I III 111 til .'
 
 -L. 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 jit!
 

 
 JERROLD, TENNYSON, 
 
 AND 
 
 MACAULAY.
 
 EDINBURGH : PRINTED BY THOMAS CONSTABLE, 
 FOR 
 
 EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS. 
 
 LONDON HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 DUBLIN M'GLASHAN AND GILL. 
 
 GLASGOW JAMES MACLEHOSE.
 
 Jerrold, Tennyson 
 
 AND 
 
 Macaulay 
 
 WITH OTHER CRITICAL ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 JAMES HUTCHISON STIRLING, LL.D. 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'THE SECRET OF HEGEL,' ETC. 
 
 EDINBURGH: 
 EDMONSTON & DOUGLAS. 
 
 18G8. 
 
 [Ml Righh n <
 
 PR 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE, vii 
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD, 1 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON, 51 
 
 LORD MACAULAY, 112 
 
 DE QULNCEY AND COLERIDGE UPON KANT, 172 
 
 EBENEZER ELLIOTT, 225 
 
 759536
 
 PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 Of these Crit ieal Essays, the three first appeared 
 in Meliora, the Social Science Quarterly Review, 
 respectively in April 1859, October 1859, and 
 April 1860. The paper on De Quincey and 
 Coleridge appeared in the Fortnightly Review for 
 October 1867, and that on Ebenezer Elliott in the 
 Supplement to the Manchester Examiner for the 
 shortest day of the year 1850. Advantage hag 
 been taken of the opportunity afforded by re- 
 publication for the insertion of certain additions 
 and corrections. Perhaps a reader here and there 
 may like to know that the last paper was written 
 before T had gone to Germany, or even knew 
 
 ' '.'lliian. 
 
 J. H. STIRLING. 
 
 'III. I., H[)INRI-|:'.H, 
 
 Januai y 1 ■■
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 
 
 ' The Life of Douglas Jerrold," by his son, is an 
 exceUent performance. Gracefully affectionate, 
 gracefully filial, it is at the same time candid, 
 modest, and truthful. If one feels always that it 
 is a reverent and loving son that speaks, one feels 
 also that it is a sincere and loyal man. In both 
 respects, indeed, there is that in the book that 
 endears the writer to the reader. Its spirit 
 throughout is gentle and ingenuous ; and the 
 whole series of pictures it presents seems, as it 
 were, to lie pleasantly, peacefully distinct in the 
 clear, mild light of an amiable and kindly nature. 
 Well-arranged and orderly, all is lightly, skilfully 
 touched : there is grace in what is said, and there 
 is grace in what is not said. In short, the little 
 book is right acceptable, right welcome. One 
 Peels pleased and satisfied that the man finds such 
 a biographer; one feels pleased and satisfied that 
 the father owned such a son. 
 
 A
 
 2 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 
 
 Besides that knowledge of him acquired from 
 his writings, it is our fortune to have possessed, 
 in respect to Jerrold, just sufficient personal 
 acquaintance to render this life peculiarly attrac- 
 tive to us. It effects for us the rounding of the 
 picture : what was known lends a charm to what 
 was unknown ; and the latter points the former. 
 The solemn thought, too, sighs round us like a 
 ghost, that he of whom we read, he whom we 
 knew, has — in the prime of life, when the harvest 
 waved before him, ripe for the gathering — passed 
 from among us, and will no more speak to mortals ! 
 And so memories of the past mingle with the 
 pictures of the present, as if to the music of far 
 off, melancholy bells, while feelings rise within us 
 of indefinable regret, of indefinable sadness. 
 
 It is these feelings that have prompted — as we 
 hope they will accompany and guide — the follow- 
 ing notice. 
 
 The parents of Douglas Jerrold were but stroll- 
 ing players, for, even as managers of the theatre 
 at Sheerness, they could hardly arrogate a higher 
 title. That he was born in London (and the date 
 is January 3, 1803) was probably a contingency 
 due to the precarious profession of the family ; 
 for it is a fact, as well that the south of England
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 3 
 
 was its usual habitat, as that the infant Jerrold 
 was carried thither in his swaddling-clothes. The 
 first four years of his life, indeed, were spent at 
 i 'ranbrook, in Kent, where Mr. and Mrs. Samuel 
 Jerrold, patronized and protected by Sir Walter 
 and Lady James, " the great people of Angley," 
 had thankfully set up their modest theatre under 
 the rude rafters of a thatch-covered barn. The 
 earliest impressions, then, of the future wit must 
 have been those of green fresh pastures and tawdry 
 theatrical properties, of fragrant wild-flower and 
 unfragrant tallow, of the simple music of the 
 sheep -bell and the squeak of fife and fiddle. The 
 eyes of the fair-haired, red-cheeked, stout little 
 fellow must have opened round and large over 
 these antitheses, so curiously typical of the main 
 perceptions and leading imagery that characterized 
 the literary efforts of his later years. How strange 
 it must have seemed to him to pass, perhaps on 
 the occasion of a rehearsal, from the fresh com- 
 mon (his little fist full, probably, of buttercups) 
 into that squalid, murky barn, with its spectral 
 rafters, and its skeleton-like benches, and the 
 rough-hewn stage, and the coarse scenery, that 
 should represent in the evening all the grandeurs 
 of the earth ! Loving the breezy fields, and the
 
 4 DOUGLAS JEK110LD. 
 
 fragrant hedges, and the fleecy sheep, and the 
 cloud and the blue of heaven, how odd the darned 
 flesh-coloured tights must have seemed to him 
 — the great, glaring, staring, glass jewelry, the 
 pasteboard helmet, the cavalier cloak, the brag- 
 gadocio boots, the pistols, swords, and daggers ! 
 
 Nor when, at four years of age, he was removed 
 to Sheerness, could the contrasts and contrarieties 
 that still surrounded him have appeared to this 
 curious and eager little soul one whit less strik- 
 ing. For the green meadows and the woolly sheep 
 he has now the filthy streets and coarse populace 
 of one of the filthiest and coarsest of seaports. In 
 compensation, however, from the window of his 
 lonely room — in which his good granny, for secu- 
 rity, while she takes the money at the theatre, 
 locks him up nightly — he can descry, away over 
 the unsightly houses, the sea, and, on its glitter- 
 ing bosom, frigates, queening it, or mightier bulks 
 of war-ships glooming, solid, fast, like castellated 
 keeps of founded stone. 
 
 But he is not always confined now to his room 
 o' nights : when such necessity presents itself, he 
 too, supporting some suitable role, must do duty 
 on the boards. Kean himself, then little bigger 
 or better than a blackguard boy, has, as Eolla,
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 5 
 
 carried this infant to the footlights. How the 
 quick, susceptible little fellow must have looked 
 and wondered at the scenes he saw ! The benches, 
 now no longer ghastly and spectral in the day- 
 light, but filled — filled with such faces ! — the oily 
 brown ones of several hundred Jacks, and the 
 blowsy red ones of as many Molls ! Then the 
 uproar, the whistling, the bellowing, the quarrel- 
 ling, and the trampling — the loud comments, and 
 the still louder accompaniments of the spectators ! 
 Then the green-room, and the men and women, 
 and their dressing and undressing there ! Surely 
 neither variety nor contrariety is wanting here to 
 excite and stimulate. Soon one of these strange 
 men, in that strange green-room, takes interest 
 enough in the willing little lad to teach him his 
 letters ; and soon he is able to cheer his solitude, 
 when locked up o' nights, with Roderick Ran- 
 dom and the Death of Abel. 
 
 "What a strange web of influences it is here 
 given us to see ! What strange and contradictory 
 materials must have constituted the thinking fur- 
 niture of that poor little prisoner! The sheep- 
 b'-ll, and the fresh meadows, and all the sweet 
 scents and sights and sounds of country life are 
 still dear to his memory ; and out there, far away
 
 6 DOUGLAS JEREOLD. 
 
 before him, is the mighty sea ! But under him 
 are the filthy streets, and the mean houses, and 
 the meaner people ! And again, but just at hand, 
 there is that rude playhouse, where the life he 
 knows so well is now at its ruddiest ! Then the 
 books he reads, Roderick Random and the Death 
 of Abel! 
 
 We must bear in mind, too, at what an epoch 
 it is he lives ; we must bear in mind that these 
 are the days of Austerlitz and Trafalgar ; when 
 the armies of Napoleon are dominant on every 
 land, and the fleets of Nelson vigilant in every 
 sea. It is a mighty hour, and the minds of men 
 are mightily stirred. Throughout all England 
 there is but one element, and it is enthusiasm — 
 enthusiasm for our sea-victories and enthusiasm 
 for our sea-heroes — enthusiasm which leaps out 
 in every look, tone, gesture of every man that 
 meets his fellow on the street — enthusiasm that 
 is caught up, shared, and declaimed nightly by 
 every one of those poor actors within the poor 
 little theatre of Sheerness. It is not wonderful, 
 then, that he, too, the quick, spirited little Jerrold 
 should, in such circumstances, acquire a feverish 
 longing for the sea ; for it is a quick, spirited 
 little Jerrold : no sickly, puny cageling, dying of
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 7 
 
 the pip, is this, but a stout, vigorous little fellow, 
 with plenty of indignant vehemence in him, and 
 an instantaneous, instinctive impulse, not to shrink 
 when attacked, but to stand up fiercely for him- 
 self. The sea and its contrasts, then, are the 
 next experiences of little Jerrold ; but before we 
 follow him thither we must advert to yet another 
 source of contrast that lay for him in the char- 
 acters of his parents. 
 
 His mother was young ; his father was old — 
 older than the very grandmother ; for the Mrs. 
 Samuel Jerrold of whom we speak was the second 
 wife of her lord, and the wife's mother was the 
 junior of the wife's husband. It is she, Douglas's 
 mother, who is the soul of the family, the soul 
 of the theatre also ; and much reason she has to 
 keep her wits about her, not for the sake of the 
 young ravens only (she has two boys and two 
 girls), but for that of her aged partner also. He, 
 for his part, the good old man, has been cuffed, 
 and huffed, and buffeted in this sad world, and 
 in that sad calling of his, till he is as mild, and 
 meek, and pliant as well-kneaded dough — as limp 
 as manipulated pasteboard — and is content and 
 happy in the quiet of whatever out-of-the-way 
 corner the swirls and eddies of the draught may
 
 8 DOUGLAS JEKEOLD. 
 
 chance to sweep him to. He plays any character 
 — Richmond or the Ghost in Hamlet — for his 
 place now is thankfully in any gap that the 
 exigencies of the occasion may present. He is 
 happy, the good, quiet, well-kneaded Samuel, if 
 things will just get along without stopping : he 
 likes the fireside ; he likes the repose of a quiet 
 novel ; he likes the serenity of a pensive pot of 
 purl. His peculiar glory and his pride, however, 
 the firm fundament of his life in this world, the 
 soil on which he grows — what we may call his 
 secret — is a pair of pumps. Pumps ! yes ; but 
 then they are the pumps of Garrick ; and they 
 are still alive with the energy of the immortal 
 sole. Poor old man ! how one sympathizes with 
 him ! How one rejoices, as he rejoices, in the 
 rock of those shoes, on which he can so securely 
 found himself ! How one delights to know that 
 his poor storm-buffeted bark had such an anchor 
 to let down and ride at ! As one thinks of all 
 those cuffings, and huffings, and buffetings, and 
 of the good, limp, pliant nature into which they 
 have pressed, and turned, and kneaded him, one 
 is glad to think that such an undeniable foun- 
 tain of consolation was conceded him as this of 
 Garrick's shoes.
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 9 
 
 Douglas does not seem to have enjoyed much 
 attention from his mother. She, poor woman, 
 had doubtless enough to do, for, as the phrase is, 
 all devolved on her; and in after years, while 
 the good, easy old man is left by the fireside, we 
 get glimpses of her flitting busily hither and 
 thither on provincial engagements. 
 
 The maternal grandmother, Mrs. Eeid, whose 
 maiden name was Douglas, seems to have been 
 the only one from whom little Jerrold received, 
 during the whole of his infancy and boyhood, 
 any regular and special guidance. She seems to 
 have been Scotch ; and from her, doubtless, little 
 Douglas inherited, not his Scotch name only, but 
 his Scotch blood also ; for that perfervidum in- 
 genivm ascribed by Buchanan to the Scots was 
 here, south of the Tweed, in the vehement in- 
 dividuality of Douglas Jerrold, as perfectly ex- 
 emplified as ever, north of the Tweed, in any of 
 the children proper of the ancient Caledonia. 
 
 One other point, which must have influenced 
 the thoughts and feelings of our young ambitious 
 aspirant, we must yet notice before following him 
 to his ship — it is the absence of a pedigree. Mr. 
 Blanchard Jerrold, as he says himself, has not 
 " been at much pains to elaborate an ancestral
 
 10 DOUGLAS JERROLB. 
 
 tree ;" the strolling player is traced no farther 
 than his own father, a horse-dealer at Hack- 
 ney ; and all the facts of the case are as 
 freely, frankly, and unreservedly stated as it has 
 ever been our lot to witness on the part of any 
 one discoursing in these " old-clo' " days of his 
 own birth and parentage. Still human nature 
 will be human nature ; and there is a touch or 
 two here that are human nature itself. We trust, 
 however, that we shall be seen to be merely yield- 
 ing to the temptation of a naturalist, and not, in 
 reality, unkindly, when we just slightly accen- 
 tuate a phrase or two in the family legend. 
 
 " The son," proceeds the said legend, referring 
 to Douglas's father, the strolling player, " the son 
 of Mr. Jerrold, of Hackney (who was a large 
 dealer in horses, at a time when horses were 
 eagerly sought, in consequence of the long-con- 
 tinued wars), and the descendant of yet richer fore- 
 fathers, the poor stroller must have remembered 
 somewhat bitterly the fact, to which he often 
 referred, that he had played in a barn upon the 
 estate that ivas rightfully his own. More of his 
 family he never communicated to his children." 
 There are strokes here that must come home, if 
 not to the consciousness, at least to the memory
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 1 1 
 
 of many a reader ; but we are sure that all will, 
 as we do, only smile with kindly recognition on 
 the family myth, and respect the family euphem- 
 ism. As some consolation to humanity in general, 
 however, whether treed or treeless, we may hint 
 that there exist few gentle houses, few noble 
 houses, ay, few royal houses, where the family 
 myths are as innocent and the family euphemisms 
 as free from vulgarity. 
 
 Jerrold's novitiate in the navy — for, as we 
 have hinted, after some five years of reading, 
 writing, and arithmetic, and just eleven years of 
 age, to the sea he went — was neither of long 
 duration nor of much vicissitude. He entered as 
 a first-class volunteer, and remained but twenty- 
 two months in the service. One year and four 
 months he spent at the Xore, on board a guard- 
 ship ; and only during six months had he any 
 experience of active service. We can fancy with 
 what pride, with what hopes, with what aspira- 
 tions, he first trod the deck of a man-of-war. 
 Still, the gloss of novelty once dulled, the ways 
 of the ship once mastered, and the characters of 
 those around him once comprehended, life on 
 board must have appeared to his eager, restless 
 nature but wearisome and monotonous. The
 
 12 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 
 
 captain seems to have been kind to him ; for he 
 allows him to read Buffon in the cabin, and in- 
 dulges him in the recreation of a flight of pigeons. 
 Without doubt, also, little Douglas employed un- 
 ceasingly both those sharp eyes and those quick 
 ears of his, and stored up daily in his memory 
 picture after picture and thought after thought. 
 Still he must have sighed for active service. 
 Whether he liked it, when he had an oppor- 
 tunity of judging, scarcely appears; but it seems 
 he thought it his duty in after life, when con- 
 sulted by any young aspirant, rather to dissuade 
 than encourage. Life must have been uncom- 
 fortable enough, one would think, during the six 
 months that— visiting Ostend, Texel, Heligoland, 
 and Cuxhaven the while — he was tossed in that 
 little brig the ' Ernest,' from the Thames to the 
 Elbe and from the Elbe to the Thames again. 
 His hammock was stolen, and he had to sleep as 
 he could. He had his disgraces and his diffi- 
 culties, his haps and his mishaps ; but no event 
 of any importance distinguished the short career 
 of the little middy. He saw a man flogged — saw 
 and sickened as he saw — and the brutality stuck 
 to his memory. He transports from Belgium a 
 number of the wounded of Waterloo ; and has an
 
 DOUGLAS JEKKOLD. 13 
 
 opportunity of hearing something of war from 
 those who had seen and suffered. 
 
 There are lessons involved here that we find 
 turning up in many a page of the future author. 
 His heart must have been at the bottom very 
 tender; for that lacerated sailor and these wounded 
 soldiers have engraved themselves deeply there. 
 Other lessons, also, he doubtless learned. These 
 were the days of brutal fun, of ferocious jocosity; 
 Douglas was proud, of purer heart and higher 
 intellect, we may believe, than any of his mates, 
 and vehemently indignant at inj ustice ; his frame, 
 too, though stout and active, could not have been 
 brawny : many cruelties must he have suffered, 
 many mortifications borne. If young gentlemen 
 were at all constituted then as they are every- 
 where now-a-days, his antecedents of birth must 
 have been often enough flung in his face, and 
 awakened in his breast the keenest and fiercest 
 of emotions. The teachings of experience were 
 here in abundance then. 
 
 Altogether, though so far as book-learning is 
 concerned, he is as yet not very far advanced, 
 and has no acquirements but reading, writing, and 
 arithmetic, still we may, without hesitation, assert 
 that, as regards insight into this practical world
 
 14 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 
 
 and the conditions of existence, young Jerrold is 
 wiser, riper, and maturer than many a much older 
 youth who, as yet, has only learned and learned, 
 and read and read, within the walls of schools 
 and colleges. 
 
 And conscious of this ripe experience, as well 
 as proud of his increased strength and stature, 
 must have been our gallant little middy of 
 thirteen, as, leaving his ship for ever, he stepped 
 once again ashore at Sheerness to greet his rela- 
 tives. But, ah ! how sad that greeting ! Hot 
 tears must have fallen on his cheeks with the 
 kisses of his friends, for to them the world is 
 changed. The theatre is broken up ; the family 
 is ruined ; the good old manager has no consola- 
 tion longer even in the shoes of Garrick ; for 
 neither he nor they will ever tread the boards 
 again. A sad reverse for them — a fearful reverse 
 for the proud young midshipman ! The result is 
 — after two months of an eclipsed existence in 
 familiar Sheerness, while the young wife has gone 
 bravely forth to seek some other resting-place 
 for her helpless children and her equally helpless 
 husband — a migration to London. 
 
 Broad Court, Bow Street, where the wanderers 
 found shelter, could have offered no very cheering
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 15 
 
 aspect to the high-hearted, crushed young middy; 
 but, like some scenes we have seen already, it cut 
 itself deep in his brain, and was stamped, in after 
 days, on many a vigorous paragraph. Broad 
 Court was a poor court ; and every reader that 
 has seen such has already before his eyes the pro- 
 per picture. The houses are, of course, wretched, 
 and the population teeming; but the character- 
 istic feature is the children — ragged and dirty, 
 but hot and loud with game or battle in the 
 midst of scpaalor, filth, and meanness. Jerrold, 
 to be sure, was but thirteen ; and, at that age, 
 the heart is usually light, while the memory is 
 but short for anything better or worse than the 
 present : still he was, in intellect and experience, 
 riper, older than his years, and his proud nature 
 must have been deeply galled. Picture him, in 
 such a place, amid such a population, skulking — 
 skulking from the door, to the door — still in his 
 uniform ! 
 
 What all this taught Jerrold can be read in 
 every page of his writings. Hitherto, his life has 
 been a life of contrasts : at Cranbrook, at Sheer- 
 ness, on board the ' Namur,' on board the ' Ernest,' 
 — wherever he has been, contrast lias been forced 
 upon him. For Douglas Jerrold, the universe has
 
 16 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 
 
 been cast on the principle of contradiction : what 
 the Germans call the Satz of Widerspruch has 
 ruled his horoscope. But here, in Broad Court, it 
 is that the contrast of contrasts, the antithesis of all 
 antitheses, impresses itself on the heart and brain 
 of Jerrold. Here it is that all the mighty mean- 
 ing of the words Eich and Poor begins to unfold 
 itself. And from this time on, this contrast 
 will continue to impress itself, and this meaning 
 to unfold itself ; for pain, privation, labour, will 
 be the constant companions of this proud, eagle- 
 hearted youth for many years yet. Poverty — 
 ignorance, vice, crime ; riches — selfishness, inso- 
 lence, arrogance ; the inequalities of fate ; the 
 injustices of fortune : these are the cuds he 
 ruminates, till the fierce thoughts of the vehement, 
 indignant man leap into the lightnings of keen 
 and passionate speech. 
 
 Meantime bread has to be won ; and little 
 Douglas is apprenticed to a printer. Whatever 
 regrets the late midshipman may have felt on 
 this occasion, we may be sure that, in view of 
 Broad Court, the parting with his uniform was 
 not one of them. His, too, is, after all, a suscep- 
 tible, impressible nature ; and he soon reconciles 
 himself to his new position. Nay, he takes a
 
 DOUGLAS JEFxROLP. 17 
 
 colour from it : books become mighty favourites 
 with him ; and he acquires an enthusiasm for 
 literature. It is probable, indeed, that an enthu- 
 siasm of this kind was not difficult to kindle in 
 the reader of Roderick Random and The Death 
 of Abel. How eagerly, how indomitably, he 
 throws himself on the new pursuits ! Early as 
 the printer is obliged to go to work, still earlier 
 rises the student, and applies himself to his. At 
 meal-times, too, his books undergo a longer mas- 
 tication than his victuals. Finally, at night, the 
 body, after its twelve hours of drudgery, may be 
 wearied if it will, but the mind shall not ; and 
 the evening shall end as the morning began, with 
 books. And what are those books ? Ifitisforhis 
 poor old father, now invalided in the chimney- 
 corner, that the good-hearted lad is pleased to 
 read aloud volume after volume of Scott's Novels, 
 it is for himself that he reads Shakespeare, reads 
 him till he has him by heart and can quote every 
 line of him. But there are drier studies necessary 
 for his assumption of a literary position; and 
 these shall not affright him. Burns, in penitent 
 moments, when resolved on steadiness, would re- 
 tain, ever and anon, "to his Latin again." Bu1 
 rold, with greater patience, with greater per- 
 il
 
 18 DOUGLAS JEEROLD. 
 
 severance, remained by his Latin, and, tcr a con- 
 siderable extent, as his whole dialect and general 
 use of words testify, conquered it. Nor Latin 
 only : French, Italian, German, were all in suc- 
 cession objects of study with him, and all of them 
 more or less acquired. Brave, then, as the little 
 midshipman on board the 'Namur' or the 'Ernest' 
 may have been, braver, far braver, we may fear- 
 lessly pronounce this wearied stripling of a printer, 
 in his mean little room in Broad Court, with the 
 Latin Grammar in his hand. 
 
 We are glad to learn, however, that the due 
 meed of relaxation is not denied him. Orders for 
 the theatres are not rare, as is to be expected, in 
 such a family ; and we may readily surmise that 
 one member, at all events, would neither refuse 
 nor neglect them. These are the days, too, be it 
 recollected, of Kean and Kemble ; and the aspir- 
 ing stripling is privileged alternately to glow and 
 quiver before the grandest Hamlets and Othellos 
 the world has ever seen. These theatrical experi- 
 ences bias his literature : it is for the stage he 
 would write ; it is as the guild-brother of Shake- 
 speare he would appear. So to dramas he applies 
 himself. He was only fifteen when his first piece 
 was written ; and only eighteen when he had the
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 19 
 
 pleasure of seeing it performed — when he had the 
 pleasure of seeing it succeed. A very singular 
 and rare experience for so young a lad ! 
 
 But he is not one-sided in his labours : besides 
 dramatic, there are other literary efforts ; and 
 these, too, succeed. Copies of verses he has the 
 bliss to see printed in the magazines ; and one 
 morning his master, who seems to have been editor 
 as well as proprietor of a newspaper, puts into his 
 hands, to be set by him in type — " joy !" — an 
 article of his own ! accompanied, too, by an invita- 
 tion to write again ! Surely the world is open- 
 ing for our brave apprentice, and his fortune near ! 
 Ah, no ! it is but the gleam of sunshine in the 
 early morning of a dismal day. If in the brain 
 or breast of the successful boy- contributor, of the 
 successful boy-dramatist, any wind of arrogance, 
 any air of presumption have developed itself, most 
 rudely will it be shaken out of him — most bitterly 
 will it be expiated. For there await him years of 
 incessant labour, years of frustrated hope, years of 
 cruel disappointment, before his name shall emerge 
 from obscurity and his place be fixed. 
 
 But these bitter experiences shall not be all 
 unsweetened, and these dark days not all un- 
 cheered ; he Bhall have a friend, and he shall
 
 20 DOUGLAS JEEKOLD. 
 
 have a wife. Of the latter, whom he marries 
 when he is but one-ancl-tweiity, we are not em- 
 powered to speak. The son could not with pro- 
 priety have expatiated on the virtues of the liv- 
 ing mother : the tone of the dedication, however, 
 and the affectionate modesty of every word he 
 uses when obliged to speak of her, assure us of 
 the esteem in which he holds her, and supply a 
 basis for that of the public also. Fancy will add 
 the rest. The soothment of young love — the con- 
 solation of an absolute sympathy— the strength 
 of purpose inspired by the consciousness of re- 
 sponsibility, — these and all other skiey influences 
 that troop in the train of marriage which the 
 heart has led, each of us shall picture for himself. 
 
 But let us linger a moment over the early 
 friend : it is Laman Blanchard, whose grave is 
 now no longer lonely, for that of Jerrold — the 
 friend of his youth, the friend of his heart — lies 
 there beside it. And it is fitting that, dead, they 
 should thus lie near each other, they who, living, 
 were bound together in such intimate and familiar 
 union. 
 
 The soft, gentle, Shelley-like Blanchard seems 
 to have looked to his harder, bolder, and more 
 resolute companion, as to the master-mind that
 
 DOUGLAS JEKROLD. 21 
 
 had a right and possessed the power to sway and 
 guide him. His pure, open, unselfish nature 
 directly acknowledges this. In 182G, he writes 
 to Jerrold : " Such as my nature is, it is not too 
 much to say that it has been almost moulded by 
 you ; and certainly of late years, nothing has 
 been admitted into it that has not received your 
 stamp and sanction." Then further on in the 
 same letter, it is even with feminine tact that he 
 writes : " If you think I can share my mind with 
 others as I have done with you, let me refer you 
 to a passage in ' Childe Harold,' commencing — 
 
 ' Oh ! known the earliest and esteemed the most.''" 
 
 There are allusions here and there too in this 
 correspondence, to quarrels and to reconciliations 
 of quarrels, that are particularly instructive and 
 
 ^gestiva It is not friends, in fact, we see ; it 
 is a pair of lovers ! Blanchard is the lady, and 
 in her loving, innocent spontaneousness, she is 
 perpetually giving unconscious offence to her 
 exacting, irritable, and somewhat perverse lord; 
 she is, ever and anon, startled at his moody 
 jealousies, alarmed by hia fierce looks, and full of 
 wonder as to whal she had done ; her allusions to 
 " jarrings when we meel in company, and a con
 
 22 DOUGLAS JEKKOLD. 
 
 straint when we are alone " are peculiarly touch- 
 ing, and faithfully depict the whole case. It is a 
 pretty love-quarrel, in short, a pretty miff ; and 
 from this troubling of the waters we understand 
 both friends better. 
 
 We are glad, then, that Jerrold has such friends 
 to cheer his battle — for to him life is a battle, and 
 this world the field of a most unequal fight. All 
 the years of his early manhood are but one series 
 of ingrate toils and unacknowledged labours. Tor 
 magazines and journals he writes scores upon 
 scores of articles ; and for the theatres, a whole 
 host of pieces. Of these latter, some fifty have 
 been specially enumerated ; and fully thirty seem 
 to have been written before their author could 
 have counted as many years. Some of these, like 
 " Black- eyed Susan," are eminently successful, 
 replenishing the coffers of vulgar, dissipated, 
 greedy managers, but bringing to their author a 
 renewal only of neglect, disappointment, and in- 
 justice. Throughout all these years, in fact, up 
 almost to his connexion with Punch, in 1841, 
 we see him, a lean, pale, hard, exasperated little 
 figure, standing by a gulf, over which he hopes 
 presently to be able to pass by means of the 
 masses of paper which he flings in ; but, alas !
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 23 
 
 the remorseless black maw swallows them all up, 
 like snow, before his eyes ; and there burst from 
 his lips the fiery imprecations of a tearful wrath, 
 and the fierce invectives of a scornful indignation. 
 Few authors have ever undergone a more pro- 
 tracted ordeal or passed through a longer novitiate 
 than Jerrold. And when, at last, his bark did — 
 after veerings, and tackirigs, warpings-in, and 
 warpings-out, in the dirtiest weather and the 
 most intricate of channels — reach the open sea, 
 and the fog rose up and showed the shoals behind 
 and the whole ocean of success in front, it was 
 wonderful to find it still so hale and hearty, still 
 so true and cheery, still so sound and pure at the 
 core, if at the same time, also, it must be con- 
 fessed, somewhat dull and indifferent, somewhat 
 sceptical and incredulous as to the advantages of 
 the voyage at all, and inclined rather to drop 
 anchor and enjoy the sunshine. 
 
 The products of his literary activity during this 
 period need hardly occupy us. In later life, they 
 were, for the most part, condemned as worthless 
 by their own author, who spoke even of the re- 
 markably successful " Black-eyed Susan," and the 
 equally successful " Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lec- 
 tures," as trash and lollipop, and desired to assume
 
 24 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 
 
 the honours of paternity for such works only as 
 " St. Giles and St. James," " Time works Won- 
 ders," "A Man made of Money," and " The Chro- 
 nicles of Clovernook." Even of these latter works, 
 it does not enter within the scope of our design to 
 speak in any detail at present. We feel more 
 occupied with the man than his works, and would 
 use the latter only to demonstrate and illustrate 
 the former. Indeed, it is doubtful if even these 
 latter works possess themselves any very certain 
 germ of an enduring vitality. For the conditions 
 of literature are involved, now-a-days, in processes 
 of transformation that are as yet neither ex- 
 plained nor explored ; and there is now the ever- 
 increasing possibility of the existence of both 
 talent and genius — clothed, too, in forms that, 
 two or three generations ago, would have ap- 
 peared marvels magnificent as palaces of Aladdin 
 — but without the least chance of either emi- 
 nence or permanence of place in the progres- 
 sion of the ages. Every reader of experience is 
 aware of examples even in the great world ; and 
 there is hardly a circle in the kingdom but can 
 point to literary powers that seem but as seed 
 flung on the rocks or dropped on the roads. And, 
 indeed, it is surprising with what equanimity
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 25 
 
 they who recognise and lament the injustice ac- 
 quiesce in the arrangement, and neglect the 
 neglected. That this may be the fate of Jerrold, 
 is, at least, to be apprehended. His prominence 
 in the world was certainly attributable rather to 
 extrinsic than intrinsic causes, though, of course, 
 the latter are even prodigally present. At all 
 events, we may say with assurance that, on the 
 whole — despite one or two exceptions, which are 
 themselves but temporary, perhaps — Jerrold' s 
 literary works have never struck deep root into 
 public estimation, or enjoyed any very extended 
 genuine popularity. Jerrold, no doubt, issued 
 from that laborious novitiate of more than twenty 
 years a finished literary athlete, agile, supple, 
 swift, with the power of accomplishing the most 
 astonishing feats, as it were spontaneously, almost 
 involuntarily. Certainly the sinew of writing had, 
 by that terrible practice, developed itself, as he 
 said himself, " like the smith's arm." But were 
 there no drawbacks to this marvellous facility, 
 no shortcomings in this wonderful ability ? Are 
 there no such things as the evils of premature, 
 are there no such things as the evils of incessant 
 authorship? Is it true that the more a man 
 writes, the better and ever lunger the better he
 
 26 DOUGLAS JEREOLD. 
 
 will write ? Is it true, that the sooner he begins 
 the better he will end ? We doubt both posi- 
 tions ; we doubt the advantages of a man becom- 
 ing a literary athlete at all, unless, indeed, his 
 function be a mere matter of business, and his 
 place that of scribe to some daily or weekly 
 journal. If a man have any higher possibility 
 than this in him— if it is to the giant, Genius, 
 that he is to give birth — it is certainly not by 
 becoming a literary athlete that he will accom- 
 plish his deliverance in any adequate or satisfac- 
 tory form. The feats of the one athlete, like those 
 of the other, however dazzling their facility, have 
 only a temporary and extrinsic value ; their secret 
 too is soon discovered, and the repetition palls. 
 
 We have done our best to love the writings of 
 the brave Jerrold ; but images and ideas like 
 these will ever intrude, and we wander from the 
 book to theorize endlessly on the evils of prema- 
 ture and professional authorship. And yet we 
 admit at once that Jerrold is a writer who has 
 widely influenced the literary, political, and social 
 opinions of his period ; that he is an able writer, 
 a vigorous writer ; a man as dexterous with his 
 pen as any master of fence with his rapier ; a 
 coiner and utterer of richest, raciest, subtlest say-
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 27 
 
 inga We admit, too, that with the names of 
 Dickens and Thackeray that of Jerrold also must 
 be always associated ; but even while conceding 
 him this parity of place beside both, we assert 
 that this place has mainly a mere external founda- 
 tion, and that his writings have never exercised a 
 tithe of the influence or acquired a tithe of the 
 renown of those of either. 
 
 Like that of some of the wits of the bvgone 
 century, his fame, indeed, may, at the last, prove 
 an affair of tradition rather than document. He 
 is essentially, even in his best writings, the sayer 
 of good things, of strong things — the wit of clubs. 
 His works are not so much carefully- meditated, 
 carefully - elaborated, carefully - finished literary 
 wholes, in which the fervid soul of an original 
 author has accomplished the embodiment of the 
 deep feelings and deep thoughts which he knows 
 to be his own, which seem to him to have been 
 born with him, which seem to him to live and 
 move in him, tormenting him to speech — not so 
 much these as collections rather of hard, sharp, 
 effective hits in words. He writes, saccade, as if in 
 blows. We feel as if we had to do with a master 
 of attack whose rapid upper-cuts and unexpected 
 back-handers were perpetually surprising and
 
 28 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 
 
 confounding us. His style and manner faithfully 
 reflect his experiences, and declare him to have 
 been a fighter, a bitter fighter, against adverse 
 fortune and opposing circumstances. As we said 
 already, contrast reigns ; contrast is his secret. 
 Of the three laws of association, one has no diffi- 
 culty in deciding which it is that dominates the 
 thoughts of Jerrold. It is from the perception of 
 contrast that he rises on the wings of scorn and 
 indignation to dart the lightnings of his epigram, 
 and scatter lavishly the imagery of antithesis. 
 
 How keen he is, how bright, how swift, how 
 polished ! the points in his writing are like the 
 points of needles. One feels sometimes, indeed, 
 as if Jerrold thought in needles — wrote in needles. 
 His very handwriting, " smaller than printed 
 types," seems to have been the work of just such 
 an implement. But if Jerrold dealt in needles, 
 one must say it was a trade he was driven to. 
 One could not eat the bread of the flinty Davidge 
 or the brassy Elliston without being converted 
 largely into iron ; whence it would be some solace 
 to fabricate needles wherewith to pierce these 
 false giants to the core. How beneath the swift 
 puncture of the all but invisible weapon they 
 must have winced and winced again !
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 29 
 
 But his living depended on these giants ; and 
 this was the secret of his defects both as man and 
 writer. Oh, it is fine work to fight a giant, but 
 most miserable bondage to eat the bread of a 
 giant ! Under such bondage, the brightest, bravest 
 soul will become at length hardened and embit- 
 tered. Under such bondage, the very richest 
 writer will become poor ; for the necessities of 
 the moment press ; he must write and write — 
 and ever for the same poor pittance — till all the 
 germinal thoughts of his fresh young mind are 
 wastefully dug up and scattered, to die of inani- 
 tion, over a score of reams, leaving at last, for the 
 enchanted palaces he had projected and the big 
 soul he had hoped to grow to, nothing without 
 him but an endless chaos of piecemeal stones, 
 and nothing within him but — the trick of the 
 trade ! 
 
 Such is the residt of extempore literature. 
 "When success arrives, all one's Promethean fire 
 is well-nigh burned out ; one has well-nigh ceased 
 to believe in it; there are no longer any of those 
 cherished secrets in the heart for which one 
 hoped a glorious utterance. Literature is no 
 Longer a realm of Faery ; no longer a magic 
 ion, in which one's young resolves are all at
 
 30 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 
 
 length accomplished ; in which the mighty good 
 one planned is now achieved and realized ; in 
 which one stands up to one's full height ; in which 
 one pours out, in free and unimpeded accents, 
 one's whole glorious inner being. It is now a 
 trade ; a thing dull, dead, mechanical ; it no 
 longer glows, it is made to seem to glow. 
 
 One has written so much, too, that one learns 
 economy. A thought is not to be lost, at so much 
 a page. We no longer dart an idea ; we seize it 
 as it rises ; we turn it and twist it ; we smite it 
 and strike it ; and so long as one spark will leap, 
 or one clang ring, we will continue to strike it 
 and smite it. We know that figures in our 
 fingers are tortured ghosts ; we hear them cry to 
 us : " Let me go now, then ! — have you not done 
 with me yet ? — for mercy's sake, good sir, let me 
 pass !" An example will explain this : — 
 
 " Jingo was born for greatness. He had in his 
 character the great element of a great general — 
 a great statesman ; marvellous self-possession. 
 Meaner boys would have been in a flutter of im- 
 patience ; not so with the pupil of Tom Blast. 
 Hence, he sat under the bed, with critical ear, 
 listening to the hard breathing of the drunken 
 man, who soon be^an to snore with such discor-
 
 DOUGLAS JEEEOLD. 3 1 
 
 dant vehemence that Jingo feared the sleeper 
 might awaken his bottle friend, Mr. Folder. Jingo 
 knew it not ; but his testimony would have been 
 very valuable to Mrs. Tangle ; for the snoring of 
 her husband was one of the disquietudes of that 
 all-suffering woman ; the rather, too, that the 
 man constantly denied his tendency to the habit. 
 He never snored. Of course not ; nobody ever 
 does. Now Jingo might have been a valuable 
 witness on the side of Mrs. Tangle, who could 
 never succeed, talk as she would, in impressing 
 her husband with a sense of his infirmity. On 
 the contrary, her accusation was wont to be re- 
 pelled as a gross slander ; an imputation un- 
 worthy of a wife and a woman. It is bad enough 
 to endure an evil, but to have the nuisance treated 
 as a malicious fiction makes it intolerable. And 
 Mrs. Tangle felt it so. Of this, however, by the 
 way. lieturn we to Jingo. 
 
