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 BIOGRAPHICAL LECTURES.
 
 By the Same Author. 
 
 Crown 8vo, cloth. 
 
 PRAYERS, WITH A DISCOURSE ON PRAYER. First Series. 
 Ninth Edition. 35. 6d. 
 
 PRAYERS, WITH A DISCOURSE ON PRAYER. Edited by 
 GEORGE ST CLAIR, F.G.S. Second Series. 6s. 
 
 SERMONS ON DISPUTED POINTS AND SPECIAL OCCASIONS. 
 
 Edited by his Wife. Fourth Edition. 6s. 
 
 SERMONS ON DAILY LIFE AND DUTY. Edited by his Wife. 
 Fourth Edition. 6s. 
 
 THE AUTHENTIC GOSPEL, and Other Sermons. Edited by 
 GEORGE ST CLAIR, F.G.S. Third Edition. 6s. 
 
 THREE BOOKS OF GOD: NATURE, HISTORY, AND SCRIPTURE. 
 
 Sermons edited by GEORGE ST CLAIR, F.G.S. 6s. 
 
 LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO.
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL LECTURES 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE DAWSON, M.A. 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 GEORGE ST CLAIR, F.G.S. 
 
 "There has perhaps never passed a life of which a judicious and 
 faithful narrative would not be useful." Dr Johnson. 
 
 LONDON: 
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., i PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 
 
 1886.
 
 D 
 
 ' Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. 
 
 " It is natural to believe in great men. 
 
 ' I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men 
 rise with labour and difficulty ; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light, and 
 in large relations ; whilst they must make painful corrections, and keep a vigilant eye on 
 many sources of error." EMERSON.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 GEORGE DAWSON, whose sermons and prayers have already been 
 published, was the best and best-known popular lecturer of our 
 day. The eagerness with which he was sought after in all parts 
 of the United Kingdom, and the large and delighted audiences 
 always attracted and rivetted by his addresses, afforded testimony 
 which was endorsed on all sides by the press. Even those who 
 feared the tendency of his pulpit teaching united in praising him 
 as an earnest and stirring lecturer. 
 
 Biographical literature was what he most loved, and perhaps 
 no other man ever discoursed so sympathetically on so many 
 authors. He delighted to analyze life and study character ; and 
 he said of himself that he would by choice have been a Professor 
 of Human Nature. 
 
 He had a faculty for exposition, and in popularising the great 
 masters of prose and verse he found his mission. At the same 
 time he made his lectures a means of inculcating great principles. 
 It was his object always to teach and elevate his present audience ; 
 and so we find him glancing frequently from the subject in hand 
 to current events or passing follies, and the everlasting weaknesses 
 of human nature. One might say of him what he himself says 
 of Andrew Marvell, " He had a most biting, satirical talent : he 
 used it lawfully, though." But he cherished a charity which over- 
 looked a multitude of faults. 
 
 The impression made by his lectures, forty years ago, may be 
 judged by the following paragraph from the Manchester Guardian 
 of that date :
 
 vi Preface. 
 
 " MR GEORGE DAWSON'S FIRST LECTURE ON THOMAS CARLYLE, 
 Delivered at the Manchester Athenceum. 
 
 " This was altogether one of the most extraordinary and deeply 
 interesting extemporaneous addresses we have ever heard. Not 
 so much for its eloquence, though replete with that quality, of an 
 earnest, real, and glowing character ; nor for its illustrations and 
 imagery, though these were numerous, varied, and striking; 
 but for its deep thought, wide comprehensive views, earnest sin- 
 cerity and truthfulness, its elevated tone, its noble and generous 
 estimate of man's nature and worth, and its manly putting aside 
 of petty conventionalities, and solemn regard for the great verities 
 of life and immortality; we repeat, it was one of the most 
 thought-awakening lectures we ever listened to. It was not a 
 mere lecture on Carlyle, but a comprehensive survey of the spirit 
 of the 1 8th century, and that which is dawning, or dawned, in the 
 i gth; a vigorous examination of the faults and merits of their 
 literature and morality ; an inquiry into the circumstances of the 
 men that have effected a change in that spirit ; a bold sweeping 
 away of much of the nonsense written and spoken of the style of 
 Carlyle ; a glance at what he has done to bring us acquainted 
 with the greatest men of the age, the writers of Germany ; and, 
 with all these, an excursive, yet not discursive, going forth into 
 and laying bare of popular fallacies, prejudices, and weaknesses, 
 and a manly, fearless assertion of the right, the just, and the 
 true, which astonished and delighted his auditors, and won the 
 assent of their conviction, as manifested by their enthusiastic 
 plaudits." 
 
 Mr Alexander Ireland who, as a Director of the Athenaeum, 
 had been the means of introducing Mr Dawson to Manchester 
 was charmed and amazed at his success. In his pamphlet, " Re- 
 collections of George Dawson," he speaks of " an ease and 
 mastery of the resources of our language that surprised his 
 hearers. Sentence followed sentence, faultless in construction and 
 symmetry. A lecture of an hour and a half's duration might have 
 been printed from his ipsissima verba without a single alteration.
 
 Preface. vii 
 
 With such endowments, it was not wonderful that he made the 
 lecture platform an educational agency. To his lectures and ex- 
 positions (for he was a born expositor) numbers have been 
 indebted for their first real knowledge of some of our greatest 
 countrymen, historical as well as literary." 
 
 When the reader has gone through the Carlyle lecture, and 
 those on Wordsworth and Coleridge, he will be able, in some 
 measure, to appreciate the phenomenon of a young man of twenty- 
 seven talking at such an elevation, for hours together, without the 
 help of notes. 
 
 In many of the remaining lectures it will be only too apparent 
 how much is lost by the meagre character of the newspaper 
 reports. 
 
 In preparing the lectures for publication I have had the invalu- 
 able co-operation of Miss Beauclerc, who has been untiring in the 
 collation of them from various reports, and has done much to 
 restore their original form. In some instances she has added 
 matter from her own shorthand notes. 
 
 The editor alone is responsible for the foot-notes. 
 
 GEORGE ST. CLAIR. 
 BIRMINGHAM, September 1885.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE . . . . , . V 
 
 1. GOOD QUEEN BESS . ... I 
 
 2. SIR FRANCIS DRAKE ..... 34 
 
 3. ADMIRAL BLAKE ... . 44 ^ i 
 
 4. JOHN MILTON . . ... ^2 (T<L 
 
 5. ENGLAND DURING THE COMMONWEALTH 60 ^-f-Lf 
 
 6. THE FOREIGN POLITICS OF OLIVER CROMWELL . . 64 l^g 
 
 7. THE DEATH-BED OF CROMWELL . 76 (TO 
 
 8. PEOPLE'S STATUE TO CROMWELL . 85 
 
 9. ANDREW MARVELL ...... 89 
 
 10. RICHARD BAXTER . ... 98 
 
 11. JOHN BUNYAN . . ... 106 
 
 12. DANIEL DEFOE . . . . .125 
 
 13. DEAN SWIFT .... . 141 
 
 14. DR SAMUEL JOHNSON . .159 
 
 15. OLIVER GOLDSMITH . . . . . .172 
 
 1 6. DR ERASMUS DARWIN AND MISS ANNA SEWARD 191 
 
 17. GEOFFREY CHAUCER ..... 205 
 
 1 8. WILLIAM COWPER . . . . . .217 
 
 19. POPE AND BYRON ... 225 
 
 20. CHARLES LAMB . . . 235
 
 x Contents. 
 
 1'AGB 
 
 21. THE POETRY OF WORDSWORTH . . 251 
 
 22. THE POETRY OF S. T. COLERIDGE . . . 308 
 
 23. THOMAS CARLYLE .... . 358 
 
 24. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY . . . 43 
 
 25. THOMAS HOOD .... .451 
 6. MARTIN LUTHER . . . . 458 
 
 27. JOHN CALVIN .... 461 
 
 28. CALVIN AND SERVETUS ... . 462 
 9. ULRICH ZWINGLI .... . 465 
 
 30. EMANUEL SWEDENBORG ... . 472 
 
 31. JOHN WESLEY . . . 487 
 
 32. DR PRIESTLEY . . 505 
 
 33. WILLIAM COBBETT . . . 516 
 
 34. RICHARD COBDEN . . . 523 
 
 35. WELLINGTON AND NAPOLEON . 534 
 
 36. THE PRINCE CONSORT . . . 547
 
 GOOD QUEEN BESS. 
 
 BIRTH, 1533. ACCESSION, 1558. DEATH, 1603. 
 
 FT has been felt necessary by every generation to review the 
 history of past generations, and to write it over afresh. No 
 generation could write its own history so as to satisfy those coming 
 after, for they would be prejudiced by the party spirit of the time, 
 and influenced by " the powers that be." No one has suffered 
 more from these sources than Queen Elizabeth ; and because of 
 the slander and abuse with which that great Protestant has been 
 assailed, by Jesuits and others, whose prejudice or interests such 
 a course suited, the present generation should seek to review her 
 history. She was one of the most wonderful women this or any 
 other nation has ever produced. We must not much regard those 
 histories which begin with appeals to the Muses. However well 
 Hume and Smollett, or others, may have drawn the character of 
 Elizabeth to suit some tastes, there is yet room for more correct 
 depiction ; there is some ground left which we may go over orally 
 and with advantage to ourselves. 
 
 You will perhaps have understood from the title of the lecture 
 that I am going rather to discuss the personal and private char- 
 acter of her Gracious Majesty, Queen Bess, than to enter into the 
 history of her time ; because it must always be a subject of interest 
 to know how the English people came to bestow upon her so 
 affectionate, so familiar, and, after all, so glorious a name as " Good 
 Queen Bess." If you remember whose daughter she was, and how 
 much she inherited of her father's temper ; if you remember the 
 woman as the Queen, you will wonder how anybody dared to call 
 her " Bess " at all ; and as to calling her " Good Queen Bess," you 
 will be certain let historians alter her character as they may, let 
 Scotchmen detest her as they please, or Roman Catholics hate her 
 as much as they like you will be certain there must have been 
 something downright hearty and genial and national and plucky in 
 her before she ever could have got the sweet, familiar name of 
 
 A
 
 2 Good Queen Bess. 
 
 " Good Queen Bess." In taking the title of my lecture I have 
 duly considered the significance of nick-names. People have been 
 handed down to posterity under various cognomens, which peculi- 
 arities mental or physical had caused to be given them. Monarchs 
 in all ages have been nick-named, but the names some of our kings 
 got for themselves, if notable, were not very noble. Thus, one 
 king having short legs was called " Curt-hose," short stockings. 
 Well, you must be hard up for things to note about a man 
 before you put that down in history short-hose, short-legs ! 
 Then there was " Long-shanks ;" and we are obliged to conclude 
 that that man hadn't very much that was noteworthy about him 
 when the length of his legs is the main thing that history has 
 recorded. There was another king whose lands were deeply 
 mortgaged, and he was called " Lack-land." (A vast number of 
 them might have been called " La.ck-brams.") Another, who 
 lacked hair upon his head, was known as "The Bald ;" another 
 comes down to us as " The Cruel." But no king or queen ever 
 gained so noble and glorious a title so loving, so familiar, so 
 enduring a nick-name as " Good Queen Bess." When you have 
 set down all the names, even including " Richard Coeur de Lion," 
 and that is a grand old name, first-rate for the age that he 
 lived in, still there is nothing that touches the heart like " Good 
 Queen Bess." When we remember how haughty and proud she 
 was, what a tongue she had (for she could swear like a man when 
 she thought it necessary, or her father's fiery spirit got the better 
 of her proud nature), how she made her courtiers go upon their 
 knees before her, occasionally boxing their ears, and thought 
 nothing of snubbing a lord ; think of calling such a seeming 
 virago Bess ! the daughter of Henry VIII., Bess ! Good Queen 
 Bess ! a title so hard to win from this churlish world. With 
 such a name she stands firm and strong, and no possible Jesuits, 
 no absurd drivellers about Mary Stuart, no petty tea-table people, 
 can upset her. You may upset Queen Elizabeth, but you can 
 never upset Good Queen Bess. Hers was the most lovable 
 label that king or queen ever yet bore, and I hope to be able to 
 prove that she deserved it too. 
 
 I shall illustrate what Bacon has called some of the "soft- 
 nesses" of Elizabeth, and I shall also show her strength. People 
 have been ever glad to find out her faults ; but then you all know
 
 Good Queen Bess. 3 
 
 how very gratifying it is to find a wen on a beautiful face ; and 
 that her faults were, after all, nothing more than a mole upon the 
 noblest countenance a mere spot on marble I shall be able to 
 show. I look upon Queen Elizabeth as the most thorough-paced 
 Englishwtf (and I use the word advisedly) this land has ever pro- 
 duced ; and as I am an admirer of the most thoroughly English 
 character, I would, if it were only for that one thing, defend 
 Good Queen Bess against all the sentimental cant which springs 
 out of a romantic sympathy for Mary of Scotland, and from 
 all the other sources of prejudice and injustice by which her 
 character and memory have been assailed. 
 
 Now, recall for a moment or two the time in which she lived 
 the very brightest in the history of the human intellect. Her 
 reign was unquestionably the most glorious one of modern times. 
 It was one of the most glorious periods of human history ever 
 recorded out of God's Holy Book. The Augustan eras of Rome, 
 of Leo X., of Queen Anne, or the much- vaunted days of Louis 
 XIV., all "pale their ineffectual fires" before Elizabeth's. There 
 were giants in Queen Elizabeth's days, and though the woman was 
 surrounded by the tallest men, physically as well as intellectually, 
 her great, grand intellect was perceptible over them all. I should 
 not say this if we had to judge of her by a tea-table standard or 
 at a Dorcas meeting, or by the meek, mild, solemn standard of 
 to-day ; for if we were so to review her we should never under- 
 stand her. She is too big for such microscopes as these. She 
 must not be looked at close-to. She must be regarded with 
 becoming reverence from a distance, or we shall not see much 
 more than the hem of her garment. You cannot paint her portrait 
 on an inch of canvas. We must be prepared to find her of super- 
 human height, and according as we realise that impression we 
 shall view her properly. She was surrounded with the grandest 
 men that ever lived in any nation or in this world. She had 
 Shakespeare for her dramatist, Bacon for her philosopher, Spenser 
 for her poet ; Sidney was the finished model of all chivalry and 
 gentlemanliness, Walter Raleigh the splendidest man whose erratic 
 course ever dazzled and puzzled mankind ; there never was a 
 better sailor than Drake or Frobisher : and these are only a few of 
 the mighty men that surrounded this mighty woman. Remember 
 it was a thorough English age : it wasn't classical ; it wasn't French;
 
 4 Good Queen Bess. 
 
 it was nothing borrowed ; the English genius came out only, 
 national, and racy of the soil, instinctive, peculiar. 
 
 Now, if you remember these things, you must remember also 
 that all these men admitted that this was the greatest woman they 
 had ever met with. Bacon says, " She is the greatest woman I 
 ever knew." Of course we have to allow a little for chivalry and 
 loyalty, and for that bad habit we men have of flattering women ; 
 still, a woman that kept her head up amongst men like those I 
 have named must have been remarkable, and you may be certain 
 that nothing will ever be done by critical examination to diminish 
 her claim to the loyalty and love of the English nation. For she 
 lived in an age celebrated not alone for the genius of the men 
 that surrounded her, but also for the noble qualities of those men. 
 It was an age of intense loyalty, and loyalty of a noble sort. It 
 was an age of adventure, when the great Englishman turned out 
 to fight the Spaniard, wherever he could find him ; the age that 
 discovered the Southern Main and its riches ; the age when 
 Drake, in that little ship, went to take the first look at the Pacific, 
 and then vowed to God that he would see that sea again and he 
 lived to keep his vow. The age of Elizabeth is one of the 
 mountain-tops ; the old times are there, and the new times are 
 there. It was the age of chivalry, and it was the age of commerce. 
 Drake is most justly considered to be a man embodying the two 
 principles as plucky and as full of fight as ever was a knight of the 
 Round Table, whilst he was as glorious a bagman as ever turned 
 out from a commercial room. When Drake went out to meet 
 " hard blows and hard cash," as his nephew says in the title-page 
 of his adventures (" The Adventures of Sir Francis Drake, in 
 search of Hard Blows and Hard Cash"), he always fought the 
 Spaniards, and he always pouched his dollars at the same time. 
 He would fight any man at any time, but he always took care to fill 
 his bag after the battle ; and he stands out as one of the most 
 memorable men in history for this strange combination of the 
 old fighting spirit and the modem utilitarian and commercial 
 spirit. We may look upon it as at once a most poetical and a 
 most practical age, and it is one we ought to love on account of 
 its being an intensely English age the most characteristically 
 national period in our history. 
 
 Now, topping all these men, stands this colossal woman. If
 
 Good Queen Bess. 5 
 
 you approach her with your little notions of what is right and 
 wrong, you will manage just to see her shoe-tie, and probably you 
 will miss everything else. Colossal, strange, marvellous, wonder- 
 ful, contrary to all rule, she requires no close inspection to do her 
 justice. The microscope may be turned on her, and you may see 
 one of her infirmities, and there you stop ; but if you will only go 
 far enough back, and try to enter into the spirit of those days, you 
 will reverence her as one of the greatest of human beings. You 
 must not, however, to appreciate her to the full, regard her as a 
 woman. She partook, it is true, of some of the nonsenses and 
 absurdities of women, without some of their great virtues ; but 
 she borrowed from men all that was great and subtle and wise, 
 without participating in any of their weaknesses and fooleries. 
 In private, perhaps, somewhat of the fool, in public she was 
 one of the wisest of the wise. As that finest old statesman, 
 Lord Burleigh, said of her, she was " one of the wisest women 
 he ever knew." Some of your blasphemers may assert that that is 
 not saying much ; but still Burleigh said it, and Burleigh meant it. 
 We find her learned, courageous, true-hearted, full of English 
 pluck. We understand what Burleigh meant. That grand pro- 
 phecy of Shakespeare's, which had the advantage of being written 
 after the fact, was what Shakespeare believed and felt and knew 
 of her, and she was enshrined by him for immortality.* 
 
 But if I could only defend Queen Elizabeth by Englishmen's 
 votes and voices, there were but little in it ; we know, however, 
 that eminent Frenchmen have given equally emphatic testimony 
 to her great merits. The great French king of the time said he 
 should be happy to be her captain-general. And the Pope very 
 good evidence, you know, with regard to Queen Elizabeth, what- 
 ever we may think of such evidence in other matters Pope Sixtus 
 said there were only three great personages in the world who were 
 fit to reign. Of course he was one, Elizabeth was another, and 
 Henry Quatre the third. And a noble trio they were Sixtus, 
 Elizabeth, and Henry IV. The Pope, speaking to Englishmen, 
 once said, " Your Queen is happily born : she governs her 
 kingdom well." And then, falling into speculations not quite be- 
 coming to his Holiness, he said, " Only let me marry her, and we 
 shall give the world a second Alexander the Great!" You see 
 * See page 32.
 
 6 Good Queen Bess. 
 
 what Sixtus thought of her. Fancy a Pope saying that ! And 
 what did the Frenchmen call her in those days ? " L'Etoile du 
 Nord." Would they have done that without occasion? You 
 will answer that Frenchmen are very apt to get praising English 
 things, though when they do so we usually take it as flattery. 
 But what did the most learned of Jesuits, Pere Dolan, say ? He 
 said, " Never did crowned head know better the art of governing, 
 nor were fewer faults ever committed in a long reign." Such 
 testimony as that must be final ; for the Jesuits were not likely to 
 speak too much in her favour. 
 
 Now, as opposed to these men Henry Quatre, Pere Dolan, 
 and Pope Sixtus I do not mind what historians say. Critical 
 examination possibly may weaken the character of Queen Eliza- 
 beth on some points which affect the testimony of her own 
 people, and which led them to call her " Good Queen Bess ;" 
 but the admiration of these giant foreigners, when they praised 
 her as the greatest of queens, weighs much with me. 
 
 But remember, Queen Elizabeth is a monster, scientifically 
 speaking, just as much as a mermaid is. She joined together the 
 greatest qualities of a great man and the foolishest qualities of 
 a great woman. 
 
 Shall I first descant upon her great and good characteristics, 
 and then, like the scandal-mongers of the present day, let her 
 quietly down ? " She was great, and good, and wise, but Or 
 shall I examine all the faults that have been laid to her charge, 
 and then endeavour to show that her foibles were overcome and 
 obscured by all that is memorable and glorious ? Adopting the 
 latter as the more just and preferable course, we will look first at 
 her amazing vanity. It was like herself, wonderful, colossal, in- 
 effable, inexplicable, only to be illustrated by anecdotes ; but as 
 to being sounded no, I cannot do it. Her sacred Majesty had 
 an amazing opinion of her own beauty, which she carried to such 
 an extent as to appoint a " Serjeant" Painter, in the person of 
 George Gower, granting to him under the royal seal the exclusive 
 privilege of painting or engraving her portrait. I believe that 
 when young she really was good-looking ; but the daubers had 
 painted her portrait badly, and she became angry about it, which 
 was natural enough. The instructions she gave to the artist are 
 perfectly charming. She ordered her portrait to be painted with
 
 Good Queen Bess. 7 
 
 the light coming neither from the right nor from the left. She 
 could not bear that a shadow should fall upon her lovely counten- 
 ance, so it must be painted in the open garden light, and there 
 must be on it no manner of fleck. Those who know that her 
 nose was prominent, and inclined to elevation at the tip, will well 
 understand why she did not care to see her profile. 
 
 She was proud of her hands. Hear a story told of her by a 
 foreigner, a Frenchman, who came over as an ambassador's at- 
 tendant. We will have it in French first. There are only two of 
 you, you know, who don't understand the French language, but 
 for those two I will translate it. " Elle ota ses gants cent fois 
 pour nous faire voir ses mains qui e"taient tres joliment modelees et 
 tres blanches." She ungloved herself a hundred times to let us see 
 her hands, which were very prettily shaped and very white. You 
 know that some men and women do think a great deal of their 
 hands. You and I, you know, have watched their tricks when 
 they wanted to display a white hand. " Elle ota ses gants cent 
 fois pour nous faire voir ses mains qui etaient tres joliment 
 modelees et tres blanches." Touching Her Majesty's vanity, that 
 is a fine story. 
 
 She objected strongly to ugly and deformed people, and would 
 have none such near her court. She was very vain, and we are 
 told that on one occasion a young Hollander, who came over in 
 the suite of the Ambassador of the States General, was overcome 
 with her beauty. During the conversation with the Queen, he 
 talked aside with an Englishman As soon as the Queen found 
 he was a handsome man for a nandsome man always fixed the 
 eyes of " Good Queen Bess" she noticed him. She afterwards 
 asked the Englishman what the young Hollander was talking to 
 him about, and he replied that the young Hollander had said she 
 was the most beautiful woman that ever he saw. She wasn't 
 angry ; no, she wasn't ; she bore it with patience and fortitude ; 
 and by-and-bye, when the embassy was about to go home, she 
 presented to the ambassador a heavy old fellow, I dare say, with 
 nothing personal to recommend him she presented him with 
 800 crowns, but to the handsome young Hollander, who had been 
 dazzled with her beauty, she presented 1600 crowns. See the 
 difference. Old fogey 01 an ambassador, doing his duty, 800 
 crowns ; young Hollander, dazzled or pretending to be dazzled
 
 8 Good Queen Bess. 
 
 with her beauty, 1600 crowns. Never was vanity, perhaps, 
 better set forth than in this episode. In flattering her, the thicker 
 it was laid on the more she believed it, and it called forth her 
 lasting favour, but perhaps not any great gifts ; and as she was often 
 told that her smile was more precious than gold, she may be par- 
 doned if she very frequently took her courtiers at their word, and 
 paid them in smiles. 
 
 And what a woman she was for dress ! She had this vanity in its 
 most wonderful form and most absurd proportions. Dress was 
 her joy : she sacrificed to it, she lived for it, she delighted in it. 
 Through her whole life she was wont to be arrayed in all her glory, 
 and the Queen of Sheba would have had a hard business to make 
 herself equal to Queen Elizabeth. Her taste for jewels was bar- 
 baric. Her delight was in pearls. Every woman of sense chooses 
 such jewels as best harmonise with her complexion. Her sacred 
 Majesty wore pearls wherever they could be put on round her 
 forehead, round her throat, and in her bows, and in her earrings, 
 and in her frills, and in her lace, and on her lappets. Everything 
 she had on was covered with pearls, even to her boots. When she 
 was young, she was badly off (for a princess) for dress. You know 
 she was a sort of poor relation, and she had a very shabby outfit ; 
 but when she came to her own she made up for lost time in a 
 most marvellous way. If you look into the " Gazette " of that day 
 you will see every now and then advertisements of this sort, 
 " Lost, from Her Majesty's back, a gold enamelled acorn ; " " Lost, 
 from Her Majesty's hat, two ruby buttons." The fact is, she 
 shed pearls, gems, and so forth, wherever she went. She was like 
 the great Esterhazy of the last generation, whose dress was so rich 
 that it cost him a little fortune every time he wore it, and, when 
 he left the room, made the fortunes of those who swept it. When 
 Elizabeth died, as it often happens in this wicked world the robes 
 of majesty came to the auctioneer. You remember when George 
 IV. died, they sold his wardrobe: it was said to have cost 
 ; 1 00,000; it fetched a good deal. We are gentle to him; for, 
 as he had no interior qualifications, he was perfectly entitled to 
 depend upon exterior ones. But Her Majesty's wardrobe was won- 
 derful. For instance, she had eighty wigs, the newest of which 
 was the reddest ; she was an artist in wigs, and as she got older- 
 being ashamed of age and trying to hide it she cautiously had
 
 Good Queen Bess. g 
 
 them made to suit the changed contour. The Bishop of London 
 once preached a sermon before her on " the love of dress." She 
 resented it very much, and the bishop got a " wigging." 
 
 She was as pert about other people's dress as she was nice about 
 her own. She snubbed Fletcher, Bishop of London, because his 
 beard was too short, and would have him lengthen it. When 
 Harrington went to court, he wore a frieze jerkin, so well made 
 that she looked at him and said, " I will have one too." She was 
 one of the first women they are at it again now who appeared 
 in men's coats. Sir Matthew Arnley went to Court in a fringed 
 suit, and, oh, that he had not done it ! for we are told by the 
 gossips that Her Majesty actually spat upon it, and she said, "A 
 fool's wit has gone to rags." For what is fringe ? Fringe is no- 
 thing but systematic rags, good stuff slit into rags hideous, abom- 
 inable ! Poor Sir Matthew shrugged his shoulders, and said, 
 " Heaven spare me from such gibery ! " And so she, with her 
 imperious, feminine temper, had her own ideas about dress. She 
 kept an eye also on the swords that were worn, and had them 
 clipped if they were too long. Like Peter the Great, she would 
 have a man at the gate to set the men's dress in order ; and if the 
 tails were too long, the tails had to be shortened. 
 
 Well, the poor Queen got old, and (I hardly like to tell you, 
 such is my respect for her ; but, then, we are going to see the noble 
 side of her by-and-bye, so I may say it) she took to paint and 
 rouge. I am sorry to say she practised two distinct arts rouge- 
 ing and enamelling. And one day such are the records of her 
 folly the women who dressed her (and they had a hard time of 
 it) determined to spite Her Majesty. You know, when a woman 
 is spiteful you must look out ! What did they do ? She had a 
 fine nose. (Of course she must have had, because no one with a 
 very little nose ever did much in this world. Napoleon I. is 
 represented as liking men with big noses ; and in fact, a big nose is 
 the outward sign of an indwelling grace.) What do you think these 
 wicked sluts did ? The Queen, since she had been getting old, 
 never liked looking in the glass, and they knew it, so one morning 
 they actually rouged her nose, just the tip, and her sacred 
 Majesty came down into the court, her nose looking like a pro- 
 montory with a lighthouse at the end, standing out and flickering. 
 
 Poor Essex once happened to see Her Majesty before she was
 
 io Good Queen Bess. 
 
 dressed for the day : she had gone to her window to get some 
 air ; he had gone to a window, and he happened to see her. He 
 ran off for his dear life, for she hadn't her paint on. He saw her 
 as she was : it was a sight to be remembered, shuddered at, and 
 fled from. Now, lest some of you, full of diction, should think I 
 am merely inventing this nonsense, let me remind you of what Lord 
 Bacon said, "She imagined that people were much influenced 
 by externals, and would be diverted by the glitter of her jewels 
 from noticing the decay of her personal attractions ; " and after 
 Lord Bacon has spoken, let all people be silent. 
 
 Elizabeth had a dairy at Barn Elms,* and used to go down there 
 and dress herself as a milkmaid. (And so poor Marie Antoinette 
 liked to play at being a dairymaid. It isn't a bad thing, you 
 know ; it gives you a chance of showing your white arms contrast- 
 ing with the milk a fine difference of tint, excellent for an artist 
 to render !) Thomas Fuller, a great wit and a great divine, justi- 
 fies all this seeming nonsense in her. He says : " She was a 
 person tall, of hair and complexion fair, well favoured but high 
 nosed, her limbs and features neat, of a stately and majestic 
 deportment. She had a piercing eye, wherewith she used to 
 search what male strangers were made of who were admitted into 
 her presence ; but as she counted it a pleasing conquest of her 
 majestic looks to dash strangers out of countenance, so she was 
 merciful in pursuing those whom she overcame, and afterwards 
 would cherish and comfort them with her smiles, if she perceived 
 outwardliness of the right sort and modest temper." So says the 
 divine, and many stories show it. She used to look at people to 
 see if she could confuse them ; if they blushed and hung down 
 their heads as if conquered by her mien, she beckoned them to 
 come to her, and then, as the old divine said, " she greatly com- 
 forted and cherished them ! " 
 
 Well, by-and-bye, the matter of painting Her Majesty's portrait, 
 of which we have spoken already, became a state affair, and, if you 
 are curious, and search into our old libraries, you will find state 
 papers on the subject. For instance, there is one with a preamble 
 that says, " Whereas, hitherto, none think sufficiently expressed the 
 natural representation of Her Majesty's person, favour, or grace, 
 it is hereby notified that, at the request of the Privy Council, Her 
 * At south-west corner of St James's Park.
 
 Good Queen Bess. 1 1 
 
 Majesty is forced to declare that some cunning person, meet 
 therein-for, shall shortly make a portrait of Her Majesty's person, 
 countenance, or visage, to be participated to others for satisfaction 
 of her loving subjects." All persons are then ordered to forbear 
 till the right picture is ready, and Sir Walter Raleigh tells us that 
 the pictures of Queen Elizabeth made by unskilful and common 
 painters were, by her commandment, knocked in pieces and cast 
 into the fire. George Gower, a portrait painter, was the happy 
 man to whom was given the warrant of appointment, and the 
 warrant runs with a fine legal flavour about it : " That to the said 
 George Gower be granted to have the sole lawful privilege, 
 license, power, and authority, that he, the said George Gower, by 
 himself, his deputy or deputies, assignee or assignees, only and 
 none other, shall and may from henceforth, for and during his 
 natural life, make or cause to be made all and all manner of 
 portraits and pictures of our person, lineaments, physiognomy, and 
 proportions of our body, in oil colours, upon boards or canvass, 
 also to 'grave the same in copper, and to cut the same in wood, 
 or to paint the same, being cut, in copper or wood, or otherwise, 
 and the said portraits, pictures, and proportions of our body so 
 being engraved or cut, to print or cause to be printed." Then 
 came the fines for meddlers with the sublime privilege of painting 
 the glorious Queen, ten pounds (exception in favour of Nicholas 
 Hilliard, who might make portraits of smaller dimensions) ; and, 
 lastly, the said George Gower was authorised to hunt up all con- 
 traband portraits and prints, and all justices, mayors, and magis- 
 trates were ordered to help him in the pursuit. Perhaps never 
 was the language of the law employed. more majestically about so 
 small a matter as a portrait Well, when the Queen sat for her 
 portrait, of course it was very glorious to paint. And we here 
 come back to her marvellous vanity. Look at the picture ! It is 
 garnished with diamonds ^4000 in worth at that time. 
 
 Then, again, her sacred Majesty had a wonderful liking for 
 presents, though she had a very slender talent for giving them. 
 (It doesn't do to let one person have all the talents you know.) 
 She was the original " horse-leech's daughter," crying incessantly, 
 " Give, give ! " Her Majesty's hand was always open to receive, 
 and her courtiers knew well that the way to please her was to give 
 her something agreeable and valuable. She goes down once to
 
 1 2 Good Queen Bess. 
 
 visit one of her nobles. On this occasion a fine gown and a 
 jupon, things pleasing to her Highness, are presented ; but, to 
 show how pleased she is, she takes from him of her own accord 
 a fork, a spoon, a salt, and an agate ! Could there be any more 
 touching proof of gratitude for her entertainment than this ? 
 
 When Elizabeth went out in public she wore high-heeled shoes 
 (though she stood five feet nine inches without them), a most subtle 
 thing to do, for it shows how well she knew the people. She 
 knew that they would like her better for her height than for her 
 talents, and that the inch added to her heels would insure her 
 more admiration than two chapters of Solomon added to her 
 wisdom. 
 
 When she went to church she sat in a pew with a lattice round 
 it, and when the bishops or clergy alluded in their sermons to 
 subjects she liked not, the lattice rattled, and she glared through 
 it at the preacher. She, however, soon forgave and forgot any of 
 these things. Then she got aged ; yes, aged ; till one day Rudd, 
 the Bishop of St David's, in the appropriate season of Lent, in the 
 year 1596, thought it his duty to warn Her Majesty that she was 
 getting to that period of life when it was time to put aside rouge- 
 pots and furbelows, and " make up her soul," as the saying is, and 
 get ready for the last journey. But he knew whom he had to 
 deal with, and so, like a wise navigator, he thought he would 
 " fetch a compass," and so get into port. So, instead of saying 
 anything about her age, he began a discourse on sacred principles 
 in general, and pointed out how Pythagoras discoursed of the 
 number seven ; and then he discoursed of the number three, and 
 spoke of the Trinity and its mystery ; and in reference to the 
 namber seven referred to the two Sabbaths, to seven times seven, 
 the year of jubilee ; and now he thought he might run on, and 
 he began to speak of seven times nine, one of the climacteric 
 years, you know. He was now getting wise, and no doubt he 
 was watching the royal pew in the gallery. At any rate he 
 thought he had better stand off a while again. So then he got 
 on to that number so dear to Protestants, that sweet number I 
 cannot pronounce it without a thrill number 666. It is a won- 
 derful number. Nobody understands it, and that is one of its 
 charms ; for as soon as these things are understood they cease to 
 interest. Now, he thought, he could do it ; and so he got back
 
 Good Qiieen Bess. 13 
 
 to his seven times nine again. Now he was going to run into her 
 number. Her sacred Majesty, sitting in a sort of box in the 
 gallery, had been leaning forward for some time, and by-and-bye 
 that glorious nose peeped out, and her temper broke out, and she 
 said to the bishop, "You keep your arithmetic to yourself: the 
 greatest clerks are seldom the wisest men." The poor bishop, he 
 shrank into his sleeves, and fairly shrivelled into his native 
 nothingness ; and when he got out of the pulpit he got advised 
 that he had better not go to court for a few days. He didn't go ; 
 and yet the woman was so gracious that, when he did go back, 
 she gave him a little jewel, just to show that she had forgiven 
 him. Wasn't he a brave bishop? Such was her vanity her 
 consummate vanity. 
 
 Another bishop also tried to do her a kindness by being " faith- 
 ful " to her, as the preachers call it. " One Sunday in April last," 
 says an old chronicler, " my Lord of London preached to the 
 Queen's Majesty, and essayed to touch on the vanity of decking 
 the body too finely. Her Majesty told the Lords that if the 
 bishop held any more discourse upon such matters as that, she 
 would fit him for heaven ; but he should walk thither without his 
 staff, and he should leave his mantle behind him. So the bishop 
 perhaps mended his manners, for he knew he had spoken full 
 plainly." 
 
 And what a charming story for those of us who love the ins 
 and outs of human nature, is that one told by Sir Roger Aston, 
 who was the ambassador to Queen Elizabeth from James of 
 Scotland. He declares that he was once up in the lobby at 
 Court, and the hangings were judiciously turned so that he could 
 look in. You know, of course, how to let a person look into a 
 room with curtains without seeming to know of it the curtains 
 get put aside by accident. Well, there was the Queen in her 
 apartment. She was then somewhat old, and the ambassador saw 
 her dancing to a little fiddle. One version of the story says the 
 page was playing the fiddle ; the other says her sacred Majesty 
 was playing it. At any rate, the old Queen, with her rheumatic 
 limbs, was there dancing about Why was it done ? She knew 
 what the old hungry Scotchman had come for. He had come to 
 see whether the fat English cherry was likely to drop into King 
 James's mouth just yet, and Elizabeth danced in spite of her rheu-
 
 14 Good Queen Bess. 
 
 matic limbs, as much as to say, " There ! there is life in the old 
 girl yet ; " that he might go and tell his old cake-eating master, 
 Elizabeth was " to the fore," and wasn't going to die just at pre- 
 sent. So goes the story, true or not. 
 
 Then, you remember, Elizabeth was very fond not of mar- 
 riage ! She never did marry, and it would be a long history to go 
 into the reasons. I have looked into the subject a great many 
 times, and I believe, after all I am a fanatic, I dare say, for 
 believing it, but I do believe it that her love of this nation was 
 so great, that she was unwilling to saddle it with any foreign 
 master whatever unwilling to entangle the nation by her marriage 
 with any foreigner. She knew the whole world hated England. 
 The hatred of the world is our dowry : we have it now, and we 
 ever shall have it. This nation was never loved yet, and never 
 will be ; and if this nation be wise, it will trouble its wise head 
 very little about the love of the world. Well, she knew that 
 nobody loved us, and she determined to keep, as far as she could, 
 this nation unentangled by foreign alliance. It was a good deal 
 to give up, and she took it out as far as she could ; for, though 
 she was never married, she liked the preliminaries immensely. 
 Her flirtations were her amusements at which she played, know- 
 ing well that she was playing the fool, but also knowing well when 
 to stop. Once or twice she made a mistake, 'tis true, but so do 
 all people make mistakes sometimes. I cannot interpret that 
 woman in any other way, but that her glowing patriotism was the 
 barrier that hindered her marriage. But as long as it was simply 
 a matter of preliminary, she liked it. The fact is, that, like most 
 sensible women, she preferred the society of men to the society of 
 women. She liked men about her, and the great men of her 
 times were like most great men they liked to play at being sub- 
 dued. It is fun for a strong man to give in to a woman's will ; 
 it doesn't hurt him, and it pleases her. Too much has been 
 made of Queen Elizabeth's flirtations. All great minds are 
 accustomed to relaxation, and often the direction which it takes is 
 foolish and eccentric. History is full of such cases. Samson 
 may lay his head on Delilah's lap, and Hercules will spin for 
 Omphale, and if he doesn't do his spinning well, the woman shall 
 take her little shoe and tap the great giant. I dare say he hardly 
 knew where it was that she tapped him, but he just felt a slight
 
 Good Queen Bess. 15 
 
 tickle somewhere or other. You know that Catherine of Russia, 
 again, liked to go through these preliminaries and performances, 
 and so it was with Queen Elizabeth and some great men about 
 her. They knew how to humour her. Essex understood it, and 
 pretended, as Walter Raleigh did, to be dazzled, and that he could 
 hardly look upon her glory. To be, like Hercules, so entirely 
 her worshipper as to spin for her, to take the distaff, and to sub- 
 mit to be beaten with a shoe you and I understand these things 
 perfectly well, far better than the solemn historians who often miss 
 the meaning of things. A story is told of a rare game at skittles 
 between Luther and Melancthon; whilst Elizabeth's amusement 
 was flirtation. 
 
 Her love of favourites, which has been oftdn brought against 
 her, should have a word. Her favourites were not cormorants who 
 fed upon the people ; she knew how to rein them in, and always 
 kept them, like a skilful horseman, well in hand. And then, as 
 very often happens with women who don't get married, or can't, 
 they hate to see anybody else get married. You remember how 
 savagely she behaved when poor Raleigh married Elizabeth 
 Throgmorton. She sent a boat with them to the Tower. Did 
 she send them to the Tower together ? Oh, no ! She sent one to 
 one wing, and the other to the other wing. There was no fun in 
 sending two lovers to the Tower, if they were to be in the same 
 room. And then it was that Raleigh that glorious man, incapable 
 of meanness beyond any other man perhaps of his own or any other 
 times ; the splendidest man for variety of gift, fertility of genius, 
 largeness of adventure, splendour of intellect, that this world has 
 ever produced then it was that he sat down and wrote one of 
 those fulsome letters to Her Majesty, that make one blush for 
 the greatness of the man. He knew her ; he knew he could 
 not pile it up too mountainously for her to believe. He who 
 flattered the most was surest to please. Raleigh expressed him- 
 self thus : 
 
 " I am in despair, I, who have been wont to behold Her 
 Majesty riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, dancing like 
 Terpsichore, walking like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair 
 hair round her pure cheeks ; sometimes sitting in the shadow like 
 a goddess, sometimes singing like an angel, sometimes playing like 
 Orpheus." And on he goes. He told her all this. She wasn't
 
 1 6 Good Queen Bess, 
 
 angry. She bore it with great equanimity. This and many other 
 things, for these stories might be greatly multiplied. 
 
 Scandals about Queen Bess have become proverbial in the 
 English tongue. But what are they? They are the "shadows" 
 in the portrait, which she was vain enough to wish omitted. That 
 fine nose of hers was sure to cast a long shadow ; but the 
 grandeur of her character can well afford to throw the long 
 shadows of her vanity, her love of dress, her coquetry, her love 
 of receiving favours, and her infinite capriciousness. 
 
 Her personnel, her proud and lofty mien, her courtesy and 
 gracefulness, the number and magnificence of her retinue, and the 
 obsequious formalities she enforced at court, have been testified to 
 by Hentzner, a German, who visited this country at the period, 
 and gave a very graphic description of Queen Elizabeth in her 
 fifty-sixth year. Her face, he said, was fair but wrinkled, her 
 eyes black, her nose hooked, and her teeth black, &c. 
 
 She was a fearfully stingy person, I admit, but when we look at 
 its effect that her parsimony tended to keep the taxes low 
 whilst we sneer at it in private life as unworthy of a queen, and 
 wonder at her greediness (for she accepted six pairs of stockings 
 with great pleasure and never gave anybody anything if she could 
 help it), yet we see that all her meanness had a beneficial effect. 
 She knew that a heavily-taxed people was an over-burdened 
 people, and Her Majesty's parsimony was upon the whole one of 
 the great distinguishing characteristics of her reign. She had a 
 subtle and politic reason for it. I have often suspected that 
 those wonderful visits to the nobility were paid to gratify her love 
 of splendour without her having to pay for it ; and then, in addi- 
 tion, she had so fine a touch of the under-politics of the world, 
 such a fine touch of diplomacy, that I suspect she sometimes 
 visited a nobleman in order to reduce him in his circumstances. 
 For, by her visits, whilst she complimented a nobleman, she so 
 effectually drained his resources, that his estates did not recover 
 for generations. It was preferable to beheading her nobles, and 
 more easy. She was capable of practising finesse in politics to an 
 extreme ; and then she had Lord Burleigh for her statesman, and 
 she was thoroughly up in mining and countermining. She had a 
 proud oligarchy to humble, and she took the best means of doing 
 it, for she took such a retinue, and stayed so long, and caused so
 
 Good Queen Bess. 1 7 
 
 much to be eat and drunk and otherwise expended, that (no 
 wonder) the nobles were afterwards poor, but she always kept the 
 taxes on the poor people down. And she did this as a matter of 
 policy. But, as I have said, she never gave anybody anything if 
 she could help it. And do you remember those terrible lines in 
 which poor Spenser, who had been to Court, and had no doubt 
 given Her Majesty many things and never got anything in return, 
 do you remember those wonderful lines, in which he tells 
 people of what comes of putting one's trust in kings and queens ? 
 
 " Full knowest thou that oft hast tried, 
 What hell it is in sueing long to bide ; 
 To lose good days that might be better spent, 
 To waste long nights in pensive discontent ; 
 To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow ; 
 To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow ; 
 To have their prince's grace, yet wait his tears, 
 To have their asking, yet wait many years ; 
 To fret their soul with crosses and with cares, 
 To teach their heart through comfortless despairs ; 
 To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, 
 To spend, to give, to want, to be undone." 
 
 That was the history of going to the Court of Queen Elizabeth in 
 the experience of poor Spenser. 
 
 We have now considered the weaknesses, or " softnesses," as 
 Bacon terms them, of Queen Elizabeth's character, and if you 
 choose to regard her as a woman, you will gather from what I 
 have told you that she was a very weak, silly woman. If, how- 
 ever, you will regard her as a man, you will find that her qualities 
 in that respect were admirable. But let us lay aside all such con- 
 siderations, and look upon her, as Hume has said, "as a rational 
 being, entrusted with the government of mankind." She was too 
 much of a character to be much liked as a woman. Pope has 
 said that it is true of most women that " they have no charac- 
 ter at all." Of course some of you object to that, and Pope has 
 been risen up against for having written that same passage. But 
 Coleridge at length sought to explain it, by saying that Pope must 
 have said it in satire ; and when you so regard it, you can forgive 
 the hunchbacked satirist, for there is much truth in what he said. 
 Why, Shakespeare's perfection of women seem in many instances 
 ^
 
 1 8 Good Queen Bess. 
 
 to be characterless. We all like Desdemona and Ophelia, but 
 then they would not have done to have governed England. 
 Turn to Elizabeth, and you find such a strong, manful, 
 angular, incisive, decisive, prompt character that no man could 
 have married her for other purposes than statecraft. Men 
 generally like to see women bestow their kindliness and gentle- 
 ness upon their own sex. Elizabeth never did so; she never 
 had any to bestow. To women she never was lovely or gentle ; 
 to a rival she was never merciful ; and she disregarded all 
 sentimental affectation and pity. 
 
 But let us see how she maintained the other point with which 
 I, in the first instance, set out namely, her greatness as a man. 
 How came the English to love such a woman as this ? Well, it 
 was because she was so thoroughly hearty ; and she had the sense 
 to know where she was and who she was, and that is one of the 
 primest virtues that a monarch can have. It was the alpha and 
 omega of Elizabeth's character. How many of the kings of 
 Europe at the present time know where they are ? Why, one 
 of them is about at the fourteenth century, and another has got 
 as far as the sixteenth; and we might go further on and find 
 kingdoms where nature is lovely, pure, and beautiful, and only 
 men and kings are vile. But Queen Elizabeth knew well her 
 time, and the necessity of her nation. She saw Martin Luther, 
 and understood his great work. She saw that Popes' Bulls were 
 burnt, and that excommunications were utterly disregarded. She 
 knew the English ; she knew she belonged to this little sea- 
 engirdled island. She understood where God had put her, 
 namely, on a shaky throne ; she knew that the Pope, and the 
 French, and everybody else, were against her, and she determined 
 that she would steady the throne. She did it, and before she 
 died her throne stood steadfast in justice and righteousness. She 
 strengthened the nation, developed its resources, and made it 
 righteous and noble. She looked upon this little island, and saw 
 at a glance where it must be, as it ever had been, great. She saw 
 that it must be great on the sea. Everybody sees this now ; but 
 she/<??rsaw it, and considering that admirals were not at that time 
 so plentiful as they are at present, it showed her greatness of mind 
 and thought. She understood the sea, and loved it ; and who- 
 ever loves the sea shall have the Englishman's love up to. the end
 
 Good Queen Bess. 1 9 
 
 of the chapter. None of your tubes and tunnels and bridges for 
 me ! Stick to the old sea ; it is our safeguard and our stay, our 
 peculiarity and our eccentricity and our glory. It is the best 
 defence that ever the nation had yet. It is worth all the mud of 
 the walls that artillerymen ever battered down or raised up ; and 
 Elizabeth knew it. Seamanship was her delight. She built ships 
 herself, and encouraged merchants to build them ; and whenever 
 she found a good seaman she honoured him. Thus, when 
 Hawkins came home from his successful negro expedition, she, 
 having got over her original prejudice against the traffic, gave him 
 a crest, and it was a characteristic one a negro proper. When 
 Admiral Drake, the boldest seaman the world ever had, came 
 home from his cruise, she went down to Deptford and went on 
 board his little ship of only 120 tons burden, in which he had 
 sailed round the world, and to which the ship of the famous 
 Argonauts is as nothing the ship of ships, the one colossal ship 
 of the world, the ship of the Devonshire Drake, who sailed the 
 Pacific, fought the Spaniards, and came off glorious ! Yes, she 
 went down and knighted the gallant sailor on his own deck. 
 There was a woman of sense or rather a man ! She didn't 
 send for Drake to come to Court to be knighted ; but she said, 
 " I will go down and knight him on his own deck." These were 
 things the nation relished. Here was a dash of sea-water that 
 won her the love of this island people. She was the restorer of 
 our naval glory. Foreigners called her " Queen of the Northern 
 Seas ; " and I will, in spite of any critics, living or dead, own her 
 as Queen and Ruler. Yes, she understood sea-water to be 
 England's glory and England's strength. This is, and always has 
 been, our delight ; long may it remain, as it was to our fore- 
 fathers, our safeguard and our impregnable dominion. 
 
