 264, 268, 270; Lucretius' theory 
 compared with, 330, 333, 334 ; Sopho- 
 cles compared with, 370 ; N. T. state- 
 ments confirmed by history, 400, 401 : 
 Galileo on interpretation of, 437 ; Dean 
 Stanley's citations, 457 et seq. ; Froude's 
 misapplied quotations, 470 ; Medita- 
 tions of Aurelius compared with, 499, 
 502 ; Ensign Lincoln's regard for, 623, 
 624. 
 Bibliotheca Sacra, Prof. Lincoln's writ- 
 ings for, 11, 592, 615. 
 Bigelow, Dr. H. J., schoolmate of Prof. 
 
 Lincoln, 611. 
 Bischofswerda, 63. 
 Blanc, Prof. Ludwig Gottfried, 57. 
 Blood, Rev. Caleb, baptized Prof. Lin- 
 coln's mother, 623. 
 Boeckh, Prof. August, Prof. Lincoln's 
 studies with, 6, 25, 88, 612, 569 ; doubt- 
 ful recognition by, 146; his estimate 
 of Roman population, 219 | associated 
 with Von Ranke, 575. 
 
 Boise, Prof. James R., associated with 
 Prof. Lincoln in B. U., 3. 
 
 Boissier, Gaston, his criticism of Momm- 
 sen, 469. 
 
 Bologne, 124. 
 
 Boniface IV., his consecration of Pan- 
 theon, 215. 
 
 Bopp, Prof. Franz, 88, 575. 
 
 Boscaglia, Prof., his opposition to Galileo, 
 436, 437. 
 
 Boston, Prof. Lincoln's birthplace and 
 home, 3, 22, 30, 113, 611 ; Ensign Lin- 
 coln's removal to, 620. 
 
 Boston Latin School, Prof. Lincoln's stud- 
 ies at, 4, 23, 24, 611 ; Prof. Lincoln pray- 
 ing there in boyhood, 44. 
 
 Boston High School, Prof. Lincoln's stud- 
 ies at, 4, 23, 24. 
 
 Bdttiger, Karl Aug., 110. 
 
 Boyle, Robert, adopts Lucretius' atomic 
 theory, 318. 
 
 Bradley, Judge C. S., schoolmate of 
 Prof. Lincoln, 611. 
 
 Bright, John, 123. 
 
 Britons (ancient), 414. 
 
 Brougham, Lord, 534 ; example of vigor- 
 ous old age, 5.35. 
 
 Brown, Nicholas, 594. 
 
 Brown, Rev. T. Edwin, D. D., his commu- 
 nication on Prof. Lincoln as a church- 
 member, 594. 
 
 Brown, Rev. W. L. (" W. L. B."), class- 
 mate of Prof. Lincoln, and held prayer- 
 meetings with him, 30 ; connection with 
 rebellion against " parts," 586. 
 
 Brown University : — 
 
 Prof. Lincoln's connection with, 2, 4, 27- 
 33, 585-591, 596, 597, 600-602, 606- 
 610, 611-617 ; his room in, 24. 
 Personal nature of its instruction, 15. 
 Antedates revolutionary war, 21. 
 Prof. Lincoln's papers used as lectures, 
 208, 337, 402. 
 
 Bruno, Giordano, accepted Lucretius' 
 atomic theory, 318; Prof. Tyndall's 
 opinion of, 344 ; and Romish Church, 
 431. 
 
 " Brunonian," extract from, 590. 
 
 Bryant, William CuUen, example of vig- 
 orous old age, 535; quotation from, 
 543. 
 
 Biicheler, Prof. Franz, 614. 
 
 Buffon, George Louis Leclerc, on dura- 
 tion of human life, 529. 
 
 Bunsen, Christian C. J., 110; estimate 
 of Roman popiilation, 218, 222. 
 
 Bunyan, John, his "Pilgrim's Progress," 
 170. 
 
 Burke, Edmund, example of vigorous age, 
 534. 
 
 Burrage, Rev. Henry S., Tholuck's anec- 
 dote of Prof. Lincoln, 595. 
 
 Burrill, Charles, sexton First Baptist 
 Church, 593. 
 
630 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Butler, Bishop Joseph, style compared 
 with Plato, 263; argument compared 
 with Lucretius, 330 ; Ensign Lincoln 
 helped print his " Analogy," 620. 
 
 Butler, Rev. Henry Montague, D. D., con- 
 temporary with Prof. Maxwell, 551. 
 
 Byron, Lord, quoted and referred to in 
 connection with Geneva and vicinity, 
 93-98; represented in "Faust," 179; 
 quoted, 101, 330, 602. 
 
 Caccini, Peter, assails Galileo, 438, 439. 
 
 Caesar, Julius, quick journey of, 298 ; con- 
 temporary of Lucretius, 316 ; Tacitus' 
 picture of, 417, 424 ; Fronde's " Caesar," 
 464-483 ; and stoicism, 495, 496. 
 
 Caligula, C. Caesar, 407, 494. 
 
 Calvin, John, 99. 
 
 Campbell, Prof. Lewis, author of Prof. 
 Maxwell's biography, 544. 
 
 Cambridge (Eng.), 614. 
 
 Canina, Luigi, 110. 
 
 Capitolinus, Julius, biographer of Aure- 
 lius, 484, 491. 
 
 Carneades, effect of his philosophy on Ro- 
 mans, 515, 516. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, on "Faust," 177. 
 
 Cass, Gov. Lewis, speech to Brown stu- 
 dents, 29. 
 
 Cassius (Avidius), relations with Aurelius, 
 493, 495, 502. 
 
 Castelli, Prof. Benedetto, friend of Gal- 
 ileo, 436, 439, 440. 
 
 Caswell, Rev. Alexis, LL. D., instructor 
 of Prof. Lincoln, 3, 611 ; sympathy 
 with students, 5, 15, 25 ; Prof. Lincoln's 
 Discourse on his Services, 592, 615. 
 
 Cato (Major), concerning jvomen, 378, 
 384 ; contrasted with Aurelius, 495 ; 
 concerning augury, 510 ; philosophy, 
 515 ; example of old age, 525, 526. 
 
 Cato (Uticensis), typical Stoic, 495, 526. 
 
 Cephissia, 140. 
 
 Chace, Prof. George I., LL. D., instructor 
 of Prof. Lincoln, 3, 611. 
 
 Chace (Chase, Rev. L-a ?), 59. 
 
 Chalmers, Rev. Dr. Thomas, 452. 
 
 Chapin, Rev. Stephen, D. D., President 
 of Columbian College, 34. 
 
 Charvati, 143. 
 
 Charybdis, modern appearance of, 134, 
 138. 
 
 Chatham, Lord, his old age, 533, 535. 
 
 ChiUon, 94, 95. 
 
 " Christian Review," Prof. Lincoln's writ- 
 ings for, 592, 615. 
 
 Christians (early), Tacitus' reference to, 
 413, 501 ; Aurelius' opinion of, 500, 501. 
 
 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, Prof. Lincoln's 
 paper on " Old Age," 14, 524-543 ; cost 
 of his house, 216 ; as to convivium, 223 ; 
 his " De Republica," 294; on custom 
 officers, 301 ; his travels, 308, 309 ; on 
 art and history, 312, 313, 409; con- 
 
 temporary of Lucretius, 316, 317, 326 ; 
 his story of Sophocles, 377 ; his letters, 
 464, 466, 474, 476, 479, 480, 482; 
 Fronde's treatment of, 477-483 ; Mid- 
 dle ton's and Mommsen's treatment of, 
 477; his patriotism, 480-482; death, 
 482, 483 ; his opinion of Cato, 496 ; on 
 religion and politics, 511, 516, 517 ; on 
 Scaevola, 520 ; quoted, 610. 
 
 Civita Vecchia, 127, 131, 132. 
 
 Clarens, 94, 96. 
 
 Classical studies. Prof. Lincoln's views 
 as to, 11, 12, 100, 357, 402, 524, 573, 
 601, 602, 609, 616 ; in Germany, 91-93 ; 
 in Italy, 105, 106, 108, 111 ; in connec- 
 tion with Plato, 233, 234. 
 
 Claudius, M. Aurelius, cost of his house, 
 216; marital relations, 390, 393, 403, 
 422. 
 
 Claudius (Appius), 533. 
 
 Clay, Henry, appearance in Senate, 38. 
 
 Cobden, Richard, 123. 
 
 Colby University, Prof. Lincoln called to, 
 615. 
 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, quoted, 75. 
 
 Collonges, 100. 
 
 Cologny, 98. 
 
 Columbian College, Prof. Lincoln's con- 
 nection with, 5, 25, 34-44, 611. 
 
 Columella, L. Jun. Mod., advice as to 
 villas, 299. 
 
 Commodus, L. Aurelius, paternity of, 
 494 ; vicious nature of, 495. 
 
 Commons Hall at Brown University, 586. 
 
 Conant's Translation, 81. 
 
 Conybeare, Rev. John, 310. 
 
 Copenhagen, 69. 
 
 Copernicus, his views held by Galileo, 
 432, 433, 445 ; condemned by Romish 
 Church, 446-448, 451. 
 
 Cosmo II., pupil and patron of Galileo, 
 434, 435. 
 