 " With knowing, delicate ear, the child con- 
 tinued to listen to the stertorous agent. At length, 
 tlif boy crept from beneath the bed, and treading 
 a- lightly as ;i fairy at a bridal couch, he made 
 his way to a window. Now, had anybody at- 
 tempted to open it for any honest purpose — had 
 Molly, the maid, for instance, sought to raise it
 
 32 DOUGLAS JEEROLD. 
 
 merely to give her opinion of the moon and the 
 night to any rustic astronomer below— it is very 
 certain that the window would have stuck, and 
 jarred, and rattled ; it was too old and crazy to be 
 made a comfortable confidant in any such foolish 
 business. Ten to one, but it had waked the 
 mistress of the Olive Branch, who would inevi- 
 tably have nudged the master. And now a rob- 
 bery was to be done — a most tremendous robbery 
 — perhaps to be further solemnized by homicide 
 — for who should say that the Parcae, who wove 
 the red tape of the life of Tangle, attorney-at-law, 
 were not about to snip it ? — who shall say that 
 so awful a crisis did not at that moment impend 
 —and yet silently went the window up ; easily, 
 smoothly, as though greased by some witch ; 
 smeared with fat ' from murderer's gibbet.' It is 
 a pity that the devil makes evil so very easy to 
 the meanest understanding. 
 
 " Two or three minutes passed, not more, and 
 Tom Blast thrust his head and one of his legs 
 into the chamber " x 
 
 We shall be glad if the reader turn up and 
 read at greater length the original for himself. 
 Our limits will not allow us a longer extract : 
 
 1 From "St. Giles and St. James," chapter xxii.
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 33 
 
 we hope, however, that, such as it is, it will suffice 
 to render our remarks intelligible, and that the 
 method and secret of Jerrold's progression in 
 composition will now rise up more or less clear to 
 every reader. The snoring, it is seen, furnishes 
 one paragraph, and the opening of the window 
 another. Then it will be found, that two other 
 paragraphs of similar digressive moralities con- 
 trive to unwind themselves, while Tom Blast is 
 kept astride of the window-sill. And even when 
 allowed to descend, access to the money is still, 
 and for a long time yet, denied him. The robber, 
 like the author himself, is not at all in the smallest 
 hurry ; he, too, must moralize. Light in hand, he 
 considers Tangle with the most meditative calm ; 
 a vein of philosophic reflection develops itself in 
 the housebreaker ; and so, paragraph after para- 
 graph, now in soliloquy and now in dialogue, con- 
 tinues to evolve itself out of the most extraneous 
 material. The writer, in fact, seems to be thank- 
 ing heaven for every new stick, stone, or straw he 
 can lug into his service ; and it is only after full 
 i s of mere moralization that the informa- 
 t i < iii i- finally vouchsafed us that Jingo, having 
 bees concealed under the bed, opens the window 
 to Tom J'. last, who, forcing the closet containing 
 
 c
 
 34 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 
 
 the gold, succeeds in robbing Mr. Tangle while 
 asleep drunk. Is it at all wonderful that we 
 should get impatient at such a manner of telling 
 a story ? Is it at all wonderful that, again and 
 again, in the course of these eight pages, the reader, 
 on the rack, longing for a step, a stir, a move for- 
 ward of any kind, should exclaim with Hamlet : 
 " Begin, murderer ; leave thy damnable faces, and 
 begin " ? 
 
 Nay, the author himself appears to side with 
 the reader, for he says : " The thoughtless reader 
 may deem it strange — unnatural — that a man 
 about to perpetrate gibbet-work should thus coolly 
 delay, and after his own fashion moralize. But 
 then the reader must ponder on the effect of long 
 
 habit. In his first battle, Julius Csesar ." 
 
 And then we have another digression ; and so, 
 after all, it is not the position of the reader that 
 is improved, it is that of the writer — by another 
 paragraph ! Let it be understood, however, that 
 we do not deny the quality of the writing as 
 writing ; it is always hard, firm, terse, clear, trans- 
 parent, admirable writing. But then, it is only 
 writing ; it is not thought. The skill is great ; 
 but then it is only skill : it is not art ; it is 
 husiness.
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 35 
 
 We have not chosen our extract with malice 
 prepense ; we took it at a venture. Jerrold's 
 manner of •writing will be found, throughout his 
 works, generally similar. If there be any excep- 
 tion it is in the inaugural chapters, which, for 
 the most part, are written freshly, flowingly, 
 triumphantly, as if from a full heart and a full 
 soul Jerrold, indeed, is always buoyant, elastic, 
 alert at the start : he is not long-breathed, how- 
 ever ; he soon flags — inspiration fails, and work 
 grows drudgery. 1 Then it is that the writing 
 becomes similar to that which we have quoted. 
 It looks artificial and mechanical ; the deft hand 
 turns it and turns it till it shines again, but the 
 liaiicl seems only there ; the heart seems other- 
 where : the heart, in fact, seems to be constantly 
 saying to itself : " This is weariness of the flesh ; 
 this is but the trick of the trade : if I had my 
 own will it is not here I should be sitting, play- 
 ing upon words and ringing the changes upon 
 sentences !" 
 
 1 Jerrold started a monthly magazine and a weekly newspaper. 
 The course of these ventures will be found to corroborate what 
 is said above. We may add that Jerrold's politics, as seen in 
 e publications, also illustrate the man. On the great ques- 
 tions of tin- day, <>n politics proper, he feels out of his depth ; 
 :•• he can speak, In- requires some anecdote, some sully of 
 general humanity, some concrete case, just or unjust, to give him 
 -■ and a purpose.
 
 36 DOUGLAS JEKKOLD. 
 
 We find Jerrold himself confessing this in loud 
 soliloquy to the reader. In chapter xii. of " St. 
 Giles and St. James " we find him talking quite 
 misgivingly of the whole trade of fiction-spin- 
 ning ; of what we once named novel-Mowing. He 
 there, of his own tale, asks doubtingly, " if this 
 small toy of a history may be allowed to have im- 
 portant moments !" But his thought is more 
 explicitly stated here : " All this delay, we know, 
 is a gross misdemeanour committed on the reader 
 of romance : who, when two lovers meet, has all 
 his heart and understanding for them alone, and 
 cares not that the writer — their honoicred parent, 
 be it remembered — should walk out upon the fools- 
 cap and begin balancing some peacock's feather on 
 his nose!' Novelists, it must be confessed, are 
 seldom honest enough to avow their own views 
 of their own industry, and disenchant their 
 readers in this plain fashion. This sentence, in 
 fact, if taken with the context, will be found 
 quite crucial ; and it needs only to read " lovyers" 
 for " lovers," and " parients " for " parents," to 
 show up the inherent bosh of the whole business. 
 So far as Jerrold is concerned, there is a tone of 
 fatigue in the whole passage : we see the weary 
 scepticism with which he views the vanity and
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 37 
 
 inanity of spinning those ropes of barren sand 
 that now-a-daya are misnamed novels : we see the 
 bitterness and dissatisfaction with which he re- 
 cognises in his digressions and moralizations but 
 the balancing- of a feather and the trick of the 
 trade. In such slate of mind it is no wonder 
 that his analogies are often so remote and distant 
 that the) 7 appear impressed — crimped — vict armis 
 crimped into his service ; and that the writing 
 seems, at times, a precipitate, exasperated spurt, 
 as if the author, in sudden resolution, had dashed 
 the rowels into his own Hank. 
 
 We do not contemplate here any regular and 
 
 complete criticism of Jerrold's writings ; but we 
 
 must remark, in passing, that the characters and 
 
 conduct of the story display faults quite similar 
 
 to those we signalize. The characters are never 
 
 creations, and seldom portraits : these Jerichos, 
 
 and Cuttlefishes, and Canditofts, and Capsticks, 
 
 and Brighl Jems, and Tom Blasts, have no life of 
 
 their own ; tiny have the life only of their author ; 
 
 they are bnt his puppets, and discourse at his 
 
 motion and in his dialect. The conduct of the 
 
 ■ : v in general may be understood from the 
 
 • we have already quoted. The incidents 
 
 are few; each is made the most of, nor passes
 
 38 DOUGLAS JEEROLD. 
 
 till its ultimate drop is wrung. The finale is 
 merely arbitrary, and, as is to be expected, 
 comes at last by a simple pulling down of the 
 curtain. 
 
 In fact, we are carried always back to the 
 evils of premature authorship. When Jerrold 
 reached middle-life, and had acquired his audi- 
 ence, he was already blase; he had now no 
 longer enthusiasm, and hardly hope. Sitting 
 there at his desk, and having with ready alacrity 
 and prompt vigour stamped with his own brand 
 the living interests and current topics of the day 
 for the columns of Punch, it was only with 
 unwillingness, we fancy, that he turned him to 
 his other writings. These things in Punch 
 were alive ; they had the red blood of the day in 
 them : but those others, the creatures of his fancy, 
 in his other and apparently more proper tasks, 
 were but pale abstractions. The world was no 
 longer what the golden boy had dreamed it was. 
 His illusions were all gone. The evils of life 
 were too gigantic ; he heard them roaring all too 
 unappeasably around him : he could no longer 
 believe in a transforming "Presto" of the pen. His 
 fancy was no longer an inspiration ; it lay in his 
 hands a tool — a tool that he could most dexter-
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 39 
 
 ously use, but still a tool. Ever to cut and 
 carve out weapons wherewith to pierce the wrongs 
 he could no longer hope to redress, was irksome 
 to him. His past lay behind him like a fearful 
 dream. "Why should he work ? he thought. Had 
 he not worked enough ? — and he shivered. No ; 
 there in the club was the ruddy reality of life ; 
 there were living men to speak with ; there were 
 opportunity and matter for living thought and 
 living speech. So the club became his arena, and 
 the solitary chamber, deserted of the enthusiasm 
 that once had made it bright, was chill to him 
 as the cell of monk. 
 
 The estimate we have thus put upon his writ- 
 ings may appear to many much too narrow, much 
 too niggardly. We may seem to have flung but 
 coldly, summarily, into the scales the products of 
 a life for which we professed so much sympathy. 
 Formal criticism has not been our object, how- 
 ever ; and we hope that, while endeavouring to 
 trace in the tissue the thread derived from the 
 prematurity and necessity of the authorship, we 
 have not unduly depreciated the signal and 
 essential merits of the tissue itself. To that 
 genius, as well as talent, has set its stamp ; 
 and it is heavy with gems with which, hereafter,
 
 40 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 
 
 many a pilgrim will seek to decorate his own 
 plainness. The reader, we think, will easily dis- 
 cern withal that, even in the discussion of his 
 literature, we have really been working at the 
 figure of the man, and that that figure has now 
 received its final and concluding touch. Yes ; that 
 last glimpse of him, as he turned his back upon his 
 study in haste to reach his club, is the finish of the 
 picture as we designed it. We believe the reader 
 to have it in his power to see now the whole 
 growth and history of the character of Jerrold. 
 For from this time out his career offers no vicis- 
 situdes but those of literary life in general, and 
 is unmarked by a single salient incident. Why 
 chronicle his changes of residence, his changes 
 of theatres, his changes of periodicals, his 
 changes of clubs, his changes of trips and tours ? 
 Each series but marks the road he travelled from 
 penury and obscurity, through toil and suffering, 
 up to affluence and fame. It is not our part, 
 either, to follow him to that last dinner at Green- 
 wich ; and still less is it for us to intrude our 
 presence into the sad and solemn scene of the 
 8th of June 1857, when the brave soul, sur- 
 rounded by his loved ones, whispered, " This is 
 as it should be," and passed away.
 
 DOUGLAS JEREOLD. 41 
 
 One word of personal reminiscence, however, 
 shall here be added. 
 
 It has been said, that " if every one who had 
 received a kindness from the hand of Douglas 
 Jerrold flung a flower on his grave, the spot would 
 be marked by a mountain of roses." The present 
 writeT is one of those who has received such kind- 
 aesa : and he, too, would fling what flower it is his 
 to bring upon the grave. 
 
 The prospectus of the Shilling Magazine had 
 reached me, busy with professional avocations, in 
 the heart of the iron district of South Wales ; 
 and its calm, high, generous tone of universal 
 sympathy, hope, promise, spoke at once to my in- 
 most feelings. The first number corresponded to 
 the promise of the prospectus, and I could not 
 ist penning and transmitting an article to the 
 editor. In a few days after despatch of my paper, 
 I waa surprised by the receipt of a small note in 
 a hand unknown to me — in a hand altogether 
 unexampled in any correspondence I had yet seen. 
 In motion evidently facile, fluent, swift — swift 
 almost as thought itself — it was yet as distinct in 
 it- peculiar decisive obliquity as if it had been 
 en§ sharp and linn in its exquisitely 
 
 minute fineness as if the engraving implement
 
 42 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 
 
 had been the keenest of needles. " Surely," 
 thought I, "the Iliad in a nut-shell is now con- 
 ceivable." 
 
 It may readily be supposed that I opened and 
 read this note with no inconsiderable curiosity. 
 There it is now before me, that little note, in its 
 browning envelope, the delicate trenchant tracery 
 of the superscription confessing to the action of the 
 river of time. There it lies before me, and all the 
 emotions it excited are fresh again within me, fresh 
 as when on the outside of that well-known post- 
 office, in that well-known Welsh iron -valley, I first 
 opened and read it. Surprise was not confined, 
 however, to the outside only ; for if, on turning tc 
 the inside, gratification predominated, surprise still 
 held its ground. What experience I had yet had of 
 applications to the editors of magazines, had been 
 all so different, that surprise, on this occasion, 
 could hardly yield even to the gratification. 
 
 The reader shall have it, this little note. It 
 ran thus : — 
 
 "January 24, West Lodge, Putney. 
 
 " Sir, — I have the pleasure to inform you that 
 
 your paper, the , will appear in the next 
 
 number. Should you feel inclined to favour me 
 with other papers, it would be desirable that I
 
 DOUGLAS JEREOLD. 4 3 
 
 should have them as early as possible in the 
 month. — Yours faithfully, 
 
 " Douglas Jerrold." 
 
 This little note, with a few others from the 
 same hand, I cherish with peculiar care ; not, I 
 am sure, to the disapprobation of the reader. 
 
 I had sent my article in the middle of January, 
 and had expected no notice of my communication 
 even in the February number. I had looked to 
 the number for March as likely to contain the 
 word of acceptance or rejection ; and here, before 
 I had even seen the advertisement of the contents 
 of the new number, was a polite acknowledgment 
 of acceptance from the editor himself, and with 
 an invitation to send more ! 
 
 I had only twice the pleasure of seeing Douglas 
 Jerrold; the first time, in May (I think) 1846; and 
 the second time, in April 1847. On both occa- 
 sions I found him in that pleasant residence on 
 Putney Lower Common, which his son so well and 
 so lovingly describes. On the first occasion, his 
 first words to me were, "Why, I had you in mind 
 fchi day;'' and he proceeded to tell me of 
 
 hi- newspaper, which lie was then planning, ami 
 which made its dSbut in the following July. On
 
 44 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 
 
 both occasions he was as open, cordial, and unaf- 
 fected as if it was an old friend he was receiving, and 
 not a person comparatively unknown to him. He 
 moved, talked, laughed in the most perfect sponta- 
 neity of freedom. There was not a particle of 
 the "snob" in him; not a breath of the bel air 
 qui s'ajoprend si vite, and of which some of his 
 contemporaries — and even those who have dis- 
 tinguished themselves the most by felicitous 
 persiflage of said bel air — are yet signal examples. 
 No; Douglas Jerrold was no "snob;" he was a 
 child of nature, as free, and frank, and uncon- 
 strained, and so as graceful as a child. He did 
 not seem, as some do, to mutter "gentleman" 
 to himself, and stiffen himself up into the due 
 attitude and aspect. He seemed never to think 
 of being a gentleman, never to try to be a gentle- 
 man, and yet — though it cannot be said, perhaps, 
 that he had all that delicacy of feeling that results 
 only from that equality of respect for others and 
 respect for one's-self which only the true gentle- 
 man possesses in sweet equilibrium within him — 
 he can be very warrantably named, gentleman. 
 It is to be considered, also, that these two species 
 of respect, thus in calm neutrality of union, but 
 with graceful oscillation now to this side and now
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 4"> 
 
 to that, hardly finds a favourable bed in the breast 
 of a literary man ; for a literary man generally 
 feels himself all too specially an ego, a particular 
 and peculiar "I." and dreams ever of his own 
 proper mission, to the disparagement frequently 
 of that of all others. 
 
 But be this as it may, there was not a pin's 
 point of affectation in Douglas Jerrold : he was 
 natural, simple, open as a boy. He chatted away, 
 on the occasion T speak of, in the liveliest man- 
 ner, gaily, frankly, unconstrainedly, and made no 
 secret either of his thoughts and opinions, or of 
 his predilections and antipathies. And I must 
 not forget to add — for I have heard of accusations 
 against him in this respect — that the first time I 
 called, he wrote out, quite unasked, and even as 
 he chatted, a cheque, as compensation for two or 
 three articles I had sent him. He gave me, also, 
 a copy of " Clovernook," showing me, with some 
 pride, a translation of it in German, and express- 
 ing tin- decided opinion that it was his best work. 
 I luring both visits, passages in his own history 
 were as freely communicated as descriptions, 
 anecdotes, and personal traits of his contempo- 
 rary -. We talked ofCarlyle: he could not say 
 he liked his style, but he honoured him, for he
 
 46 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 
 
 was a man thoroughly in earnest, and had at heart 
 every word he wrote. Did Carlyle come out 
 among them ? Yes : he was not quite an anchor- 
 ite. He had met him at Bulwer's. They had 
 talked of Tawell (the murderer of the day). He 
 (Jerrold) had said something about the absurdity 
 of capital punishments. Carlyle had burst out : 
 " The wretch ! (Tawell) I would have had him 
 trampled to pieces under foot and buried on the 
 spot !" " But I (Jerrold) said, l Cui bono — -cui 
 bono?'" This little anecdote made quite an im- 
 pression on me. As Jerrold related it, his eye 
 seemed to see again the whole scene ; his features 
 assumed the look they must have worn, and his 
 voice the tone it must have possessed on the oc- 
 casion ; and he seemed again to be holding his 
 breath, as if again taken suddenly by surprise. 
 To me, too, the whole scene flashed up vividly : 
 the vehement Carlyle, all in fuliginous flame, and 
 the deprecating " Cui bono V* of the astounded, not 
 then vehement Jerrold ; the stronger, broader 
 conflagration appalling the weaker and narrower. 
 The house at Putney seemed just the house a 
 literary man would choose. It lay there on the 
 very hem of the green common, apparently, to me, 
 the very utmost house of the very utmost suburb
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 47 
 
 of London. The study into which you entered 
 almost directly from a very comfortable sitting- 
 room, was itself a most comfortable apartment, 
 well sized, well lit, well furnished, and the walls 
 well covered with books. 
 
 Jerrold surprised me by the exceeding short- 
 ness of his stature, which was aggravated also 
 by a considerable stoop. I do not think he could 
 have stood much over five feet. He was not 
 thin, meagre, or fragile to my eye however. His 
 foot seemed a good stout, stubby foot, the hand 
 not particularly small ; and he had quite a 
 stout appearance across the chest. Then the 
 face was not a small one : he had a particular 
 broad look across the jaw, partly owing, probably, 
 to the complete absence of whisker. The upper 
 lip was long, but the mouth remarkably well 
 formed ; flexible, expressive, moving in time to 
 every thought and feeling. I fancied it could be 
 sulky, and very sulky too. But I said as much 
 when I described his character as Scotch : for 
 what Scotchman — ourselves inclusive — is not 
 sulky ? 1 1 is nose was aquiline and Men accus4. 
 His blue eyes, naif as violets, but quick as light, 
 took quite a peculiar character from the bushy 
 eyebrows that overhung them. Then the fore-
 
 48 DOUGLAS JERKOLD. 
 
 head, well relieved by the masses of brown hair 
 carelessly flung back, was that of genius— smooth, 
 and round, and delicate, and moderately high ; for 
 gigantic brows, colossal fronts, are the perquisites 
 only of milkmen and greengrocers. 
 
 Altogether, the stature excepted, Jerrold's phy- 
 sique was such as any man might be proud of, 
 and corresponded very admirably to the rapid, 
 frank, free soul that worked within it. He was 
 closely, smoothly shaved, and showed not a vestige 
 of whisker. He was well, and even, I thought, 
 carefully clothed; his linen scrupulously clean, 
 and the trousers strapped quite trimly down on 
 the patent-leather boot. 
 
 The second time I visited him he was kind 
 enough to drive us (an American with weak eyes 
 had dropped in) up to town. During the ride he 
 was particularly chatty and agreeable. He told 
 us of " Black-eyed Susan" and Elliston ; of his 
 early marriage and difficulties. We had the 
 anecdote of the French surgeon at Boulogne, who 
 insulted his rheumatic agonies with " Ce nest rien" 
 and got his retort in return. We had erudite 
 discourses on wines, and descriptions of pleasant 
 places to live in. He told us his age. He talked 
 of the clubs. He named his salary from Punch
 
 DOUGLAS JERROLD. 40 
 
 He related the history of that publication, and 
 revealed the authors. He pointed out which 
 articles were his, which Thackeray's, and which 
 Tom Taylor's. He spoke of Percival Leigh. We 
 heard of Clarkson Stanfield, and Jerrold's own 
 experiences as middy. He chatted of Dickens, 
 Thackeray, Leigh Hunt, Tom Taylor, and Albert 
 Smith. Of all he spoke frankly, but discrimin- 
 atively, and without a trace of malice or ill- nature. 
 In answer to the inquiry, " What like was Thack- 
 eray?" he said : "He's just a big fellow with a 
 broken nose, and, though I meet him weekly at 
 the Punch dinner, I don't know him so well as I 
 know you." Dickens he mentioned with the 
 greatest affection ; and the articles of Thackeray 
 and Tom Taylor were praised in the most ungrudg- 
 ing fashion. No doubt Jerrold's feelings were 
 quick and his expressions hasty; no doubt he 
 could say bitter things and savage things ; 1 tut 
 still I believe his nature to have been too loyal 
 to admit cither of envy or jealousy. 
 
 And so we came to Trafalgar Square; and there 
 
 parted. And I see him now as I saw him 
 
 then, when he turned his back and climbed the 
 
 .is of the Royal Academy. I did not think 
 then it was the last time I should see him. I did 
 not think then that, one day reading the Times 
 
 D
 
 50 DOUGLAS JEREOLD. 
 
 newspaper in the Museum Club of Heidelberg — 
 the window open, and bright in the intense sun- 
 shine the mountain opposite — the tidings of his 
 death would come on me with a shock. I did 
 not think then that, returning from a six years' 
 sojourn on the Continent, one of the first places I 
 should visit in England would be Norwood Ceme- 
 tery, to seek out there the grave of him who had 
 once been kind to me, and to find it only by a 
 reference to that of Laman Blanchard. (For in 
 the September that followed his death I could see 
 no memorial of the earth that held " so dear a 
 head.") But so it was fated. And so, calling up 
 again the short figure, and the bowed neck, and 
 the face so swift and eager that the hair blew back 
 — thinking again of the free, sailor- like nature 
 that despised convention and detested cant, of the 
 sensitive heart, of the liberal hand, of the simple, 
 loyal impulse that made his movement straight 
 — I fling this, my flower of grateful recollection, 
 on his grave, and cry, Farewell ! Brave, frank, 
 impulsive, generous Douglas Jerrold, farewell ! 
 Thou surely, if any man, didst thrill to the poet, 
 when he called — 
 
 " Ring out the want, the care, the sin, 
 The faithless coldness of the times ; 
 Fang out the feud of rich and poor, 
 Ring in redress to all mankind."
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 To that elemental and essential poetry, the 
 ideal of which both poets and critics of poets 
 must, as their own sacred fire, entertain within 
 thtiu, few men have ever clomb nearer thai: 
 Alfred Tennyson. The reedy outskirts of the 
 Muses' haunt are not nigh enough for him ; he 
 must attain to their great presence, he must 
 penetrate into the very lustre of their own inmost 
 sanctuary, returning to us, like the priest from 
 behind the veil, transfigured, luminous. With 
 him, image, emotion, music, which are as the 
 three colours in the rainbow of the poet's thought, 
 lucidly collapsing, orb into song that, heaving, lifts 
 us too on the proud wave of its own rhythmic 
 movement. Minstrels we have had, grander, 
 " fuller," perhaps, than he ; souls of a larger reach, 
 hearts of a mightier pulse, but never a poet richer, 
 never a poet truer. Finer gold, art more delicate, 
 are nowhere else procurable; and the result is so
 
 52 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 consummate, that clumsy fingers seek in vain to 
 grasp it. It is a shell most exquisitely white, 
 filling to the lustre of a most golden sea ; such a 
 shell as the poet himself found on the Breton 
 coast ; " made so fairily well, a miracle of design ; 
 frail, but of force to withstand, year upon year, 
 the shock of cataract-seas." 
 
 The clumsy fingers that seek in vain to grasp 
 it would petulantly crush it ; — for coarse are the 
 majority of the criticisms that we have seen of 
 this most genuine poet. Dull redactors trans- 
 mute his delicious melodies, his most delicate 
 and divine simplicities, into their own pasteboard 
 prose, and then cry out, " Look at it ! Do you 
 call that poetry?" The divinest gift of God, the 
 most beautiful and loveliest of the skiey messen- 
 gers vouchsafed us now, has been rated like a 
 schoolboy that had stolen apples, before the desk of 
 some tumid editor, who knows only the heaviest 
 scale, making there too a mistake so egregious 
 that the dim thought of it will haunt him. 
 
 Ah yes ! this delicate loveliness has borne the 
 shock of uglier monsters than the " cataract- 
 seas ;" slippery creatures have slid over it, and 
 mere organic slime — that can but sting — has 
 sought to hide it from the sun. But " now has
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 53 
 
 descended a serener hour," and in the great choir 
 of voices that proclaim their joy over it, the sneers 
 of envy and the ineptitudes of incapacity are 
 alike unheard 
 
 Poetry, of late, presents itself, for the most 
 
 part, in affiliated series. Wordsworth, Southey, 
 
 Coleridge, to go no higher, come in a group from 
 
 the Percy Ballads, Burns, and Cowper. Shelley 
 
 affiliates himself to Coleridge, Keats to Shelley, 
 
 and Tennyson to Keats. Three is the sacred 
 
 number, the fundamental figure, the foot that scans 
 
 the rhythmus of the universe. Omne trinum per- 
 
 fectum rotundum ; all good things are three; and 
 
 poets, as among the best, are no exception. But 
 
 of all poetic triads, the last surely is the richest, 
 
 tin- happiest, and the completes! Shelley, Keats, 
 
 and Tennyson ! No, not even in their own verses 
 
 can we find a more harmonious and triumphant 
 
 triplet They are the Three Graces of English 
 
 literature — our trinal Catullus — and should never 
 
 be found apart They should be bound in a 
 
 volume, whose very title — Shelley, Keats, and 
 
 Tennyson— were poetry. 
 
 " What!" we hear the commoner critics cry, 
 " do you dare to rank among dead and accepted 
 clfl a mere living aspirant ?" Not only that,
 
 54 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 but we dare to say that this living aspirant, as 
 the ripest of the triad, must take precedence of 
 these, his otherwise equal fellows. As completed 
 bard indeed, and in consideration (with special 
 reference to Wordsworth) of the richer humanity 
 and wider universality of his range, Tennyson, 
 perhaps, transcends the whole series of poets that 
 separates him from Milton. 
 
 And if this be true, why should it not be said ? 
 Or why should it be said to the dead skull only, 
 and not to the living face of him it touches ? 
 " Eight well know I that fame is half dis-fame," 
 so speaks the melancholy bard himself ; why 
 should we not soothe him by a word in season ? 
 Does not he do as much, and more, by us ? If 
 he feels that he " walks with his head in a cloud 
 of poisonous flies," shall we not seek to disperse 
 the insects ? Shall we not seek, so far at least as a 
 little willing shout may go, to drive off from him, 
 if only for a moment, " the long-necked geese of 
 the world that are ever hissing dispraise?" 
 
 That we should recognise no greatness but dead 
 greatness ! and that we can never see the real 
 height of a man so long as he stands five feet 
 so-and-so at our elbow ! In the poet's own 
 words, we " judge all nature from her feet of clay,
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 55 
 
 without the will to lift our eyes and see her god 
 like head, crowned with spiritual fire, and touch 
 ing other worlds." When shall an recalculating 
 generosity return among us? "When shall we 
 embrace the beautiful, whencesoever it may come, 
 and without let, without grudge, without reserva- 
 tion, call and cry and name it beautiful ? Must 
 only dulness have the benefit of praise ? Must 
 
 h new triumph of our fellow but freeze ns into 
 polite indifference that withholds its voice from 
 him, or convert us into an obstructive wall that 
 would balk his hearing, even of the plaudits 
 from without ? Waa it only " at first starting," 
 according to Charles Eeade, " that Christians and 
 artists loved each other ?" This world is indeed 
 mean; and in regard to many another besides 
 Merlin, because "he seems master of all art, it 
 fain would make him master of all vice." 
 
 This meanness Tennyson, as much as any man 
 that breathes, has known and seen and suffered. 
 Bnt he is brave withal, and will not cast himself 
 beneath it: "never yet," he cries, "was noble 
 man but made ignoble talk ; he makes no friend 
 who neveT made a foe !" In his own work, in- 
 deed, he has had his own ample consolation, his 
 own most rich reward. He that has filed so well
 
 56 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 such vast variety of measures, from " Claribel " 
 to " Guinevere " has had no dull time of it. He 
 who wooed and won " The Miller's Daughter ;" 
 who scorned "the Lady Clara Vere de Vere;" 
 who thrid the awe-hushed palace to the couch of 
 " Beauty ;" who listened to " the Sty lite," and 
 who heard the deep voice of " Ulysses' " self; he 
 that said of " Lady Clare," " Oh, and proudly 
 stood she up ;" he that saw " Godiva," " as he- 
 waited for the train at Coventry :" that dwelt for 
 years, an embowered nightingale, within the wail 
 of " In Memoriam ;" that sang " The Princess ;" 
 and that chanted " Maud ;" that looked into " the 
 meek blue eyes of Enid," " the truest eyes that 
 ever answered heaven ;" he that has been privi- 
 leged to gather and to grow in stature and in 
 shape before " the clear face of the blameless 
 King," — enough ! — let " the common cry of curs " 
 deafen all the air — of living men, here surely is 
 the crowned happiest ! He surely, if any man, 
 may dwell in a serene unreachable of all " whose 
 low desire not to feel lowest, makes them level 
 all, and pare the mountain to the plain, to leave 
 an equal baseness." 
 
 We have said that Tennyson, as ripest, must 
 take precedence both of Keats and Shelley ; but
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 5 7 
 
 we abase neither of these without a grudge. We 
 know what they are without him, but not what 
 he would have been without them. Both died so 
 young too ; Shelley at thirty, Keats at twenty- 
 four. Had Tennyson's mortal sojourn been as 
 short, is it probable that he would have inherited 
 an equal fame ! With him luckily, however — 
 luckily for us — all has gone differently. They, 
 though young, had done their work not badly, 
 and they died ; while he, who needed, and who 
 needing, got, the southern slope-lands and the 
 evening-red, has grown and ripened to the yellow 
 and the heavy ear. 
 
 Y. s doubtless; Tennyson owes no light debt 
 to Keats and Shelley ; nor indeed, are his obliga- 
 tions lighter to others of his predecessors. Not 
 alone the splendour and the purity of Shelley, or 
 the mellow notes of Keats, but "Wordsworth's 
 severe simplicity, Milton's divine abundance, 
 Spenser's rich tenderness, these also, absorbed 
 and assimilated, turn up like colours in the lus- 
 trous ver.se of Tennyson. Let us not be unjust 
 to this last, however, because of his place in 
 time. Who is it that has not had ]>redecessors ? 
 Successive sequence holds of the very quality of 
 the finite ; and it is not right that we should im-
 
 58 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 pute it singly to any man. Homer himself, first 
 lark that ever sang, would have raised an infin- 
 itely thinner note, had not echoes from still 
 earlier " makers " combiningly enriched it. We 
 have only to look back upon our earliest ballads, 
 charming as they are, to become aware of how 
 much the metal of poesy gains in firmness, den- 
 sity, weight, and shape, under the successive 
 hammers of a thousand workmen. And it is in 
 the light of these thoughts that Tennyson must 
 be looked at ; for the reproach of imitation is not 
 by any means legitimately his. From first to 
 last, from " Claribel " to " Guinevere," in " Locks- 
 ley Hall," " Godiva," " Lady Clare ;" in the Ode 
 to the Duke of Wellington, in '•' Ulysses," in 
 " The Stylite," in " Maud," " The Princess," " In 
 Memoriam," the " Idylls," it is neither Spenser 
 nor Milton, neither Wordsworth nor Shelley nor 
 Keats ; it is Tennyson himself we see, " Not Lan- 
 celot, nor another." 
 
 Still it is probable that the mastery of the craft 
 has proved much more laborious to Tennyson 
 than to either of his co-mates. It is not certain, 
 indeed, that he has yet attained to those conse- 
 cutive and uninterrupted numbers, to that grow- 
 ing, flowing, and accumulating verse for which
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 59 
 
 both Keats and Shelley — and in the greater degree 
 the latter — are so remarkable. We refer not here 
 to the narrative, which in Tennyson runs on ever 
 with infinite grace of consecution, but to the 
 metres and their peculiar sequence. Read " Hype- 
 rion," " Alastor," " Comus ;" one feels a certain 
 swell, a certain continuous rising in the mere 
 verse ; the numbers are welded, they grow, flow, 
 and accumulate. But one can hardly say as 
 much, and in the same sense, for " The Princess." 
 We get sight in this poem of a certain chequered- 
 ness rather ; the oneness, the fusion of an im- 
 provised, extempore gush is rare in it ; the hand 
 of conscious elaboration seems to linger about it ; 
 one finds turns in it, the artificial quaintness of 
 which rings with rhetoric. There is often a pecu- 
 liar insertedness, indicative as it were, of the very 
 process by which those "jewels, five-words-long, 
 that on the stretch'd forefinger of all time, sparkle 
 for ever," were actually inlaid. There seems a 
 certain impededness in the movement, a mincing- 
 Qess, a pretty mincingness, as if the feet were 
 •.•red — perhaps, like a sultana's, by ornament 
 certain reach. In short, to borrow words 
 from the metaphysical category of Quantity, t lit • 
 orbit of Tennyson is a dUcrcluui rather than a
 
 60 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 continuum ; the circle may, on the whole, be full, 
 but it has been described, as it were, in a series 
 of interrupted dots, and not in a single, fluent, 
 unintermitted sweep. The regularity of the dots 
 is hardly constant either : they are not always 
 true to the curve, but look oblique ; nor are they, 
 in equal spaces, always equally numerous. If 
 Keats, if Shelley, and, better still, if Milton, " with 
 his garland and his singing robes about him," rise 
 into the empyrean, sustained on one long gust of 
 melody, Tennyson may be said to attain like re- 
 gions as by a ladder of Jacob, the rounds of which 
 are of celestial workmanship, but not the less 
 rounds. The peculiarity alluded to is seen at its 
 fullest, perhaps, in " The Princess," where, indeed, 
 the express prettiness proper to an arabesque has 
 raised it into accentuated prominence. Its source 
 is undoubtedly the fastidious labour of the bard : 
 our enjoyment of the poem is undisturbed, how- 
 ever, and any sense of labour that may linger in 
 our ear disappears in the flow of the narrative. 
 Thorough study, in truth, might educe important 
 results here ; for Tennyson's very latest blank 
 verse, though quite unobstructed whether by 
 prettiness or the insertion of some too irresistible 
 epithet, displays a similar peculiarity ; and it is
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. Gl 
 
 worth inquiry how lav is it a conscious, how far 
 is it an unconscious product ? Perhaps, indeed, 
 the discretum may have this advantage over the 
 continuum, that it does not so soon cloy; for 
 where are there poems in any literature that can 
 be read with a less flagging interest than these 
 • Mauds," " Princesses," and "Idylls "? 
 
 We leave here this inquiry, however, and re - 
 turn to our main interest. 
 
 The Idyll, or Idyl — for both spellings occur in 
 these very poems, the one attaching itself to the 
 Greek tlBvWiov and the latter to the Latin Idylium 
 (sometimes Idy Ilium, however,) — is, on the whole, 
 Tennyson's favourite form of rhythmical composi- 
 tion. In this predilection he is not alone how- 
 ever : the Idyll is the favourite form of Keats 
 also, to whom Tennyson directly affiliates himself ; 
 and not only of Keats, but of the national poetry 
 in general. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Cowper, 
 Wordsworth — to name but these — are all emin- 
 ently idyllic. The Idyll, indeed, is our national 
 ideal A discriminative French writer remarks of 
 our English scenery, "Rien de plus attendrissant 
 qui- lea ]• 9 Anglais," Perhaps, then, it is 
 
 these landscapes that touch us ; for it is certain 
 that wi; are not more remarkable fur our factitious
 
 62 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 conventionalism than for our yearning towards 
 the unsophisticated. We toil and moil through 
 life in a thousand unsightly avenues — trade, com- 
 merce, profession, office, position — but at the end 
 of each there smiles for us an Idyll : home, 
 the country, trees, fields, and running waters, a 
 purer life with simpler manners and a ruddier 
 health. The national poetry takes the national 
 stamp ; and in this respect, the compositions of 
 Tennyson exhibit a deeper impression, perhaps, 
 than those of any other of our poets. The best 
 of his miscellaneous poems are inscribed, " English 
 Idyls ; " and now his latest and most finished 
 work he names, " Idylls of the King." With such 
 authority before us, we may venture to extend the 
 word to " Maud " and " The Princess" also ; and 
 in that case, Tennyson's poems will be seen to be 
 all— or all but all— Idylls. 
 
 According to some critics, however, the word 
 relates to the common, and is misapplied to kings 
 and princesses. We do not see the validity of 
 the objection : it is not certain that poetry relates 
 to the common in the ordinary sense at all, and 
 it is quite certain that the essence of the Idyll is, 
 that it should be a little picture-poem with nature 
 in the background, and in the foreground men
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. G3 
 
 and women of primitive and simple nobleness. 
 In the sense of this definition, it will be evident 
 to every reader that the term is admirably appro- 
 priate to the poems before us ; and an examina- 
 tion of these poems themselves will abundantly 
 demonstrate the legitimacy of their claim to an 
 equality of place beside the very highest of the 
 class. 
 
 These poems range over a period of some thirty 
 years, and present, as might be expected, a series 
 of gradations from the crudity of poetic youth to 
 the full maturity of poetic manhood. The poet, 
 one would think, however, must have largely 
 burned his juvenilia, or, at all events, have subse- 
 quently re-worked and refo lined them with un- 
 usual diligence and success, for there are but few 
 poems in his collections that can be considered 
 representative of the earliest stages of the art. 
 1 ■". . on " Claribel," we fancy, has been left to show 
 the point of departure only — just as we see in 
 cuttings, detached round mounds left standing, 
 useless surely unless to indicate the original sur- 
 face The progressive rise from such mere callow 
 
 arrow cli< ■« *i » ;is "mavis dwelleth," "wave out- 
 v. .11.-th," "throstle lispeth," "runnel crispeth," 
 " grot replieth," etc., to that most grand and in-
 
 G4 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 spired strain that closes " The Princess," or to 
 that other, grander, perhaps, and more inspired, 
 that is the climax of " Guinevere " — this pro- 
 gressive rise, as conceived between such extremes, 
 is even infinite. " Claribel " is almost alone, 
 however, and there is scarcely another poem 
 among them all on so low a level. 
 