 There was a great deal of good sense in Queen Elizabeth. She 
 hated nonsense excepting in the rougeing department ; but with 
 that single exception, and speaking of her as a monarch, as a 
 king, as a man, I say she hated nonsense. She governed her 
 weaknesses, managed her softnesses, and never allowed them to 
 run away with her. As a woman, she liked courtship ; but she 
 always contrived to keep her lovers as friends for some purposes 
 of statecraft. Her policy was wonderful ; for if she discarded a 
 suitor, she was sure to keep him for future contingencies, though
 
 2O Good Queen Bess. 
 
 she took good care not to have any of them hanging about and 
 doing nothing (for no king ever afflicted a reign less with Court 
 favourites). 
 
 There was once a quarrel between Sir Francis Drake and 
 an old aristocratic baronet, Sir Barnard Drake, some " tenth 
 transmitter of a foolish face," in Devonshire ; some genealogical 
 squabble. She soon set them right. She never troubled her head 
 about questions of genealogy and heraldry. Not she. She gave 
 to Sir Francis Drake a crest, of a ship in full sail, with the cable 
 running up to the skies, indicating he had been heaven-guided, 
 and with the motto, " By Thy help I have done it ; " and then 
 splendid piece of satire on the old baronet for old Sir Barnard 
 Drake's escutcheon she had some geese hung up by the heels and 
 fastened on the mainsail of Sir Francis Drake's vessel. She soon 
 settled that heraldic squabble. One of the greatest things a ruler 
 can do, she did grandly she expressed her profound contempt 
 for stupidity, and her glorious admiration for capability. When I 
 want to worship Queen Elizabeth, I go down in thought to Dept- 
 ford; I see the old Devonshire salt on his knees; the sword 
 touches his naval dress as the Sovereign says, " Rise, Sir Francis." 
 This scene, to me, shows one of the great acts that won for Good 
 Queen Bess old England's love. 
 
 Then she paid the debts which were incumbent on the Crown 
 when she ascended the throne, and she also repaid the loans 
 which she herself contracted. Wonderful trait in the character of 
 a king ! Why, whoever thinks now-a-days of kings paying their 
 debts ? But Queen Elizabeth had a ridiculous sense of honesty 
 and a fantastical righteousness which made her pay the Crown 
 debts. Then she had the national arsenals furnished with arms, 
 encouraged commerce, and allowed the free export of corn. She 
 was a great prophetess, understood thoroughly and heartily the 
 people of her times, and saw, even then, that it was good for a 
 nation to do what we, nearly three hundred years afterwards, 
 have hardly persuaded our wise governments to allow us to do. 
 
 What Elizabeth held she held tightly, and what she gave up she 
 relinquished gracefully. None knew better than she how to make 
 a virtue of necessity. She had once or twice to submit to the 
 House of Commons ; but she did it in such a way as made them 
 think that it was just what she was contemplating for the public
 
 Good Queen Bess. 2 1 
 
 good. The Commons consequently thought her a most wise and 
 wonderful woman, and that they themselves were a set of laggards, 
 always behind their great mistress. In this quality she shone out 
 conspicuously ; and if Charles the First had but understood it, he 
 might, in all probability, have kept his head on longer. Why, 
 this wonderful woman could smile people out of their own belief 
 and she could swear at them, too, in such round terms as I 
 could not quote. It has been said that she was a despot. Not 
 she. True, she ruled by despotic forms ; but these forms came to 
 her with the crown, and it is nonsense to talk about her despot- 
 ism simply because her reign has not been handed down to us in 
 a nineteenth century basket. Why, under the shield of her 
 despotism liberty grew and flourished, and kept England free from 
 foreign invasion, and made us a terror to foreign foes. 
 
 Then she was a learned woman too (the Protestant women of 
 that time were more learned than the women of our time). What 
 does her accomplished tutor, Roger Ascham, tell us ? He says : 
 " For two years she pursued the study of Greek and Latin under 
 my tuition." Another says : " The Lady Elizabeth has accom- 
 plished her sixteenth year, and so much solidity of understanding, 
 such courtesy united with dignity, has never been observed in 
 one of so early an age, and that combined with the love of true 
 genius, and of the best kind of literature." How many women 
 do you think there are here who can read Greek at twenty ? I 
 don't know any. I am very much prejudiced, ho doubt ; and yet 
 you know that Roger Ascham called one day at Lady Jane Grey's 
 father's house, and they were all gone a-hunting except the Lady 
 Jane. What was she doing? Reading the Phaedo of Plato. 
 In those days, when the Reformation had kindled the human 
 intellect, and lighted a sublime fire, the women amongst the 
 upper classes were educated to a pass that they have since lost 
 and slipped down from. Queen Elizabeth's learning was exten- 
 sive, solid, and deep ; it kept pace with that of the great men of 
 the Reformation, and she had a profound love for it. She under- 
 stood Latin, she spoke very decent French, she spoke Spanish 
 fairly. When ambassadors came to her, she could talk to them 
 in their own language. It must be admitted, though, that she 
 talked French like an Englishwoman, and the French ambassador, 
 when he went home, said that her accent was bad. She remem-
 
 22 Good Queen Bess. 
 
 bered that and made a note of it, for she kept a grudge-book. 
 She was a downright learned woman, though, or rather she was a 
 learned man. She was, withal, genial and generous, which made 
 her a fosterer of learning in others. 
 
 As to Elizabeth being religious, for my part I think she was so. 
 But if you come to set up some small pettifogging standard, such 
 as not using a sword, not reading a novel, not going to the 
 theatre, I will not answer for it, nor care for your judgment. If, 
 however, the setting down of her own will in conformity with 
 God's will, for the promotion of his glory and the welfare of the 
 nation, the setting before herself and her people the noble aims 
 of righteousness and justice, the noble uses of learning, and the 
 happiness of virtue ; if all these are regarded as manifestations of 
 a religious life, then I will say that, spite of all her vanities and 
 softnesses, she had in her heart true religion and relied upon 
 God. Perhaps she leaned too much sometimes upon herself; 
 but still, withal, I look upon her as a religious woman. 
 
 Elizabeth is generally put down as the model of Protestantism. 
 She was not that : she was a thorough Englishwoman, and, like 
 all English people, she loved a compromise. The average 
 Englishman detests being obliged to carry out propositions to 
 their full and legitimate conclusion. He says, " Don't be im- 
 practicable ;" and the consequence is, there is nothing in this 
 country that is logical, if by " logical " you mean that the con- 
 clusion which is the natural result from the premisses has been 
 arrived at. No, no ; we like a little of this and a little of the 
 other. Our foreign critics have laughed at us ; we are mocked 
 at all over Europe for our love of compromise. Well, it is our 
 little weakness, and it has also been our great strength ; for, whilst 
 other nations have bled to death from inability to get any govern- 
 ment that would square with their notions of the eternal realities 
 of justice, we put up with f/iis, and we bungle on with the other ; 
 and of course we speak well of the bridge that carries us over, 
 though it may not be built on the true principles of the ellipse. 
 Elizabeth was a downright Englishwoman in that respect : she 
 was never very bigoted either one way or other. Her persecutions 
 for religion were persecutions for politics, and she distributed 
 them very fairly. She liked fat Papists and Protestants with fine 
 impartiality, because she didn't care much for their little non-
 
 Good Queen Bess. 23 
 
 senses of theology. One point in her creed was " I, Elizabeth, 
 by the grace of God, do rule over these realms," and if Papist 
 or any one else gainsaid her supremacy, her remedy was, " Off 
 with his head." If you think her actions in these matters arose 
 from any great or deep principle, I don't agree with you. She 
 was a compromise herself, and she compromised in religion. 
 It is a very easy thing to say " black is white, and white is black," 
 but to say it in such a way as to appear to be saying the contrary, 
 is the great secret ; and Elizabeth's diplomacy, though of this kind, 
 must be regarded as a series of subtle works for the promotion of 
 great and glorious ends. A great compromise that answer of hers 
 when they wanted to test her as to her belief in transubstantiation. 
 She was like those wonderful Samaritans we read of in the Old 
 Testament, of whom it says, " They served God and worshipped 
 graven images ; " they had a foot in both countries. And that is 
 a good plan, you know, because then, whichever party gets to 
 the top, you have only to go over with your other leg. 
 
 Her sacred Majesty an out and out Protestant ! I don't believe it. 
 Look into her chapel and see the crucifixes and candles 1 See the 
 Romish pictures in her private rooms. Remember how she detested 
 the marriage of the clergy, and what trouble poor Archbishop Parker 
 had to induce Her Majesty, as head of the church, to allow these 
 persons to marry. Oh, she turned from it with a shudder, and the 
 Archbishop says, " I was in horror to hear such words to come 
 from her mild nature and Christian learning, as she spoke concern- 
 ing God's holy ordinance and institution of matrimony." Lord 
 Burleigh you know how wise a man he was ; no wiser man ever 
 walked in Old England persuaded her to connive at the marriage 
 of priests. But the Queen very nicely drew the line. " If these 
 persons marry," at last she decided, " their children shall not be 
 legitimate." And it was not till the reign of James the First that 
 a statute was introduced by which the children of the clergy were 
 made legitimate. Elizabeth conformed for her own safety ; when 
 it was necessary as a matter of policy. The fact is, she was both 
 indifferent and intolerant, and those who know human nature 
 thoroughly are aware that these two things can sometimes go 
 together. Did she care what the people believed ? Not at all ; 
 provided they believed in " Good Queen Bess," and in her " right 
 divine." But however much she may in private have inclined to-
 
 24 Good Queen Bess. 
 
 wards the old church, yet in public, and when the question was 
 to be decided for old England, in all external acts she was 
 thoroughly Protestant, Protestant to the last, and was always 
 looked to by Protestant nations as the champion of their cause. 
 
 To her glory be it said Queen Elizabeth was not ambitious of 
 extending her dominions. She first set her own house in order. 
 She knew full well the meaning of setting house to house and 
 land to land, so that there was no room for the poor ; * and, there- 
 fore, she minded well her own country : otherwise she might have 
 had the allegiance of nearly all the Protestant States in Europe. 
 There is one act of her reign, however, that I cannot palliate, or 
 regard with patience, and that is the measure adopted for the sup- 
 pression of the Irish Rebellion. If I were an Irishman I am 
 afraid I could never forget or forgive the wondrous wrongs and 
 injuries inflicted on Ireland in those times. It was a war of ex- 
 termination, and one of a fierce and savage description. If you 
 want a ground on which to censure or condemn Queen Elizabeth, 
 take the Irish war, and you have plentiful cause of sound abuse. 
 Have done with your cant about Mary Queen of Scots, and look 
 to that fearful period of Irish history, when ^500,000 were spent 
 in overcoming the Irish people. So bloody and exterminating 
 was the character of the war, that three children, it has been re- 
 corded, were found feeding on the dead body of their mother. 
 
 One thing I admire Elizabeth for is that she had such great 
 ministers about her. " No wonder," people say, " that her reign 
 was brilliant and successful, when she had such great ministers for 
 her counsellors." But did you ever know a fool of a ruler, or a 
 rascal of a ruler, draw wise men, in preference, to him ? I never 
 did. There is one law in this world that is never broken ; " Birds 
 of a feather flock together." Could Elizabeth draw great counsel- 
 lors by any force but that of natural attraction ? She did get them 
 about her, and she well knew how to keep them. Look at Bur- 
 leigh, that great statesman ! He was a man of comparatively low 
 degree, and yet she knew his wisdom. She never let anybody 
 fool her about him ; she never snubbed him ; to him she was 
 humble. He was the only man that that proud woman could bow 
 to ; but he was a man ; he had the best brain of any man in his 
 day, and when he nodded his head, men knew that it nodded with 
 * Isaiah v. 8.
 
 Good Q^leen Bess. 25 
 
 the secrets of his wisdom and the largeness of his statecraft. 
 Sometimes he got in a passion with her ; she bore it. If he re- 
 buked her, she was contrite. He was the only man she ever 
 allowed to sit down in her presence ; and she said to him, " My 
 lord, we make much of you, not for your bad legs, but your good 
 head." When Burleigh was sick, she went to see him ; and when 
 he left her, offended, she wept, and wooed him to come back by 
 some of the playfulest letters she ever wrote. When she went to see 
 him, his door was low, and she had to stoop. His servant said, 
 " Your Majesty must stoop," and the proud blood of the Tudors 
 was up in a moment, but she bethought herself, and said, " For 
 your master's sake I will ; " and down went that noble head. 
 Why ? Because there lay upon a couch of sickness the man who 
 was the sheet anchor of her time, the wisest man that ever ruled 
 this good old English State. Do you wonder, then, when she un- 
 derstood graciousness so thoroughly, that the people loved her? 
 
 But the time to see Queen Elizabeth is at that trying time for 
 all greatness a great emergency. In trying times, little people, 
 you know, faint and have hysterics ; and other little people rush 
 about, generally and promiscuously, ridiculous and useless, 
 screaming or in a rage. But in emergencies the true heart, rising 
 with the occasion, calms as the storm rages; the louder the 
 thunder the quieter the true heart beats. If I judge this mighty 
 monarch by this rule, she comes out proudly triumphant and 
 glorious. Taking as a grand illustration of this phase in her 
 character, her conduct during the celebrated week known in 
 history as " the Armada week," her courage and greatness then 
 displayed itself. For that great day in English history, that 
 splendidest of our glorious annals, is when Spain made its last 
 effort of haughty bigotry and insolent pride, and sent its army to 
 crush this little island of God's love. Where were your little 
 people then ? Remember, there were not many more people in all 
 England then than there are in the three metropolitan counties now. 
 We are monstrously apt to forget how few there were of brave old 
 English hearts at that time. Sometimes you find people marvel- 
 lously ill-informed on homely topics, although enormously clever 
 in showy accomplishments. I sometimes ask young people, 
 when they have just come from school or college, " Did you ever 
 hear of Queen Elizabeth ? " " Oh, yes." " And of the Armada ? "
 
 26 Good Queen Bess. 
 
 " Oh, certainly." " Now, how many grown-up men were there in 
 England in the year when we fought the Spanish Armada?" 
 " Oh, oh ! " They don't know. " Well," I say, " what was the 
 national revenue in the year when we fought the Armada ? " They 
 don't know : Mr Hume didn't mention it. " Then," I say, 
 " what do you know about the battle, if you don't know the height 
 and the weight, and the size of the men who fought it ? Can you 
 judge? What is there in the history of David and Goliath, if you 
 do not know that the haughty challenger was a giant, and Israel's 
 brave champion a stripling? And what do you know about the 
 Armada, if you do not know that Spain was a Goliath, and that 
 it was only our few millions of people, at a time when the nation 
 had but a paltry revenue and but a handful of men, that makes 
 that struggle one of the grandest recorded in history ? " When 
 Spain came up against us, was the Queen frightened? Not at 
 all. She rose with the rest of the nation, and towered above 
 the storm, and showed her ability to guide the ship of State in 
 the face of the violent tempest. With masculine courage she 
 went down the river and reviewed her little army at Tilbury, 
 and, " walking through the ranks," says the old historian, " with 
 truncheon in hand she wonderfully encouraged all of them, and 
 by her presence amongst her soldiers inspirited them." 
 
 And you remember when the danger was great, she made an 
 appeal to the country, and the nation nobly answered it. London 
 was first appealed to for fifteen ships and five thousand men, 
 and the old chronicler says that, two days afterwards, the 
 Londoners humbly entreated the Council, in sign of their perfect 
 love and loyalty to Queen and country, to accept thirty ships 
 and ten thousand men. What do you think of a Queen that can 
 elicit that spirit from a nation ? They gave her double for all 
 that she asked, and the old chronicler says (some of you will like 
 to hear it, and you are quite right), " Even as London, London- 
 like, gave precedent, the whole nation kept true, rank and equi- 
 page." Out of every little cove of Devonshire and Somersetshire, 
 the ships crept up to wait for the great army. The English spirit 
 was lively ; the people were upon their mettle. 
 
 Elizabeth was the greatest patriot this world ever knew. She 
 called her enemies the enemies of her God, her creed, and king- 
 dom. She breathed into this nation, so little and poor then, such
 
 Good Queen Bess. 2 7 
 
 a soul and life and cheerfulness, as made all hearts rejoice. 
 And then she delivered that speech of speeches, in the land of 
 lands, at the time of times, the hour of hours, the darkest and 
 the brightest hour that England ever knew. The historians have 
 put this speech into Her Majesty's mouth. I don't suppose that 
 any reporter was present : and we know that speeches are put 
 into great people's mouths, which sometimes may be a little 
 different from the speeches they make ; but if she did not make 
 that great speech, at all events it is the sort of speech, you may 
 depend upon it, that she would have made upon such an occasion ; 
 and if it does not stir your hearts when you hear it read, it will 
 show that you have become degenerate, that you have lost the 
 right nobleness of the old heroic spirit, and that the pettinesses 
 of modern times have eaten away the heart out of old England. 
 
 Listen : " My loving people, we have been persuaded by some 
 that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit our- 
 selves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery. But I assure 
 you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. 
 Let tyrants fear ; I have always so behaved myself that, under 
 God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the 
 loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects ; and, therefore, I have 
 come amongst you at this time, not as for my recreation and 
 sport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to 
 live or die amongst you all to lay down for my God, for my 
 kingdom, and for my people, my honour and my blood, even in 
 the dust. I know that I have but the body of a weak and feeble 
 woman ; but I have the heart of a king and of a King of 
 England, too and think it foul scorn that Parma, or Spain, or 
 any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my 
 realm ! To which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, 
 I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, the judge 
 and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know 
 already, by your forwardness, that you have deserved rewards and 
 crowns; and we do assure you, on the word of a prince, they shall 
 be duly paid you. In the meantime, my lieutenant-general shall 
 be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded more noble or 
 more worthy subjects. Nor will I suffer myself to doubt but that, 
 by your obedience to my general, by the concord in the camp, 
 and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous
 
 28 Good Queen Bess. 
 
 victory over those enemies of my God, my kingdom, and my 
 people." 
 
 To this speech the soldiers replied : 
 
 " We will not change our credo 
 
 For Pope, nor book, nor bell ; 
 And if the devil come himself, 
 We '11 drive him back to hell." 
 
 (That is simply and perfectly scriptural, you know " Resist the 
 devil, and he will flee from you.") And they would have done it, 
 and we would have done it too. 
 
 You know what became of the Armada. Thanks to the storm, 
 as well as to the valiancy of our seamen, it was broken to pieces, 
 and scattered with wind and wave. Every headland and bay of 
 our coast was covered with its finery, like the rags of a dandy lost 
 in a furze bush. Its annihilation was completed, as it were, by the 
 hand of Heaven itself. The battle was taken out of the hands of 
 men ; and God's terrible winds and storms scattered the proud 
 Spaniards, and drove them to the uttermost parts of the sea. 
 
 The Queen, as soon as it was over, went to St Paul's in state, 
 and there, on her bended knees, before her people, gave heartfelt 
 thanks to Almighty God for His wonderful deliverance wrought to 
 her and to her people ; while Spanish heads hung on the battle- 
 ments of the Cathedral. 
 
 Do you wonder that the people worshipped her ? I do not ; 
 for of all things the people most admire a monarch between whom 
 and themselves there is no gap, no difference of sympathy, one 
 whose heart is beating always in unison with the nation's. Oh, 
 this was a king indeed ! And there have been few like her, before 
 or since. Watch her at this Armada crisis ; admire her pluck, her 
 cool courage, her invincible spirit, her thankfulness when it was 
 all over, her glorious thanksgiving. All these things will show 
 you how the people came to love her until they called her " Good 
 Queen Bess." 
 
 " But her faults ? " Oh, faults, she had endless faults ; but her 
 virtues were in such force ! She knew her people, and she loved 
 them ; she ruled them, and she stood by them. She knew that 
 Europe hated her, and she knew that her throne was shaky, and 
 she determined to steady it, and she did and it has never been
 
 Good Queen Bess. 29 
 
 overthrown yet, and it stands the strongest throne in the world 
 even now. After I have allowed for all her nonsense and feeble- 
 ness and vanity, I turn to the list of kings, and I look down the 
 book of chronicles to boot, and what do I see? Six or seven 
 great men, and that is all ; and amongst the noble heads this is 
 the noblest. 
 
 Some of you think I am going to shirk the difficulty of Mary 
 Queen of Scots ; and if I had gone away without speaking of this 
 matter, you would very likely have said I was afraid to approach 
 it. Well, Mary Queen of Scots what have you got to say in 
 favour of Mary Queen of Scots ? " Oh, she was a very beautiful 
 woman." Well, I grant it; moreover, I wish I had seen her. 
 " Then, she was a very unfortunate woman." Certainly ; and I 
 will add, for your benefit, that she was a very wicked woman. It 
 is past all doubt that she was this. The Scotchmen themselves 
 have had to give her up on this point. She was guilty of murder 
 and adultery, and a few other matters of that kind. But, because 
 she was such a beautiful woman, there is a parcel of sentimental 
 nonsense talked about her, and Queen Elizabeth is blamed for 
 her misery, and Queen Elizabeth's character is blasted because 
 of her execution. Mary's pretty face has, in the opinion of many, 
 blotted out her crimes. As old Sir Charles Napier has said, 
 " Women are such jolly good fellows that it is difficult to believe 
 anything bad of a pretty one." 
 
 Of Mary Queen of Scots it may be said that some of her 
 qualities were admirable ; but her vices were plentiful, terrible, 
 and mountainous in their extent. Why, if some poor creature 
 living in the next street were only guilty of a tithe of her crimes, 
 the puritans of to-day would not tolerate or forgive her; they 
 would gather up their robes of righteousness around them, treat 
 her with scorn, and turn away. But this Queen this woman 
 dipped in vice, cherishing an unholy ambition, with a pride as 
 great and as vile as her harlotry, one of the foulest spots in 
 history she must be excused, pardoned, commiserated, sainted, 
 because of a pretty face, pretty behaviour an hour before death, 
 the giving away of a crucifix, taking of the sacraments, and all the 
 other (very admirable in their way) ceremonies usually attendant 
 in those days on a public execution. What have we to do with 
 such things ? If I spend sympathy on a sinner, it shall be on a
 
 30 Good Queen Bess. 
 
 living one. Why, not one of you who defend Mary Queen of 
 Scots would have touched such a woman with the tips of your 
 fingers if she were living ; but now she is dead you seek to white- 
 wash her with the extinct graces and worn-out glories of a past 
 age, and with a beautiful thread of romance you think to dim her 
 vices and cover her iniquities. Her own countrymen have not 
 been able to absolve her, and shall we do so in England? No. 
 It is for God alone to take to Himself the penitent thief upon the 
 cross by way of holding out hope to the sinner even at the 
 eleventh hour ; but it is no part of man's duty to say that a lady- 
 like death, an angelic smile, a sweet prayer, sacrament taking, 
 and pretty dying shall wipe out a life of lies and iniquity. 
 
 Do you know who Mary Queen of Scots was ? The beautiful 
 banner-bearer f Obscurantism and Popery, backed by the Guises, 
 the most detestable family in Europe. Between them they meant 
 to roll back the light that Luther had spread over the nations, and 
 without doubt, if Mary could have had her way, she would have 
 blotted out all that is great and glorious in our land ; she would 
 have closed the Bible, shut out the light, undone the Reformation, 
 and damned Luther, and consigned all the things that Reformers 
 have been valuing, with all their liberties, to perdition. And you 
 worship her. "Oh, she was a very beautiful woman !" But for 
 this, people would have recognised her true worth or worthless- 
 ness. It is wonderful how these beautiful women do fool us ; but 
 they don't fool me in this particular. I look at the two women, 
 and I say, " Hook-nosed Elizabeth for me ! " I have looked at 
 her rival, seen her beauty ; but I look at her heart, and in spite of 
 her beauty, I thank God she did not win. 
 
 " Oh, but it was a very terrible thing to behead her !" Yes,, 
 but what were they to do ? Why blame Elizabeth for the behead- 
 ing? She was against it at first. She was the very last of 
 monarchs to have played tricks with monarchy ; for the " divine 
 right " theory was very strong in her. Who were the men that 
 consented to Mary's death ? The grave, white-bearded, old 
 statesmen of England; they were the ones who did it. I do 
 not altogether justify Elizabeth's treatment of Mary; it was 
 not womanly, and nobody ever said it was ; but when Mary 
 quartered the arms of England on her shield, and disputed the 
 succession to the throne, what could Elizabeth do ? When Mary
 
 Good Queen Bess. 3 1 
 
 threatened to involve the country in civil war, it ceased to be a 
 quarrel between the two women, and became a grand question of 
 national policy; it was a question whether England should be 
 Protestant or Catholic, and whether she should be overrun with 
 the Guises. Mary was guilty of treason of intense, intentional, 
 hearty, thorough treason against the well-being and safety of 
 the land. She was a pretender, and she was a pretender 
 who was backed by the unscrupulous enemies of England. As 
 long as she lived, our enemies had the focus of insurrection, and 
 her death was thought virtually necessary to the stability and 
 peace of England. I suspect that, if she had been a man, nobody 
 would have made any fuss about it ; but they pity her because 
 she was a woman. But no blame to Queen Elizabeth for her 
 death. She stood out against it as long as it was possible. Blame 
 Walsingham, blame the great people of England if you like; but 
 no blame to Queen Elizabeth, who reluctantly consented. It was 
 a sad necessity. Mary was an intriguing woman, and there was 
 no safety for England as long as she was there. Though I mourn 
 the necessity, I throw myself into the spirit of those days of terror 
 and of seeming darkness, and my soul is with the hook-nosed 
 Queen ; for I do so passionately value the freedom of this land, 
 that I count even the life of a beautiful woman worth sacrifice, 
 rather than that our glorious liberty should have been imperilled 
 for a moment. I may be wrong. I am a crusty old man, and 
 have got past my romance, but I prefer liberty to the prettiest 
 woman I ever met ; and if Queen Mary meant mischief to this 
 dear old realm, I say, " Let her look out !" " But did not the 
 church bells ring when Mary was executed?" Do you think that 
 the men of the age of Shakespeare, and the men of the age of 
 Sidney, and of the age of Walter Raleigh, in the days of gallantry 
 and chivalry, of woman-worship and adoration do you think 
 that these men were brutes ? Why did they ring the bells ? 
 Because a woman was dead? because a queen had been be- 
 headed? Never, never. But for this reason that danger was 
 gone, that the land was safe, the rock of offence was removed, 
 the stone of stumbling was gotten away, and the path of old 
 England seemed to lead clear into the great wide realms of liberty 
 and freedom freedom of thought and of speech. So these 
 gallant fathers of ours rang the bells, although the sad occasion
 
 32 Good Queen Bess. 
 
 was the death of a beautiful woman. We may pity the unhappy 
 fate of Mary, but let not that pity induce us to commit the great 
 mistake of making amiable dying compensate for unholy living. 
 
 The bead-roll of Elizabeth's many virtues would take years to 
 tell ; but you have heard my tale, and now we must come to the 
 sad, sad scene where the aged queen lay dying, but scorning to 
 be laid upon her bed. As to Elizabeth's death, there are two 
 sorts of stories about it. Some people make her die broken- 
 hearted. I do not believe this. I think she died because she 
 was tired of it all. And her death is very noble, very grand, if 
 we look at it rightly. Some say she died for love of Essex. 
 Well, we shall not be angry with her if she did. Why not ? What 
 harm ? But as she lay dying there, how the old lion woke up at 
 times in the woman's heart, and how the true devotedness came 
 out as she asked them to move her nearer the window, that she 
 might hear through the lattice the peal of the organ and the 
 chanted psalms of the church, to which, after all, she had been 
 true, through all her follies and vanities ! What a rebuke to 
 greatness is the sad end of that great queen ! Almost alone, 
 neglected and forsaken, almost forgotten, she lay like some grand 
 old Scandinavian of past ages, whose Norse blood rebelled against 
 the idea of dying on a bed. They lifted her up with cushions, a 
 little higher and a little higher, and still she refused her bed. 
 Where were her courtiers then? They had left her, and had 
 gone to the North, to look after the rising sun there, that first of 
 the eminent blessings which the Scotch bestowed upon us James 
 the First, the Scottish Solon who had the honour of introducing 
 the race of Stuarts to the English throne. While they were doing 
 this, the great, grand, stern, ascetic, austere old Queen, disgusted 
 with the world, and finding that after all it was but vanity, took 
 days and days to die. When asked who should succeed her, she 
 replied, " None but a king." She died at last sadly, but gloriously 
 and nobly, leaving Old England so full of power, courage, and 
 patience, that the words which Shakespeare put in the mouth of 
 Cranmer, and which one may almost term a prophecy, were ful- 
 filled almost to the letter, and have become matter of history.* 
 She had blessed the land ; truth did nurse her, and she grew 
 strong in it ; liberty flourished under her ; her own did bless her ; 
 * King Henry the Eighth, Act v., Scene 4.
 
 Good Queen Bess. 33 
 
 her foes did shake like a field of beaten corn, and got well 
 thrashed afterwards ; Englishmen did eat in safety, and God was 
 truly known in her days. She had kept up the old spirit, and her 
 ministers and people had gathered round her in love as round 
 some mighty mother. She was loved by all good people, feared 
 by the bad, and disliked by the frivolous. 
 
 Some of you may again read, and with more thought, the 
 reign of that great Queen, and you may then meditate upon the 
 sweetness and familiarity of the dear old name. She gave titles 
 and honours where she found truth, talent, courage, and integ- 
 rity ; and she never chose fools for her counsellors. She may be 
 said almost to stand alone among England's monarchs. Two 
 exceptions will I claim Alfred, " the truth-teller," the immortal 
 Saxon ; and the stout-hearted puritan Huntingdonshire farmer, 
 Cromwell and they might bear her company for life. If she 
 faltered for a moment, those two might put their arms towards 
 her, and with the pious Alfred and the stalwart Cromwell she 
 would never stumble or fall. 
 
 I trust you have seen enough of her excellences to make you 
 understand why this nation reverenced Elizabeth, in spite of her 
 imperious temper and her small spirit in some things. In spite 
 of her eminent foibles, her marvellous weaknesses, if Queen 
 Elizabeth be rightly judged, you will agree with me that she 
 amply deserved the sweet familiar title of "Good Queen Bess;' 
 and I do say that that title is one of the noblest that ever a 
 nation bestowed upon a monarch.
 
 SIR FRANCIS DRAKE. 
 
 BORN 1545. DIED 1596. (FROM 36x11 HENRY VIII. TO 
 3TH ELIZABETH.) 
 
 R subject this evening is the life and doings of that brave 
 old " sea-dog," Sir Francis Drake, one of the earliest of our 
 great sea-captains, the first freebooter who showed the way to the 
 treasure-house of the Indies, our first circumnavigator of the globe, 
 and one of the chief agents in the humiliation of Spain and the 
 destruction of the Armada. 
 
 As usual, I presume you have a large acquaintance with English 
 and other history, so that you will be able to supply the back- 
 ground upon which I shall, of course roughly, paint. So long 
 as that old and, in its day, celebrated work, " The Buccaneers," 
 was a school-book in general vogue, the name and exploits of Sir 
 Francis Drake were familiar to every schoolboy ; but whether we 
 have grown better or wiser, or whether other subjects of a more 
 important kind have gained prominence in present times, certain 
 ft is that Drake is, to almost every Englishman, very little more 
 than a name. Time would fail me to give anything like a lengthy 
 description of this characteristic Englishman's story. I hope, how- 
 ever, to be able to show that a better, braver, or more plucky sea- 
 king never came from Scandinavia. 
 
 The old international laws were marked by curious ideas 01 
 right and wrong. Piracy was considered quite a gentlemanly 
 occupation ; and if a Scandinavian king had two or three sons, 
 he would give them each a good ship and his blessing, promising 
 them his curse if they were cowards enough to die in their beds. 
 A man was at liberty to fight with anybody he liked at sea ; and 
 such were the rough, unceremonious, hard-fighting times in which 
 the lot of Drake was cast. 
 
 If, however, you are going to measure Drake by a tea-table 
 standard, I must confess that his character will be at once con-
 
 Sir Francis Drake. 35 
 
 demned. For my own part, I cannot justify all that Drake did; 
 but I think that much may be excused when viewed as it ought 
 to be viewed i.e., in connection with the times in which he lived. 
 His merits are great : it was he who first found his way to the East 
 Indies, and laid the foundation of our subsequent dominion there; 
 it was he who put the first English fort in Oregon, and that formed 
 our right and title to that tract of country ; he was the main con- 
 queror of the Spanish Armada : he was, to use his own quaint 
 language, the singe'r of the King of Spain's beard and he gave it 
 such a singeing that it has never grown properly since. 
 
 Drake lived at one of the turning-points of English history. He 
 combined in himself the knight-errant, the buccaneer, and the 
 bagman. It is difficult to understand which suited him best 
 to be hard fighting, or to be getting something, though he seldom 
 fought for nothing. It was during the reign of Elizabeth, that 
 most glorious king that perhaps this country or any other has ever 
 had for, though a woman, one hardly thinks of her as a woman. 
 She possessed all a man's strength, and very little of man's nonsense. 
 She had one of the most courageous hearts and glorious of spirits, 
 and that glorious gift in stormy times, a quiet heart. The majority 
 of people are useless at such times, and exhibitions of fright and 
 fear are all they can contribute ; but the strong hearts of the world 
 grow quiet when the storm is loudest. 
 
 Queen Elizabeth had about her the greatest of great men. She 
 had Bacon for her philosopher, Shakespeare for her dramatist, 
 Spenser for her poet, Drake for her sailor, and a score of others 
 as good as they to help her. And that right royal king was 
 honoured by them all. Lord Bacon says, " She was the wisest 
 person I ever met with." People run after Mary Queen of Scots, 
 but I always feel a savage pleasure in glorifying her rival. Pope 
 Sixtus said that if he were to marry her, there would be a second 
 Alexander the Great born. She was the supremest person in 
 Europe of that day. It was during this reign that that great, 
 rough, strong, brave, covetous, fierce man Drake lived. 
 
 In those days international law was only just growing into 
 existence, and nations at peace on land used to prey upon every- 
 body on the sea. I am not defending anything; I am only 
 telling you about Drake, and endeavouring to show you that 
 Drake had not your superior advantages, and therefore we cannot
 
 36 Sir Francis Drake. 
 
 try him justly by the same standard as you should be judged by. 
 A man's rightful powers are the accepted principles and customary 
 forms of his own time. Drake was one of the most typical of 
 Englishmen ; and remember, when he went round the world it 
 was in a little ship that some of you would not trust yourselves 
 in upon the Reservoir. In this little ship this mighty man made 
 voyages which would frighten some of you to undertake in the 
 best ships of our modern times. 
 
 Francis Drake was a man of low degree, but he could not help 
 that. He was born in 1545, near Tavistock, in Devonshire 
 which, by the way, is the old heroic county of England and 
 was the eldest of twelve sons. His father, though rich in children, 
 was poor in purse. He was a poor Protestant parson, an out- 
 and-out Devonshireman. Now, he, being a Protestant, got into 
 trouble in Devonshire. He could not subscribe to the Six Articles 
 Act, which was an Act, as its royal framer * styled it, " for abolish- 
 ing diversity of opinion." The Act did not succeed, however, 
 and none but fools desired that it should succeed ; for no Acts 
 can effect the bringing in of uniformity of opinion. 
 
 Francis Drake, the eldest of a large family of sons, got very 
 little education, except what Dame Nature and his school dame 
 supplied him with. He accompanied his father in his wanderings, 
 and we find them both at Upnor, on the Medway. There his 
 father got a place among the seamen in the King's navy, to read 
 prayers to them. Thus, as Thomas Fuller quaintly says concern- 
 ing Francis Drake, " He was born in Devon, brought up in Kent, 
 God dividing the honour betwixt two counties, that one might 
 have his birth and the other his education/' Poverty compelled 
 the early apprenticeship of Francis to the master of a small barque 
 trading to France and Zealand. The master of the barque was 
 a very strict man, who believed in the old saying, " It is good for 
 a man that he bear the yoke in his youth." But Drake had both 
 
 * Henry VIII. TJie Statute of the Six Articles, or the Bloody Bill, as the 
 Protestants justly termed it. In this law the doctrine of the real presence was 
 established, the communion in one kind, the perpetual obligation of vows of 
 chastity, the utility of private masses, the celibacy of the clergy, and the 
 necessity of auricular confession. Whoever denied these articles of faith was 
 subject to be burned, or to other severe and cruel punishments. This statute 
 was repealed shortly after Henry's death, when the Earl of Hertford was 
 Protector.
 
 Sir Francis Drake. 37 
 
 pains and patience in his composition, and by-and-bye, when the 
 master of the barque died, he left the vessel to Francis, who was 
 now in a fair way to become prosperous. But he was soon tired 
 of it, for "the narrow seas were a prison for so large a spirit, 
 born for greater undertakings," so he sold the ship and went 
 off to the Spanish Main. In 1567, to his ears came the 
 news that the famous John Hawkins was going to make a voyage 
 to the West Indies ; so away he goes to join John Hawkins. 
 Hawkins went to steal a cargo of African slaves, and carry them 
 to the Spanish Main, and there dispose of them. He thought no 
 shame of his traffic, nor did the folks at home, for Queen Eliza- 
 beth rewarded him by making him a present of "a coat of arms, 
 whose crest was a demi-moor, properly coloured, bound by a cord." 
 At Rio de la Hacha, in the Gulf of Mexico, when they arrived at 
 the coast, Hawkins found that the Viceroy of the place had pro- 
 hibited the trade ; but Hawkins and Drake, not very nice about 
 international law, and insisting upon the terms of a treaty, which 
 they said authorised them to do so, attacked and sacked the 
 town, and, having established a market, sold their slaves. The 
 Viceroy, disgusted, entrapped the squadron into San Juan de 
 Ulloa by means of a sealed agreement, and there attacked it, 
 burned several of the vessels, and massacred many of the crew, 
 taking others prisoners. Hawkins and Drake escaped. No doubt 
 Hawkins was wrong ; but the Spaniards were wrong too. The 
 good old doctrine was, " Keep no faith with heretics ; make any 
 bargain." Honesty and truth were considered too good to be 
 wasted on heretics. Unfortunately for the Spaniards, they tor- 
 tured some of these English sailors under the Inquisition. Two 
 English seamen were burned alive in Mexico and one at Seville. 
 When the news reached England, the feelings of the people were 
 so excited against Spain as to induce the idea of fighting her. 
 Old England's heart took fire, and never stopped burning until it 
 had singe'd the K ing of Spain's beard, since which event there has 
 been a succession of boy kings who cannot grow them. 
 
 This attack on Spaniards forms the background of the daring 
 exploits that marked Drake's life. He lost his venture, and 
 determined on revenge. He was enraged at the loss of his own 
 ship, and the treasure it contained, at San Juan; for Drake 
 was always one who looked to the main chance. Arnid all his
 
 38 Sir Francis Drake. 
 
 fighting and his chivalry he never forgot the gold and the silver : 
 he resembled a man with two faces, the one turned towards the 
 knight-errant and chivalric times of old, and the other towards 
 the nineteenth century. What did he do ? He conceived the 
 idea of fighting the King of Spain single-handed, and he did it 
 too. The Pope was going to put Elizabeth down. Drake con- 
 sulted a clergyman, a sea-chaplain, who said he thought he might 
 lawfully take it out of the King of Spain, and repair his losses 
 upon him. Yes, that was fair ; the case was clear in sea-divinity, 
 and few of us are such arch-infidels as not to believe in a doctrine 
 that makes for our own profit. Yes, he would take it out of the 
 King of Spain. So this little man proclaims war upon the King 
 of Spain. Let us see how the dwarf proved a match for the giant. 
 He fitted out a fleet of two little vessels of 70 and 25 tons, and 
 sailed down into the southern seas, where Spain, by virtue of the 
 Pontiff's Bull, had a monopoly of trade. He scoured the coasts 
 from Terra del Fuego to Mexico, attacked Nombre de Dios and 
 Vera Cruz, burnt and pillaged various places, and made a seizure 
 of plenty of gold. He reached Darien, crossed the isthmus, and 
 made his way to the Pacific, and thence home. Queen Elizabeth 
 was delighted with him. 
 
 Drake was the first Englishman who saw the Pacific. When 
 this quaint man came to it, he was so vehemently transported 
 with desire to navigate the sea, that, falling down on his knees, 
 he implored the Divine assistance, that he might at some time or 
 other sail thither, and make a perfect discovery of the same ; and 
 hereunto he bound himself with a vow. He never forgot it ; 
 and from that time forward his mind was pricked on continually 
 night and day to perform his vow. Drake made few vows that 
 he did not perform. The sight of the great Pacific Ocean haunted 
 him, and he at last started on his wonderful voyage round the 
 world in a little ship called the Pelican, afterwards named the 
 Golden Hind, the first English keel that ever ploughed those 
 waters. On some desolate shore he found a gibbet, " on which," 
 he says, "I thanked God, and took courage." And why not? 
 Some people see no reason in it, but it showed that some civilised 
 people had been there, a people who had handed judgment and 
 justice over to the law, who were above mere revenge ; and so, when 
 he saw that sublime gibbet, he " thanked God, and took courage."
 
 Sir Francis Drake. 39 
 
 Now, two men went out with Drake on his great expedition, 
 and the fate of one of them is considered a terrible blot on Drake's 
 memory. He was a gentleman named Doughty ; this Mr Doughty 
 was hung, and it has been put down as a murder. After inquiry, 
 it seems to me that Mr Doughty was a gentleman with a long 
 tongue ; a bouncing, boasting, insubordinate person, who, because 
 he was a partner in a limited company, was not disposed to bow 
 down to the manager. He thought himself quite as good as 
 Drake. Now, the deck of a ship is not the place in which to 
 show this sort of spirit. It won't do. You cannot have a Repub- 
 lic on board ship. The will of the captain must be supreme, and 
 all but despotic ; and Drake is a man who will have no nonsense 
 on board the Golden Hind. So some sort of court-martial was 
 got up, and Doughty was tried. It is a strange thing to under- 
 stand. He was tried and sentenced ; and then, just before he was 
 hung, he and Drake sat down, and took the communion of the 
 Lord's Supper together. Why not ? He had been fairly tried and 
 fairly sentenced ; they quite thought that Doughty should be hung, 
 and so they broke the bread of love together. Doughty was hung, 
 and the other went back to his ship. It was no private quarrel ; 
 but because it was an English ship a bit of old England of which 
 Drake was the commander and Doughty had been braggish and 
 noisy and insubordinate, it was agreed that Doughty should be 
 quietly hung, and he himself acknowledged the justice of the 
 sentence. 
 
 But there is a stranger part of the story still. Chaplain Fletcher 
 by-and-bye turns round and begins to take Doughty's side. So 
 Drake said, " I must put you down, but you are not worth hang- 
 ing, Thomas Fletcher ; you are the vilest knave that ever lived." 
 
 So Drake sits cross-legged, and summons Fletcher before him, 
 and says to him, " I excommunicate thee, Thomas Fletcher, from 
 the Church of God, in the name of Jesus Christ." " But Drake 
 was a sea-captain." Certainly. But on board the Golden Hind 
 this man, Francis Drake, was viceroy on behalf of the monarch 
 who was head of the Church of England. So he said, " I excom- 
 municate thee, Thomas Fletcher." (The Church of England is 
 surrounded with a very prickly rim ; you have got to cave in, or 
 they won't give communion to you.) There is something droll in 
 it Drake perched on a barrel for an Episcopal throne droll, but 
 charming.
 
 40 Sir Francis Drake. 
 
 This man was a very strange person, and on board his little 
 ship he was a king. Drake a king ? Yes ; and when he sat 
 down to dinner, he had a trumpet sounded, and made a proclama- 
 tion that he was going to dine. He knows the power of gold lace, 
 and that people like to be ordered about by gold lace. At one 
 time he puts on the black cap, and sentences a man to death ; at 
 another, he puts on short sleeves and gold lace, and proclaims, 
 " I, Francis Drake, am going to dine." That is human nature. 
 It is said that he was sometimes vindictive and cruel, but you 
 would do him an injustice if you thought there was any hardness 
 in this man. He waited upon the sick sailors with the tenderness 
 of a woman. He was tender as a woman, playful as a child, fierce 
 in fight, fervent in prayer, terrible when angry, soft, gentle, merci- 
 ful, even tearful, if need be. 
 
 He now makes his way through the Straits of Magellan to the 
 then unknown west coast of America. No Englishman had been 
 there before, and he had no book to tell him what to do. He 
 makes his way northward, till he comes to California, and goes on 
 till he gets to 48 deg. north latitude. His men could not bear 
 that, and they said they must go home. Well, it is arranged that 
 the party will go home ; but they won't creep back again. Drake 
 determines to go boldly across the mid ocean to the Moluccas and 
 Java. This voyage took him two years and ten months. The 
 Golden Hind was the ship of ships. In that little ship of 120 tons 
 this dauntless man sailed round the world. The big ships that 
 are built now are vulgar, though tourists go running after them. 
 An Italian artist once took a cherry-stone, and carved such things 
 upon it that it was worth more than a whole row of Birmingham 
 houses. Size, bigness, does not count for everything. 
 
 On Drake's return, special honours and marks of royal favour 
 were shown him by Good Queen Bess. She visited him on board 
 the Golden Hind at Deptford, and he entertained her at breakfast. 
 And then she made him kneel down, and she knighted him there, 
 and gave him a crest. Did ever king or queen do a more graceful 
 act than that ? To go down to him on board his own ship, and 
 knight him there ! The grace of it lends lustre to the act. In 
 knighting him, that splendid woman knew that she borrowed more 
 glory from him than she could give to him. Subsequently there 
 was some quarrel between an old Sir Barnard Drake and him, as
 
 Sir Francis Drake. 4 1 
 
 to whose was the crest. The Queen boxed their ears, and then 
 settled the question of the crest by giving Francis for his a ship 
 in full sail, with a cable running up to heaven, as an emblem of 
 the guidance which she believed he had had from above ; and in 
 glorious satire upon Sir Barnard, she ordered his crest to be hung 
 upside down on Sir Francis Drake's mainsail, which much dis- 
 comfited Sir Barnard. 
 