 Cousin, Victor, student of Plato, 233. 
 
 Cowper, William, 313. 
 
 Crassus, L. Luc, cost of his house, 217. 
 
 Crassus, M. Lie, 417, 473. 
 
 Creech, Thomas, 318. 
 
 Crocker, Rev. Nathan B., S. T. D., 586. 
 
 Crcesius, Gerardus, his "Homerus He- 
 braeus," 203. 
 
 Cumae, 111. 
 
 Curtis, George William, his editorial on 
 Prof. Lincoln, 606. 
 
 Curtius, Prof. Ernst, 614. 
 
 Curtius, Prof. Georg, 614. 
 
 Dallas, George M., 123. 
 Dante (Alighieri), 181. 
 Darwin, Charles, similarity to Lucretius, 
 
 334 ; his theory, 343, 346. 
 D'Aubign^, J. H. Merle, 99. 
 Davidson, Dr. Samuel, 54, 55. 
 Delbriick, Gottlieb (curator of Univ. 
 
 Halle), 55. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 631 
 
 Demoeritus, influence on Lucretius, 317, 
 
 320, 322, 326, 339, 345. 
 De Quincey, Thomas, as to insanity of 
 
 Lucretius, 315. 
 Deuschle, Dr. J., on Platonic myths, 236. 
 Devens, Judge Charles, classmate of 
 
 Prof. Lincoln, 4, 611. 
 De Wette, Prof. Wilhelm M. L., Tho- 
 
 luck's opinion of, 53. 
 Dickson, Thomas G. (B. U. '51), Prof. 
 
 Lincoln's friendship with at Athens, 
 
 138, 141. 
 Dijon, 127. 
 
 Dillaway, C. K., instructor of Prof. Lin- 
 coln, 4, 24. 
 Dindorf, W., 362. 
 Diodati, 98. 
 Diogenes, 516. 
 Dion Cassius, 390. 
 Dixon, Hon. Nathan F., student at Brown 
 
 University, 585. 
 Dixwell, Epes Sargent, instructor of Prof. 
 
 Lincoln, 4, 24. 
 Domitian, Tacitus' record of reign of, 
 
 404-406, 411, 423, 424; contrasted 
 
 with Aurelius, 491, 492. 
 Donatus, j3Elius, record of Lucretius' 
 
 death, 315. 
 Dresden, 59, 63, 64, 614. 
 Dronke, Gustav, on Sophocles, 363, 364, 
 
 365, 370, 375, 376. 
 Drusus, M. Liv., 412, 477. 
 Dryden, John, 318. 
 Dryander, Rev. Hermann, pastor at Halle, 
 
 57. 
 Diintzer, Heinrich, on Faust, 154, 176. 
 Dyer, Thomas, 218, 222. 
 
 Eckermann, John Peter, his Goethe's 
 "Conversations," 152, 171, 176, 179, 
 182. 
 
 Edmunds, Thomas, friend of Ensign Lin- 
 coln, 622. 
 
 Edwards, Jonathan, 263. 
 
 Eleusis, 141. 
 
 Elliott, Lemuel H., steward of Brown 
 Univ., 587. 
 
 Ellis, Dr. George E., schoolmate of Prof. 
 Lincoln, 4, 611. 
 
 Ellis, Rev. William, 111. 
 
 Elton, Prof. Romeo, instructor of Prof. 
 Lincoln, 24, 611. 
 
 Empedocles, his influence on Lucretius, 
 319,339,340. 
 
 Encke, Johann Franz, 88. 
 
 English customs and manners : fees, 67 ; 
 postage regulations, 81 ; railways, 1 14 ; 
 hotels, 115 ; work and pleasure, 115, 
 116; want of reverence, 118, 122; op- 
 position to dissenters, 118 ; elections, 
 123. 
 
 Epictetus, on travel, 302 ; influence on Au- 
 relius, 489, 490, 496, 497 ; not an idola- 
 ter, 521. 
 
 Epicurus, influence on Aurelius, 320, 321, 
 
 339. 
 Epinois, Henri de 1', 429. 
 Erdman, Prof. Johann Eduard, instructor 
 
 of Prof. Lincoln at Halle, 5, 25, 54. 
 Erfurt, 91. 
 
 Erskine, Thomas, 535. 
 Etna, Mt., 134. 
 
 Euripides, on old age, 530, 571. 
 Eusebius, 315, 401. 
 Evarts, William M., schoolmate of Prof. 
 
 Lincoln, 611. 
 
 Faust, Prof. Lincoln's paper on, 11, 13, 
 19, 151-184, 615; Tholuck's criticism 
 of, 51. 
 
 Federal Street Baptist Church, Boston, 
 Prof. Lincoln baptized there, 30. 
 
 Femey, 98. 
 
 First Baptist Church, Providence, Prof. 
 Fisher's address on Prof. Lincoln de- 
 livered there, 1 ; Prof. Lincoln's con- 
 nection with, 17, 594, 615 ; 250th anni- 
 versary, 592. 
 
 First Baptist Sunday-school, Providence, 
 Prof. Lincoln's connection with, 17, 29, 
 130, 133, 594, 615; his letter to, 133; 
 50th anniversary, 592; "Snow-storm 
 Sunday," 592. 
 
 Fitzpatrick, Bp. J. B., classmate of Prof. 
 Lincoln, 611. 
 
 Fisher, Prof. George P., LL. D., his me- 
 morial address on Prof. Lincoln, 1-21. 
 
 Flourens, Gustave, 529. 
 
 Folkestone, 124. 
 
 Forbes, Prof. James David, 548. 
 
 Frankfort, 152. 
 
 Franz, Prof. Johann, 88. 
 
 Frederick William IV., patron of letters, 
 6, 86, 87, 359, 580, 583. 
 
 French . manners and customs : railway, 
 124; custom-house, 124; worship, 126. 
 
 Friday Evening Club, Prof. Lincoln's pa- 
 pers for, 11, 151, 185, 232, 273, 296, 
 315, 356, 378, 402, 427, 484, 503, 524, 
 544, 598, 615. 
 
 Friedlander, Prof. Ludwig Hermann, 54 
 
 Frieze, Prof. Henry S., LL. D., 7. 
 
 Fronto, teacher of Aurelius, 484, 487, 488. 
 
 Froude, James Anthony, Prof. Lincoln's 
 paper on his " Caesar," 14, 464-483. 
 
 Gaisford, Prof. Thomas, 235. 
 
 Galba, 416, 418, 419, 493. 
 
 Galileo, Prof. Lincoln's paper on, 427-455. 
 
 Gammell, Prof. William, LL. D., in- 
 structor of Prof. Lincoln, 3, 24, 32, 611. 
 
 Gartz, Prof. J. C, 54. 
 
 Gassendi, Pierre, follows Lucretius' 
 atomic theory, 318. 
 
 Gebler, Karl von, on Galileo, 427-429, 447. 
 
 GeUius, Aulus, 317. 
 
 Gemellus, C. Memmius, 319. 
 
 Geneva, 7, 93-102, 612. 
 
632 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Genoa, 102, 127. 
 
 German customs : Christmas, 51 ; sere- 
 nading professors, 55, 89; students' 
 habits, 52, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 76, 77, 
 
 78, 85 ; social gatherings and supper, 
 54, 57, 61, 62 ; reading circle, 59 ; stu- 
 dent tour, 59 ; music, 62, 63, 89, 144 ; 
 passports and police, 67, 71, 72 ; hired 
 mourners' and domestics' costumes, 68 ; 
 Sunday observance, 69, 80, 145, 146; 
 journeyman's tours, 72 ; fairs, 73 ; beds, 
 75, 77 ; diet and housekeeping, 76 ; 
 ■women's work, 83; gymnasia, 91 et 
 seq.; hotels, 603; railways, 603. 
 
 German language, how to learn it, 73, 74 ; 
 studied by Prof. Lincoln, 77, 78, 81; 
 Prof. TyndaU's error in, 461, 462; 
 taught by Prof. Lincoln, 597, 613. 
 
 Germanicus, 309-311, 410,416,421,477. 
 
 Germans, ancient, 413. 
 
 Gesenius, Prof. Fried. Heinrich Wilh., in- 
 structor of Prof. Lincoln, 5, 25, 54, 55, 
 
 79, 88, 612 ; his person and character, 
 54-56, 80, 81 ; his writings, 79. 
 