 Be the cause where it may, fire or correction, 
 the crudities natural to young poets have, as re- 
 gards these poems, been pretty well effaced, and 
 the general negative of Tennyson must be named 
 a small one. It is, in short, the negative of youth 
 in general ; which consists, as we all know, in a 
 preponderance of form over matter, and in a con- 
 sequent exaggeration and distortion of the form. 
 To make up for substantial deficiency, there is an 
 unsparing use of the mere organ. With will 
 enough and effort enough, there is a vastly dispro- 
 portionate result ; for it is futile to rattle the loom 
 if the shuttle be empty and the warp unbeamed. 
 There is a constant straining at originality in 
 image, verse, and measure, that terminates in af- 
 fectation only. We have reminiscences of the 
 library rather than reflexes of fact. The imagery 
 seems external : it is traditional and not original. 
 Blooms, shoots, winds, dews, roses, lilies, gold, and
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 65 
 
 silver, are re-distributed simply as they have been 
 received, and with as little difficulty. Examples 
 of this negative we think we see in several of the 
 earliest poems, as in "Claribel," " The Owl," " The 
 - i-Fairies, " The Poet," "The Ode to Memory,' 
 "The Dying Swan," "The ( loose," etc. In "A 
 Character,"' the poet, perhaps, rather endeavours 
 than succeeds to get words for what he sees — the 
 cold dilettante, the mere amateur, namely ; and we 
 do not altogether except from a general imputation 
 of the negative even such poems as "Mariana," 
 "The Recollections of the Arabian Nights," and 
 " The Lady of Shalott." These are doubtless meant 
 to be very weird and wonderful, but they are mere 
 breath, and, despite their verbal music, are as bar- 
 ren as the wind. The figures are invisible in their 
 own vague splendour : the cup is too luscious ; we 
 are surfeited with sweets, and would fain pass it. 
 Experience, in fact, is as yet not ripe enough to give 
 either solid substance or precise shape to the mere 
 
 mis of the youth of genius, who accordingly 
 wastes himself in the bare formality of his art 
 
 I in t let us leave the faults and seek the ex- 
 cellences : let as abandon the cold emptim 
 of the negative for the warm fulness of the 
 affirmative. Let us select for review a review 
 
 i.
 
 06 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 that our' limits will not permit to exceed a 
 very fugitive glance — a few of the most noted 
 of these Idylls. 
 
 Almost all of them are named from and group 
 themselves around females. As a true poet, Tenny- 
 son is conscious of his own double nature ; and 
 his purer half, his sister, has ever an indefinable 
 charm for him. Throughout all his poems, female 
 characterization is the leading interest, and touches 
 the daintiest, the subtlest, and the nicest every- 
 where abound. 
 
 What a charm of natural grace there is in 
 " Lilian!" what a simple sweet archness ! " Smil- 
 ing, never speaking, looking through and through 
 us, thoroughly to undo us," we see her bodily. The 
 whole charming, natural little scene springs up 
 freshly to our eyes. We feel actually present, we 
 see it all, we enjoy quite as much as the actors 
 themselves the sly and quiet preparation, and 
 then the sudden accomplishment, of the seizure 
 of the little lady. We positively feel the " crush- 
 ing" of her. Then the physical music, and the 
 adaptation of physical sound generally to sense 
 and subject : in such qualities Tennyson is a fin- 
 ished master. There is a little poem of this kind 
 which we recollect to have read ten years ago, and
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. G7 
 
 which we miss from the edition before us. 
 It is "The Skipping-rope," as regards internal 
 thought valueless, but invaluable as a wreath 
 of words that conveyed to the very eye a series 
 of interchanging physical motions. We could 
 have better spared " Claribel" than " The Skip- 
 ping-rope." 
 
 This, which we have just indicated, is of course 
 only one of the smaller adjuncts and adjuvants 
 of poetry : such as it is, it is a true one however, 
 and Tennyson, perhaps of all poets, knows best its 
 use. Tennyson, in truth, is not only a born poet, 
 but he is a complete artist. He is master of the 
 trade, and at home with every tool of it. From 
 assonance and alliteration up to the Pythian tone 
 of rapture itself, no secret fails him. Foot and 
 pause and rhyme and rhythm, are all his creatures, 
 and docile to his will. He knows what rich vir - 
 tue, what strange influence may flow from an old 
 word, or a new word, or a word used for the occa- 
 sion in its stricter and more directly derivative 
 sense. He knows, too, how the mere position of 
 voids, single or in clusters, produces those sud- 
 den pulsings of physical melody — yea, of essential 
 poetry that come upon the tuned instrument 
 within us, like the sudden perfume of some un
 
 68 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 noticed sweetbrier which arrests us with the 
 charm of its unexpected deliciousness. An ab- 
 solute power of expression dwells in these poems 
 in its every form indeed, and " the fitting of apt- 
 est words to things" transacts itself unceasingly. 
 Terms and phrases there are, the subtlest, the 
 cunningest, the most penetrative and incisive, 
 that touch the very quick of the truth — that 
 reach to the inner inmost — that dragout the pal- 
 pitating thought itself to the light, and no mere 
 piecemeal husk of it. Tennyson, in short, pos- 
 sesses in its totality that inner melody by virtue 
 of which is hardship his, and he knows every 
 touch and turn that gives it egress, direction, 
 modulation. 
 
 " Lilian" is followed by " Isabel" — a beautiful 
 ideal of complete and placid wifehood. " Her 
 eyes are not down-dropt, nor over-bright, but fed 
 with the clear-pointed flame of chastity." " The 
 laws of marriage are charactered in gold upon 
 the blanched tablets of her heart." " Upon her 
 lips there reigns the summer-calm of charity." 
 " She has a prudence to withhold, a hate of gossip- 
 parlance and of sway." These traits are perfect 
 and unmistakable, and do indeed give us " a form 
 of finished chastened purity." " Madeline" and
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 69 
 
 "Adeline" are, as characterizations, equally suc- 
 cessful ; and there is fine music in several other 
 poems of the date 1830. "Love and Death" 
 indeed is quite startling in its finish, and one is 
 tempted to surmise that it must have slipt in 
 fr»»m some later period. 
 
 The i ms of the second division, 1832, improve 
 
 greatly on those of the first, and are mostly flights 
 indicative of a stronger pinion. " Oenone," though 
 remarkable for classic depth and purity, has not 
 received the attention she deserves. " Lady Clara 
 Yere de Vere" is an exceedingly felicitous and 
 effective little piece. The high-born flirt would, 
 for mere pastime, make an insulting conquest of 
 the poet ; but to his lucid vision her inner worth- 
 lessness is all apparent, and to his simple dignity 
 "the daughter of a hundred earls is one not to be 
 desire* L" His pride, too, is as characteristic as the 
 lady's own : " he knows she is proud to bear her 
 name, but yet her pride is no match for his, for 
 be i> too proud to care from whence he came." 
 The haughty coquette, he is quite determine^, 
 -hall not " lix a vacant stare and slay him with 
 her noble birth." He tells her pleasantly that 
 " th<- -rand old gardener and his wife laugh at 
 the claims of long descent," "that to him a simple
 
 70 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 maiden in her flower is worth a hundred coats of 
 arms," and, 
 
 " Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 
 'Tis only noble to be good : 
 Kind hearts are more thaD coronets, 
 And simple faith than Norman blood." 
 
 The sort of democratic aristocracy here is parti- 
 cularly fine : it is expressed without envy or any 
 base heat ; there is not a trace of vulgarity in it. 
 Here are only the simplicity and the quietude of 
 the fitting self-respect. We are reminded here of 
 the gigantic phrase of Burns, " that he brings his 
 patent of nobility direct from Almighty God ;" 
 and we are pleased that Tennyson, cherishing a 
 like conviction, should express it with so much 
 tranquillity of unpretending assurance. Such 
 things please all — ploughman and parvenu, sub- 
 ject and sovereign — for they touch the eternal 
 dignity of man as man — a height higher yet than 
 that of king or kaiser. 
 
 Among the poems of 1832 we have the tale 
 of the sweet, true wife that Alice, " the Miller's 
 daughter," made. This is a genuine Idyll, and 
 overpoweringly touching. We know no more per- 
 fect poem of a like size in the language. As a 
 tale of love, it breathes at once a tenderness and
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 71 
 
 a truth of passion that can be paralleled nowhere 
 out of any other author. It is a rounded little 
 whole, and there is the charm in it of a pictur- 
 esque reality that seems stolen from the very 
 person of Nature herself. It exhibits in music, 
 word, thought, and story, a perfection so chaste 
 and pure that it is conceivable only to him who 
 has ivad it. Fain would we quote — fain hang a 
 long, long time yet over this perfect mirror of 
 sweet love and true poesy — but our limits forbid. 
 In the same division, " The Lotus-eaters " is 
 also an exceedingly successful little poem. The 
 dreamy haze of the dreamy, enchanted land is 
 transferred to the verse, and the numbers lift 
 their feet as lusciously slothful as the hours 
 themselves in that overpowering climate. What 
 pictures spread themselves in single lines : 
 
 or, 
 
 " They sat them down upon the yellow saml, 
 /,'. i ween the sun ami moon upon the shore ;" 
 
 " To dream and dream like yonder amher light, 
 Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height !" 
 
 Besides the mere charms of verse, there is 
 throughout the poem a fine spirit of human re 
 flection. The whole scepticism of the day (how 
 perfectly Tennyson can indue what state of mind
 
 72 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 he pleases !) comes to richest speech here : no 
 stanza but is a symbol of satiety ; no word but 
 breathes itself out languidly as if utterly used up ; 
 and every line is glutted weariness. 
 
 As the poems of 1832 rise on those of 1830, so 
 do those of 1842 rise upon their predecessors. 
 Still the best of each division must be understood 
 as coming together in the end to constitute a sort 
 of upper house of peers. The tendency to the 
 Idyll comes here more plainly to the surface : as 
 we have already remarked, indeed, this division 
 is even named " English Idyls." It is now that 
 a most careful study of Wordsworth makes itself 
 prominent. " The Excursion," and pastorals like 
 " Michael," and " The Brothers," must have now 
 attracted to themselves the nights and days of 
 the young Tennyson. Such poems as " Audley 
 Court," " Dora," " Walking to the Mail," "Edwin 
 Morris," " The Gardener's Daughter," etc., are 
 manifestly mere pleasant exercises of the poet in 
 his art. The best of them, such as the last men- 
 tioned, are graceful pictures of flowers, fruits, and 
 trees, alive with beauty and eloquent with love — 
 love the richest, chastest, purest. Everywhere 
 there are charming conceits and the daintiest 
 turns. Still we cannot fail to see a certain
 
 ALFRKH TENNYSON. 
 
 straining, a certain stiffness, a certain elaborate- 
 ness as of an essay or an exercise ; and some time 
 alter we have read them, they present themselves 
 to our memory as but selected college copy-books, 
 creditable in their series. 
 
 It is otherwise, however, with "The Morte 
 d'Arthur," " St. Simeon Stylites," " Ulysses," 
 "Godiva," "The Two Voices," " Locksley Hall" 
 "The Day-dream," "Lady Clare," etc., all of 
 which are to be ranked among the most perfect 
 poems we possess. In "Love and Duty," " The 
 (i olden Year," "The Vision of Sin," "Amphion," 
 " The Talking Oak," etc., there are quotable gems 
 of rarest lustre, fascinatingly rich with love, 
 phantasy, and wisdom — ripe poesy, indeed, full- 
 tongaed if cnrions-tongued. 
 
 Let us remind the reader of " The Day-dream," 
 of " The Prologue," " The Sleeping Palace," " The 
 Sleeping Beauty," "The Arrival," "The Eevival," 
 The Departure," "The Moral," "L'Envoi,"" The 
 Epilogue." The poet himself tells us that "soft 
 Lustre bathes the range of urns;" but are not these 
 • of urns — golden all — upon a palace-marble 
 
 1 tathed in lustre surely from the spheres ? What 
 simple felicity of speech is this! What triumphant 
 utterance to the most delicate fancies, the richest
 
 7-4 ALFliED TENNYSON. 
 
 imaginations ! What delicious music ! What 
 most voluptuous sound ! It is indeed a fairy 
 palace — urns, lawns, parrot, peacock, page, butler, 
 steward, king — fairy, tranced, but alive and human 
 — alive and human, though under the crystal 
 settings and amid the rainbow deckings of the 
 very warmest and subtlest of poets ! 
 
 Then Lady Clare ! " Oh, and proudly stood she 
 up !" — is it not the ballad of ballads ? What pri- 
 vilege to be able to read such tendernesses, such 
 noblenesses, to those we love, and to see their 
 cheeks flush and their eyelashes glitter as we 
 know our own do ! Then " Locksley Hall ! " 
 How beautiful this love ! How passion has grown 
 and strengthened with the poet, and he has clomb 
 to his majority ! How all external helps and aids 
 drop from him, and he stands forward on his own 
 strength ! The botany and ornithology of books 
 have ceased, and those of nature have begun. He 
 lives in his own heart now — in his own soul, and, 
 living there, he must see with his own eyes, hear 
 with his own ears, and speak with his own lips. 
 Every line becomes a quotation : not one but 
 might be a saw deep-sculpt upon a temple's 
 front. All here is high, noble-hearted, generous, 
 and unselfish ; the love, the wisdom of the dove
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 75 
 
 that scorns, that pities the serpent of the world. 
 Let him who would regain the uncorrapted 
 tivshness, the nnsoiled purity of his prime, read 
 "Loeksley Hall!" 
 
 " The Two Voices " is also a noble poem, and 
 we see in it one of the purest spirits of the age, 
 wrestling with those grand and awful speculations 
 that all time presses on us, but never any time 
 more than the present. In this poem, and in 
 " Locksley Hall," indeed (in " The Lotus-eaters," 
 the element in question was more an affair of re- 
 productive art), are the first murmurs of those sad 
 questionings, which attain their full completeness 
 of articulation in " In Memoriam." The poet is 
 as yet young, however ; his muscles are elastic, 
 and his heart is fresh ; nature is still glad and 
 glorious around him; and the veil before humanity, 
 — if it has fallen ragged here and there, revealing 
 poverty and sin, — is yet thick enough elsewhere 
 to conceal to hope a possible most joyous opulence. 
 It is to be said too, that his pure, true, humble 
 heart naturally reverts always to the only refuge 
 thai has efficacy to extend the healing of assur- 
 ance. I >n the whole, we cannot help gathering 
 from these poems a most pleasing picture of the 
 sing Tennyson, "nursing his youth sublime
 
 7G ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 with the fairy tales of science and the long results 
 of time." We see him, like a knight, noble, 
 chivalrous, and high, speaking ever a language so 
 different from the slang of those unfortunate 
 "fast" men, that almost everywhere else now-a- 
 days obtrudes like sin ; he, surely, is blameless of 
 the wine -stains and the smut of clubs; nor has 
 the flare of city midnights withered or made 
 haggard him. But to resume 
 
 What a very gem of art " Godiva" is ! So 
 pure it is — so chastely limned — upon a tablet 
 white as snow ! No word but is the right one. 
 No cut that is not sharp and true. How has he 
 attained to this most perfect utterance ? How is 
 it that at the end, it is only a wet eyelash or 
 some half-articulated exclamation that can speak 
 the enchanted lustre and the absorbing joy with 
 which we have been filled and flooded ? Why 
 quote, reader ? Go, read it for yourself ! Eead, 
 and find yourself, the dingy garments of the day 
 all dropped from you, endued in a robe white as 
 charity and soft as goodness. Such charm flows 
 from the pure flush of this most true imagination. 
 
 " St. Simeon Stylites" has always been a special 
 favourite with us. There is in it an originality 
 of conception as well as a completeness of execu-
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 7 7 
 
 tion, thai has always captivated us. To paini a 
 sheep or a tree, the painter, aw are told, becomes 
 a sheep or a tree : with a like object, and in a 
 like manner, Tennyson has made himself " The 
 Stylite." He has transformed himself into the 
 lonely living statue on the narrow pillar in the 
 Syrian waste. He has lived that outward life of 
 heal and cold, of wet and dry, till now, stiff with 
 aches and bowed with age, he is only half alive. 
 Not less truly has he lived the inward life of this 
 strange saint : he has converted his own conscious- 
 ness into a dusky, hot, blind sense of sins, which 
 he hardly understands, which he hardly believes 
 in. but which prompt the most passionate cries. 
 A dusky imagination he gives himself, firing up 
 to thoughts of beatitude and the crowns of 
 martyrdom. Feelings, too, of self-righteousness he 
 acquires from the merits of his sufferings ; and a 
 dusky, but most real vanity must mix itself with 
 all, for below stand the people worshipping him, 
 and proclaiming the miracles he has wrought upon 
 them. The whole consciousness of the poet has 
 ■iin- for the nonce a dusky, hot, blind, right- 
 eou-, self-righteous vanity. There is really here a 
 very rare faculty of analytic conception ; and it is 
 in union with a power of expression as sure as rare.
 
 78 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 " The Ulysses" is a strain even higher than 
 " The Stylite," and quite as singular and original. 
 What a noble vision is not that of the old hero, 
 who will not "rust unburnished," but will "shine 
 in use," who will leave his kingdom to his mild 
 Telemachus, and like a Viking in his burning 
 bark, will die, sailing beyond the sunset and the 
 paths of all the western stars ! How grandly he 
 recounts that which he did and is ! His voice 
 comes from the mighty prime, and enables us to 
 understand what might have been "that large 
 utterance of the earlier" demi-gods. The poem 
 is a finished picture, original and true, and pure 
 in simple power. 
 
 Beautiful as Tennyson's miscellaneous poems 
 are, one feels discontented, nevertheless, that they 
 should be so short, so fragmentary, so disconnected. 
 Should not this grand power, one is apt to think, 
 have been nursed, and cherished, and fed in secret, 
 till it had been equal to a very Atlas-orb of song? 
 Thinking thus, however, we turn questioningly to 
 the larger poems. 
 
 On "Maud," w r e can linger as momentarily 
 only as on her beautiful sisters that have pre- 
 ceded her. This poem, it appears, has hardly 
 succeeded in propitiating official criticasters. It
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 75 
 
 is one, however, that will stand uninjured mightier 
 Masts than such weak breaths as theirs. It is a 
 most complete, consistent little work, perfect in 
 its rounding, perfect in its keeping, perfect in its 
 details. Maud, " with her clear-cut face, faultily 
 faultless," changing for us as she changes for her 
 lover, grows upon us, and fills up into a woman 
 charming and complete, whom we love with our 
 whole love. The brother, " that oil'd and curled 
 Assyrian bull," is perfect in his place and perfect 
 in his function. The incidents of the little drama 
 open on us in an extremely felicitous maimer, 
 and the character of the moody solitary (with his 
 ways of genius in a sulky temperament) that loves 
 Maud, develops itself admirably. The poem 
 abounds, moreover, in ripe reflection, in mature 
 human wisdom, on the level of the day. The 
 Love in it is true and passionate, and gives birth 
 to some of the most exulting and triumphant 
 erotic strains that can be found in any literature. 
 The poet ascends here and there into a fervour of 
 n unusual to him ; and, as regards intensity, 
 " Maud" is perhaps the intensest poem that 
 Tennyson has ever written. There is indeed in 
 it fpiitean oriental warmth of feeling and unite an 
 oriental exuberance of music and imagery, and
 
 80 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 we hesitate not to pronounce it the finest love- 
 chant — most truly is it a chant — in the whole 
 compass of English literature. 
 
 " The Brook " is a pleasant little triumph of 
 art thrown off with the ease of the assured master. 
 Kate Willows is but a glimpse into a picture, but 
 it is a very delightful one. The ode to the Duke 
 of Wellington, with its melody, its pathos, its 
 grandeur, its majesty, and its incisive apprecia- 
 tiveness of character, we only mention. 1 
 
 " The Princess " is one of the noblest poems 
 we have ever read ; it overflows with all the 
 opulence of the guild; it possesses the deepest 
 pathos, and again a sense of greatness, that lifts 
 us to the heroic. The play of fancy is exhaust- 
 less, and the skill of the workman unexcelled. 
 How from the prologue, with its wilful little 
 Lilia, its demure maiden aunt, its high-spirited 
 students, the travestied statue of Sir Ralph, the 
 
 i We may also mention now the beautiful poems of " Enoch 
 Arden," and of " Aylmer's Field," which have at least extended 
 the fame of their author. In the same volume " The Grand- 
 mother," and the "Northern Farmer," are for our poet fresh 
 victories, admirably executed portraits of genuine human analysis 
 both. The " Alcaics" and the bit of the Iliad contrast Tennyson 
 unfavourably, as was to be expected, with Milton and Homer : 
 while, as was also to be expected, the imitation of Catullus is 
 most deliciously and delightfully successful.
 
 AI.KKEH TENNYSON. 81 
 
 bluff Sir "Walter, the lady-knight that fought her 
 foes, the institute, and " the nineteenth century 
 i«n the grass," — how from all these, as from so 
 many reels and bobbins, the magic threads wind 
 off and spin themselves into this dream-like med- 
 ley. The cracked old (Jama himself hangs on by 
 the prologue, and has his particular thread some- 
 where — that we feel sure of — though we cannot 
 exactly siv where, But this poem has a purpose, 
 and an important one ; and more light has been 
 thrown by it on the question of the relative posi- 
 tion of the sexes than by all the express articles 
 ever written on the subject in book or newspaper. 
 In this the poet has done good service to his own 
 immediate days. So nobly, too, as the result is 
 • •xpressed! Than the Prince's address to the 
 subdued and softened Ida, what subtler strain 
 of inspiration can we well find in any other 
 bar 1 ! 
 
 " The Idylls of the King," — in view of their 
 length, of the unity that imparts symmetry and 
 coherence to them, and of the calm, ripe power 
 in which, as in an atmosphere, they liv< — are 
 
 rtainly the must important of all the Idylls. 
 Tie- introduction to " The Morte d'Arthur," in 
 which we learn "he burnt his Epic, his King 
 
 V
 
 82 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Arthur, some twelve books," leaves us at no loss 
 to know that we are here in presence of the poet's 
 earliest love. Keats, sick of the meanness and 
 mercenariness of modern life, fled to an ideal 
 Greece ; and Tennyson, sick too, took refuge in 
 the fairy land of Arthur and the Table Bound. 
 To such a gentle soul as that of the young and 
 as yet unknown Tennyson, we may readily con- 
 ceive the dominant manners of his own days as 
 all unsuited. From the vulgar indifference of the 
 mere wealthy, as from the equally offensive in- 
 difference of the mere well-born, what could he, 
 with his credulity (as poet) of Godhead every- 
 where, and his soul athirst for sympathy, — what 
 could he but turn, chilled, repelled, indignant ? 
 What dear delight to such a soul to flee from the 
 jarring world of the present, and breathe its own 
 natural air amid the nobleness and the knight- 
 liness that floated palpably from the grand person- 
 ages of that land of Faery ! Then, like a true poet, 
 he would not breathe this fine air selfishly, but 
 he would open it to his fellows ; and so he mused 
 and mused, and dreamed and dreamed, and for 
 us, too, spread those lustrous lawns, and rain- 
 bow woods, and golden palaces, filling them with 
 shapes the stateliest and the best of generous
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 83 
 
 poesy. "What a healing lies in these grand phan- 
 tasies for the sick time that glares around us ! 
 What shapes of men and women, to shame us out 
 of our vulgarity, impurity, and corruption ! 
 
 In female characterization, we have already 
 had occasion to remark the power of Tennyson ; 
 hut all previous triumphs in this kind are out- 
 done by the present. The women of the " Idylls" 
 are emphatically representative women. Elaine, 
 though perhaps clearer, harder, and, so to speak, 
 more simply single, may be looked on as but a 
 younger sister of Enid ; but Enid, Vivien, and 
 Guinevere are sharply defined, and each is typical 
 of a class. 
 
 Vivien were a truer Dame aux Camelias than 
 that hectic nullity of Erench sentimentalism that 
 originates the name. She is the true light woman, 
 with all her wiles, and with all her selfish shal- 
 lowness. Rebuffed, detected, stale, " she hears in 
 thought the lavish comments when her name is 
 named, and hates the knights." No resource is 
 left her but the aged Merlin, with his shaggy 
 eyebrows and his shaggy beartl Him, then, she 
 follows with her arts relentlessly, and all the 
 more relentlessly that she knows him to possess 
 a spell which, once hers, would restore to her
 
 84 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 will the power that had forsaken her charms. 
 Of course, she succeeds, and she leaves the out- 
 witted sage, shrieking out over him the just 
 reproach of " fool." The poet has here ample 
 canvas for his woman's lore, but the subject is 
 unpleasant. The wise old Merlin, in such undig- 
 nified positions, causes but pain ; and the image 
 will not mitigate the fact that 
 
 " The pale blood of the wizard, at her touch, 
 Took gayer colours, like an opal warmed." 
 
 What a contrast to the evil, hard, and shameless 
 Vivien is the guileless, sweet, shamefaced Enid, 
 the very type and model of a faithful, tender, and 
 a loving spouse ! Her husband, the good, honest, 
 frank, lusty Geraint, sullen from misapprehen- 
 sion, puts her to a variety of trials, which the 
 sweet soul bears with such unchangingness of 
 obedience, that the reader is completely won to 
 her. Some of the scenes are exquisitely beauti- 
 ful, finely conceived, and skilfully executed. 
 
 Guinevere is a character of a very different 
 stamp from that of Enid. She is a queen, every 
 inch of her, if a sinful one : she is also a woman, 
 every thought and feeling of her, if, too, a sinful 
 one. She is not the meek, and sweet, and gentle 
 Enid, but still less is she the shallow, loose, and
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 85 
 
 flaunting Vivien. She loved Lancelot, mistaking 
 him, unfortunately, for Arthur, her affianced lord, 
 before she had seen the latter ; and high, generous, 
 and stately, she yet possesses not moral power 
 enough to clasp her feelings to her duty. Yet, in 
 her heart of hearts, there lurks the better woman ; 
 and, in the end, her penitence and recognition of 
 the worth of him she has injured are most noble 
 and queenlike. 
 
 The male characters in these fine tales are as 
 successful as the female. So statelily they move 
 in the simple knightliness that is their element ! 
 " They step with all grace, and not with half dis- 
 dain hid under grace, as in a smaller time, but 
 kindly men moving with kindly men." What 
 smaller time the poet means, the reader sees. 
 Yes ; politeness now-a-days is seldom more than 
 "half disdain hid under grace." Generally, in- 
 deed, it is something infinitely worse than this : 
 it is the affectation of a certain easy audacity, in 
 which there is no ease nevertheless, but always 
 the uneasy self-interrogation, " Have I hit it, 
 think y..u '{" Whatever it be, and whencesoever 
 it be, we all know it. Tennyson lias here accur- 
 !v indicated it : he, indeed, knows it well— we 
 remember he was "gorgpnized by the stony
 
 86 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 British stare of an oil'd and curled Assyrian bull " 
 —and hates it. Whatever is genuine in the 
 island hates it, and most fervently prays to be 
 delivered from it. It is the mildew that sits 
 withering up all our social existence now. It lay 
 at the heart of the Indian mutiny perhaps, and 
 it has certainly " gorgonized " the better part of 
 Europe into hatred of us. How different were 
 the manners of these men, these gentlemen ! 
 " They did not deal in scorn, but if a man were 
 halt or hunched, scorn was allowed in him as part 
 of his defect, and he was answered softly by the 
 King and all his Table, — or from exceeding man- 
 fulness and pure nobility of temperament, they 
 refrained from even a word." 
 
 These fine manners find in Lancelot their sort 
 of living impersonation. He moves, and breathes, 
 and speaks, and acts full man, full gentleman, the 
 knightliest of all the court, the star of chivalry. 
 But our grand poet, loving all that is pure and 
 chaste in life, will not allow Lancelot to pass by 
 as something perfect, as something to be revered 
 only. Tie will not let us see him without the 
 cloud upon his brow, fallen from his sin with 
 Guinevere, and against the king. Noble, grand, 
 he stands up still, but a chequered image, " for the
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 87 
 
 great and guilty love he bare the queen, in battle 
 with the love he bare his lord, had marred his 
 face, and marked it ere his time." In grand 
 consciousness of this, the grand man, though 
 fallen, says himself: "In me there dwells no 
 greatness, save it be some far-off touch of great- 
 
 58, to know well I am not great : there (pointing 
 to Arthur), there is the man !" 
 
 Yes, there is the man ; for Lancelot and every 
 other figure become eclipsed and lost in the lustre 
 that surrounds the king. Not without reason, 
 but rightly, are they named " The Idylls of the 
 King;" for he is the ever-present unity of the 
 whole, and all else is ancillary merely. To the 
 eye of the bard, no purer, greater figure ever grew 
 than this of Arthur. To the eye of the reader, 
 also, most truly can it be said to grow : for it is 
 only at the last, when we have reached the focus 
 of the climax, that a thousand little traits that we 
 had passed unheeded suddenly flash together, in 
 our consciousness, into an image of such pure and 
 perfect herohood, that our own small human ii\ 
 must dilate to hold it. The art with which the 
 individual beams, at first scattered here and there, 
 and lost to sight, are, at length, and all at once, 
 and suddenly, in one transcendent and astounding
 
 88 ALFKED TENNYSOX. 
 
 focus, gathered, is, beyond expression, great. Into 
 this focus even " The Morte d' Arthur " enters as 
 a component ray of no weak lustre ; and now it 
 is only that we understand who he was "who 
 fought all day in Lyonnesse ;" him for whom Sir 
 Bedivere " made broad his shoulders to receive 
 his weight ; " him who told us, " More things are 
 wrought by prayer than this world dreams of." 
 Queen Guinevere, and Lancelot, and all the court, 
 were, after all, not of this man's height. To her 
 and them " he was all fault who had no fault ;" 
 whom she could love, whom they could love 
 " must have a touch of earth : " "it was the low 
 sun made the colour." He was but " a moral 
 child," " a passionate perfection," and " who can 
 gaze upon the sun in heaven ? " To them noble- 
 ness was tameness. To such interpreters, "his 
 white blamelessness, from over- fineness not in- 
 telligible, was accounted blame." Yet the un- 
 conscious instinct of his greatness lies in them 
 all, and radiates from them all. 
 
 See him, how he moves among them ! Vivien 
 has spoken words of invitation to him, " at which 
 the king had gazed upon her blankly, and gone 
 by." Enid, " gravely smiling, he lifts from horse, 
 and kisses with all pureness, brother-like, and
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 89 
 
 shows an empty tent allotted her, and glancing 
 for a moment till he sees her pass into it," turns 
 then, etc. Oh, the mild face of this blameless 
 king ! we see it even when Geraint begs per- 
 mission to leave the court, " and the king mused 
 for a little on his plea, but, last, allowing it," etc. 
 What noble trust he has in his dear friend, the 
 great Sir Lancelot, and in his queen ! When the 
 courtiers pledge the two, Sir Lancelot and her, 
 he, the king, listens, smiling ; for pure and great 
 himself, they, too, are pure and great, and the 
 love between them must be pure and great and 
 chivalrous, and it pleases him, as between such 
 dear ones. When suspicion comes, it finds the 
 soil so noble that it has pains to grow : " and the 
 king glanced first at him, then her, and went his 
 way." How he felt, and what he did, when the 
 truth came, make manifest the man. The queen 
 says, " He never spake a word of reproach to me ; 
 he never had a glimpse of mine untruth." How 
 could he — he who " honoured his own word as if 
 it were his God's," and was so white himself that 
 his whiteness shone upon and hid the blacknesses 
 of those around him ? 
 
 Let OS see him in the fight, " this moral child ;" 
 let us sec " the king charge at the head of all his
 
 90 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Table Round, and break " the foe ! Let us see 
 him, 
 
 " High on a heap of slain, from spur to plume, 
 Red as the rising sun with heathen blood ! " 
 
 And seeing him thus, let us remember how mild 
 lie is at home, how " if his own knight casts him 
 down, he laughs, saying his knights are better 
 men than he." Yet Lancelot " never saw his 
 like " in war : " there lives no greater leader." 
 
 Then see him with Lancelot, even after sus- 
 picion has been whispered to him : he flings one 
 arm about his neck " with full affection," and 
 says, 
 
 " Lancelot, my Lancelot, thou in whom I have 
 Most love and most affiance, for I know 
 What thou hast been in battle by my side." 
 
 These are some of the traits that we pass, and 
 hardly see, but which flash up suddenly into our 
 recollection, when we hear his last words to the 
 queen, and get the last glimpse of lus face, 
 " which then was as an angel's." For these con- 
 stitute the climax, and there is the focus of which 
 we have spoken. These the last words of the 
 king over the queen, " grovelling at his feet, with 
 her face against the floor," issuing, as it were, 
 from the great wound in his mighty heart, rise
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 91 
 
 up like the yearning music of a pure god in sor 
 row. Hollow, monotonous, terrible with wrong, 
 awful with prophecy, deep with the depth of 
 doom, the voice of the blameless king, now 
 superhuman, strikes, clang on clang, appalling 
 the sinner at his feet, appalling us. All the sad 
 story : tin- treachery, the sin, the grief, the rain 
 of the noblest plans, the sense of greatness unap- 
 preciated, the wrong to friendship and to faith, 
 " the pang that made his tears burn, while he 
 weighed their hearts with one too wholly true to 
 dream untruth in them ;" the grand tenderness — 
 tenderness as of a woman, a man, a saint— in him 
 " whose vast pity almost made him die ;" the 
 grand forgiveness, the mighty love unchanged, 
 unchangeable ; the hope that, " leaning on our 
 fair father, Christ," and purified, she yet may 
 claim him " in that world where all are pure," — 
 all comes upon the reader, who feels himself 
 transformed, intensified, as by communication 
 with the hearts of angels — all comes upon him 
 — and his heart is swollen and his eyes burn — all 
 comes upon him with a sense of grandeur, with a 
 ight and conflict of emotion, with a sublimity 
 of soitow, such as he shall have for the first time 
 then experienced from the power of poet. "0
 
 92 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 true and tender ! selfless man, and stainless 
 gentleman ! " well might the queen exclaim : 
 "' Ah, great and gentle lord, who wast, as is the 
 conscience of a saint among his warring senses, 
 to thy knights — now I see thee what thou art ; 
 thou art the highest and most human too ; not 
 Lancelot, nor another !" Yes, the highest and 
 most human too ; not Lancelot, nor another ! A 
 king indeed, a man, a gentleman, a royal man, a 
 royal gentleman — " the king !" Can we see him, 
 and not grow better ? Can we think upon that 
 clear face, without acknowledgment that we pos- 
 sess, through Tennyson, the light of another moral 
 sun within us, which sun has been gathered by 
 the poet from the infinite white light of Christ, 
 and fixed, to guide us, within the large ideal of a 
 Christian king ? 
 
 Ideal certainly, and superhuman, are these 
 shapes, but not mhuman ; no good feature there 
 but may be ours. As for Enid, we should pity 
 that man who has not seen and known and loved 
 her somewhere — somewhere as mother, sister, 
 daughter, wife, rare as she certainly becomes : 
 for Enid, once the ideal of an Englishwoman, now 
 too " slow " for these " fast " times, and ill at ease 
 beneath the bold eyes of the new audacity, can
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 93 
 
 find but little favour anywhere now-a-days, and 
 is hardly even seen by our oil'd Assyrian arbiters. 
 
 We do not agree, then, with the objection that 
 the personages in these poems are " unreal, and 
 belong to fairy land;" on the contrary, we believe 
 them valuable wholly and solely for the humanity 
 that is in them. That that humanity should be 
 demonstrated alien to the actual world, and not 
 in us, would nowise move us ; for that humanity, 
 if not now in us, was once in us, and should still 
 be in us. If we are so wedded to colour that 
 these transparent lovelinesses are invisible to us, 
 the blame is ours, the loss is ours. The objection, 
 in short, is baseless, and, if admitted, would wither 
 up, not these alone, but all the other great shapes 
 shadowless of sacred poesy. 
 
 In these Idylls we have the very purest growths 
 of genius ; and they are presented to us with all 
 the charms of the most finished art. No effort 
 now ; no straining for originality ; the light touch 
 of the master everywhere ! The story flows on 
 with entrancing simplicity ; and we are ever and 
 anon surprised into tears, touched to the quick by 
 the mere beauty of it. The simplicity, too, is not 
 bald, not austere, but soft, and delicate, and lus- 
 trous. " To doubt the fairness of these poems
 
 94 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 were to want an eye ; to doubt their pureness 
 were to want a heart." 
 
 There remains for us but one work of Tenny- 
 son's, the " In Memoriam," to notice now. The 
 others, as Idylls, seemed to form a unity, and 
 came naturally together ; this one, however, 
 stands apart in a solitude all its own. There 
 is a love here greater than the love of women ; a 
 grief deep as the grief of mothers in bereavement. 
 Early associations — and, in confirmation, consult 
 Longfellow's " Golden Milestone "- —constitute the 
 tree that clasps closest to the heart of the poet, 
 growing into it with root and branch and tendril : 
 tear this tree up, and oh, the sacred blood that 
 rains upon the ground ! We feel indeed as if this 
 were one of those things so inexpressibly holy 
 that they are for silence and the heart only : the 
 noises of the world sound loud and sacrilegious 
 here. We stand upon the threshold of the sacred 
 cell that held his tears, that holds the voice of his 
 distress for ever, and dare hardly venture in. The 
 minstrel bowed upon his lyre — this lyre's fitful 
 note — awe and appal us. Here, if ever, however, 
 is a human heart nakedly given us, and we may 
 not reject the lesson. 
 