 In 1585 we find Drake gone off to Spain and Portugal. What 
 a little people we were in those days ! How many people had we 
 then ? Only a few hundreds of thousands, and our income was 
 but small. Spain was proud and grasping. One great sea was 
 called the Spanish Main. And now came the great fight of the 
 world, when little England, headed chiefly by little Drake, over- 
 threw the King of Spain. Drake visited Virginia, he took the 
 settlers on board, and brought them home. It was a terrible 
 time, an heroic time, a time to be remembered. For news came 
 that there was a mighty armada coming from Spain to invade 
 England. It was enough to shake the heart of this little people ; 
 but our fathers were not easily shaken. It was then that Drake said 
 he should like to go and singe the King of Spain's beard. " They 
 shall never reach England, except they swim,'' said Drake ; and 
 so it proved, for he utterly routed the whole of them. He went 
 to Spain, attacked their ships, and swept away all their prepara- 
 tions for the armada, and secured for England a twelvemonth's 
 breathing-time to get ready. We can excuse a man for talking 
 loudly when he has done such big deeds. When the formidable 
 Spanish Armada did come, Drake had the principal part in its 
 defeat. The story was told that Spain's mighty fleet was really 
 coming. The very names of the ships and the names of the men 
 that commanded them were enough to have taken the breath out 
 of old England. But Drake was equal to it. A strong man, 
 when he has done all he can, is calm and quiet, though the storm 
 is near. He shaved himself, and quietly got ready. Shaved ? 
 Certainly. Shaved on the morning of the battle ? Yes ; and 
 when he had finished his rubber he went into a boat and got on 
 board his ship. This man's practised sailorship perhaps saved 
 England. Drake, true to his instincts, fixed his practised eye 
 upon the treasury, and said, " We will have that ship." He gave 
 hard blows for hard gold. He attacked the big ship ; but they
 
 42 Sir Francis Drake. 
 
 couldn't get at him, you know, he was so small. However, it 
 ended in his taking that ship and bagging that gold. One big 
 Spanish ship yielded without a blow when the commander found 
 that he was summoned to surrender by the terrible Drake. Thus 
 he utterly annihilated the Spanish Armada. Queen Elizabeth 
 was fearfully stingy. Her cry was always " Give, give." Her 
 sacred Majesty never paid to-day what she could put oft' till to- 
 morrow, and the poor sailors could not get paid. These English 
 sailors had to be paid for drubbing the Spaniards with Spanish 
 money. 
 
 And now Drake goes away on his last and unfortunate voyage 
 to the West Indies. He wants to have another touch at Spain. 
 It was on this voyage that poor Hawkins and Drake quarrelled 
 for the first time. This preyed upon the tough old seaman, and 
 he sickened and died. And soon after that, Death touched Drake, 
 and that great old sailor died, and of course he was buried where 
 he ought to have been buried in the sea. There' is no place like 
 the sea to bury a sailor in. The famous verse of his old panegyrist 
 runs thus : 
 
 " The waves became his winding-sheet, 
 
 The waters were his tomb ; 
 
 But for his fame the ocean sea 
 
 Was not sufficient room." 
 
 Besides his fame as a sailor, Drake has been brought into 
 prominence by introducing tobacco into this country. He 
 was boastful, fond of popularity, and a clever speaker. He had 
 something to talk about, and knew how to say it. Some of his 
 actions nothing can justify. There used to be many Devon 
 peasants' tales and superstitions about him. These people, on 
 passing Drake's house at night, used to run by it, fancying they 
 heard the shrieks of people being murdered. These poor folk 
 thought that some of his gold was not well come by. Of course 
 the Spaniards disliked him ; and when Spanish brats would not 
 be quiet, their mothers frightened them with Drake. In summing 
 up the distinctive traits of his character, one may call him a 
 Scandinavian viking cropped out late, with such differences as 
 changed creed and culture may make. He had an equal love of 
 hard blows and hard money. Glory, gold, and yarn-spinning 
 were his delight. He ventured on trackless oceans without chart
 
 Sir Francis Drake. 43 
 
 or map, with a bold heart and fearless daring. He was patient, 
 self-enduring, manfully pious, energetic, and of admirable pluck. 
 He had a great dislike to opposition. Some have called him 
 arrogant, for he had a talkative and somewhat boastful tongue. He 
 had what Sir William Monson calls " the four principles" to further 
 his gift of speaking "boldness of speech, understanding in what 
 he spoke, inclination to speak, use in speaking." Drake's arrogance 
 is easily tolerated ; for, loud as was his bark, his bite was far worse, 
 and his big words were never the " sauce of small deeds." He 
 was an Englishman through and through. He was a downright 
 good specimen of a brave-hearted, fearless, God-fearing English 
 sailor (for with all his faults he feared God in his way) ; a man 
 whose virtues far exceeded his faults, and whose glorious achieve- 
 ments blotted out what stains some of his deeds may have cast 
 upon his fame.
 
 ENGLAND DURING THE COMMONWEALTH. 
 
 A.D. 1649 TO A.D. 1660. 
 
 [The following brief report of the first two lectures of a course on 
 "The History of England during the Commonwealth" is 
 only given here because it may serve as an introduction, 
 however imperfect, to the lectures on Cromwell which 
 follow.] 
 
 IV /T R DAWSON introduced his subject by indicating the spirit 
 ** in which such an investigation should proceed, as he con- 
 sidered it not his province to furnish a dry catalogue of facts or a 
 barren array of dates, drawn into due chronological sequence, but 
 to search after the motive power behind, which had produced 
 great actions, and might reproduce them again ; for mere know- 
 ledge, when abstracted from the principles which are laid in our 
 common nature and evolve action, is nearly worthless. Individual 
 life, he believed, formed a guide to the study of history, since 
 history but records the manner in which the feelings and passions 
 of men of a like nature were expressed under peculiar circumstances. 
 The lecturer confessed himself desirous of maintaining impar- 
 tiality, and said that, while he would examine the events of the 
 period under consideration by the light of modern principles, he 
 would allow for the opinions, feelings, and circumstances of the 
 time. He described this epoch in English history as the noblest an 
 epoch remarkable for the struggle which was made by all the great 
 moving principles to be represented in the contest. The Jewish 
 mind was indicated in the warlike songs of David which were 
 chanted by the soldiers of Cromwell ; the influence of the Classics 
 was manifested, in that stern and uncompromising discharge of 
 their duty, which finds so many parallels in the history of Greece 
 and Rome. It was the trial season, also, of religious opinions, as, 
 in the agitation of the time, there were brought into contact
 
 England during the Commonwealth. 45 
 
 Romanists, Episcopalians, Puritans, Presbyterians, Independents, 
 and others, all striving after success. Then, too, was arrayed 
 chivalry against popular rights, absolutism against the Constitu- 
 tion, and feudalism against the freedom of the people. 
 
 Mr Dawson then proceeded to refute the views advanced by 
 Rousseau in his treatise on " The Social Contract, or Principles 
 of Political Right," where monarchy is represented as a contract 
 originally framed between the king and his people. The lecturer 
 concluded one of the ablest and most eloquent addresses to which 
 we have listened, by an examination of the " divine right of 
 kings ;" and expressed an opinion that much of the evil which had 
 been wrought on the earth by the abuse of power, might be traced 
 to the defective education of kings, who were taught this mis- 
 chievous doctrine of divine right, and made to forget that the 
 people necessitated kings, and not kings the people ; and that for 
 the people's interest only were kings made to govern. 
 
 Mr Dawson began the second lecture of the course by remark- 
 ing that in adopting the eclectic mode of conducting the inquiry 
 into this the most important epoch of English history, it would be 
 necessary to introduce constitutional politics not the local and 
 temporary interests so commonly regarded as politics, but the 
 wide and embracing principles which affect the happiness and 
 national well-being of the whole people a class of politics which, 
 rightly understood, had their foundation in religion, and, like 
 religion, had for their chief end the improvement of mankind. 
 Many writers upon this portion of our history start with the 
 assumption that the constitution was already fixed in the time of 
 Charles I., whereas the struggle was partly in order to settle the 
 constitution ; and as it is impossible in a free country that it ever 
 can be definitely fixed, the assumption is eminently fallacious. 
 
 The lecturer, having briefly alluded to the defective principles 
 of Rousseau, proceeded to give an interesting sketch of the rise 
 and progress of kingship. The earliest form of individual power 
 exerted over numbers might be referred to the patriarchal age, 
 when the head of a household became its ruler. Then, families 
 having common interests, united to achieve their common ends, 
 and death or other causes reducing the number of the rulers, the 
 government of the whole became concentrated in one individual.
 
 46 England during the Commonwealth. 
 
 This widened into tribes and chiefs, until an increase of popula- 
 tion made them nations, and their supreme ruler king. It was 
 observed that in countries where feudalism had intervened, the 
 monarchy became mixed ; where it had not, monarchy was 
 absolute. 
 
 The next portion of the lecture traced the elevation of the 
 people into a political element of the State. Before they enjoyed 
 political influence, the State differences were between the king 
 and the nobles the barons attempting, by lessening the royal 
 power, to increase their own, and the king endeavouring, by 
 weakening their authority, to extend the royal prerogative. The 
 feudal barons or chiefs, to increase their power, sought to pro- 
 pitiate the inhabitants of cities and towns, by granting them 
 certain powers of judicature ; while the kings also endeavoured to 
 secure their allegiance by confirming and extending their privileges, 
 and strengthening the towns to resist the barons. These immuni- 
 ties and rights drew the population from the country into the 
 towns ; and during the quarrels between the aristocracy and the 
 court, the people rose to be a recognised portion of the State. 
 The king and nobles then becoming alarmed at the increasing 
 power of the people, gave up their "ancient quarrel," and made 
 common cause against them. This alliance has been chiefly 
 supported by a standing army, and by the church, the dignitaries 
 of which, being of the aristocracy, and having power over their 
 subordinates, have almost always ranked on the side of the king 
 and the nobles. 
 
 Charles was then described as attempting to take from the 
 people many of the political privileges which they had received 
 from his predecessors, one of the most important of which was the 
 right of the Commons to receive and appropriate the public 
 revenue of the country ; and taxation, therefore, was one of the 
 immediate causes of bringing about the crisis which accomplished 
 the revolution and established the Commonwealth. Charles 
 found himself engaged in war a war which the parliament had 
 stimulated while the funds were inadequate to carry it on with 
 spirit. The Commons voted a supply, but it was not sufficient. 
 He demanded more, but they refused unless he would consent to 
 discuss their rights and adjust the differences existing between 
 themselves and him. The king threatened ; the Commons re-
 
 England during the Commonwealth. 47 
 
 mained inexorable. Recourse was then had to " benevolences " 
 and " loans." Loans they were not, since they were demanded 
 by the King, and those who refused were imprisoned. These 
 extreme measures, however, alarmed the King, who dismissed the 
 prisoners upon their petitioning for release. But five gentlemen 
 refused to accept liberty unless discharged by the laws of the 
 country. Charles consented to this appeal, and the prisoners 
 were liberated on the ground of unjust imprisonment. They had 
 been detained contrary to the written law, but in conformity with 
 the law of usage or common law. 
 
 Mr Dawson then adverted to the benefits of the Habeas Cor : 
 pus Act ; spoke of the withdrawal of confidence from Charles by 
 all parties in consequence of his duplicity ; pointed out the evil 
 counsel of the queen ; and in criticising the opinion of D'Israeli, 
 that " Charles was a martyr to direct taxation," showed its 
 falsity. He brought this able and instructive lecture to a close 
 by passing a bright eulogium upon the character of the Puri- 
 tans, commending the noble conduct which marked their course 
 throughout the great struggle, but reproving their strictness, which, 
 upon the "pendulum" principle, appears to have been adopted 
 as the farthest from the follies and guilty excesses with which they 
 were surrounded.
 
 THE FOREIGN POLITICS OF OLIVER 
 CROMWELL. 
 
 (16491658.) 
 
 T^HE day has long gone by when it was necessary to vindicate 
 ^ to Englishmen who read and think for themselves, instead 
 of slavishly following the cuckoo cry of men of the Restoration, 
 the character of Cromwell from the aspersions and many mis- 
 understandings under which it lay misunderstandings which 
 arose because it was to the interest of these men to cry down one 
 in whose presence they felt their own dwarfdom. 
 
 In reference to his foreign politics, we shall find Cromwell a 
 very old-fashioned man indeed. I look at him with more interest 
 in these times ; for now when there are not many great men 
 living, it is well to go to the great men dead. Cromwell carried 
 into foreign politics the peculiarity of his English politics. He had 
 one great determining principle as to what he should do and 
 that was, to do that which he counted right. He read his Bible, 
 from which he drew the true polity for the Church, and out of that 
 polity he deduced a true polity for the State. The Puritans in 
 those days tried to govern here and abroad on Bible principles. 
 
 They set up duty, honour, and right, above expediency or 
 prudence, or that regard for vested interests which in subsequent 
 times has made so large a part of political science. The con- 
 sequence was that Cromwell was neither ashamed nor afraid to 
 fight at home or abroad to uphold a principle or a creed ; and 
 any battle he fought was for that purpose. It is now out of date 
 to go to war for a creed ; but in Cromwell's day it was not so : a 
 creed was his guiding principle believing, as he did, that Popery 
 and slavery meant the same thing, and that Protestantism and 
 liberty were identical. It looked so to the men of that age 
 because they saw that whenever there went on in the world any 
 peculiar devilry, any extraordinary cruelty, mighty iniquity, or
 
 The Foreign Politics of Oliver Cromwell. 49 
 
 great shame, it was sure to be done under Papal sanction, or at 
 least under the Papal banner. In those days, the war between 
 the Protestant and Catholic was not over. The thirty years' war 
 in Germany almost smoked in its ashes at that time. The trace 
 of the armies of Tilly and Wallenstein was yet to be found in 
 Europe. The persecution of the Vaudois came, to show that the 
 days of Rome's cruelty were not numbered with the past. Every- 
 where Cromwell regarded Romanism as devilry, cruelty, and 
 tyranny ; for Romanism, in those days, kept the Holy Office of 
 the Inquisition in full force ; and if there was one thing that 
 provoked the wrath of England, it was the Inquisition, especially 
 as it was sometimes not nice in taking an Englishman under its 
 merciful protection. Remembering, also, that the old hatred to 
 Roman Catholics, arising from the attempt made by Spain to 
 invade England in Elizabeth's time, had not gone down, and 
 bearing in mind the insolent pretences then made by Spain to the 
 dominion of the New World, you can easily understand how this 
 should cause Cromwell to draw his sword for Protestantism. For 
 God's truth, which he took Protestantism to be, Cromwell always 
 fought. 
 
 But in his foreign politics, Cromwell was not a theoretical poli- 
 tician. He never tried to thrust particular forms of government 
 upon a foreign people. Many consider that he was a Republican, 
 or one insisting that Republicanism was the only true and proper 
 form of government; but nowhere do we find him doing this. In 
 reality he was not particularly nice about .the form of govern- 
 ment, provided it embodied what he considered God's truth. If 
 he had thought that " Oliver Rex " was more charming than 
 " Oliver Protector," then Oliver Rex he would have become ; for 
 there were then, and still are, many to whom words are great 
 symbols. In those ignorant days, if the being king or called 
 king would have enabled him to reign better, he would have been 
 king. 
 
 Like Elizabeth, Oliver Cromwell always kept a look-out for 
 the good men. He entered the arena of foreign politics, then, 
 with no desire to thrust on other countries our form of govern- 
 ment, but with a determination to support the right wherever it 
 was trodden down. Full of a great patriotic ambition, he knew 
 that England ought to be the top country ; he saw that Elizabeth 
 
 D
 
 50 The Foreign Politics of Oliver Cromwell. 
 
 had begun to make it so ; he mourned over the enfeebling booby- 
 isms of James the First, and he determined to carry out his 
 famous boast that the name of Englishman should be as that of 
 the Roman of old a shield and protection against all wrong, 
 wheresoever he might be. Even Hume has said of Cromwell, that 
 England, under him, was a terror to evil-doers, and a praise to 
 them that did well, and was never so much dreaded or so much 
 respected. And you may be sure of this, that no man or country 
 is much respected that is not also much dreaded. That was the 
 state to which Cromwell brought England. 
 
 The first instance in Cromwell's policy I shall refer to will be 
 the Dutch War, which was, probably, an unfortunate war, being 
 Protestant against Protestant, and, according to Cromwell, an 
 unlucky one ; but it arose, not from a Protestant question, but 
 from a question of commerce and trade. There was a debate 
 about the sovereignty of what were called the narrow seas. We 
 claimed it, and we required the Dutch to strike their topsails in 
 certain places, in sight of English vessels. There was also the 
 question as to whether the Dutch should pay tithe for fishing 
 within sight of the English coast. Cromwell's mind was made up 
 that there should be no one above England. The whole of the 
 question resolved itself into this whether the supreme govern- 
 ment of the sea should be with Holland or with England. Crom- 
 well was determined it should be with England, It was the old 
 sawyer's question of who should be the top sawyer, and as the 
 Dutch at first would not give in, he forced them to do it. Van 
 Tromp was nearly as good a man as Blake ; battles were fought 
 with dubious success, but at last the Dutch had to yield. They 
 had to strike their topsails, to pay the herring, to give up the 
 sovereignty of the narrow seas, and to send out from amongst 
 them Charles the Second and his crew (this latter point being 
 demanded by Cromwell, both from the Dutch and from France. 
 They were a set of plotters, whose desire was to raise a foreign 
 legion, and disturb his reign ; and, therefore, Cromwell determined 
 to have them turned out). The Dutch afterwards sank down into 
 the quiet, mercantile, comfortable, fat, heavy-bottomed State 
 which Holland has ever since been. 
 
 But the great and most important feature in Cromwell's foreign 
 politics was the Spanish war. People say it was unjust, because
 
 The Foreign Politics of Oliver Cromwell. 5 1 
 
 Cromwell sent out an expedition to attack Spanish America at a 
 time when we were at peace at home. But this was not at all 
 uncommon in those times. The sea was a sort of " Irish quarter " 
 in the world ; a " shindy " might be going on there at any time, 
 and the land know nothing whatever about it. On land they 
 might be peaceable and well disposed, while at sea the hand of 
 the strong was the law of right. Cromwell fought Spain in 
 America, because she claimed the sole right over America its 
 commerce and the Indians. Spain obtained her right from the 
 Pope, who, when he was something, divided the world according 
 to his sovereign pleasure. By a pleasant fiction, which was be- 
 lieved at the time, the world belonged to the Pope. The logic 
 was simple : The world was God's ; the Pope was Christ's vice- 
 gerent ; therefore the world belonged to the Pope. And his Holi- 
 ness said, " I do bestow America upon my dear children the 
 Spaniards." Whereupon the Spaniards thought that a very good 
 claim in law. And so it was, up to the time of the Reformation; 
 but by Cromwell, who hated the Pope as he hated the devil, 
 the Pope's license was as little regarded as would be that of his 
 successor at this day, if he were to say to England that he would 
 allow us to hold our own. Cromwell said, " I was the first dis- 
 coverer of America, and therefore I claim it." Spain also claimed 
 America as the first discoverer. But jurists said this could only 
 hold good as to parts in which they had settled. The Pope had 
 also said there was to be no faith nor trade with heretics, and 
 Spain acted on that principle. Debarred from trading with Eng- 
 lish vessels, Spaniards robbed them. But then came the queerest 
 point. The history of this world contains nothing more cruel than 
 the doings of Catholic Spain to the Indians of South America. 
 Cromwell believed in universal brotherhood as well as the men of 
 to-day ; and John Milton set forth in a State paper the reasons for 
 going to war with Spain. Milton justified it on this principle : 
 " All men are brethren ; therefore any great and peculiar wrong 
 done to any part of the human race is a wrong done to the 
 whole." "Ergo" said Cromwell, "wherever there is any great 
 wrong, there go I to right, revenge, and redress the wrong." 
 Hence he took up the cause of the Indians, who suffered such 
 dreadful things from Catholic Spain. 
 
 By this time Spain had heard what sort of a man ruled England,
 
 5 2 The Foreign Politics of Oliver Cromwell. 
 
 and an ambassador came to Cromwell to propose peace. Crom- 
 well offered two conditions freedom of commerce and freedom 
 of thought ; and would not allow any peace until Spain allowed 
 freedom of conscience and every right. He said, " I will have no 
 peace unless you allow every Englishman in Spain to read his 
 Bible, and worship where and how he pleases ; unless you drop 
 your pretensions to any monopoly in commerce, and trade with 
 England on an equality." The ambassador refused even to send 
 such conditions home. He said, " My master has got two eyes ; one 
 is the Inquisition, the other his monopoly of the American trade, 
 and you ask him to put out both eyes at once." Probably most 
 of you will agree with me that any monster, one of whose eyes was 
 the Inquisition, ought either to have plucked it out and cast it 
 from him, or got someone to do it for him as soon as possible ; 
 and, as Spain would not do it for herself, Cromwell, who was a 
 terrible oculist, said he would perform the operation for her. 
 
 The Pope's right to bestow was good enough when the people 
 believed in him. but when they ceased to have faith in him he was 
 an impostor. Cromwell declared that if an Englishman lived in 
 Spain, he should have his Bible ; but Spain had refused to allow 
 them in their ships to have the Bible, and therefore Cromwell was 
 perfectly justified in going to war with Spain. There was another 
 thing that embittered the feeling betwixt the two nations. Ascham, 
 one of our ambassadors, had been murdered in Madrid by English 
 Royalists, and in vain had Cromwell asked that the murderers 
 should either be punished or delivered up to him. He authorised 
 the execution of a brother of the Portuguese ambassador on Tower 
 Hill, for killing an Englishman on the steps of the Royal Exchange 
 which was dreadfully informal, but was a pretty tolerable example 
 to Spain, and showed her what she should have done. 
 
 Then there was the Inquisition, which was a terrible thing to 
 Englishmen. With the principle of non-intervention, what right 
 had we to interfere with the Inquisition ? you ask. But Crom- 
 well said to them, " You make an arrogant pretence to commercial 
 monopoly in America, which I deny;" and then he put forth a 
 long list of the wrongs which Englishmen had suffered the in- 
 solent claim to commercial monopoly, the murder of English 
 subjects, the existence of the Inquisition, into which Englishmen 
 had got. Going to war, therefore, with the Spaniards, Blake first
 
 The Foreign Politics of Oliver Cromwell. 53 
 
 seized Jamaica, then went to Santa Cruz, blew the whole fleet into 
 destruction, and hit Spain so hard a blow that she has not 
 recovered from it to this day. It was England that was chosen 
 to chastise her insolent pride, her greed of gold, her carelessness 
 of blood, her lust of dominion, her beggarly crouching at the feet 
 of priests, and the other rank offences and crimes that brought 
 down on her God's curse, man's wrath, England's indignation, 
 Cromwell's terrible hand, and Blake's swift, sharp, and mighty sword. 
 
 Cromwell did great things for England, and was the founder of 
 its commercial greatness. He kept together liberty of thought, 
 immunity of Englishmen, freedom of commerce, open seas, and 
 the rights of the world to trade. I heartily justify Cromwell's 
 great Spanish war. 
 
 Then there are his dealings with France. Cromwell did not 
 make war on that country on any great scale. By insisting on the 
 turning out of Charles from France, he kept peace with that 
 country. Charles was ultimately turned out without much trouble. 
 Mazarin, who then ruled, was a strong man, but he well knew that 
 Cromwell was stronger; so he advised his master to give way. 
 Cromwell drilled Cardinal Mazarin into good order, so that he 
 dared not go contrary to his opinion. When Cromwell died, they 
 wore their deepest crape at Versailles, knowing that a great man 
 had gone out of existence. The most courtly court in Europe wore 
 crape for the brewer's son ! Let those who measure men's respect- 
 ability by the number of coaches at their funeral, bear that in mind. 
 
 Now came Cromwell's favourite scheme of a league of Pro- 
 testants, his most darling object. He proposed that all Scandi- 
 navia, Holland, the Swiss Protestant cantons, and the Protestant 
 states of Germany, should make one league. At the present day 
 it might be ridiculous to form a Protestant league ; but in those 
 days it was a necessity, for Popery would take the sword and strive 
 to destroy the very existence of Protestantism. In Luther's days, 
 Protestantism had to fetch Gustavus Adolphus from Scandinavia 
 to fight. It was by terrible fighting that it won for itself breathing 
 space in Europe. The Roman Catholics of those days meant 
 extermination, and carried it out as far as they could, until that 
 grand man, Gustavus, cleared such a lane, with those Swedes ot 
 his, into the heart of Germany, that Romanism had to accent 
 realities, and chew the bitter cud, not of things as they ought to be,
 
 54 The Foreign Politics of Oliver Cromwell. 
 
 but of things as they were ; and though it still claimed the whole 
 world, and still kept on talking about its claims, it only pocketed 
 as much as was to be got. Cromwell knew that community 
 of creed was a real force in politics ; and, in order to bring about 
 his darling scheme, he commenced with Sweden. For don't 
 measure the Sweden of that day with the Sweden of this. In 
 those days it was a first rate state, had the best of soldiers, had 
 some of the greatest men, had got in it all the old Scandinavian 
 fire, all the old Scandinavian honesty. It was geographically 
 strong, and strong in Protestantism. It was ruled over by a 
 woman, but what a woman ! Cromwell sent to Christina a man 
 of great brain and great vanity, Bulstrode Whitelock. Whitelock 
 thought it was deemed necessary to send him away as the oppo- 
 nent of the Protectorship ; but Cromwell saw he was the right 
 man, and made him go. The result was as it has been from the 
 beginning and will be to the end. When a very clever woman 
 meets with a very clever man, they may contest it as long as they 
 like, but to the wall, to the second place, the lady must go. 
 Christina was a wonderful woman, but Whitelock was a little 
 deeper and wiser. In those days queens got wonderful men 
 about them ; and Christina, too, had admirable men around her. 
 It may not be so now ; it seems to have gone out and become 
 unfashionable. It may be that married queens are so content 
 with what they have gotten ; but at all events, it is not as it was 
 in the days of Elizabeth and Christina. Sweden had then such 
 men as Oxensteirn to counsel her. Sweet flirtations went on 
 between Christina and Whitelock, and it is known how she sent a 
 message to him stating that she was very poorly because she had 
 not seen him for a few days. He brought Sweden over to the 
 side of England, and by degrees the famous Protestant league was 
 formed. 
 
 Cromwell tried to win Denmark to his side, but she, as now, 
 was engaged in talking about Sound dues, and could not attend 
 to him. However, he got the Hanse towns, the Protestant 
 cantons of Switzerland, and certain German states. This scheme 
 of Cromwell's has been laughed at as Quixotic ; but it was bold 
 and daring, and above prudence, because it was a piece of wisdom. 
 The connection between liberty and Protestantism was thorough 
 and complete. Cromwell said, " We know you Catholics hate us,
 
 The Foreign Politics of Oliver Cromwell. 5 5 
 
 and we take our position." There was hardly a congregation in 
 Europe that had not the shield of Cromwell thrown over it. 
 
 The Vaudois and other people came under the protectorship cf 
 Cromwell. The Vaudois, that most apostolic of all churches, had 
 been most cruelly persecuted by the Duke of Savoy, their sweet 
 Alpine valleys being deluged with blood in the name of Christ. 
 When the news of the massacre reached England great excitement 
 was created ; the people took it up as their own suffering, and 
 wonderful subscriptions were raised. England, Holland, Sweden, 
 and the Swiss cantons remonstrated with Louis of Spain, and at 
 last an armistice was patched up. But it did not last long ; for a 
 people who believe that no faith ought to be kept with heretics 
 will keep an armistice as long as suits them, and no longer. Then 
 it was that Cromwell sent his famous message : " Unless you 
 show favour to the people of God, England's guns shall Tie heard 
 in the castle of St Angelo." Was this right or wrong? The new 
 doctrine is, that if Vaudois can be put down they ought to be put 
 down that if a nation can be crushed it ought to be crushed. 
 Cromwell might have said : " Here are Vaudois on the anatomical 
 table ; if you can kill them it is clear you have a right to do so. If 
 the fellows had deserved to live they would have lived ; but as they 
 are dead, it shows they ought to be." A fine doctrine that 
 "whatever is, is right!" Cromwell believed no such thing; he 
 would have hated such political atheism altogether, as being a mere 
 attempt to cover cowardice with the salve of conscience. If you 
 had talked in that way to Cromwell, out would have leaped his 
 sword, his tongue would have become eloquent, and he would 
 have said that, according to his creed, God sent the strong men 
 into the world to protect the weak, and that wherever there was 
 a crying injustice being done, universal brotherhood called for 
 the succour of the true-hearted and the brave. He said, " You 
 sha'n't touch these Vaudois any more ;" and the Duke of Savoy 
 thought he had better not, and the Pope of Rome thought so 
 too. 
 
 Nay, amongst other curious things, Cromwell actually got money 
 out of Rome. In the confusion which followed the death of the 
 King, Rupert ran off with some ships, and sold them in Roman 
 and Florentine territories. Blake was sent out debt-collecting, 
 and Cromwell said to him, "You go to Rome and Florence, and
 
 56 The Foreign Politics of Oliver Cromwell. 
 
 call for the little accounts they owe me for those ships." Blake 
 did go, and got the money. He made out the account for the 
 Duke of Florence, and the Duke paid it. He also made out a 
 little bill for the Pope, who had frequently heard of money com- 
 ing from this country to his, but not of money going from Rome 
 to England. He demurred ; but Blake had not much patience, 
 and soon got the money out of Rome, which knew there was a 
 man in England who would not have injustice done without retalia- 
 tion, and would have right and justice done. 
 
 Blake then went along the Mediterranean coast : the Dey of 
 Tunis curled his lip at him ; but Blake brought up his long boats, 
 burnt the fleet, and brought the Dey to order. Cromwell then 
 sent him to box the ears of the Knights Templars, and he gave 
 them such a blow as made them mend their manners. 
 
 The principle of action with Cromwell was, that no English- 
 man should be wronged without justice being done to him. 
 Cromwell's retaliatory justice followed like lightning upon wrong- 
 doing. Was he right or wrong in this ? Is that the doctrine to 
 be followed, think you? Or should we rather, as at the present 
 day, let our people be insulted, shut up in prison for Bible-read- 
 ing, cut down in Austrian streets, and then protocol about it, and 
 diplomatise over it, and take money for it, and so let the matter 
 pass over? That is, when a man commits one sin, you are to 
 give him the chance of committing another. That is not the 
 meaning of the words, " If a man smite thee on the one cheek, 
 turn to him the other also." If Spain chooses to say, " We will 
 not suffer a single Englishman to enter the country," then I should 
 recommend Englishmen not to go. But if Spain, having suffered 
 Englishmen to take up residence in it, having fattened both upon 
 our blood and our treasure, having had its base soil watered with 
 the best blood of England, and acting as though the sponge were 
 the best way of wiping out English debts if this Spain refuse us 
 rights of free worship and burial, such rights ought to be main- 
 tained at all risks. Look at what Spain has lately been doing. 
 Take up the burial question of Madrid, which is not yet settled, 
 the Spanish Government refusing to allow burial ground to 
 Protestants, on the ground of their being heretics. Spain owes 
 debts of money, honour, and blood to England, but has not the 
 heart to pay them. We have watered her plains with our best
 
 The Foreign Politics of Oliver Cromwell. 5 7 
 
 blood, we have rescued her people from the tyranny of the French ; 
 we were fools enough to lend her money, which we cannot get 
 paid. They are glorious repudiators. They deny us burial-ground 
 and free worship. The better way is, either to retire from Spain 
 or make them yield. We may stand it, but Cromwell wouldn't. 
 Acting on this principle, he humbled Holland, taught France 
 good manners, crippled Spain, shook the Inquisition, seized 
 Jamaica, humbled the Pope, frightened pirates, and punished 
 those who injured an Englishman. In the palmiest days of old 
 Rome, no Roman was ever better protected than was an English- 
 man by Cromwell. If an Englishman did wrong in a foreign 
 country, he gave him up to justice. But he determined that, so 
 long as an Englishman acted right in a foreign country, he should 
 have his Bible and free worship. 
 
 He had an immortal secretary in Milton to defend his policy. 
 The Latin letters of Milton ought to be read by this generation ; 
 and his prose works, especially that on " The liberty of unlicensed 
 printing," are not read so much as they ought to be. If you read 
 Milton well up, you will understand liberty indeed. Milton's pen. 
 Blake's cannon, and Cromwell's character and sword, were always 
 just behind each other. 
 
 Then came the Restoration, under Charles the Second ; and 
 the degradation and knavery that followed partly undid the great 
 work of Cromwell and Elizabeth. With " the blessed Restoration'' 
 things turned. Though Charles the Second could not knock 
 down the tall work of Cromwell, yet, like a snail, he left his royal 
 slime upon every part of it. Good, dear Charles soon had a 
 town sold, a pension taken, our armies in disgraceful subordina- 
 tion to France, attempting to crush a free country. Under 
 Charles the Second England ate incalculable dirt, was dragged 
 through the mire, and became the laughing-stock of Europe. 
 There was riot at home, and knavery and cowardice abroad. 
 Cromwell fought for free Bibles, free speech, the liberty of 
 Englishmen against the Inquisition ; he put out the King of 
 Spain's eyes, and secured honour and respect for England. All 
 this was the result of single-heartedness of purpose. He had 
 but one aim to make Old England great as the servant and 
 champion of truth the top nation, because it served and feared 
 God most, and loved righteousness most.
 
 58 The Foreign Politics of Oliver Cromwell. 
 
 Cromwell may be called Quixotic, but to wise men Quixotism 
 does not mean what it means to fools. To fools it means fight- 
 ing windmills, but not so to wise men. As the immortal book 
 means it, it is the lifting of man above the miserable things of 
 policy and of the hour, to live with and for certain things that 
 are eternal. Cromwell loved certain eternal truths, and lived for 
 them ; but his misfortune was that he lived in the wrong age. If 
 he had lived now he would be called by some the modern Don 
 Quixote, being for an open commerce, against the Inquisition, for 
 God's truth, and eternal right. He would be mad in the eyes of 
 modern people. Certainly he had success, which is the test of 
 merit in these days. Of all tests of righteousness, success is the 
 one now. Succeed and you are a patriot, fail and you are a 
 rebel. Cromwell succeeded, but he fought for great principles. 
 He fought for things worth a man spilling blood and spending 
 money for not a Vienna treaty, that may begin to go to rot as 
 soon as signed. He fought for light against darkness, for God's 
 truth against devilry, for freedom against tyranny. Had he lived 
 now, he would have liked nationalities and liberty. If he had 
 come back to take the management of the Russian war he would 
 have astonished us. He would ask Austria to hold up her hands, 
 and tell her he didn't like the colour of them. He would bid 
 one nation after another show whether she were such as a just 
 and honest man might have alliance with. He would not have 
 played one nation against another, but would go for the right ; 
 and, if necessary, it would have been with him, England against 
 the world ! He did not believe the great lie, " The end justifies 
 the means." His end would have been noble, and his means of 
 accomplishing it worthy of the end. Till we fight against some- 
 thing more dreadful than death, war cannot be justified. 
 
 In his public politics Cromwell carried out his private politics, 
 which were characterised by simple-mindedness and single-hearted- 
 ness. Terribly earnest, gloriously imprudent, marvellously mag- 
 nanimous, ambitious for his country, pardonably desirous it should 
 stand at the top, but only desirous it should do so because he 
 thought it had most of God's truth, most of righteousness, and 
 most of liberty in it. Such was Cromwell in his foreign policy. 
 Every Protestant " conventicle" felt there was a mighty shield 
 over them they sat under the shadow of the great British oak,
 
 The Foreign Politics of Oliver Cromwell. 59 
 
 though their rulers would not let them have their own vine and 
 fig-tree. Cromwell laid priestcraft by the side of kingcraft lo 
 keep it company. 
 
 He was a man who, if he were to come back to these days, 
 would be out of his element and out of his place. But he had 
 the root of the matter within him. " Great liar, hypocrite, cant- 
 ing fanatic, psalm-singing knave, man of low ambition, vulgar 
 buffoon," as Hume, that bigoted anti-bigot, may call him smell- 
 ing as he may of grains, and even with the signs of the brewer's 
 tub about him to the last nevertheless, after his vocabulary of 
 abuse was exhausted, Hume could acknowledge that never was 
 England so respected and feared as when under the administra- 
 tion of Oliver Cromwell.
 
 THE DEATH-BED OF CROMWELL. 
 1658. 
 
 ERTAIN local reasons, well known to most of you, prevented 
 any public demonstration if, indeed, there had been any dis- 
 position to make it on the day of days in English history, the famous 
 3rd of September. This year [1858] the anniversary fell upon the 
 very day of the week on which Cromwell died, Friday. It is not for 
 me to judge how far it was in your hearts to Inake that day 
 memorable ; but, as I have said, there were local reasons which 
 interposed. However, better late than never, to call to mind that 
 great day and that great man. If we did not do so on the day 
 itself, better do so on any day than forget the memory of a man 
 who was by far the greatest Englishman that ever yet lived. 
 
 You must not expect from me any flourishes of oratory, if I 
 were capable of them, nor anything new to be said of the man, for 
 there is nothing new to be said of him, but simply a rational 
 commemoration of a great man not a king, I grant, but a man 
 who was called by a king " A base-born mechanic," and for whose 
 head the same king offered a great reward, though, as Castlereagh 
 has remarked, he was never likely to get it until Cromwell was done 
 with it himself. 
 
 Before I go on I will remind you of certain beautiful words in 
 the WISDOM OF SOLOMON [chap, iv.] : " The memorial of virtue is 
 immortal, because it is known with God and with men ; when it is 
 present, men take example at it ; and when it is gone, they desire it; 
 it weareth the crown, and triumphs for ever, having gotten the vic- 
 tory striving for undefiled rewards." Of no man are these words 
 more true than of Cromwell. The significance of a death-bed does 
 not depend upon what a dying man may utter, not upon what 
 anointing oil may be poured upon his head, nor upon what, cate- 
 chism comes from his lips. The death of a man must be interpreted 
 by his life ; and if his dying lips are too feeble to utter his faith, 
 and his ghostly enemy may triumph over him, and his last words
 
 The Death- Bed of Cromwell. 6 1 
 
 are anything but what he delighted in in life, I trust our religion is 
 enough to make us believe that God will not forget a life of three- 
 score years and ten spent in the fear of Him. I should count it 
 a small matter indeed did we not regard the last moments of 
 Cromwell as all of a piece with his eventful and all-important life 
 the end of days nobly spent. 
 
 Let us briefly see who the man was, for the significance of a 
 death-bed depends upon a clear understanding of the man about 
 to die. 
 
 Let me congratulate some of you upon the wondrous change 
 that has come over your understanding, and therefore your 
 estimate your estimate, and therefore your speech, regarding this 
 great man. It used to be written that he was arch-liar, chief 
 hypocrite, the mightiest self-seeking ambitious impostor. But 
 glorified in his life by Milton, well understood by the kings of 
 Europe, feared by them, mourned by them, well known by his 
 contemporaries to be a great man, he fell after death, as Macaulay 
 has said, into the hands of little men; and when the reign of the 
 saints was over, and that of the strumpets began, one can little 
 expect that a debauched king could find canvas large enough, or 
 colours true enough, to paint the likeness of the stern and mighty 
 Puritan. By degrees, however, and slowly, partly through the 
 decline of party spirit, and partly from a better understanding of 
 what true religion is, this man's memory is redeemed from the 
 obloquy that has been heaped upon it. It used to be said that he 
 was too clever a man to believe what he said, and that therefore 
 he was a hypocrite who put on Puritan phrases to hide the 
 hollowness of his heart, and the want of true religion. Then he 
 was called traitor and renegade. If you look at him as a theorist 
 wedded to one particular theory of politics, as some "five-point'' sort 
 of man with nothing but his charter ; if you wish to make him some 
 two-centuries-old Chartist, than he was a renegade. But with a 
 practical intellect, and a robust wisdom, and a most manful desire 
 to do the best thing that could be done without bragging of it, 
 antagonistic to Fifth Monarchy men and Millennarians and the 
 like, who stood upon their transcendental tub and talked largely 
 about what was to convert the world, he could not but be. He 
 never stuck to particular points. He had his ideal of government, 
 but he was a downright practical Englishman ; and it was his end
 
 62 7^he Death- Bed oj Cromweh, 
 
 and aim to govern England in the best possible way without mak- 
 ing a noise and preaching sermons about how it was to be done. 
 His manners were too rigid, his morals too strict, he was too 
 Biblical in speech and heart to be understood by the Court of 
 Charles the Second. He was a godly man, and fell among 
 thieves; he was a godly man, judged by libertines, who feared 
 neither God nor man. Don't say too much against Cromwell 
 be'cause he put down a church ; don't say he was an impostor, 
 liar, fool, because he deposed a king ; for it may be asked, What 
 sort of a church was it, and what sort of a ruler, that could be 
 thrown down by such a man ? These and such verdicts, then, are 
 being altered, and I hope most of you whom I am addressing will 
 agree with me that Cromwell was emphatically a man. His intel- 
 lect was the most equally diffused of anybody's in history"; there 
 was a masculine robustness oi mind 1ft film (touched here and 
 there with a little fanaticism, it is true, but it was slight) ; and 
 whether we see him farming in Huntingdon, fighting at Naseby, 
 winning at Worcester, governing in London, or dying at Whitehall,, 
 we shall find him of full-grown, robust mind, evidently born to 
 rule, always up to the wants and emergencies of the hour and 
 the nation, always bringing to bear upon the time a never-failing 
 courage, and an intellect that never grew dim. 
 
 Opinions have become changed as to the theories of great men's 
 lives. It is held by some, that the secret of getting on in life con- 
 sists in drawing up a plan for the attainment of some definite 
 object, and pursuing it resistlessly until the end is gained. No 
 great and good man ever did that yet. It may be very well for 
 well-to-do city aldermen to say they came to town with half-a- 
 crown, and heard Bow Bells calling them to come and be Lord 
 Mayors ; or for men who have grubbed through by-ways, and dark 
 ways, and dirty ways, till they have reached their ambitious ends, 
 to sit down like successful civic Jupiters, and proudly exclaim, 
 " Think of my opportunities, and look at me now ! " But we are- 
 speaking now of another sort of people altogether we are speaking 
 of great and good men. The truly great man only plans first of 
 all the eternal principles on which he will act, and leaves it to 
 God to settle the way and the hour. He will be something his 
 mind is made up a good man he will be ; but what he shall 
 strive for, what he shall get, how much he shall be " worth," as
 
 The Death-Bed of Cromwell. 63 
 
 the phrase goes, never enters his mind. Really great men have 
 acted on this principle : " When thou art bidden to a feast, take 
 a low seat, and sit there ; by-and bye you shall be beckoned to 
 come up'higher." Whatever work that lower end finds them, they 
 do honestly, faithfully, and truly, and in due time they are 
 beckoned by the visible finger of circumstances, which is God's 
 finger ; and, never disobedient to the call, they advance step by 
 step, and stage by stage, until they stand an immortal band of ex- 
 amples of the great words of our Lord, " Seek ye first the kingdom 
 of God and His righteousness, and all these other things shall be 
 added unto yon." And again, " He that is faithful in few things, 
 shall be made lord over many." 
 
 Look again at another common principle in life. In this world 
 there is even a conspiracy against able men who are not of the 
 right set. There are the high Brahmins and the Pariahs of 
 society ; and fogeydom, stupidity, and men in possession, combine 
 in a perpetual league to keep the strong man down. But do they 
 ever succeed ? It is very poetical and very nice to write about 
 mute Miltons, village Cromwells. and neglected Hampdens ; but 
 what is the fact ? Is it not a glorious chapter in the career of 
 human life, that men bowed down and almost crushed by obstacles 
 of want and obscurity, have yet worked their way to the top, until 
 they stood the world's masters ? Depend upon it society must 
 send for these men when they are wanted ; if a thing wants doing 
 and one man can do it, we must have him. In the time of danger 
 and a nation's trial, we must send for the one strong man. So 
 with Cromwell. His own quaint, blunt account of his rise is 
 worth your remembering. "I was a person," said he, "who from 
 my first employment was suddenly preferred and lifted up from 
 lesser trusts to greater, from my first being a captain of a troop of 
 horse ; and did labour as well as I could to discharge my trust, 
 and God blessed me ' therein ' as it pleased Him." Seeing that 
 additions to Lord Essex's army of some new regiments were desir- 
 able, the troops being composed, most of them, "of decayed old 
 serving men, tapsters, and such fellows," who could not cope with, 
 and were beaten by, the Royalist army, composed " of gentlemen's 
 sons, younger sons, and sons of quality," he volunteered to raise 
 some men " of a spirit that is likely to go on as far as gentlemen 
 will go, or," said he, " you will be beaten still." The result was
 
 64 The Death- Bed of Cromwell. 
 
 Cromwell went into the east and recruited the immortal Ironsides, 
 men who were never beaten, but, as Cromwell himself wrote, 
 " whenever they were engaged against the enemy they beat con- 
 tinually." This act is the key to Cromwell's life. He never 
 thrust himself into a single appointment he ever held, but was 
 always called to fill it. 
 
 Much has been said about Cromwell's religion ; but to some of 
 you who have been bred up in the forms of Dissent, the old lan- 
 guage of the Puritans is familiar. To you the quaint phrases, the 
 curious seekings of the Lord, the frequent prayer meetings, and 
 the chanting of psalms, is not difficult to be understood. Those, 
 however, to whom Church traditions are everything, to whom every- 
 thing must come in regular established historic order, and who 
 pray from the book, cannot understand the sturdy fanaticism with 
 which these men march through life. Cromwell can never be 
 understood in England, unless the whole Dissenting life of England 
 is duly appreciated. In his days there was some of the most 
 robust morality, some of the best God-fearing men, some of the 
 noblest and humblest piety, some of the best wrestlings with the 
 devil, some of the best triumphing over the flesh, and some 
 of the most sincere religion the world ever saw. Cromwell 
 well held that the Bible was God's book, and that it was good for 
 disciplining the Heart, ruling a house, and saving a soul; and 
 therefore that it was also good for fighting a battle, governing 
 a nation, or selecting a Parliament that it was good to leaven a 
 state in its heart, soul, and conscience, by the true and eternal 
 will of God. Hence it came that the Bible was often quoted 
 in the mouths of the stern Puritans. Nov/-a-days, the Bible is kept 
 for holidays ; it is living bread, it is true, but it is shew Dread. 
 But is it to be wondered at, that in those times, when it came to 
 fighting and king-killing, when it came to Nasebys and Marston 
 Moors, the words of the Old Testament, the histories of the fight- 
 ing men of Israel, of the Prophets, of Samuel and Saul, and the 
 denunciations of king-making and king-choosing, entered into the 
 hearts and the speech of the Puritans ? You may call it " cant," 
 if you like. But canting means saying something we do not 
 believe. Now, Cromwell's phrases were often grim and odd ; but 
 before we condemn them, let us inquire whether they did not 
 convey the real meaning ot his heart.
 
 The Death-Bed of Cromwell. 65 
 
 Aided by Admiral Blake, Cromwell raised this country pre-em- 
 inently, and gave social and religious freedom to its people. He 
 made England feared, respected, and great ; always fostering the 
 lowly, protecting always the weak. Strange, such fruit as this 
 should grow on a bad tree ! Even his enemies confessed that the 
 fruits of this man's rule and government were the best and most 
 glorious the world ever saw. 
 