 Gherardi, Prof. Silvestro, on Galileo, 429, 
 
 435, 447. 
 Gherardini, Bishop, 438. 
 Gibbon, Edward, 211, 212, 219, 298. 
 Gifford, William, quotation from his ver- 
 sion of Juvenal, 387. 
 Giorniei, 66. 
 Giesebrecht, Wilhelm von, pupil of Von 
 
 Ranke, 578, 579. 
 Gladstone, William E., Prof. Lincoln's 
 
 paper on Juventus Mundi, 11, 185-207 ; 
 
 example of vigorous old age, 538. 
 Goddard, Prof. William G., instructor of 
 
 Prof. Lincoln, 611. 
 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von.. Prof. Lin- 
 coin's paper on " Faust," 11, 151-184 ; 
 
 Tholuck's opinion of, 51 ; love of Rome, 
 
 108, 576 ; admiration of Lucretius, 319 ; 
 
 example of vigorous old age, 534 ; read 
 
 byVonRanke, 570, 576. 
 Goodwin, Rev. Daniel, on Prof. Lincoln in 
 
 " Brunonian," 590. 
 Gotha, 91. 
 Gould, B. A., instructor of Prof. Lincoln, 
 
 4, 23, 611. 
 Gould, Dr. Augustus A., 123. 
 Gower, Frederick (B. U. 1870, non-grad.), 
 
 558. 
 Gracchus, Tiberius, 468. 
 Granger, Rev. James N., D. D., 594. 
 Gray, Thomas, influenced by Lucretius, 
 
 318, 321, 354 ; quoted 532, 533. 
 Great Eastern, Prof. Lincoln's description 
 
 of, 116. 
 Greece, Prof. Lincoln's visit to, 138-143, 
 
 613. 
 Greek manners and customs : brigands, 
 
 140; khans, 140, 142; hotels, 142; 
 
 washerwomen, 142. 
 Greene, George W., 612. 
 
 Gregory XVL, 428. 
 
 Grimm, Profs. Jacob and William, 88. 
 
 Grote, George, 7, 612; his "Plato," 242, 
 
 275. 
 Grotius, Hugo, 426. 
 Guild, Reuben A., LL. D., 16. 
 
 Hackett, Prof. Horatio B., instructor of 
 Prof. Lincoln and fellow student in 
 Germany, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 595, 611, 
 612. 
 
 Hadrian (Emperor), 486, 490. 
 
 Hague, Rev. William, D. D., 80. 
 
 Hague, the, 614. 
 
 Hale, Edward Everett, classmate of Prof. 
 Lincoln, 4, 611. 
 
 Halle, Prof. Lincoln's residence and stud- 
 ies in, 5, 6, 25, 51-65, 76-84, 595, 612 ; 
 revisited, 602. 
 
 Hamburg, visited by Prof. Lincoln, 67- 
 71. 
 
 Hamilton, Alexander, early maturity of, 
 538. 
 
 Hamilton, Sir William, 550. 
 
 Hammer and Tongs Society, 27. 
 
 Hannibal, 127. 
 
 Hardwick, Charles, quoted, 197. 
 
 Harkness, Prof. Albert, Ph. D., LL. D., 
 remarks on Prof. Lincoln, 607. 
 
 "Harper's Weekly," editorial on Prof. 
 Lincoln, 606. 
 
 Harris, John, 111. 
 
 Harvard College, Prof. Lincoln urged to 
 enter, 4, 24. 
 
 Haupt, Prof. Moritz, 57, 76. 
 
 Havercarap, Sigebert, 318. 
 
 Havre, 112. 
 
 Hawtrey, Edward Craven, D. D., 123. 
 
 Hay, Rev. Prof. Charles Augustus, 65, 
 84. 
 
 Hazard, Edward H., his anecdote of 
 Prof. Lincoln. 585. 
 
 Hegel, Georg Wilh. Fr., 88, 89, 186, 233, 
 236, 248 ; Prof, Lincoln's comments on, 
 90 ; influence on Von Ranke, 575. 
 
 Heidelberg, 65 ; Prof. Lincoln's visit to, 
 85. 
 
 Hengstenberg, Prof. Ernst Wilhelm, in- 
 structor of Prof. Lincoln, 25, 88, 612. 
 
 Heraclitus, 320, 340. 
 
 Herculaneum, 111. 
 
 Herkomer, Hubert, his portrait of Prof. 
 Lincoln, 18, 600, 608, 613. 
 
 Herodotus, 188, 195. 
 
 Herrman, Prof. Carl Friedrich, 236, 237. 
 
 Herrman, Prof. Johann Gottfried, 76, 
 572. 
 
 Hermskretschen, 63. 
 
 Herschel, Sir John, 123. 
 
 Hesiod, 530. 
 
 Hill, Dr. John H., 140. 
 
 Hill, Rowland, 121. 
 
 Hingham, 619. 
 
 Hirt, Emil, 110. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 633 
 
 Hobbes, Thomas, 284, 318. 
 
 Hoffman, Rev. Mr., court preacher at 
 Berlin, 144. 
 
 Holbach, Baron d', 318. 
 
 Holden, Oliver, 622. 
 
 Holmes, Oliver WendeU, 1, 535. 
 
 Homer, Prof. Lincoln's treatment of, in 
 connection with " JuventusMundi," 11, 
 185 et seq. ; read by Roman girls, 382 ; 
 quoted, 510 ; as to old age, 530 ; his 
 old age, 533 ; studied by Von Ranke, 
 571. 
 
 Honorius (Emperor), 211, 212. 
 
 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Prof. 
 Lincoln's fondness for, 9, 595, 599, 609 ; 
 as taught by Prof. Lincoln, 9, 602, 610 ; 
 his edition and life of, 10, 592, 614 ; 
 Rome and Romans in his time, 14, 208— 
 231 ; best understood in Rome, 106 ; 
 his saying of himself applied to Goethe, 
 152 ; as to influence of poets, 166 ; his 
 theology, 199, 200 ; as to travel, 296, 
 298, 299, 303, 304, 306, 308 ; his love 
 of the country, 314 ; influenced by 
 Lucretius, 317 ; a3 to books, 319 ; his 
 " Dis earns," 360, and "ivy crown," 
 361, applied to Sophocles; on punish- 
 ment inevitable, 367 ; quoted, 378, 599, 
 604; on women, 380, 382, 389; on 
 boys' education, 381 ; on Jews, 400 ; on 
 Greek culture, 514; on periods of life, 
 528 ; quoted as to Prof. Maxwell, 545. 
 
 Humboldt, Alex, von, Prof. Lincoln's 
 note to, 146 ; example of vigorous old 
 age, and honor paid him, 534, 542. 
 
 Humboldt, William von, Goethe's letter 
 to, 151 ; influence on Von Ranke, 575. 
 
 Hume, David, 191. 
 
 Hunt, William M., at Rome with Prof. 
 Lincoln, 7, 612. 
 
 Huxley, Prof. T. H., 342. 
 
 Inquisition, Galileo and, 427-455. 
 
 Interlaken, 65. 
 
 Irving, Washington, 535. 
 
 Italy, Prof. Lincoln's visits to, 6, 25, 100, 
 102-112, 127-138, 612, 613. 
 
 Italian customs and manners < proces- 
 sions, 104, 136 ; beggars, 104, 128, 130, 
 133, 135, 137, 138; holy week, 129; 
 passports and duties, 128, 137 ; travel 
 and brigands, 131 ; artists, 132 ; want 
 of education, 133, 135, 137; immoral- 
 ity, 137. 
 
 Jackson, Andrew, visit to Providence, 
 
 29. 
 Jacobs, Prof. Chr. Friedrich Wilhelm, 91. 
 
 242. 
 Jahn,Otto, 236. 
 Janet, Paul, 347. 
 Jenkin, Prof. Fleeming, 339. 
 Jerome, 315, 317. 
 Jews, classic references to, 400, 412. 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, 117. 
 
 Josephus, 400. 
 
 Jowett, Prof. B., his translation of Plato, 
 
 232, 242; his scholarship, 234-236; 
 
 comments on Plato, 287, 288, 293. 
 Juvenal (Dec. Jun. Juvenalis), his power 
 
 as a satirist, 224, 353, 380; quoted, 
 
 231 ; as to travel, 303 ; as to women, 
 
 387, 389, 394, 397, 399 ; as to Jews, 400 ; 
 
 as to riches, 506. 
 " Juventus Mundi," Prof. Lincoln's paper 
 
 on, 11, 185-207, 615. 
 
 Kant, Immanuel, influenced by Lucre- 
 tius, 325 ; vigorous old age, 534. 
 
 Keith, Alexander, D. D., 111. 
 
 Kepler, Johann, relations with Galileo, 
 432,|433 ; prohibited by Romish Church, 
 451. 
 
 King, Rev. Jonas, D. D., 140. 
 
 Kirk, Rev. Edward Norris, D. D., ser- 
 mon better than Spurgeon's, 125. 
 
 Klaproth, Julius von, 197. 
 
 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 570. 
 
 Knittlingen, 154. 
 
 Kobner, Rev. Mr., 70. 
 
 Kostlin, Dr. Karl, on Goethe, 171, 176. 
 
 Lachmann, Karl, Konr. Fr. Wilh., 318. 
 
 Laelius, Caius, stoic and friend of Cicero, 
 519, 526. 
 
 Lambinus, 318. 
 
 Lamettrie, Julien Off ray, 318. 
 
 Lanciani, Prof. Rudolfo, Prof. Lincoln's 
 visit to, 613. 
 
 Lange, Friedrich Albert, on Lucretius' 
 atomic theory, 318, 337, 338 ; on Bru- 
 no, 344 ; on Christianity and material- 
 ism, 348 ; misquoted by Prof. Tyndall, 
 461-463. 
 
 Larkin, Sophia Oliver, 22, 619, 622 et seq. ; 
 genealogy, 619. 
 
 Lausanne, 96. 
 
 Lefevre, Charles Shaw- (Viscount Ev- 
 ersly), 123. 
 
 Leghorn, 127. 
 
 Leipsic, Prof. Lincoln's visit to, 56, 64, 
 72-76. 
 