 The particular grief we shall pass in silence ;
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 95 
 
 guessing only " from its measure" the greatness 
 as well of mourned as mourner. For us, it shall 
 not be the heart of the poet, but the broken heart 
 of the century that wails here in an absolute 
 music. For indeed it is not a particular, but a 
 universal grief that constitutes the burthen of 
 these melodious tears. The soul of the poet, 
 solemnized by the great shadow that has fallen 
 into it, rises into sublimity, and wrestles, Job- 
 like, with the unanswerable Why ? Deep doubt 
 has seized hi in ; for these are days of doubt, and 
 scepticism is sovereign of the hour. How be- 
 neath the weight of all these doubts, this good 
 soul struggles, lifting to the cope of heaven eyes 
 so pitiful, prayers so fervently earnest ! He 
 would indeed be the child of God : but the air is 
 dark, and he knows not where to turn. His soul 
 heaves yearningly Godward : but ever and anon 
 the knowledge of the day falls, like a cold dawn, 
 with a shiver on him ; and faith faints helplessly 
 into the arms of despair. That there is " no hope 
 of fame for modern rhyme," "that fame itself 
 expires in endless age ;" these are small matters. 
 Hut now to him "time has become a maniac 
 scattering dust," "life a fury slinging flame," 
 " and meo but Hies, that sting, lay eggs, and die ;"
 
 9G ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 and hope there seems none, but, as a particle of 
 matter, " to be blown about the desert dust," or 
 " sealed within the iron hills." The poems ex- 
 pressing these dismal mental experiences are, we 
 hesitate not to say, absolutely unexcelled, whether 
 in ancient or in modern verse. We refer more 
 particularly to Nos. 53, 54, 55, and others in the 
 immediate neighbourhood of these. It is in one 
 of these that the reader will find what we have 
 been accustomed to consider— when taken in con- 
 nexion with the general context — the grandest 
 poetical image that has ever been produced, those 
 " great world's altar-stairs that slope through 
 darkness up to God." Throughout the whole of 
 these magnificent psalms, we have expressions fur- 
 nished us, the most trenchant and incisive, for all 
 the subtlest turns of educated reflection : no 
 point of cultured speculation but has here its 
 word. One glories in this triumph of expression : 
 one feels glad that every phantom has received 
 its name at last, and that we have thus power, at 
 will, to summon them into day. Still, again, one 
 feels sad ; one feels unsatisfied : can the poet name 
 the phantoms only, can he not lay them also ? 
 Eight is it to put the problem : to put the pro- 
 blem, and to put it truly, is the duty of every
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 97 
 
 true man. Far happier were those days, certainly 
 when the problem was not put, and when every 
 man lived and moved and had his being in an all- 
 unconscious answer ; but our days have been 
 otherwise appointed ; we, it seems, must put the 
 problem. But, after all, are we but putting it ? 
 The happiness of the unconscious answer is 
 certainly denied us evermore ; but have we really 
 not yet attained to the greater happiness, the 
 clearer happiness of a conscious answer ? Do not 
 we touch here a question much more important 
 than the mere putting of the problem? As for 
 that, indeed, has not the problem been put and 
 put again ; and, as regards mere putting, has it 
 not, at length, reached its ultimate perfection ? 
 To what end repeat and re-repeat, and why for 
 ever in these days the sound of doubt, disgust, 
 complaint, hopelessness, weariness, despair ? The 
 path of literature after forty, is it only from 
 
 om to gloom? Dickens used to cheer us with 
 the freshness of the mere senses, the elasticity 
 of the mere animal heart : but where is all his 
 buoyancy dow '. Have we nothing left but flat- 
 
 3, insipidity, staleness ? Thackeray, once on 
 a linn-, ( ould make us hate the meanness of pre- 
 tension ; but has Ik; become himself a portion of 
 
 <:
 
 98 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 that which, all his life, he has so exclusively and 
 industriously watched and held up to ridicule ? Is 
 his pen but a weary snob, ineffably blastfe, un- 
 utterably used up, that yawns in blank satiety 
 even while it so glibly nibs over the paper ? And 
 Carlyle too — is there not a tone of inexpressible 
 sadness in him ? Then Tennyson, and the ques- 
 tionings of "In Memoriam !" Why is this? Is 
 there nothing for the race but scepticism and the 
 senses, or — scepticism and suicide ? Surely we 
 have advanced, at last, beyond the mere putting 
 of the problem ; surely the answering of it " must 
 even now be of ripe progress '" Surely there is 
 this answer, at all events, that Christianity, after 
 French criticism, and German criticism, and ac- 
 cepting each for what it is worth, and for all it is 
 worth, is a purer thing than ever, and that it will 
 live for ever, and grow for ever ! The cheerless 
 atheism of Feuerbach, and the preposterous auto- 
 theism of Max Stirner (if in earnest), are, we 
 know, externally the latest fruits of the latest 
 philosophy : but they are only externally so ; 
 and neither ever really possessed any umbilical 
 cord of junction. No : the true result of the 
 latest philosophy — the true result of Kant and 
 Hegel — is, that knowledge and belief coalesce in
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 99 
 
 lucid union, that to reason as to faith there is but 
 one religion, one God, and one Redeemer. 
 
 The small section who affront the sun of 
 Sunday with their petty pamphlets in their open 
 shops — who occupy, so self-complacently, their 
 flimsy world of an " Age of Eeason," — who 
 pretend still to read by the paltry light of French 
 enlightenment, — have been certainly left behind 
 by that other party who— in the midst of a 
 certain uneasy hesitation, that, Antoeus-like, must 
 seek renewal of strength from time to time in the 
 earth of the senses — profess adhesion to the faith 
 of Schelling in his Spinozistic epoch ; but botli 
 have been far transcended by those whom philo- 
 sophy has enabled consciously to return to the 
 feet of a Mediator and Saviour. 
 
 This is the last great step ; and it is right that 
 poetry should know of it, that she may apply 
 herself to the more congenial task of singing faith 
 than of pointing doubt. Still the reader must not 
 infer that Tennyson, rising, in the sad darkness of 
 the bereaved hour, into the sublime atmosphere 
 of Job, ever condescends to the shabby prose of 
 infidelity. We have said already that his humble 
 it turns always to the one true refuge ; nor 
 indeed has any poet, not even excepting Cowper,
 
 100 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 written with a purer piety than the bard of " In 
 Memoriam." His "faith is large in Time, and 
 that which shapes it to some perfect end." If he 
 has " touched a jarring lyre at first," he strives 
 to " make it true " in the end ; and he attains 
 finally the grand hope, with which his dead friend 
 is mingled, to 
 
 " Arrive at last the blessed goal, 
 When He that died in Holy Land, 
 Will reach lis out the shining hand 
 And take us as a single soul." 
 
 But the cloud does not sit upon him for ever ; 
 rising, it " lets the sun strike where it clung ;" 
 and Tennyson, issuing from his grief, has soared 
 to truth and humanized his song. He has come 
 to see that poetry is something infinitely higher 
 than a mere refinement of cultivated leisure ; he 
 desires to make it operative towards a purpose ; 
 he seeks to lead it, like a purifying spirit, reno- 
 vatingly, into the actual and the practical. 
 Hence " The Princess," and " The King," and the 
 reflective portions of " Maud." We shall not 
 depreciate these great services to humanity ; still 
 we anticipate from Tennyson a turning to the 
 practical completer yet. The " stitch, stitch, 
 stitch " of " The Shirt," though in a certain sense
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 101 
 
 a very common sound, and heard in a worse 
 than common room, is really much sublimer 
 than the consciously- intervolved word- vapour of 
 Wordsworth on his mountain-top. The " One 
 more unfortunate" on Waterloo Bridge is really 
 more poetical than " Guinevere ;" and sorrows 
 like these cry piteously for help to us from 
 every corner. Oh the wrongs of children, for 
 example, in the rank brick- work of fastidious 
 London ! Was ever world more cruelly confused 
 and desperate? And shall not the poet aid to 
 purify, to sweeten, and to cleanse ? His true 
 themes lie not, after all, in the shadowy legends 
 of a buried past. He himself says, " Nature 
 brings not back the mastodon, and why should 
 any man remodel models ?" The poet, with his 
 stylus and his tablets, gliding between the forest 
 and the sea, or winding round the cataract to the 
 mountain, is not, after all, our highest figure ; nor 
 h Ins highest hest the polishing of carven cedar in 
 refined and amiable solitude. It is the present 
 that must minister to the present; vainly shall 
 we expect an adequate and effectual healing from 
 the recovered images of an ancient tomb. 
 
 We have already assigned to Tennyson the 
 nearest place to Milton ; still all such decisions
 
 102 ALFEED TENNYSON. 
 
 of relative rank are to a certain extent invidious, 
 one-sided, and untrue. There is in Milton a 
 density and intensity of metal, audible in the 
 very breadth and depth of the mere ring of it, 
 that securely place him above all later aspirants ; 
 but as we have hinted, we are not without com- 
 punctions in singling out Tennyson from all 
 these for the next place. Dryden and Pope give 
 rise to no uneasiness, for they are poets of another 
 class. To Burns we can do justice apart, and 
 on other grounds. With Cowper, Campbell, 
 Southey, Moore, we can set ourselves right. 
 Even Byron and Coleridge shall not excite a 
 qualm, for they are mere Bedouins of verse — 
 nomads — not settlers in the realms of song. Our 
 difficulties relate, all of them, to Wordsworth, 
 Keats, and Shelley. 
 
 When we think of the " Laodamia," for ex- 
 ample, we are compelled to admit that there is 
 in Tennyson nothing more perfect, whether in 
 thought or execution, nothing higher, nothing 
 purer, while, at the same time, if not grander, it 
 is at least denser in tone than anything this poet 
 has yet produced. Then Shelley, with his ima- 
 gination as of the unclouded blue when nothing 
 but the sun is there — his selfless heart — his
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 103 
 
 boundless sympathies — his pity and his gentle- 
 ness — his images, which are as living sublimities 
 that awe — the supernatural melodies of his verse 
 — the unparalleled splendour and magnificence of 
 his innumerable products — how shall we abate 
 him under any man ? Keats again, so fecund, 
 facile, full, with his delicious sound, his instan- 
 taneous instinct of the very self of elemental 
 beauty, his sumptuous fancy, his gracious ima- 
 gination — Keats, blowing a pipe so mellow that it 
 charms, whispering single words that are as "open 
 sesames" to the most enchanting secrets — Keats 
 perplexes us in turn. Where can we find grounds 
 to justify our preference? As compared with 
 either Shelley or Keats, we cannot claim for 
 Tennyson any superiority of original endowment ; 
 he is probably inferior to the former in material 
 grandeur, as to the latter in material richness. 
 Perhaps his coinage is less red-new than theirs ; 
 perhaps his imagery does not always blend 
 indissolubly into one essence with the thought 
 like theirs, but stands side by side with it, 
 illustratively, rhetorically. Perhaps there is in 
 him more art, in them more nature. How found 
 his higher seat, then ? 
 
 A regards Wordsworth, on the other hand,
 
 104 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 conceding, perhaps, superior richness of origi- 
 nal nature to Tennyson, how shall we prefer 
 his products before that " Laodamia " which we 
 have already vaunted ? Coleridge sums up 
 Wordsworth's excellences under six heads, which 
 are shortly these : — 1. Pure, appropriate lan- 
 guage ; 2. Weight and sanity of original reflec- 
 tion ; 3. Sinewy strength of lines and paragraphs ; 
 4. Truth to nature ; 5. Subtle thought in unison 
 with sensibility, and sympathy with man as 
 man ; 6. Imaginative power. Now, every one of 
 these six attributes can be predicated quite as 
 truly of Tennyson as of Wordsworth, and, reflec- 
 tion apart, quite as truly, sometimes more truly, 
 both of Keats and Shelley. Coleridge's character- 
 istics are evidently too general then — they do 
 not possess sufficient definiteness of specific limi- 
 tation to enable us to apply them as criteria 
 regulative and distributive of the distinctive 
 merits of any poet : they are clues tied to a 
 hundred boles ; they are general, and not, as they 
 profess themselves, special, critical tests. 
 
 Perhaps, on the whole, we may sum up the 
 problem not too incorrectly thus : — 
 
 In regard to the question of relative supe- 
 riority, Tennyson's difficulties with Wordsworth
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 105 
 
 concern uot the man but the products; while 
 with Keats and Shelley they respect less the 
 product ^ than the men. 
 
 We have always believed that Wordsworth did 
 not bring with him so directly and absolutely 
 from nature the rich-flushed ivory of the poet's 
 soul as either of his three younger rivals. We 
 fancy we detect all through Wordsworth an occa- 
 sional insonority as of original wood. In fact, if 
 we consider Wordsworth, in his general character 
 as thinking man, we must admit that his intelli- 
 gence was, in many directions and to a con- 
 siderable extent, opaque and wooden. Such, we 
 find from The Representative Men, he must have 
 manifested himself to Emerson. The woody fibre 
 present in the man, however, disappears from his 
 products. His best sonnets, " The Vernal Ode," 
 " Laodamia," etc., are wholly free from it : it 
 has been roasted out and a perfect metallic ring 
 obtained. It is the quality of this metallic ring, 
 its density, that seems to attach to Wordsworth, 
 relatively i<> Tennyson, greater weight, greater 
 breadth, greater size, and to approximate him 
 more naturally ami justly to Milton. We feel, 
 however, that much of this density is Milton's 
 own ; that it is the result of life Ion- study and
 
 106 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 effort on the part of Wordsworth, who, in all 
 probability, would never have come near it had 
 not the metal of " Comus," the " Odes," and the 
 " Sonnets " ever rung in his ear. Observe, too, 
 how often Wordsworth's " points " are but affairs 
 of words. Tennyson has been accused of affec- 
 tation, but the censure is much more relevant to 
 Wordsworth. In the ripe works of the former 
 there is no affectation unfilled by a solid core of 
 substance, while in the best productions of the 
 latter affectations abound, consisting of mere form, 
 and all but wholly empty. Wordsworth has been 
 called a metaphysical poet. Of metaphysics pro- 
 per he knows nothing ; and how often do we not 
 find the passages specially so named mere convo- 
 luted vapours of laborious breath, involving only a 
 fraudulent sublimity of tumid verbiage ? Words- 
 worth's very position w 7 as adverse to the produc- 
 tion of the humaner and more valuable results of 
 the art. It is not in the nature of things that a 
 man who sets himself to stare at mountains and 
 at lakes only should, in the end, really enrich 
 himself. In such exclusive companionship huma- 
 nity will well from him, and he will become rigid 
 as his own rocks, narrow and bald and indurated. 
 Wordsworth, then, probably inferior to Tenny-
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 1 7 
 
 son in primitive and original, becomes certainly 
 inferior to him in ultimate and acquired man- 
 hood. Then again, as regards the products, if 
 there seems a superior density of tone in some of 
 them, this merit is weakened by reflection on its 
 source. Here, then, we found the claim of Tenny- 
 son to superiority, on greater native manhood, 
 and on the greater variety, richness, and more 
 human interests of his successful products. It is 
 really a great matter that we hear, in Tennyson, 
 a voice from the whole range of culture. 
 
 In regard to Shelley and Keats, it is not the 
 natural Tennyson that is greater than either : it 
 is the ripe maturity of his thought, wrought into 
 the fair products of his imagination, that has 
 bestowed on these a weight and value, rare in 
 any poet, and mostly wanting in the young effu- 
 sions of Keats and Shelley. Thus, then, Tenny- 
 son is distinguished from Wordsworth, on the 
 one hand, by superiority, as well of original 
 richness as of acquired range ; and, on the other 
 hand, from Keats and Shelley by the ripe matu- 
 rity and full humanity of his products. 
 
 There is one « liaracteristic in which, though it 
 is common to all great writers, Tennyson is unusu- 
 ally eminent — it is the faculty of conception, or of
 
 108 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 inner perception, inner vision. He never writes 
 until he has fairly pictured all; and while he 
 writes, his eye never for a moment quits the 
 picture, but passes on from point to point with 
 luminous fidelity and unerring accuracy. The 
 anecdote of Arthur treading on a crowned skele- 
 ton, from which the crown rolls into light, and, 
 turning on its rim, flees, etc., will illustrate our 
 meaning. Equally good illustrations may be 
 found in the fall of Geraint, his battles, the scene 
 with Enid in the hall of Doorm, the tournament 
 in Elaine, and the final interview of the king with 
 the queen. In this minute picture-work, Tenny- 
 son is always particularly vivid. It is no speci- 
 ality of his, however, but belongs to all great 
 writers. To tell the whole truth, it is the secret of 
 literature in general : look at it but deep enough, 
 and even the commonest old tub, red-hooped awry, 
 will suggest words to render it interesting. 
 
 The main characteristics of Tennyson are yet 
 to mention : they are ethical conception and 
 classical execution ; the latter being but the 
 necessary concomitant and natural shadow of the 
 former. The central sun of all Tennyson's writ- 
 ings is the heart : this is the reflection that lies 
 in his deepest deeps. " In Memoriam " alone de-
 
 A.LFBED TENNYSON. 109 
 
 monstrates Tennyson to possess the richest, purest, 
 truest, natural heart, perhaps, of any poet on 
 record ; and with this natural heart is involved 
 what we name the whole ethical side of him. We 
 know no poet that lias ever displayed an equal 
 sense of moral goodness in its two forms of great- 
 ness in man and of purity in woman. To all 
 fi urns of these he rises thrilling, dilating, brimming. 
 He is the most Christian of poets. This is liis 
 leading attribute ; and the classic execution is but 
 its emanation, but its natural garment. 
 
 Milton is moral certainly; but he is fierce, in- 
 tolerant, Hebraic ; while Tennyson is gentle, sweet, 
 and Christian. Wordsworth is also moral; but 
 he is cold and thin, while Tennyson is warm and 
 rich. There is a spirit of gentleness in Keats and 
 Shelley, especially the latter, which is ethic cer- 
 tainly ; but, in Keats, it is aimless and lost in 
 mere sensuous beauty, while, in Shelley, it is a too 
 eager longing only that rushes into error. 
 
 It is this ethical or human side of Tennyson 
 that involved his necessity for maturity and ex- 
 perience. To Keats, who had no quest but 
 sensuous beauty, boyhood sufficed. To Shelley 
 again, who, too eager to wait, too impatient even 
 fur the laws of time, must, instantly and at once,
 
 1 ] ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 give voice and shape to all his crude sympathies 
 and torrid anticipations, youth gave verge enough. 
 But Tennyson, who bore the burthen of a purer, 
 richer, larger humanity, required the breadths of 
 Space for his roots and the heights of Time for 
 his branches. 
 
 Such are the results of a comparison of Tenny- 
 son with several of our greatest Idyllists. We 
 may say that Milton keeps the summit of the 
 hill, and sits amid the thunders ; that Wordsworth 
 has chosen for himself a separate crag, where he 
 lives in a somewhat thin complacency, but waited 
 on by simple dignity and solemn earnestness ; 
 that Shelley takes the very breast of the moun- 
 tain, fronting the firmament and the sun ; that 
 Keats has found a haunted wood upon the flank, 
 where flash the white feet of the gods and god- 
 desses ; and that Tennyson, holding himself free 
 to wander where he will, prefers the fields of 
 labour and the flowers of culture hard by the 
 smoke of roofs. 1 
 
 1 Many, it must be confessed, will certainly bear recollections 
 within them, in the light of which Wordsworth will show beside 
 Tennyson as the deep, true, pure, the holy, simple, severe spirit of 
 Nature herself beside an artist that rejoices in the lustre of gems 
 and jewels and golden prettinesses, in the gauds and knicknacks of 
 mere art, — in " carven imageries of fruits and flowers, and diamond 
 panes of quaint device." But will sincerity of analysis sub- 
 stantiate this ? Will not the thought of a certain external effort,
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 1 1 1 
 
 In conclusion, let us but think again of all 
 those gentle lovelinesses, and subtle delicacies, 
 and manly greatnesses, that name themselves 
 " Godiva," " Lady Clare," " Enid," " Ulysses," 
 " Arthur ; " let us think of the passionate in- 
 tensity of " Maud," of the exuberant phantasy of 
 " The Princess," of the ripe culture, deep thought, 
 and long, long wail of " In Memoriam ; " let us 
 think of the true eye for character in the Ode to 
 the great Duke and elsewhere ; let us not forget, 
 either, the poet's kindly, genial, manly letter to 
 his friend Maurice ; let us recall all these, and 
 the one tendency that directs them all, 
 
 " To keep down the base in man, 
 To teach high thought, and amiable words, 
 And courtliness, and the desire of fame, 
 And love of truth, and all that makes a man ;" 
 
 and surely we must agree that, unless language be 
 hypocrisy and literature a sham, this is not only 
 the richest, purest, and truest of poets, but also — 
 so far as publicity reaches — the richest, purest, 
 and truest living man. 
 
 ■tain thinness, a certain meagreness and prose, obtrude to 
 
 from the one, of a thousand realities, a thousand truest 
 
 triumphs, to add to the other! It is a happiness in the end, be 
 
 all that as it may, that we can afford to worship at both shrines. 
 
 requiring first of all a special analysis, has not 
 
 been mentioned shore ; if [ess rich, or less richly-tuned, than on* 
 of the others, he is probably stronger than aithei .
 
 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 Judging from such notices as we have read, it 
 would seem difficult for the critics of the day to 
 speak of this eminent man in other terms than 
 those of extreme admiration, or of not much less 
 extreme dislike. The way in which the whole 
 stock quiver of superlatives has, on this occasion, 
 been precipitately emptied, and its contents in- 
 discriminately applied, reminds us of a passage of 
 Lord Macaulay's own. He remarks, in reference 
 to a certain successful speech, that it was said of 
 it, " that it was more ornamented than the 
 speeches of Demosthenes, and less diffuse than 
 those of Cicero." " This unmeaning phrase," he 
 continues, " has been quoted a hundred times ; 
 that it should ever have been quoted except to 
 be laughed at, is strange : the vogue which it has 
 obtained may serve to show in how slovenly a way 
 most people are content to think." A truer obser- 
 vation has very seldom been made ; and we dare
 
 LORD MACAULAY. 1 1 3 
 
 say the recollection of our readers has not any 
 very difficult or distant journey to travel back for 
 the discovery of illustrations in professional criti- 
 cisms on Lord Macaulay himself. Where there 
 are no bounds neither is there any centre, and 
 there reigns only a futile and impracticable vague. 
 This we, for our part, would fain eschew. In 
 short, a characterization that, with precision of 
 limit, shall possess a coherent, reasoned interior 
 of discernment and discrimation — this is our ob- 
 ject ; and, if we fail in its accomplishment, we 
 can assure our readers that it will be against our 
 own best efforts. 
 
 To those who look forward to the triumphs of 
 literary or political life, the career of Macaulay is 
 no less instructive than interesting. What ele- 
 ments of success were given him, and, still more, 
 what elements of success he himself brought, 
 deserve, on the part of all such aspirants, the 
 very closest attention. If it be true, as regards 
 the former of these considerations, that he seems, 
 from the very first, to have been borne, as it were, 
 on supporting hands, steadily onwards, from place 
 to place, and from honour to honour, till ambition 
 the very greediest would have called content- 
 no less true is it that, but fur the second COD 
 
 |[
 
 114 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 sideration, but for the elements of success which 
 he himself brought, these places would never have 
 been held, and these honours could never have 
 been accorded. Had the youth displayed no 
 talent, had he written no prize poems, had he 
 not shone in the Union Debating Club, all the 
 wealth of Zachary Macaulay his father, and all 
 the influence of Wilberforce his friend, would 
 have been powerless to aid — would have been 
 powerless to extract from Lord Brougham one 
 single word of that long letter of advice which, 
 received in young Macaulay's twenty-third year, 
 must have exercised a most valuable influence on 
 his whole character and subsequent progress. But 
 more, in addition to talent, and in addition to 
 study, had not the youth possessed a rare sobriety 
 of judgment, a rare perseverance of effort, and a 
 rare concentration of purpose, all the other ele- 
 ments would have still been futile. It is to the 
 union of these elements that we must attribute 
 both the steadily progressive advance, and the 
 splendid ultimate result that crowned it. The 
 irregularities, the impetuosities, the passions, even 
 the conscientious scruples of genius, have often 
 rendered nugatory the wisest plans of parental 
 experience ; and we doubt very much that old
 
 LORD MACAULAY. 1 1 5 
 
 Zaehary's scheme would have attained an equal 
 success, had his son been such as Burns or Byron, 
 as Shelley or Coleridge, or even as the steady, 
 persevering, and victorious, but keen-tempered 
 Carlyle. 
 
 In truth, it is very rare to see the means of 
 parents, the influence of friends, the powers of 
 talent, the application of study, and the perti- 
 nacity of effort so long and so unintermittedly 
 exerted on a single object. The reader, perhaps, 
 has a difficulty in realizing to himself our mean- 
 ing here. It wants, however, but one word to 
 make the whole case plain to him. Throughout 
 the entire course of his life, even from very early 
 student days, Thomas Babington Macaulay did 
 nothing but, — in its own first words, — " write the 
 history of England from the accession of James n. 
 down to a time which is within the memory of 
 men now living." He directly admits this : he 
 speaks of his History as " a work which is the 
 business and the pleasure of his life." His 
 1. ays are no less explicit. With exceptions 
 that hardly need be noticed, the whole of them 
 relate to that object, and several of them are 
 actual draughts of that whole history. Consider J 
 them— Milton, Hallam's "Constitutional History
 
 1 1 6 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 of England," Bunyan, Hampden, " Burleigh and 
 his Times," " The War of the Spanish Succession," 
 Horace Walpole, Sir James Mackintosh's " His- 
 tory of the Eevolution," William Pitt, Bacon, Sir 
 William Temple, Lord Clive, Warren Hastings, 
 " The Comic Dramatists of the Eestoration," 
 Samuel Johnson, Frederick the Great, Madame 
 D'Arblay, Addison, and the Earl of Chatham ; — 
 do not they relate, all of them, to the historical 
 period in question, and have we not perhaps been 
 too fastidious in omitting from the list Eanke's 
 " History of the Popes," and even Southey's 
 " Colloquies," and Gladstone " On Church and 
 State" ? Again, to stoop closer, may not the 
 Milton, the Hallam, the Hampden, the Burleigh, 
 the Mackintosh, and others, be regarded as suc- 
 cessive sketches and rtchauffdes of the whole 
 theme ? It may be said, indeed, that it was not 
 literature that his parents and friends, at all 
 events, most probably aimed at ; but our readers 
 will have no difficulty in perceiving that even 
 Macaulay's political life subserved, in reality, the 
 same plan : it supplied him with means, and it 
 extended to him the special experience necessary 
 for the peculiar History he contemplated. 
 
 Thus then, parents, friends, position, study, and
 
 LORD MACAUI.AY. 117 
 
 inclination, all working together to a common 
 end, triumph was their due, and triumph came. 
 
 But the concentration of endeavour is, on the 
 part of Macaulay, even greater than we have yet 
 named. A favourite position of Thomas Carlyle, 
 in some of his earlier essays, is, that David Hume 
 constitutes the intellectual king of these days. 
 By this he means that the opinions, the ideas, the 
 system of thought, the general mode and manner 
 of intellectually looking at and judging matters 
 which characterized that philosopher, had become 
 the common thinking property, the common 
 thinking furniture of the majority of leading men. 
 Of course Carlyle by no means intends to intimate 
 that all these leading men are of necessity sceptics, 
 or infidels, or bound to each and every special 
 opinion of David Hume, but simply that a certain 
 general cast of mind which, in the case of this 
 celebrated man, had attained to great complete- 
 ness and distinctness of development, had been 
 inherited and adopted by them. In this sense, 
 we find ourselves constrained to say that the in- 
 tellectua] father of Lord Macaulay was eminentlv 
 David Soma We fancy it is always wit b a sense 
 of secret satisfaction and inward complacency 
 that Macaulay mentions the very name of Hume.
 
 118 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 He talks of liim with unction as " a great his- 
 torian," and seems to linger with fond admiration 
 over his " narrative, which is likely to last as long 
 as the English tongue." The present generation 
 is perhaps, on the whole, not quite disposed to 
 extend so much of its favour to David Hume, 
 and may question the position we assume. But 
 one glance at the last generation, with its Godwins, 
 Benthams, Molesworths, with even its Sir James 
 Mackintoshes and Lord Jeffreys, will suffice for 
 the perception of an anterior probability in regard 
 to our opinion ; and a consideration of the mental 
 points of view common to such men as Mill and 
 Buckle in our own day will probably confirm it. 
 
 What we would allege then is, that the young 
 ambition of Macaulay — nay, that the enduring, 
 life-long ambition of Macaulay — was to find him- 
 self side by side with David Hume, as the 
 continuator of his History, and as an inseparably 
 conjunct and equal classic. For this he amassed, 
 even while at college, and year after year indus- 
 triously afterwards, all those great stores of read- 
 ing and information that bore directly or indirectly 
 on this one subject. For this he tried himself in 
 relevant periodical papers, and feared no waste ; 
 for he said to himself cheerily and proudly :
 
 LORD MACAU LAY. 119 
 
 One day, in the long evening of my life, I will 
 throw over these, connecting them into oneness, 
 the bulk of an entire history, and this history, 
 over these essays, shall be as the great dome of a 
 cathedral that closes unitingly over its many rich 
 and splendid chapels. But the will of man on 
 earth can never assure itself of identity with the 
 will of God in heaven ; and Macaulay, when he 
 had executed, with unintermitted exactitude and 
 complete success, three-fourths of the programme 
 he had set himself, vanished from among us, 
 leaving in consternation before the gap of an 
 unparalleled fragment the largest assembly of 
 spectators that any single historian had ever seen 
 around him. 
 
 In our view, then, the life-long aim that de- 
 termined the general action of Lord Macaulay 
 was eminently simple. A like simplicity, and of 
 identical origin, distinguished his character, as 
 well as all his principles, literary, political, 
 philosophical, and religious. In fact, all that to 
 analysis is summed up in the name of David 
 1 1 nine, is centrally operative in these also. And 
 yet, at first view, the two men seem directly 
 antagonistic. Eume was a Tory, Macaulay is a 
 Whig : Hume was a sceptical metaphysician,
 
 120 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 Maoaulay has abandoned metaphysics ; Hume 
 ridiculed the church, Macaulay attends the church ; 
 Hume swore by Pope and sniffed at Shakespeare, 
 Macaulay swears by Shakespeare and sniffs at Pope. 
 Positions more diametrically opposite, and on the 
 most important concerns of humanity, political, 
 philosophical, religious, literary, it is impossible to 
 find. Still it is our deep belief that no single 
 phrase {mutatis mutandis) can more completely 
 and comprehensively describe Thomas Babington 
 Macaulay than this : he is David Hume in the 
 nineteenth century, conformed to the church, and 
 author of the continuation of " The History of 
 England." 
 
 In truth, Hume was a Tory by Jacobitic pre- 
 dilection only : he was a Whig in principle — so 
 far, at least, as we are to name that principle from 
 the practice of the present day. What, in fact, is 
 the system of thought that David Hume is held 
 to represent ? In one word, it is the philosophy 
 of the eighteenth century. Now, to most of us, 
 that one word is suggestive only of infidelity, 
 free-thinking, deism, atheism, of scepticism in 
 religion, of sensualism in philosophy, and of 
 republicanism in politics. Still to apply any of 
 these terms to the philosophy of the eighteenth
 
 LORD MACAULAY. 1 2 1 
 
 century would be to name it badly, for, though 
 the doctrines and opinions implied in such ex- 
 pressions are certainly concomitants and attend- 
 ants of that philosophy, they are, in reality, only 
 phenomenal and temporary forms. English think- 
 ers, whichever side they have taken, have been 
 content to remain with a very indistinct, obscure, 
 and confused consciousness on these points ; and 
 the consequence is, that at this moment we know 
 of no single really intelligent and fully enlight- 
 ened discussion of this subject in the English 
 language. The Germans, on the contrary, have 
 coolly turned upon it, lifted it, looked at it, and 
 examined it piecemeal, till now, having at length 
 fairly filled and satisfied themselves with what of 
 instruction, negative or positive, they could ex- 
 tract from it, they have long since packed it up, 
 and laid it on the shelf, labelled AufMarung, a 
 word which, meaning in its ordinary use simply 
 enlightenment — up-lighting or lighting-up — and 
 badly rendered 6claircissemcnt by Mr. Sibree, may 
 !»<• here translated, with reference at once to the 
 special up-lighting implied, and a certain noto- 
 rious exposition of that up-lighting, the " Age of 
 Reason." Now, into this subject it is not our 
 cue to enter ; it suffices our objects to say at once
 
 122 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 that the fundamental principle of the Aufkldrung, 
 of the up-lighting, of the " age of reason," of the 
 philosophy of the eighteenth century, is, in one of 
 Lord Macaulay's favourite phrases, the right of 
 private judgment. This really constituted the 
 spiritual attitude of humanity — its principle — in 
 the eighteenth century ; and the majority of the 
 reproaches usual in this connexion concern not 
 that attitude, not that principle, but a variety of 
 secondary or temporary phenomena, necessarily 
 or contingently concomitant. 
 
 It will have already suggested itself perhaps, 
 then, to our readers, that this phrase, right of 
 private judgment, still tinged, be it observed, with 
 the peculiar colours of its peculiar birth-time, is 
 very fairly capable of being named the leading 
 principle in the political, philosophical, and reli- 
 gious opinions of Lord Macaulay. Our space 
 allows us only to touch such points ; but we hope 
 that the touch, light as it is, will elicit such 
 sparks as may enable the reader to follow, more 
 or less adequately, the general course of our 
 thought here. 
 
 The philosophical opinions of Lord Macaulay 
 are neither complicated nor abstruse. In his 
 system the a priori has no place ; everything
 
 LORD MACAU LAY. 123 
 
 must demonstrate its legitimacy to him a. posteriori 
 and by induction. " All systems," he says, " reli- 
 gious, political, or scientific, are but opinions 
 resting on evidence more or less satisfactory." 
 With metaphysics lie will not meddle; they are 
 beyond the province of humanity. The specula 
 tions of Hume in this field, with his " Enquiry 
 concerning the Human Understanding," his in- 
 vestigation of the theory of morals, and his dis- 
 courses of Palamedcs concerning the state Fourli 
 — these speculations have no other result in the 
 eyes of Macaulay than to demonstrate the im- 
 possibility of any rational solution on such sub- 
 jects ; accordingly he accepts this conclusion and 
 will inquire no further. All, however, that Hume 
 can teach him about " the liberty of the press," 
 " the principles of government," " the science of 
 politics," "parliament," "parties," "civil liberty," 
 " commerce," " luxury," the " balance of trade," 
 " passive obedience," and the " Protestant succes- 
 sion," he learns with avidity. Adam Smith, too, 
 he makes his own. It is in the same spirit that 
 he recurs to Bacon as to " the great apostle of 
 experimental science." "Bacon," he says, " said 
 nothing about the grounds of moral obligation or 
 the freedom of the human will," but he was
 
 124 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 mightily concerned about " utility and progress." 
 These then, utility and progress, are to Macaulay 
 the only recommendations. " An acre in Middle- 
 sex is better," he says, " than a principality in 
 Utopia." And he has no patience with that 
 philosophy which " fills the world with long 
 words and long beards, and leaves it as wicked 
 and as ignorant as before." He ridicules Cicero 
 and Seneca for that, disdaining to supply, they 
 preposterously seek to set us above, the wants of 
 humanity. He agrees with Bacon that " the 
 earlier Greek speculators, Democritus in particu- 
 lar, were superior to their more celebrated suc- 
 cessors ;" and of these latter he says : " Assuredly 
 if the tree which Socrates planted and Plato 
 watered, is to be judged of by its flowers and 
 leaves, it is the noblest of trees ; but if we take 
 the homely test of Bacon, if we judge of the tree 
 by its fruit, our opinion of it may be less favour- 
 able." 
 
 Lord Melbourne is represented to have said 
 once — " I wish that I was as sure of any one 
 thing as Tom Macaulay is sure of everything." 
 Our task here is exposition and not discussion ; 
 still we cannot help remarking that the infallible 
 correctness ascribed by Lord Melbourne to Mac-
 
 LOKD MACAU LAY. 125 
 
 aulay, demonstrates itself, in one or two of these 
 passages, as, after all, human. Democritus, for 
 example (though why the inventor of the atomic 
 theory — so wonderfully complete in almost every 
 detail too — and the great ancient apostle of mate- 
 rialism, should be so much of a favourite with 
 both Bacon and Maeaulay is very plain to us), 
 was not earlier than Socrates, but probably several 
 years younger. At all events, he was undoubtedly 
 contemporary with Socrates, and long survived 
 him. The dates of Socrates are B.C. 469-399. 
 Democritus is said by the latest authorities to 
 have been born in the year B.C. 460, nine years 
 after the birth of Socrates ; and he is universally 
 admitted to have reached a great age, no less, 
 according to some, than that of 104 years. Even 
 should we assume B.C. 470 as the birth-year of 
 Democritus, the state of the case would remain 
 essentially the same. Then, again, it is too bad, 
 and indeed rather unlucky, that Maeaulay should 
 at all quarrel with Socrates, for, in truth, Socrates 
 is the father and founder of the very system of 
 thought professed by Bacon and by his critic 
 after hi in. The age of Pericles was also an " age 
 of reason," an era of " up-lighting," and the prin- 
 ciple then was the principle now, the right of
 
 126 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 private judgment. For this condition of thought, 
 Socrates was, though not by any means wholly, 
 largely responsible, and he fell a victim to the 
 offended traditional institutions which that prin- 
 ciple insulted. But, this apart, there is another 
 and a stronger reason why Socrates should be 
 considered the father and founder of the system 
 of thought which, since the time of Bacon, has 
 been established among us, and it is this : Soc- 
 rates was certainly the originator of generalization. 
 This is indisputable ; Socrates invented the ex- 
 press, the methodic, the scientific investigation of 
 general ideas, just as certainly as Newton invented 
 the theory of gravitation, and much more certainly 
 than that Bacon was the first to recall attention 
 — such is the merit assigned him by Macaulay — 
 to the method of induction by experiment. 
 
 Be this as it may, and passing to the political 
 creed of Macaulay, we find this latter of a similar 
 colour to the philosophical. " Political science," 
 according to him, " is progressive and experi- 
 mental like the rest." "Ever since I began to 
 observe," he remarks, " I have been seeing nothing 
 but growth, and hearing of nothing but decay." 
 Accordingly, he has no patience with the lauda- 
 tores temporis acti, but declares them to be " as
 
 LORD MACAULA.Y. 127 
 
 ignorant and shallow as people generally are who 
 extol the past at the expense of the present." He 
 affirms that " the more carefully we examine the 
 history of the past, the more reason shall we find 
 to dissent from those who imagine that our age 
 has been fruitful of new social evils ; the truth is, 
 that the evils are, with scarcely an exception, old ; 
 that which is new is the intelligence which 
 discerns and the humanity which remedies them." 
 As regards government, then, he is clearly for the 
 doctrines of the passive political economists, and 
 stand unreservedly by an almost absolute laissez 
 /aire. To all poetic theories that bear on the 
 past, he answers by bills of mortality and tables 
 of statistics. Social evils, in his view, must in 
 general correct themselves ; he will have no inter- 
 meddling, and confesses to a horror of all paternal 
 government. He knows of no infallible opinion. 
 Be asks who are the wisest and best. And whose 
 opinion is to decide that ? He declares govern- 
 ment unfit to direct our opinions, or superintend 
 our private habits ; and he sums up the whole 
 duty of the state thus: — "Our rulers will best 
 promote the improvement of the nation by strictly 
 confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, 
 by Leaving capital to find its most lucrative
 
 128 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 course, commodities their fair price, industry and 
 intelligence their natural reward, idleness and 
 folly their natural punishment, by maintaining 
 peace, by defending property, by diminishing the 
 price of law, and by observing strict economy in 
 every department of the state." 
 
 It is evident, then, that Macaulay's political 
 and philosophical principles go hand in hand, and 
 that they all take origin in the philosophy of the 
 eighteenth century. Indeed, he makes no secret 
 of this : he openly eulogizes the Encyclopaedists : 
 and it is with great complacency that he is able 
 to assert, "By this time the philosophy of the 
 eighteenth century had purified English Whiggism 
 from that deep taint of intolerance which had 
 been contracted during a long and close alliance 
 with the Puritanism of the seventeenth century." 
 