 Cromwell hesitated, and finally refused, to take the title of king. 
 Men have an inherent love for high names and sounding titles, for 
 robes and scarlet, and pewter regalia. Why, then, should not a wise 
 man hesitate before he refused a title which yet could not enhance 
 the man, but simply add a dignity to his name ? Why should he 
 not ponder, and pause, and pray, why not wait from day to day 
 for more conviction and more reason ? At last he said, " No, I 
 take not that title." I would have loved him less had his decision 
 been otherwise, for it evinced practical wisdom, a noble impati- 
 ence of trivialities ; it was another sign of the fine, manly, emphatic 
 intellect with which he was endowed. 
 
 Passing on to the memorable day on which Cromwell died, the 
 Protector, in speaking of that day, said it was " a day of the year 
 whereon from his first childhood, by the Lord's wondrous grace, 
 up to the present time, he never had attempted aught but he had 
 therefrom reaped a golden harvest." On that day had he fought, 
 and won, at Dunbar, on that day did he prevail at Worcester : 
 on that day he died. Remember the lines of one of England's 
 greatest poets : 
 
 " The third of the same moon whose former course 
 Had all but crowned him on the self-same day, 
 Deposed him gently from his throne of force, 
 And laid him with the earth's preceding clay. 
 
 " And showed not Fortune thus how fame and sway, 
 And all we deem delightful, and consume 
 Our souls to compass, through each arduous way, 
 Are in her eyes less happy than the tomb." 
 
 Let us look at the man as he drew near to his death-day. The 
 latter part of his life had not been easy ; everybody seemed to be 
 against him. Parliament began to dispute about the right to rule 
 and govern : his whole life had become a burden. There were
 
 66 The Death- Bed of Cromwell. 
 
 conspiracies of Republicans, Presbyterians, and Cavaliers ; threat- 
 enings of assassination ; and these, with a worn frame and a sad 
 heart, had reduced him to a weakness that did not gradually ap- 
 pear. Then came that crowning sorrow, the death of his favourite 
 daughter ; she whom to know was to love and pray for ; between 
 whom and him had subsisted that mystic and strange affinity that 
 sometimes lives between father and daughter ; that spiritual union 
 which made her life seem his life, and the light of her soul and 
 conscience his. She had pleaded for the Cavaliers where none 
 else had dared, and he had borne from her what he could not have 
 endured from any other. She fell sick, and he left the State .and 
 its works, and for fourteen days sat by his dying child, lost in grief, 
 and almost overcome with sorrow ; for he was one of the world's 
 strong men, and, therefore, one of the world's tender men. We 
 must not waste that word " tender." It is not for the soft and 
 habitually kind ; it is only applicable to the strong, stern, robust 
 men of the world : it must be regarded as the water that came 
 from the rock of Moses. What wonder that this mighty man, in 
 losing the child of his heart, should have been shaken with a final 
 shaking ? 
 
 Preparations were made to celebrate the 3rd of September. 
 Oliver lay on his bed complaining that his life had been a burden, 
 and too heavy for man. How did he spend his last days ? He 
 called for his Bible, and desired "an honourable and godly 
 person " to read to him a passage from Philippians. Then he said : 
 " This scripture did once save my life, when my eldest son, poor 
 Robert, died, which went as a dagger to my heart ; indeed it did." 
 Reading on of Paul's contentment and submission to the will of 
 God in all conditions, he said : " It's true, Paul, you have learned 
 this, and attained to this measure of grace; but what shall I do? 
 Ah ! poor creature, it is a hard lesson for me to take out, I find it 
 so ! " But reading still further on, where Paul saith, " I can do 
 all things through Christ that strengthened me," faith began to 
 work, says the chronicler, and his heart to find support and com 
 fort, and he said thus to himself: "He that was Paul's Christ is 
 my Christ, too." 
 
 He quitted Hampton Court for London, and quitted it for ever. 
 He thought he should not die; prayers were offered for his 
 recovery, and afterwards for his speedy recovery, but in vain ; his
 
 Tke Death- Bed of Cromwell. 67 
 
 sickness increased. Then came the last words of this man. The 
 veil of the death-bed is a terrible one to undraw, but if a man in 
 those moments could call for his Bible, and turn his mind calmly 
 to eternity, he was no hypocrite. Once he was heard saying : " I 
 was once in grace," and it has been argued thence that he had 
 fallen from it. But was there ever a great and good man who 
 could not look back on a brighter and purer hour ? He had never 
 held that men might sin that grace might abound ; his morals were 
 clear, and his life pure and sweet, and he had joined faith with 
 works. He spoke a good deal of the " Covenants " of works and 
 grace ; he was heard ejaculating : " It is holy and true. Who made 
 it holy and true ? the Mediator of the Covenant." And he used 
 also many other expressions betokening a holy and sincere soul. 
 So, believing in God, and with the consciousness that he was 
 beloved by God, with the eternal arms around him, he sank to 
 rest. In the tumult of the storm that was raging on the day he 
 died, the dying man offered up one of the noblest and best prayers 
 ever made, praying for his people and tor his enemies, and ending 
 with" one brief word for his exhausted frame " And give us a 
 good night, if it be Thy pleasure. Amen." So passed away 
 England's great " liar," its " chief hypocrite," its most ambitious 
 "base-born mechanic." So passed away one of the greatest and 
 strongest Englishmen, and one of the robustest saints; and, 
 allowing for his little fanaticisms and mixed motives, one of the 
 truest and sincerest of men. 
 
 His body was exhumed and mutilated by Charles the Second 
 and his profligate Court. Contrast the death of that monarch in 
 the midst of debauchery with that of Cromwell. What were 
 Charles's last words ? They were characteristic of the man. 
 With all his faults, he was at least a well-bred gentleman. So, 
 said he, " I have been an unconscionable time dying." He 
 actually asked those around him to excuse it. Thus he passed 
 away, cheating himself to the last, as he had cheated all others ; j 
 liar to the last, with the smirk of a gentleman. Can you doubt of j 
 which we may say, " This was the death-bed of the righteous ? " 
 Contrast the two, and go away with the cuckoo-cry, if you can, 
 " Thank God for the blessed Restoration." 
 
 But we have not done with Cromwell yet. The question has 
 arisen, " Shall Cromwell have a statue among the kings of Eng-
 
 68 The Death-Bed of Cromwell. 
 
 land?" And it has been settled to my satisfaction at least. 
 Surely you would not place him beside such finished gentlemen as 
 Charles the Second and George the Fourth ! A monogamist, 
 would you rank him with Henry the Eighth, who had several 
 wives? Would you put a man who wore a common, shabby, 
 country-cut coat in such company ? Why, the stone George, who 
 revelled in the fopperies of Brummell, would faint ; and Henry 
 would blush in marble ! Would you send him who told the truth 
 to associate with Charles, to whom truth was a stranger ? Charles 
 would be saying, "Noll,* tip us a song," when all that poor 
 Cromwell could offer would be some Puritan psalm. That would 
 sound dismal indeed ; whilst even good George the Third might 
 not feel altogether comfortable. Put him amongst kings? No, 
 no ; let him rank with the three Johns Milton, Bunyan, and 
 Locke. The question has been well settled ; let the " base-born 
 mechanic " rank with his order ; and were he to have a new 
 tomb, the noblest and best inscription that could be written upon 
 it would be, " Here sleeps Milton's friend." 
 
 * Old Noll Oliver Cromwell was so called by the Royalists. Noll is a 
 familiar contraction of Oliver i.e., Ol', with an initial liquid.
 
 PEOPLE'S STATUE TO CROMWELL. 
 
 (From the "Birmingham Mercury," April 7, 1849.) 
 
 " OH ALL Cromwell have a statue?" Many of our readers 
 ^ may remember the lively and earnest occupation which 
 this question gave to the press of England in the autumn of 1845. 
 Throngs of " Vindices," " Clios," "Templars," "Churchmen," 
 "Fair Plays," "Earnests," "O. P. Q.'s," &c., sallied forth to do 
 battle in the papers over the claims of Oliver Cromwell to partake 
 the honour destined to each of the sovereigns of England in the 
 new Senate House, and every important journal, metropolitan and 
 provincial, put forth its leading article to maintain or deny the 
 right of the mightiest of all England's rulers to this national recog- 
 nition of his sovereignty. Every impartial observer of the strife 
 must allow that where the right was there was the might also ; 
 that the side of plain justice and common sense drew to itself all 
 the ability of the country ; that those who besought the committee 
 of taste not to sin against facts, not to ignore history, not to im- 
 poverish and degrade a great national memorial, nor to refuse 
 this recognition of sovereignty to the transcendent sovereign 
 whom Europe and the world had with awe and admiration ac- 
 knowledged that the champions of so sound and plain a cause 
 completely got the better of those who urged the committee to 
 insult common sense, trample upon fact, outrage history, and 
 imitate the stupid folly of the statute book in making over to the 
 base reign of Charles II. the glorious years of his great prede- 
 cessor. 
 
 Never did public opinion return a fuller and more unmistak- 
 able " Yes " to any query than to the question " Shall Cromwell 
 have a statue?" The committee of taste, however, would not or 
 dared not act upon this unhesitating " Yes," failed to interpret, or 
 shrunk from fulfilling this clear intimation of the national dis- 
 position ; and yet ventured not to refuse all honour to that in- 
 jured name which the intellect and energy of England were
 
 70 People's Statue to Cromwell. 
 
 learning especially to honour. The committee, therefore, made a 
 compromise stupid, meaningless, and unsatisfactory as such 
 compromises always are. They would recognise Cromwell, but 
 must ignore the Protector ; would make no room for him among 
 the rulers of England, but provided him a place among the illus- 
 trious generals ; conceded to the soldier the statue which they 
 refused the sovereign; bestowed the honour where it was not de- 
 manded, withheld it where it was required ; left undone the thing 
 they ought to have done, and did the thing they ought not to 
 have done. We are not particularly anxious to express our grati- 
 tude to conquerors, to multiply the memorials of military genius. 
 When a great man is illustrious in more ways than one, has a vast 
 and manifold greatness, why select his inferior greatness for 
 honour ? Besides, while acknowledging Cromwell's consummate 
 generalship, and grateful for it, as an instrument of " the good old 
 cause," we are the less eager to commemorate it as it was dis- 
 played against his countrymen, and feel especial reluctance to 
 glorify the hero of a civil war, the conqueror of Englishmen, 
 Scotchmen, and Irishmen. 
 
 It was for the ruler, the greatest of our rulers, that the statue 
 was claimed. It was to see the legitimate series so magnificently 
 broken, to mark among so many mock-monarchs one veritable 
 and unmistakable king, to place among the so-styled sovereigns 
 by right divine, one sovereign by a real right divine, the right of 
 his own soul to give those ruthless Normans, those fierce or 
 feeble Plantagenets, those tyrannical Tudors, those weak, wicked 
 Stuarts, those dull, stupid, profligate Germans, the glorifying com- 
 pany of this one Englishman, this solitary incarnation of English 
 valour and persistency, English might and mercy; English morality 
 and religion it was to accomplish this that the controversy was 
 carried on and the nation stirred. And the stir won from the 
 committee of taste the promise of a statue for the warrior ! 
 
 The controversy dropped ; but its burden was not forgotten. 
 Lately some inhabitants of St Ives, near which town Cromwell 
 lived for some years in obscurity, and where prayer and meditation 
 prepared him for his work, met to deliberate about the erection of 
 some monument to their mighty townsman. But this is not a 
 work for the men of St Ives alone ; it must be the deed of the 
 people of England. If the Protector is not to stand amongst the
 
 People s Statue to Cromivell. 71 
 
 monarchs, let the English people do what they can to repair the 
 wrong by raising a statue to this greatest of Englishmen, and join 
 to glorify in some worthy fashion the national hero. 
 
 Cromwell has claim to this memorial from the people of 
 England, as their greatest expression, as the fullest and sublimest 
 manifestation of the English character, of that calm strength, that 
 awful energy, that unresting persistency, that sublime good sense, 
 that moral earnestness, that intense religiousness, that erect walk- 
 ing by sight where such walking is required, that entire walking by 
 faith where such is the guidance needed, which we Englishmen 
 would fain believe to be our national characteristics, and are fond 
 of boasting of as such. It was this mighty nature, spent in assert- 
 ing the civil rights to which we cling so fondly, in vindicating the 
 freedom of conscience we love so dearly, that lifted him so high 
 and kept him there, and during his elevation revealed the great- 
 ness of the English character to all the world, and exalted the 
 name of England among the nations. His was the English char- 
 acter idealised, dilated into divine dimensions, magnified, glorified. 
 He yielded the sublime spectacle of strength, grandeur, nobleness 
 of nature, gloriously manifested upon an earthly throne, humbly 
 prostrate before the Heavenly Throne. Alas, that England should 
 have yet to render the honour due to her own especial hero 
 should have yet to raise a statue to this mightiest Englishman ! 
 
 But this memorial is not required merely as honour due to 
 surpassing greatness, as a debt due to neglected greatness ; it is 
 still more imperiously demanded as reparation due to slandered, 
 injured, outraged greatness. 
 
 " Alas ! the frowning ages ! full o'er thee 
 Has swept the slander of each century." 
 
 England more than forgot Cromwell. She has been ashamed 
 of her greatest; has denied, disowned, cast down, insulted her 
 hero ; has magnified the small affair of 1688 at the expense of the 
 mighty business of 1642 ; has exalted her Dutch deliverer to revile 
 her own English redeemer; and fondled the puppet monarchs 
 whom she fetched in her need from Germany, to trample on her 
 own born King, her own mighty Protector, who arose in her sore 
 extremity to guide and govern and glorify her. The base and 
 impotent revenge of the wretched Royalists, in tearing from the
 
 72 People's Statue to Cromwell. 
 
 grave and fixing on a gibbet the illustrious corpse, has not been 
 nationally mourned or publicly atoned for. We demand this 
 statue, as a solemn recantation of the slander, as some expiation 
 of the sin, as a witness that England has regained her soul, has 
 learned at last to admire her greatest, revere her noblest, love her 
 best. 
 
 And last, but not least, this honour is due to Cromwell as a 
 champion of "the good old cause," as a man who fought for 
 nobler ends than did ever warrior, and ruled with higher aims than 
 did ever sovereign. No one cast more aspiring glances towards 
 the future, more devoutly believed in a better time to come. The 
 present age is beginning to learn that the progress which it calls for 
 is indeed that " good old cause " for which he prayed, and worked, 
 and fought, and reigned. Let this age, then, express its own 
 aspirations and endeavours in this statue, whereby it would utter 
 its gratitude to this great hoper, this mighty worker. 
 
 We would have no time lost in stirring up the country to this 
 long deferred act of justice. Let a society be formed at once in 
 every important town for collecting contributions ; when a suffi- 
 cient fund is raised, let a sculptor be immediately engaged ; the 
 place where the statue is to stand can be fixed while the work is 
 on hand. Could a site be procured there, London, of course, is 
 the proper abiding-place of so national a monument ; after the 
 metropolis, Huntingdon, his birth-place, or Naseby field has the 
 next best claim to entertain the memorial of him. And then, on 
 some smiling, fragrant, flowery April 25th, his birthday, or on 
 some sunny and glorious June i4th, the day of Naseby fight, or 
 better still, on some soft, bright September 3rd, his own fortunate 
 day, the day on which he so signally prevailed over men, the day 
 whereon he passed to God, let the lovers of " the good old cause " 
 gather together from all parts of England to inaugurate the statue, 
 and to hail in this national recognition of their hero the certain 
 triumph of the cause so dear to him and them.
 
 ADMIRAL BLAKE. 
 
 BORN 1598. DIED 1657. (FROM 40x11 ELIZABETH TO STH CROMWELL.) 
 
 ITHER the principles of the old English Commonwealth and 
 Puritanism had in them some marvellous power to bring 
 out great men, or had great luck in bringing out the best men the 
 country could give, to do its work in the best way. It had its 
 Cromwell, a soldier ; its Blake, a sailor ; its Milton, a poet-states- 
 man. But, leaving you to settle how it was whether it was a 
 question of luck, or the inspiration of commonwealth principles 
 I want to bring you to know something of one of the most 
 neglected of old soldiers and sailors that this old land of ours ever 
 had. That is Robert Blake. 
 
 He belonged to a west country family, and was born when the 
 west of England was in its glory ; when Bristol was what Liverpool 
 is now. Blake's ancestors appear to have been country gentle- 
 men, but one of them Humphrey Blake turned merchant. He 
 left Bristol and went to Bridgewater, where he set up vessels, and 
 became what is well termed a merchant adventurer. They had 
 then to fight as well as sail. Piracy in that day was a gentlemanly 
 fashion. It is only in times like this that the fashion has changed. 
 The merchant of that time piloted his own ship, looked after his own 
 enemies, ran the risk of being sold in Barbary, or to hear a tune 
 in Tunis ; and if he escaped these chances he did tolerably well. 
 Well, such a man was Humphrey. He had a large family, and 
 at the tail of them came Robert. 
 
 Robert Blake went to Bridgewater School, and, being of a very 
 quiet and studious turn, he was passed from school to Oxford. 
 Whilst he was at Oxford, he was famed for being pious, devout at 
 prayer, and a strong lover of field sports. A man to be devout, 
 now, must be I won't say what ; but it is impossible in these 
 days to be anything like pious and be fond of sport. They had 
 not got the fiddle-faddle and squeamishness of these days then :
 
 74 Admiral Blake. 
 
 men did not groan and go about with pale faces, canting, as if 
 field sports were anything ungodly. If any one of you thinks 
 that God can't be good to a man who loves field sports, I hate 
 your bastard Judaism. 
 
 There is an odd tale told of Blake putting up for a scholarship at 
 Merton College, and failing, trying again, and again not succeed- 
 ing. It is said that he did not get it because he was tall. But 
 he was a thorough good scholar not one of the deepest, but a 
 great lover of the classics, which gentlemanly taste he retained 
 through life. He loved old Horace to the last ; and at that time 
 of day it was not altogether approved of that the man who feared 
 God should quote Horace. 
 
 He was also known at Oxford for his opinions. Whoever feeds 
 his soul upon the classics becomes dangerous. No wonder that 
 the French priest lately wanted to put them down altogether, and 
 put the old musty theology of the fathers in their place. The 
 classics heralded-in the Reformation, and were at the bottom of 
 the republics of the world. Studying his classics, Blake drank in 
 his hatred of kings and priestcraft, and became a thorough-paced 
 lover of the principles of republicanism and the commonwealth. 
 What he believed people soon found out, for he spoke his opinions 
 freely. Hence he was known at college, by those who didn't like 
 him, as a dangerous youth ; his friends called him a rising man. 
 
 About this time, Archbishop Laud, with the soul of a petty 
 pedant, was attempting to force his Middle-Age antiquarianism 
 on England, and Blake got a thorough distaste for that. But 
 there came signs of poverty at home. He gave up his college 
 life. His father died, and the family were dependent on him. 
 He did the work nobly, brought up his brothers and sisters, and 
 made their way for them in life. 
 
 Then, by-and-bye, as you will remember, a king put his 
 quarrel upon the issue. Now, when people are reasonable, they 
 won't fight. But suppose there's a saw-pit, and both people want 
 to be top sawyers ; if neither will give way, fight they must. If 
 Charles had listened to reason the little question would have been 
 settled. But by-and-bye, he threw down the glove of battle, and 
 there were plenty to take it up. Among them was Blake. He 
 looked to his pike and his powder, got his friends and horses 
 ready, and prepared himself for the time of fighting. When the
 
 A dm iral Blake. 7 5 
 
 war broke out the first troop in the field was that of Robert Blake. 
 Every man in it was a picked man, after Cromwell's pattern, a 
 God-fearing man, that made conscience of the matter. 
 
 Blake very soon showed a strong fertility of genius, marvellous 
 energy, and comprehensiveness of mind. All the west of England 
 was for the King except Bristol, which was strong for the common- 
 wealth. Well, Blake got command of a fort there, upon the 
 taking or non-taking of which depended the taking or non-taking 
 of the town. That was very absurd, of course, giving an Oxford 
 student, who knew nothing of fortification, who had not the 
 inestimable blessing of routine, a man not a Brahminical soldier 
 born at the top of command, it was very absurd and altogether 
 irregular to give him any charge of that sort. But he did his 
 work so well that volley after volley rolled back the royal troops, 
 and the fort was not taken. 
 
 Rupert, the strange, adventurous, daring prince was there. He 
 was a son of a king of Bohemia by an English princess; but 
 things turned out badly in that kingdom, and they had to run. 
 He wandered all over Europe, asking succour of the kings in 
 vain, and getting it only from republican Holland. As soon as 
 he came to England, the King wanted to make him governor of a 
 colony, and Laud proposed to make him a bishop (every creature 
 after its kind !), but he became neither. The fine old gentlemanly 
 Cavaliers were taken with him in a moment ; they loved the fiery, 
 impetuous, daring dash and boldness of the man. They put him 
 at the head of their cause, and there he was at Bristol. Well, the 
 governor got weak-hearted, and surrendered ; but in his anxiety to 
 give in, he forgot to tell Blake that he had capitulated ; and when 
 the Royal soldiers went up to take possession of the fort, it was 
 the old story a rattling, terrible volley, that sent them reeling 
 back. Rupert declared that was against the laws of war (and so 
 it was), and that he had a good mind to hang Blake. It would 
 have been a good thing for Rupert if he had ; for Blake was his 
 scourge through life, and put an end to Rupert by-and-bye. The 
 governor was tried for not telling Blake of the capitulation, and 
 thus putting in jeopardy the lives of his men. Ah ! they were 
 studiously finical and fastidious in those days of the lives of their 
 fighting men. 
 
 Well, Blake was made a lieutenant-colonel in Popham's regi-
 
 76 Admiral Blake. 
 
 ment, and went down to Lyme Regis, where there happened to 
 be some ships belonging to some rich Roundhead merchants of 
 London ; and Blake was to defend them. But Lyme Regis was 
 just the very last place that ought to be defended upon sound 
 orthodox rule. Upon sound principles of routine, nobody could 
 or should defend it. But Blake did. Prince Maurice, Rupert's 
 brother, went against him, and asked him to surrender he could 
 not think of defending that place. Blake told him he thought he 
 should; as for surrendering, he knew nothing about it at all. 
 And before that little nasty place Maurice raged and chafed, lost 
 his most precious blood and best men ; and then had to go and 
 leave it, to tell that the defence of that place was against all rule 
 the most irregular and disorderly thing ever done. 
 
 Well, Blake got relief from London, and marched very soon to 
 Taunton most important at the time, as it blocked up Charles' 
 way into Cornwall. It used to be the way in those days, if the 
 Royal troops were in a town, and the Roundneads came in 
 greater force, to march out at once. The Roundheads did the 
 same by the Royal troops; and nobody had ever thought of 
 defending Taunton. But this irregular Oxford student, great in 
 Horace and in prayer, guiltless of the solemn rules of routine, 
 when they asked him to walk out, said, " No ; I will defend it." 
 He held out. 
 
 During the pause was passed the " self-denying ordinance." 
 What was that but the method Old England had in those days of 
 getting rid of titled incapables ? At the head of the Republican 
 party were gentlemanly Essexes and Warwicks lords, men that 
 were born to command, that knew all about it, only they were 
 double-minded men. They never lost battles if they could help 
 it, for reputation's sake ; they never won fights, because aristocracy 
 would be in peril. It would have been invidious to have named 
 persons, so the Act was made general, the Warwicks and Essexes 
 went out, and the army and navy were for a little time headless. 
 But men came one a farmer, a man who had no business there, 
 fond of draining, of chapel, Bible-reading, and prayer : Cromwell 
 put himself at the head ! Of course this was very bad. Who 
 cared about seeing or hearing him? If Essex had sneezed, it 
 would have been an honour ; if Warwick had coughed, folks would 
 have been enchanted ; but who cared anything about Mister
 
 A dmiral Blake. 7 7 
 
 Oliver Cromwell? Well, it was while Blake was keeping the 
 Royalists at Taunton that the self-denying ordinance was passed, 
 the turning-point in Cromwell's cause. The Somerset people were 
 exceedingly disgusted with his conduct, and they said they would 
 sweep him out. They asked him to give in, but he sent the quaint 
 answer that he had committed his cause to the Lord, and he had 
 not the smallest doubt that the Lord would see him through it. 
 They did not sweep him out. Then came Berkeley, and also 
 asked him to surrender, pointing out that famine was impending 
 over the town, and that he might as well give in at once. Blake 
 sent back word that he had not yet eaten his boots, and that he 
 would never give up so long as he had the prospect of such a 
 dinner before him. There was a pig in Taunton at that time, and 
 Blake had it whipped in various quarters of the town, and there 
 arose such a squealing that the besiegers thought that so long as 
 there were so many pigs in Taunton, there was no chance of 
 getting Blake out. Relief came at length, and all the folks ran off 
 to church to hear a long sermon good, though long ; and such 
 was the condition of the people that the soldiers, tired and hungry 
 themselves, would not eat a morsel of their rations, but gave them 
 up to the besieged. 
 
 Then came Goring, that brave and cruel soldier of King 
 Charles. He determined to insult Blake, and sent in a little 
 ragged tattered drummer with a flag of truce, to ask for an 
 exchange of prisoners. Blake took the poor drummer, gave him 
 a new suit, and sent him back. You can't beat a man who could 
 do that. Goring burned a house in his rage, and Blake caused the 
 bells to ring, because when the enemy got angry, he said they were 
 sure to make fools of themselves. Taunton held out, but when 
 the siege was ended there was little of Taunton left. The pivot 
 of the whole of England's history was the disorderly, irregular, 
 unheard of, and unroutine-like, grand, and noble defence of 
 Taunton by Blake. 
 
 Then came Charles's fall. Against the king-killing, Blake freely 
 spoke. " I will peril my life to save the King's," he said. But 
 he was out-voted ; the sacred and innocent blood was shed ; and 
 Blake, having said his say, went on with his work. 
 
 There is one incident which should have been mentioned 
 before. One of his brothers, hearing that two Royalist officers
 
 7 8 Admiral Blake. 
 
 were on the road, mounted and went after them himself without 
 reporting it ; quarrelled with them, fought, and was killed. Blake 
 was in the streets of Bridgewater when the news came. He said 
 simply, " Samuel had no business there ; " but as soon as he got 
 into the house, away from the crowd, he shed many bitter tears. 
 Tacitus said of our fathers, " They get done with their weeping 
 quickly, but they keep their sorrows long." So I hope it will ever 
 be. 
 
 Well, while many others had a call to London, where the 
 Republican loaves and fishes were to be divided, Blake remained 
 in the country ; but by-and-bye Cromwell sent for him, and they 
 proposed that he should turn admiral. He knew nothing of navi- 
 gation, and yet they asked him to be an admiral who knew nothing 
 of admiralship. They had no admiral, but they caught a man ! 
 Part of the navy was mild Presbyterian ; the greater part was 
 Royalist, and Rupert had got them away at Holland. Cromwell 
 saw the push England was in ; so, instead of sending over the town 
 for Admiral Routine, to see if he could do it, and to Admiral 
 Epaulette, if he was not capable, he sent for the man Blake. He 
 appointed him with Deane and Popham, generals and admirals at 
 sea. A man at that time was everything at once, just as you see 
 Menschikoff wearing spurs on shipboard a commander, governor, 
 general, ambassador, and liar-in-chief for Russia.* They were 
 ordered to do three things : first, to reorganise the navy ; second, 
 disperse the ships under Rupert ; and, third, they were to put 
 down the Irish rebellion. The navy then was like our Crimean 
 army now all wreck, rot, and ruin. Like our commissariat,, 
 there was plenty on paper, but nothing to be got. Blake insisted. 
 on seeing the things themselves, routed out incapables, soon put 
 things to rights, and set out to fulfil the second and third parts of 
 his commission. He soon got the love of his crew, for he was one 
 of the tenderest, gentlest fighting men England ever had. He 
 would send a big ship away although he wanted his guns home 
 with a cargo of sick and wounded sailors. He took great care of 
 the stuff with which our battles were fought. Blake went and 
 chased Rupert to Portugal. Rupert got up into a neutral river, 
 and because it was neutral Blake could not follow. He tried to 
 
 * This lecture was given in the winter of 1854, when we were at war with 
 Russia.
 
 Admiral Blake. 79 
 
 get the King to let him, but he failed in that ; Rupert tried to get 
 Blake assassinated, but he failed in that. Blake got tired of this, 
 and as the Brazil fleet was coming home, he took them at once, 
 and while he was righting them, Rupert escaped. Then Blake 
 went to the Scilly Islands places impregnable, "that could not be 
 taken" ; but he went and took them, knocked down the robbers' 
 cave, and regained the ships ; and Rupert died away. 
 
 There was a coolness between France and England ; there was 
 no love between any court and England, for they all wanted to 
 put Old England down ; and Blake, while sailing about, met a 
 French ship. He told the captain to come on board. The man 
 did, and Blake asked for his sword. He said he did not know 
 they were at war, or that Blake wanted to fight. " Oh, but we 
 are," said Blake; "go back and let us fight it out." Back 
 he went, and fight it out they did ; and the next time the 
 captain appeared on Blake's quarter-deck was to deliver up his 
 sword. 
 
 Then we come to the great Dutch war. Holland had two great 
 admirals, Van Tromp and De Ruyter, and the latter went against 
 Blake. A storm came on, there was no fighting j and when the 
 Dutch Admiral went back the mob hooted him. Like all mobs, 
 they were unreasonable. He had no business to have had a 
 storm ; he was abused and reviled. The proud man knew that 
 he had been ill-treated, so he retired. Van Tromp then took the 
 command. He met Blake off Dover, and to it they went. We 
 did not win, but we did not lose that battle. There was some- 
 thing wrong, and a commission was sent down at once on the 
 moment to see whose fault it was, and to decide on the spot. 
 They turned out the men that were to blame. Among them 
 was Blake's brother, who had been half-hearted, who had not 
 done his best. Of course, Blake should have said, " Oh ! it's my 
 brother Ben ; he has not done his duty, but I promote him." 
 But no ; with the spirit of the old Roman, he broke him, and sent 
 him away. 
 
 The next great battle was off Portland. For three whole days, 
 " from morn till dewy eve," they fought ; and when the fight was 
 over the question was settled for ever. The Dutch lost 1 1 ships 
 of war, 30 merchantmen, and 1500 sailors ; they had to pay the 
 expenses of the war, turn out Charles II., and strike their flag
 
 8o Admiral Blake. 
 
 to England. Since those days the narrow seas have belonged to 
 us, and the rule of the seas has been ours. 
 
 Blake went down, sick in health, to the country, at home with 
 his brother Humphrey : walked about, had prayers, had a com- 
 fortable glass of canary, and sometimes two, and if anybody came 
 in they had a bit of old Horace. But there came a war with 
 Spain for no particular reason ; but the people hated Spain. 
 Blake was sent out to collect some little accounts, and the first 
 debtor he called on was the Duke of Florence. Then he went 
 to the Pope and told him he owed 12,000 pistoles; and for 
 the first time money actually flowed from the Vatican towards 
 Old England. He then, while in the Mediterranean, came to 
 Tunis. The Dey twirled his moustache, wanted to know who 
 the English were, and, of course, as a king should do, refused 
 to settle his account. Blake entered the harbour, blazed 
 away at Dey's vessels, and, having set them on fire, went off 
 to box the ears of the Knights of Malta. Then he came 
 to Cadiz, and Lisbon, and Santa Cruz. The Spanish fleet 
 lay under the guns of the harbour. Nobody would ever 
 have thought of going in there to certain destruction ; but with a 
 fair wind Blake swept in, blazed away the mortal day long, and 
 when the sun sank there was not a single Spanish stick above water. 
 In that affair the favourite brother of Blake, it was whispered, 
 had been guilty of cowardice. "If none of you captains will 
 charge him," said Blake, " I will." He was tried and found guilty. 
 All the captains wrote a petition to Blake to allow his brother to 
 go quietly home in his ship. Blake wrote at the bottom, 
 "Allowed ;" but he added, in a line, " he shall never be employed 
 more." 
 
 It is men like this that Old England wants now. If there is 
 one book that Englishmen should read at this time, it is the life 
 of the devout fighter of England, who counted not blood against 
 duty. 
 
 Well, he felt he was dying, and asked leave to return. The 
 ship came to Plymouth, the harbour was lined with crowds of his 
 countrymen to welcome the hero; and the guns were charged, 
 the bells were ready, the shouts of welcome were hanging on the 
 lips of anxious thousands, when there was a pause. The man was 
 wanting. They went into his cabin, and there they found that
 
 Admiral Blake. 81 
 
 the moment the ship had touched the old hoary soil he loved so 
 well, the man had died. Then they took the body to Greenwich, 
 had it embalmed, carried it to Westminster, and buried it there. 
 It slept there until Charles the Second came with his beggarly 
 spawn, when they raked Blake's ashes out of the grave and threw 
 them to the winds. The living curs of royalty were thought 
 better than the dead lion of Kepublicanism. 
 
 So ends the history of this great man. Contrast him with some 
 men at our head in the present day. I fear Englishmen are now a 
 race of pigmies, unable to govern and unable to grow. From this 
 old land that made tyrants tremble there is now no voice. Let us 
 pray to God that He will send some man to England who will cut 
 his way through routine and incapacity, who will pass a new self- 
 denying ordinance, and who will not let the name of Old England 
 be blotted out from the map.
 
 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 BORN 1608. DIED 1674. (FROM STH JAMES I. TO I4TH CHARLES II.) 
 
 A HASTY criticism may incline some persons to say, " What new 
 can be said about John Milton ? " I believe there is nothing new 
 to be said about him. An equally foolish criticism might say, 
 when we ?je .^oing to the Alps, " What is there new to be seen in 
 the Alps ? " There is nothing new to be seen, but we have not yet 
 seen what is old. It is necessary, in order to understand Alps or 
 poets, that everyone should take his own view, and that view, to 
 each one, is the most important. 
 
 One is struck with wonder that you and I have never consulted 
 together before about John Milton. But Milton is not a man for 
 young people to talk about ; it takes a great deal to understand a 
 very great man, who has no parallel in his greatness. No man 
 stands more by himself than does Milton. The only men who 
 can have any relationship with Milton are Dante, as a Christian 
 poet; Shakespeare, as being the superior man of intellect; the 
 great German Goethe, as being the great man of self-culture ; and 
 Milton's great friend, companion, and superior officer, Cromwell, 
 because he was the friend, leader, champion, and true gene- 
 ral of that Puritanism to which Milton devoted himself. When 
 we have looked at Milton beside these four men, there is no other 
 man in the world at all to be compared with him. 
 
 From materialism, in any of its shapes, he was wide as the poles 
 asunder. If I had to select the passage in Milton's works, whether 
 in prose or verse, which of all others sheds most light upon him, 
 which explains him most, and most requires explaining by the 
 man, it would be the one which is the sublimest utterance of 
 egotism that perhaps the world has ever heard ; yet not so much 
 the egotism of the man as the egotism of humanity. It is a passage 
 which you need to listen to with all your ears, for it is hard to 
 catch the full sound and sense of it at one reading : " For the
 
 John Milton. 83 
 
 world, I count it not as an inn, but a hospital ; and a place not 
 to live, but to die in. The world that I regard is myself. It is 
 the microcosm of mine own frame that I cast my eye on. For 
 the other, I use it ; but like my globe, and turn it round some- 
 times for my recreation. Men that look upon my outside, perusing 
 only my condition and fortunes, do err in my altitude, for I am 
 above Atlas his shoulders. The earth is a point not only in re- 
 spect of the heavens above us, but of that heavenly and celestial 
 part within us. That mass of flesh that circumscribes me hurts 
 not my mind. The surface that tells the heavens they have an 
 end, cannot persuade me I have any. I take my circle to be 
 above 360. Though the number of the arc do measure my body, 
 it comprehendeth not my mind. Whilst I study to find how I 
 am a microcosm, or little world, I find myself something more 
 than the great. There is surely a piece of the divinity within us 
 something that was before the elements, and owing no homage 
 unto the sun. He that understands not thus much, hath not his 
 introduction or first lesson, and is yet to begin the alphabet of 
 man." That passage is the most splendid vindication of human- 
 ity against cant and false humility which has ever been written. 
 Of course, Milton was, as all men are, of the earth, earthy, and 
 notwithstanding his turning the world round as his globe, it had its 
 revenges upon him, for we find him as most great men if he goes 
 wrong, he goes wondrously wrong. When really great men go right, 
 they are mountain high; but when they go wrong, they are sea-deep. 
 
 Milton's father was a Puritan, but he had not the Puritanism of 
 the present day, which is almost beneath contempt He had 
 none of the modern nonsense called " seriousness," by which some 
 heavy-headed booby, incapable of seeing the grace and the glory 
 of art, or unable to listen to the charm of music, or to catch the 
 mirth of the world, shakes his dull heavy head, lead-weighted as 
 it is, and putting down all cakes and ale, declares himself to be 
 " serious." He took pride in his little lad John, and did not let 
 him scramble into education, or " pick up " knowledge, but while 
 he gave him bread for the body, he fed him with the daily bread 
 of the mind and of the soul. 
 
 We will pass over Milton's continental trip, and picture him on 
 his return to England. He was consummately beautiful ; his body 
 was perfect, every limb truly balanced; a man like an antique
 
 84 John Milton. 
 
 god; his face was perfection, his auburn hair flowing in glory; 
 there was nothing defective, halt, or limping about him. With a 
 sword in his hand he would fence with the best swordsman in 
 Europe, while, if he took the harp, he could play with the best 
 musicians in the world. Milton was thoroughly Greek in the true 
 sense. He had the sereneness and self-sufficiency of the old 
 Greeks, and their peculiar intellectual power, rather than emotional 
 nature. Passionate in his love of freedom, is it to be wondered at 
 that he was a Republican ? How many kings have there been, 
 before whom such a king as Milton could be brought to bow 
 down ? You cannot bring a man up to consummate manhood, and 
 ask him to bow down to golden calves or things unworthy to rule. 
 I scorn the pitiful affectation of the moderns, who think it is sin 
 for a man to avow himself a Republican, when that great and 
 mighty master of grace, accomplishment, and godliness, declared 
 himself to be unable to bow his head to men, except they were 
 what he was himself erect in virtue, upright, manly, fit to guide 
 and to lead. When any of you can reach high enough to touch 
 that man's shoe-buckle, then it may be time to talk as some of you 
 do. Could a consummate Greek like that be anything else than 
 a Republican ? Impossible. 
 
 Comparing Milton with Goethe with the latter self-culture was 
 an end, while Milton cultivated himself for the world, for work, for 
 God, and for man. Goethe ended in himself, while Milton 
 cultivated himself with equal care and success, in order to throw 
 himself into the din of battle, into the strife of politics, into the 
 stir of humanity, into the frivolities, if you like, which distinguish 
 political strife. Milton entered heartily into the struggles of 
 politics. He was not like some men of the present day, who affect 
 to despise politics as "low." This all-accomplished man came 
 into the world to serve and to work. He sat down and wrote 
 pamphlets most abusive ones too and he stood by the side of 
 Cromwell, that rough soldier, who found in him a friend. 
 
 There is nothing more wonderful in literary history than to 
 compare Milton with Shakespeare. I have shown you the all- 
 accomplished and all-cultivated scholar ; but Shakespeare was not 
 accomplished in the ordinary sense. Shakespeare never went to 
 college; and, thank God, knew no language but his own, for it was 
 from Shakespeare knowing English so well that he wrote the
 
 John Milton. 85 
 
 splendid English he did write. What a rebuke to those of us who 
 are going in for education and culture too much ! Where Milton 
 was greatest, Shakespeare was as great, and then he had what 
 Milton had not, a large comprehensive sympathy. The flaw in 
 Milton is that he wants mirth there is no laughter in the man. 
 Milton had no humour; but Shakespeare could paint sages, 
 simpletons, saints, and sots. Shakespeare was tender, even to 
 improper people like Burns, who was tender even with the devil ; 
 but Milton was hard and bitter. In some respects, Shakespeare 
 overtopped Milton. In Shakespeare we have a great Catholic ; 
 in Milton, a great Sectarian. There was nothing of the priest in 
 Shakespeare ; he did not try to make men better or wiser, except 
 incidentally. Milton, on the other hand, was a priest struggling 
 to make men better, a Sectarian pleading for a great cause. In 
 Shakespeare and Milton stand two mighty pillars in the temple of 
 English literature. They are beauty and strength : one, a child of 
 nature brought up on its most rich diet, a genius highly cultured ; 
 and the other greater, because he was more universal, and more 
 pitiful, and more sympathetic. 
 
 Milton's domestic sympathies were weak, and his most unfor- 
 tunate and inexplicable marriage with Mary Powell was a stupen- 
 dous act of folly. The misery attendant upon that marriage may 
 be in some part due to the fact that Milton married a girl instead of 
 a woman. Milton, the man of thirty-five, of splendid culture and 
 glorious person, but with a hardness in his nature which we all 
 regret, with a want of tenderness and pity which has robbed him, 
 and robbed him justly, of much of the world's love, by a sudden 
 impulse which no man can account for, went down into the 
 country, and came back burdened with a young girl and such a 
 girl ! One doesn't blame her ; she was only seventeen years and 
 a half, and perhaps had hardly done with her doll. He took her 
 into a stately house, austere, severe, where she had no companions 
 except two or three of the girls she took with her, and who stayed 
 for a while. Then in a very short time, disenchanted of whatever 
 strange enchantment there might have been, she left him, Milton, 
 no doubt, giving her a sort of helping push, and consenting to the 
 child going back to her old home. And then, before she was out 
 of the house, while her step was yet to be heard on the stair, he 
 sat down to write those terrible tracts on Divorce. We will not
 
 86 John Milton. 
 
 now discuss those tracts, because, in the first place, probably none 
 of you take a practical interest in the question ; and, secondly, 
 because they are rather strong meat, and not all of you have 
 arrived at the time of life for strong meat. They are very full of 
 strong language, and that in great variety. In them Milton rings 
 the changes upon unlovely marriages and dreary women. He 
 describes such marriages as a worse condition than the loneliest 
 single life. He describes such wives as the one he had got, as 
 mute and spiritless mates, and the maintenance of the marriage 
 tie under such circumstances as the impossible performance of an 
 ill-driven bargain. He talked about married people hating one 
 another with a most operative hatred, and about the chaining of a 
 living soul to a dead body. 
 
 It was a noble spirit which led Milton to enter into the arena of 
 political and theological strife. This born poet, this worshipper of 
 beauty, this splendid scholar, laid aside not only his tastes, but his 
 largest ambition and glorious dream, in order to discharge what 
 he believed to be a great public duty. Taught by what he so 
 emphatically called " God's secretary, conscience," instead of 
 taking the course which most men would have done, that splendid 
 man laid his laurel wreath down, and bade it lie there, forgotten 
 and neglected ; he hung up his glorious harp, and took down the 
 weapons of conflict ; he left poetry for theology, left beauty for 
 politics, left works of art to plunge into a battle in which sectaries 
 were to be his companions, fanatics and fools both his enemies 
 and his friends. Perhaps a more splendid case than this of true 
 sacrifice to what is considered to be the weal of the nation has 
 not been seen in modern times. Though he wrote politics with a 
 splendour no other Englishman has ever reached, yet Milton still 
 confessed that that was not the kind of writing in which he felt 
 himself at his best ; for, in words eminently significant and admir- 
 ably quaint respecting this new kind of writing treatises on 
 Divorce, on Prelacy, and the Tenure of Kings he said it was " a 
 manner of writing wherein, knowing myself inferior to myself, led 
 by the genial power of nature to another task, I have the use, as 
 I may account it, but of my left hand" No man could put it 
 better ; to write politics was with him to write with the left hand. 
 What a marvellous right hand his must have been ! 
 
 But his sight failed, and people said it was a judgment from
 
 John Milton. 87 
 
 God for taking the wrong side. (We still hear some of that old 
 imbecility.) But if a man uses his eyes too much, even in read- 
 ing religious tracts, he will turn blind. Milton studied the 
 Hebrew Bible every morning ; but he had no family worship, 
 attended no church or chapel, and belonged to no sect, believing 
 that God must be worshipped in spirit, and holding converse with 
 the Hebrew prophets. He who surpasses or subdues mankind 
 must have solitude as his companion, and that was the case with 
 Milton. 
 
 Upon his return from Italy, he might have joined either in the 
 Catholic revival, the Protestant movement, the revival of Greek 
 learning, or with Archbishop Laud and his rites and ceremonies ; 
 but he had no liking for revivals of the past. 
 
 And what have we to do with bringing back yesterday? If 
 yesterday cannot keep itself alive, I will not be its resurrectionist. 
 We have something better to do than turn gravediggers. I do 
 not believe in any revivals of the past, either in religion or art ; 
 and I think that amongst the most voluminously absurd things 
 which God's earth has been plagued with in our own times are 
 some of our modern chapels, with their revivals of styles of 
 architecture. 
 
 Milton left his poetry, and plunged into the mud, the mire, the 
 dirt, and the storm of politics, and took his side with Cromwell 
 for freedom for the man, freedom for the State, and freedom for 
 the Church. That was his Puritanism unlike what is often 
 called Puritanism now and he drew a bright picture of the 
 future of England. But his picture was not realised, and the 
 Restoration followed the Restoration for which, until lately, the 
 nation has given God thanks in church ! Milton expected the 
 Second Advent of Christ ; but Charles the Second was restored 
 instead, to rule over England. 
 
 At length total blindness came upon Milton, and his days were 
 drawing to their ending. His politics done with, his left hand 
 taken out of service, he resumed the use of his glorious right 
 hand, his youth's dream was carried out, and he wrote his poem 
 of poems, " Paradise Lost." Never, perhaps, has there been a 
 similar case of a man putting away his youth's dream at the call 
 of duty, and then living to take it up. As he got old he did not 
 become feeble. Wrapped in an old gray coat, he sat sunning
 
 88 John Milton. 
 
 himself at the door of his house, his life's battle over, his youth's 
 dream carried out. 
 
 Do you think that man repented of anything he had written or 
 done ? Not he. Recant ? Not a word. Never once having 
 faltered or failed, with him there was now no change of opinion. 
 Self-satisfied in the highest sense, agreeing with all he had ever 
 believed or said, the sun shone upon him, his soul walked in glory 
 far away from the crowd of the street, and he held converse with 
 Hebrew prophets, whilst the great Romans and the greater Greeks 
 were ever present to him. 
 
 And so, at last, this great soul passed away, without sigh or tear, 
 without weeping or wailing, without repenting or recanting. 
 Though much lacking in tenderness, though we can hardly love 
 him, yet he was a prince of scholars and a great poet. Take 
 Milton for all in all politician, poet, man there has been none 
 greater than he. Perhaps Wordsworth's characterization of him 
 will always continue the best : 
 
 " His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart."
 
 ANDREW MARVELL. 
 BORN 1620. DIED 1678. (FROM 17x11 JAMES I. TO iSTH CHARLES II.) 
 
 A MONGST English worthies of a second rank, one of the most 
 *^ noble is Andrew Marvell. He was not one of the greatest 
 men of his time, but was the honestest and best of the second- 
 class men. He lives by virtue of one anecdote and one character- 
 istic : the anecdote I shall hereafter refer to, and the characteristic 
 you will see running through the whole of his life. He was one 
 of the most incorruptible Englishmen that ever lived ; he lived in 
 days the most corrupt and thoroughly despicable that England 
 ever knew in the reign of the weakest, and at the same time the 
 vilest monarch that ever disgraced the English throne, Charles the 
 Second. Charles was, as a king, as vile as he was as a man, and 
 nothing but the subservience we shall have to look into by-and- 
 bye, backed by the Church, and therefore followed by the State, 
 could ever have induced a man to believe the king worthy of his 
 support, or have led great men to grovel at his feet. All the 
 great trees in England were cut down, except two or three, and 
 amongst these, the tallest and most noble was Andrew Marvell. 
 