 Leo, Prof. Heinrich, instructor of Prof. 
 Lincoln, 5, 25 ; at party, 54, 55 ; famil- 
 iarity with America, 58. 
 
 Lepidus, Marcus, 216. 
 
 Lessing, Gotthold Ephr., 427. 
 
 Leverett, F. P., instructor of Prof. Lin- 
 coln, 123. 
 
 Leyden, 614. 
 
 Libri, Julius, 433. 
 
 Ligarius, 476. 
 
 Lincoln, Ensign, as a father, 3, 22, 544 ; 
 his ancestrf , 618, 619 ; children, 22, 23, 
 611,618, 619; his religious character, 
 3, 611, 619-622 ; born m Hingham, 619 ; 
 autobiography, 619; childhood, 619, 
 620 ; early attempt at profanity, 620 ; 
 
634 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 influence on Professor Lincoln, 619- 
 622 ; education and apprenticeship, 620, 
 621 ; independence, and industry, 620, 
 621 ; conversion and baptism, 620-622 ; 
 friendship for Deacon Heman Lincoln, 
 622 ; escapes being christened Heman, 
 
 622 ; a lay preacher, 3, 611, 623 ; mar- 
 riage, 622, 623; his wife becomes a 
 Baptist, 623 ; her character, 623-625 ; 
 her death, 22, 623, 624; letter to his 
 children, 622-625 ; his death, 27, 622. 
 Lincoln Fund, 18, 604, 608, 613. 
 
 Lincoln, John Larkin, Chronological Index of Events in Life of : — 
 
 Birth at Boston, February 23, 1817 3, 22, 611 
 
 Childhood 22, 43 
 
 His mother's death, 1821 22, 623 
 
 Earliest studies 22, 23 
 
 Pupil at Boston Latin School, 1826-1830, 1832 4, 23, 24, 44, 611 
 
 Ready for college, 1830 23 
 
 Pupil at Boston High School, 1831 4, 23 
 
 Early religious impressions, 1826-1832 (?) 24, 43 
 
 Conversion and baptism, 1832 ' 24, 43, 27, 30 
 
 Student at Brown University, 1832-1836 4, 24, 27-33, 585, 611 
 
 His father's death, 1832 3, 24, 27, 622 
 
 Begins to teach Sunday-school class, 1833 29 
 
 Revival at Brown University, 1834 30-33 
 
 Tutor at Columbian College, Washington, D. C, 1836-1837 . . 5, 25, 34-44, 611 
 
 Call to ministrv, 1832-1838 37, 42, 45 ef seq., 107 
 
 Student at Newton Theological Institution, 1838-1839 ... 5, 25, 45-50, 611 
 
 Tutor of Greek at Brown University, 1839-1841 5, 25, 586, 612 
 
 First visit to Europe, including studies at Halle and Berlin, and travel, 1841- 
 
 1844 5, 6, 25, 51-113, 595, 596, 612 
 
 Professor of Latin at Brown University, 1844-1891 2, 7, 613 
 
 Married, July 29, 1846. 
 
 Publishes edition of Livy, 1847 ....'. 592, 614 
 
 Publishes edition of Horace, 1851 592, 614 
 
 Superintendent of First Baptist Sunday-school, 1855-1876 17, 133, 592-594, 615 
 
 Second visit to Europe, 1857 15, 114-147, 613 
 
 Receives degree of LL. D. from Brown University, 1859 615 
 
 Conducts Benefit Street Young Ladies' School, 1859-1867 .... 15, 597, 613 
 
 Teaches German at Brown University, 1867-1877 613 
 
 Third visit to Europe, 1878 15, 614 
 
 Publishes edition of Ovid, 1883 592, 614 
 
 Presentation of Herkomer portrait, 1886 18, 600, 608, 613 
 
 Fourth visit to Europe, 1887-1889 15, 602-604, 613 
 
 Lincoln $100,000 Fund, 1889 18, 604, 608, 613 
 
 Last illness, 1889-1891 604-606, 617 
 
 Death at Providence, October 17, 1891 606 
 
 Lincoln, John Larkin {see also Anec- 
 dotes) : 
 
 Address of Professor Harkness, 607. 
 
 Ancestry, 618. 
 
 Anecdotes (see under head of Anec- 
 dotes in Index). 
 
 Archaeology, interest in, 7, 105, 109, 
 110, 111, 129, 132, 139, 143, 614. 
 
 Art, interest in, 59, 64, 103, 105, 110, 
 130, 132, 614. 
 
 Baptism, 24, 27, 30. 
 
 Baptist views, 24, 30, 65, 70, 126, 456 
 et seq., 596. 
 
 Benefit Street School, 15, 597, 613. 
 
 Biographical sketch (" New York Even- 
 ing Post "), 611. 
 
 Birth, 3, 22, 611. 
 
 Bible, love of, 43, 49, 52, 77, 124, 139, 
 594, 600, 606. ^ 
 
 Brown University, student at, 4, 24, 27- 
 33, 585, 611 ; tutor at, 5,25, 586, 612 ; 
 professor at, 2, 7, 608, 613, 617 ; rela- 
 tions with the faculty, 17, 617 ; sug- 
 gested as president of, 616. 
 
 Childhood, 22, 43. 
 
 Classical studies, views as to, 11, 12, 
 92, 100, 106, 108, 601, 602, 609, 616. 
 
 Classics, editions of, 9, 592, 614. 
 
 Classmates at school. See Beech er, 
 Bigelow, Bradley, Devens, Ellis, Ev- 
 arts, Fitzpatrick, Hale, Motley, Sum- 
 ner, Torrey, Weld. 
 
 Colby University, called to presidency 
 of, 615. 
 
 College catalogues and necrology, writ- 
 ten by him, 16, 597, 615. 
 
 Columbian College, teacher at, 5, 25, 
 34 et seq., 44, 611. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 635 
 
 Conversion, 24, 43, 596. 
 
 Death, 606. 
 
 Diary, at Brown Univ., 27-33 ; Colum- 
 bian College, 34-44 ; Newton, 45-50 ; 
 Germany, 51-66; Europe in 1857, 
 116-133, 137-143. 
 
 Education, 4-6, 22, 23, 25, 27 et seq., 
 40, 611 ; views as to, 14, 37, 38, 74, 
 593. 
 
 Educator, ability as, 7-10, 14, 15, 598, 
 602, 606, 608, 614, 616. 
 
 Essays, college and seminary, 591. 
 
 European visits, 5, 6, 15, 25, 51-113, 
 114-147, 595, 596, 602-604, 613, 614. 
 
 Father, his. See Ensign Lincoln. 
 
 Father, character as, 598, 605. 
 
 First Baptist Church and Sunday- 
 school, connection with, 17, 29, 124, 
 130, 132-137, 594, 615. 
 
 Fishing, fondness for, 599, 600, 603. 
 
 Hazing experience, 585. 
 
 Herkomer portrait, 18, 600, 608, 613. 
 
 Horace, edition and life of, 10, 592, 
 614. 
 
 Humor, 8, 10, 18, 34 et seq., 52, 55, 77, 
 102, 589, 590, 616. 
 
 Illness, last, 605. 
 
 Impurity, dislike of, 588. 
 
 Instructors, his. See Alger, Beck, 
 Bekker, Bernhardy, Blanc, Bopp, 
 Caswell, Chace, DUiaway, Dixwell, 
 Elton, Encke,Erdmann, Franz, Fried- 
 lander, Gammell, Gesenius, Goddard, 
 Gould, Grimm, Hackett, Hengsten- 
 berg, Leo, Leverett, Magoun, Mar- 
 heineke. Miles, Miiller, Neander, 
 Pernice, Puchta, Ranke, Raumer, 
 Reich, Ritter, Rodiger, Rosenberger, 
 Schelling, Sears, Sherwin, Steffens, 
 Tholuck, Twesten, Wayland, Weg- 
 scheider, Westermann, Witte, Zumpt. 
 
 Intellectual activity, 10, 544, 597, 613, 
 617. 
 
 Letters, to Prof. Fisher, 19 ; from Eu- 
 rope, 67-113; 114-116,133-137,143- 
 147 ; from Providence, 597. 
 
 Liberality, financial, 49, 598, 627 ; reli- 
 gious, 19, 104, 106, 126, 130, 144, 146. 
 
 Lincoln Field, 18, 605. 
 
 Lincoln Fund, 18, 604 605, 613. 
 
 Livy, edition of, published, 9, 592, 614. 
 
 Memorial Address on, 1 et seq. 
 
 Ministry, call to, 28, 37, 42, 45 et seq., 
 107, 615. 
 
 Mock programmes, opinion of, 588. 
 
 Modern languages, his familiarity with, 
 7, 70, 73, 74, 78, 100, 110, 111, 124, 
 462, 612, 613. 
 
 Mother, his, 544, 619, 611, 622 et seq. 
 
 Music, love of, 55, 59, 63, 82, 86, 101, 
 126, 144, 605, 606, 617. 
 
 Napping, habit of, 597. 
 
 Natural scenery, love of, 93, 94, 96, 97, 
 99, 101, 128, 138, 140, 141, 600, 605. 
 
 Nearsightedness, 599. 
 
 Old age, 604. 
 
 Outdoor sports, interest in, 18, 605, 616. 
 