 This sentence brings us, by an obvious transi- 
 tion, to the consideration of Macaulay's religions 
 principles ; and in these, too, we shall find him a 
 genuine son of the philosophy of the eighteenth 
 century. The reader, however, must take great 
 care not to misunderstand us here. We are not 
 going to prove Macaulay an infidel ; such a charge 
 were simply the very last we should think of 
 bringing. What may be called his private re- 
 
 D 

 
 LORD MACAU LAY. 129 
 
 ligious feelings, Lord Macaulay never obtruded 
 on the world, and we are not going to invade 
 them. What we have to do with here is wholly 
 and solely the public religious principles of Lord 
 Macaulay. These principles, indeed, two words 
 shall name for us at once, and these two words 
 are— Universal Toleration. In his own language, 
 " he is as averse to Laud on the one hand as to 
 Praise-God- Barebones on the other;" as averse to 
 the Puritan as to the Catholic, as averse to the 
 Higli Churchman as to the Independent. Exeter 
 Hall is to him a place of intolerance ; he sneers 
 at its " bray," and speaks with contempt of " its 
 prescriptive right to talk nonsense." In such 
 sentiments, it is plain, he is David Hume all 
 but in propria persona. He is the supporter of 
 an Established Church, but were there no poor 
 people, were there only rich people, he would be 
 a Voluntary : and, meantime, the true arrangement 
 appears to him to be, the Establishment of Epis- 
 copacy in England, of Presbyterianism in Scotland, 
 and of Pioman Catholicism in Ireland. Withal, 
 lie is a friend to the Dissenters, and will stand 
 up manfully were even a Unitarian attacked. 
 Speech, June G, 1854.) 
 The reader who will take the trouble to ex- 
 
 i
 
 130 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 amine the essays on Gladstone on " Church and 
 State/' and on Eanke's " Histoiy of the Popes," 
 will find a host of passages confirmatory of our 
 position. He rejoices, for example, " in the im- 
 mense strides that we have made, and continually 
 make, in mathematics and the sciences," but he 
 complains that " with theology the case is very 
 different." He says, " As regards natural religion, 
 we are no better off now than Thales or Simo- 
 nides." The argument from design was as well 
 known by them as by us ; and " the immortality 
 of the soul is as indemonstrable now as ever." 
 " It is a mistake," he asserts, " to imagine that 
 subtle speculations touching the divine attributes, 
 the origin of evil, the necessity of human actions, 
 the foundation of moral obligation, imply any high 
 degree of intellectual culture. Such speculations, 
 on the contrary, are, in a peculiar manner, the 
 delight of intelligent children and of half-civilized 
 men." " But," he goes on to say, " neither is 
 revealed religion of the nature of progressive 
 science ;" and he remarks, significantly, that 
 " Catholic communities have, since the end of the 
 sixteenth century, become infidel and become 
 Catholic again ; but never have become Protes- 
 tant." It seems to him that " we have no security
 
 LOBD MACAULAY. 131 
 
 for the future against the prevalence of any theo- 
 logical error that ever has prevailed in time past 
 among Christian men ;" and of the IJoman Catho- 
 lic Church he observes : " When we reflect on 
 the tremendous assaults which she has survived, 
 we find it difficult to conceive in what way she 
 is to perish." He thinks of Sir Thomas More and 
 his belief in transubstantiation, of Samuel John- 
 son and certain of his foibles, of such subtle intel- 
 lects as Bayle and Chillingworth becoming, after 
 years of scepticism, Catholics, and so, " for these 
 reasons, he has ceased to wonder at any vagaries 
 of superstition." Very Humian is the remark: 
 ■ It is by no means improbable that zealots may 
 have given their lives for a religion which had 
 never effectually restrained their vindictive or 
 their licentious passions." Here, too, is a touch 
 as if by the very pen of the same master ; re- 
 marking of sects that, in power, they are bigoted, 
 insolent, and cruel, he adds that, " when out of 
 power, tln.-y find it barbarous to punish men for 
 entertaining conscientious scruples about a garb, 
 about a ceremony," etc. The same spirit is seen 
 in this : " We frequently see inquisitive and rest- 
 less spirits, after questioning the existence of a 
 Deity, bring themselves to worship a water.'
 
 132 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 Passages of this kind abound in Macaulay, and 
 even others of a still more Humian type, bujt 
 these must suffice. 
 
 There is, however, a class of turns in Macaulay 
 which have been ascribed to the circumstances of 
 his early breeding, but which we are disposed to 
 attribute to the same influence of Hume. Of 
 these we should wish to give here a sample or 
 two. Speaking in his History of Wharton, he 
 remarks : " His father was renowned as a distri- 
 butor of Calvinistic tracts, and a patron of Cal- 
 vinistic divines : the boy's first years were passed 
 amidst Geneva bands, heads of lank hair, up- 
 turned eyes, nasal psalmody, and sermons three 
 hours long." This description is so applicable to 
 the circumstances of Macaulay's own boyhood, 
 that surely, if we are to ascribe the use of such 
 language to his early breeding, it must be by 
 means of the principle, not of action, but of re- 
 action. In fact, there cannot be a doubt that the 
 feeling at the bottom of such phrases is one not of 
 reverence, but of latent derision. Macaulay, in 
 truth, has a weakness for what we shall name a 
 patrician or aristocratic subrision. He tells us, 
 for example, that the French courtiers "sneeringly" 
 remarked of their Grand Monarque, that he was
 
 LORD MACAULAY. 133 
 
 in the right " not to expose to serious risk a life 
 invaluable to his people." The sneer here is un- 
 concealed then ; and there can be no doubt that 
 when he speaks of being brought to worship a 
 wafer, as in a sentence just quoted, he is there, 
 too, in the act of enjoying a gentle subrision. 
 Now it appears to us that the following sentences 
 are constructed on a similar model ; and, if 
 allowed to be subrisory, they must be pronounced 
 eminently Humian. 
 
 " Those sectaries had no scruple about smiting 
 tyrants witli the sword of Gideon." " Here and 
 there an Achan had disgraced the good cause by 
 stooping to plunder the Canaanites, whom he 
 ought only to have smitten." " Crawford was 
 what they called a professor ; his letters and 
 speeches are, to use his own phraseology, ex- 
 ceeding savoury." " They invited Amalek and 
 Moab to come back and try another chance with 
 the chosen people." " These pious acts, prompted 
 by the Holy Spirit, were requited by an untoward 
 generation with," etc. " A pious, honest, and 
 learned man, but of slender judgment, and half 
 cra/.'-'l by his persevering endeavours to extract 
 from Daniel and the Revelations some informa- 
 tion about the Pope and the King of France."
 
 134 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 If these extracts be compared with the quota- 
 tions in reference to Wharton and Louis xrv., no 
 reader can mistake the true nature of their spirit. 
 The turn in the last, indeed, is quite unmistak- 
 able without collation, and would hardly satisfy 
 Dr. dimming or the author of the " Coming 
 Struggle." We had marked several other passages 
 for quotation ; but we think that sufficient evi- 
 dence has now been led to establish the truth of 
 our assertion, that the public religious position of 
 Macaulay is very similar to that of David Hume. 
 Macaulay, in fact, will not entertain any question 
 of religion in any matters of public and general 
 application, with the single exception of an 
 Established Church ; and, as we have seen, he is 
 not solicitous about the special nature of such 
 Church, so long as it is simply established by the 
 will of the majority. Like Hume, in truth, there 
 are two things, in a religious sense, which 
 Macaulay cordially hates. Hume names the 
 one " superstition " and the other " enthusiasm." 
 Of Macaulay's feelings toward the former we 
 have already seen enough. His notions of the 
 latter are implied in all that he says relative to 
 bigots and fanatics. But nowhere are his thoughts 
 seen clearer than in his account of George
 
 LORD MAr.Ul.AV. L35 
 
 Fox, the Quaker, or in his description (Iianke's 
 "Popes") of a converted tinker, whom the 
 Roman Church, unlike the Protestant, he says, 
 would have turned to its own service. In 
 these, his cold statement of religious experiences 
 reads like an extract from some medical w©rk 
 pathologically relating the symptoms and pro- 
 gress of some bodily malady. Such things 
 involve a process that seems alien to him ; for 
 the most part, he looks on with disgust and scorn, 
 or, at best, with curiosity and compassion. No ; 
 all Macaulay's sympathies are with the temporal ; 
 and when the subject of religion occurs to be taken 
 up, it is simply viewed as one of the other material 
 interests. It is very characteristic of him to re- 
 mark, that " Catholicism is the most attractive of 
 all superstitions," and that " the Jewish religion, 
 of all erroneous religions, is the least mischievous." 
 In short, when he says of Danby, "His attach- 
 ment to Episcopacy and the Liturgy were rather 
 political than religious," the dictum, without 
 straining and without uncharity, might easily 
 receive a wider application. 
 
 Those of our readers who know anything of the 
 French philosopher Comte, or of his English dis- 
 ciple Buckle, will, we daresay, have already per-
 
 136 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 ceived that the opinions of these " philosophers " 
 are not only similar, but even constitute a natural 
 termination to those of Macaulay. They, as is 
 well known, would sneer into annihilation all 
 metaphysics and all theology, and would wish to 
 see thought restricted to the observation and 
 registration of phenomena. Well, Macaulay too 
 takes his stand by induction, which just means 
 the observation and registration of phenomena : 
 he too rejects metaphysics ; and if he does not 
 wholly reject theology, he restricts it to a province 
 certainly of the narrowest. The very law of 
 necessary connexion (a phrase borrowed from 
 Hume, to whom, however, necessity of connexion 
 existed not, but only constancy of conjunction), by 
 means of which the Comtists seek to transform 
 the manifestations of our intellectual and moral 
 faculties into mere links of the same great chain 
 of cause and effect which physical things obey, 
 seems not without a certain attraction for 
 Macaulay also. Talking of our tendency to 
 regard the Golden Age as left behind us in the 
 past, he says : " This is chiefly to be ascribed to a 
 law as certain as the laws which regulate the suc- 
 cession of the seasons and the course of the trade- 
 winds : it is the nature of man to overrate present 

 
 LORD MACAUI.AY. 137 
 
 evil and to underrate present good — to long for 
 what he lias not and to be dissatisfied with what 
 he has." 
 
 We should be glad to join issue on several of 
 these points, and to discuss them at length, but 
 such is not our present object, and here we have 
 no sufficient space. We content ourselves with 
 saying, for the sake of our own position with the 
 reader, that while we do not look on the philo- 
 sophy of the eighteenth century with unniingled 
 satisfaction, we certainly regard that of Messrs. 
 Comte and Buckle with unqualified reprobation 
 and contempt. Further, we think that the func- 
 tions of government are not of a negative nature 
 only (exclusively restricted to the protection of 
 person ami property), but capable of an affirmative 
 application also. Macaulay, indeed, is here in 
 reality at variance with himself ; for, in regard to 
 a national church and a national school, he actually 
 concedes to government a function evidently 
 affirmative. We, for our part, see no reason — 
 and we are sure that Lord Macaulay could not 
 have assigned one — why the affirmative function 
 should Btop there, and are inclined to believe 
 that, in this connexion, there is a science (social 
 science] opening, of which Lord Macaulay, in his
 
 138 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 own bitter words to Southey, " had yet to learn 
 the alphabet." Again, we believe that physical 
 truth would be an inexplicable and indeed 
 meaningless fragment— so much mere purpose- 
 less flotsam— -were it not there for, and did it not 
 terminate in, metaphysical truth. Then religion 
 is to us the tap-root of humanity, and all else is 
 but nauci, fiocci, minimi, pili. Neither can we 
 allow that metaphysics, morals, and religion are, 
 either severally or collectively, destitute of pro- 
 gress. Very far from that, we believe that the 
 final cause of the world is neither more nor less 
 than such progress, and that history has no theme 
 whatever but, intellectually, morally, and re- 
 ligiously, the enlargement and enfranchisement of 
 the consciousness of man. Progress, however, we 
 do not view as, so to speak, fluent extension ; we 
 should name it rather a series of consecutive and 
 accumulative progresses. The history of civilisa- 
 tion is a history of civilisations — a history of higher 
 following on lower dispensations ; the tree of exist- 
 ence, the Yggdrasil of our Norse forefathers, decays 
 as surely as it grows, but it grows as surely as it 
 decays, and each new growth is larger, fuller, braver 
 than the last. This tree has successively grown up 
 and withered down, in India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, 

 
 LORD MACAULAY. 139 
 
 ( rreece, and Italy ; it is now in full leaf in Eng- 
 land, but a thousand years hence it may be bud- 
 ding and blossoming elsewhere. 
 
 We have now obtained for ourselves an insight, 
 more or less clear, more or less complete, into the 
 principles and aim with which Lord Macaulay 
 entered on the arena of life ; let us now see how 
 he, so accoutred and impelled, bore himself, and 
 what were the products of his so guided and 
 directed industry. 
 
 When Macaulay left college for London in 1825, 
 he carried with him a very complete knowledge of 
 the Greek and Latin classics, as well as a compe- 
 tent acquaintance with the leading literatures of 
 modern Europe. He does not seem to have ever 
 attempted to realize to himself an intellectual 
 conception of the Greeks or Romans as human 
 beings, and in relation to universal history ; but 
 the literary masterpieces of these peoples were 
 fairly stored in his excellent memory, where his 
 
 eedingly sound and discriminating taste had 
 well arranged, shelved, and lettered them. Ui^ 
 knowledge of modern literature was also evidently 
 
 tensive, and, on the whole, exact. The classic 
 Italians, and the French writers of the age of 
 Louis xiv., he had manifestly studied with great
 
 140 LORD MAC AULAY. 
 
 care, and discussed in his own mind with great 
 discernment. We have also occasional notices 
 from him of German and Spanish authors, and 
 even a quotation or two in these languages ; but 
 though he had indubitably attained to a very 
 considerable and satisfactory conception of the 
 main merits of these literatures, still it appears 
 probable to us that Macaulay could not have 
 justly claimed the title of either a German or a 
 Spanish scholar. Macaulay, in fact, was a man 
 of great practical perspicacity, and we do not 
 believe that he would have willingly carried one 
 ounce more weight than was necessary to his 
 purpose. We find him, for example, contented 
 to remain with but slender mathematical acquire- 
 ments ; and nowhere is there the slightest evi- 
 dence that he ever troubled his head about Egypt's 
 place in universal history, the Hindu Vedas, the 
 origin of society in Central Asia, the migration of 
 the tribes, or the philological relations of Turan 
 and Iran. The preference of Italian and French 
 to German and Spanish, then, is in complete har- 
 mony with our Humian theory ; and we can easily 
 believe that any study of these latter languages re- 
 sulted fully as much from the set of the times as from 
 expectation of help towards his peculiar object.
 
 LORD MACAU LAY. 141 
 
 J kit, besides these literary and academic stores, 
 even in 1825 Macaulay had already made great 
 progress in the study of English history and poli- 
 tics, especially during those reigns that were char- 
 acterized by the growth and evolution of what are 
 named constitutional principles. Indeed, so en- 
 grossed is he in this study, that in his very first 
 article of any note (Milton, Edin. Rev. 1825), he 
 cannot resist the temptation to intercalate an his- 
 torical summary. Analogous but more extended 
 historical summaries followed in the Hallam, the 
 Hampden, fche Burleigh, and others. So very 
 similar, indeed, are these summaries, and so fre- 
 quently do they recur, that one gets to feel a little 
 surprise at the favour that allowed even a Mac- 
 aulay to insert and re-insert, and yet again insert, 
 what was mainly nothing more than the rifacci- 
 m into of an old material. 
 
 The History would lead us to suppose, as we 
 have already shown, that a certain reaction really 
 had taken place in Macaulay against the Calvin- 
 ism of his friends. There is no evidence of this, 
 however, in the early essays. It is possible, in- 
 deed, that the studies and experiences of the 
 university may have taught him to regard the 
 tern of religious thought under his father's
 
 142 LORD MAC AULA Y. 
 
 roof as biassed and narrow ; but nowhere can we 
 find any evidence of a youthful, a poetic, or an 
 aristocratic revolt against it. His clear, sound 
 judgment sees well where he is placed, and what 
 his friends are worth to him ; he remains on the 
 best terms with them, he supports their views, he 
 makes speeches for them, but still he takes up his 
 own position calmly in the centre, as that consti- 
 tutional Whig which his historical studies recom- 
 mend to him. The same clear, practical judgment 
 that has decided his choice leads him again to 
 perceive that it is wisest for him, once having 
 chosen, to declare himself. Accordingly, he is 
 quite open in his avowal that he " would be first 
 an Englishman and then a Whig," and he takes 
 his side in the most public and unhesitating 
 fashion. 
 
 The young man, who has such friends and con- 
 nexions, who has distinguished himself so much 
 at college, who has spoken so well at Abolition 
 meetings, who has written such capital articles 
 in the Edinburgh, who is so manifestly a true 
 Whig that he knows more about Whig history, 
 and can give better expression to Whig principles 
 than the very best Whig among them, is not long 
 left without public employment. He is made a
 
 LOBD MACAULAY. 143 
 
 Commissioner of Bankruptcy, and so early as 1830 
 a seat in Parliament is found for him. He enters 
 Parliament at a most important crisis too. The 
 great Reform Bill is in the agonies of gestation, 
 and the Whigs are troubled with the most natural 
 solicitude. The young man of thirty is too saga- 
 cious not to discern all the possibilities of the 
 position. He is possessed, withal, of such vigour 
 of will as enables him to convert his perceptions 
 into deeds. He throws himself, though new to 
 the House, completely into the situation. He 
 becomes one of the leading supporters of Govern- 
 ment. Indeed, his services are soon such that, in 
 less than four years, a most lucrative appointment 
 is found for him — an appointment so lucrative 
 that in three years he is able to return from India, 
 where he held it, the recipient of an opulent and 
 lordly income. 
 
 Macaulay is not yet thirty-eight, then, and we 
 already set' how well the aim he set himself has 
 thriven with him. His practical experience of 
 Parliament and of India is an incalculable gain 
 i" him in his vocation of historian. All this 
 time, too, liis studies on the one concentrated 
 subject have never slackened. We can trace 
 their ] in the series of essays already more
 
 144 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 than once referred to. Indeed, these studies seem 
 thoroughly ripe now, and even the execution of 
 his design largely accomplished. What a happy 
 prospect gilds all the west for him at the early 
 age of thirty-eight ! — he has wealth, he has posi- 
 tion, he has honour, he has even in a goodly state 
 of forwardness the one work which was to be 
 " the business and the pleasure of his life." 
 Naught remains for him but, in the midst of 
 leisure, in the midst of all the agremens of the 
 most choice society in the world, a member of 
 Parliament even, for he may make the duties 
 light, that he finish his work, that he build the 
 temple, and transform to enclosed chapels those 
 gorgeous Olives and magnificent Hastingses. Ac- 
 cordingly such is the position that we see him 
 assume for the remainder of his days. And in 
 such position he is able to do such services to the 
 Whigs, and gain such honour in the eyes of his 
 fellow-countrymen, that in 1857 a patent of nobi- 
 lity is conferred on him. But, alas ! the labours, 
 that wore now the look of pastime and recreation 
 rather than drudgery and penance, and to the 
 termination of which he might, so far as his age 
 was concerned, look not too presumptuously for- 
 ward, were destined to be snapped asunder in the
 
 I.oUD MACAULAY. I 1 •"• 
 
 midst, and remain for ever a fragment merely. 
 On the 28th day of December 1859 (just fifty 
 nine years of age), Lord Macaulay died, and the con- 
 tinuation of Hume remains itself to be continued. 
 Some of his too ardent admirers have not 
 scrupled to claim for Lord Macaulay the first 
 place as orator, poet, essayist, and historian. This 
 claim, so put, we think insupportable. These 
 admirers themselves describe the speeches of Lord 
 Macaulay as but spoken essays ; and they give, 
 besides, such an account of the deficiency of his 
 voice and the stiffness of his action as demon- 
 strates the nullity of their own claim, so far as the 
 orator is concerned. For our part we find the 
 speeches to read exceedingly well, and we can- 
 not admit that they have only the character of 
 spoken essays. On the contrary, we find in them 
 not the mere fluent continuousness of writing, but 
 the energetic interruptedness, and, as it were, the 
 successive hammer-strokes of actual speech. On 
 this head it will suffice to say, however, that they 
 are well-worded pieces of excellent generalization 
 and clear judgment. The Whigs, though pro- 
 bably sometimes quivering with misgivings that 
 he was going too far, must on tin' whole, have 
 been much enlightened and very much gratified 
 
 K
 
 146 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 by those admirable expositions of their own prin- 
 ciples. 
 
 In regard to the " Lays of Ancient Kome," the 
 Times writes thus : — " As a poet, at a time when 
 it was supposed that nothing new could be in- 
 vented, he struck out a style, the enchantment of 
 which is felt by all ages and all conditions alike, 
 which has no prototype in ancient, no parallel in 
 modern times ; which unites the simplicity of our 
 ancient ballads with the rich images and stirring 
 dialogue of the epic, often sweetly descending to an 
 idyllic character, reminding us of the happier pas- 
 sages of Theocritus." The authority is unimpeach- 
 able and the testimony clear, nevertheless we can- 
 not help thinking that both the Times and Lord 
 Macaulay have made a sad mistake here. It is 
 our deliberate belief, in short, that the " Lays of 
 Ancient Borne" are — bearing in mind that their 
 author is a man of the quickest intellect, and of 
 the most cultivated taste — not poetry, but, so far 
 as we understand the word, doggrel. Macaulay, in 
 talking of his Mulgraves, Rochester's, Montagues, 
 Dorsets, etc., laments that their poetry should have 
 been preserved to mislead us only in forming a 
 judgment of their characters and talents otherwise. 
 We think it very possible that some future histo- 
 rian may repeat Macaulay's remark, and of Mac-
 
 LOKD MACAULAV. H7 
 
 aulay's own case. Again : it is of Addison's poetry 
 that our essayist himself remarks : " Ever since 
 the time of Pope there has been a glut of lines of 
 this sort, and we are now as little disposed to 
 admire a man for being able to write them as for 
 being able to write his name." Even so ; and a 
 fortiori (since the Percy Ballads) in regard to the 
 " Lays of Ancient Pome." up 
 
 " Got brave Dick Turpin, 
 And he swore by the mass 
 That he would ride to York city, 
 All on his steed Black Bess !" 
 
 Positively such stuff as this may, in certain 
 circumstances, be bearable. But, the brave 
 Me-zen-ti-us ! and the brave Ho-ra-ti-us ! are 
 worse than the bagpipes as described by Shake- 
 speare. We hear at once the true Whitechapel 
 skirl, and in such barbarous union with the sacred 
 dames of another world and of other associations 
 that we involuntarily stop our ears, fain to ex- 
 clnde a positive pain. For it is to be recollected 
 that the hearing of some ballads bawled in 
 Whitechapel is said to have suggested these ex- 
 traordinary hermaphrodites. This origin, whether 
 feigned or true, is certainly most apposite. 
 
 Tin' truth is, in an age that regarded poetry 
 high as ours docs, the self complacence of a
 
 148 LOED MACAULAY. 
 
 successful author, who could do almost every- 
 thing well, and who had written prize poems in 
 his youth, could not resist a clutch at the bays of 
 the bard ; but he signally missed, and we only 
 wish that he himself had had the opportunity, in 
 the case of somebody else, to point the moral. 
 For us, to be sure, there is some consolation in 
 the inimitable sentence of the Times ; we should 
 be sorry to forget that sweet descent to Theocritus 
 and the idyllic. We must do ourself the justice, 
 however, to say one word on " Ivry." This is a 
 piece of true merit, full of spirit and energy. Had 
 Macaulay preserved no other poem but this, though 
 it could never have sufficed to entitle him to the 
 name of poet, it would have been there, a proof 
 of versatility, and it would always have been 
 taken into account in every estimate of the essay- 
 ist and historian. 
 
 These words bring us to the true functions of 
 Macaulay, and to the true scenes of his triumphs. 
 The essays, as we have seen, are often written, 
 so to speak, in aid of the History, and assume, 
 for the most part, the character of preliminary 
 draughts, or of collateral complements. Some 
 among them display, as reviews, a rare excellence 
 of a technical kind. An admirable sample of
 
 LORD MAC AULA V. 149 
 
 such excellence is the " Southey " (1830) ; indeed, 
 a more perfect business article we do not recollect 
 ever to have read Reviewing, in Macaulay's 
 own words, is certainly " to a critic an easy and 
 habitual act " in this case. The " Robert Mont- 
 gomery " is, to be sure, quite as business-like ; 
 but the game there comes too thick on us ; it is 
 a battue we assist at; sport becomes slaughter, 
 and we cease to have interest in it. But in the 
 " Southey," the coups d'adressc and the tours de 
 force are captivating beyond comparison. How 
 the poor laureate must have writhed under the 
 dexterous touches of this finest and supplest of 
 whips ! Macaulay has here a subject entirely 
 within his range ; his style is now full-fledged 
 too, and his manner perfect. There is, perhaps, 
 a little fine malice towards the Toiy poet lurking 
 in the heart of the Whig reviewer ; at all events 
 he feels that the Tory poetry of politics, as ex- 
 pounded by Southey, is powerless against his 
 own Whig prose, and he marches to battle with 
 the gayest confidence. Not one word is ever 
 wasted, not a single sentence falls in vain. Points 
 and ed litter everywhere; incisions gape to 
 
 every stroke, and punctures follow to every 
 thrust Verily this is clastic writing, vigorous,
 
 150 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 rapid, true. What irony, what sarcasm, what 
 fine derision perfectly cut into words ! " Mr. 
 Southey," he remarks, " brings to the task two 
 faculties which were never, we believe, vouch- 
 safed in measure so copious to any human being 
 — the faculty of believing without a reason, and 
 the faculty of hating without a provocation." 
 How finely he says too : — " Government is to 
 Mr. Southey one of the fine arts : he judges of a 
 theory, of a public measure, of a religion or a 
 political party, of a peace or a war, as men judge 
 of a picture or a statue, by the effect produced on 
 his imagination : a chain of association is to him 
 what a chain of reasoning is to other men, and 
 what he calls his opinions are, in fact, merely his 
 tastes." Expression here is surely in perfect ade- 
 quacy with the thought ; and all these exquisite 
 little turns are weighty as bullets and precious 
 as gold. Then, withal, he is so true and discri- 
 minating, truer, perhaps, and more discriminating 
 in his praise than in his blame : when he ap- 
 plauds, he approves himself such a critic as even 
 Southey himself must accept with entire satis- 
 faction. 
 
 Speaking of Mr. Southey's poems he says : — 
 " The short pieces are worse than Pye's and as
 
 LORD MACAILAY. 151 
 
 bad as Cibber's." " The longer pieces," he con- 
 tinues, " though full of faults, are nevertheless very 
 extraordinary productions." He doubts " greatly 
 whether they will be read fifty years hence ;" but 
 has no doubt that, if read, " they will be admired." 
 Flow admirably true, telling, and trenchant, every 
 one who knows anything of the subject must 
 feel this criticism ! In this most felicitous paper 
 panegyric itself has the effect of the most cutting 
 satire, as where the reviewer says of the " Life of 
 Nelson :" — " It would not in all literary history 
 be easy to find a more exact hit between wind 
 and water." Then how relentlessly the Whig 
 constitutionalist insists on holding up to the 
 theoretic dreams of the Tory poet his bundles of 
 statistical tables and his rolls of mortality bills '. 
 Southey has not the ghost of a chance with him ; 
 the facts are so strong that they need advance 
 only in the lightest badinage, the easiest persi- 
 flage. Mr. Southey, the reviewer says, resembles 
 Milton's Satan, who contrived to travel round the 
 world "always in the dark;" and he adds — and 
 in the addition we see the rapier home — " it is not 
 everybody who could have so dexterously avoided 
 blundering on the daylight in the course of a 
 journey to the antipodes." The whole essay
 
 152 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 abounds in the most exquisite expressions, the 
 most vivid and effective figures. There is wit, 
 allusion, illustration ; no element fails. All the 
 arts of this species of composition are present 
 in profusion, and Macaulay approves himself a 
 finished craftsman. 
 
 Macaulay 's longest essay, and perhaps the most 
 elaborate, is the " Bacon." The power of writing 
 has now come to full maturity with him ; nay, 
 we are not sure but that the fulness is excessive 
 and runs over ; we are not sure but that the art 
 has run away with the artist. Has anybody not 
 on business ever read this essay without more 
 than one of those intercalatory relaxations fami- 
 liarly known as sMjjs ? The facts in Bacon's life 
 are few, and Macaulay tells us nothing new in 
 regard to them. Still the river of words flows on 
 copiously, endlessly. This is discussed and that 
 is discussed, and not a stitch is dropped, and 
 the whole subject must be exhaustively treated. 
 And sure enough it is exhaustively treated ; the 
 teeth of wolf never stripped a bone more exhaus- 
 tively clean. Let the reader in search of proof 
 turn only to the discussion of the question of 
 philosophy that terminates the essay, and which 
 really a page or two might have contained, and
 
 LOUD MACAl LAY. 153 
 
 he will find that it takes up about twice the space 
 of the essay he is now reading. This excessive 
 copiousness is decidedh a blot, then. Still, the 
 living, leafy, wide-stretching boughs into which 
 the writer's art transforms the mere dead and 
 fragmentary fallen twigs of truth are wonderful, 
 and we are kept in continual admiration of the 
 constant unexceptionable writing, the constant 
 interesting pictures, the constant luminous good 
 sense, and the constant appearance of research. 
 
 The " Samuel Johnson" (1831) is one of 
 Maraulav's most celebrated and characteristic 
 essays ; and certainly perhaps there is rio more 
 vivid, no more graphic, no more racy piece of 
 writing in the language. The style is terse, clear, 
 keen, while there are a fulness and a rapid con- 
 tinuance of utterance that hurry us triumphantly 
 along with the stream of expression. Still we 
 cannot help seeing that it is a tale dressed up, 
 that effect is aimed at, and that effect alone is 
 aimed at.j The truth of the matter is evident 1\ 
 doI by any means of vital importance to the 
 writer ; oo1 that he despises, or at all wishes to 
 negled truth, but just because his object lias no 
 present relation with truth. In fact, the aim here 
 Lb Doi instruction at all ; there is no thought of a
 
 154 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 lesson ; the wish is amusement, entertainment, 
 interest only. The desire, too, is accomplished, 
 for the essay is as successful as any series of dis- 
 solving views. It is bright, glittering, brilliant, 
 but— we must say it — it is shallow. It deals 
 with the outside only — with the hull, the husk, 
 the poor scrofula- scarred body, and not with the 
 soul of Johnson. How different the Johnson of 
 Carlyle ! There it is not the squalid, unsweet 
 giant in dirty linen, gobbling and slobbering, with 
 straining eyeballs, over his victuals, that we see. 
 No ; there it is the humble pious heart, the 
 strong sense, the understanding solid, weighty as 
 granite ; or again, it is the great doubt-riven soul 
 that would have peace in God and a world of far 
 other interests than the pettinesses of time. 
 
 Macaulay, in fact, has no business with such a 
 soul as this of Johnson. Instead of seeing it, 
 understanding it, loving it, he maunders about 
 Johnson's credulity in matters spiritual, and his 
 incredulity in matters temporal, and enjoys his 
 own enlightened subrision over "superstition." 
 We have here, indeed, an excellent specimen of 
 what is one of Macaulay's main recommendations 
 to the general reader — a delight in gathering and a 
 power of painting personal peculiarities. Mac-
 
 LORD MACAULAY. 155 
 
 aulay is never more at home than in such scandal : 
 the eating, drinking, and clothing of men, their 
 mistresses, their warts, their bandy legs, or their 
 red noses — Macaulay has, in such curiosities, ab- 
 solutely the furore of a collector. Now such 
 things were so abundant in poor Johnson that 
 Macaulay saw nothing else. As Johnson was a 
 Tory indeed, Macaulay did not care to see any- 
 thing else. For that Macaulay yielded to the 
 bias of party is as certain as that Johnson himself 
 so yielded. He (Macaulay) talks of the Tories at 
 times as if they were wolves. " The howl," he 
 BayB, " which the whole pack set up for prey and 
 for blood appalled even him who had aroused and 
 unchained them." It is this same party influence 
 that leads him to write with such partiality of 
 Addison and such hatred of Pope. He labours 
 under a jaundice of this sort, so deep, indeed, that 
 even the poor dwarfed, deformed, diseased body of 
 Pope seems to excite feelings of detestation in 
 him ; and he speaks of it as legitimate game for 
 Addison, had Addison chosen to revenge himself 
 for the lines on Atticus. Macaulay is, if possible, 
 more unjust to Johnson than to Pope, however ; 
 he sneers at his works, talks of them passing into 
 oblivion, and seems quite to ignore all the great
 
 156 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 qualities of that true Englishman. If he could see 
 nothing in Johnson's criticisms, or in his bio- 
 graphies — if the melancholy wisdom of a lifetime, 
 which is the burthen of " Easselas," had no worth 
 for him — if he had no gratitude for the Dictionary- 
 even, surely he might have recollected that this 
 was the man who wrote the letter to Chesterfield, 
 a piece of manliness and of unsurpassed felicity of 
 expression, that will be alive, we doubt not, when 
 even " Clive" and " Warren Hastings" have ceased 
 to interest. 
 
 We would not have the reader suppose, how- 
 ever, that we undervalue the two celebrated 
 essays just mentioned. The History has absorbed 
 and superseded some of the very best of the 
 others ; but these still remain in their own entire 
 and undiminished proportions, the most pro- 
 minent, the most attractive, and, probably with- 
 out exception, the most universally read of all 
 Macaulay's writings. 
 
 Beyond all doubt there are no themes in the 
 history of the world better adapted for the peculiar 
 pen of Macaulay than the characters and deeds of 
 these, the two most famous, or infamous, of all 
 our Indian proconsuls. It is to the imagination 
 that Macaulay prefers to address himself; and
 
 LORD MACAULAY. 157 
 
 here certainly, if anywhere, there were materials 
 enough to aid him in such a purpose. In the 
 background we have the vague splendour of the 
 Bast ; the snows of mightier hills ascend ; the 
 beams of a mightier sun pour forth ; strange 
 cupolas loom through the haze of heat, and 
 minarets of other creeds glance ; palaces of marble 
 rise with chambers where the air is heavy with 
 the pomp of hangings, and opulent with the lustre 
 of jewelry and gold. In the foreground, heroes, 
 single-handed, scatter armies, or burst into the 
 secret treasure-houses of Arabian story. Nor is 
 the thrill wanting that these are Englishmen, 
 and that the name of England has been made a 
 name of terror and fascination by them in every 
 town and hamlet of these enchanted regions. 
 
 In these gorgeous essays, the style corresponds 
 admirably with the material on which it is em- 
 ployed, and with the startling events which it 
 relates. It is dyed in a thousand colours ; it 
 glitters with a thousand points ; and the swift- 
 ness of its speed is as the rush of the eager victor 
 through the broken wreck of the terrified foe that 
 fleea Still this is the highest praise that can be 
 awarded the aysj it is not for any quality 
 
 of thought that they are valuable ; they are
 
 158 LORD MACAULA.Y. 
 
 scenic merely. Indeed, we fear the lesson they 
 teach is of no good tendency ; the imagination is 
 kindled up into admiration of material riches and 
 material power, while actions black with perfidy 
 or red with blood are allowed, in all this earthly 
 and earthy splendour, almost to hide themselves. 
 We fear that such men as Clive and Hastings 
 have been too often taken as exemplars by our 
 countrymen in the East ; that hatred to our 
 name, the deeper for suppression, results ; and 
 that for all this, the essayist, who preferred an 
 audience of the imagination to one of reason, is 
 very seriously to blame. 
 
 But the book of Macaulay is undoubtedly his 
 History. Its foundation has been laid as far back 
 as the very first stirrings of literary ambition — a 
 lifetime of study, a lifetime of experience had 
 collected the materials, and a lifetime of labour 
 had been employed on the work. \ It is a national 
 loss that it remains unfinished, for never perhaps 
 were theme and historian so well adapted to each 
 other ; and never perhaps had historian manifest- 
 ed a similar amount, as well of concentration of 
 design as of continuousness of preparation. The 
 theme was the constitutional history of England ; 
 and Hallam himself had no superiority over
 
 LOUD MACAULAY. 1 59 
 
 Macaulay in clear recognition of the true consti- 
 tutional principles. There was here a certain 
 groundwork of reason and philosophy, then, to 
 impart unity and coherency to the whole ; and to 
 this groundwork of philosophy the workman was 
 thoroughly equal. But, in addition, there were a 
 hundred elements, for the elaboration of which it 
 was precisely this workman that possessed the 
 necessary skill. There were marches, and pro- 
 gresses, and processions, and the fierce tides of 
 battle. There were parliaments, and the fights of 
 parties, the reasons pro and the reasons con, and 
 the triumphant tellings of the ayes and noes. 
 Manners there were to paint and characters to 
 draw, containing both of them an inexhaustible 
 store of those salient peculiarities that constitute 
 the quaint, the odd, the curious, the original. In 
 short, here was a theme that required precisely 
 such an historian ; and here was an historian that 
 required precisely such a theme. "We really be- 
 lieve that there does not exist in any language 
 reading more captivating than this History.yThe 
 interest of Carlyle's French Revolution is cer- 
 tainly at times infinitely more intense, but one 
 cannot get rid of a feeling of a certain interrupt- 
 edneas, a certain inequality in that work, while
 
 160 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 the march of Macaulay is never either accelerated 
 or retarded. 
 
 We should name the style in Macaulay's earlier 
 writings, a transparent but flushed rapidity. But 
 as regards the style of the History, while the 
 transparency has been allowed to remain, and in 
 greater perfection than before, the rapidity has 
 been mitigated and the flush removed. What 
 was transparent but flushed rapidity is now 
 transparent complacent fluency. The river has 
 reached the plain, and gently subsides into a wide 
 smilingness of flow, as if grateful for the broad 
 ease it feels. 
 
 If such was the style, the mental attributes of 
 Macaulay, now mellow in maturity, were equally 
 well adapted to the task. There was a judgment 
 tamed into the measure of success by its very 
 circumspection, its very ascription to the general 
 philosophy of the eighteenth century — a judgment 
 which, within this range, was luminously clear and 
 sharply precise. There was a memory eminently 
 retentive, ready, and suggestive, stored, too, with 
 material, teeming with illustration, prompt with 
 allusion. There was a fancy exceedingly vivid, 
 cpiick, and fertile. It was a source of facility and 
 success, too, that so much had been already done,
 
 LOUD MACAULAY. 161 
 
 that it was a more than thrice-told tale that was 
 in question, that nothing goaded to overspeed, that 
 all conduced to the adoption of the calm, the 
 leisurely, the placid. Accordingly a result so 
 splendid has been produced that its incompletiou 
 will remain the lament of our latest literature. 
 " In lenocinio commendationis dolor cat man/us, cum 
 id agcrct, cxtiactcv." 
 
 It is not to be supposed, however, that Macaulay 
 has no faults ; such a consummation is not for 
 humanity. Faults he has, and great ones, up 
 from mere qualities of style to attributes of intel- 
 lect. In style, for example, despite his many 
 true merits, Macaulay cannot be regarded as the 
 very highest master. A nature so remarkably 
 facile, adroit, and quick as his found no difficulty 
 in appropriating the lesson, taught by so many 
 contemporaries, of a more living picturesqueness 
 and of a more natural reality in writing. That 
 this is an age of photography holds as true of the 
 domain of the pen as of that of the pencil ; and 
 Macaulay yielded like others to the fascination 
 of the new trick. His deepest sympathies, never- 
 theless, are with the writers of the eighteenth 
 century, and theirs was the style which his judg 
 ui'.-nt, at bottom, really approved. That style he 
 
 L
 
 162 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 might quicken with measures, or freshen with 
 colours, borrowed from the new ; but it was that 
 style that, in the main, should still be his. Accord- 
 ingly he abounds in the stock metaphor, the stock 
 transition, the stock equipoise, the stock rhetoric, 
 the stock expedients generally of Addison, Eobert- 
 son, Goldsmith, Smollett, but especially David 
 Hume. Phrases analogous to " sinks into insig- 
 nificance" are common with him ; he constantly 
 tells us of men of " parts," that so and so had 
 "parts ;" and he speaks of "the nerves of the 
 mind." We can have, by oversight, even such a 
 
 i 
 
 sentence as this from him : " Though his wasted 
 and suffering body could hardly move without 
 support — he Jiciv to London." On the whole, the 
 style of Macaulay is one rather of culture than 
 creation. .Rarely do we find in it any of those 
 peculiarly delicate, almost evanescent turns by 
 which the new thought of an original writer 
 announces itself. 
 