 In following the rule that you cannot know much about a man 
 unless you know something of his father (and I need not remind 
 you that what we have done for ourselves is often very little, and 
 what our fathers have done for us is often the largest part of any- 
 thing distinguishing about us), we shall have to look a little into 
 his family. His father was a native of Cambridge, and master of 
 the grammar-school at Kingston-upon-Hull. He was a very 
 upright, bold, courageous Englishman a man pious, withal face- 
 tious and grave. These things may be easily united in a healthy, 
 sound-minded man ; and when they are disunited, it only proves 
 that the man is unhealthy. Andrew was his only son, who became 
 afterwards noted. The circumstances of the lather's death were 
 characteristic. He lived on the one side oi the river Humber.
 
 90 Andrew Mar veil. 
 
 and he had a friend, a lady, who lived on the other side. This 
 lady had an only daughter upon whom she doted. This daughter 
 crossed the river to attend a family baptism in Marvell's house- 
 hold, and she being anxious to get back the same day, went down 
 to the water side, Mr Marvell, senior, attending her. The weather 
 was stormy, but the obstinate girl was determined to cross, and, 
 though warned by the boatman of the danger, persisted in her 
 determination, for fear her mother should be anxious. Mr Mar- 
 vell. too, a thorough gentleman, seeing that she had crossed for 
 his pleasure, determined to re-cross with her, and, so sure and 
 certain did he feel of the result of that short passage, that when 
 he went on board the boat, just as they were putting off, he threw 
 his gold-headed cane on the shore, and asked whoever might pick 
 it up to give it to his son Andrew ; and then, with that cheerful- 
 ness that perfect men always feel, he cried out, " Ho ! anybody for 
 heaven ? " Before they had got half across the river, the boat 
 upset, and both the generous man and the enthusiastic girl whom 
 he was so chivalrously escorting, met their death. The bereaved 
 mother of the young girl took great interest in Andrew Marvell, 
 and, after her grief was over, sent for him, and befriended him 
 ever afterwards, and at her death left him her little fortune. 
 
 Marvell was born i5th November 1620. He received a good 
 education. At fifteen years of age he went to Cambridge, and 
 entered Trinity. There he stayed until they sent a recruiting 
 party to Cambridge, when he fell in with a recruiting sergeant of 
 the black regiment of Jesuits. They sent their recruiting sergeants 
 where young men were most rife, and unfortunately enlisted 
 Marvell into their ranks. After a long and unremitting chase, he 
 was found by his friends at a bookseller's shop, and carried back 
 in triumph to Cambridge. This ended his connection with Jesuit- 
 ism, and he never liked either Jesuits or Pope afterwards. We 
 do not see much of Marvell's college life, except one ugly-looking 
 entry in the books " It is agreed by the masters and seniors that 
 Mr Carter, Dominus Wakefield, Dominus Marvell, Dominus 
 Waterhouse, and Dominus May, in regard that some of them are 
 reported to be married, and the others look not after their ways 
 nor acts, shall receive no more benefit of the college, and shall be 
 out of their places, unless they show cause to the college for the 
 contrary, in three months." Some of them had married, and some
 
 Andrew Marvell. 91 
 
 i 
 
 of them had neglected their exercises ! The first of these crimes 
 is by far the greatest for a man at college to be guilty of; for what 
 has marriage to do with books? I am happy in being able to tell you 
 that Marvell was only guilty of the lesser fault. He, however, got 
 into some other scrapes at Cambridge, and was finally expelled. 
 Possibly he was tired of gerund grinding, and found some of the 
 principles rather fogeyish. 
 
 He was thrown from Cambridge into the wide world, and pro- 
 ceeded to do what almost every man of good birth and high breed- 
 ing did in those days he travelled. Whilst in Rome, he became 
 acquainted with another Englishman, John Milton. Milton was 
 some eight years older than Marvell, and those eight years helped 
 Marvell to that due reverence for Milton, which is necessary to 
 give the true tone in friendship between man and man. These 
 young men felt all courage in Rome, and they astonished the people 
 by their free speaking upon Protestantism, and also by their 
 polished speech and accomplished manners, showing the inhabit- 
 ants of the Seven-Hilled City that there were scholars in England 
 with better heads and bolder hearts than any the shadows of the 
 Vatican had produced for many years. There being some priest 
 there who had been making rather an extra fool of himself, Mar- 
 veil fell to and attacked him. This made Rome warm, and they 
 went to Paris. Here Marvell fell foul of a worthy Abbe, who had 
 a theory about finding out people's character by their hand-writ- 
 ing, and had written a little book upon it. Marvell wrote a satire 
 upon the book, and thus made Paris warm. 
 
 There is a long gap here, and the only thing we can see of 
 Marvell is that, on returning home, he was tutor to Lord Fairfax's 
 daughters. There is a notion now-a-days that women are 
 better educated than they were once. But that is all nonsense, 
 you know. Women were once a great deal better educated than 
 they are now. We have only to go back to Queen Elizabeth's 
 time, and we find that ladies then spoke Latin admirably, and 
 could read Greek fluently, and speak the French language, not 
 like a great many women now, with an English accent, but very 
 well. There is a notion that the education of woman is quite a 
 new idea. No such thing : it has gone backwards, and not for- 
 wards. Well, Marvell was employed for the education of Lord 
 Fairfax's daughters. He afterwards became joint-secretary with
 
 92 Andrew Marvel I. 
 
 Milton to Oliver Cromwell, and in that capacity composed his 
 grand apology for the Protector. 
 
 After spending a year and a half in that occupation, he was, in 
 the year 1660, returned as M.P. for Kingston-upon-Hull, and he 
 was paid for it. It is considered quite an awful thing now to pay 
 a Member of Parliament. It is extremely " proper " to look the 
 most horrible disgust, when anyone ever proposes such a thing. 
 But it was the old English custom, and we of the present day are 
 the innovators. That sounds strange to you, who have such an 
 abomination of paying members of Parliament. But we pay the 
 Queen to govern us ; we pay a gentleman to be her husband ; * 
 we pay the archbishop to look after the bishop, and we pay the 
 bishop to look after the curate, and we pay the curate to see to 
 our souls ; we pay the policeman to watch for us, and we pay the 
 hangman to hang us. Nothing for nothing is the Englishman's 
 rule, until we come to the member of Parliament. Marvell always 
 took his salary, and I admire him for it. People have no objec- 
 tion to anyone else being paid for speaking, whether lawyer or 
 parson ; but when it comes to paying a Member of Parliament, it 
 is counted a shame indeed. All this fudge is sheer cant. I con- 
 sider the old-fashioned way of paying members is much better 
 than the new-fangled one of members paying their constituents for 
 electing them. What a fuss some of you make when the physi- 
 cian conies to see you ! How he tacks all over the room, and you 
 walk after him ; then you put his guinea up in a piece of paper, 
 and, pretending to shake hands with him, you put it into his 
 hand ! What nonsense ! He would not have come, if you did 
 not pay him. Put the money down on the table, and let him give 
 you a receipt for it with a stamp upon it. They used to pay the 
 members in Marvell's time ; but now you expect a member to 
 open every dirty disgusting beer-shop in your dirty borough, and 
 pour the beer down the throat of every dry-throated fool that 
 likes to have it. Sometimes the good people of Hull, in addition 
 to his salary, made their member a little present, and on one 
 occasion we find him writing to them acknowledging the receipt 
 of a barrel of ale, and praising its quality as being " bright, good, 
 and strong," so much so that he said it was " a great risk to a sober 
 man." Marvell carried out, while in Parliament, the habit of writ- 
 
 * This lecture was delivered in 1859. The Prince Consort died in 1861.
 
 Andrew Mar veil. 93 
 
 ing to his constituents, and giving them a minute account of the pro 
 ceedings of every session ; and he tells us that, on one or two oc- 
 casions, he went without his dinner that he might not disappoint 
 them. He was a man much looked up to in the House. Though he 
 was no speaker, yet he wrote well. Sometimes Prince Rupert voted 
 on his side. Rupert had great respect for Marvell ; and when the 
 Prince talked sense, which he did occasionally, people used to say 
 that he had been with his tutor, and that tutor was Marvell. The 
 history of Prince Rupert is an eventful one. The son of a king, 
 he escaped from the flames of his father's palace, and after wan- 
 dering over Europe, met with an asylum in England with his 
 uncle, Charles the First. He became a soldier, bold to a fault, 
 and intrepid without judgment. After the downfall of Charles he 
 left England and took the command of that part of the English 
 fleet which still adhered to the royal cause. He was followed by 
 Blake, by whom he was compelled at last to give up pirate's 
 work. After the Restoration he returned to England and spent 
 the rest of his days in philosophising and making experiments in 
 mezzotint. 
 
 Marvell had a great dislike to two things standing armies and 
 excise duties. He lived in some of the worst days of English 
 history when the reign of the saints was over, and that of the 
 strumpets had taken its place. It was the day of that graceless 
 scamp Charles the Second, whose character is best described in 
 the epitaph made on him by one who knew him well.* 
 
 " Here lies our mutton-eating king, 
 Whose word no man relies on ; 
 He never said a foolish thing, 
 And never did a wise on'." 
 
 It was an age when men committed iniquity and gloried in it, 
 and wrote "sinner" without shame across their foreheads. The 
 king sold the country for foreign money, and bartered his own 
 and his kingdom's dignity and interest for a mess of dirty French 
 pottage, like a royal traitor as he was. The time was a time of 
 reaction, and reaction is always extravagant, for, as Luther 
 coarsely though truly said, " Human nature is like a drunken 
 beggar on horseback, gets on on one side and falls off on the 
 
 * The witty Earl of Rochester.
 
 94 Andrew Marvell. 
 
 other." Hence it was no easy thing for Marvell, as a member of 
 Parliament, to uphold liberal principles at such a time, when the 
 nation made an idol of Charles the Second. Charles the Second 
 certainly was the drollest idol ever nation set up ; that black- 
 haired, witty, good-for-nothing scamp. Still, it did set him up, 
 and it has been the hardest work to keep the reaction within 
 bounds. Marvell was a man that would never take a bribe, 
 though he always took his salary. I have no notion of people 
 affecting not to like to receive the money their services have 
 earned. St Paul himself sanctioned taking money for preaching, 
 and I fully believe in the doctrine, and practise it too. On one 
 occasion the Duke of Monmouth went to Hull, and the Corpora- 
 tion broke out into extravagant demonstrations of loyalty, as 
 Corporations always do at such times, and amongst other modes 
 of displaying it made the Duke an honorary present of six broad 
 pieces, which he offered to Marvell, who refused them. 
 
 Comparing Charles the Second with George the Fourth, the 
 first was at all events a clever scamp, good-humoured, and witty ; 
 while the last was merely a stupid sensuality. Wit was Charles the 
 Second's delight. Charles would rather have been laughed at 
 wittily, than not have had wit at all. The times were fearfully 
 corrupt in Charles's reign ; but Marvell undesistingly maintained 
 his integrity in the midst of all. Marvell went to Court, got into 
 conversation with Charles, and made such an impression that 
 Charles became very anxious to secure his services. The next 
 day he sent his Lord-Treasurer, Danby, to find him out. This 
 was rather a difficult matter ; but at last the minister found the 
 house in a little street leading out of the Strand, and then occurred 
 that famous scene that makes Marvell immortal. The Treasurer 
 got to the first floor : no Andrew Marvell on that floor (only such 
 people as you and I live on the first floor). Then he found him- 
 self up on the second floor ; but that would not do. Then he 
 stumbled his way up to the top-pair, and the door stood open, 
 and there was Marvell writing. The Treasurer made him a model 
 bow. Marvell said he was afraid he had lost his way. The 
 Treasurer said he had not, if it had conducted him to Mr Marvell. 
 So they talked about the weather and about all sorts of things, 
 except the subject he had come about. There is nothing very 
 difficult in coming to the point, when one party does not know
 
 Andrew Mar veil. 95 
 
 what it is ; but when we both know what we want, what a time 
 it takes to get at it ! By-and-bye it was time for the Treasurer to 
 go, and then he told Marvel how delighted the king had been 
 with him last night, and, quite accidentally, dropped a ^1000 note 
 upon the table. Now, consider on the one side lodgings in a 
 three-pair back, on a scant salary, and on the other an offer of 
 jiooo. What did Marvelldo? He knew what it meant. He 
 knew what was meant by a compliment from Charles II. There 
 are very few people who have soul enough to give you one when 
 they should. They let it go by for a time let it alone for six 
 months, perhaps. They are intending, some day, to show you a 
 lively sense of gratitude ; but they put it off. But a compliment 
 from Charles the Second, and an offer of ^1000 ! What did 
 Marvell do ? He rang the bell, and up came Buttons. " What 
 did we have for dinner yesterday ? " said Marvell. " Oh, we had 
 that little shoulder." " Oh," said he, "yes ; and what did we have 
 for dinner to-day ? " " The shoulder cold." " Oh, so we did ; 
 and what shall we have for dinner to-morrow ? " " Broth," said 
 Buttons. " Good," said Marvell, " you may go down." Then he 
 said to the Lord-Treasurer, " Marvell's dinners are provided, you 
 see ; Marvell wants not the king's money." Now, a man cannot 
 do one thing like that without doing many things like that. The 
 thousand pounds went back to the dirty source from whence it 
 came, and Marvell was none the worse for sending it. If I were 
 going to name a fresh constellation, I think I should name it 
 " Andrew Marvell's Shoulder of Mutton." The shoulder of mutton 
 of Marvell ranks with the wine tub of Diogenes, the Roman 
 general's dish of turnips, the leather coat and continuations of 
 George Fox, and the sawdust dumplings of Benjamin Franklin. 
 They should all be borne in mind, as proving the true secret of 
 independence to be having few wants. 
 
 Then came the contest between Marvell and Parker, Bishop of 
 Oxford, a man with the morals of a publican and the bigotry of a 
 Pharisee, who called Dissenters vipers, and heresy a greater sin 
 than adultery. Marvell put down that prelate by the publication of 
 his satire The Rehearsal; and a reward of ^50 was offered for the 
 discovery of the printer, and of ;ioo for the author. Marvell, 
 however, escaped prosecution. This man maintained his 
 position in the senate for twenty years; but by-and-bye his
 
 96 Andrew Marvell. 
 
 enemies began to thicken and multiply. You cannot have a 
 sharp pen without having many enemies. He was waylaid 
 more than once; but it never put him out, he said. At last, 
 after going down to Hull in July to make a speech to his con- 
 stituents, he died in London in peace, in the fifty-eighth year of his 
 age, on the i6th November 1678. He died very suddenly, and 
 it was said that he had been poisoned, but I cannot see any 
 ground for the suspicion, and it is impossible to prove it at this 
 distant period. There is no interest, to some people, in a man's 
 dying in a natural way ; so it has been written down that Marvell 
 was poisoned. He was " beloved by good men, feared by bad 
 men, admired by all, and imitated by few." What nobler epitaph 
 could a man have ? And I especially note to you one beautiful 
 clause " feared by bad men." In these days there is such a 
 desire for being feared by no man. Marvell was the terror of 
 England. When he dipped his pen in the ink, he was the terror 
 of all corrupt people. His whip was one of the sharpest, and his 
 lash was always laid on in admirable fashion. Some of you may 
 remember that of all men I respect him whose writings are law- 
 fully satirical, and Marvell's " king's speech " (a sham speech for 
 Charles the Second) is one of the finest things for satire I ever 
 saw. He had a most biting satirical talent, and he used it as few 
 men do. He used it lawfully, because only against base curs ; 
 for satire is always lawful and laudable against bad and mean 
 things, though it should never be used against good ones. Some 
 people doubt whether it is right to be satirical. Now, I would 
 say, never doubt whether it is right to be satirical, so long as there 
 are any vermin in the world. I am certain that almost any 
 instrument is lawful against them. If a thing be an imposture, 
 lash it as hard and as fast as you can. Satire is abominable only 
 when it is directed against anything that is weak or gentle. Mar- 
 veil wrote a droll satire on the Dutch, in which he depicted them 
 as manufacturing their country with handfuls of earth dragged out 
 of the sea, and alleged that their king should be the man amongst 
 them who could drain best. 
 
 Marvell also wrote several poems. Some of them are beautiful 
 enough, and they show a rather extensive knowledge of the 
 classic languages, and a rare culture. Nature had bestowed upon 
 this man some of her most admirable gifts, and cultivation had
 
 Andrew Marvel I. 97 
 
 done everything that was possible to perfect him. He began life 
 a poor man, and he died a poor man. So long as there are left 
 in this nation just ten righteous men enough to save us so 
 long will Andrew MarvelPs name be remembered among us. 
 
 I have no intention of giving any seasonable lessons upon elec- 
 tions; but it is a strange thing how a man now will spend thousands 
 of pounds to get an honour that men at that time used to run 
 away from. Any man, with no moral qualification whatever, 
 but possessed of wealth, is returned with enthusiasm by free, 
 enlightened, and independent electors. They have nothing but 
 a big purse, and that is enough, for this generation. Marvell's 
 letters to his constituents are admirable ; they are written by a 
 faithful, painstaking man, and contain an account of all that went 
 on in the House of Commons. They are some of the greatest 
 curiosities in England ; therefore, when any of you want to get 
 yourselves up to electioneering pitch, let me recommend to you 
 these letters of Marvell's to his constituents. You may meet with 
 a coarse word now and then, but if you have nothing bad in you, 
 you will not find much there. 
 
 I have a perfect veneration for this incorruptible Englishman. 
 I can only lament that he has very few successors. If you wish 
 such men to be more common, the best way is to create a demand, 
 and you will have them. The present representative of Birming- 
 ham, John Bright, has a great touch of old Marvell in his compo- 
 sition, in his dauntless courage, and incorruptible honesty. True, 
 Mr Bright has the Quaker views about war ; but many a man is a 
 Quaker by grace, but a fighting man by nature ; and in electing 
 him you have chosen as your representative, of all men in England, 
 the man most like Andrew Marvell.* 
 
 * These closing sentences indicate the motive of the lecture. In its first 
 delivery it had reference to John Bright, who was returned for Birmingham 
 without any expense to himself.
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 BORN 1615. DIED 1691. (FROM I2TH JAMES!. TO 2ND WILLIAM AND MARY.) 
 
 /COLERIDGE well and justly wrote, " We had in the time of 
 ^ Charles the First at once the glory and the shame of the 
 English Diocesan Church : the glory, for the vast and various 
 learning and the stupendous talents of its prelates, dignitaries, and 
 clergy ; and the shame, for their atrocious cruelties, and the rapid 
 approximation to the superstitions and doctrinal heresies that the 
 Reformation had upset ; but the reign of Charles the Second was 
 the reign of infamy of the Church of England." 
 
 Fortifying oneself by the authority of so good a Churchman as 
 Coleridge, I will proceed to put before you the life of perhaps the 
 greatest of the Nonconformist divines Richard Baxter, born in 
 Shropshire, near the river Severn, hard by Eaton Constantine, in 
 the year 1615. His father had a moderate estate, which he got 
 through by immoderate expenditure. He had in his youth been 
 a gambler, and had got through his money ; and in his later years 
 he became not only religious but puritanical, taking very scant 
 pleasure in the gross, careless, and sensual life by which he was 
 almost entirely surrounded. Poor little Richard Baxter's early 
 education was necessarily entrusted to such clerical people as were 
 to be found in the neighbourhood, but the samples were some- 
 thing about as shameful as ever the Church admitted within its 
 range. There was an old clergyman, who never had had much zeal, 
 and who had lost what little strength he ever had ; and around this 
 old cumberer of the ground (incumbent they called him) there 
 were grouped in succession a set of about the most notoriously 
 worthless gamblers, cobblers, tinkers, and broken-down tradesmen 
 that ever tried to get a living out of the vineyard of the Church, when 
 they found they could not get one elsewhere. One had laid the 
 flail, another the thimble, a third was " the excellentest stage player 
 in the neighbourhood," and a fourth an attorney's clerk, who, not
 
 Richard Baxter. 99 
 
 having done honour to his own profession, was not likely to shed 
 much dignity upon the office of clergyman. Among these ruffians 
 Baxter spent his early years, going thence to the grammar school 
 at Wroxeter, whose master was Mr Richard Wicksted, chaplain at 
 the council at Ludlow. While here, Baxter wished to go to a 
 university, but his master did not consent, because of the neglected 
 state of the lad's early education. Mr Wicksted was a very negli- 
 gent tutor, but he had a very good library, in which the lad got 
 plenty of reading. He afterwards supplied his old master's place 
 at Wroxeter; and there being no chance of his going to the 
 university, he went to Mr Garbett, and studied theology under 
 him. After having, by the patronage of Lord Newport, who was 
 a friend of his father's, obtained some little assistance, it was pro- 
 posed that he should go to Court, and go to Court he did, having a 
 special introduction by Sir Henry Herbert, who was Master of the 
 Revels. He remained at Court for one month, and then discovered 
 what he might have known before, that he was about the last man 
 in the world cut out for the sublime farce and solemn ineptitude 
 of dancing a fool's attendance about a Court, being in truth one 
 of the solemnest men that ever lived, one upon whom the next 
 world intruded all his life long. What could he do at Court ? 
 How could that satisfy a man whose soul was ever pondering upon 
 the saint's " everlasting rest " ? As was to be expected, he soon 
 came back again into the country, where his natural seriousness, 
 inherited from his father, and increased by the dissipation of a 
 month at Court, led him to ponder on the work he had to do. 
 He took to reading Puritan divines, and found more nourishment 
 for his soul in them than in anything Sir Henry Herbert could 
 introduce him to. The Bishop of Worcester shortly afterwards 
 ordained him; he obtained a school-master's license, and in 
 Dudley, Richard Baxter set up his ferrule for the first time. 
 
 At that time he was a Conformist ; but he read, listened, and 
 observed, all of which are often dangerous for Conformists, and 
 the result was, that he came to reject, first, the indiscriminate com- 
 munion of the Church of England, then compulsory subscription 
 to articles. Then he scrupled at the sign of the Cross in baptism ; 
 then he became an adversary of what was then called the English 
 Diocesan Frame. The next of his little heresies was that he did 
 not care that people should kneel down at the Communion ; and
 
 TOO Richard Baxter. 
 
 then he had scruples about the surplice, and had very great doubts 
 about wearing that white and innocent garment. Last of all, he 
 objected to what was then called the famous " Et-cetera Oath." 
 So this Conformist became a little nonconforming, always longing 
 for unity and striving for harmony, but nevertheless obliged to 
 leave the Church which he loved so well, until at last we find him 
 a Presbyterian. 
 
 The next move in his life was to Kidderminster, to act as the 
 curate of the vicar, who closely resembled the Shropshire clergy 
 among whom Baxter's early lot was cast, and who was persuaded 
 by his flock to leave the place in charge of curates. Here Baxter 
 passed probably the happiest, as certainly the noblest, time of his 
 life when he was a model pastor at Kidderminster. A just, up- 
 right, bold, valorous shepherd was this, rebuking sin without 
 hesitation, and the vices of the town without faltering. He was 
 then (as was the custom of the clergy in those days) teacher, 
 almoner, physician, friend, and legal adviser of his flock ; and with 
 this position, while he knew when to apply the rod to the sinners' 
 backs, he knew when to apply the balm to their souls. He could 
 wield the scourge, like Christ in the Temple, and could also 
 administer the unction of comfort with tenderness. 
 
 While he remained in Kidderminster, there came the sound of 
 war, for the Civil War had broken out. Baxter was a Monarchy 
 man ; but whilst he believed the old monarchy to be a priceless 
 blessing, and was too true a man to be a partisan, he yet loved 
 very many of the Puritans. This the people could not understand, 
 and the consequence was that he was suspected by both sides. 
 He got into trouble at Kidderminster, and had an evil time of it ; 
 and the people there, to whom he had spoken with so mucli 
 plainness, joined in running him down. Baxter then took refuge 
 with a number of other clerical brethren at Coventry, among 
 whom were some of the sweetest, simplest souls that ever lived. 
 What that body of simple souls who took refuge there thought in 
 their retirement was told by Baxter. " In the simplicity of our 
 hearts, we believed Essex and Cromwell were fighting the battles 
 of King Charles ; " and " when the Court newsbook told the world 
 that swarms of Anabaptists were in our army, we thought it was a 
 lie." 
 
 After a time Baxter became an army chaplain, and was present
 
 Richard Baxter. I o i 
 
 at Edge Hill, and present as chaplain to Whalley's regiment at the 
 sieges of Bristol, Sherborne, and Worcester. The soldiers among 
 whom he was could not only fight, but conduct theological argu- 
 ments ; and at Amersham in Bucks, Baxter on one occasion con- 
 ducted an argument which lasted from morn till dewy eve, with a 
 regiment of buff jerkins. He would have the soldiers listen to 
 him, and they were willing, provided they could have their say; 
 so he got up in his pulpit, the soldiers filled the church, and there 
 from morning till nearly night he argued with them, and kept 
 possession of the pulpit until they left the church, so that he 
 claimed the victory. 
 
 Now Cromwell had no very great love for these eternal disputings 
 of soldiers. He had a secret contempt for them, as all earnest 
 men must have, and so he disliked Baxter, and would not listen 
 much to him. He had a belief that there was something else to 
 do than to be splitting theological hairs, and to be continually 
 dipping down into the dark to come up loaded with obscurity. 
 The consequence was that, when Baxter was introduced to 
 Cromwell, he had a very cold reception. But they afterwards had 
 many long discussions, and it is delicious to read the accounts 
 which Baxter himself gives of the contests between them. Baxter 
 left a good portrait of Cromwell. " He was a man of excellent 
 natural parts for affection and oratory, but not well seen in the 
 principles of religion ; of a sanguine complexion, and naturally of 
 such vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity, as another man hath when he 
 hath drunken a cup too much, but naturally also very far from 
 humble thoughts of himself, and that was his ruin." They neither 
 of them loved the other, and Baxter hit upon a curious scheme for 
 detaching first one, and then all the regiments from Cromwell ; 
 but, happily for him, the Protector did not discover the scheme 
 which the inventor was prevented by illness from carrying out, or 
 most assuredly the engineer would have been " hoist with his own 
 petard." It quite broke down. 
 
 Always a bold man, Baxter still raised his voice against what he 
 called the treason, rebellion, perfidiousness and hypocrisy of Crom- 
 well. He preached it in the pulpit, he wrote it to him in letters, 
 told it him to his face ; but Cromwell, being a brave man, and 
 loving bravery in others, was not much disturbed by what came 
 from Baxter. He had a great respect for Baxter, although he dis-
 
 iO2 Richard Baxter. 
 
 liked him, and Baxter was invited to preach before the Lord 
 Protector. Glad of the chance, he resolved to " improve the 
 occasion," and preach a " faithful " and " searching " sermon (both 
 good phrases), and so Cromwell was not spared. Believing in his 
 heart that Cromwell had encouraged sectaries, he lifted up his 
 parable against him. The thesis was : " On the sin of politicians 
 keeping up divisions and sects, in order that they may fish in 
 troubled waters." The Lord Protector listened to the sermon, 
 and then got up and had a down-right good argument with Baxter. 
 It was not unusual for people to reply to the preacher in those 
 days. Baxter has left a report of the circumstance, in which he 
 lets down Cromwell and lauds himself with great vigour. Accord- 
 ing to Baxter, " the Protector began by a long tedious speech." 
 The sermon was two hours long. The Protector's speech was 
 " of God's providence in the change of government, and how God 
 had owned it, and what great things had been done both at home 
 and abroad;" and "when he had wearied us" (says Baxter) 
 " with speaking about an hour, I told him that it was too great 
 condescension to acquaint me so fully with all this matter, but I 
 told him that we took our ancient monarchy to be a blessing, and 
 not an evil to the land, and I humbly craved his patience that I 
 might ask him how England had forfeited that ancient blessing, 
 and unto whom that forfeiture was made. Upon that question he 
 wakened up with somewhat of a passion, and he told me it was no 
 forfeiture, but God had changed it as pleased him," &c. " Thus 
 four or five hours were spent ; " and during this long discourse 
 " Lambert fell asleep," as it was natural he should. 
 
 In these discussions, however, Cromwell used to get the better 
 of Baxter, as he not only summed up the debate, but also voted 
 twice. Baxter has told the story of these discussions in his own 
 inimitable way, and has acknowledged his defeat ; but he also told 
 Cromwell that he could answer all his arguments in two sheets of 
 paper. Poor Baxter could not meet Cromwell in the Council, but 
 he felt that if he were alone he could soon answer the arguments. 
 Cromwell, however, believed that he was right, and as long as he 
 could have his own say, he did not care what other people might 
 desire to say. It was a sad way to treat divinity, and it is no 
 wonder that Baxter resented it, for he was out-talked and out- 
 numbered by Cromwell. He could not get a word in, and that
 
 Richard Baxter. 103 
 
 was a sad state of affairs, as many of you who are present to-night 
 will be aware of if you have ever seen a man at the British Associa- 
 tion waiting anxiously to read a paper. (Long after this, however, 
 Baxter lived to see his blessed Monarchy restored, and to say 
 bitterly that he had seen days of greater liberty under the rule of 
 " an usurper." He spoke bitter words on the tyrant he was bound 
 to submit to. Under Cromwell he had had liberty, but under 
 Charles II. he had only the liberty to write.) 
 
 Baxter, after the failure of his theological scheme to blow up the 
 army and carry Cromwell prisoner, went back to Kidderminster, 
 and continued to work in peace and righteousness, being faithful 
 and courageous, and in his infirmities he laboured on in the cause 
 he had adopted. 
 
 I shall rapidly pass over the historical facts that followed, and 
 come to the restoration of the house of Stuart. The Parliament 
 then distrusted the Nonconformists, and estimated that their own 
 strength was small and the Presbyterians' was great. However, 
 they soon found out that they themselves were stronger than they 
 expected, and that the Nonconformists were only very weak. 
 So, instead of treating the Nonconformists with Christian love 
 and charity, they treated them with some indifference. Baxter 
 was at Kidderminster when he was called as one of four clergy- 
 men of the Presbyterian Church to preach before King Charles 
 II., who, not knowing then the relative weakness of the Non- 
 conformists, compared with his own people, professed a desire to 
 grant some liberty to them. Baxter preached before the king, 
 and before Hyde and Southampton (politicians of the fine Italian 
 flavour), on " The contrast between the sensual and the spiritual 
 life." The sermon still exists, and is without parallel, for in its 
 whole course there is not one courtly phrase to relieve the sad 
 censure of the whole. When, however, the King found that the 
 Nonconformists were not so powerful as he had imagined, Baxter 
 was requested to provide a scheme of church government, and was 
 offered the Bishopric of Hereford. He did all he could to bring the 
 dissenting clergymen into the Church, but failed, and he declined 
 the bishopric which had been offered to him. Then came the Con- 
 ference at the Savoy,* at which Baxter attended, and fought some 
 
 * A palace in the Strand, built by Peter, Duke of Savoy, more than a hun- 
 dred years before.
 
 1 04 Richard Baxter. 
 
 good battles in aid of the belief that he had accepted. The 
 bishops who attended the Conference had gone there with their 
 minds made up as to the conclusion, so there was little good 
 resulting from it. The sham conference in the Savoy over, then 
 came the downfall, and the shamefullest period in the history of 
 this country. The Act of Uniformity the disgrace of the English 
 Church was passed, and then came the day that dark St Bar- 
 tholomew's day (some wonder what the saint did that his day 
 should be doubly damned in ecclesiastical history) when two 
 thousand clergymen, the most learned ministers who had been 
 engaged in the ministration of the Word of God, were driven 
 from their livings and their homes into hiding in all parts of the 
 country. Baxter went with them.* He, among others, seceded 
 from the Church, and suffered penury and pain for what he 
 believed to be the truth. 
 
 He was then forty-seven years of age, and bowed down with 
 infirmity. He lived until he was seventy-five, being under the 
 necessity during many of the latter years of life to hide him- 
 self and live in ceaseless misery. Baxter did not live alone, for, 
 notwithstanding that he had preached against the clergy marrying, 
 at the age of forty-seven he married Margaret Charlton. She was 
 much younger than he was, but nevertheless they continued to 
 live happily together, and she sustained him in his troubles, and 
 was of much comfort to him in his latter years. 
 
 He was a grave, steady man. He spent seventy-five years 
 without gaiety, without fancy, with very little imagination. 
 There was scarcely a touch of poetry in him. He was a sort of 
 prose Dante never in Paradise, but always looking on the sad 
 side of human nature. His diseases quenched his ambition and 
 animal appetites. Had he been a healthy man, those seventy-five 
 years of his life might have been of a very different character. 
 
 The persecution of the Nonconformists and the impeachment 
 and prosecution of Baxter must be referred to. He was tried by 
 that beast, buffoon, sneak, liar, knave, bully, tyrant, blackguard, 
 Judge Jeffreys, who sentenced him to a term of imprisonment. 
 He called Baxter, on his trial, "blockhead," "villain," and 
 " rogue." Even in gaol Baxter was never still, but occupied his 
 
 * Baxter had been a king's chaplain, although he had not accepted a 
 bishopric.
 
 Richard Baxter. 105 
 
 time in writing the books which have made his name famous. 
 After enduring imprisonment for some time, he was pardoned, 
 and lived to see better days, for he saw 1688. 
 
 Baxter was an amazing believer in omens and signs, and ghosts 
 and witches. Just then Sir Matthew Hale was adjudging witches 
 to death, More* was preaching against them, and the learned 
 were investigating the source of their power. As one of the Non- 
 conformists, he may be looked upon as their chief, and as one of 
 the greatest in their history. 
 
 The works which Baxter has left are very voluminous, and were 
 written under all sorts of physical and other difficulties. I can 
 recommend a perusal of them to you as the most learned metaphy- 
 sical disquisitions that can be found. But his works testify more 
 to the greatness of the workman than the greatness of the work. 
 Take him for all in all, he was one of the greatest of literary men. 
 No words can praise him too much, for although he was sick and 
 weary, yet his works are a pyramid of learning, industry, and 
 greatness, such as has seldom, been matched. They are the 
 monument of a big soul, a sickly body, and a long, learned, and 
 laborious life. 
 
 * Henry More, an English divine and a Platonist, one of the original 
 members of the Royal Society.
 
 JOHN BUNYAN. 
 
 BORN 1628. DIED 1688. (FROM 3RD CHARLES I. TO SRD JAMES II.) 
 
 TDROBABLY many of you will agree with me that, having culled 
 * some of the most gorgeous flowers of modern horticulture, it 
 is a pleasure to turn to what are called the old-fashioned stock, the 
 flowers with the old odour, that bring up remembrances of our 
 younger years, of school-boy days, and the cottage homes of Eng- 
 land. Thus, while it would be perfectly possible to place before 
 you high names, scholars, men of noble birth, yet I turn to the 
 simple cottage flower, a native English flower, John Bunyan. 
 
 It is a curious task to investigate the life of a man, one of the 
 most famous the world has ever had ; for, with the exception of 
 the Bible, Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress " has been more widely 
 read than any other book, and has been translated into most lan- 
 guages ; has pleased the scholar, and delighted the schoolboy ; is 
 read by the peasant, and pondered over by the divine. We are 
 all indebted to John Bunyan for an interesting I may say for a 
 unique service, the production of a pleasant Sunday book. It 
 is as pleasant as any six-days' book in the world. There are many 
 Sunday books that are good for the soul, as medicine is good for 
 the stomach : nothing can be said against them, except that, like 
 the book of the prophet of old, they are exceedingly bitter. But 
 John Bunyan's is as pleasant a book as a man can read. A debt 
 is to be paid to dead men as well as to the living. Bunyan was 
 a tinker, although he wrote the " Pilgrim's Progress," and it is our 
 duty to bring him out life-like, to show what kind of man he was, 
 how he lived, and what quaint, strong, wise men there were in 
 this country two centuries ago. Knowing that many of you are 
 tolerably ignorant of the life of this glorious old tinker, in that it 
 is pleasant to me to vindicate the rights of the laity, I have chosen 
 to speak of this noble old layman. 
 
 I know there is a musty, mischievous proverb which says that
 
 John Bunyan. 107 
 
 the cobbler should stick to his last. If it means that a man who 
 can get his living by mending shoes should not desert that occu- 
 pation to make poetry, good ; but when it is said by professional 
 people, duly appointed, called, and consecrated, that no man can 
 preach except he has been be-schooled and be-colleged in this 
 place or another, I open the great book of history, and I read of 
 improper people doing great things who ought not to have done 
 them, lay folks who did nobler works than those who ought to 
 have done them. I read of improper tent-makers, and poor 
 illiterate fishermen, who did the greatest and noblest work the 
 world ever saw. The best fighting and singing, the best preach- 
 ing and writing has been done by crestless, low-born, dirty, 
 ignoble, hard-handed people, who have what folks call " a mission :) 
 greater than the church's call ; and among the long bead-roll of 
 such lay people is John Bunyan. He was in Bedford gaol many 
 years, and we should remember that if Bunyan and many 
 others had not undergone long and trying imprisonments, the 
 people of the present day might have been unable to sit in slip- 
 pered ease at their drawing-room fires. Old Mortality's task was 
 a pleasant one, to go from kirk to kirk removing the mosses and 
 restoring the legends on old grave-stones. So our task to-night 
 is pleasant that of restoring the name and the legends of a man 
 who wrote the world's most popular book : a book that is not 
 only wise, and true, and popular, but which actually "sells." 
 
 John Bunyan was born at Elstow, a small village near the sleepy 
 and quiet town of Bedford, in 1628, in the days of the Common- 
 wealth, in the old fighting days of English difficulty and English 
 liberty. A man's nature depends a great deal on the atmosphere 
 in which he is born. Bunyan came into life when the greatest 
 struggle in which this land has been engaged was about to begin ; 
 when the incapable and wicked Stuarts were trying to the utmost 
 the patience of the people ; when Puritanism and Republicanism 
 were about to teach their material doctrines upon this soil. His 
 father was a tinker, and Bunyan took to the hereditary trade. He 
 was brought up in the grim and bitter order of God-fearing 
 puritanism. His father was a just, severe, Bible-reading, much- 
 praying man, a thorough-paced Puritan, a lover of religious liberty. 
 Bunyan tinkered his kettles in a pious atmosphere, growing up 
 troubled with questions and doubts all too soon. About his boy-
 
 io8 John Bunyan. 
 
 hood we read but little. His father was among the poorest in 
 the land, and he gave John a poor education accordingly. What 
 he did learn he mainly forgot, so that it came to the same thing 
 in the end, as if he had never had any education at all. 
 
 And here I must remark that one peculiarity attends all the 
 biographies of Tinker John. The child in the tale asked where 
 the sinners were buried when it found all the grave-stones in a 
 church-yard eloquent in praise of those that lay around. So all 
 other biographers say whatever of good they can string together 
 of the men whose lives they pourtray. About John Bunyan, how- 
 ever, the only discussion has been how "bad" he was; whether 
 he was, as Southey said, " merely a blackguard," or whether he 
 was not a sad, graceless, outrageous rip, licentious and sinful. 
 There are two parties in that debate ; one taking all Bunyan's 
 self-accusing as true, and the other denying it. But there are also 
 two courts : the court of God's law, or Conscience ; and the court 
 of man's law, or Public Opinion. The Apostle Paul was, he said, 
 " the chief of sinners ; " yet if they had taken him before a 
 magistrate on that charge, he could have rebutted it by proof; 
 but in the other court, the court of conscience, he would have 
 fully admitted it. Now, many of John Bunyan's bitter speeches 
 against himself as boy and young man may be interpreted in that 
 way. 
 
 People sometimes get angry if they have a faithful portrait of 
 a man before he was "converted;" but it is desirable to know 
 how bad a man has been in order to glorify the grace which has 
 made him better. Bunyan, in the outset of his career, was not a 
 very bad man in some senses that is, he did not come before 
 the magistrates ; and when he vilifies himself, according to the 
 fashion of some good people, we must take a little off from his 
 vilification. He called himself a "Jerusalem sinner," and we 
 have a piece of autobiography from his pen, entitled " God's 
 Grace to the Chiefest of Sinners." But a drunkard he never 
 was; licentious, in the common meaning of the term, he was 
 not. He was nothing more than an ordinary, ignorant country 
 lad. I defend him against himself. He was not the low be- 
 sotted reprobate that he declared himself to be. 
 
 Bunyan had about him the best and the worst parts of old 
 Puritanism. There are some who say that the early part of his
 
 John Bnnyan. 109 
 
 life was marked by the most open and daring profligacy ; but 
 when accused of being a gross sinner, he, judging himself by the 
 court of conscience, stoutly denied it. He catalogued his short- 
 comings. He said he was a " town-swearer " a sort of pattern 
 swearer that he cursed and swore bitterly. It is certain that 
 Bunyan was at one time a fearful fellow to curse and swear ; so 
 much so, that the worst woman in Bedford said he was enough 
 to corrupt the whole town. Whatever Bunyan did, he did it with 
 all his might ; so that when he swore he swore awfully, and good 
 people were in the habit of saying, "You swear as bad as tinker 
 Bunyan." Again, in after times, when he wrote concerning him- 
 self, it was (as has been said) as the " chiefest of sinners ;" but, 
 though he thus described himself, it is not for others to use such 
 language regarding him. What men say about themselves before 
 God is very different from what they would say about themselves 
 before their fellow-men ; and though Paul called himself the chief 
 of sinners before his Maker, in the eyes of men he was the chief 
 of saints. It is a different event, a different tribunal altogether ; 
 and those men are not to be condemned as hypocrites, as they 
 often are condemned, who speak in disparagement of themselves 
 before God, yet who claim a favourable consideration from their 
 fellow-creatures. 
 
 Bunyan had a tender conscience and an ignorant mind. He 
 was a noisy, disorderly, ranting kind of rip. That he said of him- 
 self; but you must remember that in those times playing at 
 cricket and lying were often regarded as breaking part of the 
 same tables. That was Puritanism. They had two tables of 
 commandments that Moses gave, and twenty more of their own, 
 to which they demanded the same respect. Hence I find that 
 Bunyan's conscience was as much wounded by playing at 
 " hockey" and by Sunday bell -ringing, as by profane swearing. 
 His love for bell-ringing was no great sin. I like a good peal of 
 bells myself; not that solitary bell that is so often heard calling 
 people to church that is enough to give anyone the horrors who 
 comes within its sound but I like to hear a good peal of bells. 
 But Bunyan, his " conscience beginning to be tender," thought 
 his bell-ringing was a vain and wicked practice, and he therefore 
 forced himself to leave it. Yet, he says, his mind hankered. 
 But one day, when he went to the steeple-house to ring, he began
 
 no John Biinyan. 
 
 to think, "How if one of the bells should fall?" "Then," he 
 says, " I chose to stand under a main beam that lay overthwart 
 the steeple, from side to side, thinking that here I might stand 
 sure ; but then I thought again, should the bell fall with a swing, 
 it might first hit the wall, and then, rebounding upon me, might 
 kill me for all this beam. This made me stand at the steeple 
 door. And now, I thought, I am safe enough for if the bell 
 should now fall I can slip out behind these thick walls, and so be 
 preserved notwithstanding." So after this he would still go to see 
 them ring, but would not go any further than the steeple door. 
 But then it came into his head, " How if the steeple itself should 
 fall ? " " This thought," he says, " did so continually shake my 
 mind that I durst not stand at the steeple door any longer, for fear 
 the steeple should fall upon my head." 
 
 There are one or two principles to be borne in mind previous 
 to opening that rare old book, " Bunyan's Autobiography." All 
 autobiography is valuable. It gives an inward view of man's life, 
 and is infinitely preferable to all the laboured panegyrics which the 
 biographers of ordinary great men can heap upon them. If you 
 read the book I have named, you will see Bunyan at once, and 
 find that he was one of those enthusiasts whom some call fanatics 
 and some madmen ; who hear suggestions, as they believe, from 
 visible, tangible forms around their beds ; and to whom it is in 
 vain to say they do not see them, for they verily and firmly believe 
 that they do. 
 
 At an early period Bunyan was seized with an incessant torment 
 of soul. He was one of those who believed that the world rested 
 on awful darkness and terrible mysteries ; that God was a reality, 
 not a doctrine; that the fire of hell was as real as the fire upon 
 his hearth, the heavens as certain and real as the distant Indies. 
 Like Luther, the first years of his life were spent in fighting devils. 
 He saw the devil, not with iris and pupil, but in a more terrible 
 way with the eyes of the soul. Even the Bible was to him a 
 torment for a time. He made every text a demon. He minded 
 no punctuation ; he took scraps of the book everywhere, without 
 reference to its literary meaning. These things remembered, 
 Bunyan's speeches may be better understood. No event occurred 
 that a special providence did not act with reference to him. Even 
 his dreams were real to him. Thus he spake of one of these awful
 
 John Bunyan. \ 1 1 
 
 visitings: "At another time I dreamed that I was in a pleasant 
 place, living in riot and luxury, banqueting and feasting my senses, 
 when, on a sudden, even in a moment, a mighty earthquake rent 
 the earth in sunder, and out of the wide and dreadful gap came 
 bloody and amazing flames, and in those flames the figures of men 
 tossed up in globes of fire, and falling down again, with horrid 
 shrieks, and cries, and execrations, whilst some devils that were 
 mingled with them laughed loud at their torments. And whilst I 
 stood, trembling at this affrighting vision, I thought the earth 
 shook under me, and a circle of flame enclosed me. But when I 
 thought myself just at the point of perishing, one in white shining 
 raiment descended and plucked me out of that dreadful place, 
 whilst the devils cried after me to leave me with them, that I 
 might receive the just punishment my sins had deserved ; yet I 
 escaped the danger." He tells us that, even before he was nine 
 years old, his childish sins " did so offend the Lord, that He did 
 scare and frighten me with fearful dreams, and did terrify me with 
 fearful visions. For often, after I have spent this and the other 
 day in sin, I have in my bed been greatly afflicted, while asleep, 
 with the apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits, who still, as 
 I then thought, laboured to draw me away with them, of which I 
 could never be rid. Also, I should at these years be greatly 
 afflicted and troubled with the thoughts of the fearful torments of 
 hell-fire ; still fearful that it would be my lot to be found at last 
 among those devils and hellish fiends who are there bound down 
 with the chains and bonds of darkness unto the judgment day." 
 Later on, one of his dreams so haunted and frightened him, that 
 he thought his breastbone was bursting. The old curses of God 
 were of course immediately attached to it, and he said directly, 
 " This is Judas Iscariot's fate." One Sunday, when he was play- 
 ing at " cat," having struck it one blow from the hole, just as he 
 was about to strike it the second time, he heard a voice a voice 
 so real that he turned on one side the better to hear it crying 
 out, " Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or have thy sins 
 and go to hell?" He turned, and saw Christ in the heavens, 
 looking down upon him as being displeased, and severely threaten- 
 ing him with some grievous punishment for his ungodly practices. 
 Some of you smile. Now, what I hate is to see petty, small- 
 headed, sentimental people affect to despise and sneer at great
 
 1 1 2 John Bunyan. 
 
 men. Would you sneer at the life of St Paul ? And yet he too 
 called himself the " chief of sinners," and he too saw a vision of 
 Christ. 
 
 Bunyan had the Bible, and at first used it like a fool he took 
 half texts ; and this, with his tender conscience and his ignorance, 
 made him wretched indeed. He was all light one day, when he 
 came on a text of beauty in Solomon's Song; and he was miserable 
 another day, because he happened upon another verse in St Luke. 
 But now he fell into the company of a poor man, who induced him 
 to read the Bible more diligently ; and, naturally enough, he 
 turned to the historical part, to the history of the Kings of Judah. 
 He became a reformed character, and showed great alteration in 
 his life and manners. But he was not " converted." 
 