 Ovid, edition and life of, 110, 592, 614. 
 
 " Parts," rebellion against, 586. 
 
 Patriotism, 79, 82, 106, 137. 
 
 "Ponies," opinion and treatment of, 
 
 589, 590. 
 Physique and health, 22, 32, 45, 47, 64, 
 
 114, 117, 127, 141, 146, 147, 586, 595, 
 
 597, 599, 605, 607, 615, 617. 
 Preaching, Prof. Lincoln's first ser- 
 mon, 47. 
 Press notices of, 606, 608, 611. 
 Pupils, relations with, 2, 7, 9, 10, 15, 18, 
 
 20, 36, 588, 589, 590, 598, 600, 602, 
 
 607-609, 616. 
 Religious experience, character and be- 
 
 Uefs, 17, 19, 20, 24, 28 et seq., 30 et 
 
 seq.,' 37, 42-50, 53, 111, 124, 126, 
 
 131, 137, 588, 594, 595, 598, 600, 611, 
 
 615, 617. 
 Religious liberality, 19, 104, 106, 126, 
 
 130, 144, 146. 
 Reminiscences of student life, 587, 588. 
 Resemblance in character to Ensign 
 
 Lincoln, 597, 619, 621 et seq. 
 Revised New Testament, opinion of, 
 
 600. 
 Saxon Switzerland, tour through, 59 et 
 
 seq. 
 Scholar, abUity as, 8, 9, 100, 544, 606, 
 
 614, 616. 
 Social relations, 6, 609, 615, 617. 
 Speaker, ability as, 594, 617. 
 Sunday-school, views as to, 593. 
 Sundays, how occupied, 24, 29, 30, 47, 
 
 52, 60, 69, 70, 77, ^0, 117 et seq., 124, 
 
 126, 129, 130, 132, 138, 144, 145. 
 Slavery, opinions concerning, 82. 
 Theological studies, 45 et seq., 615. 
 Tour with Tholuck, 84, 612. 
 Travels, 5-7, 15, 51-147, 359, 541, 542, 
 
 568, 569, 596, 602-604, 607, 612, 613, 
 
 614. 
 Youthful appearance, 46, 586, 595, 
 Vacations, outdoor life in, 595, 599, 605, 
 
 614, 617. 
 Vassar College, called to presidency of, 
 
 615. 
 War (civil), prophecy of, 79, 82. 
 Writer, ability as, 11, 614. 
 Writings not included in this volume, 
 
 592. 
 Lincoln genealogy, 618. 
 Lincoln, Deacon Heman, 622. 
 Lincohi, Prof. Heman, D. D., 22, 595, 
 
 611, 619. 
 Lincoln, Henry E., 22, 619. 
 Lincoln, Joshua, 22, 611, 619. 
 Lincoln, Sophia (Mrs. Charles D. Grould)) 
 
 22. 
 Lincoln, Rev. Thomas OHver, 22, 619. 
 Lincoln, William Cowper, 22, 49, 619. 
 
636 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Lipsius, Justus, 218, 426. 
 
 Liszt, Franz, Prof. Lincoln's appreciation 
 of his music, 82, 86. 
 
 Liverpool, 114. 
 
 Livy (Titus Livius), remembered by Prof. 
 Lincoln at Valence, 127; on women, 
 378, 379, 381 ; alluded to by Tacitus, 
 408, 419 ; mentioned by Quintilian, 425 ; 
 his criticism of Cicero, 482 ; his story 
 as to augury, 510 ; as to popular reli- 
 gion, 511 ; record shows superstition, 
 513; use of "senex," 528; Prof. Lin- 
 coln accused of writing preface to, 589 ; 
 Prof. Lincoln's edition of, 9, 592, 614. 
 
 Locke, John, 284, 318, 534. 
 
 London, Prof. Lincoln's visit to, 7, 114- 
 123, 612, 614. 
 
 Longfellow, H. W., example of vigorous 
 old age, 535. 
 
 Lorini, Padre, 438. 
 
 Louis Philippe, 86, 125, 428. 
 
 Louis XIII., 125. 
 
 Lucan, M. Annseus, 473, 475. 
 
 Lucian, 308. 
 
 Lucretius (T. Lucr. Carus), Prof. Lin- 
 coln's papers on, 14, 315-336, 337-355 ; 
 allusion to, 20 ; as to travel, 305 ; coun- 
 try, 31.3 ; an Epicurean, 517 ; unlike 
 Virgil, 518; Prof. Maxwell's beliefs 
 compared with, 565. 
 
 Lutheranism, leaders of Evangelicai 
 party : Tholuck, 6, 56 ; Hengstenberg, 
 88 ; Neander, 89 ; Tauchnitz, 75 ; 
 leaders of Rationalistic party: Weg- 
 scheider, 54; Ammon, 60 ; " Young Ger- 
 man " party following Hegel, 90; per- 
 secuting Baptists, 68-70 ; centennial of 
 Reformation, 80 ; church service, 144. 
 
 Luther, Martin, his pulpit, 76 ; studied 
 by Von Ranke, 572. 
 
 Lyell, Sir Charles, 123. 
 
 Lyndhurst, Baron, his vigorous old age, 
 535. 
 
 Lyons, 100, 127. 
 
 Macrobius, Ambr. Theodosius, 396. 
 
 Maecenas, C. Cilnius, marital troubles, 
 396 ; student's mispronunciation, 589. 
 
 Magdeburg, 72. 
 
 Magoun, Nathaniel, instructor of Prof. 
 Lincoln, 23. 
 
 Mai, Angelo, 487. 
 
 Malcom, Rev. Howard, Prof. Lincoln 
 baptized by, 24, 30. 
 
 Malle, Bureau, de la, 218, 220. 
 
 Manning & Loring, 620. 
 
 Mansfield, William Murray, Earl of, ex- 
 ample of old age, 535. 
 
 Marathon, 139, 140- 
 
 Marheineke, Philip Conrad, 88. 
 
 Marini, Monsignore, 428. 
 
 Marius, Caius, 417, 464, 468, 472, 479. 
 
 Marquardt, Karl Joachim, 218. 
 
 Marseilles, 127. 
 
 Martha, Benjamin Constant, 499. 
 
 Martial (M. Val. Martialis), description of 
 Baise, 305 ; as to women, 380, 385, 386, 
 389, 390, 398; as to schoohnasters, 381. 
 
 Maxwell, Prof. James Clerk, on atoms> 
 324 ; as to First Cause, 343 ; Prof. Lin- 
 coln's paper on life and character of, 
 544-567. 
 
 "McLeod" case, 79. 
 
 Medici, Cosmo, 426. 
 
 Megara, 141. 
 
 Meillerie, 94. 
 
 Melancthon, Philip, 154. 
 
 Mellini, Cardinal, 438, 442. 
 
 Memel, origin of Baptist church in, 68. 
 80. 
 
 Mendelssohn, Felix, 86, 359. 
 
 Merivale, Charles, estimate of Roman 
 population, 218, 220 ; on Tacitus, 409, 
 417 ; description of Piso, 416. 
 
 Messina, Prof. Lincoln's visit to, 133 et 
 seq. 
 
 Metternich, Prince Clemens Wenzeslaus, 
 example of vigorous age, 535. 
 
 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 86. 
 
 Middleton, Conyers, his Life of Cicero, 
 477. 
 
 Milan, 66. 
 
 Miles, S. P., instructor of Prof. Lincoln, 
 24. 
 
 Milman, Dean Henry H., quoted as to 
 Horace, 208. 
 
 Milton, John, quotation applied to Goethe, 
 155 ; quotation showing imitation of 
 Plato, 253 ; student of Lucretius, 318 ; 
 quotation of thoughts similar to Lu- 
 cretius, 332 ; quotation applied to Au- 
 relius, 498 ; vigorous age, 533. 
 
 Misenum, 111. 
 
 Mock programmes. Prof. Lincoln's opin- 
 ion of, 588. 
 
 Modern languages. Prof. Lincoln's acqui- 
 sition of, 73, 74, 100; study of, at Propa- 
 ganda, 110. (See also German lan- 
 guage.) 
 
 Mommsen, Theodor, as to Roman history, 
 467, 468 ; defends Caesar, 470 ; depre- 
 ciates Pompey, 472; and Cicero, 477, 
 478 ; as to philosophy in Rome, 514 ; 
 his praise of Von Ranke, 573, 582. 
 
 Monnetier, 98. 
 
 Montaigne, Michel de, 525. 
 
 Monte, Cardinal del, 435. 
 
 Montreaux, 94, 96. 
 
 More, Sir Thomas, 294. 
 
 Motley, John Lothrop, a schoolmate of 
 Prof. Lincoln, 611. 
 
 Miiller, Prof. Julius, instructor of Prof. 
 Lincoln, 5, 25, 58, 612. 
 
 Muller, Prof. Fried. Max, 196, 206. 
 
 Muller, Otf ried, 110. 
 
 Mure, William, 190, 191, 203. 
 
 Miirray, Prof. James O., S. T. D., his 
 opinion of Prof. Lincoln as a scholar 
 
INDEX. 
 
 637 
 
 and teacher, 9, quoted by Prof. Lincoln 
 as to classical studies, 601. 
 Mycenae, visited by Prof. Lincoln, 142. 
 