 Another fault of Macaulay, begun probably 
 under the influence of Hume, and increased by 
 Parliamentary experience, is the tediousness with 
 which he expatiates on the pros and cons of party. 
 He is never better pleased than when he gets the 
 two parties on " the floor of the House," and has
 
 LORD MACAULAY. 103 
 
 an opportunity of conjecturally cataloguing all tin- 
 motives and opinions, probable or possible, on the 
 one side and the other. This is a trick of Hume's 
 too, but Macaulay feels absolutely in his element 
 here, and cannot persuade himself to quit but 
 with the flush of triumph over the majority of 
 the ayes and the minority of the noes. 
 
 Macaulay seems, and is generally reckoned, a 
 great master of portrait-painting. So far as 
 striking epithets and sharp well-defined predi- 
 cation are concerned, Macaulay certainly deserves 
 the praise. The words applied do indeed seem so 
 trenchant, that the man, we are tempted to believe, 
 must be cut out by them ; and very often the 
 /« rson, at all events, is cut out by them. Johnson, 
 Horace Walpole, James I., James n., William in., 
 and some others, are certainly actually seen by the 
 reader. William in., indeed, is not only seen, 
 but even, perhaps, understood. But this is not 
 the cast- with the characters generally. Those 
 Sunderlands, Arlingtons, Cliffords, Ashleys, Mon- 
 tagues, Kussells, Hamiltons, etc. etc., have all of 
 tin-in been successively and individually intro- 
 duced to 08, and with the most brilliantly specific 
 langoa 11 we find that they all retreat, as 
 
 we leave them, into a vague distance, where they
 
 164 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 become more and more shadowy, and finally 
 disappear. We have not, after all, seen what 
 manner of men they were ; these sharp and telling 
 predicates gave us them in pieces only, and it is 
 in vain we seek to find them coherent in a whole. 
 How different Carlyle ! One word, and we have 
 Robespierre, or Mirabeau, or Danton, or Calonne, 
 or Vergniaud, and we never lose them. They are 
 men and realities to us for ever, and not mere 
 bundles of qualities artfully stuffed out by brilliant 
 predication. This is the difference of art. Carlyle 
 seeks to seize his man in the very centre of his 
 nature, in that one quality that harmonizes all the 
 varieties and diversities of his actions. Macaulay, 
 by collecting all these varieties and diversities db 
 extra, seeks to put together a figure which, unpro- 
 vided with this central and uniting knot, falls all 
 abroad in pieces again. The stupid phrase, " such 
 is the inconsistency of human nature," which 
 occurs so frequently in Macaulay, is, in reality, 
 only a consolation addressed to himself on a 
 dimly-felt failure in construing of the kind alluded 
 to. " The character of Harley," says Macaulay, 
 " is to be collected from innumerable panegyrics 
 and lampoons ; from the works and the private 
 correspondence of Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, Prior.
 
 LOUD MACAULAY. 165 
 
 and Bolingbroke, and from multitudes of such 
 works as 'Ox and Bull,' 'The High German 
 Doctor,' and the ' History of Robert Powell, the 
 Puppet Showman.' " This we believe to be evi- 
 dence crucially decisive of the truth of our judg- 
 ment here. It is perfectly plain from these words, 
 that Macaulay sought to construct Harley out of 
 a thousand piecemeal materials gathered from 
 without. In this way, indeed, a figure (but in 
 perpetual danger of instant dissolution) may be 
 pieced together, but never an actual human char- 
 acter realized to thought. Such human character, 
 instantly found in what it says itself, is seldom or 
 never found in what is said of it. And this is the 
 secret of Carlyle's art : he searches for the one 
 look, the one gesture, the one act, the one word 
 that gives ingress to the inner whole, and never 
 troubles himself to gather from without the scat- 
 tered beams of manifestation, knowing well that 
 no sheaf, however large, collected in that way, 
 will ever enable him to restore the original 
 luminary. 
 
 But if it be thus with the characters of 
 Macaulay, an analogous inexactitude frequently 
 accompanies his statements of fact And here it 
 is the celebrated descriptive chapter which will
 
 166 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 best illustrate our views. The subject of that 
 chapter is eminently suited to Macaulay, both as 
 regards his outward execution and his inward 
 habit of thought. As regards the former, he had 
 to describe contrasts (in reference to our own 
 times) adapted to interest and pleasingly surprise 
 the very shallowest faculties, while, as regards the 
 latter, the burthen of the story was progress, 
 moral and intellectual progress. But what a re- 
 markable easiness and indifference of temper he 
 manifests in the collecting and selecting of his 
 materials ! The most of them are collected from 
 writers fifty or sixty years later than the period 
 described ; and the most of these writers are 
 novelists. His one great authority for a very large 
 portion of the contents of that chapter is un- 
 questionably Roderick Random. The incidents 
 of travelling, the state of the roads, the highway- 
 men, the tricks of London, the squire, the curate ? 
 are all to be found there. And certainly it is 
 quite true that in the novels of Smollett and 
 Fielding there is, as Thackeray observes, a very 
 great amount of historical truth " in solution." 
 Still, Macaulay has taken this observation a great 
 deal too much au pied de la lettre, and it is simply 
 ridiculous to put up Orson Topehall, a prey to all
 
 LOHD MACAU LAY. 167 
 
 the rascality of London, as the normal English 
 squire of the day. Still more ridiculous is it to 
 represent the curate Shuffle, whom Roderick 
 
 Random finds drinking, smoking, and fiddling in 
 the alehouse, as the true type of the priest of that 
 time. W( raid we be historically accurate should we 
 mm Sir Pitt Crawley to represent the baronet- 
 age, and Lord Verisopht the peerage of our own 
 davs ? Out of the smells of the Thames and the 
 Serpentine, out of the painted harlots who, morning 
 and evening, infest Regent Street, and out of the 
 skittle-sharpers, and hundreds the like, of whom 
 we hear daily in the newspapers, would it not he 
 easy to furbish up a picture of these days as 
 piquant and racy, but at the same time quite as 
 fallacious as Macaulay's representation of the 
 times of our ancestors? 
 
 The reader, we daresay, recollects the descrip- 
 tion of the English traveller in the Highlands, 
 rising in the morning from the bare earth, blind 
 with smoke, mad with itch, etc. : Macaulay tells 
 us himself the Bource from which he derives all 
 these and other extraordinary particulars. In a 
 note li<- Almost all these circumstances 
 
 an- taken from Burt's letters; for the tar I am 
 
 indebted to Cleland's poetry." His manner of
 
 168 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 working is here evident, then : the statements 
 of a single writer are conclusive to him. The 
 evidence of a single witness is accepted as true, 
 and not only as regards the particular facts to 
 which that witness speaks, but in a generalized 
 application that infinitely exceeds and transcends 
 the testimony. Then an accidental notice, in 
 some forgotten verses, of tar seen on some indi- 
 vidual Highlander, is eagerly accepted, and affixed 
 as a general characteristic, not necessarily for its 
 truth, but simply for the additional spice and 
 point it lends to the story. [We see here, indeed, 
 another great distinction between Macaulay and 
 Carlyle. In regard to any character, scene, action, 
 or event, Carlyle strives, nay, we may say, con- 
 vulses himself (so earnest is he) to attain to the 
 picture, while Macaulay, for his part, is content, 
 in such circumstances to attain to a picture. " f This 
 difference between these writers is conclusively 
 distinct. Macaulay again is certainly always 
 diligent ; he reads and excerpts indefatigably ; but 
 he does not, like Carlyle, spend days and nights 
 in thought as to what is to be believed, as to how 
 the matter really stood. Both have studied the 
 same materials, and it is eminently characteristic 
 of both that, in regard to the battle of Dunbar, to
 
 LORD MAC AULA Y. 169 
 
 take but a small instance, while Macaulay ad- 
 heres to the old picturesque story about Cromwell 
 thanking the Lord for the Scots leaving the 
 high ground, Carlyle, by dint of research, endless 
 sifting, and accurate personal inspection, has real- 
 ized for us a new, and true, and infinitely more 
 picturesque " drove" of Dunbar. Another differ- 
 ence between these writers is that Carlyle pos- 
 sesses dramatic art in very great perfection, while 
 in this respect Macaulay is largely deficient. 
 The latter is undoubtedly entitled to the praise, 
 ascribed by Carlyle to Hume, of " epic clearness," 
 but it is Carlyle himself who can alone lay claim 
 to the greater praise of dramatic intensity. The 
 fall of Lomenie de Brienne, and that of Eobe- 
 spierre are really very complete dramas. But the 
 most important contrast between Carlyle and 
 Macaulay lies in their immensely different intel- 
 lectual point of view. Macaulay ignores the 
 metaphysical and spiritual, and seeks to surround 
 himself by a well understood and well arranged 
 temporal lie stands as strongly by the Philo- 
 tophy <>f the Conditioned as Sir William Hamilton 
 himself: it is as clear to him as to this philo 
 gopher that the unconditioned extremes are 
 mutually contradictory, and he will nut waste his
 
 170 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 time on them. The supernatural element is a 
 problem quite beyond us ; and he, for his part, 
 will content himself with this truth, that the 
 really best life for this world is the best life for 
 the next world also. How different Carlyle ! 
 The void in that wild longing heart, no condi- 
 tioned, no mere temporality, how wide and splen- 
 did soever, could for a moment fill. No ; his 
 eyes are Godwards, and his soul athirst for the 
 ampler ether of the other side. 
 
 But we must hasten to make an end. In con- 
 clusion, then, we may say of Macaulay that be his 
 shortcomings what they may, he has completely 
 realized his own ideal. He says himself : 
 " The diligence, the accuracy, and the judgment 
 of Hallam, united to the vivacity and the colour- 
 ing of Southey — a History of England written 
 throughout in this manner would be the most 
 fascinating book in the language : it would be 
 more in request at the circulating libraries than 
 the last novel." This was written in 1835, 
 and accurately foretold the fortune of his own 
 History twenty years later. Yes ; Macaulay 
 eminently possessed — and again we use his own 
 words-i^" the art of writing what people will like 
 to read ; he rejects all but the attractive parts of
 
 LORD MACAULAY. 171 
 
 his subject ; he keeps only what is iu itself amus- 
 ing, or what can be made so by the artifice of his 
 diction." He cannot originate, he cannot create, 
 but he disposes admirably, and has a marvellous 
 power of what the French call the mise en scene. 
 In subtlety, depth, fertility, in spontaneity of 
 thought, he is infinitely behind his own great 
 prototype Hume. To the solidity, the compre- 
 hensiveness, the completeness, the immensity of 
 range of Gibbon, he can have no pretension. To 
 the earnestness, the intensity, the vision of Carlyle, 
 he is equally a .stranger. With men like these 
 he is simply incommensurable. His place is not 
 among the kings ; he holds no throne ; he sits 
 not by the sides of Thucydides and Tacitus. In 
 the annals of the world we know but one mate 
 for him — a mate that he would disdain, perhaps, 
 but a mate that if here inferior is there superior ; 
 — this mate is Sallust.
 
 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 UPON KANT. 
 
 In the remarks of these two English writers on 
 the German philosophers, especially Kant, there 
 lies the possibility of certain lights, not unillus- 
 trative as well of the one side as of the other, and 
 not unlikely, perhaps, to be of interest to the 
 general reader. It is this reader's ear we would 
 win, then, on this subject, for a few pages. 
 
 From De Quincey we quote at once as fol- 
 lows : — 
 
 " Kant is a dubious exception. . . . Within 
 his own circle none durst tread but he. But 
 that circle was limited. He was called by one 
 who weighed him well, the Allcs-zermalmcndcr, 
 the world- shattering Kant. He could destroy ; 
 his intellect was essentially destructive. He had 
 no instincts of creation or restoration within his 
 Apollyon mind . . . [he] exulted in the pro-
 
 DE QULNTF.V AND COLERIDGE UPON KANT. 173 
 
 spect of absolute and ultimate annihilation. . . . 
 The King of Prussia [was] obliged to level his 
 state thunders, and terrify him in his advance, 
 else I am persuaded that Kant would have form- 
 ally delivered atheism from the professor's 
 chair." 1 
 
 Now, on matters German, De Quincey is 
 usually admitted to be a master, and it is hardly 
 indirectly that he himself claims as much ; never- 
 theless, there is not one of these words that de- 
 serves not to be negatived. Really, throughout 
 his whole life, the thoughts that lay nearest to 
 Kant were God, Immortality, and Free-will 
 These to him (with Ontology, but only as fore- 
 court) constituted Metaphysic ; and to re-establish 
 metaphysic was his single aim. To talk of Kant 
 exulting in the prospect of annihilation, " ab- 
 solute and ultimate annihilation," is even less 
 relevant than to talk of Galileo rejoicing in the 
 unmoved centrality of the earth ; while there 
 are few names in our mouths the addition to 
 which of " Atheist" were a greater blasphemy. 
 We must look closer, however, at the circum- 
 stances of the charge. 
 
 There is only a single characteristic in Kant 
 
 1 De Quiucey's Works, Hogg's edition, vol. li. pp. 162, 163.
 
 174 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 which, on the religious side, has been made a 
 handle of attack ; and that is the undoubted 
 supremacy which he awards to morality. Hence 
 probably the imputation of Pelagianism, as like- 
 wise, later, that of Eationalism. Morality with 
 Kant, however, has a width of meaning that is 
 quite peculiar to himself. To him it means that 
 single principle which realized, as alluded to 
 already, the interests of metaphysic. Nay, it was 
 morality — the world of practice — that explained 
 to him the lacuna in these respects in the world 
 of theory (knowledge), and exhibited these lacuna 
 themselves as a provision of the most indispens- 
 able purpose. It is no wonder then, that Kant 
 valued or ove?*valued morality. 
 
 As for Pelagianism, Eationalism, etc., they 
 concern Theology, and shall be left aside. We 
 may remark only that we have not yet found 
 anywhere in Kant a single word that tends not 
 to re-establish religion, and knit us closer to 
 Christianity. From the very surface of his writ- . 
 ings, indeed, Kant is seen to form even a con- 
 trast to the Voltaires, and others the like, with 
 whom such information as De Quincey's would 
 rashly class him. Kant is no mocker, no French- 
 man of the eighteenth century, with a blind pre-
 
 UPOS KANT. 1 75 
 
 judice against the religion which he has seen- — 
 and because he has so seen it — outraged around 
 him. Kant was piously brought up Loth by 
 parents and instructors, and religion, with all 
 that concerned religion, remained to him through 
 life the central interest; nor was it aught but 
 venom and vulgarity that brought the charge of 
 heresy against him. 
 
 As regards the allusion to the King of Prussia, 
 we may say, indeed, that either Schubert's account 
 nt the transaction, or that of Eosenkranz, as con- 
 tained in their united edition of the works of 
 Kant, or Kant's own (in his preface to the Streit 
 ii r Facv.ltiltcn), will alone suffice to demonstrate 
 at once the absurdity of De Quincey's misrepre 
 sentation. This is, indeed, to give a strange 
 validity to the miserable industry of Hilmer, 
 Hermes, YValtersdorf, and company. This is 
 strangely to invert the true character of that 
 contemptible attack on the aged Kant in 1794, 
 on which an indignant Germany has ever since 
 called shame, We are not required to say more 
 In iv. Kant's own letter to the King is at once a 
 triumphant defence and an overwhelming rebuke. 
 And while Roaenkranz, as regards this matter, 
 and in reference to Christianity, directly styles
 
 176 DE QUINCEY AND COLEKIDGE 
 
 Kant "the Bestorer of Faith," Schubert, in the 
 same connexion, writes thus : — 
 
 "Kant's candid inquiries and pure intentions 
 were clouded, perverted, disgraced ; and the 
 noblest and surest friend of existing monarchical 
 institutions, the veritable reverer of the Christian 
 religion and its blessed influence on the elevation 
 of the people and moral ennoblement . . . was 
 accused as a scorner of Christianity and an enemy 
 of the people's welfare." 
 
 De Quincey had ample means of information 
 within his power, and it is quite impossible to 
 account for his travesty of this Hilmer and 
 Hermes affair into a compulsory resort to his 
 bolts on the part of the Prussian Jupiter against 
 the attacks of an atheistic Apollyon. To compare 
 these several allegations, indeed, with the reputa- 
 tion and pretensions of De Quincey is to set 
 ourselves adrift on a sea of speculation where 
 there are many feelings besides satisfaction and 
 repose. 
 
 But, as intimated, there is more to strike us 
 still than these curiously absurd imputations 
 about annihilation and atheism ; for, briefly to 
 say it, there is not one word in the whole quota- 
 tion but jingles false. But, first of all, here is
 
 UPOH KANT. 177 
 
 another little quotation with which we shall 
 begin what we have further to say : — " So far 
 from seeing too dimly, as in the case of perplexed 
 obscurity, their defect is the very reverse ; they 
 see too clearly, and fancy that others see as clearly 
 as themselves. Such, without any tincture of 
 confusion, was the obscurity of Kant." Further 
 on, too, De Quincey (Works, vol. iv. pp. 182, 183) 
 talks of the same as an " elliptical obscurity," 
 links in a chain of thought being omitted. 
 
 Style, as we know, is one of De Quincey 's 
 familiars ; he is not only an admirable stylist 
 himself, but he is also an admirable judge of style. 
 Knowing Kant, then, he must be correct as to 
 Kant's obscurity. Now Kant is obscure — even 
 Hegel says so, and he of all men is the best qua- 
 lified to judge ; but Hegel's theory of Kant's 
 obscurity is very unlike De Quincey's. Hegel, 
 in fact, explains it by the words, " Zum Ueber- 
 fluss des Beweisens kommt noch der Ueber- 
 fluss der Sprache," or, indeed, by the single word 
 1 1 eschwatzigkeit." Nay, in regard to expressions 
 of Kant, Hegel (Logik, i. p. 84 ; the other, p. 220) 
 may be found using such words as " rerwonene 
 Schwerfalligkeit." And this is the truth. Kan 
 rarity, so far from being produced by " fancy- 
 
 M
 
 178 DE QUINCEY AND COLEIUDGE 
 
 ing that others saw as clearly as himself," arose, 
 on the contrary, simply from fearing that he 
 should never get others to see at all. Kant's 
 obscurity, so far from "being free from confu- 
 sion," is full of it — full to " perplexed clumsi- 
 ness." Kant's obscurity, finally, so far from 
 being " elliptical," is tautological, is produced, 
 not only by " superfluity of proving," but by 
 " superfluity of speech," by mere " loquacity," 
 endless iteration. Would the reader have an 
 example, let him turn to the Kritik of Pure 
 Reason, and endeavour to read there the second 
 " analogy of experience." What is discussed in 
 it is Causality, the germ, the fons et origo, the 
 creative eye, the key to Kant's entire system. 
 The needs, then, in such a case, are distinctness, 
 clearness, conviction, certainty ; but what we 
 have instead can be termed only a tautological 
 obscurity, perplexed not only to confusion, but 
 even to despair. Kant here can never persuade 
 himself that he has yet stated the case so that a 
 reader must understand it ; arrived at the end, he 
 returns ever to the beginning again ; in perpetual 
 doubt, he repeats a thousand times ; and the 
 ultimate effect on the reader is to produce the 
 belief that all this straining and striving on the
 
 UTON KANT. 179 
 
 part of Kant arises not so much from his in • 
 ability to set his principle in its true light, as from 
 the inadequacy of the principle itself to the light 
 in which he would set it. Here, in short, what 
 to De Quincey is present is really absent, what 
 absent really present ; and this brilliant writer 
 is " contradictorily and even curiously" in error. 
 The irrelevancy that loomed through De Quin- 
 cey 's absurd and impossible charges of atheism, 
 repeats and confirms itself, then, as regards such 
 a palpable matter as style, — where, too, the critic 
 himself is eminently a master and judge. 
 
 But, returning to the first quotation, we perceive 
 the teaching of Kant further characterized by De 
 Quincey as only of a negative or destructive na- 
 ture. " His intellect was essentially destructive," 
 he says ; then he talks of " his Apollyon mind," 
 and, of course, he could not miss that everlasting 
 but much misunderstood " Alles-zermalmender." 
 All this again, however, is just the reverse of the 
 truth. The destructive or negative side of Kant's 
 intellect was very subordinate to the constructive 
 and affirmative. Construction, indeed, was his 
 Bpecial industry ; and, if he possessed any in 
 stincte al all, these were they which De Quincey 
 directly denies him — instincts, namely, of'resto-
 
 180 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 ration and creation." What can be at all named 
 the negative or destructive side of Kant's indus- 
 try confines itself almost exclusively to the Dia- 
 lectic of his first Kritik. But even there his 
 object, in the end, is not by any means to de- 
 stroy, but simply to prepare for building — simply 
 to prepare for " restoration and creation." He 
 desires, indeed, to point out what, on certain 
 subjects, speculative reason is qualified to say, 
 and what, on the same subjects, it is not qualified 
 to say ; and he hopes that, while he will be thus 
 able, on the one hand, to put a stop for ever to 
 the scandalous rixce of philosophers, he will be 
 able also, on the other hand, to lead us to the 
 only true and valid arguments which can have 
 place in the sphere in question. This is his 
 simple object ; and this he conceives himself to 
 have accomplished ; and the word " destructive," 
 as applied to that object, would not only have 
 surprised and vexed him, but it is a word totally 
 beside the point which he regarded. 
 
 The source of such mistakes as convey them- 
 selves by this word " destructive " of De Quincey, 
 or the phrase of others, that Kant left reason " a 
 faculty of lies," is to be found probably in this, 
 that it is only the latter part of the Dialectic of
 
 UPON KANT. 181 
 
 the first Kritik which, as more easily written, has 
 Keen generally read. Thus it becomes intelligible 
 how students, who understood what they read in 
 isolation only and not in connexion, were tempted 
 to fly to the unwarrantable conclusion that, be- 
 cause Kant here opposed some of the usual argu- 
 ments bearing on the existence of God, he sought 
 1 1 1 discredit this doctrine itself. The reverse was 
 the truth, and Kant here had no object in the 
 end that was not affirmative. 
 
 But leaving this, it is certain that, apart from 
 this single Dialectic, all else in Kant is creative 
 and restorative. In the JZsthetik and Analytik 
 of his first Kritik, for example, he creates afresh 
 ontology, while his second Kritik, together with 
 the latter part of the third Kritik and this very 
 Dialectic of which we have just spoken, restores 
 metaphysic, or, to Kant's belief, establishes the 
 existence of God, the freedom of the will, and the 
 immortality of the soul. In the third Kritik, 
 further, if there be a certain negative as regards 
 '/• ;/,'. this negative is again owing to motives 
 Bincerely affirmative, and there is much in the 
 criticism that is both penetrating and satisfac- 
 Moreover, also, it is in this Kritik that 
 we have affirmatively enunciated, and for the
 
 182 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 first time, perhaps, 'principles of the sublime and 
 beautiful, accompanied by surprisingly original 
 and suggestive characterizations of genius and 
 of what concerns the liberal arts. We are not 
 limited t'o the three Kritiken either, but may 
 refer to his numerous affirmative contributions, 
 as to psychology in his Anthropology, to logic in 
 his treatise of that name and elsewhere, and to 
 the principles of politics in various of his minor 
 works. The whole works of Kant, indeed, are 
 such as readily to enable any one conclusively to 
 demonstrate the injustice of applying the epithet 
 " destructive" to such an opulent and affirmative 
 soul ; and De Quincey, in the allegations which 
 he has permitted himself, has only perpetrated a 
 crime — a crime not only to Kant and history, but 
 a crime to himself. 
 
 To be told so pointedly, too, that Kant's circle 
 was " limited" grates ; for the vast comprehen- 
 siveness of the man lies in the very titles of his 
 books, and we know that, of all modern philo- 
 sophers, he was the first to exhibit to us the ex- 
 ample both of a character and a system that, to 
 speak like Emerson, " came" (as nearly as pos- 
 sible) " full circle." 
 
 Then in this circle " none durst tread but he"
 
 UPON KANT. 183 
 
 the Apollyon, the Allcs zcrmahncndcr, the 
 shattered of the world This is the central weak 
 point, the special lunrs of the De Quincey nature. 
 De Quincey here has teased up his imagination 
 into the mighty, the monstrous, the vast, the 
 vague ; and so he would similarly infect ours. 
 We must watch the limbs of a giant in the gloom 
 —a giant who was alone in his power, hut dan- 
 gerous, destructive, deadly. We take leave to 
 
 . , however, that this awful being of the ima- 
 gination, around whom, at the bidding of De 
 Quincey, we are, as it were, to charge the air with 
 the strange, the mystic, the irresistible — with 
 what we name to ourselves, as in reference to De 
 Quincey and in his own word, the " tumultuosissi- 
 mento," contrasts but oddly with the plain little 
 Konigsberg burgher of truth. Within his own 
 circle none durst tread but he ! Why, the fact is, 
 that anybody may enter it and pace about it at his 
 ease, if he will but faithfully apply what ordinary 
 faculties have been refused to no one. Kant has 
 certainly left behind him the greatest philosophical 
 structure thai any man since Aristotle, and before 
 BegeL had been privileged to raise. Still then- 
 is nothing supernatural or superhuman in the 
 utal powers by which this was accomplished.
 
 184 BE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 Philosophically, Kant is fertile, rich, original, as 
 well in depth as in comprehensiveness, to a de- 
 gree that surprises : he was the first, as it were, 
 that entered the very temple of metaphysic, and 
 made its whole space his. Still his secret to 
 all this was patient and tenacious thought. A 
 clue was given by Hume, and his merit was 
 to follow it unweariedly till the whole treasures 
 to which it led lay at his feet. True ; original 
 power of faculty was required for this, and such 
 was present from the first ; but in this faculty 
 there was nothing of the amorphous, nothing of 
 the incomprehensible, nothing of the hopelessly 
 transcendent, nothing of that which the words of 
 De Quincey would picture. There is nothing of 
 all this, indeed, whether in the thoughts, or in the 
 words, or in the demeanour of the plain, simple, 
 discreet, of the eminently well-meaning, but some- 
 what old-maidenish and loquacious, Herr Profes- 
 sor Kant. Kant, indeed, is a lesson of plainness 
 to De Quincey. Take up the first volume of 
 the latter's works, and read the autobiographic 
 sketches. It is impossible to proceed far before 
 — always, too, in a certain dissatisfaction with the 
 business spinning and the common literary ex- 
 pedients in support — one says to one's-self : How
 
 UPON KANT. 185 
 
 much dandyism there is in all this, and surely 
 De Quincey might have received the lash of 
 Thackeray, yet kissed the rod ! The eternal 
 ascription of wealth and importance to everything 
 that belonged to him ; the perpetual weary gossip 
 about lords, lords, and ladies, ladies, his dressing- 
 room and his hurrying to his toilette ; the uxori- 
 ousness of Lord This, not vulgar, but noiseless, 
 and unobtrusive ; the sweet Irish style of innocent 
 gaiety of Lady That ; the immense rents of the 
 various houses he lived in ; the trouble he had 
 with the hard-mouthed horses at Lord So-and- 
 so's ; the heavy golden perquisite he gave the 
 groom ; his longing for four horses, not for splen- 
 dour — oh no ! they used to drive six and eight 
 horses in "Wales ; the intense commerce he had 
 had with men of every rank, from the highest to 
 the lowest : such things, surely, can warrant no 
 other conclusion. Then we have his want of ap- 
 petite for the " mechanic understanding," and his 
 necessity for stimulants in the shape of mysteries. 
 Coleridge's mind demanded mysteries, it appears, 
 and bo docs his ; and we see him, resolute, so far 
 as wis! . to rise to some great monumental 
 
 work, something that concealed a most profound 
 meaning— a meaning of prodigious compass.
 
 18G DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 Thus perpetually is he lashing himself into the 
 grandiose, the " tumultuosissimento," some dream 
 " tumultuous and changing as a musical fugue," 
 " where he was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, 
 chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cocka- 
 toos," etc. 
 
 These last words will recall, perhaps, one of the 
 finest passages of the Confessions, of which not 
 to admire the writing as writing would amount 
 to felo-de-se ; but after all, is there anything in 
 it, is it more than empty form, can it boast a par- 
 ticle of matter, is there burden of thought in it, 
 and is not the very trick of it soon learned ? In- 
 teresting it is certainly, and from an inferior artist 
 we should receive it without a murmur. But De 
 Quincey was in himself no inferior artist. De 
 Quincey brought a rich original endowment, as 
 Burns says, " direct from Almighty God." Not 
 only did he possess an imagination of marvellous 
 opulence — not only was a susceptivity his, rare, 
 discriminating, universal, and of the most delicate 
 touch — not only could he give expression to such 
 faculties by a style elastic, living, inexhaustible, 
 that penetrated with ease into every nook, nor 
 ever turned baffled away — not only this, but he 
 added further a most excellent understanding,
 
 UPON KANT. 187 
 
 clear, sound, vigorous : and by this addition he 
 stood forth a man fit formally to cope with the 
 very highest problems that any philosophy has 
 yet proposed. In a certain sort, indeed, De 
 Quincey came from the bosom of his mother, per- 
 haps a swifter, perhaps a richer spirit, it may be 
 than even Kant. Yet compare the work they did. 
 That is the truth of De Quincey ; he fell a mar- 
 tyr to the tone of the day — a tone that sounded 
 only genius, genius ; let us have flights, let us have 
 the unexampled, the inconceivable, the unutter- 
 ably original To have the credit of being up in 
 German Metaphysicians, Latin Schoolmen, Thau- 
 maturgic Platonists, Religious Mystics, etc., this 
 too lay in the order of the day. But to be up in 
 such things meant only to be able to read in them, 
 and so, from time to time, take inspiration from 
 them. Fairly to apprehend, masticate, absorb, 
 assimilate them — them and their historical con- 
 nexion — that was not the business of the creative 
 genius, but only of the plodder. Accordingly, as 
 we have just seen in De Quincey's case, to be up 
 in Kant was simply to know him not, but to be 
 guilty of monstrous injustice to the name and 
 fame of one of the purest and greatest worl. 
 whom history records. Truly it was a vast 
 
 I
 
 188 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 mistake : the early years of the present century 
 sparkled in England, as with the splendours and 
 gaieties of a feast, so many men of surpassing 
 genius talked and wrote and sang in them. But 
 anything worthy of the name of study or of work 
 had been accepted by the fewest. Not ill-read 
 in classics certainly, the most of them left college 
 with but a formal varnish of the other disciplines ; 
 and — save some desultory reading — as they left, 
 they for the most part remained. Nor with all 
 his genius, with all his talent, with all his un- 
 questionable learning, can De Quincey, on the 
 whole, be considered an exception. It is this 
 which, in his respect, we have sought to illus- 
 trate in canvassing his relation to Kant, in regard 
 to whom his mistakes also, we hope, have not un- 
 profitably been signalized. 
 
 One other notice ("The Last Days") of Kant 
 there occurs in De Quincey 's works, but, as only a 
 repetition of Wasianski's painful and unnecessary 
 diary of a case of senile marasmus in the person 
 of Kant, it shall not concern us here. De Quincey 
 speaks also of Schelling, of the Transcendental 
 Idealism, but his description of this book looks 
 as if it were not from knowledge, though in such 
 terms as to imply knowledge, — the basis all the 
 time being simply conjecture.
 
 ITON KANT. 189 
 
 We shall now turn to Coleridge in similar re- 
 ference : and shall begin, as after the preceding 
 is but natural, with the peculiarity of his char- 
 acter, in subjection also, like that of De Quincey, 
 to the influences of the time. Here, as there, our 
 tone shall be that of one who loves : we shall no 
 longer see, we hope, however, the divine nimbus 
 alone, but something, too, of the man within. We 
 shall remain still, nevertheless, not fuller of frank- 
 ness than free from grudge. As we have not 
 reviled De Quincey, so neither shall we revile 
 Coleridge. The best of this fine poet and critic 
 of poets we carry by heart, and have so carried 
 it through life; and we shall not willingly yield 
 to any one in intensity of appreciation for the 
 minutest beauty, or in enthusiasm of admiration 
 for genius, and music, and imaginative splendour. 
 
 Probably Coleridge was right when, as will be 
 found in certain autobiographical notices at the 
 
 1 of the second volume of the second edition of 
 his Biographia Litcraria, he talks of his "ebul- 
 lient brain" in boyhood; and intimates that at 
 that period "no poor fellow's idea-pot ever so 
 babbled up" as his own. It will not be easy to 
 conceive, either, any more accurate description of 
 his own young literary self than that contained
 
 190 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 in these words from page 320 of the same volume : 
 — " Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth, and 
 feelings of deep and bitter contempt for almost 
 all who traversed the orbit of my understanding, 
 were even then prominent and manifest." What 
 is thus indicated is by no means an individual 
 phenomenon, however, but a constitution of con- 
 sciousness that may be predicated of many — that 
 may be predicated, for example, not of one, nor 
 of several, but probably of all those men who, 
 from Byron to Alexander Smith, from Hazlitt to 
 Gilfillan, from Mat Lewis to Thackeray, from 
 Burns to Tennyson, from De Quincey to Carlyle, 
 have been regarded as possessed, whether for 
 potence or for impotence, of the temperament of 
 genius. For it by no means follows that power 
 or strength is convertible with genius : the pro- 
 bability, indeed, is, that for one seed of genius 
 that struggles to the tree, nine hundred and 
 ninety-nine die at various stages of imbecility 
 and misery. But, however this be, Coleridge's 
 words apply, even in view of the names recited, 
 to no one more accurately than to himself. He 
 had an " ebullient brain ;" his " idea-pot" was as 
 a seething caldron. A greedy reader, he was deep 
 in metaphysic and theology before fifteen. The
 
 UPON KANT. 191 
 
 hymns of the mystic Synesius were at his fingers' 
 ends ; Catullus and Terence and Lucretius lay 
 under his pillow; and, disdaining the games of 
 the open, he walked the academic corridors, recit- 
 ing passages, applauding, blaming, suggesting, — 
 his cheeks glowing, his head smoking, and his 
 heart atlame. He knew nothing of the ways of 
 lit'.', nothing of the world, nothing of the men in 
 it, -all these were on the outside to him, beings 
 of another class, inferiors to his imagination, before 
 whom he yet cowered as superiors in fact. In 
 the so great love that developed itself within him 
 for poets and philosophers, in the splendid images 
 and big thoughts thev woke in him, in the wild 
 enthusiasm with which he pleaded for them, in 
 the scorn and hatred that inflamed or gnawed 
 him towards those who denied them, — in all this 
 he felt earnest that he was of kindred nature, 
 predestinate to Apolloship, the godship of pro- 
 phecy, the godship of song. Then followed pur- 
 poseless wanderings, aimless aberrations — as of 
 nip', indeed, aimlessly drunken of his own good 
 fortune, and that dallied aimlessly with the very 
 pri\ Liege he hogged. 
 
 But now love came, and, for tin 1 time, he was 
 ned Once again the earth was golden and
 
 192 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 the air was joy ; he had found his Sara. In awe 
 before the innocent sweet wisdom, the prescient 
 purity, his heart grew deep. They need not fear 
 for bread, he thought : it was his Father's world, 
 and they could not want. He had wealth within 
 him — opulence. The world was open to him ; 
 literature was open to him ; he would spring into 
 the saddle and spur before the rest. So he mar- 
 ried, and began the Watchman. Of the happiness 
 of love we will believe that he tasted deeply, as 
 of the happiness of work ; but not for long. Too 
 soon the Watchman is of avail but as fuel in the 
 grate ; too soon has marriage taught him, as he 
 says himself, " the wonderful uses of that vulgar 
 commodity yclept bread ;" too soon we find allu- 
 sions in him to his wife's groans, and their thin 
 faces, and his distress to write for bread. Alas, 
 the ways of life ! The dsedal wings have snapped, 
 then ; and, with a shock, he has come to earth. 
 When he looks up again, it is to him, we fancy, 
 as if some one had snuffed the lights out, and he 
 sees the shabby actors, and the rough wood, and 
 the coarse canvas. It is, indeed, by no means 
 pleasant to have to see the Watchman go up in 
 that way ; while, as for his wife's thin cheeks and 
 her groans that call to him for bread, that is in-
 
 UPON KANT. 193 
 
 supportable. A certain wild honey that will not 
 feed the body, — this is all he has gathered ; bread 
 he has none. An inner life is his one necessity; 
 but, in so uneasy an externality, of which he is 
 himself the powerless and apprehensive centre, 
 an inner life he cannot have — an inner life it is 
 maddening even to try to have. He cannot help 
 reverting to the time when he was alone, and free 
 from responsibility. He doubts his fitness for 
 domestic life, and fain would make it credible to 
 himself that poetry cannot consort with prose. 
 On the other side, again, he cannot hide from 
 himself the advantages of well-sized rooms, and 
 commodious furniture, and delicate dinners, and 
 the talk mostly to himself, with freedom from 
 care. If then, now, he seek to relieve the domes- 
 tic burden by a visit to his friends, we cannot 
 wonder ; while we must sympathize with his 
 resolution that there, in that leisure, he will 
 write, he will work, he will do the best for his 
 family, he will create philosophies, dash down 
 poems that — that — etc. 
 
 But, even in this element, the good was not at 
 
 once realized. It was so pleasant to read, and 
 
 Bm, and wander, and talk, and be listened to. 
 
 \V. ir k was irksome, he found. These fine things 
 
 N
 
 194 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 that he would condescend to do, and that cer- 
 tainly everybody expected of him, would not, 
 unfortunately, allow themselves to be done at a 
 wish. If philosophies were to be made, philo- 
 sophies were to be learned ; and that was labour. 
 These German fellows, at all events, of whom he 
 spoke so much, were strangely intolerant of being 
 read in. One could read in Plato and Bacon, and 
 all the rest of them; and one could quote passages 
 from them that spoke for themselves. But was 
 the one or the other possible with the Germans ? 
 One might, indeed, quote from Kant, as others 
 did, the moral world within and the starry heavens 
 without; but was there any possibility of a single 
 other quotation? It was disagreeable; people 
 looked up to him so ; he had spoken so divinely, 
 he had promised so> much ; it seemed there was 
 an element of expectation round him ; he felt 
 goaded, goaded, for ever goaded. A panoramic 
 imagination and an easy stomach ; if he was to 
 work, he must have the latter : if he was ever to 
 evolve the marvels of which his words had given 
 the foretaste, he must have the former ; but opium 
 gave both. And so procrastination increased, 
 and as he could not vacate the tripod, and as 
 with time intensity of expectation grew, there
 
 UPON KANT. 195 
 
 needs must come excuses, and pretexts, and 
 subterfuges, and plausible propos to every man. 
 Or, by fits, answering desperately to the goad, he 
 wrote blindly, but authoritatively, of Hobbes and 
 Descartes, and vilipended Hume, and quoted 
 Plato and Plotinus, Salvator Posa and Grymeus, 
 and appropriated the erudition of Maass, and 
 plagiarized from Schelling, and maundered about 
 Kant — losing daily more and more of that which 
 is the soul and centre of humanity, conscience, 
 and the moral law. 
 