 There was a strange, deep, and terrible struggle through which 
 that poor human soul passed before it emerged into the sunlight, 
 and before there was written that map of the soul's progress which 
 will last mankind to the day of doom. He was troubled about 
 the doctrine of Election, that deep question with which all earnest 
 men have struggled one day in their lives, that doctrine which is 
 not to be learned at chapel, not to be explained by saying it is 
 only a doctrine. Why, there is election going on on every side of 
 us ; we see it every day. But Bunyan was much exercised about 
 the number of the elect. He had doubts as to whether the Bed- 
 fordshire elect were made up, in much the same manner as he 
 would as to whether the Bedfordshire Militia had their full com- 
 plement of men. Two years and a half thus passed, with wrestling 
 of body and soul ; with groans, and cries, and tears ; with actual 
 and visible fightings with devils, and bandying of texts damnatory 
 and consolatory. 
 
 Bunyan once got such great comfort from a text which came 
 into his mind after he had been many weeks oppressed, that he 
 says it was as if it talked with him. Thus he continued for about 
 a year, not doubting but that it was a text out of the canonical 
 Scriptures. But when, at last, happening to cast his eye upon the 
 apocryphal books, he found it there, oh ! the horror that scared 
 him ! The text soon lost all its virtue. Of course, if I were to 
 quote the text to you, the result would be very different in your 
 case. Of course, you all have the Apocrypha, and your acquaint- 
 ance with it is such that you would not be likely to be misled,
 
 John Bunyan. \ 1 3 
 
 But with Bunyan it was different. To him, the Apocrypha was a 
 forbidden book. 
 
 By degrees the darkness was broken, and the clouds began to 
 pass away from Bunyan's mind ; he read the Scriptures more pro- 
 fitably ; his former evil habits were left off, and he began to see 
 his way more clearly. He firfally concluded that, as there were 
 no data by which to determine the question of Election, the best 
 way was for each man to make his calling and election sure in his 
 own way. But he had much to pass through yet, and it cost him 
 many struggles to pierce the clouds of ignorance and doubtfulness 
 that beset him. 
 
 At nineteen he entered the army, and you know which side he 
 would take in the contest. He took the solemn epic side, not the 
 ditty and lyrical part. He was drawn to go to the siege of Leices- 
 ter, but when he was just ready, a comrade desired to go in his 
 stead. He consented. That comrade was shot in the head by a 
 musket-bullet, and thus Bunyan had a " miraculous escape." He 
 had had three hair-breadth 'scapes before ; twice during the early 
 part of his life he was in imminent danger of drowning, and on 
 another occasion he was, through his own rashness, in danger of 
 being killed by an adder. These things made a great impression 
 on his mind. He became a moral, though not yet a religious 
 man. He thought to test his faith by working a miracle, and one 
 day, as he was between Elstow and Bedford, he came to a puddle 
 in the road, and the temptation came to him to command the 
 puddle to dry up. He said to himself, " If the puddle dries up, I 
 shall be saved, and if not, I shall be damned." But he had his 
 misgivings about risking his salvation on his power, so he con- 
 sidered a minute, and thought he would pray first, and work the 
 miracle afterwards, which resulted in his not working the miracle 
 at all. He would rather let his damnation hang upon an uncer- 
 tainty, than try to settle it in that way. 
 
 Soon after this he heard three or four poor women talking of 
 the Gospel in one of the streets of Bedford. He gave ear to them, 
 and they opened up light to him. He went to hear preaching, 
 but it tormented him. His conscience was continually crying out 
 He could not cut a stick, or stoop for a pin ; he could not eat his 
 food or look upon anything, but a voice cried to him, " Sell Christ 
 for this." Thus the demon cried ever, " Sell Christ for that ; sell 
 
 a
 
 1 1 4 yohn Biinyan. 
 
 Him, sell Him, sell Him." If he ran away, " Sell Him, sell 
 Him ; " the cry was still in his ears. But he was struggling out of 
 Despond. He told these poor old women of his troubles, and 
 they took him to Mr Gifford, a poor preacher in Bedford, and a 
 man himself of strange history, who from persecuting the Puritans 
 had become their apostle ; a man well fitted to deal with Banyan's 
 scruples. Bunyan listened to his preaching, and the turmoil of 
 his soul was calmed. 
 
 He progressed into church fellowship among the Baptists, and, 
 as his graces grew, some of the members of the church discovered 
 that Brother Bunyan had a gift a gift to preach. They told 
 him so. But Bunyan declined. He a. "Jerusalem sinner" like 
 him preach? He counted himself unworthy to preach the 
 Gospel of Christ ; for he considered that he had committed a sin 
 equal to that of Judas, and had " sold Christ." At length, after 
 much entreaty, they persuaded him to try, not before the congre- 
 gation at first of course, but in private, before the elect and select, 
 to see if he was " sound." He tried and succeeded. He had not 
 been fashioned at Oxford or Cambridge, but he had half of the 
 preacher's furniture in himself he had a heart that knew man, 
 and that tested the things of life. Those about him had known 
 what impressions he could make upon them, and that he was the 
 very man for the preacher's office. Paul was set to preach imme- 
 diately after the striking event which occurred on the way to 
 Damascus ; and so, when tinker Bunyan was changed into church- 
 member Bunyan, they thought him fit to preach at once. After 
 his first trial, Brother John Bunyan was set apart as a preacher of 
 the Word. There was no going to sleep under honest John. He 
 positively laid hold of the heart. He was of the race of preachers 
 who are like eavesdroppers. He knew all about his hearers, and 
 could turn them inside out, so well could he sound the inmost depths 
 of the human heart. On one occasion two thousand Londoners 
 were drawn from their beds at seven o'clock in the winter's 
 morning to hear tinker Bunyan. What preacher could work such 
 a miracle now? He was able to pour balm into the wounds of 
 others, because he had balm poured into his own wounds. 
 
 It was now that he commenced to write poetry ; but he had 
 better have let it alone, for he was not much of a poet. 
 
 But before that, at the age of nineteen, poor as he was, John
 
 John Bunyan. 1 1 5 
 
 Bunyan married. He and this woman came together as poor as 
 poor might be, not having so much household stuff as a trencher 
 or a spoon between them. She had for her dowry (think of it !) 
 two books rare things in those times. One was " The Plain 
 Man's Pathway to Heaven," and the other was " The Practice of 
 Piety," which her father had left her when he died. These were 
 but dry rods, but they were given to a man who had power to make 
 them blossom as the rose ; and they ultimately blossomed into 
 that glorious book, " The Pilgrim's Progress." It is a question 
 whether Bunyan would ever have written the " Progress," if his 
 wife had not brought as her marriage portion " The Plain Man's 
 Pathway to Heaven." What could she have brought him better? 
 If she had had three hundred pounds, of what good would the 
 money have been now ? It would have disappeared long, long 
 since ; but she brought him the " Pathway to Heaven," and he set 
 about inditing the pilgrim's progress to that goal. His wife was 
 a godly, well-conditioned woman, who bore him several children. 
 
 Bunyan was, then, a preacher. Episcopacy had raised its head 
 again, and they used their first day of liberty to repay the insults 
 of Cromwell's time glorious time, of which the worst that can be 
 said is that it was a day of psalm singing and Bible reading ; while 
 the best that can be said of the time that followed is, that it was 
 an age of fiddlers, buffoons, strumpets, and all sinners. In that 
 day, the godly old Nonconformists were done even to death. 
 Eight thousand men died in prison during that old blackguard 
 Charles II. 's reign. And under what banner? the right of private 
 judgment. Under what rallying cry? the right of reading the 
 Bible. When next there is any stone-throwing, let us remember 
 the eight thousand martyrs who died in that time the time of 
 stupid, bullying magistrates, of wicked insolent priests. 
 
 Bunyan's first essay at preaching was in the kitchen of Samsel- 
 hamlet, Bedford. You might see him out there, in the garden, 
 under the pear-tree, having what preachers call " five minutes to 
 himself," to arrange his heads and so forth, before he begins his 
 sermon. Well, after five years of preaching, he got into trouble. 
 He was warned against his preaching, and told that a warrant was 
 out against him. He was informed that a constable was on the 
 scent, and would soon arrive to arrest him, but that did not 
 daunt him ; he walked about the orchard, meditating and debating 
 whether he should run away or preach. He at last determined
 
 1 1 6 John Bunyan. 
 
 that he dared not run, and that it was his duty to preach, for he 
 thought, "If the shepherd runs, what will the sheep do?" So 
 the brave, hearty, stalwart soul returned to the kitchen and began 
 the meeting ; he did preach, and the constable came in and 
 arrested him in the king's name in the name of that fag-end of a 
 worthless dynasty, Charles II. and he was taken before a stupid, 
 grammar- breaking, illogical magistrate, such as were common in 
 those days, and are not quite extinct in the present time a 
 tyrannical, purse-proud man, a bully and a dunce, a thoroughbred 
 debauchee, but great among the magnates of the county and 
 the indictment was read : " That John Bunyan, of the town of 
 Bedford, labourer, hath devilishly and perniciously abstained from 
 coming to church to hear divine service, and is the common 
 upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles, to the 
 great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this 
 kingdom, and contrary to the laws of our sovereign lord the king." 
 Ay, here was the secret of the arrest. He might have been as 
 heretical as he pleased if nobody went to hear him ; but adding 
 to heresy success was adding insult to injury a thing not to be 
 borne. That was what brought down on Bunyan so bitter a fate. 
 It was in that day reckoned a sin not to go to the parish church. 
 In our day we have heard of it, but it was worse in the time of 
 Bunyan. On being asked whether he would cease to preach, and 
 would attend church, he quietly replied, " No, I must preach, and 
 I cannot attend church." He was asked if he would give sureties, 
 and told he would then be released. The sureties were to be 
 bound over to keep him from preaching, and if he did preach 
 again their bonds were to be forfeited. But he would not consent 
 to this. Bunyan said he could not give up preaching, as it was a 
 matter of conscience with him. " Conscience," said the magis- 
 trate ; " now none of your Puritan French here ! " I suppose he 
 had never heard the word before, and so he thought it was a bit 
 of French Bunyan had picked up. The magistrate pointed out 
 to him the consequences that would follow if he persisted in 
 preaching, but Bunyan preferred to go to jail rather than give in, 
 although he knew that it meant separation from his wife and poor 
 children. He was especially concerned about his poor blind 
 child, of whom he said, " She lay nearer my heart than all beside." 
 " Oh," he said, " the thoughts of the hardship my poor blind one 
 must go under will break my heart to pieces." " Poor child," he
 
 Bunyan. 117 
 
 thought, "what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in 
 this world ! Thou must be beaten, must beg, must suffer hunger, 
 cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now 
 endure the wind should blow upon thee." But yet, recalling 
 himself, he thought, " I must venture you all with God, though it 
 goeth to the quick to leave you." " Oh," he said afterwards, " I 
 saw in this condition I was as a man who was pulling down his 
 house upon the heads of his wife and children ; yet I must do it, 
 I must do it." So to jail he went, to Bedford jail, on that sluggish 
 river Ouse. He was sent there for a month, with an intimation 
 that if he did not conform, he would be banished. 
 
 Jails in those days were very different to what they are now. 
 Now, if I go to prison, I have a chaplain to look after my spiritual 
 welfare, a barber to shave me and to cut my hair, the best of 
 plain food cooked in the best possible manner, and I am weighed 
 to see how heavy I am. But Bunyan was thrust into prison under 
 different conditions. He remained in Bedford Jail twelve years. 
 
 Here he tried his hand at poetry, a specimen of which will give 
 you an illustration of his illiteracy, and show you the style in 
 which the future author of the admirable " Pilgrim's Progress " 
 began to write. The verses he wrote in his copy of " Foxe's 
 Book of Martyrs " under certain woodcuts verses worthy of any 
 of Catnach's sheets published* might be quoted. Thus, under 
 the print of an owl appearing to a Council held by Pope John 
 at Rome : 
 
 " Doth the Owle to them appear, 
 Which putt them all into a fear ; 
 Will not the man trubel crown'd 
 Cast the Owle unto the ground." 
 
 Under the martyrdom of John Rogers, the protomartyr in the 
 Marian Persecution, he wrote : 
 
 " It was the will of X (Christ) that thou should die, 
 Mr Rogers his body in the flames to fry. 
 O blessed man ! thou did lead this bloody way, 
 O how wilt thou shien with X in the last day." 
 
 You will see from this that Bunyan was made a scholar in jail, 
 
 * " Old Jemmy Catnach," of the Seven Dials, printer, publisher, toy-book 
 manufacturer, dying speech merchant, and ballnd-monger.
 
 n8 John Bunyan. 
 
 wherein many a man has ripened. That jail was the university in 
 which he studied and graduated. For twelve long years he lay in 
 that damp, dark, Bedford prison, and that is time enough for a 
 good curriculum. He was laid up there to mellow, and that it 
 was which gave him such a fine autumnal tint before he came out. 
 When he went to Bedford prison, Bunyan was like a green apple, 
 but they hung him up on the walls, so to speak, and he became 
 mellowed and sweetened, wise, peaceful, and gracious. He was 
 an ignorant though a god-fearing man when he entered, but he 
 came out a wise man, a lover of peace, the possessor of a catholic 
 soul, and altogether a gentle, apostolic kind of man. Bedford jail, 
 then, was the place in which a good man ripened, and a great 
 book was written. 
 
 Bunyan had a good-tempered jailor during a great part of the 
 time, who used to let him out sometimes, and even occasionally 
 let him go home to spend a night. He always came back at the 
 appointed hour ; he would have made an appointment with death, 
 and have kept it sacredly. On one of these occasions a remarkable 
 circumstance occurred. Bunyan was at home, and in bed, but 
 could not sleep ; he lay restless and tumbling about, and became 
 very uneasy. At length he told his wife that he felt constrained 
 to return to the jail, he did not know why, but he felt he must go 
 back at once. No entreaties could detain him ; he acted upon his 
 feelings, and returned to his prison. He had not returned long, 
 when a messenger arrived suddenly from London, who called up 
 the jailor, and demanded if all his prisoners were safe. " Yes," he 
 said. He asked him again if he was quite sure. He said, " Yes." 
 Then he asked him if Bunyan was safe, and he answered, " Yes." 
 So the authorities had got to know that Bunyan had been allowed to 
 go out, and wanted to prove it, and this they could have done, had 
 not Bunyan returned when he did. Now, what do you call that ? 
 A " strange coincidence," perhaps ; or you may attribute the fact 
 to John having eaten something at supper which disagreed with 
 him, and prevented his sleeping. I think differently, but I cannot 
 stop to explain further : those who like may stick to their coin- 
 cidence or their " supper." I must be permitted to adhere to my 
 own impression. Bunyan went so far as to preach occasionally, 
 when he was thus temporarily out of prison. They let his blind 
 child go into the jail to him every day, which was a great comfort
 
 John Bunyan. 1 1 9 
 
 to him. He said that his sunshine departed when those dark orbs 
 left him every night. The great womanly heart of that bold 
 daring man thought constantly of his wife and children at home, 
 and of the poor blind one that " lay nearest his heart," and for 
 them in prison he was almost tempted to sell his soul. He took 
 to work at laces and making tags, to keep them from starvation. 
 
 There, too, in prison, he wrote his " Pilgrim's Progress." The 
 prison work of mankind, though a painful thing, is yet great and 
 glorious a theme with many grand recollections. During 
 Bunyan's tedious imprisonment, what books had he ? Only two. 
 There was a Bible, which is a whole library in itself history, 
 prophecy, poetry, ethics and there was Foxe's Book of Martyrs, 
 the reading of which book prepared Bunyan for writing the 
 "Vanity Fair" of his "Pilgrim's Progress." Quaint Thomas Fuller 
 said he did not judge of the hospitality of a house by the number of 
 chimneys it had, but by the number he saw smoking, so, after all, 
 it is not the number of books a man has, but those he reads, 
 masters, digests, makes part of himself, which determines their 
 value to him. 
 
 The first book Bunyan wrote during his imprisonment was 
 " Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners." Now, I suspect 
 that many of you have never read this little book never seen it, 
 perhaps. If this is so, let me recommend you to get it, and read 
 it through. There's a book for you to read next Sunday afternoon. 
 " Grace Abounding " was the prelude to Bunyan's famous "Pil- 
 grim's Progress," which shows so truly the inner life of a man 
 passing through this world to the one beyond. Who of us has not 
 read that book with rapture ? I should like to see the portrait of 
 the oddity who has not read the " Pilgrim's Progress." It is 
 written in plain, Saxon language, such as all can understand. If 
 you invite me to dinner, I don't want you to ask if you shall 
 " assist " me to meat, or if I will " patronise " your dish. No, 
 no; speak plainly, " Will you have some beef?" This book si 
 written so plainly, simply, and true to nature that a sentence 
 means almost a volume, and we find ourselves quoting from it 
 constantly, as we do from Shakespeare. As an instance, I am 
 going from here, we will say, to some distant city where you have 
 a son living. You are naturally anxious as to his welfare, pro- 
 gress, and so forth, and you ask me to make some inquiries about
 
 I2O John Bunyan. 
 
 him. I have not much time to write a long letter, so I say, " He 
 is beneath the walls of Doubting Castle ; " or, " He is in the grip 
 of Giant Despair ; " or, " He is passing through the streets of 
 Vanity Fair ; " or, " He is in the Valley of Humiliation ; " or, 
 " He has caught sight of the gate of the City from the top of the 
 Delectable Mountains." And Bunyan's characters, too, are alive 
 to-day Mr Ready-to-halt, Mr By-ends, Mr Facing-both-ways, Mr 
 Two-tongues, Mr Hold-the-world, Mr Love-gain, and so on. 
 
 Besides his " Grace Abounding " and " Pilgrim's Progress," 
 Bunyan wrote several other treatises while in prison " The Holy 
 War," " Christian Behaviour," " The Resurrection of the Dead," 
 &c. I recommend you to read them all. 
 
 About this time a large number of Quakers were lingering their 
 lives away in the jails of this country. An equal number of able- 
 bodied Quakers offered to go and take their places in jail, so that 
 they might be released ; but they were not allowed to do it. No 
 substitute was offered or accepted for Bunyan. After a confine- 
 ment of about twelve years and a half, he was, however, at length 
 set free : not .by Bishop Barlow, as some have said, but by one of 
 the noble company of the Society of Friends. This was a generous 
 act ; for Bunyan had attacked them in controversy with bitter 
 coarseness. For once in his life Charles the Second deviated into 
 gratitude. Eight thousand God-fearing Englishmen languished 
 their lives out in jail during his reign ; but he once went out of 
 his way as a token of thankfulness for what was called the " crown- 
 ing mercy of Worcester." Some Quakers had been able to render 
 him a service, and, finding him in the humour, they induced him 
 to grant his royal signature for the release of a number of persons 
 then in prison. The worthy Quakers put John Bunyan on the 
 list, for they did not confine it to " broad brims." 
 
 Bunyan found his household affairs in sad disorder, and he gave 
 up tinkering and took to preaching. That man knew his Bible 
 well, and he knew that other book well ; that book with red 
 covers and which is red all through the human heart ; so he 
 could not fail to make a good preacher. Sixteen years of his life 
 were given to preaching. 
 
 After he got popular, many charges were brought against him 
 by ignorant and malicious people. They called him a wizard, a 
 Jesuit, a highwayman, and said that he was licentious with
 
 'John Bunyan. 121 
 
 women. To all of which charges he affirmed he could only say, 
 " God knows that I am innocent." And what should he say, 
 he asked, to those who had thus bespattered him ? Should he 
 threaten them ? chide them ? flatter them ? entreat them to hold 
 their tongues ? No, not he. " My foes," he said, " have missed 
 their mark in thus shooting at me. I am not the man. I wish 
 that they themselves were guiltless. If all the fornicators and 
 adulterers in England were hanged up by the neck till they were 
 dead, I, John Bunyan, the object of their envy, would be still 
 alive and well." 
 
 And thus, again, Bunyan ungallantly repelled one of these 
 charges " In this," said he, " I admire the wisdom of God, that 
 He made me shy of women, from my first conversion until now. 
 These know, and can also bear me witness, with whom I have 
 been most intimately concerned, that it is a rare thing to see me 
 carry it pleasantly towards a woman ; the common salutation of 
 women I abhor, it is odious to me in whomsoever I see it. Their 
 company alone, I cannot away with ; I seldom so much as touch 
 a woman's hand, for I think these things are not so becoming me. 
 When I have seen good men salute those women that they have 
 visited, or that have visited them, I have at times made my ob- 
 jections against it ; and when they have answered, that it was but 
 a piece of civility, I have told them, ' It is not a comely sight.' 
 Some, indeed, have urged the ' holy kiss ;' but then I have asked 
 why they made baulks, why they did salute the most handsome, 
 and let the ill-favoured go? Thus, how laudable soever such 
 things have been in the eyes of others, they have been unseemly 
 in my sight." That was not churlishness he was twice married 
 but distrust of himself. It was not want of feeling ; for remem- 
 ber the little blind child that " lay nearest his heart." But he had 
 a thorough contempt for those empty-headed, milk-and-water 
 dandies, dangling ever after women, summed up in the lines 
 
 " A dandy is a man that would 
 Be a woman if he could, 
 But as he can't, does all he can 
 To show the world he 's not a man." 
 
 And although Bunyan was a writer and a preacher, he had a good 
 deal of the tinker left in him ; so when good men talked to him 
 about " holy kisses," he asked, with a twinkle in his eye that was
 
 122 John Bunyan. 
 
 left from the tinker " How is it, then, that only the young and 
 pretty ones are kissed ?" 
 
 Thus Bunyan repelled all the vile charges brought against him. 
 For one of his foes he prayed thus : " O Lord, convert him from 
 the error of his ways ; but if he be not converted, O Lord, be 
 pleased to lay Thine hand heavily upon him/' They called him 
 ugly names. Well, what of that? That is the common way of 
 putting a man down at the present day ; just as a country squire 
 once called me " Atheist " and " Baptist " in the same breath. 
 
 At length, when sixty years old, John Bunyan, one of the great- 
 est of writers and the sublimest of allegorists, died in London in 
 1688, and was buried in the old frowsy churchyard of Bunhill 
 Fields, that great burying ground of Nonconformity, where Daniel 
 Defoe and Isaac Watts now rest. A tombstone to his memory 
 may still be seen. I advise you, next time you visit London, to 
 go and see it. The last act of his life was one of peace-making 
 an endeavour to reconcile a father to his erring son. Taking 
 cold during his return journey, he was seized with a violent rheu- 
 matic fever, from which he died. 
 
 Of his love for his family I have spoken, but he was more con- 
 cerned for their spiritual than merely for their temporal welfare. 
 He was once told that a gentleman in London, a very wealthy 
 citizen, would take his son Joseph as an apprentice, without any 
 premium, which might be a great means to advance him ; but he 
 declined this liberal proposal, saying, " God did not send me to 
 advance my family, but to advance His gospel." 
 
 Though he never became a scholar, yet the greatest men that 
 have lived since his day have borne testimony to his genius and 
 his worth. Whom shall we call to hold the canopy over his head ? 
 Southey, Johnson, Coleridge, Macaulay. All these have borne 
 testimony to his merits. The tinker has had his robes borne by 
 these men, and nothing is much more wonderful in literature. 
 Dr Johnson, you know, had no high opinion of the Puritans, and 
 yet he had a very high opinion of Bunyan. As an instance of 
 his dislike to the Puritans, One day Johnson went on a visit to 
 a friend of his, and found him in the garden picking up snails 
 and throwing them over the fence into his neighbour's garden. 
 Johnson remonstrated with him, and said that was hardly the 
 thing ; but on being told in an undertone that the neighbour was
 
 John B^myan. 123 
 
 a Puritan, he said, " Oh, well, throw away then, throw away !" 
 But of Bunyan he had a very high opinion, and ranked his " Pil- 
 grim's Progress" among " the very few books indeed of which 
 the reader, when he comes to the conclusion, wishes they had 
 been longer." That was well remarked. The word " finis" at the 
 end of a book is generally a happy consummation. When I read 
 the little words, " the end," I almost invariably say, " So be it," 
 with all my heart. But that is not the case with the " Progress." 
 It is not only too short, but the book can be read again and 
 again. Johnson allows it a high place among the works of ori- 
 ginal genius. Coleridge also a ripe scholar said a man read 
 the work three times ; once, as a boy, for the story ; second, as a 
 theologian, for its doctrines ; third, as a man and a scholar, for 
 its style and writing. And when posterity has decreed that a man 
 or a book shall be popular, you need not trouble anything further 
 about it ; they will take care of that. 
 
 To praise Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress" were an idleness. It 
 is a book beyond all praise. The world has loved it, the world 
 still loves it, and that is sufficient. His was a wonderful task 
 when he wrote the " Progress," for what had he to do ? He had 
 to render into outward and visible forms the subtle and strong 
 passions of individual internal life. Such a process is like catch- 
 ing a cloud and making it permanent, or like turning a thought 
 into a thing. But John Bunyan has done it. In this work he 
 has taken the hidden things of the interior life and put them into 
 words, as an artist puts them on canvas ; and there are no pic- 
 tures better. " They are homely," you say. So much the better. 
 And what realism there is about them ! There are so many 
 characters in the book that those whom he addresses are pretty 
 sure to find themselves in it. As a theological work it is admir- 
 able. Its Calvinism I don't know where anybody not a theo- 
 logian could get a better view of Calvinism than here. It is 
 Calvinism in its singing robes, with a smile on its face, and with 
 some flesh and blood put into it. 
 
 But while Bunyan lends the stiff and chill John Calvin what 
 he has not love ; while he sets John Calvin to music Bunyan's 
 style is sterling and uncompromising. Read not Addison or 
 Johnson ; read Bunyan, who employed direct and true, and none 
 of your drawing-room, English. The " Pilgrim's Progress " is
 
 124 John Bunyan. 
 
 remarkable for its mastery of the English language. The man 
 who would speak good English should take to his company the 
 authorised version ot the Bible and Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Pro- 
 gress." Bunyan's is chapel English, man's English, woman's 
 English, the English spoken everywhere by the native sons and 
 daughters of the soil. It is none of your finical, white-gloved, 
 eau-de-cologned English, but true English, bold, tough, firm, not 
 to be mistaken. The "Pilgrim's Progress" is a book of old 
 Saxon language, ot theology, of rhetoric, of poetry, of romance 
 for all ages and for all faiths. There Calvin's theology best ap- 
 pears, and although I cannot agree with everything in that creed, 
 yet I cannot forget that it was a stout, manful, noble creed, that 
 took the rose-pink sentimentalism out of a man, that bred men, 
 trained giants, and brought forth heroes. 
 
 Southey also describes Bunyan well ; and Macaulay said, writ- 
 ing of the period in which they lived, that the only two men of 
 large creative genius in that age were Milton and Bunyan. His 
 " Holy War " is not equal to his " Pilgrim's Progress." A man 
 cannot write two books equally good. Writing a first book is 
 something like first love. Second love may be a decent, tolerable 
 sort of love enough ; but it is not like first love ; nor is a second 
 book, generally speaking, at all comparable with the first. Bunyan 
 poured himself into his first book; in the second book he mixed 
 some criticisms also. In regard to Bunyan's Sermons, I cannot 
 say that I have got on very well with them myself. They are bad 
 to manage. But they have one good old merit, they are of 
 sufficient lengthy having been preached in the days of the hour- 
 glass. " There were giants in those days," who preached by the 
 hour-glass, turning it up to run a second hour after one had been 
 consumed in speaking. 
 
 I have described the " Pilgrim's Progress " as a " paying " book. 
 One hundred thousand copies of it were published before its 
 author died, and countless thousands since; for of a hundred 
 persons who can read now, about one could read in Bunyan's 
 time. The work has been translated into at least twenty-five 
 different languages, even Rome having its edition of the " Pilgrim," 
 with the great Pope left out. John Bunyan is a strong example 
 of what education can do for a man of original genius, although 
 he never knew what education was in the ordinary acceptation of 
 the term.
 
 DANIEL DEFOE. 
 
 BORN 1661. DIED 1731. (FROM 2ND CHARLES II. TO 4TH GEORGE II.) 
 
 I" AM going to set before you to-night a man to whom very 
 seldom justice is done. It is sometimes a man's misfortune to 
 have done one thing so exceedingly well, that people forget 
 all the rest of his works ; and I am sorry to say of many English 
 people that all they know of Defoe is that he wrote " Robinson 
 Crusoe." Considering that he was one of the most voluminous 
 of our writers ; the greatest political pamphleteer, with one ex- 
 ception, we ever had ; the truest-hearted and most plucky defender 
 of liberty ; and the writer of many books as great as " Robinson 
 Crusoe," it is hardly fair that he should go down to posterity with 
 so very simple an epitaph as " Here lies Daniel Defoe, who wrote 
 ' Robinson Crusoe.' " Nothing could be easier than to prove 
 every one of you to be debtors to Defoe. To the reading of 
 "Robinson Crusoe" you owe the happiest moments of your 
 school-days. You preferred it far before the grammar-learning 
 which the pedagogue said was good for your spirits; you were 
 lost in wonderment at the story, and in days long after have 
 pondered deeply how one could rub over fiction such an air of 
 truth. But, as I am certain some of you know very little more 
 about Defoe than that he wrote that strange story, we are met 
 to-night to pay a debt of honour to him, for the pleasure he 
 brought us in our youth. 
 
 But in Defoe's case there are other reasons. The villain of one 
 generation sometimes turns out to be the hero of another. Men 
 pointed at with bitter sneers in their own day, get monuments by- 
 and-bye ; and as Defoe had the honour of the pillory, of going to 
 prison, being barked at by fools, brayed at by asses ot every sort, 
 persecuted by the Church, and shunned by Dissent, it becomes us 
 to see whether or no we can join in the verdict of the high priests 
 who put him in the pillory, or whether we would not rather honour
 
 1 26 Daniel Defoe. 
 
 the man who stood there. Hence, I want to show you what 
 character Defoe had. 
 
 Of course, I am not here to defend Defoe's opinions, because 
 if I did that it would be impossible for some of you to enjoy 
 the story, for what Defoe had to say he said with remarkable 
 plainness. The views he took were always of the strongest, and 
 generally a long way before the crowd, and therefore very little 
 likely to be pleasing to all. There is, however, a wide difference 
 between stating a man's views historically, and defending them 
 controversially. To tell all the facts of that man's life were a 
 long task. In brief, there was not a squabble he had not a finger 
 in. He carried his pen as some men carried their swords in 
 the olden time, ready to leap into any quarrel. He loved a 
 row dearly for its own sake ; but he always took the side of truth, 
 and fought the battle out. Whether he had courts with him or 
 not, there he was, ready to plunge into the controversy of right, 
 ofliberty in the Church, and freedom in the State. 
 
 As Defoe wrote two hundred and ten pamphlets and books, you 
 will excuse me from describing them all. It were half-an-hour's 
 work to give even the title-pages, which in those times were often 
 works in themselves, setting out the author's life, giving his motives 
 and reasons, the why and the wherefore. Let us consider how 
 different in character are his books how grave are some, how 
 little serious others ; how loose are some, how studiously correct 
 are others. To understand this problem, it is necessary to look 
 at his ancestry. 
 
 Defoe, or Foe whether we account it a misfortune or no was 
 notable to trace his pedigree beyond his grandfather; but that 
 was something : everybody hasn't a grandfather. This grandfather 
 was a jolly old Cavalier, well to do, who did not much care for 
 politics. He was fond of field-sports, and kept a pack of hounds, 
 calling them after the generals on both sides Goring and Waller, 
 Fairfax and Cromwell, equally careless which might prove himself 
 the better. Sometimes grandfathers crop out in grandchildren, 
 and this good old fellow Foe was well represented in young 
 Daniel. They caught him more than once after the hounds, and 
 sometimes on the race-course, which made his dissenting friends 
 rather shy of him those who could not blend very well the Old 
 Hundredth with the " view halloo " of the huntsman. You must
 
 Daniel Defoe. 127 
 
 remember, then, that some of his grandfather's blood got into 
 Daniel Defoe ; for you will be at a loss if you do not keep that 
 fact in view in considering his life. His father, James Foe, 
 butcher and Dissenter, was a very different person. He kept no 
 dog ; or, if he did, it was a butcher's dog. He was a Dissenter of 
 the grave sort grim, godly, God-fearing not mirth-provoking ; an 
 excellent man, but not lively ; a backbone Dissenter one from 
 principle and conscience, not by pedigree and accident ; not 
 because it was " better to reign in hell than serve in heaven ;" not 
 because he would rather be the big man of the Meeting than 
 the nobody of the Church. To him Dissent was the marrow of 
 religion ; and he inculcated into the son a goodly share of it. Put 
 the grandfather and father together, and from this singular cross 
 the strange character of Daniel Defoe may be explained. Where 
 he got the wonder-working De I cannot tell. There is some 
 doubt about it but I am rather afraid we are all fooled at times, 
 and that Daniel Foe added the De in order to sink the paternal 
 offal in Defoe. This is of little consequence ; everybody knows 
 it is quite allowable for anybody to take any name or title he 
 likes. Other folks do it ; and therefore we cannot very well take 
 up Foe, the butcher's son, for it. Daniel Foe Daniel Defoe ! 
 What a world of wealth it adds ! 
 
 Daniel was born in 1661, in St Giles's, Cripplegate. We know 
 little of his youthful days. As a boy he was a fighter, full of 
 courage, as in after life. In childhood, he did not learn much, 
 except this never to strike an enemy when he is down a rule 
 he followed through life. From boxing boys he got to thrashing 
 kings and rulers, not with the fist, but with that fierce, trenchant, 
 witty pen of his. 
 
 He was flung upon the world during the reign of Charles the 
 Second, of which no better thing can be said than that it was the 
 reign of strumpets vice the reign of Saints. At that time the 
 Popery fever set in the incoming of the " Scarlet Woman," &c., 
 and the news went forth that very soon Smithfield fires were to 
 be relighted. Dissent, full of fear, whispered that very soon there 
 would be no Bibles in England. Whereupon young Defoe set 
 about copying his Bible out in shorthand. Daniel worked like a 
 horse until he had written out the whole of the Pentateuch. He 
 then grew so weary that he gave it up, and expressed himself
 
 1 28 Daniel Defoe. 
 
 "willing to risk the rest." Don't let us be too hard on poor 
 Daniel : not many of you would copy even the Pentateuch in 
 shorthand. An old commentator said "that this was an 
 employment indifferently suited to a gentleman of lively spirits, 
 who cannot be supposed to have had the strong feeling that 
 actuated elder people." 
 
 I admire the boy's pluck in getting through the Pentateuch, but 
 I am glad he did not get to the end of Revelation. He would 
 have been too good for this world if he had accomplished that. 
 He should be praised for what he did, and more for what he failed 
 to do. 
 
 In course of time, when he left school, young Defoe, intended 
 for the Dissenting ministry, was promoted to an academy of the 
 Dissenters, to prepare him for his future work. It was the same 
 academy in which Samuel Wesley, the father of the more cele- 
 brated John, got his education, and, curiously enough, which he 
 afterwards abused. It was not a place where mild divinity and 
 spotless neckcloths were alone cultivated ; it was where freedom 
 was taught as a faith, and liberty as a creed. This was what 
 Wesley called a nursery of sedition. To one of these nurseries, 
 then, at Newington Green, over which the Rev. Charles Morton, 
 a ripe scholar, was placed, Defoe was sent, and here he acquired 
 his knowledge. Defoe his father a butcher, and he himself sub- 
 sequently a seller of stockings was very naturally jealous of his 
 own learning. The easiest way of putting him out was to intimate 
 that he was not a scholar. One of his chief depreciators at the 
 academy was a Mr Tutchin a man he more than once squabbled 
 with in after life who taunted him with his origin. Everybody 
 has his Tutchin ! And Defoe challenged him in the following 
 terms : 
 
 " As to my little learning and this man's great capacities, I fairly 
 challenge him to translate with me any Latin, French, and Italian 
 author, and afterwards to translate them each crossways, for the 
 sum of 20 each book ; and by this he shall have an opportunity 
 to show before the world how much Daniel Defoe, hosier, is inferior 
 to Mr Tutchin, gentleman." 
 
 This showed his learning. He did not offer to simply translate 
 Latin or French into English, but Latin into French, French into 
 Italian, and so forth.
 
 Daniel Defoe. 1 29 
 
 From some cause or other, Defoe soon left the academy. Thus 
 was the young theologian pitched into the time of Charles the 
 Second, a time when Dissenters were driven hither and thither 
 like cattle. 
 
 There is no need to sketch the state of English manners at that 
 period, when drunkenness was looked upon as an accomplishment, 
 and the fewness of the commandments a man kept as a sign of 
 common sense. It was at this time that this man, trained in god- 
 liness, brought up in strictness, his father a Dissenter, stepped 
 forth into the light, fairly equipped, able to speak, able to write, 
 and able deeply to think. He began very soon to write, and his 
 pen was ever ready in the cause of right. Large and small, his 
 works are so numerous that we cannot now go through them, but 
 will take those most characteristic of the man and men of the 
 time. 
 
 The Test Act came up,* and was much opposed by the 
 Dissenters, chief among whom was Alderman Loves. In an 
 open speech, he said : "I had much rather see the Dissenters 
 suffer by rigour of the law, though I suffer with them, than see 
 the laws of England trampled under the foot of prerogative." 
 That is the keynote to the whole spirit of Defoe rather be a 
 bondsman by law than a freeman by favour ; rather go to Newgate 
 by law than to Court by the King's breath. That was the spirit 
 that filled this dauntless man all his life. At that time, though the 
 Dissenters were much persecuted, they were rising into importance, 
 and in that and after reigns they were used as a foil to give liberty 
 to the Roman Catholics. But some of them were sturdy enough 
 
 * The Test Act was passed in 1673, with the object of preventing political 
 power being placed in the hands of Papists. The title of the Act is, "An Act 
 for preventing dangers which may happen from Popish Recusants." Under the 
 provisions of the Act, all persons holding any office or place of trust, civil or 
 military, or admitted of the King's or Uuke of York's household, were to 
 receive the sacrament according to the usage of the Church of England, and 
 to make and subscribe the following declaration: "I, A. B., do declare that 
 I believe there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord's 
 Supper, or in the elements of bread and wine, at or after the consecration 
 thereof by any person whatsoever." The Dissenters entertained such fears of 
 the Papists that they actively supported the passing of this Act, though it 
 included them not less than Papists, by reason of the requisition of taking the 
 sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. The Student 1 * 
 Hume.
 
 1 30 Daniel Defoe. 
 
 to refuse it, like Paul, who would not be released but by the law. 
 Thus matters soon passed into the famous Protestant epidemic, 
 of which the great quack and impostor was Titus Gates, who gave 
 out new and marvellous stories day by day of what was to be done 
 by the great ogres of Rome. Defoe tells of the sort of feeling 
 which existed at that time, indicated by the popular belief in the 
 story that six Popish Frenchmen stole the Monument, but were 
 made to bring it back. You know that whether a story is believ- 
 able or not doesn't matter, if it is only given to the public at the 
 right time. If the story had been that six Frenchmen had eaten 
 the Monument, it would have obtained equal credit. All this 
 was going on, and it was the early field in which Defoe was 
 trained. 
 
 By-and-bye he got to work. The first book he wrote was called 
 " Speculum Crepe-gownorum " (a looking-glass for crape gowns). 
 This title needs some explanation. Crape had been introduced 
 by some refugees ; the ladies made gowns and petticoats of the 
 stuff, gentlemen had waistcoats of it, the clergy had crape gowns 
 (for they had not been elevated to the dignity of silk). This was 
 the peg Defoe took on which to hang his satire, which so well 
 succeeded that it not only put down the affectations and fopperies 
 of the young clergy, but drove crape out and nearly ruined the 
 folks who made it. The pamphlet was written in reply to the 
 famous Roger L' Estrange, who had been making fun out of the 
 Dissenters. There was plenty of room for this fun, but, to the 
 astonishment of L'Estrange and the world, there came a man 
 from out their camp as good as he, who held up to the clergy a 
 looking-glass showing their faults in a manner they did not like. 
 He was almost the first man of the Dissenters who was able to 
 laugh and make anyone else laugh. 
 
 Then came his history of the Hungaro-Austrian wars, which 
 cannot now be entered into at length. Writing on that great 
 war between Austria and the Turks, Dissenter and Protestant 
 as he was, he went for the Pope. The Dissenters, very glad to 
 see the Pope turned out anyhow, pitted the crescent against 
 the cross. " Nay," said Defoe, " the Turk is worse than the 
 Pope ; I had rather the Popish house of Austria should ruin the 
 Protestants in Hungaria than that the infidel house of Othoman 
 should ruin both Protestant and Papist by overrunning Germany.''
 
 Daniel Defoe. 1 3 1 
 
 In this, although Defoe took the really logical course, he was 
 certainly prudentially wrong. 
 
 Then came James the Second, and now we find Defoe girding 
 on the veritable sword ; for the next event in his life was his join- 
 ing the Duke of Monmouth's expedition a step he was led to 
 take by his intense hatred to the Stuarts. He had three great 
 hates in his life : he hated the Pope, he hated the Stuarts, and he 
 hated the Devil. But he had three great loves also : he loved the 
 Whigs, he loved King William with manly passion, and he loved 
 Dissent. Monmouth, Charles the Second's son by one of his 
 many mistresses, admirable in person, noble in disposition, witty 
 in mind, hounded on by foes at home and persecuted when 
 abroad, listening to hollow promises of aid, landed in England 
 without troops, to conquer the land. For a little time he gained 
 some small successes, but, as we know, the expedition miserably 
 failed. Defoe, at the end of the fight at Sedgmoor, escaped, and 
 came back to London, hating the Stuarts more than ever, and 
 prepared to welcome King William more than before. How 
 Monmouth, taken in a ditch, went bravely to the scaffold, you 
 know ; how he died you have read ; how the bloody butcher 
 Jeffreys, and other drivelling, drunken, unjust judges, backed by 
 packed and corrupt juries, stained the annals of England by their 
 unholy decisions, sending innocent men to death, to Virginia, and 
 elsewhere, you have all heard. However, Defoe got back with a 
 safe skin, remained quiet for a little, and then plunged into war- 
 fare again. 
 
 James silly and stupid, gloomy, tyrannical, and cowardly 
 began to tickle the Dissenters by holding out the olive branch. 
 This man was a bigot at heart, and never intended good to Dissent. 
 The seeming olive branch was nettles. The best thing said of 
 him was by a French wit, who, seeing him come from a Popish 
 chapel, said, " There goes a nice honest gentleman that gave up a 
 kingdom for a mass." You know James's end, and how William 
 was brought in. Defoe loved William as a man, and was angry 
 with the tittle-tattle that sprang up against him. Men called him a 
 Dutchman, and thought that made up a multitude of sins. They 
 wanted to have a Stuart without mischief in him, a thing impos- 
 sible, as everybody knows. They wanted to have James's pedi- 
 gree and William's sense
 
 132 Daniel Defoe. 
 
 But we are getting on too fast. In his private affairs we now 
 find Defoe visiting Spain, not on political, but on business grounds. 
 On his return he set up as a hose-factor in Freeman's Court, 
 Cornhill. His friends called him a "hose-agent," his enemies 
 called him a "stocking-seller." He was too mercurial and did not 
 succeed well. He was never calculated for a tradesman. " A 
 wit behind the counter no apron-strings can hold," as he expressed 
 it, and he shortly became bankrupt. But he paid his creditors up 
 to the uttermost farthing. There are bankrupts and bankrupts ; 
 and Defoe was the eccentric, the almost inconceivable bankrupt, 
 almost extinct like the dodo, who pays his debts when he need 
 not. He did not pay them at once, however. He went down to 
 Bristol during the days of his darkness, and there, as the poor debtor 
 was only allowed one day's grace a week, he acquired the name of 
 the " Sunday Gentleman," from being seen on the Sabbath only. 
 But his commercial prosperity became a little better. At length 
 there came a gleam of sunshine, and he rose in political favour 
 with King William, who made him accountant to the Commis- 
 sioners of the Glass Duties. He held this appointment until the 
 commission court was broken up, when the duties were repealed, 
 and with them went the office. Next he set up 'a brick and tile 
 works at Tilbury, where he employed one hundred labourers; he 
 built himself a great brick house at Newington Green, and was at 
 his highest point of commercial importance. 
 
 Tile-making, however, did not suit him much better than 
 stocking work. His spirit could not be restrained. If there were 
 any pamphlets to be written, or a shindy going on, away went his 
 apron, and he was in the middle of the fray. He was a regular 
 Ishmael his hand against every man, and every man's hand 
 against him. He was one of those uncomfortable men who never 
 make a good partisan. He could see the speck on the church 
 steeple, but could perceive likewise the dust on the table in the 
 conventicle. He was plentiful of his satire, and did not spare 
 any man. He wrote a pamphlet on "Occasional Conformity.""* 
 The occasion of it was this : There were men (mayors and alder- 
 
 * "Occasional Conformity," as it was called, was the compliance of Dis- 
 senters with the provisions of the Test Act, by receiving the Lord's Supper 
 according to the rites of the Church of England, in order merely to qualify 
 themselves for holding office or entering into corporations.
 
 Daniel Defoe. 133 
 
 men) that were for going to church sometimes. Sir Humphrey 
 Edwin, while he was Mayor of London, after attending church 
 one Sunday forenoon, carried the insignia of his office to the con- 
 venticle at Pinner's Hall in the afternoon. Great was the outcry 
 made by the Churchmen. One said that Sir Humphrey had 
 been guilty of a horrid crime, inasmuch as he had dared to carry 
 the insignia to the hated conventicle, but Defoe did not rush in 
 to defend him. In his rough way, he denounced this " playing at 
 bo-peep with the Almighty," as he called it. Not polite, but very 
 forcible this. The idea of a horrid Dissenter going to church in 
 pomp and state it was not to be borne by Churchmen. Defoe 
 thought so too, and put it down. 
 
 He next wrote his " Reformation of English Morals." Such a 
 reformation was a giant's work. Hercules and his stable business 
 was nothing to it, and Defoe was not a Hercules. He began by 
 attacking the Stage ; but the Stage lived longer than he, and its 
 reformation did not ensue. He was bitter, especially, against the 
 " Beggar's Opera." Archbishop Herring joined him bitterly, and 
 I am inclined to agree with them, being unable to find a hero in 
 a beastly Jack Sheppard or a brutal Dick Turpin. 
 
 Then came one of Defoe's great books. Now I have told you 
 of folks calling William a Dutchman. They called themselves 
 " true-born Englishmen," and Defoe thought that was arrant cant. 
 The people were beginning to tire of their King William, and 
 hankered after the Stuarts again. They said, " He 's only a 
 Dutchman, and we want a true-born Englishman." And " True- 
 born Englishmanship " soon became the popular cry. Then 
 Defoe was told that they were laughing at King William, and 
 forthwith he took his pen, and sat down and wrote his " True- 
 born Englishman," to show that, of all the mongrel breeds in the 
 world, the English could claim first place for being the most 
 mixed. And very clever it was. Thus he wrote 
 
 " The Romans first with Julius Caesar came, 
 Including all the nations of that name, 
 Gauls, Greeks, and Lombards; and by computation, 
 Auxiliaries or slaves of every nation, 
 With Hengist, Saxons; Danes with Sweyno came 
 In search of plunder, not in search of fame. 
 Scots, Picts, and Irish from the Hibernian shore, 
 And conquering William brought the Normans o'er.
 
 1 34 Daniel Defoe. 
 
 All these their barbarous offspring left behind, 
 The dregs of armies, they, of all mankind, 
 Blended with Britons, who before were here 
 Of whom the Welsh ha' blest the character. 
 From this amphibious ill-born mob began 
 That vain, ill-natured thing an Englishman, 
 These are the heroes who despise the Dutch, 
 And rail at new come foreigners so much, 
 Forgetting that themselves are all derived 
 From the most scoundrel race that ever lived 
 A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones 
 Who ransacked kingdoms and dispeopled towns. 
 