 Naber, Prof. Samuel Adrian, 487. 
 
 Nsevius, Gnaeus, 537. 
 
 Nagelsbach, Karl Friedr., 205, 206. 
 
 Naples, visited by Prof. Lincoln, 111. 
 
 Napoleon I. and III., 125, 470. 
 
 Narragansett Pier, 599. 
 
 Nauplia, 142. 
 
 Neander, August, instructor of Prof. Lin- 
 coln, 6, 25, 568, 612 ; his learning and 
 lectures, 88; torchlight serenade to, 
 89 ; anecdotes concerning, 596. 
 
 Needham, Mass., place of Prof. Lincoln's 
 first sermon, 47. 
 
 Nepos, Cornelius, 386. 
 
 Nero (Emperor), his bad mother, 393, 
 403 ; Tacitus' record of, 406, 407, 410, 
 416, 422. 
 
 Nerva (Emperor), Tacitus' record of, 
 404-406.^ 
 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, similarity to Lucre- 
 tius, 318, 339 ; vigorous age, 534. 
 
 Newton Theological Institution, Prof. 
 Lincoln a student at, 5, 25, 27, 37, 43, 
 45-50, 611 ; address before alumni, 
 259-272 ; essays and sermons at, 591 ; 
 Rev. Heman Lincoln, D. D., professor 
 at, 611. 
 
 " New York Evening Post," biographical 
 sketch of Prof. Lincoln, 611-618. 
 
 "New York Tribune," editorial on Prof. 
 Lincoln, 601. 
 
 Nibby, Antonio, estimate of Roman pop- 
 ulation, 212. 
 
 Niebuhr, Bartold Georg, on "Faust," 
 153; on Aurelius, 484; influence on 
 Von Ranke, 572, 574, and on history, 
 578. 
 
 *' North American Review," Prof. Lin- 
 coln's articles for, 592, 615. 
 
 Octavius. See Augustus Caesar. 
 
 Old age. Prof. Lincoln's paper on, 524- 
 543. 
 
 Olshausen, Prof. Hermann, 53. 
 
 Olympiodorus, 212. 
 
 Oncken, Rev. John Gerhard, Prof. Lin- 
 coln's acquaintance with, 68, 70, 80, 81. 
 
 Otho (Emperor), Tacitus' delineation of, 
 407, 416, 420, 422. 
 
 Ouchy, 96. 
 
 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), on fashion- 
 able travel, 305 ; on Lucretius, 317 ; on 
 women, 380, 386-388, 396 ; on his wife, 
 382 ; on vice, 389, 400 ; on reverence 
 for age, 541 ; studied by Von Ranke, 
 571. 
 
 Palo, 131. 
 Panaetius, 519. 
 Palmerston, Viscount, 123. 
 
 Parker, Theodore, fellow student with 
 Prof. Lincoln, in Rome, 612. 
 
 Parkman, Francis, fellow student with 
 Prof. Lincoln, in Rome, 7, 612. 
 
 Paris, visited by Prof. Lincoln, 7, 112, 
 124-136, 147, 612, 614. 
 
 Pattison, Rev. Robert E., D. D., 594. 
 
 Paulinus, Suetonius, 416. 
 
 Peel, Sir Robert, 79. 
 
 Pernice, Prof. Ludw. Wilh. Anton,, 54. 
 
 Perte du Rhone, Prof. Lincoln's excursion 
 to, 100-102. 
 
 Peter, Carl, estimate of Roman popula- 
 tion, 219. 
 
 Peyton, Baillie, in United States Senate, 
 40. 
 
 PhUermenian Society, Prof. Lincoln a 
 member, 28. 
 
 Piale, 212. 
 
 Pierce, Hon. Edward L., on Prof. Lin- 
 coln as a teacher, 10. 
 
 Pillnitz, 60. 
 
 Pindar, 534, 542. 
 
 Pima, 64. 
 
 Pisistratus, 190. 
 
 Piso, Cnaeus, 410. 
 
 Piso, L., 416, 418, 493. 
 
 Pitt, William, example of youthful ma- 
 turity, 538. 
 
 Plato, Prof. Lincoln's papers on, 11, 13, 
 14, 615, (on Platonic myths) 232-258, 
 (on Platonic philosophy) 259-272, (on 
 Republic) 273-295; Lucretius' affinity 
 with, 320; on design, 345; quotation 
 applied to Sophocles, 377 ; quoted by 
 Tacitus, 425 ; quotation applied to Au- 
 relius, 494 ; relation to Roman thought, 
 495, 514-516, 520 ; example of vigorous 
 age, 534 ; on old age and conviviality, 
 540 ; on immortality, 542. 
 
 Pliny (the elder) as to Augustan Rome, 
 211, 213 ; on travel, 299, 300, 303, 304, 
 309, 310, 312 ; on longevity, 529. 
 
 Pliny (the younger), on Roman women, 
 382, 397; on Tacitus, 403-405, 409; 
 on early Christians, 501. 
 
 Plumptre, Prof. E. H., his Life and Writ- 
 ings of Sophocles (notes), 360,365,370, 
 374, 376. 
 
 Plutarch, on custom-houses, 301 ; Alex- 
 ander's oak, 312 ; anecdote of Sopho- 
 cles, 377 ; on husbands, 384 ; on Ro- 
 man women, 394, 396, 398, 399; on 
 Casar, 469, 476. 
 
 Poland, Prof. William C, biographical 
 sketch of Prof. Lincobi, 10, 611-^18. 
 
 Pollio, Asinius, 420, 477, 482. 
 
 Pomerania, 68. 
 
 Pompeii, 111. 
 
 Pompey (Cneius Magnus Pompeius), 
 aimed at monarchy, 417; relations with 
 Caesar, 465, 479; Mommsen's treat- 
 ment of, 472. 
 
 Porter, Henry Kirke, gift through Prof. 
 
638 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Lincoln to Brown Museum of Archaeol- 
 ogy, 614. 
 
 Portici, 111. 
 
 Preller, Ludwig", fellow student with 
 Prof. Lincoln at Rome, 7, 612. 
 
 Press notices, " New York Tribune," 601 ; 
 " Harper's Weekly," 606 ; " Providence 
 Journal," 608 ; " New York Evening 
 Post," 611. 
 
 Priscus, Helvidius, 496. 
 
 Probus, M. Aurelius, 211. 
 
 Propertius, Sextus, on life at Baiae, 306 ; 
 an art student, 312 ; on women, 380, 
 381, 388, 389. 
 
 Protestantism, associated with Geneva, 
 99 ; its irreverence, 104 ; much sermon, 
 little worship, 106, 117, 118 ; vs. Cathol- 
 icism, 133, 135. 
 
 "Providence Journal," Prof. Lincoln's 
 editorial on Tyndall, 461 ; editorial on 
 Prof. Lincoln, 608 ; Brown Necrology, 
 written by Prof. Lincoln for, 615. 
 
 Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemseus), 432, 445. 
 
 Puchta, Prof. Georg Friedr., 88. 
 
 Pythagoras, 285. 
 
 Quintilian (M. Fabius Quintilianus), on 
 smuggling, 301 ; on women, 389 ; prob- 
 ably taught Tacitus, 403 ; his prophecy 
 as to Tacitus, 425, 426. 
 
 Randall, Rev. Silas B. (" S. B. R."), as a 
 student, held prayer - meetings with 
 Prof. Lincoln, 30. 
 
 Ranke, Leopold von, instructor of Prof. 
 Lincoln, 6, 25, 88 ; Prof. Lincoln's pa- 
 per on, 14, 566-584. 
 
 Raphael Sanzio, 260. 
 
 Rationalism, opposed by Tholuck, 6 ; De 
 Wette's tendency to, 53 ; leaders in, 
 Wegscheider, 54, 81, Ammon, 60; re- 
 sults of, 90 ; taught in Geneva, 99. 
 
 Raumer, Prof. Fried. Ludwig Georg von, 
 88. 
 
 " Rebel Class" (1835), at Brown, 585. 
 
 Reggio, 137. 
 
 Reich, Prof, von, 55. 
 
 Religion, in connection with classical 
 study, 12, 13, 19, 20, 356-358, 571 ; re- 
 ligious revival at Brown, 30 et seq. ; 
 Tholuck's views, 52, 53 ; religious per- 
 secution, 68-70, 427 et seg. ; at home 
 and abroad, 69, 70, 80, 85, 124- 
 126, 129, 130, 133-137. 139, 144-146; 
 conflicting theories, 88, 90, 99, 463; 
 Spurgeon's teaching of, ll9 et seq. ; 
 Plato's conception of, 259 et seq. ; Lu- 
 cretius' conception of, 330, 333, 335, 
 336, 344-350 ; Sophocles' teaching as 
 to, 359, 360, 363-376 ; ancient Roman, 
 384, 398, 399, 503 et seq., 543 ; Jewish 
 and early Christian, 400, 401, 501, 502 ; 
 Aurelius' conception of, 496 et seq. ; 
 religion and science, illustrated in Prof. 
 
 Maxwell, 562, 564-567 ; Prof. Lincohi's 
 views concerning, 27-33, 42-44, 48, 
 588, 593-595; Ensign Lincoln's be- 
 liefs, 622-625. 
 Renan, Ernest, 484. 
 