 It is here now that we take up Coleridge, with 
 
 the view of eliciting lights that, in relation to the 
 
 Germans, may prove illustrative as well of them 
 
 as of him ; and painful, harsh, as this general 
 
 picture may be, we hope to adduce matter that 
 
 shall abundantly substantiate it. Of such matter, 
 
 indeed, a large store has been already laid before 
 
 the public. Sir James Mackintosh, Professor 
 
 Ferrier, and Coleridge's own editor and nephew, 
 
 Henry Nelson Coleridge (whose candour at once 
 
 and research in these respects are alike admirable), 
 
 have amply accomplished this as regards Hobbes, 
 
 I 1 {cartes, Bume, Maass, and Schelling. De 
 
 Q dncey, ton, so far as concerns Schelling and 
 
 I ileridge's intromissions with bim, declares that
 
 196 DE QUINCE Y AND COLERIDGE 
 
 " the entire essay (in the Biographia Literaria), 
 from the first word to the last, is a verbatim trans- 
 lation from Schelling." The paper of Professor 
 Terrier in particular (see Blackwood's Magazine 
 for March 1840) is a formal proof of this; and 
 we quite sympathize with this accomplished and 
 earnest student, when, with reference to Cole- 
 ridge's cheerful, or even benignant, admissions of 
 "genial coincidences" between himself and Schel- 
 ling, he exclaims : — " Genial coincidences, for- 
 sooth ! where every one word of the one author 
 tallies with every one word of the other!" We 
 do not intend to re-tread, however, all the ground 
 which has been already so well trodden by these 
 eminent men in advance. Still, in the prosecution 
 of our own immediate theme (Kant), we shall 
 touch on several points that may prove, perhaps, 
 supplementary to what has been said, not of 
 Maass and others before him, but of Schelling. 
 
 In chapter ix. of the Biographia Literaria, we 
 find these : — 
 
 " While I in part translate the following obser- 
 vations from a contemporary writer of the Conti- 
 nent, let me be permitted to premise, that I might 
 have transcribed the substance from memoranda 
 of my own, which were written many years
 
 UPON KANT. 197 
 
 before his pamphlet was given to the world ; and 
 that I prefer another's words to ray own, partly as 
 a tribute due to priority of publication, but still 
 more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case 
 where coincidence only was possible. ... In 
 Schelling's Xatur-Philosophie, and the System des 
 Tran8cendentalen Idealismus, I first found a genial 
 coincidence with much that I had toiled out for 
 myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had 
 yet to do." 
 
 One is apt to suppose that there is a tacit 
 reference to Kant here, and that his was the 
 quarry from which Coleridge must have " toiled 
 out" that — whatever it was — of which he speaks. 
 In the same chapter, indeed, he acknowledges 
 himself to be indebted to the "writings of the 
 illustrious sage of Konigsberg, more than to any 
 other work," for the invigoration and discipline 
 of his understanding; he boasts (and 1815 is the 
 date) of "fifteen years' familiarity with them;" 
 and he alleges, in explanation of his coincidences 
 with Schelling, that they had both "studied in 
 the same Bchool, and been disciplined by the same 
 preparatory philosophy, namely, the writings of 
 K n\" But if Coleridge admit, in Cant's regard, 
 a like debt with Schelling, it is not so certain
 
 198 DE QUINCE Y AND COLEEIDGE 
 
 that he was fully awake to the truth in either case. 
 We suspect that he did not understand the exact 
 nature of Schelling's obligation to Kant ; and that, 
 like most of his countrymen probably, he supposed 
 Schelling to be a great original writer, who, of 
 course, read in Kant, as in others, but, on the 
 whole, owed his triumph to his own " magical 
 brain." The strict historical connexion of the 
 German philosophers was not then well under- 
 stood in England, and such suppositions were, at 
 least on the part of non-experts, very excusable. 
 Coleridge, then (whether, as a professed expert, 
 excusable or not), will not, as seems likely, by any 
 means, foolishly allow himself to be any deeper 
 in Kant's debt than he fancies Schelling will. 
 " Yet there had dawned upon me," he cries, "even 
 before I had met with the Critique of the Pure 
 Reason, a certain guiding light ; " and he lets us 
 know that there were others besides Kant to 
 whom he and Schelling owed inspiration. " Both 
 had equal obligations," he asserts, "to the polar 
 logic and dynamic philosophy of Giordano Bruno ; " 
 and then, as regards Behmen (Bohme), while 
 Schelling knows him only recently, coincides with 
 him only incidentally, and can extend to him 
 " only feelings of sympathy," he (Coleridge)
 
 UPON KANT. 199 
 
 reverences him from "a much earlier period," 
 " owes him a debt of gratitude," and has to thank 
 him for " obligations more direct." Coleridge 
 will not attribute to Kant all the glory, then, 
 whether in his own case or in that of Schelling. 
 They had both Bruno, he says; they had both 
 Behmen. Still we may take it for granted that 
 he would have allowed the greater part of the 
 glory to have been the due of Kant. 
 
 Xow, then, returning to our extract, we find the 
 case to stand thus : — Coleridge claims to have 
 virtually preceded and anticipated Schelling 
 through a like knowledge with this latter of 
 Kant, Bohme, and Bruno. Xay, we are given to 
 understand that this is not wonderful, inasmuch 
 as Coleridge, in some respects, had even the ad- 
 vantage of Schelling. This was particularly the 
 case as regards Bohme, and as regards " a certain 
 guiding light." What concerns Bohme may be 
 passed, there is so much else to occupy us. The 
 reader, we daresay, has a very good guess already 
 aa to what knowledge of Bohme the works of 
 Coleridge will -how, and what those of Schelling; 
 as well a- to how it stands with the age, direct- 
 ness, and amount of it in the case of either. As 
 for the "guiding light," in the possession of that
 
 200 DE QUIXCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 light — if it led Coleridge to the results of Schel- 
 ling in independence of Kant — we may allow 
 him to have been singularly fortunate. Never- 
 theless, we are disposed to believe that, had he 
 known how the matter really stood with what we 
 call " the strict historical connexion," Bruno and 
 Bohme, indeed (though not as co-factors in the 
 same breath with Kant) might have been men- 
 tioned, but not the " light." A " guiding light " 
 to Kant and beyond Kant, before Kant — that were 
 truly a wonder of wonders ! 
 
 Coleridge's anticipation of Schelling, now, is 
 contained, it seems, in certain "Memoranda;" 
 and these were written, we are told, " many years 
 before Schelling's pamphlet (a word which runs 
 lighter than ' book ') was given to the world." 
 Again, further, the particular " pamphlets," of 
 which, in the case of Schelling, Coleridge avows 
 knowledge, are the Natur-PMlosophie, and the 
 Syste7ii des Transcendentalen Idealismus. It is 
 the matter of these, then, that Coleridge shall 
 have anticipated. Now, the comparison of a few 
 historical dates will put these things in very curi- 
 ous lights. 
 
 Coleridge returned from Germany in 1800, 
 where he had resided during fourteen months :
 
 UPON KANT. 201 
 
 and, as was natural to suppose, it is to this date 
 (of 1800) that, in the Biographia Litem ria, he 
 refers, as we have seen, the commencement of his 
 knowledge of Kant, Xow, the Natur-Philoso- 
 phic was published in 1797, and the Transcai- 
 dentcUen IdealismMS in 1800. It is evident, then, 
 that Coleridge's " Memoranda," having been writ- 
 ton many years before Schelling's " pamphlet was 
 given to the world," must have been written many 
 years also before 1797, many years before Fichte 
 (the first sketch of whose system dates only from 
 179l), many years before he knew Kant, or had 
 even learned German, and, indeed (seeing that he 
 was born in 1772), many years before his twenty- 
 fifth year. If the " light " perplexed, these " Me- 
 moranda" confound. "Written as alleged, their 
 contents are to be supposed accurately represented 
 by this verbatim translation from Schelling ! Let 
 us assume a mistake in the date, however ; let us 
 assume the "many years" not to have existed; 
 and the " Memoranda" to have been written after 
 a knowledge of Kant. In that case it must be 
 1 that, between 1800 and 1815, Coleridge 
 had time enough to "toil out" for himself, from 
 Kant, such doctrines as those of Schelling's, and 
 before any actual acquaintance with Schelling,
 
 202 DE QUINCEY AND COLEKIDGE 
 
 if it were from Kant, directly from Kant and 
 before any actual acquaintance with Schelling, 
 that such doctrines were to be at all toiled out. 
 But every one in the least acquainted with Ger- 
 man philosophy, and its rigid historical sequence, 
 must smile somewhat curiously at the pretensions 
 of any one, even a German, to the evolution of a 
 system from Kant, identical with that of Schel- 
 lins, without the intervention of the link of Fichte. 
 From Kant to Schelling, Fichte, in fact, is the 
 indispensable bridge. Coleridge, if he evolved 
 Schelling, must, at least, have previously known 
 Fichte. But Coleridge did not know Fichte. 
 His notice of Fichte in this celebrated chapter 
 (ix.) is but a word, and representative of little or 
 nothing ; while the burlesque is simply childish, 
 and points to an astounded gaping at the outside 
 of the Wissenschaftslehre, as its only possible 
 source. Or if Coleridge evolved Fichte, where 
 is that evolution represented in his works ? Nay, 
 where in his works is that " much that he had 
 toiled out for himself?" where is that which, 
 by Schelling's " powerful assistance," he after- 
 wards did ? where is this accomplishment that is 
 like Schelling, and beyond Schelling, to be found 
 represented ? Why, nowhere — unless in that
 
 UPON KANT. 203 
 
 astonishing, claimed and unclaimed, attributed 
 and unattributed, piece of transcendental idealism, 
 in reference to which bewilderment reaches its 
 climax, when we read, " ' To remain unintelligible 
 to such a mind,' exclaims Schelling, on a like 
 occasion," and know that this is the occasion, and 
 that Coleridge is simply literally translating, 
 even in his notes (as in that one about Leibnitz 
 and Hemsterhuis), from Schelling ! "When he 
 says, then, that he " might have transcribed ' his 
 Schellingianism ' from memoranda of his own 
 that were written many years before Schelling's 
 pamphlet was given to the world," is he not also 
 saying something so delightfully impossible that 
 it is impossible not to smile ? But when, further, 
 we see the bland Coleridge politely bowing, and 
 chivalrously waiving the pas to Schelling, as pre- 
 ferring " another's words to his own," " as a tribute 
 due to priority of publication," but " still more 
 from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where 
 coinddi nee only was possible," is it possible to do 
 aught else — in presence of so comical an example 
 of the pure ludicrous — than convert the smile 
 into a downright laugh? 
 
 But if Coleridge evolved Schelling without 
 knowing Schelling, he must have evolved him
 
 204 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 also, not only without knowing Fichte, but with- 
 out — or rather, let us say, only with such know- 
 ledge of Kant as gave rise to very strange results ; 
 for, however curious be the " light that dawned 
 on him" before, scarcely less curious must we 
 pronounce the light that dawned on him after, he 
 knew Kant. To illustrate and make good this 
 allegation, we cannot altogether avoid quotations ; 
 but, as we shall compress and reduce them to 
 their least, it would be very desirable that the 
 reader kept the original by him. In chapter ix. 
 Coleridge refers to Kant thus : — 
 
 " The originality, the depth, and the compres- 
 sion of the thoughts ; the novelty and subtlety 
 yet solidity and importance of the distinctions ; 
 the adamantine chain of the logic ; and, I will 
 venture to add (paradox as it will appear to those 
 who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant 
 from reviewers and Frenchmen), the clearness and 
 evidence of the Critique of the Pure Eeason, etc. 
 . . . took possession of me as with a giant's hand. 
 After fifteen years' familiarity with them, I still 
 read these, and all his other productions, with 
 undiminished delight and increasing admiration. 
 The few passages that remained obscure to me, 
 after due effort of thought (as the chapter on
 
 UPON KANT. 205 
 
 original apperception), and the apparent contradic- 
 tions which occur, I soon found were hints and 
 insinuations referring to ideas which Kant either 
 did not think it prudent to avow, or, etc. ... He 
 had been in imminent danger of persecution. . . . 
 The expulsion of [Fichte] . . . from the Univer- 
 sity of Jena supplied experimental proof that the 
 venerable old man's caution was not groundless. 
 In spite, therefore, of his own declarations, I could 
 never believe that it was possible for him to have 
 meant no more by his Noumenon, or Thing in 
 itself, than his mere words express ; or that, in 
 his own conception, he confined the whole plastic 
 power to the forms of the intellect, leaving for the 
 external cause, for the materiale of our sensations, 
 a matter without form, which is, doubtless, incon- 
 ceivable. I entertained doubts, likewise, whether, 
 in his own mind, he even laid all the stress which 
 he appears to do on the moral postulates. . . . 
 $u)VT]a€ avverolaiv : and for those who could not 
 pierce through the symbolic husk, his writings 
 were not intended. Questions which cannot be 
 fully answered without exposing the respondent 
 to personal danger," etc. 
 
 Thin ], while it proves Coleridge to have 
 
 seriously occupied himself with the great work of
 
 206 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 Kant as far as the deduction of the categories, 
 proves him also, however strenuous and persever- 
 ing his endeavours, to have, in general result, 
 failed. That ease in " the " pure reason to which 
 he pretends, he did not attain. For, in the first 
 place, the ascription to Kant of designful reti- 
 cence and intentional obscurity is not only un- 
 founded and gratuitous, but its reverse is the 
 truth. Kant's great works are free from any 
 reticence, and as for intentional obscurity, any- 
 thing wider of the truth it were impossible to 
 invent. Kant is — but never intentionally — ob- 
 scure ; only from excess of intention to be not 
 obscure is it that, in effect, he becomes obscure. 
 This Kant knew and lamented ; and so it is that 
 he is never done with cries to the excellent 
 " styles " of such men as Eeinhold and Fichte to 
 come to his rescue. " Hints and insinuations," 
 then, are quite beside Kant ; and, of all works, 
 precisely his contain the least of " symbolic husk." 
 A literal conveyance of his thought, for this he 
 strains ; but he never calls on imagination for 
 one that shall be figurative or symbolical. Of 
 the obscurity, a peculiar terminology is certainly 
 one element ; but the others, as said, are only 
 diffuseness, prolixity, and repetition (see Hegel
 
 UPON KANT. 20 7 
 
 again here in his Hist, of Phil., vol. iii. p. 503). 
 Then the reason alleged, caution in consequenrr 
 of persecution, is but an anachronism. That poor 
 affair of Hilmer and Hermes in 1794 (still less 
 Fichte'a mishap in 1799) could have no influ- 
 ence on events of 1781, of 1788, or even of 1790. 
 Kant, then, far from being anxious to conceal his 
 thought, was, on the contrary, orcr-anxious to 
 express it, and even sensitive to a fault at failure. 
 Before printing, he does not seem to have prac- 
 tised the usual reticence in conversation even ; 
 his friend Hippel could, from that source, and in 
 priority to himself, publish some of his most 
 original ideas. Kant, in brief, is the most in- 
 genuous, candid, and loyal of mankind ; and 
 Coleridge's long and somewhat ecpiivocal defence 
 of concealment (see his book further) could not 
 possibly have been more misplaced. 
 
 In the second place, in his misinterpretation of 
 the obscurities which he himself assigns, lies the 
 proof of Coleridge's failure to understand that 
 single theory of perception which, we may say, is 
 their sole burden. Of the various materials in 
 this theory — noumenon, sensation, intuition, no- 
 tion of understanding, act of judgment, idea of 
 and of the various syntheses of these, in
 
 208 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 imagination, in " original apperception," etc., we 
 readily grant the difficulty ; but this difficulty 
 Coleridge has not overcome. On the contrary, all 
 these tilings, which are as windmills of fact, he 
 has only Quixotically converted into giants of 
 dream. This is seen in the very expedient by 
 which he has resolved the obscurity and reticence 
 in question : in superfcetating, that is, these by a 
 fantastic brood of his own, he has, at best, only 
 complimented his imagination at the expense of 
 his understanding. Thus the noumenon — which, 
 as but external antecedent known only in its 
 subjective effects, lays Kant under the most sig- 
 nificant restrictions, not only in reference to 
 knowledge, but in reference to design and beauty 
 — must, according to Coleridge, be to Kant, let 
 him say what he may, the same cunning and 
 unnameable sphinx, or other monster, that it is 
 to himself. Nevertheless, Kant does confine that 
 " plastic power " in the very manner which Cole- 
 ridge refuses to believe ; while, as for " matter 
 without form," it is not easy sufficiently to indi- 
 cate the constancy and clearness with which Kant 
 urges that objects which are perceived only through 
 a medium of sense can and must have form only 
 from within. As regards sensation and intuition
 
 UPON KANT. 209 
 
 (perception), on Maass, who is then signalizing 
 the commonest Kantian distinctions here, Cole- 
 ridge will be found (chap, v.) commenting in such 
 manner as suggests only the blind groping of an 
 unsteady imagination in the dark. These relate, 
 for example, to matter (sensation from without) 
 and form (perception of time and space from 
 within) ; now, when Maass remarks that the 
 characters of an object are either individual or 
 common {i.e., either material ov formal), Coleridge 
 appends the comically inapposite comment — 
 " Deceptive ; the mark (character) in itself is 
 always individual ; by an act of the reflex under- 
 standing, it may be rendered a sign or general 
 term. - ' In remarking (chap, xii.) that Kant's 
 intuition is used only " for that which can be 
 represented in time and space," he would have 
 insured perfect correctness, had he added the 
 words, internally as well as externally; and, in 
 that case, he would have seen that, in his sense, 
 Slant does not deny "the possibility of intellec- 
 tual intuitions." On the contrary, it is on these, 
 and in that sense, that the introduction to the 
 • Kritik is hugely specially employed. The 
 intellectual intuition which Kant denies to man 
 is that (without medium of sense) which he 
 

 
 210 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 ascribes to God ; and is not what Coleridge sup- 
 poses — it is, in fact, the " Anschauender Ver- 
 stand" of which he never caught a glimpse. 
 When, further, he goes on to prefer to Kant's sense 
 of intuition the ordinary English one, he again 
 speaks, surely, in complete unconsciousness of 
 the corresponding theory. Coleridge's knowledge 
 of the remaining elements of this theory— at least, 
 as represented by his intimations in respect to 
 apperception, imagination, and the postulates — is 
 not unconfirmative of the preceding. Appercep- 
 tion is spoken of in the extract as — that which it 
 pretty well is — the obscurity special ; but how- 
 ever absurd it be to attribute it to reticence, to 
 intention, it is infinitely more absurd to imagine 
 it into dream. In chap. xii. Coleridge speaks of 
 it thus : — 
 
 " Here, then, we have by anticipation the dis- 
 tinction between the conditional finite I (which, 
 as known in distinct consciousness by occasion of 
 experience, is called by Kant's followers the em- 
 pirical I) and the absolute I Am, and likewise 
 the dependence, or rather the inherence of the 
 former in the latter ; in whom we live and 
 move," etc. 
 
 Kant's " empirical I " is the ego as manifested
 
 UPON KANT. 211 
 
 under affection, while his absolute " I Am" is the 
 pure formal I, or, as he calls it also, the bare " I 
 think," — that is, the simple reflection I, which, to 
 make them ours, " must accompany all our other 
 ideas, is in every experience of consciousness one 
 and the same, and can be itself accompanied by 
 none beyond." It will perhaps be admitted, 
 then, that this Orientalizing or Judaizing of the 
 simple identity of every one — this hypostasizing 
 of a thought common to all of us indiscriminately, 
 into the awful I Am, is the most extraordinary 
 apotheosis on record. That Coleridge should 
 have converted the obscurity of some half-dozen 
 paragraphs on a point of ordinary psychology into 
 this ! No wonder that he conceived Kant, in 
 such a ticklish position, reticent. Indeed, the 
 due reticence might have been fortunate for him- 
 self here. On imagination we have this : — 
 
 " The imagination, then, I consider either as 
 primary or secondary. The primary imagination 
 I hold to be the living power and prime agent of 
 all human perception, and as a repetition in the 
 finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the 
 infinite I Am." 
 
 There are those, doubtless, who, in this passage, 
 and others such, have seen only the original and
 
 212 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 profound depth of Coleridge's own philosophy. 
 There underlies all these wonders, however, 
 nothing but Kant's simple distinction of imagi- 
 nation into productive and reproductive, and the 
 association of the former with original appercep- 
 tion — affairs all of only human quality. A small 
 matter, then, may give birth to the most marvel- 
 lous spectra in the brain of Coleridge ; of which 
 spectra, however, the true names are but distor- 
 tion and caricature. The ideas of reason, lastly, 
 fall, for one part, into the moral postulates ; and 
 in these Kant shall be to Coleridge insincere ! 
 On these, as on a rock, Kant, however, found 
 himself just rescued from a ravening ocean all 
 around ; though, too, he thankfully acknowledged 
 (in design) a distant gleam of firm land elsewhere. 
 In these dreamy misapprehensions, then, and 
 strange misinterpretations, we may well admire 
 the relation of Coleridge to Kant. 
 
 In the third place, the terms with which the 
 extract opens, in regard to the merits of Kant and 
 his works, are not always such aswe would ex- 
 pect from an expert. " Compression," as we have 
 seen, even though applied to the thoughts, is a 
 word inapposite. Then, in spite of compression, 
 it is not difficulty that Coleridge finds, but, on
 
 UPON KANT. 213 
 
 the contrary, " clearness and evidence." Hegel, 
 for his part, found the study of Kant " difficult" 
 and " hard ;" and humanity in general have called 
 him " dark." But Coleridge's own subsequent 
 words cohere but ill with the general statement. 
 After fifteen years' familiarity with the works of 
 Kant, he still reads them, and with increasing 
 admiration. This is not much : still it is to be 
 said that he who has once mastered such writers 
 as Newton, and La Place, and Aristotle, and 
 Kant, does not usually return to read in them, 
 and with increasing admiration, etc. In such 
 cases a return is conditioned by defect of memory, 
 or for the sake of reference. The emotional, the 
 imaginative, the rhetorical, does not exist in Kant; 
 he has no sallies of wit, no novelties of expres- 
 sion, no charm of manner, to attract in his works ; 
 and, having once achieved these, his Principia, 
 we return as seldom to them as the mathemati- 
 cian to his Euclid. It is very different writers 
 that we read in, and with increasing admiration, 
 etc. In such phrases, then, we hold Coleridge to 
 speak, not in intelligence, but in the air; as it 
 were, afloat, too, in a canoe of mere literary bal- 
 ance. 
 
 Perhaps we have seen in the preceding, not
 
 214 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 only error, but even a certain disingenuousness. 
 This latter macula, at least, is visible elsewhere. 
 In chapter x., for example, we find Coleridge 
 saying : — 
 
 " The very words objective and subjective, of such 
 constant recurrence in the schools of yore, I have 
 ventured to re-introduce. ... I have cautiously 
 discriminated the terms, the reason, and the 
 understanding, encouraged and confirmed by the 
 authority of our genuine divines and philosophers, 
 before the Ee volution. . . . This [chap, xii.] dis- 
 tinction between transcendental and transcendent 
 is observed by our elder divines and philosophers, 
 whenever they express themselves scholastically. 
 ... I shall venture [xii.] to use potence, in order 
 to express a specific degree of a power, in imita- 
 tion of the algebraists. I have even hazarded the 
 new verb potentiate," etc. 
 
 Now, to begin with transcendent and transcen- 
 dental, these words involve a distinction so 
 absolutely and exclusively Kant's, that, without 
 appealing to the whole subsequent history of 
 philosophy in Germany, we may at once permit 
 ourselves categorically to contradict the statement 
 of Coleridge. Of reason and understanding, again, 
 we may speak in precisely the same tone. This
 
 UPON KANT. 2 1 5 
 
 distinction, also, is Kant's, and Kant's alone ; in 
 whom, in fact, we are allowed to see the very 
 process of its birth. Authority, then, is here 
 superfluous ; but, were it at all wanted, there is 
 Hegel's, and more than once. As for subjective 
 and objective, Coleridge knows only their current, 
 not their more important moral sense ; but they, 
 too, like the others, are not derived from the elder 
 divines, the schools of yore, etc., but straight from 
 the Germans ; nor can less be said for the terms 
 potence and potentiate, which are peculiarly Spel- 
 ling's. There is a petty moral hebetude involved 
 here, then, to which the excuse of opium, advanced 
 in other cases, will not apply. It is true, Sir 
 William Hamilton similarly sins ; but may we 
 not say, in the phrase of this latter, that the at- 
 tempt implied, whether as concerns knowledge or 
 as concerns ingenuousness, is " an involuntary 
 felo-de-se" 1 It is fairly ludicrous, indeed, to hear 
 Coleridge, in the midst of such labours (Maass 
 and Schelling lying open before him), calling for 
 our indulgence, " while he goes sounding on his 
 dim and perilous way." 
 
 The defence of Coleridge here, however natural, 
 is characterized, on the part of his friends, by 
 sucli naive propos as these : —
 
 216 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 " These borrowed plumes dressed him out but 
 poorly ; ... he was generally spoken of ... as 
 a man of original power, who had spoiled his 
 own genius by devoting himself to the lucubra- 
 tions of foreigners ! . . . There can be no reason- 
 able doubt that he was at least in the same line 
 of thought with him — was in search of what 
 Schelling discovered — before he met with his 
 writings ! ... It would not be difficult to show 
 that Coleridge might have worked out a system 
 not dissimilar to Schelling's in its essential 
 features." 
 
 Then we have allusions to his characteristic 
 peculiarities, his " nerveless languor of body and 
 bodily mind," his ignorance of the ways of " the 
 market," and his want of " the mechanic under- 
 standing." Now, we must say that, let his pecu- 
 liarities have been what they may, ignorance of 
 " the market" — want of " the mechanic under- 
 standing" — was not among them. Of this — and 
 in its most mechanic and market application to 
 pounds, shillings, and pence — Coleridge must be 
 pronounced to have possessed a very fair share. 
 Writing his Biographia Literaria, after the lapse 
 of many years, he can still tell us in it all the 
 particulars about the commercial unsuccess of the
 
 UPON KANT. 2 1 7 
 
 Watchman, the Friend, etc., as about his sub- 
 scribers, his canvassers, what he lost, and how he 
 lost it, etc. He can talk as acutely as any trades- 
 man of the stock of paper left upon his hands, 
 " each sheet of which stood him," he assures 
 us, " in fivepence previous to its arrival at his 
 printer's." He forgets not his " postages," or how 
 he had to buy paper and pay for printing, " at least 
 fifteen per cent, beyond what the trade would have 
 paid." As little does he forget that he had to 
 give "30 per cent., not of the net profits, but of 
 the otoss results," etc. Towards the end of the 
 last volume, again, we find him able to use such 
 expressions as these : — 
 
 " On the 200 which Parsons in Paternoster 
 Row sells weekly, he gains eight shillings more 
 than I do. . . . To be sure, I have been somewhat 
 fleeced and overreached by my London publisher. 
 . . . I rather think that the intention is to employ 
 me as a mere hackney, without any share of the 
 'profits'.' 
 
 Sunly there is no want of "the mechanic 
 understanding "— -no ignorance of the ways of 
 "the market" here. That, surely, is the very 
 vernacular of both. As for his ill health and the 
 opium it necessitated, into that we shall uot pre-
 
 218 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 sume to inquire ; while, as for the want of fraudulent 
 intention, and his general declaration in reference 
 to Schelling, we shall content ourselves with 
 reminding our readers of all that we know now, 
 of his mis- references, of his groundless pretensions, 
 of all his various other equivocal proceedings ; 
 and we shall contrast with this knowledge one 
 other extract, at the same time that we desire 
 very much that the reader would not content 
 himself with this, but would refer to the original 
 for full details. The extract (from chapter ix.) 
 is this : — 
 
 " It would be but a mere act of justice to my- 
 self were I to warn my future readers that an 
 identity of thought, or even similarity of phrase, 
 will not be at all times a certain proof that the 
 passage has been borrowed from Schelling, or that 
 the conceptions were originally learned from him 
 . . . many of the most striking resemblances — 
 indeed, all the main and fundamental ideas — were 
 born and matured in my mind before I had even 
 seen a single page of the German philosopher; 
 and I might 'indeed affirm, with truth, before 
 the more important works of Schelling had been 
 written, or at least made public. . . . God forbid 
 that I should be suspected of a wish to enter into
 
 rrox KANT. 219 
 
 a rivalry with Schelliug for the honours so un- 
 equivocally his right. ... It would be an act of 
 high and almost criminal injustice to pass over in 
 silence the name of Mr. Richard Saumarez . . . 
 who needed only have taken his foundations some- 
 what deeper and wider to have superseded a con- 
 siderable part of my labours." 
 
 We should not like to do injustice to the fine 
 imaginative and aesthetic intellect of Coleridge ; 
 but are we to blame if we recognise here as well, 
 the insincerity and subterfuge, and even craft, of 
 a nature weak, and very weak, morally ? Surely 
 the introduction of Mr. Richard Saumarez, in such 
 connexion, must clinch reflection. It does not 
 discompose Coleridge, either, to know that his 
 translation of Schelling constitutes these "labours," 
 which Mr. Saumarez just missed "superseding;" 
 and lie winds up quite comfortably, as usual, with 
 Gryiueus and Salvator Rosa. 
 
 The truth probably is, that Coleridge was not 
 properly a student of philosophy, but rather a 
 reader earptim. It pleased him, all the same, to 
 sun himself, as quite a Brobdingnagian student, in 
 the eyefl <>i' the innocent reader, by significant 
 
 riling nods to the fact of metaphyaic and 
 psychology being Ids "hobbyhorse." In like
 
 220 DE QUINCEY AND COLERIDGE 
 
 manner it pleased him, too, to yield to such idle 
 subjective fancies of the moment, as " I believe in 
 the depth of my being that the three great works 
 since the introduction of Christianity are Bacon's 
 Novum Organum, Spinoza's Ethica, and Kant's 
 Kritik ;" and to console his conscience, when it 
 gnawed, by such images as, "I have laid too 
 many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness, 
 the world, with ostrich carelessness, and ostrich 
 oblivion." It is quite in keeping that Spinoza's 
 should have been previously called an " unwhole- 
 some book ;" nor is it discrepant from such a 
 nature that it should be very sharp on plagiarism 
 in others, as in Hume and Aquinas, and about 
 the line from Politian, and that it should whine 
 pretentiously about taking " a refuge from bodily 
 pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse 
 researches." In all these things, plainly, it is no 
 methodic student that we are made to see, but, 
 on the contrary, a stranger, as it were, in a 
 mysterious land that had roused the imagination 
 rather than the understanding. 
 
 With faculty and law, mostly of mere recep- 
 tivity and imaginative suggestion, what system of 
 philosophy could Coleridge have thought out for 
 himself? A procession of pictures he could give
 
 UPON KANT. 221 
 
 — to more he was incompetent. How, in this 
 Biographia Litcraria, he flows on in an endless 
 prosing and prosiness, a dreamy, egotistic, queru- 
 lous, plaintive prosiness — on and on, and round 
 and round — his topics, fancy and imagination, — 
 AYordsworth, Souther, Lamb, the " lyrical ballads," 
 the standards of criticism, Pope, Gray, Milton, 
 Shakespeare, Plotinus, Proclus, Plato, Kant, 
 Schelling — always in these last as if supporting 
 a mighty weight, a something precious, mystic, 
 unapproachable, of profound import, of prophetic 
 power. Then, in addition to his anti-Bonaparte, 
 anti-Jacobin, conservative politics, we have what 
 he would call perhaps his transcendental trini- 
 tarianism, and his mystical, rapt transformations, 
 or reformations, of baptism, and the other rites 
 of the Church, conceived mostly in Greek. Anon 
 we have quotations — and he perfectly knows the 
 effect of these — from the works virorum obscu- 
 rorurn. Finally, he returns again to mumble and 
 maunder about German philosophy, and that he 
 had toiled it all out for himself; but that, in his 
 laziness, he was magnanimous. Probably at 
 bottom — we grieve to say so — it is a weak, self- 
 indulgent, hollow nature this — a Harold Skimpole. 
 It is his daughter that tells us in the preface,
 
 222 DE QUINCEY AND COLEEIDGE 
 
 " Some persons appear to have confounded the 
 general courtesy and bland overflowing of his 
 manners with the state of his affections, and 
 because the feelings which prompted the former 
 flitted over the surface of his heart, to suppose 
 that the latter were flitting and superficial too." 
 This is said for an opposite purpose ; but still — 
 and without gainsaying that purpose- — we think 
 it reveals features as well, quite specially charac- 
 teristic of the class alluded to. 
 
 And this is what the analysis of mature life 
 makes of the idol of youth ! This is he who made 
 epoch with us, and filled us with the enchantment 
 of music, and emotion, and dream ! This is he 
 who wrote "Genevieve," and " Christabel," and the 
 " Ancient Mariner," and it is of him who wrote 
 them that cold analysis has drawn so desecrating 
 a portrait ! But is not this analysis too harsh, and 
 might not admiration and affection limn the same 
 features, but with warmer and with truer colours ? 
 May not original sensibility, may not bodily in- 
 firmity, may not adverse circumstances combine 
 to kindle charity and transmute blame into sorrow 
 — sorrow that a youth crowned with poetic buds 
 so gorgeous, should have grown into no trium- 
 phant, but into a disappointing and disappointed
 
 UPON KANT. 223 
 
 manhood — sorrow, but sorrow not unmingled still 
 with gratitude even for what he gave ? Be it so ; 
 but, for the sake of the future, neither let the due 
 lesson fail. To that let us take, as an astringent, 
 the bitter draught of Hegel : — 
 
 " Man, as he is outwardly — that is, in his 
 actions (not, of course, in his mere bodily exter- 
 nality), so is he inwardly ; if it is only inwardly 
 — that is, only in designs, intentions, that he is 
 virtuous, moral, etc., and his externality is not 
 identical therewith, then is the one as hollow and 
 empty as the other. . . . What a man does, that 
 he is ; and to the lying vanity that warms itself 
 with the consciousness of inward excellence, let 
 us oppose the Gospel-text, ' By their fruits ye 
 shall know them.' . . . Our great men have willed 
 that which they have done, and done that which 
 they have willed. ... A man of character is a 
 man of understanding, who, as such, has definite 
 objects before his eyes, and pursues these with 
 firmness. He who wills something great must, 
 as Goethe says, know how to restrict himself. 
 He who, on the other hand, wills all, wills in 
 effect nothing, and brings it to nothing. There is 
 a number of interesting things in the world : 
 Spanish poetry, chemistry, politics, music; this
 
 224 DE QUINCE Y AND COLERIDGE UPON KANT. 
 
 is all very interesting, and we cannot take it ill 
 of any one who occupies himself with these. In 
 order, however, as an individual in a prescribed 
 position, to bring something about, we must hold 
 by what is definite, and not split up our strength 
 in many directions." 
 
 Our general lesson, then, is now obvious. To 
 the genius-airs, and genius-flights, and genius- 
 indulgences of De Quincey and Coleridge, we 
 oppose, as well the industry, the ingenuousness, 
 and the modesty of Kant, as the silence, the self- 
 restriction, and the iron toil of Hegel. We hope, 
 too, that there are readers for whom other further- 
 ances will not be wanting.
 
 EBENEZEE ELLIOTT, THE CORN- 
 LAW RHYMEE. 
 
 I. — THE BOY. 
 
 In the midst of a busy iron-manufacturing 
 community, and in the centre of a green, light 
 little room, " like a ship's cabin," with portraits 
 of Cromwell and Washington on the wall, there 
 sits a mild, submissive matron, smiling on a 
 smart, good-looking boy beside her, while another 
 boy hovers on the outskirts, as if in exile, — an 
 exile sorrowfully felt to be deserved, but scarcely 
 why. 
 
 It is Mrs. Elliott, with her clever son Giles, 
 and her dull son Ebenezer, in the little parlour 
 of their house in Masbro'. 
 
 The door opens abruptly to a determined, pug- 
 nacious-looking man, followed by another, appa- 
 rently a Dissenting preacher. The latter, in truth, 
 is Tommy Wright, pastor, preacher, and tinker, 
 
 P
 
 226 EBENEZER ELLIOTT, 
 
 of, or belonging to, Barnsley. The former is Mr. 
 Elliott, named, out of irresistible compliment to 
 his characte'ristique, " Devil Elliott." " He comes," 
 he says, " from the Border Elliotts, who stole 
 alike from Scotch and English, no matter which." 
 
 Of politics is their converse. A rank Badical 
 is the " Devil;" a red-hot Jacobin. Hark to 
 him ! Pointing to the figure of Washington 
 on the wall, he shakes his sides with sardonic 
 laughter " at the glorious victory of his Majesty's 
 forces over the rebels at Bunker's Hill." 
 
 Politics exhausted, the good men now will 
 catechise the boys. Giles, in the centre, can 
 answer everything, and receives the plaudits both 
 of tinker and " Devil." Poor Ebenezer, on the 
 contrary, snooled, snubbed, crest-fallen, on the 
 outskirts, can answer nothing. 
 
 Satchel on back, behold them now under weigh 
 for school, Giles alert and willing, Ebenezer chilled 
 and speculative. Why should he go to school ? 
 He does not envy Giles ; he admires him beyond 
 all bounds ; for is he not beautiful as an angel — 
 clever as an angel? But he — he is a dunce, and 
 can learn nothing. Why should he go ? The 
 master will beat him if he stays away, perhaps. 
 Let him ! He hates school : he won't go. So he
 
 THE CORN-LAW RHYMER. 227 
 
 makes hia escape from Giles, and runs for cover 
 to the open country. 
 
 What a change ! He has passed the bounds of 
 space and time, and entered a new world. The 
 broad day receives him with extended arms ; the 
 ail breathes on him with delight ; the fields rise 
 up to him; the flowers, the trees, the sunny 
 gToves, the birds, all welcome him. He is their 
 playmate and their favourite. Ah ! he is some- 
 thing here — he is something now. 
 
 So glides the day, but evening comes. The 
 truant schoolboy skulks back into the dunce 
 again, to hover doubtfully on the outskirts of the 
 domestic circle ; loving his mother, for she is 
 gentle even to him ; worshipping Giles, for he is 
 handsomest of the handsome, the cleverest of the 
 clever ; and reverencing his father with an awful 
 eye, for is he not the far-famed " Devil," rough 
 with his tongue and ready with his hand ? 
 
 The tender bud, however, will not remain 
 nuked. A husk grows— of self-will, surly, gruff, 
 stiff-walling himself in to himself, with his 
 beloved images of field and flower and tree. A 
 s>-nse of wrong, too, rises — fuel for the flame of 
 indignation that will hereafter blaze. 
 