 The wonder which remains is at our pride 
 
 To value that which all wise men deride. 
 
 For Englishmen to boast of generation, 
 
 Cancels their knowledge and lampoons the nation. 
 
 A true-born Englishman 's a contradiction, 
 
 In speech an irony, in fact a fiction, 
 
 A banter made to be a test of fools 
 
 Which those that use it justly ridicules. 
 
 A metaphor invented to express 
 
 A man a-kin to all the universe." 
 
 He completely knocked the bottom out of the "true-born Eng- 
 lishman," and showed how nice a mixture we were Picts and 
 Scots, and aboriginal people, who dyed the last pattern into our 
 skins; Saxons and Normans, Huguenot refugees and Vaudois 
 exiles. This is the " true-born Englishman." " Stand up and 
 let us look at you," he said, " there are not two alike ; you must 
 all have come out of the cave of Adullam." I am sorry to say 
 Defoe was right. I think it better not to trouble ourselves over 
 much about our origin. Here we are, and here, D. V., we intend 
 to stop. Well, King William heard very little more of being a 
 Dutchman again. He knew the immense service Defoe had 
 rendered him, sent for the wit, and took him into favour ever 
 afterwards, making him his personal friend. 
 
 Well, King William went and Queen Anne came. We have 
 looked at her before small head, tender conscience, very scru- 
 pulous, very stupid ; with always one woman to whom to gush 
 or rather two, one who was finishing and another who was 
 coming in a churchwoman one day, a popular election woman 
 another. Sometimes she thought she should be on the throne,
 
 Daniel Defoe. 135 
 
 and sometimes not ; sometimes she stood up, and sometimes sat 
 down : very good ; very good for nothing ; a poor, well-meaning, 
 feeble kind of woman ; didn't do any harm I don't think it was 
 in her ; I don't think she did any good, and I don't think she 
 understood what it meant. She was a fine piece of back-ground, 
 neutral tint ; a capital chance to scribble any pattern upon. And, 
 as might be expected, out came the Jacobite to scribble his pat- 
 tern, and the churchman to scribble his. At that time high 
 churchmen were beginning to get rampant. Sacheverell was for 
 putting down " these Dissenters" with a high hand, and preached, 
 " He cannot be a ' true-born Englishman' who does not lift up 
 the bloody flag and banner of defiance against Dissenters in the 
 streets of London." Queen Anne, afflicted at the idea of doing 
 her miserable Stuart brother wrong, gave the party all the feeble 
 aid she could. This worthy divine, Sachevereil, did lift up the 
 bloody banner against Dissenters, and their meeting-houses were 
 given to the flames. Defoe heard of it, and as King Alfred 
 sought the Danish camp as a harper, so he sought the camp of 
 the Churchman, and wrote his matchless pamphlet, " The 
 Shortest Way with the Dissenters." With irony all too keen he 
 wrote as a Churchman. The church people were delightfully taken 
 in. Parcel after parcel went down to Cambridge. It was bought 
 up by church folks and parsons everywhere. Dear dull souls, 
 they could not see the satire. The pamphlet advocated fire and 
 sword against the Dissenters as the shortest way to get rid of 
 them. The clergy were delighted with it, and one went so far as 
 to say that " next to the sacred Bible and the holy Commentaries, 
 this is the very best book I have ever read ! " It was this con- 
 summate piece of irony that saved English Dissent. Defoe had 
 gone into the Churchman's camp and " fooled them to the top of 
 their bent ; " and great was the outcry on the discovery. How 
 did the Dissenters take it ? A great many of them took it seri- 
 ously ; nearly all of them had lingering suspicions. " Is it of the 
 heavens, heavenly ; or is it of the devil, devilish ?" 
 
 By-and-bye the secret got out. Fancy the rage of the clergy, 
 who had carried the book with them into their pulpits ! Fancy 
 the rage of Cambridge, that they had been taken in by a low 
 Dissenter ! Poor Defoe got between two fires. The dear dull 
 Dissenters did not take the joke ; and, as is the case now, those
 
 1 3 6 Dan id Defoe, 
 
 who didn't see it didn't like it, and those who did see it were 
 worse, because they thought it was teaching the church people 
 how to hurt them. Heavy deacons, and other folks of that kind, 
 did not see what there was in such a thing as that. One Benson 
 (how we should like to have his portrait !) was himself going to 
 raise a prosecution against Defoe. He was saved the trouble. 
 The House of Commons took the matter up, and ordered the 
 book to be burned by the hangman. Defoe, seeing the storm 
 coming, fled ; but when the printer and publisher were arrested 
 he pluckily came back to bear the brunt. He was not the man 
 to shirk a responsibility. He never deserted a friend, and was 
 never the base, beggarly, contemptible coward to try to get out of 
 the mischief he had been the chief cause of making. He came 
 out boldly, and was tried. " I wrote the book," he said ; " there 
 is no mistake about it." As the author he was sentenced to pay 
 a fine of 200 marks, to stand three times in the pillory, to be 
 imprisoned during the Queen's pleasure, and to find sureties for 
 seven years. How this was brought about, by a corrupt court 
 and a packed jury, we know. All these punishments were carried 
 out. He went to the pillory, but the people did not pelt him. 
 Instead of throwing mud and rotten eggs, they wreathed the 
 pillory from top to bottom with garlands, and came out from 
 public houses and drank his health from foaming flagons. It 
 was his day of triumph. It was a rare day's fun in London. 
 There, in the hot sun, they came round him with their beer. 
 " Here's a health to you, Defoe," they cried ; and not a grain of 
 mud was flung at him by any man. But there was a thing Alex- 
 ander Pope that did throw at him in his " Dunciad." The 
 little crook-backed liar wrote : 
 
 " Earless on high stood unabashed Defoe, 
 And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge below." 
 
 But Pope's mud stuck to his own fingers, and Defoe's character 
 was untouched. Whatever noble amateurs may say of Pope, he 
 was a mean, cowardly creature, a man with a crooked soul in a 
 crooked body, all too mawkishly effeminate to sympathise with 
 martyred principle. 
 
 Defoe wrote a hymn to the pillory when he came out ; he set 
 the pillory to music a common metre, perhaps, but there it is.
 
 Daniel Defoe. 137 
 
 What can you do with a man like that ? a man that would frame 
 and glaze the instrument of torture, and hang up the whip that 
 scourged him, in his best room. He went to Newgate; but 
 though in prison, his brave heart was uninjured, and his pen was 
 busy. There, in that vile place, among pirates, pick-pockets, and 
 trulls, he made the best of circumstances, and gathered informa- 
 tion from their lives and their wickednesses that served him as 
 subjects for his pen afterwards. 
 
 The " Review " he brought out was the precursor of all Reviews, 
 and was earlier than the Spectator, Rambler, and Tatler, though 
 not a single complete copy can now be found. His reputation 
 was great, and the booksellers served him very badly, and, in spite 
 of his remonstrances, often put his name on the title-page of a bad 
 book in order to sell it. Defoe himself wrote a preface to a most 
 dull and stupid work on Death,* and entitled it " Mrs Veal's 
 Ghost," f than which few things are more humorous. 
 
 By the intercession of a political enemy, Harley, he was at 
 length released from Newgate, and retired first to Bury St. 
 Edmunds, and then to Dorchester, for quietness ; but he could 
 not keep himself at rest, and a man that cannot be quiet at two 
 such towns as these, cannot find quiet on this side of the grave. 
 His enemies brought sham actions against him, persecuted him, 
 opened his letters, got him into every kind of trouble. 
 
 Yet he got into some favour again, and through Harley's influ- 
 ence he was sent to Edinburgh, where he took part in some of the 
 preparatory negotiations relative to the Union of England and 
 Scotland. In connection with this mission he issued a large book, 
 which contains most valuable information touching the Union. 
 
 He was now sixty years of age ; he had had a touch of apoplexy, 
 and his right hand began to fail him. With enemies and troubles 
 many, we find this man of 2 10 books a kind of intellectual Ishmael, 
 a man who would as soon attack Dissent for its vulgarity and cring- 
 ing as the Church for its pride and tyranny. 
 
 But now came out the golden book, " Robinson Crusoe," the 
 
 * Drelincourt's. 
 
 t "A true relation of the Apparition of one MRS VEAL, the next day after 
 her death, to one MRS BARGRAVE, at Canterbury, the 8th of September, 1705, 
 which apparition recommends the perusal of Drelincourt's book of consola- 
 tion against the fears of death."
 
 138 Daniel Defoe. 
 
 boy's darling, the delight of the world ; the most consummate tale, 
 perhaps, that was ever written. It came from the pen of a man 
 empty in pocket, bankrupt, broken down, who had been in the 
 pillory, and in Newgate twice. He sat down after all this, and 
 wrote that sunshiny golden book, a book that all wise men should 
 read twice, a book that has taken more boys into the British Navy 
 than ever press-gangs have done. Critics want to show that it 
 was founded on fact ; but who cares ? It owes nothing but to 
 the admirable, witty way in which he makes fiction appear truth. 
 What a curious problem it is which that book proposes ! What 
 a singular proposition it sets itself to work out ! given a man born 
 under the circumstances of civilisation suddenly put into con- 
 ditions of barbarism, what will become of him ? As a work of 
 art, its liveliness, its evenness, its simplicity, plainness, and minute- 
 ness of detail, need not to be dwelt upon. This extreme minute- 
 ness is remarkable in his other works too. More people have 
 risen up from reading his " Robinson Crusoe," " Memoirs of a 
 Cavalier," and " History of the Plague," believing they have read 
 a veritable narrative, than from any other novels. He did not see 
 the Plague of London, and was never a Cavalier, in spite of his 
 most detailed relations. To characterise " Robinson Crusoe " 
 would be as absurd as to characterise the " Pilgrim's Progress," 
 which lives in every heart. 
 
 Many books followed his " Robinson Crusoe ; " some that rather 
 shock us. These are gatherings from Newgate, and Newgate 
 flowers are not all sweet. There's one thing, you need not read 
 them. He wrote a host of novels, " Colonel Jack," " Captain 
 Singleton," " Moll Flanders," and so on. They are all the adven- 
 tures of pickpockets, and such like people, thieves, et hoc genus 
 omne ; and are out of date now. A writer in the Edinburgh Review 
 has attempted to construct a complex theory on the subject of the 
 man who condemned the " Beggar's Opera '"' penning these novels. 
 
 I think it arose from his associations in Newgate, from his 
 forced companionship with Colonel Jacks and Lady Roxanas; 
 for he was far too good a judge of human nature to sit down and 
 sulk in a corner, or to shout out amidst such a crew the nasal 
 songs of Zion. Perhaps, too, he found this more profitable than 
 writing some life of another Colonel Gardiner, destined to lie 
 unbought on Tract Society shelves. 
 
 He retired at last to Stoke Newington, in the hope of closing
 
 Daniel Defoe. 139 
 
 his troubled life peacefully ; but it was not to be. He had 
 gathered together a, little money for the sake of his family, and of 
 this he made his son trustee. His son turned traitor, and made 
 away with the money ; and this man's tough British heart, that 
 had stood the attacks of clergy and political enemies unmoved, 
 and had withstood the pillory and Newgate, this great heart broke 
 before the cruel treachery of his son. Priests, kings, troubles 
 many of body and mind, had failed to crush it ; it yielded now. 
 He was buried in Bunhill Fields, the Campo Santa of English 
 Dissenters, where Watts was first silent, and Bunyan ended his 
 pilgrimage. His death occurred in 1731. But what happened 
 to him after death ? His very name has been perverted to 
 Dubow, most probably by the stupidity of the sexton, and, as 
 such, it appears on the books. Says the register, " Buried, April 
 26, Mr Dubow." This is fame ! The man who has frightened 
 kings and made priests tremble is " Mr Dubow." What a lively 
 rebuke to all human greatness ! I know not, since Solomon 
 wrote " all is vanity," aught so bitter and sad. The author of 
 " Robinson Crusoe " " Mr Dubow" ! 
 
 In his works, Defoe's capacity and knowledge are fully 
 shown. He did other things than write novels. Many matters 
 over which there are squabbles in this day as to the invention, 
 were projected by him. The whole system of savings banks, the 
 intellectual equality of women, the idea of idiot asylums, police 
 supervision, street lighting, the education of females, free trade, 
 the whole practice of so-called modern political economy, all these 
 and other subjects were by him treated. He was a brave active 
 man, who saw things as they were, and said what he thought ; a 
 man battling for liberty all his life through ; who fought with a 
 wrong-doer, whether friend or foe ; the Ishmael of political 
 writing. But he did not get the full length of liberty itself. Like 
 others, he stopped short ; there was a limit even to liberty. 
 There is a pleasant and admirable passage in old Foxe him of 
 " The Martyrs " which shows how he understood liberty 
 thoroughly ! He asked that the King would be pleased not to 
 burn the Anabaptists. He might do anything else to them he liked ; 
 anything but burning would be toleration sufficient for Foxe. Listen 
 to the delightful old twaddler : "There are chains, there is exile, 
 there are branding and stripes, and even the gibbet; this alone, 
 burning, I earnestly deprecate."
 
 1 40 Daniel Defoe. 
 
 
 
 Defoe would not go that length. He would neither have the 
 kicks, stripes, chains, gibbets, or branding of old Foxe ; but he 
 would stop short of Unitarianism : that was strong, open heresy. 
 Proper Baptists, decent Independents, holy Presbyterians, were 
 tolerable; beyond them he would stop. He did not see with 
 Locke, that what is called toleration is a notable law of the human 
 soul. It was left for Locke to do in philosophy what George 
 Fox did in religion. Defoe did not see that ; but he was like 
 most of his compeers, and like a very large number of his succes- 
 sors. For all that, the man worked like the builders of the second 
 temple : the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other. His 
 books have gone down nearly all but one but there was not 
 one of them but went to deepen the foundations of the citadel 
 of freedom for the people in Church and State. As a specimen of 
 his popularity, it is worthy of mention that 80,000 copies of his 
 " True-born Englishman " were sold in his life-time. 
 
 We have a portrait of his person, taken by the police, which, if 
 not always flattering, and perhaps not quite what our wives would 
 admire, is generally true. I have one or two of these portraits of 
 myself, limned by police hands, which I treasure. When the 
 House of Commons resolved to punish Defoe for his book, they 
 issued the following proclamation : 
 
 " Whereas, Daniel Defoe alias De Fooe, is charged with 
 writing a scandalous and seditious pamphlet, entitled ' The Short- 
 est Way with the Dissenters.' He is a middle-sized spare man, 
 about forty years old, of a dark complexion and dark brown 
 coloured hair, but wears a wig ; has a hooked nose, a sharp chin, 
 gray eyes, and a large mole near the mouth. Whosoever shall 
 discover and send Daniel Defoe to one of her Majesty's principal 
 Secretaries of State, or any of her Majesty's Justices of the Peace, 
 so as he may be apprehended, shall have a reward of ^50, to be 
 paid upon such discovery." 
 
 Such, then, was the man, his character, and works. I have 
 touched but slightly on them all, and must leave you to study at 
 your leisure the life and doings of one of the worthy strange old 
 souls of this land. Defoe deserves more regard from the courtly 
 historians, who have given Mr Addison, Swift, and others, far higher 
 praise than they could find it in their hearts to bestow upon this 
 Dissenter, who stood in the pillory, and who learned much of his 
 wisdom in the dark cells of Newgate.
 
 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 BORN 1667. DIED 1745. (FROM 7TH CHARLES II. TO rSxH GEORGE II.) 
 
 T DO not set Dean Swift before you as a model, nor as one you 
 should love that you will have some difficulty in doing. I 
 do not pet him, I do not praise him. What we have to do is to 
 study one of the most remarkable men this country ever produced ; 
 one of the strongest men, and one of the strangest mixtures of good 
 and evil the good far outweighing the evil that can be found 
 in literature. Some are prejudiced against Swift ; but if they are 
 inclined to condemn him because of his conduct towards women, 
 let them just remember the other side. We should listen with a 
 good deal of hesitancy to the condemnation of a man that two 
 such women as Stella and Vanessa loved so thoroughly as they 
 did. If he was such a wretch as many people suppose, why did 
 they love him ? People are angry with Swift because they cannot 
 love him ; but they should remember that he is not a model. In 
 studying a man like Swift, we must do just what we would when 
 we go into a museum, where there are animals the form of which 
 we do not admire, talons which we dread, and sharpnesses from 
 which we are glad to be saved. The question is not, whether we 
 admire, but whether we cannot possibly understand. We have an 
 eccentric, strong, violent man to speak of. Remember, too, that 
 his life began in poverty and dependence, and ended in gloom and 
 madness. We should be merciful to a life whose beginning was 
 in wretchedness and dependence, and whose dark night sank into 
 idiocy. For, if Swift sinned much, certainly he suffered much, 
 and his retribution was as great as any of his crimes. 
 
 While residing as a clergyman in Ireland the happiest time of 
 his life he was the leader of English politics, for he had more 
 brains than any English politician. The little people who tried to 
 use him had a contempt for him, and he returned it with interest; 
 only in his case the contempt was well measured and he under- 
 stood it, but in their case it was foolish and vulgar.
 
 142 Dean Swift. 
 
 Swift was born on the 3oth of November 1667, in Dublin ; but 
 though born in Ireland, he was of English descent, his father being 
 a Yorkshireman and his mother a native -of Leicestershire. It is 
 idle to talk of Swift as an Irishman. He had not the graces of an 
 Irishman. If he gave you a penny, he threw it at your head; but 
 if an Irishman did not give you a penny, he would give you a cart- 
 load of blessings ; Swift would damn you while he blessed you. 
 Swift, too, took care of his money ; he was mean sometimes, and 
 careful. And he hated a scene in the market-place ; you wouldn't 
 catch him gushing. Although he was a minister, he said his 
 prayers on the sly ; he was afraid that people should think him 
 religious, or, rather, was afraid that people should see him at it. 
 That was not very Irish. You don't catch an Irishman putting a 
 bushel over his virtues. Not he ! He would take a good tall 
 candlestick, and place it so that the world might be the better for 
 his example. Swift was English through and through. He didn't 
 like smiling, he didn't like sentimentalism, he didn't like any show 
 of feeling or emotion, except when it was necessary to gain an end. 
 He would not write a book for the sake of writing a book. He 
 would rather have swept a crossing than been a cadger of litera- 
 ture, scribbling books for sixpence. When he wrote a book, it was 
 because he had an end to carry. Neither his virtues nor his vices 
 were Irish. He was a patient, industrious, laborious, plain-speak- 
 ing Englishman, hating sentimentalism, effusion, and finery of 
 every kind. He was vindictive, violent, unforgetful, unforgiving. 
 He did not want to be an Irishman ; even the degree that he was 
 Irish he considered a misfortune. (Fancy an Irishman consider- 
 ing it a misfortune to be Irish !) He was hampered by this mis- 
 fortune, and it led to many evil results. 
 
 His father died before Swift was born. There was an evil 
 beginning in life for a poor mother to bear her ruined child when 
 the father was gone ! That was of itself a tragedy. It is an in- 
 vocation to pity. It should win the mercy of the hardest. Swift's 
 father was a poor man, and his funeral was provided by the society 
 with which he was connected. Swift's nurse was a Whitehaven 
 woman, and she loved the child; and wishing to return to her 
 friends at Whitehaven, she ran away and took Swift with her; and 
 when he got there, he was so delicate that his mother thought he 
 had better stay, rather than run the risk of another sea voyage.
 
 Dean Swift. 143 
 
 So he stayed among poor people in Whitehaven for three years. 
 Here was another bad start. To do the old woman justice, how- 
 ever, she loved the child, and did her best for him. Before he 
 was three years old she had taught him to read decently ; and at 
 five he could read the Bible. 
 
 He came back to Dublin delicate and miserably poor; what 
 little he got was given him most ungraciously by his uncle Godwin, 
 and Swift never forgave him. It is true his uncle hadn't much 
 to give, but he had the reputation of being rich, and he suffered 
 for his reputation, as men often do. His uncle's hard way with 
 him sank into Swift's heart. When his uncle Godwin died, he 
 fell upon his uncle William. His uncle William was not rich 
 either, but he was generous, and he had a genial way of giving 
 what he gave. And so all through his life Swift never forgave his 
 uncle Godwin, and never blamed his uncle William. No man 
 could bear the yoke of dependence so proudly as Swift, who was 
 the proudest of men. All these hardships entered into the heart 
 of Swift, and on every birthday he used to read the curse uttered 
 by the man of old, " Let the day perish wherein I was born, and 
 the night in which it was said, ' There is a man child conceived.' " 
 What a state a man must be in when he keeps his birthday in 
 that fashion ! 
 
 He went to school at Kilkenny, and there again somebody 
 paid for him. Then, at fourteen, he went to Trinity College, 
 Dublin, still a pensioner. He had a poor time of it there, and 
 they set him the usual nonsense, namely, formal logic, and that 
 miserable superstition, that depth of human imbecility, Greek and 
 Latin verse-making. He was a most irregular student, however. 
 There was that fascination of irregularity about him, that any 
 book the authorities said he ought to read lost its charm, for there 
 are some men who, the moment they see "With Authority" on a 
 book, make up their minds that it is something dull. It is bad to 
 stamp a book with the pcrmissu snperiorum. Swift read amaz- 
 ingly, but always discursively. In two years he had seventy-five 
 penalties to pay ; but at the end he got or rather they gave 
 him the Bachelor's degree, " by special favour," which means 
 that he didn't deserve it. He also got a degree at Oxford. 
 
 Afterwards, through the influence of his mother, Sir William 
 Temple, to whom she was distantly related, found a place for him
 
 144 Dean Swift. 
 
 in his residence at Moor Park, near Farnham, Surrey. He was 
 not a regular chaplain, but a sort of dependant, and took his 
 dinner with the upper servants. Can't you imagine, as Thackeray 
 suggests, what the butler arid the footman thought of this " Irish 
 schollard " this man with the ink and the ragged gown ? King 
 William was in the habit of coming to Moor Park to see Sir 
 William, who was a great favourite, and on such occasions Swift 
 would walk with the king in the garden. The king was so pleased 
 with him that he offered him a troop of horse, thinking he offered 
 him the highest of degrees, but Swift declined the offer. Great 
 hopes crept into the mind of the dependant, and Swift thought 
 the king might remember him in another way ; but later in life he 
 found new force in the passage, " Put not thy trust in princes." 
 
 About that time Swift wrote some verses meant for Pindaric 
 odes ; and Dryden, who was his kinsman, said, referring to them, 
 "Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet." Swift never forgave 
 him, and Dryden caught it afterwards, as you may remember. 
 
 By degrees the bondage at Moor Park became irksome to 
 Swift, and Sir William Temple grew cold. There was no great 
 quarrel, but Swift became sick of his beggarly dependence. A 
 place turned up under the Master of the Rolls, with ^100 a year, 
 which Sir William offered him. Swift refused it, and resolved to 
 enter the Church, saying that his refusal of the situation would 
 show that he did not enter the Church for mere love of pelf. But 
 the bishops demanded a character, and asked him where he lived 
 last? With Sir William Temple he said. Had he given him a 
 certificate? No. Then he must get one. There was humble 
 pie ! This proud scholar had to ask Sir William Temple, whom 
 he had left, for a character ! It took him five months to make 
 up his mind to it, and when he did write to Sir William there was 
 an unnecessary degree of humility about his letter that makes one 
 wish he hadn't written at all. He got his certificate, however, 
 and the bishops gave him holy orders ; and it was a pity they did. 
 For what had Swift to do with holy orders ? They were a fetter 
 and a bondage to him. Swift was a man that trembled before 
 God's majesty. Swift was a man that was full of love to man. 
 Swift knew how to keep the two great commandments. But holy 
 orders ! Was he a man cut out for holy orders ? Was he a man 
 <br pennissu supcriorum ? Was he a man to fit on a white choker '
 
 Dean Swift. 145 
 
 Was he a man to walk out upon the world, a retained defender of 
 questions he hadn't examined ? He was not made for holy orders, 
 and they became to him a hindrance in life. 
 
 Swift's residence at Moor Park was an evil thing for him. He 
 saw pretty nearly all the great people of England there ; for the 
 aristocracy used to come to Moor Park. He looked at them ; and 
 the long, lean, lank, poor scholar scorned them. He knew that 
 he could wind them round his finger. He saw the big-wigs, and 
 he looked underneath the surface of high life, and found little else 
 but powder and hair and wig. 
 
 His journal to Stella contains many a touch of scorn about that 
 Moor Park business : " I have often thought," he says, " what a 
 splutter Sir William Temple used to make about his being a 
 Secretary of State." "I think I saw Jack Temple and his wife 
 pass by me to-day in his coach. I took no notice of him ; I am 
 glad I have shaken off that family." Swift obtained a living at 
 Kilroot, in the diocese of Connor, worth about ^100 a year, which 
 he afterwards handed over to a poor curate with a large family. 
 It was a Protestant parish, and there were usually about twenty 
 listeners. 
 
 Swift went back to Sir William Temple's as a friend, not as a 
 servant, and dined with Sir William instead of with the butler. It 
 was then that he became acquainted with that black-eyed lass 
 that was to be a joy and trouble to him ; but the story of his 
 loves I must reserve till further on. 
 
 We now find him engaged in the pastime of hoisting an 
 engineer with his own petard, in his controversy with John 
 Partridge, the almanac-maker. Partridge did not die at the exact 
 date anticipated, that would have been too obliging of him, but 
 lived a little longer in the vain endeavour of proving that he was 
 not what people took him to be a ghost. 
 
 With the year 1710 came a change of Ministry, and it soon 
 became apparent that the poor Irish clergyman carried the brains 
 for both Parties. He had more brains than the whole of the 
 leading men of both sides Whig and Tory ; and they had the 
 singular grace of knowing it. The consequence was, Swift was 
 now in his glory ; for both sides were eager for him. The Whigs 
 would have liked to have him if they could, and the Tories wanted 
 him badly for they always want brains badly and were prepared 
 
 K
 
 146 Dean Swift. 
 
 to bid high for him. Of course Swift has been visited with the 
 wholesale indiscriminate condemnation which generally attends 
 every man who is too independent to be a partisan, and sees too 
 clearly the deep root in human nature of the opposite principles 
 of Conservatism and Jacobinism, to be dragged like a tin kettle 
 at the tail of any party. " In order to preserve our Constitution 
 in Church and State," Swift said, " whoever has a true value for 
 both will be sure to avoid the extremes of the Whigs for the sake 
 of the former, and the extremes of the Tories for the sake of the 
 latter;" and he avoided both extremes for the sake of both. The 
 only man of importance who treated him with coldness was 
 Godolphin, and Swift considered this a thing not to be forgotten 
 or forgiven. His collection of rods was a very good one, and 
 contained a choice selection ; and it is pretty clear Godolphin did 
 not like " Cid Hamet's " rod. 
 
 And now Swift formally and openly joined the Tories. The 
 " first fruits " were remitted at once, so glad were the Tories to 
 get him ; and he promptly set about getting ready that vigorous, 
 energetic, and unscrupulous brain of his to defend them through 
 thick and thin. He was ready to knock statesmen over, punch 
 the king, or crush anything that stood in his path. He could use 
 every kind of weapon, and he attacked all, big and little, who 
 came in his way. No creature was too small to bring down his 
 vigorous and vehement strength ; and he did this to such effect 
 that it never troubled him again. If a flea bit him, he said, he 
 crushed it He was versatile, Protean, versed in all forms of 
 composition : street songs, epigrams, lampoons, scandals, lies, 
 veracities, truths, arguments, sophistry, logic, history (real or made) 
 whatever he wanted, he had it ready. Having worked hard for 
 his own party, it was clear that he ought to have something ; and 
 Harley, with the supercilious stupidity of people with less brains 
 than rank, who don't understand men who have brains and no 
 rank, sent him $o. Isn't it amazing? No doubt Harley thought 
 that something. But he had mistaken his man. Many men have 
 their price ; but ^50 was not Swift's price. So Swift simply shut 
 it up in the envelope and sent it back again ; and he would have 
 nothing more to do with Harley until that aristocratic snob apolo- 
 gised for the meanness of sending it. 
 
 And now it was wonderful what a friendship apparently sprung
 
 Dean 'Sivift. 147 
 
 up between Jonathan Swift and these big-wigs. They called him 
 " Jonathan," sometimes it was " dear Jonathan ; " they patted him 
 on the back, and, what is rather sad to know, he seemed to like 
 it, although there was a deal of savage independence about him. 
 Perhaps he made rather too much fuss about independence. At 
 all events, he liked to make people feel that brains were as good 
 as anything else. He liked to stand upon his own ground, and 
 that was the ground of conscious knowledge and power. As Dr 
 Johnson said, with perfect justice, it must be allowed, Swift at 
 one time dictated the political opinions of the English nation. 
 Conscious of his power, he knew how to use it. These big-wigs 
 called upon him. Well, he was " not at home ; " " can't be seen 
 now, call again." There was a club, numbering sixteen, called 
 " The Brothers," and they elected Swift one of their number in 
 fact, he was at the head of the business. There is an admirable 
 picture drawn of the time and of Swift, by Bishop Kennet. It 
 describes Swift at Court, and the closing remark of Kennet is a 
 fine Episcopal touch, for it mentions the Queen entering the room, 
 beckoning to Swift, " and then," says Kennet, " both went off just 
 before prayers." Here was Swift in his glory. He was dispens- 
 ing patronage, and Swift loved to do good in his own time, and 
 in his own way. He made a good and kind use of his private 
 influence too, promoting the success of Pope's Homer, and 
 serving his friends how he could. 
 
 The existence of the Tory government depended entirely upon 
 the making of peace with France. Dean Swift could make a war, 
 or he could end a war. Nothing was easier with this wonderful 
 man. Ask Dean Swift to make a war. " With pleasure." Ask 
 him to turn it off. "Certainly." So he wrote a pamphlet on 
 " The conduct of the allies." Everybody read it. The Whigs 
 were enraged, but it succeeded, and the war stopped. 
 
 Was Swift disinterested all this time ? Well, not exactly. He 
 was too proud to ask for anything : he would rather rot in the 
 gutter than ask any man for anything. But he was not too proud 
 if he saw anything coming if he saw the hand reached out to 
 him to meet it half-way. Why not make him a bishop ? Per- 
 haps he wanted spiritual qualification? Spiritual fiddlestick ! 
 What had that to do with it ? They did not care for that in those 
 days. Swift in the House of Lords to defend the Government
 
 148 Dean Swift. 
 
 through thick and thin, to cover them with glory for his tongue 
 was as sharp and terrible as his pen was what was aimed at, and the 
 Ministry were willing to make him a bishop. It is true people said 
 he was an infidel ; but that was a slander. They referred to his 
 " Tale of a Tub," and called him a blasphemer ; but that was a 
 scandal. They did not want him to go in and defend the Church. 
 No, no, the Church and State especially the State. Harley would 
 have made him an archbishop, if it could be done ; but there was 
 the Queen against him, and he had provoked the hostility of a 
 royal favourite by a lampoon. Poor Queen Anne ! she was the 
 absurdest person the world has ever seen. She was a woman 
 with a small brain and a tender conscience ; and a conscientious 
 fool is a difficult person to manage. Queen Anne had not read the 
 " Tale of a Tub " herself (if she had she never would have under- 
 stood it), but she had heard from Archbishop Sharp that Dean 
 Swift was a questionable person ; and she also was appealed to by 
 one of her favourites the lady whom Swift had lampooned who 
 opened against him woman's potent artillery tears. What can 
 any man do when a woman takes to crying ? You cannot curse 
 her, however angry you may be. You don't know what to do. 
 So at last Swift left : it was plain there was no bishopric for him. 
 So back he goes to Ireland in a sulk and a rage ; and, taking his 
 Deanery of St Patrick, quietly makes a face at it, when nobody is 
 looking. The imperial intellect was thus thrust into that back 
 parlour called Ireland. In his Deanery one gentleman had been 
 well, call it misbehaving. Coming into Church, he joined in 
 the singing. The Dean was looking at him. In the anthem, un- 
 fortunately for the gentleman were the words, " Whither shall I 
 flee from thy presence ; whither, whither, whither shall I flee ? " 
 Swift, moderately, but loud enough to be heard, rejoined, " Go to 
 gaol, you blackguard." Next day. the man being duly penitent, 
 things went on as usual, and he was forgiven. It was a strange 
 change for Swift to leave such homage, as no man of his rank 
 had ever received before in this world, to go and live a miserable 
 back-parlour life in Ireland ; to go to a small Irish living, to settle 
 disputes between drowsy pew-openers and ecclesiastical spider- 
 brushers. He had no aristocratic relations his wealth was in his 
 head. He had made himself worshipped in England, and no 
 sooner was he gone from London than mischief began. Oxford
 
 Dean Swift. 149 
 
 and Bolingbroke quarrelled, and "dear Jonathan" must comeback 
 to make them friends. Their dissension threatened the very exist- 
 ence of the Tory party. Swift came, but failed to reconcile them. 
 He published the " Public Spirit of the Whigs," a severe and bitter 
 attack upon that party, containing also some abuse of the Scotch, 
 whom he called " a poor, fierce, Northern people." They didn't 
 like it, and it was droll to see the Scotch nobility going up to 
 complain. There they went, actually before the throne, whimper- 
 ing like school-boys, " Please your Majesty, that nausty great 
 Irishman says we are not as clane as we ought to be." If it were 
 not written in history, I would not have believed it. Swift didn't 
 retract j he held the same opinion to the last. Oxford and 
 Bolingbroke would not make it up, and Swift goes into Berk- 
 shire and visits with his friend Geary. Oxford is in disgrace; 
 writes to Swift, and they go down into Herefordshire. The Queen 
 dies; exeunt the Tories. Bolingbroke, in disgrace, goes into 
 exile. The change was great. 
 
 From 1714 to 1720, Swift lived a quiet life in Ireland, and 
 perhaps these were some of the most pleasant years of his life. 
 In 1720, his restless spirit heard a new call. Caring little for 
 Ireland, loving the people but little, yet, seeing that they were 
 down-trodden and oppressed, his soul was up in arms at once. 
 He saw the Irish being put upon, and out he goes from the shade 
 into the full blaze of day. The state of Ireland was then what it 
 has always been wretched and miserable. Ireland's history has 
 been likened to an April day : gloom and sunshine. Yes, it is 
 like an April day, only an April day all gloom and no sunshine. May 
 be the sunshine is being reserved, so that by-and-bye they will get it 
 all together. The poor Catholics were snubbed, they were like a 
 toad under the Protestant harrow ; the Protestants were divided 
 into sects and parties, each party hating the others with an intense 
 hatred only excelled, when they united, by the hatred they all 
 showed to the said toad. Again, England, was trying to reduce 
 Ireland to a beggarly province, instead of raising it to an integral 
 part of a flourishing empire. The English Parliament was trying 
 to arrogate to itself the right of making laws for Ireland a right 
 to which it had no claim. It was contrary to the principles of 
 national righteousness. The policy of the English was to keep 
 the Irish down to put down Irish manufactures, to put down
 
 150 Dean Swift. 
 
 everything Irish, except Irish poverty, oppression, and misery. 
 What was to be done was to " keep these Irish poor ; keep them 
 divided." If you want to hit a man down, don't shoot him ; draw 
 upon him, sponge upon him, live upon him, fleece him, bleed him, 
 borrow from him, steal from him, keep him low ; and that was 
 the policy that England was following with Ireland. Some of the 
 legislative enactments passed to cripple or extinguish altogether 
 branches of Irish industry in the reign of William III. were the 
 causes of the fire of indignation which burned within Swift. By 
 10 and ii William III. the exportation of Irish woollen cloth, 
 except to England, was entirely forbidden. At a stroke, the Irish 
 woollen manufacture went down. And what arose in its place? 
 Smuggling wool to France. So that the sapient English destroyed 
 a branch of Irish industry, to afford material to France offering to 
 the world a spectacle of stupidity equalled only by the accompany- 
 ing dishonesty, selfishness, and rapacity. Swift saw this, and he 
 wrote that most famous of political pamphlets, "A proposal for 
 the universal use of Irish manufactures, utterly rejecting and 
 renouncing everything wearable that comes from England." Oh ! 
 all Irishmen thought this excellent the Papist, the Rapparee,* 
 the Orangeman ; all shapes and shades of this wonderful people 
 were agreed. Off went the English coats, and on with the Irish 
 frieze. Now was not that a plucky thing? This man stood up 
 against the English nation. He was brought to trial, and after a 
 hard struggle between the judge and the jury, Swift was left to the 
 tender mercies of the former ; but ultimately the victory rested 
 with him. This done, the down-trodden people learned to look 
 to this glorious Englishman as one of their noblest defenders, 
 and one of the purest patriots old Ireland ever had. 
 
 In 1723, Swift had another fight. Copper money was very 
 short. A Wolverhampton tinman, named William Wood, in a 
 way which greatly displeased Swift, through the solicitation of the 
 Duchess of Kendal, obtained permission of George I. to coin 
 copper money to the amount of ^"100,000, in half-pence and 
 farthings. Swift determined to pitch into Wood, and he wrote 
 the " Drapier's Letters." t In writing as an ordinary Dublin 
 draper there was a great advantage. Swift might be as vulgar, as 
 
 * A wild Irish plunderer, armed with a rapary or half-pike, 
 t Signed M. B. Drapier.
 
 Dean Swift. \ 5 i 
 
 common-plcice, as back-parlourish as would hit the popular fancy. 
 Well, he declared Wood's coppers were hardly worth buying. 
 He wrote ballads about them, and at last nobody would have the 
 coin at all. Tradesmen put out the sign, " Wood's ha'pence not 
 taken here." In his " Drapier's Letters," Swift made a violent 
 attack on Wood, poured out the vials of his wrath upon him, 
 called him Woodlouse, transferred the Wood to his head, and 
 every place where wood could be ; called him wormwood, green- 
 wood, logwood, hardwood, put him under the pump, and 
 pumped ridicule and invective upon him until he was soaked 
 through. One of Swift's ballads runs thus, representing Wood as 
 the singer : 
 
 " My dear Irish folks, 
 
 Come leave off your jokes, 
 And buy up my ha'pence so fine, 
 
 So fair, and so bright 
 
 They will give you delight : 
 Observe how they glisten and shine ! 
 
 They'll sell to my grief, 
 
 As cheap as neck beef, 
 For counters at cards to your wife ; 
 
 And every day 
 
 Your children may play 
 Span farthing, or toss on the knife. 
 
 When tradesmen have gold, 
 
 The thief will be bold, 
 By night and by day for to rob him : 
 
 My copper is such 
 
 No robber will touch, 
 And so you may daintily bob him." 
 
 Why, this was an exceeding lie : the coins were good enough, 
 but it answered Swift's purpose to say they were bad. A lie was an 
 acceptable weapon to him. He knew it was a great mistake for 
 those who wanted to gain their ends in times of excitement to be 
 scrupulous. It ruined a partisan as a speaker. The true policy 
 was to lie largely, cook statistics, alter them daily, say anything 
 and all things. This was Swift's method ; he was before the par- 
 tisans of the present day in discovering it. A nice conscience, 
 accuracy of statement, the best statistics, carefulness about figures, 
 preciseness as to details these are not the things with which you
 
 152 Dean Swift. 
 
 can expect to carry your case. Lie largely ; lay it on ; muddle 
 figures, disregard statistics, sweep away questions about details, 
 and success is certain. It may be that Swift descended to the 
 vulgar. Yes ; but if you are to sing for the streets you must not go to 
 Homer ; you must appeal to the people in words they understand. 
 His street lampoons were coarse ; but they served their purpose, 
 which, if they had not been coarse, they could not have done. 
 To move a concert hall, Tennyson is not required would fail 
 altogether ; the man for that work is the author of " Not for Joe." 
 To declare that Wood's copper money was brass, was about as 
 brazen a lie as ever was uttered. But Swift, as usual, was victorious. 
 The patent was withdrawn from Wood, and compensation granted. 
 The harsh policy of England towards Ireland still irritated 
 Swift, and he wrote one of the most singular and strongest pieces 
 of grim satire ever penned, entitled " A modest proposal for pre- 
 venting the children of poor people in Ireland from being a bur- 
 den to the country, and making them beneficial to the public." 
 This was a scheme for utilising brats a most desirable thing. 
 " I have been assured," says Swift, " by a very knowing American 
 of my acquaintance, that a young, healthy, well-nursed baby, a 
 year old, is a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, 
 whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled ; and I make no doubt 
 it will equally serve as a fricassee or ragout." " I grant this food 
 will be somewhat dear," he goes on, " but it will therefore be very 
 proper for landlords. They who have already devoured the 
 parents, have the best title to the children." He recommended 
 the eating of babies, especially to Protestants, because it would 
 thin the ranks of the Papists ; for, as there were more Papists 
 than Protestants, of course more Popish children would be de- 
 voured. The suggestion has a great many advantages. I don't 
 know whether it ever struck the Protestant party as it ought to 
 have done ; indeed, I don't know whether it may not at the pre- 
 sent time commend itself to their notice as worthy of their con- 
 sideration. It was the grimmest and bitterest thing ever penned. 
 But what a state for a people to be reduced to : not to know 
 what to do with their children ; for that was the case with Ireland 
 then. Swift was again prosecuted, as he had been for the 
 " Drapier's Letters ;" but his friends gathered round him. The 
 Quakers know how to contribute to a fray without actually sharing
 
 Dean Swift 153 
 
 in it, and it is said that one of them put the following text on the 
 walls of Dublin : " And the people said unto Saul, Shall Jonathan 
 die, who hath wrought this great salvation in Israel ? God forbid. 
 As the Lord liveth, there shall not one hair of his head fall to 
 the ground ; for he hath wrought with God this day. And the 
 people rescued Jonathan, that he died not." So the grand jury 
 ignored the bill, and there it ended. This popularity, however, 
 was too noisy, and he retired to the country from it. Next we 
 find him in London ; then back to Ireland again, because poor 
 Stella was ill. 
 
 At last came out, not only the most famous of his books, but, of 
 its kind, the world's greatest book, "Gulliver's Travels." If I 
 begin to talk of this book it will be all over with Swift. I will, there- 
 fore, pass it by the book of books, containing all the greatness, 
 and all the sadness and littleness of Swift. There is more of Swift 
 in " Gulliver," than in all his other works. All that went before, 
 and all that came after, are there. There are his humour and 
 savagery, his generosity and satire, his cynicism and scorn for 
 mankind. 
 
 Another visit to England, some more events, and then, as Scott 
 says, " The stage darkness, before the curtain falls." Swift became 
 an idiot, and lay for three years in that state. His infirmities and 
 suffering increased, his glorious memory began to fail him ; his fits, 
 formerly restrainable, now became unrestrainable violence, and the 
 great man lay down in idiocy. We have seen an ember die ; it 
 goes down in darkness, and then flickers up again, so, during the 
 long three years in which this mighty man lay more helpless than 
 a child, again and again appeared a little flicker a little blue flame 
 to show that it was more obstruction than loss of power. The 
 housekeeper tells him it is his birthday, and people are getting 
 ready the bonfires. "It is all folly," he replied, "better let it 
 alone." So for a moment there was fire again. The servant-man 
 went to take away the watch one day. " No, no ; bring it here." 
 Another time he said, " I am what I am I am a fool." The 
 servant-man was breaking coal another day, whereupon Swift said, 
 " Why, you blockhead, it is a stone." In 1 745 his sufferings ended, 
 and when he died there never was a man of whom it might be 
 more devoutly and earnestly said in the words of the Liturgy,* 
 * The Order for the Burial of the Dead.
 
 154 Dean Sivift. 
 
 " We give Thee hearty thanks for that it hath pleased Thee to deliver 
 this our brother out of the miseries of this sinful world." The Irish 
 idolised him, and, when he was gone : O how they wept for him ! 
 How they mourned for him ! They lifted up their voices, and 
 they wept, fulfilling to the letter the words of Shakespeare: 
 
 "Yea, beg a hair of him for memory, 
 And, dying, mention it within their wills, 
 Bequeathing it as a rich legacy 
 Unto their issue." 
 
 In person, Swift was a comely man ; tall, strong, well-made, with 
 dark blue eyes, black and bushy eyebrows, and nose somewhat 
 aquiline; a haughty dauntless man, who was never known to 
 laugh, and seldom to smile. The description of Cassius exactly 
 fits him : 
 
 " He reads much. 
 
 He is a great observer, and he looks 
 Quite through the deeds of men. 
 Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort 
 As if he mock'd himself and scorn'd his spirit 
 That could be moved to smile at anything." 
 
 He had a high opinion of himself and his powers. His pride 
 was the most wonderful thing about him. He was as proud of the 
 weight of his brain as other men are of the strength of their 
 muscles, or the length of their pedigree. He had the clearest 
 knowledge of his own wonderful powers, and looked upon himself 
 with admiration. He was economical ; at once a lover and a 
 despiser of money. He knew, with Solomon, that "money is a 
 defence ; " he knew that every sixpence saved was a liberty gained, 
 and that every pound put by was a palisade against fools. He 
 understood that the minimising of wants was one way, and the 
 maximising of resources was another way, of gaining wealth, so he 
 was profuse, but never profligate, in his expenses. He left his 
 money to a lunatic asylum. He knew the affliction was coming 
 upon himself, and he did all he could to lessen the suffering of 
 others. If you want to test his qualities, you may find them 
 paradoxical, strong, proud, manly, hasty, kindly, merciful, savage, 
 and severe, but full of generousness and justice a man, I do not 
 say possible to love, but a man very possible marvellously to 
 admire.
 
 Dean Swift. 155 
 
 With all Swift's greatness the majority of people are more inte- 
 rested in him because of the women who loved him than the 
 books he wrote. Wasn't it wrong for women to love him at all 
 this proud, bitter, infidel kind of man ? Women love strange 
 people ; and they loved Swift, and died for him. There must 
 have been something lovely in him, or they could not have done 
 so, although women certainly are great idol-makers. Women 
 love blockheads and fools. It is a very common practice of 
 theirs to take a block of wood a blockhead and with vermillion 
 and gold do as the old idol-makers did. Women should not be 
 interfered with in their idolatry ; for if they ceased loving blocks 
 and making idols, and took to loving only wise people, how many 
 men would be without a choice ! The world would not be quite 
 so densely peopled as at present in any country. Therefore let 
 idolatry and the idolaters prosper. Ordinary women may be 
 advantageously left to make idols of blockheads, but such women 
 as loved Swift were not the sort to love blockheads. He was 
 lovely, or he had not been loved by them. Their love was a 
 passion ; they died for him. It may be that when he was loved, 
 those dark blue eyes of his could sometimes shine with a sweet 
 lustre, and the great, strong, stern, sad man could be made gentle 
 and playful. As Thackeray said, "The book of Swift's life 
 opens at leaves kept by these blighted flowers" Varina, Stella, 
 Vanessa. 
 
 Jane Waryng [Varina] was a sister of a college chum of Swift's. 
 He courted her for seven years, with varying degrees of tempera- 
 ture. He wrote to her at one time that " impatience is the most 
 inseparable quality of a lover ;" but he was not always impatient 
 for her. He cooled, and she had to remind him to ask his in- 
 tentions, and whether he still loved her. It was very awkward 
 for Swift. He sent, in reply, one of the shamefullest letters ever 
 written by a man to a woman. He was perfectly ready to marry 
 her, but he put it in such a way that a woman must have been 
 past all respect who did anything but reject him with scorn. He 
 did not inquire whether her person was beautiful or her fortune 
 large ; all he required was cleanliness in the former, and com- 
 petence in the latter. In short he got out of the engagement 
 without compromising himself legally. 
 