 Rhode Island Historical Society, Prof. 
 
 Lincoln's pai^ers before, 14, 568. 
 Rhode Island Sunday School Conven- 
 tion, Prof. Lincoln's paper before, 592, 
 593. ' ' 
 
 Ritter, Prof. Carl, 88, 575. 
 Rives, William CabeU, 39. 
 j Robertson (William Bruce, D. D. ?), 55. 
 Robinson, Rev. Edward, D. D., receives 
 
 degree from Halle, 80, 81. 
 Rodiger, Prof. Emil, instructor of Prof. 
 
 Lincoln, 5, 25. 
 Roman Catholicism, 110 ; good and bad 
 features of, 60, 85, 106, 110, 126, 129, 
 135 et seq. ; persecution of Galileo, 427 
 et seq. 
 
 Roman Women, Prof. Lincoln's paper 
 on, 378 et seq. ; Agricola's wife, 384 
 Agricola's daughter, 382; Agrippina 
 390, 393 ; Agrippina, 2d, 393, 421 ; An 
 tonia,394 ; CIaudia,390 ; Cleopatra, 390 ; 
 Cloelia, 379, 380 ; (Corinna), 387 ; Cor 
 nelia, 398 ; (Cynthia), 381 ; (Delia), 381 
 Domitia, 394 Domna Julia, 398 ; Faus- 
 tina, 492, 494 ; Flavia, 401 ; Fulvia, 483 
 daughter of Fundanus, 382; Galeria 
 529 ; Julia, 383, 391, 396 ; Julia, 2d, 392 
 Junia, TertuUia, 415, 530 ; Livia, 390 
 394, 398, 412 ; Locusta, 393 ; Lucretia! 
 380, 381 ; Marcella, 391 ; Mareia 380 
 daughter of Ovid, 396 ; wife of Ovid 
 382; Octavia, 390, 394, 396; Poppsea 
 390, 400; Pomponia, 401; wife of 
 Pliny, 396; Scribonia, 390, 392; Te- 
 rentia, 396, 629 ; Theophila, 398 ; (Te- 
 lesina), 390 ; Vipsania, 391 ; Valeria 
 Massalina, 390, 393 ; wife of Varius, 
 396 ; wife of VespiUo, 390. 
 
 Roman religion, Prof. Lincoln's paper on, 
 503 et seq. See also Religion. 
 
 Rome, Prof. Lincoln's visits to, 5, 7, 25, 
 102, 105-111, 128-131, 612 ; Prof. Lin- 
 coln's paper on Horatian Rome, 208- 
 231 ; on Roman travel, 296-313. 
 
 Rogers, Samuel, quoted, 107; vigorous 
 old age, 534. 
 
 Rosenberger, Prof., 54. 
 
 Rothe, Prof. Richard, 85. 
 
 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 93, 94. 
 
 Rubini, Giovanni Battista, 86. 
 
 Rugby, 614. 
 
 Rusticus, Junius, 489. 
 
 Salamis, 141. 
 
 Sallust, mentioned by Quintilian, 425; 
 
 on period of life, 528. 
 Savigny, Prof. Fried. Carl von, 88, 575. 
 Saxon Switzerland, Prof. Lincoln's student 
 
 tour in, 59 et seq. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 639 
 
 Sayles Memorial Hall, Prof. Lincoln's 
 portrait hung in, 600, 608, 613. 
 
 Scaevola, Quintus Mucins, as to holydays, 
 509 ; his religious teachings, 520. 
 
 Scaliger, Joseph Justus, 318. 
 
 Schandau, 61. 
 
 Scheiner, Christoph, 436. 
 
 Schelling, Prof. Fried. William Joseph 
 von, instructor of Prof. Lincoln, 6, 25, 
 88, 89, 568; on "Faust," 153; influ- 
 ence on Cousin, 233. 
 
 Schiller, Johann Chr. Fried., quoted, 2, 
 367 ; studied by Von Ranke, 570. 
 
 Sehleiermacher, Fried. Daniel Ernst, suc- 
 ceeded by Twesten, 88 ; student of Plato, 
 232, 242 ; influence on Cousin, 233 ; on 
 Von Ranke, 575. 
 
 Schmidt, Prof. Johann, 614. 
 
 Schulze, Johann, 574. 
 
 Scipio, Africanus (the younger), disciple 
 of Pansetius, 519 ; in Cicero's writings, 
 526 ; youthful maturity, 537. 
 
 Scylla, present appearance, 134, 138. 
 
 Sears, President Barnas, D. D., instructor 
 of Prof. Lincoln, 5, 25 ; at Halle, 58, 
 81 ; on Tauehnitz, 75 ; elective system, 
 602. 
 
 Sellar, Prof. W. Y., 316. 
 
 Seneca, L. Annseus, quoted by Prof. Lin- 
 coln, 20 ; on Baise, 306 ; nature, 313 ; 
 women, 380, 386, 389, 392 ; Maecenas, 
 396 ; Jews, 400 ; relations with Aure- 
 lius, 490, 496, 497 ; similarity to Chris- 
 tianity, 521. 
 
 Settele, Prof., 451. 
 
 Severus, Catilius, grandfather of Aure- 
 lius, 486, 493. 
 
 Shakespeare, quotation applied to study 
 of Plato, 274 ; to Lucretius, 329 ; Cor- 
 delia compared to Antigone, 375 ; 
 treatment of Csesar, 469, 475, 476 ; on 
 old age, 528, 531, 541. 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 319. 
 
 Shepard, Stephen O., classmate of Prof. 
 Lincoln, 25 ; extract from letter (note), 
 46. 
 
 Sheridan Richard Brinsley Butler, vig- 
 orous age, 534. 
 
 Sherwin, Thomas, instructor of Prof. Lin- 
 coln, 24. 
 
 Sicily, Prof. Lincoln's visit to, 134 et seq. 
 
 Simonides, 534. 
 
 Sitio, Francisco, 436. 
 
 Slavery, Prof. Lincoln's opinion of, 82. 
 
 Smith, William, LL. D., Prof. Lincoln's 
 visit to, 115 ; his estimate of Roman 
 population, 219. 
 
 Socrates, on First Cause, 345 ; his vigor- 
 ous age, 534. 
 
 Sophocles, Prof. Lincoln's paper on, 11, 
 13, 356-377, 615 ; on old age, 530 ; his 
 vigorous age, 534 ; studied by Von 
 Ranke, 571. 
 
 Sorrento, 111. 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, popularity'of "Faerie 
 Queen," 170; compared with Homer, 
 190. 
 
 Spurgeon, Rev. Charles Haddon, his ser- 
 mon recorded by Prof. Lincoln, 117 et 
 seq. ; not greatly liked by him, 125. 
 
 Statius, Pub. Papinius, on Roman women. 
 382. 
 
 Stanley, Dean, Arthur Penrhyn, Prof. 
 Lincoln's criticism of his views on bap- 
 tism, 456 et seq. 
 
 Steffens, Prof. Heinrich, 88. 
 
 Strumpell, Prof. Ludwig Adolf, 614. 
 
 Strauss, David Fried., scorns name Chris- 
 tian, 54 ; court preacher, 88 ; his theol- 
 ogy, 90. 
 
 Strauss, Rev. Dr., 145. 
 
 Stuart, Prof. Moses, 81. 
 
 Suetonius, C. Tranquillus, record of Au- 
 gustus' sayings, 213, 392 ; as to Roman 
 travel, 298, 299, 309; his lost work, 
 315. 
 
 Sulla, L. Cornelius, Tacitus' reference to, 
 417 ; Fronde's treatment of, 464, 468, 
 472 ; Cicero's opinion of, 479. 
 
 Sulpicius, Servius, 477. 
 
 Sumner, George, 22. 
 
 Susemihl, Franz, 236. 
 
 Switzerland, Prof. Lincoln's visits to, 6, 
 25, 64-66, 93-100, 612, 614. 
 
 Sybel, Heinrich von, pupil of Von Ranke, 
 578, 580, 582. 
 
 Tacitus, Cornelius, Prof. Lincoln's paper 
 on, 14, 402-426 ; his citation of, 20 ; as 
 to tax collectors, 301 ; on Roman travel, 
 309, 310 ; on Roman women, 380, 388, 
 393, 401 ; his marriage, 382 ; on Roman 
 vice, 389 ; on Jews, 400 ; his apprecia- 
 tion of noble characters, 486, 493, 496 ; 
 on love of glory, 498 ; on early Chris- 
 tians, 501 ; record of Junia Tertullia's 
 longevity, 530 ; studied by Von Ranke, 
 571, 578; quotation from his "Agri- 
 cola " applied to Prof. Lincoln, 617. 
 
 Tacitus, M. Claudius, 425. 
 
 Tait, Prof. P. G., 549. 
 
 Talleyrand de P^rigord, Ch. Maurice, 535. 
 
 Tauehnitz, Karl Chr. Philipp (publisher), 
 his conversion, 75. 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, his " Two Voices " ap- 
 plied to " Faust," 166 ; his misconcep- 
 tion of Lucretius, 352. 
 
 Teplitz, 63. 
 
 Terence (P. Terentius Afer), on (Edipus, 
 372 ; quotation applied to Prof. Lin- 
 coln, 609. 
 