 So sensitive, true-hearted, warm-hearted, he
 
 228 EBENEZER ELLIOTT, 
 
 has been called " dunce" till he never doubts but 
 he is one. In his soul of souls, he believes him- 
 self impervious to learning ; and, in that belief, 
 actually is impervious. Hardened by incessant 
 reprehension, cowed by the brilliant Giles, awed 
 by his terrible father — them and their whole 
 world he abandons for the refuge of his own. He 
 plays on the bosom of the earth by day ; he 
 skulks home at night, and creeps to bed, with 
 images of terror shaking and unhinging his fine 
 young nerves. 
 
 His brother and his schoolmates, however, must 
 needs confess his stronger something; on all 
 emergencies, they flock behind his pluck. From 
 his mother comes the sensitiveness, from his father 
 the pluck. But he owes the latter not a little 
 also to the recalcitration and resistance natural to 
 his erroneous position. 
 
 Such is the boy ; but now the father, learning 
 of his inattention to school, takes him thence, and 
 puts him to work. 
 
 II. — THE YOUTH. 
 
 The change is emancipation. He has now 
 work that he can do, and he docs it. He is 
 surrounded now by associates who have no idea
 
 THE CORN-LAW RHYMER. 229 
 
 that he is dull, but acknowledge his worth rather. 
 Nay, he is their master's sou, and they look up to 
 him. Even in book-learning, he is their superior. 
 Most blessed is the change ! At last he has found 
 something he can do ; at last he is respected. 
 
 The abasement he has been subjected to, how- 
 ever, has driven everything like pride of position 
 out of him, and he cannot consider his fellow- 
 workmen as inferiors. Nay, at first he regards 
 them as superiors, and looks on them apprehen- 
 sively. Every little sign of attention and respect 
 that comes from them, he is peculiarly soft and 
 open to. The most trifling mark of their very 
 notice pleases and delights him. In such circum- 
 stances he becomes yielding ; he cannot say them 
 nay. Even when they are wrong, he has not the 
 heart to say so. He cannot resist their invita- 
 tions to the York Kcelman. He is frank, warm- 
 hearted, social ; and the change of position, the 
 new consideration that has fallen on him, renders 
 him peculiarly susceptible of consent to the ways 
 of those around him. He enjoys the new joy, 
 not moderately, but immoderately ; he gets drunk 
 at times. 
 
 Still, in all this are the elements of much good. 
 : elf respect is given to him, and, from resistance
 
 230 EBENEZEK ELLIOTT, 
 
 to his own errors, come gradually depth, strength, 
 and self-control. He is, after all, no drunkard, 
 but a hard and steady workman. From his 
 sixteenth to his twenty -third year he works for 
 his father, as laboriously as any servant he has — 
 and without wages, except a shilling or two of 
 pocket-money. In the midst of the workshop, 
 too, he has not forgotten " nature." 
 
 He sees a botanical book one day with plates of 
 flowers so well executed, that he tries to touch 
 " the mealiness." He learns to copy these plates ; 
 and, in his delight, is lifted " a foot above the 
 inmates of the alehouse." In this way he gets 
 attached to botany ; roams far and wide for 
 plants ; and rapidly accumulates a large collec- 
 tion. The attention of every one is attracted with 
 admiration to these labours ; and at length — " an 
 era" to poor Ebenezer — even the brilliant brother 
 Giles applauds. 
 
 From loving flowers themselves, he gets to love 
 descriptions of them ; and thus is attracted to 
 " The Seasons." Admiring descriptions, he too 
 must try his hand ; he perpetrates verse. More 
 and more his own deficiencies open on him. He 
 seeks to amend them ; he resorts to books. He 
 cannot penetrate and assimilate them by the
 
 THE CORN-LAW RHYMES. 231 
 
 methods of others, but he can by his own ; and 
 at length, without knowing a single rule of gram- 
 mar, " he can write English." 
 
 Great, then, have been the gains of the youth : 
 strength, self-respect, learning, and articulation, 
 together with much practical experience of the 
 minds and manners of the working classes. 
 
 III. — THE YOUNG MAN. 
 
 As is frequently the lot of genius, this period 
 seems to have been the most painful of all — the 
 period of struggle, uncertainty, and unsuccess, of 
 drudgery and despair. 
 
 He is now married, and happily ; in business 
 also, but unhappily. He is in company with 
 " many partners ;" and the concern is " bankrupt 
 beyond redemption from the first." This he had 
 either been too inexperienced to see, or too blate 
 — too shy — to withdraw in time from. His 
 partners seem to have been relations; and pro- 
 bably his sensitive and but recently uplifted 
 nature was not so confirmed in manhood as to be 
 capable of a " no." He was flattered by getting 
 into business at all perhaps; and thought why 
 should he, by any petty misgivings of his, hurt 
 the feelings of such men as these ?
 
 232 EBENEZER ELLIOTT, 
 
 Be that as it may, he passes several years here 
 "in hopeless efforts and hopeless hopes," till, 
 "losing every penny, he finds an asylum under 
 the roof of his sisters-in-law." A cruel situation 
 this of crushed pride and down-necked shame for 
 such a man ! 
 
 He flees, however, to " nature" again ; he paints 
 from her, writes from her ; and has ample leisure 
 to ruminate and digest the experience he has 
 received. 
 
 IV. — THE MAN. 
 
 At the age of forty, he starts with a borrowed 
 £150 in business again. He is active, he is pro- 
 vident, he succeeds — " turns £20 a day often," and 
 accumulates a fortune. 
 
 He is a man now. He has turned all the past 
 into food ; it is incorporated with his person ; he 
 is taller, stronger, every way abler. He stands on 
 his own legs ; he sees with his own eyes. He can 
 say Ay or No as it suits him. He is a man at last 
 on his own account. In all the relations of life 
 he is without a flaw. As a tradesman he is dili- 
 gent, straightforward, and sagacious ; as a citizen, 
 full of public spirit, vigour, and sympathy ; as a 
 husband, spotless ; as a father, everything that is 
 tolerant, kind, and considerate.
 
 THE CORN-LAW RHYMER. 233 
 
 He loves — and aims to be — the bold, the 
 strong, the free, the independent. In his own 
 short, abrupt fashion, he is rougldy generous ; and 
 for all his grnffness, hnskiness, and occasional 
 fierceness, he is the most warm-hearted and 
 benevolent of men. "Withal, he is spontaneous and 
 impetuous, no respecter of persons, irascible, rash, 
 and hasty-handed, as well as hasty-worded. 
 
 His love of nature still abides with him, side 
 by side with his indignation of wrong ; and these 
 are the key-notes — the warp and woof of him, 
 both as a man and a writer. He speaks of the 
 primrose and the bread-tax ; of nature's bounty 
 and man's injustice. ( "With one hand he points 
 to the abased forms of the poor ; with the other 
 to the wide domain of beauty which is their 
 birthright. He has love and he has hate ; and 
 both he expresses vigorously. 
 
 He has a firm, decided attitude, and is not to 
 be carried off his feet by the breath of any one. 
 In every way, in fact, he has realized the posses- 
 sion of an effective practical manhood. 
 
 V. THE TOP OF THE HILL. 
 
 From his fortieth to his fifty-sixth year, such is 
 the aspect of the self and circumstances of Elliott
 
 234 EBENEZER ELLIOTT, 
 
 The panic of 1837 breaks in on him, however, 
 and robs him of " fully one-third of his savings." 
 So, prudently collecting what is left, he retires 
 from business, and in spite of his losses, and in 
 spite of having, with the most thoughtful affec- 
 tion, " enabled his six boys to quit the nest," he 
 finds that he carries with him no less a sum than 
 £6000. These sixteen years, then, no one will 
 call unfortunate. 
 
 With his usual sagacity, and notwithstanding 
 the vaticinating croaks of his whole circle, he 
 advantageously purchases a small property. He 
 converts a wild fox-cover into a cultivated gar- 
 den, and builds for himself, his wife, and his 
 daughters, a house of simplicity and comfort. 
 
 No modern finery is admitted there : all is of 
 the true household fabric — substantial, touch- 
 able, usable. He has a maid-servant and occa- 
 sionally a man. He owns a St. Bernard dog. He 
 possesses a Welsh pony, to which belong a small 
 gig and harness — all three costing him £8, 1 0s. 
 He has a piano : that, however, he holds to be no 
 luxury, but the essential of the poorest. An un- 
 caged canary wings and sings in his parlour, and 
 settles often on his venerable head. No ennui 
 seizes him ; he is practical to the last : he reads,
 
 THE CORN-LAW RHYMER. 235 
 
 lie writes, he works in Lis garden ; lie is seldom 
 idle, and always happy. With the frankest 
 courtesy and the freest hospitality, he receives 
 as guests, from time to time, some of the best of 
 his contemporaries. And thus, walking, driving, 
 reading, writing, planting, gardening, happy in his 
 friends, happy in his family, he enjoys, for thir- 
 teen years yet, the peace of a most golden setting. 
 
 But let us look now a little closer at the figure 
 of this brave old warrior, reposing under the 
 crimson west on the trophies of his triumphant 
 manhood. 
 
 Reader ! be not displeased to find that he was 
 " not a man of large proportions, a true son of the 
 forge, broad-set, strong, and muscular ;" that he 
 was " not more than five feet seven inches ; of a 
 slender make, and a bilious-nervous tempera- 
 ment ;" his mouth " pugnacious" and his features 
 "harsh." Spirit laughs at matter; soul looks 
 forth ever pityingly and mockingly from its wrap- 
 page of clay. Be not displeased with this ; but 
 idealize it. Call him up, the slender man with 
 tli" susceptible temperament. He is courteous 
 and urbane. His grey eyes gleam with love, or 
 lighten with indignation. There is resolution on 
 his lip, and " scorn in his nostrils." He walks
 
 236 EBENEZER ELLIOTT, 
 
 with pride, and his feet would trample tyranny. 
 Listen to him ! No weak vanity, no spoiled 
 egotism, no blown conceit ! With a broad and 
 blunt liberality, he sets himself at his price, or 
 modestly below it. " Time," he says, " has devel- 
 oped in me not genius, but powers which exist in 
 all men, and lie dormant in most." How plain 
 he is ! A blue waistcoat to his hips, blue trousers, 
 blue coat, blue cap ! A man for actual work is 
 this, and no high-flyer ; practical, matter-of-fact, 
 and resolutely down on the ground. 
 
 No mysticism, no over-refinement, no super- 
 subtlety are tolerated here. Nevertheless, love of 
 nature and indignation of wrong have worked to 
 some purpose in him ; and the wings grown from 
 these have borne him well. Like a true poet, he 
 has seen " dim morning shake the rainbow from 
 his plumage," and found — 
 
 " The stars that give no accent to the wind 
 Are golden odes and music to the mind." 
 
 Nor has he hesitated to chant, as if his armed 
 foot beat the ground, " The song of battle" to the 
 oppressor : — 
 
 " Day, like our souls, is fiercely dark ; 
 What then ? 'Tis day ! 
 We sleep no more. The cock crows — hark ! 
 To arms ! Away ! "
 
 THE CORN-LAW RHYMER. 237 
 
 And oh, iii the agonies of his grief for the suffer- 
 ings of the world, how he calls and cries and 
 shrieks to the All-father — 
 
 " When wilt thou save the people ? 
 O God of mercy ! when ? 
 The people, Lord, the people ? 
 Not thrones and crowns, hut men ! 
 Flowers of thy heart, God ! are they ! 
 Let them not pass like weeds away, 
 Their heritage a sunless day ! 
 God save the people ! " 
 
 Such is the nature of his inspiration ; no chiar- 
 oscur of a curiously-intervolved and equivocal sub- 
 limity ; but, fervour, fire, directness, pith. The 
 man has energy ; the writing, energy. There 
 are truth, honesty, and a purpose in him. He is 
 content to speak out warmly, strongly, clearly, 
 the feelings that nature and her tribes — that man 
 and his injustice — cause in him. He has taste, 
 terseness, point ; but he has not the sacred and 
 peculiar tone — he has not the aroma — of the 
 divine and separated bard, " whose soul is as a star, 
 and dwells apart." He has not even the pomp, 
 the long-drawn swell, the mighty period of our 
 grander and greater prose-masters. Whether in 
 verse or prose, he is simply a hard, firm, vigorous, 
 and thoroughly earnest writer ; nor is he eligible,
 
 23S EBENEZER ELLIOTT, 
 
 on the whole, whatever be his prominence, for any 
 unusual eminence of place. 
 
 There is so much essential manhood in him, 
 however, so much of the stuff of genius— that we 
 do not abate him thus without a qualm. A little 
 more excavation and scooping out of the natural 
 imperviousness and opacity, of the natural saw- 
 dust and timber, of the brain, — a little more 
 initiation and instruction — might so easily have 
 conferred on him not only Wordsworth's mystic 
 intellection and occult utterance, but even the 
 prophetic mantle of an Emerson or a Carlyle, that 
 we grudge to place him lower than even the very 
 highest of these. 
 
 However this be, not so much for his writing 
 as for his manhood, it is that Ebenezer Elliott shall 
 be memorable for ever. His worth lies in the 
 life that he can fearlessly throw open to his 
 fellows, rather than in the words that he has 
 either rhymed or written. We cannot regret that 
 he did rhyme. Many of his rhymes shall abide 
 with us as amulets; nor shall our children's 
 children willingly let them die. But after all 
 we love better to hear him talk. 
 
 Grey-haired, with the dress, manners, and ap- 
 pearance we have described, we like to wander
 
 THE COEX-LAW RHYMER 239 
 
 with him over field and meadow, delighted to the 
 core with the raciness of his fresh and character- 
 istic speech ; for, full of originality, piquancy, and 
 point, we feel that it is the language of a genuine 
 experience, thoroughly ruminated, digested, and 
 assimilated. AVe like his prejudices even, for 
 the crust without is generally indicative of the 
 tenderness within. 
 
 How it contracts our lip to hear him exhort a 
 friend, "Alter or omit the lines in your poem 
 which refer to your detractors ; why stand on 
 your defence without occasion ? Live them down 
 or die them down !" Such swift, trenchant-like 
 strokes but seldom fail him. 
 
 With what a large tolerance, but manly affec- 
 tion, he speaks of his sons ! His eldest : " Per- 
 haps a more simple-mannered unassuming man 
 never lived. He is no poet, and yet there is a 
 touch of the poetic in all he does or suffers. If 
 he opens his snuff-box to a stranger, he spills the 
 snuff, of course ; and he gets on best when he 
 stumbles." " Henry and Francis (as I wish them 
 to do) are living on the interest of money earned 
 by themselves, and increased by gifts from me." 
 And so on with all the rest. On Edwin, the 
 gentleman of the family, " a Tory of course," and
 
 240 EBENEZER ELLIOTT, 
 
 buying an ass, because it was gentlemanly to 
 ride, he is particularly amusing, liberal, and 
 large. The sunny geniality, the kind, open, frank, 
 tolerant heart, denoted by all this, must be ap- 
 parent to every one. There is no narrow sourness 
 here, no sulkiness — all is provident, considerate, 
 and affectionate. 
 
 Towards the close, he talks of his own health 
 thus : " I shall recover, I am told. The truth is, 
 I improve desperately. I suffer great pain, and 
 after losing more than twenty-eight pounds in 
 weight, I continue to lose weight at the rate of about 
 one pound weekly. You cannot fatten calves in 
 that way. If I am not removed suddenly, I shall 
 last to April next." It is no weakling, no winner, 
 no whimperer, that can afford to jest thus ; but a 
 wise, chastened, and humble heart, — a manly and 
 a gallant soul. In all his letters and recorded 
 conversations, there is a rich and quaint and 
 racy-tongued sagacity, an open tolerance of nature, 
 a large and manly common sense. 
 
 excellent old man ! bravely didst thou 
 struggle ; and thy reward was victory. Long and 
 pleasant was the red evening of thy days. Chil- 
 dren numerous, virtuous, prosperous, received thy 
 latest sighs ; and thy grey hairs were laid with
 
 THE CORN- LAW RHYMER. 241 
 
 honour in the dust. A picture, in fact, of such 
 consummate success is rarely to be met with 
 whether in the life of the man of letters or in that 
 of the man of the world. Which of his contem- 
 poraries has realized the like ? Behold him " tired, 
 but self- sustained, like one who after hard labour 
 reaches his home and rests on his own hill-top, 
 envying no man, feeling that he is no longer 
 wanted, that he has done his work ; that he can 
 die when God calls him, thankful that the battle 
 is over, and the good time coming !" 
 
 May such lot be ours ! May we, too, die as he, 
 with the notes of the robin in our ears ! May 
 we, too, swan-like, sing as he — 
 
 " Brothers, I have done my best ; 
 I am weary, let me rest. 
 Let me rest, but lay me low, 
 Where the hedge -side roses blow ; 
 Where the winds a-Maying go ; 
 Where the little daisies grow ! " 
 
 We must not close this paper without alluding 
 1m the little volume which has suggested our re- 
 marks. 1 The quarry from which we cut our statue 
 cannot be concealed, and if justice induced no 
 acknowledgment, policy would compel it. 
 
 1 77 /./■•■. Character, and Genius of I BUiott, the Corn 
 
 Law Rhymer. By January Seuile. London, Whittaker and Co. 
 
 Q
 
 242 EBENEZER ELLIOTT, 
 
 The life of Elliott, by January Searle, is a most 
 eloquent, kindly, and affectionate performance ; 
 where the sympathy of at least an equal, if not 
 exactly a kindred spirit, warm but discriminating, 
 sufficient to inspire but inefficient to mislead, 
 kindles the subject with the true fire, and invests 
 it with the most delightful interest. Peer greets 
 peer with the most noble fervour, and the com- 
 monest reader is exalted and enlarged. The 
 conduct of the work is exceedingly judicious : 
 admitting not the firm drawn inferences of the 
 biographer only, but the grounds of them also, it 
 is rendered as valuable as interesting. In this, 
 as in former writings of January Searle, there 
 are sound criticism and keen analysis. And still 
 do images, the freshest and the fairest, live to his 
 presence ; nor has he laid aside the knightly 
 pen that touches all into the chastened gold and 
 simple sunniness of the old romance. 
 
 Such passages as the following will show our 
 meaning : — 
 
 " There is no mistaking the man : like the 
 warriors of the old chivalry, wherever he ap- 
 peared, he left the mark of his battle-axe behind 
 him." 
 
 " His wild spirit never was entirely tamed ;
 
 THE CORN-LAW RHYMER. 243 
 
 and the spots and claws of the leopard are every- 
 where visible." 
 
 " No sooner do the dark aspects of humanity 
 pass over his mind, than he bursts forth with 
 passionate and vehement exclamation ; and the 
 calm heavens and the meek and beautiful earth 
 are suddenly darkened and distorted with the 
 fiery ashes of his wrath." 
 
 " He gathers fresh strength at every step ; and 
 beats up the thunder from the hard highway." 
 
 " Every painful throb and every agony of the 
 heart were familiar to his ear; and he reproduced 
 them in melodies which drop down into the sold 
 like the tears of music." 
 
 " He would utter the finest things, one after 
 another, with the throat of iEtna ; scattering 
 them about in blasts of fire and thunder. He 
 was a sort of walking earthquake, clad in flowers 
 and rainbows ; one of the most beautiful and 
 terrible of men." 
 
 We had marked other passages ; but to prove 
 the mineral fewer would suffice ; and he who 
 requires more has small skill in such geology. 
 
 FINIS.
 
 EDINBURGH : T. CONSTABLE, 
 PRINTER TO THE QUEEN, AND TO THE UNIVERSITY.
 
 HANDBOOK 
 
 OF THE 
 
 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 By DR. ALBERT SCHWEGLER, 
 
 TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED BY 
 
 JAMES H. STIRLING, LL.D. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 From the Freeman's Journal, October 21, 1867. 
 
 " The treatment of the first epoch is singularly interesting . . . 
 the metaphysical student who likes a short course of philosophy 
 will find much useful information in the Handbook." 
 
 From tlie London Review, November 2, 1867. 
 
 " Those who are acquainted with the other works of Dr. Stirling 
 will be disposed to congratulate Schweglcr on falling into such 
 good hands. It will be difficult to mention any one in England 
 well versed in the philosophy of Germany, from Leibnitz to 
 Hegel, as the translator of this Handbook. Dr. Stirling is also a 
 man of independent thought, fearless judgment, and a meta- 
 physical appetite, that enjoys with the keenest relish the heavy 
 and somewhat unpalatable systems of German speculation. The 
 subtleties of thought and expression in which Berlin professors 
 .lit are quite to our translator's taste. ... It would be hard 
 to praise the Handbook too highly, and we hope to hear that within 
 a short period it has taken the place of Lewes and Renouvier in 
 the hand- of our yonn ophical student." 
 
 From the chixgow Daily Herald, November 16, 1867. 
 " We should hardly call a book of this character here by Buch
 
 a modest name as a ' Handbook,' because handbooks, especially 
 handbooks of philosophy, are generally of the most meagre and 
 trashy description. The student, however, will find this little 
 history of three hundred and forty pages crammed full of informa- 
 tion, systematized and clearly expounded by a mind that took in the 
 whole range of philosophy at a glance. . . . Dr. Stirling, whom we 
 do not now hesitate to call the ablest metaphysical writer we have 
 in Scotland, says that to the student of philosophy Dr. Schwegler's 
 History is indispensable ; and we believe he is correct. We do not 
 know any other work where such a comprehensive view of the long 
 life of philosophy from Thales to Hegel is to be found." 
 
 From the (Jourant, November 18, 1867. 
 
 " Mr. Stirling has done good service to the student of Philo- 
 sophy by translating Dr. Schwegler's admirable and excellent little 
 Handbook. . . . We cannot help saying that we trust he will soon 
 enable us to form an opinion on his ' Annotations ' by giving them 
 complete. There is very much suggestive metaphysical thinking 
 in even the small instalment we have received. That Mr. Stirling 
 was a thoroughly qualified and competent thinker, we knew before ; 
 but he has now shown that he is not less accomplished as a critic 
 of the history of philosophy than he is acute and profound as a 
 metaphysician." 
 
 From the North British Daily Mail, November 25, 1867. 
 
 " The annotations appended to the body of the book are valu- 
 able." 
 
 From the Chronicle, November 30, 1867. 
 
 " It is a history of philosophy in the ordinary sense, written 
 with extreme accuracy and clearness, and with wonderful power 
 of condensation. Zeller's ' History of Greek Philosophy ' is too 
 masterly a book to contain much that is superfluous : still the 
 earlier part of Schwegler's volume contains in substance nearly all 
 that is important in Zeller, except the references and illustrations. 
 
 . . His translation abounds in vigour and liveliness which is 
 quite wanting in the very imperfect version of Mr. Seelye. Schweg- 
 ler's text does not stand in much need of annotation. Still the 
 remarks which Dr. Stirling has appended are useful in bringing
 
 Schwegler's results side by side with the conclusions of writers 
 popular in England ; and they may certainly claim the merit 
 of thorough insight into the points at issue." 
 
 From the Oxford University Herald. 
 
 "The circumstances narrated, the facts reproduced, the inci- 
 dents compiled, and the conclusions deduced, are suggestive of 
 historical research and descriptive powers on the part of the writer 
 of a high order. Dr. Stirling's translation and annotations are a 
 valuable addition to the standard works of the classical library, 
 and our only desire in speaking cautiously of the work is that 
 the talented translator may be induced to reproduce the rendering 
 of • The History of Philosophy ' in a more elaborate form." 
 
 From the Aberdeen Free Press and Buchan News, Nov. 29, 1867. 
 
 " This is a good translation of an admirable book. . . . Avoiding 
 the lengthened criticisms in which Lewes frequently indulges, 
 Schwegler is able to devote more space to the historical and ex- 
 pository part of the subject, and consequently, except in the case 
 of the English schools, his delineation of the system of any philo- 
 sopher is generally fuller and more minute, and his exposition 
 more detailed than the corresponding one in Lewes. We might 
 point to the account of the philosophy of Spinoza as a good ex- 
 ample of the author's singularly lucid manner in portraying an 
 important system. . . . Though containing a great deal of matter, 
 economy of space has kept the size of the volume conveniently 
 small and pocketable, and, on the whole, while we can recommend 
 the book as one admirably serving its professed purpose— a hand- 
 book, — it may safely be said that it possesses merits of a much 
 higher and more original character than are usually found in that, 
 often the most unsatisfactory kind of manufactured commodities." 
 
 From the Morning Journal, December 14, 1867. 
 
 " Its careful and intelligent perusal must prove of very great 
 service to any one just entering upon the noblest of all studies. 
 . . . This German handbook deserves all the merit assumed for it 
 by the translator, in respect of its clearness, fulness, and connected- 
 ness. . . . The annotations at the close of the volume by the 
 translator are both elucidatory and controversial, and throw con- 
 siderable light on the early schools of philosophy."
 
 From the Saturday Review, January 11, 1868. 
 
 Dr. Hutchison Stirling himself is neither a confused thinker nor 
 an obscure writer. An essay which he has lately published on De 
 Quincey and Coleridge shows an intelligence clear of all fog, and a 
 power of direct and forcible exposition. Its exposure of Cole- 
 ridge's plagiarism from Schelling, though it would have been more 
 graceful had it been less tinged with self-satisfaction, is final on 
 the question. His account of the mode, half-conscious, half-un- 
 conscious, in which Coleridge lapsed into his appropriation of 
 another's thoughts and words, is a really fine piece of psychological 
 tracery. So in the little volume which is now before us, Dr. 
 Stirling has appended some fifty or sixty pages of annotations, 
 which, taken by themselves, will be found very interesting and 
 original reading." 
 
 From the Popular Science Review, January 1868. 
 
 " Dr. Stirling gives us a very satisfactory translation of Schweg- 
 ler's condensed and useful ' History of Philosophy.' " 
 
 From the British Quarterly Revietv, January 1868. 
 
 " The manner and matter of the book are facile and intelligible. 
 . . . Enough is done to enable us to endorse Dr. Stirling's verdict 
 ' that Schwegler's is at once the fullest and the shortest, the 
 deepest and the easiest, the most trustworthy and the most 
 elegant compendium that exists in either German or English." 
 
 From the Westminster Review, January 1868. 
 
 " Schwegler's is the best possible ' Handbook of the History of 
 Philosophy,' and there could not possibly be a better translator 
 of it than Mr. Stirling : it is rarely, indeed, that a person of such 
 qualifications will be good enough to translate." 
 
 From the British Controversialist, November 1867. 
 
 " This translation is fluent, readable, and thoroughly English, 
 although it retains the clasp and grasp of the original German. 
 
 The annotations as a whole form a body of powerful 
 
 controversial adversaria to the positive school of speculative 
 writers." 
 
 Edinburgh : EDMONSTON & DOUGLAS.
 
 By the same Author. 
 Recently published, in 2 Vols. 8vo,]^p. 1164, price 28s., 
 
 THE SECRET OF HEGEL; 
 
 BEING THE HEGELIAN SYSTEM IN ORIGIN, PRINCIPLE, 
 FORM, AND MATTER. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 From BelVs Messenger. 
 
 " There can be no question whatever respecting the weight and 
 solidity of Mr. Stirling's exposition. . . . It will mark a period in 
 philosophical transactions, and tend more thoroughly to reveal the 
 tendencies of modern thought in that direction than any other 
 work yet published in this country has done." 
 
 From tlie Edinburgh Courant. 
 
 " Mr. Stirling's learned and laborious endeavours to unveil the 
 mystery of Hegel are entitled to attentive and thoughtful con- 
 sideration. . . . Mr. Stirling has applied himself to his subject 
 ically and thoroughly. . . . There can no such complete 
 guide be found in the English language." 
 
 From the Glasgoio Herald. 
 
 " This is a most remarkable book in several respects. The 
 authoi ; -. ] ■• rhaps, the very first in this country who has laboriously 
 and patiently Bounded Hegel. . . . Unlike any of the commen. 
 tatoi - 01 Begel that we have yet seen, Mr. Stirling can always be 
 understood by an intelligent and attentive reader. He writes as 
 if he wished to make himself plain to the meanest capacity, and 
 he ha> a facility of language and illustration which lights up the 
 driest and most abstract reasonings of his master."
 
 From the Temperance Spectator. 
 " A great book has just been published entitled, 'The Secret of 
 Hegel/ which, sooner or later, must attract the attention, and 
 influence the conclusions, of true thinkers." 
 
 From the Weekly Despatch. 
 "Avery elaborate, conscientious, and earnest work. . . . We 
 express our high estimation of the ability and research displayed 
 in it." 
 
 ' From John Bull. 
 
 " If anything can make Hegel's ' complete Logic' acceptable to 
 the English mind, such faith and industry as Mr. Stirling's must 
 succeed. . . . Those who wish to form a complete survey of the 
 great field of German philosophy will do well to study these 
 volumes." 
 
 From the London Review. 
 
 " We welcome most cordially these volumes. ... A work 
 which is the monument of so much labour, erudition, perseverance, 
 and thought." 
 
 From the A thenceum, 
 
 " To say that this is by far the most important work written in 
 the English language on any phase of the post-Kantian philosophy 
 of Germany would be saying very little. . . . One of the most re- 
 markable works on philosophy that has been seen for years." 
 
 From the Churchman. 
 "The book itself is of much value, especially at the present 
 time. ... It will repay those well who will give the necessary 
 attention to its reading. We have to thank Mr. Stirling for setting 
 these obscure dicta in as clear a light as they can be set in, and 
 making them as intelligible as they can be made." 
 
 From the Eclectic Review. 
 " All readers who have the taste and patience necessary for the 
 encountering such tasks will be glad to receive Mr. Stirling's 
 exposition. We have read it with deep interest. It was a very 
 tough task, and he has wrought it in a determined and intelligent 
 manner." 
 
 From the Westminster Revieiu. 
 " — Has approached nearer to an intelligible exposition of the 
 Hegelian philosophy than has yet been accomplished in England.
 
 . . . The Preface a remarkably vigorous and masterful piece of 
 writing — the book able in the highest degree." 
 
 From the Globe. 
 '• Mr. Stirling has certainly dune much to help the English 
 student. . . . He is a writer of power and fire — original, bold, 
 self-reliant, and with a wealth of knowledge and thought that 
 must soon make him distinguished among the teachers of the 
 teachers of this country." 
 
 From Professor M assort. 
 " The book deserves a cordial welcome." 
 
 From Mr. Cupples. 
 "The whole work is in my view a masterpiece— a great book. 
 The style, manner, method, and art of it enchant me— to use a 
 loose expression among general terms. I consider it to be com- 
 pletely successful in what it proposes to do. Its appearance 
 should constitute an era at once in the literary and the philoso- 
 phical aspect. The ease and fulness of philosophical expression in 
 it— the power and wealth of illustration, comparison, assimilation, 
 analogy, metaphor, literary filling out and accommodation, and 
 finish — are to my mind unique. The labour, the patience — the 
 instinct for truth and for metaphysical tracks and trails— the con- 
 stant connexion with life— the explanatory method of resuming 
 ami taking up, so that the reader is taught without almost any 
 stress on his own thought — these things continually rouse my 
 admiration and delight. The whole book is colossal — a wonder of 
 work. The style of it is unique in raciness, original force, and 
 utterly unaffected prodigality of wealth— expository, ratiocinative, 
 illustrative, literary, familiar, discursive. The characterizations 
 of the man Hegel are dclicue of literary touch." 
 
 From the Caledonian Mercury. 
 " Whatever may be said of the speculative German himself, the 
 ability of his expositor is superior to question. Mr. Stirling has 
 brought to his work an able and instructed mind, and an unwaver- 
 ing confidence in the power and majesty of his master. He is in 
 himself a host of critics and disciple.-." 
 
 From the Scotsman. 
 "The Author is a man not merely of large and thorough philo- 
 sophicsl culture, but of strong, rugged, original powers of mind ;
 
 8 
 
 a crushing if not subtle reasoning faculty ; humour, genuine 
 though elephantine, and apt to put its foot upon various philo- 
 sophers' toes and reputations ; a sterling, fearless love of truth ; 
 and the faith of a religious devotee in the possibilities of the 
 Hegelian philosophy. . . . The critic, the historian, the sociolo- 
 gist, the physiologist, the student of natural science, will find ideas 
 in exploring after the secret of Hegel that will be useful in arrest- 
 ing other secrets." 
 
 From the North American Review. 
 " The Author is a man of classical accomplishments, of the 
 sturdiest and, at the same time, keenest intellectual faculty, of 
 imagination enough to stock an aviary of popular poets." 
 
 From the British Controversialist. 
 " It is granted to few in any age — and especially in this age of 
 critical rather than of effective thought— to gain by a single effort 
 the highest place in any department of literature. This rare feat 
 has been accomplished by James Hutchison Stirling. To him 
 ' familiarity has been converted into insight ; the toils of specula- 
 tion have made him strong ; and the results of speculation have 
 made him wise.' At a time when philosophic thinking seemed 
 exhausted, and panting souls toiled after truth apparently in vain ; 
 when realism and psychology appeared to be triumphant over 
 idealism and metaphysic ; when the diviner element in man was 
 losing the consciousness of itself, aud had begun to be ignored in 
 speculations upon human nature ; and when the outward forms of 
 Being looked as if they were certain not only to win, but to mono- 
 polize the entire attention of mankind — one arose, suddenly as an 
 apparition, capable of changing all that. A philosopher in good 
 truth — one who, stirred by the love of wisdom, had toiled long and 
 longingly to acquire a knowledge of the hidden roots of thoughtful 
 life, and who, unrestingly though unhastingly, devoted the vigour 
 of manhood's prime to that researchful study which alone repays 
 the thinker with revelations— came forth from the seclusion of a 
 self-imposed discipleship to lay upon the library table of reflective 
 men the results of a 'ten years' conflict' with the mighty mysteries 
 of human thought and feeling. Solid, judicious, and capable men 
 saw in the book matter for profound consideration, and determined 
 to bestow on it a loving perusal and a careful judgment." 
 
 London : LONGMANS k CO., Paternoster Row.
 
 By the same Author. 
 In Svo, price 5s., 
 
 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON; 
 
 BEING THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERCEPTION 
 AN ANALYSIS. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 From tlie Scotsman. 
 
 " Mr. Stirling has published a separate thin volume, justifying 
 his hostile criticisms by details, and dealing altogether a blow to 
 the reputation of Sir W. Hamilton's doctrine of perception more 
 ponderous 'than that dealt by Mr. Mill ; for it is a blow struck 
 from a higher altitude, and directed by an eye that commands a 
 wider range than Mr. Mill's, though its power of near vision be 
 not so keenly critical and microscopic." 
 
 From the Aberdeen Journal. 
 
 " Mr. Stirling's works in exposition of the Hegelian philosophy 
 stamped him as a writer of the first rank on philosophical subjects. 
 . . . We unreservedly give Mr. Stirling high praise as a contro- 
 versialist ; he had already earned his laurels as an expositor in the 
 field of philosophy. His vision is large, clear, and minute ; and 
 as a mental anatomist, he cuts neatly, cleanly, and to the core." 
 
 From the Glasgow Herald. 
 
 " Mr. Stirling, by hia large work on Hegel, has already proved 
 himself a most accomplished thinker, and his present analysis 
 certainly shows him to be a severe (perhaps too severe) and subtile 
 critic. . . . We place a very high value upon this analysis. It 
 shows that the author writes from fulness of knowledge, and after 
 a careful thought ; and it also exhibits ingenuity, dexterity, clear 
 decided convictions, and vigorous expression."
 
 10 
 
 From Bell's Messenger. 
 
 " Mr. Stirling, in preparing this treatise, shows the same amount 
 of metaphysical acuteness and intelligence which were so mani- 
 festly apparent in ' The Secret of Hegel.'" 
 
 From the Guardian. 
 
 " It is the genuine product of a peculiar mind which is really 
 original and thoughtful." 
 
 From the Fortnightly Review. 
 
 "From onslaughts such as those of Mr. John Mill and Mr. 
 Stirling, the philosophy of Hamilton will either perish altogether, 
 or will arouse such an earnest activity on the part of its disciples, 
 as to make metaphysical speculation once more a great arena for 
 intellectual athletes, as of old it was." 
 
 From the Weekly Despatch. 
 
 " The volume is characterized by the same high qualities shown 
 in 'The Secret of Hegel.'" 
 
 From the Edinburgh Courant. 
 
 " His knowledge of metaphysical subjects is plainly thorough 
 and extensive ; and his book, as it stands, will very well reward 
 the attention of the student." 
 
 From the Westminster Review. 
 
 " There could not be a more vigorous and damaging onslaught 
 on Hamiltonianism than that of Mr. Stirling — the more damaging, 
 because we have here the result of an unprejudiced examination 
 of the writings of that celebrated logician." 
 
 From the London Review. 
 
 " The author of this second volume under notice, bears a name 
 that stands high in the list of modern philosophical writers. Mr. 
 Stirling's ' Secret of Hegel,' which was noticed in our columns some 
 time back, stamped the writer at once as a man of profound 
 thought, wide erudition, and great independence of view. ... As 
 we might expect from a critic of Mr. Stirling's subtlety, earnest- 
 ness, and self-reliance, the scrutiny is very close and unsparing, 
 and we must say that Hamilton's reputation comes out of the 
 trial considerably damaged."
 
 11 
 
 From the Sjxctator. 
 
 " The work of a writer well acquainted with his subject, and who 
 deals with his subject in a lucid manner, and with a disposition to 
 do justice to the opinions he combats. . . . The difference of posi- 
 tion taken in these attacks gives to Mr. Stirling's criticisms an 
 interest not destroyed by an acquaintance with that of Mr. Mill, 
 while we may learn from it much more clearly the relation of Sir 
 William's philosophy to that of Kant, and what advance Sir 
 William supposed himself to have made on the great German 
 thinker." 
 
 From the British Controversialist. 
 
 " This is the work of a man who is emphatically a thinker. 
 James Hutchison Stirling has written a treatise on 'The Secret of 
 Hegel' — which, we regret to say, we have not read. There is, 
 however, in this harsh-spoken, trenchant, and incisive critique, 
 proof enough of ability to give new, fresh, vigorous thought 
 to the problems of philosophy. The vision and the insight 
 the man is acute and accurate. The argument against Sir 
 William Hamilton's tenets is put in a more telling form 
 than it has been presented by its author's 'more distinguished 
 contemporary, Mr. Mill ;' and as it is less discursive it is 
 more cogent. The eye with which Mr. Stirling has perused 
 the scattered writings of Hamilton has been lynx-like in its 
 fault-seeing. The selective faculty which culled the pertinent 
 extracts to which he refers as embodying the distinct utterances 
 of the doctrine of Hamilton, has been choicely gifted with a sleuth- 
 hound's infallibility of pursuit and seizure, despite of all dodges 
 and evasions. The logical power by which comparisons have been 
 made between passage and passage, thought and thought, is 
 cultured and sharpened to the finest ; while the language em- 
 ployed in the discussion is terse, animated, varied, well arranged, 
 and most effectively put together. It would be difficult indeed to 
 mistake the signification of any sentence in the book. Without 
 being so pedantically scholastic, it is as translucent as Hamilton's. 
 The grasp of his mind is tense, the heat of his passion intense, and 
 the language in which he expresses both is sententious, graphic, 
 and precise." 
 
 London: LONGMANS k CO., Paternoster Row.
 
 This book is DUE on the last 
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 JAN 3 1956 
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