 Tetlow, John, Prof. Lincoln's Latin let- 
 ter to, 589. 
 
 Thales of Miletus, referred to in connec- 
 tion with Lucretius, 326, 340. 
 
 Thames Tunnel, Prof. Lincoln's descrip- 
 tion of, 117. 
 
 Theophrastus, 536. 
 
640 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Theremin, Ludwig Friedr. Franz, 88. 
 
 Thierry, Jacques Nicolas Augustin, 574. 
 
 Thiers, Louis Adolphe, his vigorous old 
 age, 538. 
 
 Thiersch, Friedr. Wilhelm, 110. 
 
 Tholuck, Friedr. August, instructor of 
 Prof. Lincoln, 5, 6, 25, 76, 79, 80, 612 ; 
 his character and ability, 6, 52, 56, 78, 
 82, 133 ; his opinion of Goethe, 51 ; 
 Christinas at his home, 51 ; influence 
 on Olshausen, 53 ; opinion of De Wette, 
 53 ; at dinner party, 54, 55 ; serenaded, 
 55 ; at social gatherings, 57, 58 ; tours 
 with Prof. Lincohi, 64-66, 84, 612; 
 visited in 1857, 143; his anecdote of 
 Prof. Lincoln, 595. 
 
 Tholuck, Mrs., her kindness and merri- 
 ment, 52 ; at social gathering, 57, 58 ; 
 urges Prof. Lincoln to take good care 
 of her husband, 64 ; her friendship for 
 Prof. Lincoln, 65 ; pen picture of, 78 ; 
 visited in 1857, 143 ; in 1878, 614; in 
 1887, 602. 
 
 Thomson, Sir William, 324. 
 
 Thrasea Psetus, 416. 
 
 Thucydides, studied by Von Ranke, 572, 
 578. 
 
 Thurlow, Lord, Edward, vigorous age, 
 535. 
 
 Tiberius (Tiberius Claudius Nero), influ- 
 enced by Livia, 390, 395; Tacitus' 
 record of, 407, 410, 411, 422, 424 ; ban- 
 ishment of Jews, 412 ; his contempt for 
 senate, 420, 492 ; republican sentiment 
 in his time, 477. 
 
 Tibullus, Albius, on Roman women, 380, 
 381, 399. 
 
 Tippelskirch, Friedrich von, pastor near 
 Halle, 58, 59. 
 
 Tiryns, 143. 
 
 Titus (Roman emperor), patron of Taci- 
 tus, 404; Tacitus' record of, 407, 411. 
 
 Torrey, Prof. H. A., schoolmate of Prof. 
 Lincoln, 611. 
 
 Travel, Roman, Prof. Lincoln's paper on, 
 296-314; Prof. Lincoln's travels, see 
 Lincoln, John Larkin. 
 
 Trajan (Roman emperor), Tacitus' record 
 of, 404-407, 414, 419. 
 
 Tuch, Prof. Joh. Chr. Friedr., visited by 
 Prof. Lincoln, 56 ; Gesenius' pun on, 56. 
 
 Tumebus, 318. 
 
 Twesten, Prof. August, D. C, 88. 
 
 Tyler, John, 39, 79. 
 
 Tyler, Prof. W. S., 365. 
 
 Tyndall, Prof. John, his comments on Lu- 
 cretius, 318, 325, 327 ; his views com- 
 pared with Lucretius', 338, 341-343, 
 351 ; Prof. Lincoln's critique on the 
 " Belfast Address," 461-463. 
 
 Ugone, Jacobo, 204. 
 UUmann, Prof. Karl, 85. 
 Ulrici, Prof. Hermann, 57. 
 
 Umbreit, Prof. Friedr. Wilh. Karl, 85. 
 
 University, German idea of, 91, 92. 
 
 United Brothers Society, 28. 
 
 Urban VIH., pasquinade on his theft, 
 215 ; first encouraged and then con- 
 demned Galileo, 436, 444, 451. 
 
 Vahlen, Prof. Johann, 614.. 
 
 Valence, reminds Prof. Lincoln of Livy, 
 127. 
 
 Van Buren, Martin, described by Prof. 
 Lincoln, 38. 
 
 Varius, L. Rufus, 217. 
 
 Varro, M. Terentius, resembling Cowper 
 in praise of country, 313 ; as to Roman 
 religion, 520. 
 
 Versailles,- 125. 
 
 Verus, Lucius, worthless co-ruler with 
 Aurelius, 494, 495. 
 
 Verus, M. Annius, grandfather of Aure- 
 lius, 486. 
 
 Vespasian (Titus Flavins Vespasianus), 
 his survey of Rome, 211, 212 ; Tacitus' 
 record of, lost, 407. 
 
 Vesuvius, 111, 112. 
 
 Vevay, 93, 94. 
 
 Vico, Giovan Battista, quoted as to Ho- 
 mer, 190. 
 
 Villeneuve, 94. 
 
 Virgil (P. Vergilius Maro), quoted as to 
 Olympian theology, 199 ; relations with 
 Maecenas, 217 ; praise of Augustus, 297 ; 
 his age at Lucretius' death, 315 ; prob- 
 able reference to Lucretius, 350 ; read 
 by Roman girls, 382 ; on death of Mar- 
 cellus, 391 ; on religion, 509, 518 : on 
 old age, 530 ; studied by Von Ranke, 
 571. 
 
 Visconti, Ennius Quirinus, 110. 
 
 Vitellius, Aulus, Tacitus' record of, 407, 
 420, 423. 
 
 Voigt, Prof. Johann, 58. 
 
 Voltaire, Fr. M. Arouet, quoted as to 
 Lake Geneva, 93 ; not admired by Prof. 
 Lincoln, 98. 
 
 Vopiscus, Flavins, on dimensions of Rome, 
 211, 212. 
 
 Vrana, 140. 
 
 Wachsmuth, Prof. Ernst Wilh. GottUeb, 
 57, 76. 
 
 Waitz, Georg, 582. 
 
 Wakefield, Gilbert, 318. 
 
 Wales, Prince of, dinner party in Halle 
 on his christening, 54, 82. 
 
 Washington, Prof. Lincoln's life in, 5, 25, 
 34 et seq. 
 
 " Watchman, The," Prof. Lincoln's let- 
 ters to, 68, 71, 75, 79, 84, 85, 91, 93, 
 102, 107; editorial on Dean Stanley, 
 456. 
 
 Wayland, Francis, LL. D., instructor of 
 Prof. Lincoln, 3, 611 ; friend of En- 
 sign Lincoln, 4, 24; sympathy with 
 
INDEX. 
 
 641 
 
 students, 15 ; edited college catalogues, 
 16 ; revival service, 31 ; Tholuck's 
 praise of his " Moral Science," 79 ; 
 treatment of class rebellion, 586 ; elec- 
 tive system, 602. 
 
 Wedler, biographer of Tholuck, 65, 84. 
 
 Wegscheider, Prof. Julius Aug. Ludwig, 
 his rationalism, manners, and appear- 
 ance, 54, 80, 81. 
 
 Welcker, Friedr. Gottlieb, (notes) 195, 
 196, 197, 198. 
 
 Weld, Francis Minot, schoolmate of Prof. 
 Lincoln, 611. 
 
 Westcott, B. F., (note) 236. 
 
 Westermann, Prof. Anton, instructor of 
 Prof. Lincoln, 57, 76. 
 
 Whewell, Dr. WiUiam, 123, 275. 
 
 White, Hugh L., appearance and meeting 
 with Van Buren in Senate, 38. 
 
 White Mountains, visited by Prof. Lin- 
 coln, 597. 
 
 Wiley, Henry, cousin of Prof. Lincoln, 
 24. 
 
 Williams, Archdeacon, his Homeric the- 
 ory, 203, 204. 
 
 Wilson, Prof. John, his remark as to Ho- 
 mer, 192 ; instructor of Prof. Maxwell, 
 549, 550. 
 
 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 110. 
 
 Winer, Prof. Georg Benedikt, at Leipsic, 
 his manner and odd appearance, 57, 76. 
 
 Wise, Gov. Henry Alex., 40. 
 
 Witte, Prof. Karl, 57 ; extracts from his 
 Life of Tholuck, 65, 612. 
 
 Wolf, Fried. Aug., 190, 191. 
 
 Women, Roman, Prof. Lincoln's paper 
 on, 378 et seq. ( See also Roman women.) 
 
 Wordsworth, William, Mr. Gladstone's 
 reference to, 201 ; an admirer of Lu- 
 cretius, 319 ; quoted by Prof. Tyndall, 
 351 ; vigorous age, 534. 
 
 Wyman, Prof. Jeffries, 123. 
 
 Xenephon, on conviviality, 540; on im- 
 mortality, 542. 
 
 Young, Edward, compared with Lucre- 
 tius, 353. 
 
 Zarncke, Prof. Friedrich, 614. 
 
 Zeller, Eduard, (notes) 236, 243, 246, 248. 
 
 Zeno, compared with Epictetus, 490 ; 
 
 with Aurelius, 495, 497. 
 Zoega, Georg, 110. 
 Zumpt, Prof. Karl Gottlieb, instructor of 
 
 Prof. Lincohi, 6, 25, 88. 
 
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 THE UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA UBRARY