 Stella came next. She was Esther Johnson, a natural daughter,
 
 156 Dean Swift. 
 
 I believe, of Sir William Temple. She saw heaven nowhere but 
 in Jonathan Swift's blue eyes. At first Swift was her guardian, 
 her brother, her friend. It was a happy and holy love that 
 existed between them at first, and the growth of that innocent 
 love continued until the removal of Stella to Ireland, when 
 slander stepped in and suggested a love of another kind as pos- 
 sible. I have looked carefully into the loves of Swift and Esther 
 up to this time, and can find no trace of sex in their love ; it was 
 pure, innocent, simple love. Stella's hand, however, was virtually 
 refused to Tisdale, gossip was at work as usual, and the sug- 
 gestion was made to Stella that she might be Dr Swift's wife. 
 And why not ? She loved him deeply ; she was fair, and she had 
 brains. Swift loved her ; then why should they not be married ? 
 Farewell now to the simple confidence of other days. She blushes 
 and flutters when he calls, and trembles at his footfall or the sound 
 of his voice He probably never intended to marry her ; there 
 was no touch of sex in his love for her. Then comes that fatal 
 sign : she began to get jealous. She wanted to know about a lady 
 he had mentioned ; she finds his journal not quite so tender, not 
 quite so long ; and this love-sick woman weighed every word in 
 his letters, seeking for some new light. 
 
 She had a brilliant rival in Vanessa (Esther Vanhomrigh), 
 daughter of a wealthy Dutch merchant living in London, a proud, 
 handsome, haughty woman. Swift thought if poor Stella heard 
 of this it would pain her. He began to sneak ; he began to con- 
 ceal. When the conscience preached concealment it was time to 
 change : so he will break through and go back to Ireland. Vanessa 
 declares her passion; she stamps her little foot and declares he 
 will not go. In return for her deep impassioned love he offers 
 her friendship. For love like hers for the love of this imperious 
 woman to offer her friendship! Swift left London; Vanessa 
 pursued. He got her back. 
 
 Fancy, if you can, the position of this man. There was one 
 woman left in London who must be after him or die ; there was a 
 woman in Ireland whom he must marry or she will die. Oh ! if 
 his sins were great, his sufferings were great. So he dallies with 
 poor Stella, and will not marry her. At last he learns that 
 Vanessa has found there is a little estate belonging to her near 
 Dublin, and she must come to it. She was delighted to have an
 
 Dean Swift, 157 
 
 excuse to be near Swift. He was in great perplexity about her 
 following him into Stella's orbit. He went to see her occasionally 
 not often. She planted a laurel every time he visited her, and 
 she dated her letters with the number of laurels. The question 
 soon presented itself to Swift, "What is to be done?" Stella's 
 reputation was going, and her health too : her life was ebbing 
 away. At last he made up his mind to marry her. He married 
 her because he loved her the less of the two ; therefore the sacri- 
 fice was the greater, and the atonement the greatest. He married 
 her ; but what a marrying ! At midnight, in a little house at the 
 bottom of the garden. He would not let her take his name ; they 
 never lived in the same house ; they were never alone together 
 from the day they were married. Was that what she wanted ? 
 Was that what the great fond heart wanted ? to see her husband 
 as others saw him, and to be bowed out with the last guest ; to go 
 to the dinner-party as a hired housekeeper ; not to have his name 
 that proudest sign of woman's victory; not to look at him 
 except slyly when he was not looking ; was that what that loving 
 woman wanted ? Strangest thing in human nature ! The mar- 
 riage was never owned. Why not ? Why marry her at all ? To 
 save her life. Then why not acknowledge the marriage? Per- 
 haps Swift's damnable pride had something to do with it, for she 
 was illegitimate. He visited Vanessa, and she wrote to Stella to 
 know whether she was really married or not. The reply was, " I 
 am Mrs Swift." Swift saw the letter, and one of his dreadful 
 paroxysms ensued. He saddled his horse ; he rode like a fury, 
 and as he only could ride. Stella saw his terrible face as he 
 entered, and as he, striding forward, laid down her letter before 
 her, and, without a word, left her again. He played with fire, and 
 here was the result. Esther Johnson sank. 
 
 Swift's madness now hastened apace. If this man sinned, 
 surely he suffered. These are theories, however, which I will not 
 now go into. There stands the moral : Don't play with fire. He 
 knew he had killed one woman already ; he knew the other victim 
 was fast approaching her grave. Such is the strange story : I 
 leave it to you to work it out for yourselves. I cannot believe 
 that Swift deserved the extremely severe sentence passed upon 
 him. I do not believe he ever loved Stella with the love a man has 
 for the woman he would marry, and there is only a trace of this
 
 158 Dean Swift. 
 
 with regard to Vanessa. Perhaps his terror of the homely under- 
 side of human life may have influenced him ; his disease, a fatal 
 malady, hung upon him from his youth, and he may have trem- 
 bled at the notion of linking a woman's fate with that of a man 
 who already showed signs of lunacy. His motives were no doubt 
 mixed, but we are not here to judge him. There was, however, 
 misery enough to have made him mad. So ended that strange 
 life. " It hath pleased Thee to deliver this our brother out of the 
 miseries of this sinful world." And such a wreck ! lying there 
 three years in idiocy. " Vanity of vanities ! all is vanity, saith the 
 Preacher."
 
 DR SAMUEL JOHNSON. 
 
 BORN 1709. DIED 1784. (FROM 7TH ANNE TO 24x11 GEORGE III.) 
 
 TT seems almost necessary to apologise to you for bringing 
 -* before you so old a subject, but if I can freshen up in your 
 minds the memory of one of England's greatest men, I shall be 
 well satisfied. The life of Samuel Johnson divides itself into two 
 parts one, the climb to fame, ease, and honour ; and the other, 
 the expanding in fame, ease, and honour. I propose to dwell 
 first on the period of his life during which Dr Johnson was 
 engaged in a long stiff struggle with the difficulties of life. The 
 doctor met with almost every obstruction, and suffered from 
 almost every evil ; but he overcame them, and became the most 
 respected, the greatest, and the most famous man of his country. 
 I will begin by looking a little at Johnson's ancestry. Look 
 at Michael Johnson, a native of Shropshire, of obscure origin, 
 who settled in Lichfield, where he became a bookseller, and where 
 the people made him a magistrate a man of strong and active 
 temper, melancholy temperament, very poor and in debt always, 
 a fair scholar but a poor man of business, a high churchman, and 
 a royalist and loyalist of the most approved pattern, who believed 
 in the Stuarts and much other old-world nonsense. One thing 
 good about Michael Johnson was that a woman fell in love with 
 him without being asked. That is enough at any time to cover 
 a multitude of sins. She followed him to Lichfield, and lived 
 opposite to him that she might see him go in and out, and he, 
 when he found this out, went across the way and offered her 
 his hand, but it was too late her heart was broken, and all he 
 was permitted to do was to see her buried in the old cathedral at 
 Lichfield, and to put up a monument to her memory. Samuel 
 Johnson's mother was a Worcestershire woman, possessing a good 
 understanding, which had never been cultivated, and this fact, and 
 the differences between Michael Johnson and his wife, was the
 
 ioo Dr Samuel Johnson. 
 
 cause of much unhappiness between them. It was into this dreary, 
 common-place kind of home, produced by these two uncongenial 
 spirits and poverty, that Samuel Johnson came, and he came bearing 
 a rare burden of evils : he had king's evil, he was purblind, he in- 
 herited the germs of many diseases, and was of a most melancholy 
 temperament. 
 
 He was taken to London to be touched by Queen Anne for the 
 evil, but it had no effect upon the lad, except that he carried 
 through life the remembrance of a most gracious lady, and of some 
 little toys which his mother bought for him on the way. There 
 were some other circumstances connected with his boyhood's years 
 which had a great effect upon him. One of these was his being 
 carried into the cathedral at Lichfield to hear the ecclesiastical 
 mountebank, Dr Sacheverell. In his school-days, he, being a 
 cripple, was unable to walk to school. Boys carried him there on 
 their backs, and he, being of the greater understanding, rewarded 
 them by doing their school-exercises for them. Even at that early 
 age he was distinguished for the superiority of his mental capacity. 
 
 Dr Johnson's studies were not profound in any one branch. 
 He was prevented by disease from pursuing one subject long; but 
 his learning was very various, and he was ready to bring it to bear 
 upon every subject. After his school days he spent two years of 
 sauntering, loitering, desultory reading ; but yet those years were 
 usefully spent. In 1728, when he went to Pembroke College, 
 Oxford, he was afflicted with hypochondria, irritation, fretfulness, 
 gloom, and despair. He was not a very regular student. He was 
 very poor and very proud. Some good Samaritan, seeing his toes 
 out, left a pair of shoes in his room ; but the Doctor sent them 
 out at the window. In after life he would not have done it. He 
 would have swallowed his pride to have his toes in. He got into 
 debt, and was compelled to leave Oxford without taking a degree. 
 
 To obtain a living, he went as usher to a school at Market 
 Bosworth, and finding that insufferably dull, he left, and came to 
 this excellent town of Birmingham. And this town was doubtless 
 grateful for the honour of the great man's visit. This town must 
 be always grateful to any great man who will put his foot in it ; 
 for its history is such a long eastern plain of well-to-do-ness, un- 
 broken and diversified by genius it is so difficult to hunt up the 
 name of any great man who was ever born in it that one is grateful
 
 Dr Samuel Johnson. 161 
 
 to Johnson for treading its streets. There are not many classical 
 places in this town, but there is one in the Old Square, in which 
 Johnson ate, laughed, and slept. Here Johnson had to do a little 
 writing for a Mr Warren, who was the only bookseller in Birming- 
 ham then ; and it is said that he was only half a bookseller after 
 all. In Birmingham Johnson met with Mr Hector, who was his 
 lifelong friend. There was little to be picked up by the Doctor in 
 Birmingham, and therefore in 1734 he went to Lichfield. He 
 sent out proposals for publishing the Latin poems of Politian : 
 but nobody wanted them. He went to London, and applied to 
 Mr Cave (Sylvanus Urban), the manager of the Gentleman's 
 Magazine, who lived at that classical spot, St John's Gate, in 
 Clerkenwell. Cave could do nothing for him, and he returned to 
 Birmingham. 
 
 At this time Johnson was long, lean, gawky, gaunt, scrofulous, 
 diseased, purblind, and out at elbows and toes, but not out of 
 courage the only thing he was permanently in. He must have 
 been one of the oddest scholars the world ever saw. Never did a 
 mortal genius clothe itself in so ragged and contemptible a cover- 
 ing. He was now thrown into the company of Mrs Porter. She 
 was a widow ; she is said to have been fat ; I believe she was fair, 
 and she was considerably beyond forty. She was planned upon a 
 liberal scale. Wicked people said she had a weakness for cordials; 
 but this probably amounted to nothing more than a liking for what 
 would simply make her feel comfortable in the evening. Johnson, 
 the ragged and the lean, met Mrs Porter, the gracious, the bountiful, 
 and the liberally planned. Mrs Porter took only one evening to 
 find out what England could not see for many years Johnson's 
 character; for she said to her daughter, when Johnson had left, 
 " That is the most sensible man I ever saw." She found out, after 
 a few hours' conversation with him, what a splendid heart and 
 genius were concealed beneath a miserable covering. The conse- 
 quence of this was a love-marriage on both sides, although Johnson 
 was only seven-and-twenty and she was forty-eight. It must have 
 been a funny sight to the clergyman, such an odd couple walking 
 up the nave she so fat, and he so lean he so like the spire of 
 the church, and she so like the little squat body thereof. 
 
 The consequence of this marriage was the necessity for further 
 work, and Johnson retired again to Lichfield, and started a school ;
 
 1 62 Dr Samuel jfo/mson. 
 
 but he only had three pupils, amongst whom were Garrick and 
 his brother. Johnson's affection was so grotesquely and oddly 
 shown, that the three little rips, his pupils, had no pleasure in 
 their early years equal to watching the schoolmaster making love 
 to his wife. The school failed, and Johnson again went to London. 
 When he and Garrick were both famous, they used to chaff each 
 other about who went to London with two shillings, and who had 
 two-and-sixpence. In London, Johnson suffered a great deal 
 from poverty, and made use of many little artifices to eke out his 
 scanty means, and all the great kindly acts which his large manly 
 heart prompted him to do cost him much self-denial. When he 
 said that a man could live very well in a garret for one-and-six- 
 pence a-week, the statement was not a speculative but an experi- 
 mental one. Living in a garret, if anybody asked him where his 
 residence was, it was very easy to reply, " I am to be seen at 
 such-and-such a place." He found out that one might enjoy a 
 great deal of good company in a coffee-house, by expending three- 
 pence. Johnson afterwards learned to dine for eightpence : he 
 got a cut of meat for sixpence, and a piece of bread for a penny, 
 and he gave the waiter a penny. Johnson was fond of moralising, 
 and said, "Always give the waiter a penny." It is always wise to 
 do so. Another of Johnson's maxims was, "All visits should be 
 paid on clean-shirt days." 
 
 In London Johnson did all kinds of literary work translations, 
 epitaphs, plays, poems, parliamentary debates, and everything else. 
 He was first engaged with Cave, to report the parliamentary 
 debates for the Gentleman's Magazine, in which Johnson took 
 particular care " that those Whig rascals should not have the 
 better of the argument." In 1738, he began to lift his head a 
 very little above the level of mankind, and London, after several 
 years, began to get a glimpse of what Mrs Porter found out in a 
 night. In this year he wrote his poem " London," and got ten 
 guineas for it. Pope read it, and foretold that Johnson would 
 obtain a position in the literary world. It was after this that 
 Johnson made the acquaintance of Savage. People wonder how 
 itwas that Johnson liked Savage. They imagine that Johnson 
 was entirely composed of wisdom, and that he was nothing but a 
 dictionary of aphorisms. He was no such thing. He was a great 
 hungry man, with hot blood, strong passions, odd ways, queer
 
 Dr Samuel Johnson. 163 
 
 likings and dislikes, and mountainous prejudices, and he liked 
 Savage because Savage had what he himself had not, and could 
 not get the incommunicable thing, gentlemanliness a quality 
 which it is said it takes three generations to make ; and this was 
 so very strange to poor Johnson ! Once Savage and Johnson 
 walked around a square all night, not having any money to pay 
 for a lodging. " We were in high spirits, and brimful of patriot- 
 ism," said Johnson ; " we inveighed against the ministry, and 
 resolved to stand by our country." Two ragged scholars, without 
 sixpence to pay for a bed why, the very plushed things in the 
 square would have scorned them. And they resolved to stand by 
 their country ! When other nations were going to ruin, Johnson 
 placed his great old Tory hand upon England, and although it 
 rocked a little even in his grasp, he saved it, and the ragged 
 scholar's vow was fulfilled. 
 
 In 1747, the prospectus of prospectuses was issued the pros- 
 pectus of the Dictionary of the English language when the 
 diseased, purblind man was lifting his head slightly above the 
 obscurity which had surrounded him, and was emerging into the sun- 
 light of fame. That great dictionary was completed in three years. 
 For his dictionary Johnson received ^1500, a miserable compen- 
 sation for the labour and expense. It was always a favourite 
 subject of contemplation and conversation with Johnson the 
 number of Frenchmen it took to make the Dictionary of the 
 Academy. " Forty Frenchmen for forty years," he would say ; 
 "one Englishman for three years; forty by forty is 1600, there- 
 fore, as 3 is to 1600, so is a Frenchman to an Englishman." He 
 regarded the French as having been made of the stuff that was 
 left after making the English. In 1749, he produced his "Vanity 
 of Human Wishes," for which he got fifteen guineas ; and about 
 the same time he brought out his tragedy of " Irene," which was, 
 by the acting of Garrick, prevented from being damned on its 
 first representation, and which, by running nine nights, put ^100 
 into Johnson's pocket. He went to see it played, too, in a most 
 elaborate get-up scarlet waistcoat, with gold lace, and in a cocked 
 hat, with gold lace also. Johnson was a man of sense, and he 
 said, " You can speak to people better when you are well dressed." 
 And he was right. When you are ill dressed you look shabby ; 
 when you look shabby you are apt to feel shabby, and will act
 
 1 64 Dr Samuel Johnson. 
 
 shabbily. But Johnson grew fond of visiting the theatres tell it 
 not in Gath, nor publish it in pious Ascalon and he went behind 
 the scenes, and continued to do so until he, not being made of 
 adamant, found that it would not do, and he told Garrick that 
 he would not come any more, and he didn't. Johnson's next 
 work was " The Rambler." 
 
 From this time things went pretty smoothly, until 1752, when 
 his wife died. This went sheer to his heart, for he loved her 
 dearly, and he (for which I will not blame him) prayed for her, 
 but conditionally he hoped it was not wrong, and if it was not 
 wrong he would pray for her. When he was rich enough, he 
 raised a monument to her. After this time, Johnson was great 
 in London, but greatest at his club not a club like those of the 
 present day, a sort of immense joint-stock public house but a 
 place where the most genial spirits of the day met for social mirth 
 and conversation ; for Johnson was great in conversation, fond of 
 argument and disputation, and if you would not contradict him 
 he would contradict you. 
 
 When Johnson was preparing his dictionary, he wished very 
 much for the patronage of Chesterfield, but that nobleman 
 neglected him until the work was published, and then he sought, 
 by recommending the book, to gain the credit of patronising 
 Johnson. It was an instance of the truth of the words of the 
 Psalmist, " Men will praise thee when thou doest well to thyself." 
 This I have always found to be true. But Johnson wrote to 
 Chesterfield a letter, informing him that his patronage had been 
 withheld till it was not wanted. That letter was an immense 
 stone, to which Johnson put his great Titanic shoulders, and rolled 
 it against dedications, patrons, and patronage, and demolished them 
 by one giant blow. That letter of Johnson's is medicinal. It 
 should be taken when there is too great a tendency to bow down 
 and worship the great ones of the earth ; when there is danger of 
 thinking that some great man, merely by virtue of being great 
 externally, is wise, and when there is an inclination to flatter him 
 accordingly. The letter is an invaluable prescription for people 
 who are under the delusion that literature cannot survive without 
 peers, that science borrows lustre from the mere names of 
 nobles, that a meeting cannot be held for the discussion of social 
 science unless there is an extensive exhibition of live lords. It is
 
 Dr Samuel Johnson. 165 
 
 a remedy for people who are in danger of running about to such 
 persons, touching their hats to them, and saying, "Would you 
 condescend to be scientific ? " or, " Would you be so very good 
 as to shed the light of your admirable countenance upon Litera- 
 ture ? " It is a cure for all snobbery and undue worship of big 
 people ; and, since it was written, no man who has a book to write 
 that the public wants, goes hat in hand to Lord Chesterfield or to 
 Lord Anybody else. 
 
 There are few things in the world which are so well worth 
 studying as the conquest which man makes in particular circum- 
 stances ; and upon that account I have spent a good deal of time 
 in showing how Dr Johnson struggled with more obstructions, 
 more diseases, more poverty, and more hindrances than any other 
 man in literary history. We now find him in comparatively easy 
 circumstances, occasioned by one of the wisest pensions ever 
 bestowed. Rewarded, all too late, with one of those righteously 
 merited pensions given by governments in those lucid intervals 
 when they deviate into sense ; great in the possession of well-won 
 fame in his own right ; and patted on the back and patronised by 
 the great in wealth and small in sense, Johnson found himself all 
 at once the one man in England at whose feet the greatest in 
 sense and intellect were not ashamed to sit, and the one man in 
 England who, finding them there, was able and willing to rule 
 over the most royal of them the greater they were, the more he 
 liked to fight them. The only man that ever may be said to have 
 drawn a battle with Johnson was the great Burke himself. Though 
 thus placed, however, no change came over him ; he was Samuel 
 Johnson simple, learned Samuel Johnson still. 
 
 As for his works, are there not his " Shakespeare " and his 
 " Lives of the Poets " ? And whatever there may be to say against 
 the former, this cannot be denied, that Johnson was one of the 
 earliest to see that Shakespeare, in disposing of those precious 
 " unities," and laying down a rule of his own, was as great and 
 wise as all who, having not the brains to lay down rules of their 
 own, blindly follow those laid down for them in grand old 
 Greece. Truly his notes to Shakespeare are not worth much, for 
 his imagination was not great ; but that preface, it is one of the 
 greatest, wisest pages that has ever been written about the greatest, 
 wisest man that ever dawned upon this world. But we must not
 
 1 66 Dr Samuel Johnson. 
 
 idolise Johnson, or any one else. We must acknowledge that 
 some 'of his notes to Shakespeare are indeed very trifling; that in 
 them there are attempts at elucidation where there is no darkness ; 
 there are offers to guide where there is no necessity to guide ; 
 there are efforts to give a clue where there is no labyrinth ; and 
 there are pompous flourishes when nothing is needed to be used 
 at all. Whoever neglects to read the preface neglects what is 
 valuable ; whoever wastes his time in reading anything beside will 
 get nothing for his pains. And then Johnson's " Lives of the 
 Poets " it cannot be expected that any human being, how gifted 
 soever he may be, can bring a score of geniuses to the bar of 
 criticism and judge them all truly without one dash of favouritism, 
 one dash of prejudice, one spark of partiality for one, that would 
 not, unintentionally, injure another. Yet this man a man of 
 gigantic prejudices and strong dislikes, who, if he did not like a 
 man, found it difficult to do him justice took the very work in 
 hand, and did it as no other man could have done. That which 
 he said about Milton, though severe, was, in my opinion, a victory 
 for him. It has been urged against him that his prejudices led 
 him into doing an injustice to Milton ; but at least this may be 
 said of him, that he was the first to bring Milton from ill-merited 
 obscurity, and demand for him well-merited admiration. That he 
 did not like Milton we may be sure ; but that, struggling against 
 that dislike, he should have done Milton so much justice as he 
 has done him, is a thing marvellously to his credit. 
 
 But leaving his books to hurry on with his life, one must of 
 necessity fall back upon Boswell that toad-eater, snob, booby, 
 fool whose only wisdom consisted in the ability to know a great 
 man when he saw him, and whose only glory it was that he had 
 the wit to encollar and enchain himself, writing upon his collar, 
 " Samuel Johnson, his dog," and handing the chain to Johnson 
 with the humble petition, " Please own me." Such a man it is 
 simply impossible to place before you even as a subordinate 
 character, and therefore he must be allowed to go merely to 
 speak without being introduced. The stories told of Johnson and 
 Boswell are almost unbelievable, if not unwarrantable. 
 
 One of Johnson's most wonderful successes and delights was 
 his visit to Scotland, where he went with Boswell. This visit was, 
 I believe, productive of a great deal of good, though the Scotch
 
 Dr Samuel Johnson. 167 
 
 would not admit it. But the people of Scotland are a people who 
 have marched into all countries, and have taken possession ; and 
 where they go they stop. People must put up with a little egotism 
 from them, and a determination never to be at a loss for a trum- 
 peter. Now, what is the greatest kindness you could do such a 
 people and such a nation ? Rasp them down a little. Johnson 
 knew that, and he did it but wisely. He gave them some hints, 
 and they did not like them, though beyond doubt some of them 
 were adopted. I still believe that thousands of trees were planted 
 because of Johnson's visit to Scotland. But Johnson did not 
 only hint a want of trees ; he also insinuated a want of soap ; and 
 when he returned to England he humorously alluded to the 
 scarcity of that article, and afterwards, it is believed, Scotland 
 became cleaner and better. "The finest prospect in Scotland," 
 he said, " was the road to the south ; " and when asked by one to 
 admit that at least Scotchmen were good gardeners, " Of course 
 you are," he said " what could you do without gardening ? You 
 haven't any farms, and couldn't farm them if you had." "We 
 were the first to do away with fees to servants," said another, 
 " you must admit that." " Of course you were," he said, " you 
 could not pay them." But one of the finest things he ever said 
 one of the finest lines of poetry he ever wrote was that con- 
 cerning his journey to Scotland : " Making a journey from 
 England to Scotland," he wrote, "is like seeing a flower die down 
 to a stalk." 
 
 I admit that Johnson had prejudices, and whilst he was a man 
 of gigantic powers, he was a man of trifles one whom nothing 
 pleased better than to tease poor Boswell about Scotland. Though 
 they are to this day time-honoured jokes, we like them because 
 they are lively and ever entertaining. And then from Scotland 
 Johnson went down to Boswell's seat, and Mrs Boswell didn't like 
 him. How could she? No doubt he did splash the water about 
 awfully when he washed, and spill his tea, and all that, and no 
 doubt these habits rendered him a very obnoxious person in the 
 eyes of the lady. But how thoughtful he was about it afterwards, 
 and how at the end of all his letters he " hoped that Mrs Boswell 
 was more placable !" 
 
 Johnson returned to London, out of which, it may be truly said, 
 he was never supremely happy. He was not a great man out in
 
 1 68 Dr Samuel Johnson. 
 
 the country ; he could not have been if he had tried. Next to 
 London, Oxford was his favourite place ; and when he got there 
 amongst his old associations and the dust of libraries he was 
 happy. He went down there now and again for a time. He 
 expanded as soon as he got there; he blew off steam; he sat 
 himself down and read, and afterwards returned to London, well 
 laden with literature. But my object is not to follow Johnson 
 through all the places and things which he admired. 
 
 By-and-bye Dr Johnson came to that dying which he dreaded. 
 He feared it always ; he never pretended that he did not do so. 
 He did not fear death, but he feared dying ; not the mysterious 
 destination after death, but the act of setting out for it. And, yet, 
 when the time came, he laid him down in faith, and was put to 
 rest amongst the great of his native land. 
 
 Coming on, then, to a consideration of Johnson's character, 
 it may be characterised as a strange compound of greatnesses and 
 littlenesses, of wisdom and folly. He was a man who had weak- 
 ness of body, who was melancholy in temper, who had an over- 
 clouding of soul ; a man who was nevertheless respected, a man 
 of greatness, a man whose name was revered, a man with whom 
 it was considered a reputation to have been associated. A man 
 wept over by all who knew him ; a man who was often regarded 
 as a great, coarse, immovable bear. But one who knew him well, 
 said he had nothing of the bear about him but his skin, and he 
 spoke truly. Johnson had the tenderest heart and the strongest 
 temper; the bitterest sarcasm and the gentlest spirit of considera- 
 tion ; the profoundest learning and the most foolish of supersti- 
 tions ; the most utter hatred of sin and the most tender mercy 
 towards sinners. He was a wonderful and strange sage, a man of 
 sharp temper, bitter tongue, and strict conscience ; a man ready 
 to forgive and quick to lament offences. There was, too, a deal 
 of ponderous fun about him, and he put it into one of the oddest 
 of places his dictionary. " Lexicographer," it runs, " a writer of 
 dictionaries a harmless drudge." Cobbett never was capable of 
 a finer touch than that, although, in illustrating nouns of number 
 in his Grammar, he wrote, " House of Commons ; den of thieves." 
 But what I chiefly like him for, excepting his tender-hearted- 
 ness and his unusual kindness, is his robust nature, which won 
 him the esteem of all who had the pleasure of his acquaint-
 
 Dr Samuel Johnson. 169 
 
 ance. His good sense was wonderful ; he examined any case 
 presented to his notice on its merits, and he exhibited some of 
 the most estimable discretion and gave some of the most admir- 
 able decisions ever known. Conversation, too, was his delight : 
 he was greater in conversation than he was in his works. He hated 
 all that miserable, effeminate nonsense uttered or expressed in 
 conversation, such as, " We don't like politics and religion ; let 
 us talk of something else, that we all agree about." What a 
 lively evening conversation of that kind must make ! How enter- 
 taining it must be ! Dr Johnson was a man who, by his conver- 
 sation, put an end to many a club, dissolved many a society. He 
 was a man who liked a good stand-up fight. If one person in 
 company said it was blowing an east wind, he said it was blowing 
 a west wind, merely in order to get some person's wind up. That 
 was one trait of Dr Johnson's character. He was a man of 
 irascible temper, and was a terrible enemy to all bores. Wher- 
 ever Johnson met a man stuffed, he took him up at once, like a 
 child takes up its doll, and shook the bran out of him. There 
 were no half measures about it; he did it once and for all, 
 thoroughly. How he did punish that little Mrs Thrale, the 
 brewer's wife, to be sure ! And then his sarcasms in conversa- 
 tion were abominable sometimes. " Doctor, what do you think 
 of marriage?" said an empty-headed fellow to him one day. 
 Rather a wide question truly ! No doubt the querist saw it, for 
 he narrowed it immediately. " Do you think I ought to marry, I 
 mean?" he explained. The Doctor's blood was up at once. 
 " Sir," he said in his bitterest tones, " nobody ought to marry 
 where there is no chance of propagating brains." It was a harsh 
 sentence, and he felt it. The moment he had said it his con 
 science began to work, but he did not apologise in words ; he 
 never bowed in his life, except to an Archbishop, and then he 
 bowed, not only all over, but all over the room. No, he did not 
 apologise in words ; but he left the room, to return after a space, 
 turn the conversation, and bring from the depths of his memory 
 and fancy such a wealth of charms as must have made the young 
 man feel glad that he had been knocked down, for the sake of 
 being picked up again by so kindly a hand. Another day, an 
 empty-headed man, who had pestered him much, ventured to 
 agree with him. "HI have said anything, sir, that you can
 
 1 70 Dr Samuel Johnson. 
 
 understand," said the Doctor, " I beg to apologise to the rest of 
 the company." 
 
 But though thus severe to bores, his kindness and humanity of 
 heart in little things was wonderful, for he was merciful even to his 
 cat. Who but Johnson would have gone out to buy oysters for 
 his cat " Hodge/' lest the servants should treat her unkindly, on 
 the suspicion that she caused them trouble? And what other 
 piece of Christian charity can compare with that good work of the 
 Samaritan on the Jericho route, but that act of Johnson's, when, 
 finding a poor woman, fallen, cast out, diseased, upon the pave- 
 ment, he took her upon his back, took care of her for a long time, 
 and with all tenderness endeavoured to put her into a virtuous 
 way of living? And then, Robert Levett, and the negro servant ! 
 And above all, that affectionate farewell of the old servant of his 
 father's, Catherine Chambers the greatest man in England pray- 
 ing with, weeping over, kissing, taking a tearful farewell of the 
 poor old domestic on her death-bed ! Nothing in history is more 
 touching than this man's tenderness. His conscience, too, was 
 tender, for did he not stand bareheaded for an hour in Uttoxeter 
 market-place, doing penance for refusing to mind his father's 
 bookstall there fifty years before ? When he had obtained a 
 house, that house was the resort of many poor, intellectual per- 
 sons, in whose company he gloried. 
 
 But one of Johnson's greatest qualities was his opinions. Of 
 course it was the fashion to snub Johnson a few years ago, because 
 he was a Tory. Johnson was a grand Conservative ; nature and 
 inclination made him so. He was born a worshipper of Govern- 
 ments ; he looked up to Caesar from his childhood ; he had a 
 strong passion for kings. This is the common instinct of man ; it 
 was the deliberate judgment of Johnson. But you must remember 
 that he was not a blind Tory ; he was a Constitutionalist. He 
 gloried in his own and all other countries being well governed and 
 well conducted. He had a deep instinctive loyalty, mixed withal 
 with a strong, ineffaceable love of liberty not the liberty of law- 
 lessness, but the liberty limited by order and good government. 
 He was a man free from servility, manly, upright, an immense 
 lover of kings and authorities, fond of ceremonialism and forms. 
 And I would here like to impress upon you that Conservatism is 
 a principle as necessary to social life as is its opposite. To talk
 
 Dr Samuel Johnson. 1 7 1 
 
 of Conservatism being " silly " is the same as to get up a spirit 
 against galvanism, to draw no distinction between cold and hot 
 water, to assist in putting down the North Pole, or to prevent 
 water from freezing. We cannot go on without Conservatism; 
 the world would come to a standstill without it. And Johnson 
 leaned strongly to Conservatism perhaps too strongly ; but it 
 was ever visible in all his actions that he disliked despotism. 
 
 He was full of gentle kindness and humanity, sweet-heartedness, 
 good sense, bountifulness, and hatred of what was mean and con- 
 temptible ; a man on whom some few weaknesses sat, like patches 
 on the fair cheeks of the beauties of his day, to call attention 
 merely to his many greatnesses. His counting of posts, his care 
 to put his right leg foremost on the threshold, his prejudices, and 
 his rudenesses must all be overlooked, when one but merely 
 glances at the struggles, the greatness, and the goodness of the 
 man.
 
 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 BORN 1728. DIED 1774. (FROM 2ND GKO. II. TO I4TH GEO. III.) 
 
 T F I were allowed to choose a professorship, I should like to be 
 -* appointed Professor of Human Nature, not, perhaps, so 
 much because this is the study I best understand, as the study I 
 best love. 
 
 To-night I have to deal with one of the most remarkable speci- 
 mens of human nature which it ever perhaps has been my lot, not 
 to dissect, I hope, nor to despise, but rather to set before you, in 
 all his own flesh and blood foolishnesses, weaknesses, and noble- 
 nesses, which makes him at one and the same time one of the 
 weakest and most loveable of mankind. 
 
 Other gentlemen have set before you the curiosities of the animal 
 kingdom. They are very wonderful, my interest in them is intense, 
 and my ignorance of them prodigious. I like to hear all about the 
 bones and stones of the world, of boulders and aboriginal apes ; 
 but my faculty, if I have one, is simply to study the strange human 
 beings who have passed before my gaze. You will be pleased, 
 therefore, to consider that our particular study now is the curiosities 
 of human nature. 
 
 To-night I have to introduce a most eccentric and a most love- 
 able man. I cannot praise him. I must withhold from him my 
 moral esteem and admiration, but I am afraid we shall have to find 
 that Goldsmith had all those graces which, like beauty of the 
 body, ask no logic and need no introduction, which win their way 
 at all times and in all places, until at last, though our better reason 
 may revolt against it, we must look upon him much as we do upon 
 a pretty woman she is never out of season and never out of place, 
 always welcome, let her come whenever she will, and never dis- 
 tasteful, but when she turns her back to go. The Shandyan 
 theory, of which I am so fond as to the way in which names influ- 
 ence natures, breaks down sadly in this instance. The name Gold- 
 smith seems to imply ease and comfort, and plenty, and freedom
 
 Oliver Goldsmith. 173 
 
 from care; but what meaning has it when applied to a man who 
 throughout his life had but the remotest connection with gold ? If 
 the Goldsmiths had anything to do with gold, it must have been 
 the smith's part, to make it for other people, and never to touch it 
 themselves. Oliver Goldsmith never had gold, nor had his family. 
 Their hearts were in the " right place," their brains anywhere ; in 
 them prudence and common-sense seem to have been sadly 
 dislocated. 
 
 Oliver Goldsmith was one of that remarkable class for which 
 Ireland has become so famous absentees. I don't know how it is 
 that this glorious country has never been able to keep her children, 
 and I will not speculate lest there should be any Irishmen present. 
 Jonathan Swift was an Englishman banished and exiled to Ireland ; 
 this man was an Irishman who banished himself to England, and 
 never went back to Ireland. I am not going to apologise for him 
 or to praise him, it is too often the custom of lecturers to seek to 
 do either the one or the other, but I am going to take the creature 
 as he presents himself, and to understand him as far as I can. I 
 have no great praise to bestow on Goldsmith, but I have to show 
 that, -whilst I am prepared to condemn him by my moral sense, and 
 whilst obliged to say that he was not at all respectable, yet he had 
 those graceful graciousnesses and gracious gracelessnesses which, 
 in spite of a sense of condemnation, made him after all one of the 
 darlings of the human race. 
 
 Goldsmith's family had always been distinguished for being 
 worthy people, in the best sense, but not in the worldly sense. 
 Oliver was the son of a clergyman, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, 
 who, as often happens in this disorderly world, was a man of 
 small means and large family. Probably the rev. gentleman fell 
 back on that " trust in Providence," which political economists do 
 not take into account that " when God sent a mouth, He sent the 
 food to fill it." I am always glad to hear this, especially when I 
 read of people being starved. On November loth, 1728, at Pallas, 
 near Edgeworthstown, came this little Oliver into the world, and he 
 repaid his father for his care in bringing him up and educating 
 him, by immortalising him. He embalmed his father, not in that 
 old Egyptian fashion of stuffing your parent with sweet spices, 
 and putting him in a tomb along with an ibis and a cat, but he 
 immortalised his father's memory by putting him into his works;
 
 i 74 Oliver Goldsmith, 
 
 so that, as long as the son will be remembered and the son will 
 be remembered as long as it shall please God that the English 
 tongue shall be spoken, which will be for ever and ever the 
 father will be remembered too. Who is there that has not loved, 
 laughed, and wept with the Man in Black in " The Citizen of the 
 World " ? Who does not know the Preacher in " The Deserted 
 Village," and Dr Primrose in " The Vicar of Wakefield " ? Who 
 has not given their love, their laughter, and their tears to the Rev. 
 Charles Goldsmith ? for he was the Man in Black, the Preacher, 
 and the Vicar of Wakefield. Oliver was an ungracious child, but 
 he embalmed and immortalised his father ; he made us love him, 
 and laugh at him, and pity him, and weep for him, so that if he 
 could come into the flesh again, he would forgive the boy all his 
 follies, because there never was a father yet upon whom a son 
 bestowed knighthood as Oliver bestowed immortality upon his 
 father. 
 
 Charles Goldsmith when Oliver was bom was " passing rich on 
 forty pounds a year." Promotion came, and he woke up from 
 forty to two hundred pounds, and the living of Kilkenny West. 
 Protestant and a clergyman, rich in children, poor in pence, .better 
 fortune came to him when the rector of Kilkenny West went to 
 glory. Happy arrangement for those who are waiting for succes- 
 sion, for if the old ones did not die, what would become of the 
 young ones' chances of promotion ? I don't know who the rector 
 of Kilkenny West was, I have forgotten ; but whoever he was, he 
 happily went to join the heavenly choir, and the result was that the 
 Rev. Charles Goldsmith moved up from ^40 to ^200 a year. What 
 a move ! Of course 200 is nothing to people who roll in wealth, 
 and who belong to a town where pen-making realizes ^70,000 
 in two days for its pictures ; but when the news came of the death 
 of the incumbent of Kilkenny West to a man who had a wife and 
 six small children and forty pounds a year it would be difficult for 
 that man not to say, " The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken 
 away ; blessed be the name of the Lord." What liturgical expres- 
 sions the Rev. Charles Goldsmith made use of I don't know ; but 
 at the call of Providence he became the vicar of Kilkenny West, 
 and it is evident that he was resigned to Providence. 
 
 He went to the lovely village of Lissoy, which enthusiasts have 
 endeavoured to make themselves believe is the original of " Sweet
 
 Oliver Goldsmith. 175 
 
 Auburn, loveliest village of the plain." As a matter of fact. Lissoy 
 was anything but a lovely village, and if anybody "deserted" it, 
 he had the best reasons for going. 
 
 The first person who put a book into Oliver's hand was a woman 
 named Elizabeth Delap, and this was her boast to her latest breath: 
 she also said that Oliver was a dull boy, and impenetrably stupid. 
 Dr Johnson said that Goldsmith was a plant which flowered late; 
 but Washington Irving said he flowered early, and came to fruit 
 late, which is rather a truer statement, horticulturally considered. 
 From the village dame to the village school-master was Oliver's 
 next step, and it was not a long journey ; it is not even now. 
 The village school-master was a Mr Byrne, who was a retired 
 quartermaster of an Irish regiment, and had served in Marlborough's 
 wars. He believed in fairies more than in fluxions, and in ghosts 
 more than in the classics ; he knew more of the rich mythical 
 glory of nonsense than of that dull pedant Virgil, or those Roman 
 historians, under which you and I had in our youth, as it seemed 
 for our sins, to groan. 
 
 The most pitiable thing Oliver had to contend with was what 
 do you think ? Oliver had the small-pox, and he had it in the 
 confluent form. We have it on the authority of the doctors that 
 it was "confluent" small-pox. Small-pox is bad; but confluent 
 small-pox ! If any of you think that for your sins you deserve to be 
 tormented in fire and brimstone, I warn you that I am free to say 
 Bon voyage; but with regard to the deserts of others, you had better 
 be careful, for "with what measure you mete it shall be measured to 
 you again." Some of you, I know, are so grounded in common 
 sense, so steeped in philosophy, so lost in enlightenment, that you 
 say, "What does it matter to a man whether he is good-looking or 
 not ?" Then you know little of life. Good looks, always despised 
 and envied of those who have them not, little valued of those who 
 have them, have awful power. They save introductions. If you 
 are good looking you need have no card engraved, you may go 
 into anybody's society and be welcomed ; but if you have a 
 snub nose like poor Goldsmith, if you have had "confluent 
 small-pox," and are covered with its marks, you will require a 
 card of recommendation and a testimonial. Therefore, never 
 say it is a small thing to be ugly. It is a terrible thing to 
 be ugly ! it is a rock, a mountain, an obstruction, and a hin-
 
 176 Oliver Goldsmith. 
 
 drance ; and it should be counted in any man's way to glory, that he 
 had this Alp to cross. This poor lad had confluent small-pox, 
 which spoilt all his little claim to manly beauty. He was ugly, 
 ungainly, ill-looking. At Elphin, Athlon e, Edgeworthstown, at 
 every school he went to, there was the consenting verdict, that he 
 was a stupid, heavy blockhead, little better than a fool. Every- 
 body made fun of him " the blockhead of the parish," " the fool 
 of the neighbourhood." One woman, with one of those flashes of 
 inspiration of which women are occasionally guilty, said that he 
 had " two natures." All the quaintest and strongest and most 
 loveable of mankind come, in the idea of some people, under the 
 homely definition, " ill-baked " ones. One bed holds the saint and 
 the sinner, one frame the child of God and the child of the world. 
 So this man had two natures, and if ever anyone tries to make 
 them into one it will take him a very long time, and I dont know 
 whether he will ever succeed. Goldsmith had two natures, and 
 he had them both very heartily, but he never fused them. Let his 
 poverty, his small-pox, his ugliness plead for him. Think of the 
 intense, uneasy consciousness of supposed defects one of the 
 worst burdens man or woman can carry about the world. To 
 suppose that nobody likes you, and that nobody can like you ; to 
 think that you are " a fright " that on the women's side ; to think 
 that you are " a fool " that on the men's side a booby, hideous, 
 ugly, and scarcely to be tolerated ; this is a sore and heavy burden 
 to bear, and Goldsmith had to bear it. 
 
 Oliver's father gave him a strange education, which the son has 
 set forth in one of his immortal works. He said, " My father 
 loved all the world, and fancied that all the world loved him." 
 Beautiful illusion ! The one was solid truth ; but the other, 
 mirage. Oliver was told that universal benevolence was what first 
 cemented society; he was taught to consider all the wants of 
 mankind as his own. This lesson he soon learnt. He learnt to 
 regard "the human face divine" with affection and esteem. "We 
 were wound up," he says, "to be mere machines of pity, and 
 rendered, so, incapable of withstanding the slightest impulse, made 
 either by real or affected distress. In a word, we were taught to 
 give away thousands, before we had learned the art of getting a 
 farthing." This was Oliver Goldsmith all over. These Gold- 
 smiths never wanted to get ; they were only born to give. So it
 
 Oliver Goldsmith. i 77 
 
 is even now. In this disorderly world, as I have before called it, 
 those who have do not give, and those who have not, give. It is 
 one of the crying sins of our time, that the men who have are 
 scrubs, and the men who have not are profuse, generous, and 
 charitable. There is a compensation in this, you see. If the man 
 who had much gave much, he would be a monopolist, and there- 
 fore God has ordered it that those who have shall not give, and 
 that those who have not shall give. All these Goldsmiths were 
 alike in this. They were like princes in the affairs of the heart ; 
 in the affairs of the world they were fools. Granted that they had 
 anything to give, they were princes ; but as they had nothing to 
 give, they were usually beggars. 
 
 This dull, incapable blockhead, Oliver, showed, by one or two 
 boyish sallies at the expense of those who played tricks upon him, 
 that he was clever ; and his family, thinking they saw hopes of 
 him, selected the Church as the future field for the display of his 
 talent. Thus he became a sizar at Trinity College, Dublin. 
 Poor scholar ! marked by his poverty from head to foot ; distin- 
 guished as poor by the cap that he wore ; bound to sweep out 
 courts, to carry out victuals, and to serve at table. 
 
 There is one incident in his last holidays before entering at 
 Trinity, which is worth narrating. He had borrowed a hack, and 
 he had got a guinea. He mounted the horse, and with his first 
 guinea throbbing all over him, Oliver rode about. He felt like I 
 felt with my first half-crown he found in it electricity and mag- 
 netism, which produced an attraction between it and the nearest 
 pastry-cook's ; he was a capitalist and a patron. Oliver had a 
 guinea and a horse ! A guinea is enough to turn any young man's 
 head ; but a guinea on horseback ! He was a master of the art 
 of the vis inertia of jolliness. Did he ride like a courier? Not 
 he. He loitered, and loafed, and lagged, and pottered, and stuck 
 about, and stayed to look at everything, till at last, instead of 
 having got far on his journey, he found himself towards nightfall 
 in the streets of that dismal little hole, Ardagh. Here he asked 
 his way to "the best house in the place," meaning the best 
 public-house. But the man of whom he inquired was the wag of 
 the village, and he directed him to the finest gentleman's house in 
 the place. So up to the house rode glorious Oliver, called for 
 what he wanted, ordered his horse to be put up, ordered supper, 
 
 M
 
 j 78 Oliver Goldsmith. 
 
 and invited his landlord's wife and daughters (they were pretty) 
 to join him. Before he went to bed, he gave instructions for a hot 
 cake to be prepared for him for breakfast. The gentleman of the 
 house was a humourist, and entered heartily into the fun. Next 
 morning, when Oliver called for his bill, he found out his mistake, 
 as there was nothing to pay. This incident Oliver Goldsmith put 
 into "She Stoops to Conquer." I read the play the other week, to 
 see whether I could laugh at it, and I could. I have never seen 
 it on the stage, but wish I had; for, well acted, it must be 
 screaming. 
 
 One of Goldsmith's peculiarities was that he turned all his 
 history into his books. You could read his life from his books. 
 He had a happy art of using his own misfortunes, and he had 
 also the happy art of being virtuous in his books, though not 
 altogether virtuous out of them. His life was often the thrums 
 and ends and underwork of his writings. He had two sides : the 
 under side, his life ; the upper side, the golden, glorious, beautiful 
 side, his works. He gave good advice, in consequence of never 
 having taken it. He was one of those men of whom I have 
 known several, who, by his faults, his follies, his genius, his 
 fooleries, his blunders, his mistakes, and his nonsenses, learned, 
 even as a preacher would learn, to preach well on virtue, because 
 of his acquaintance with vice. For a man preaches all the better 
 for being a sinner. " Oh, but,'' you will say, " a man ought to 
 practise what he preaches." So he ought, no doubt ; but there 
 would not be so many good preachers as there are if everyone of 
 them did. Again, you may say, " How could Goldsmith write 
 so many beautiful things without having practised them ? " The 
 answer is that if he had practised them he would never have 
 written them. Goldsmith was a prince of moralists, a king of 
 maxims, a master of apophthegms, lord of proverbs. How did he 
 know them ? By never acting upon them. 
 
 So poor Goldsmith, longing after good, but having it not, and 
 by not having it understanding it all the more, put all that he was 
 not into his works, and shed an everlasting glory on his memory. 
 His life was one side of a medal, and when he wrote he turned it 
 over. His works are his biography reversed. 
 
 Oliver had a sister named Catherine, who had privately 
 married a Mr Hodgson, the son of a gentleman of property, and
 
 Oliver Goldsmith. 179 
 
 the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, indignant that it should be thought 
 any man should make a sacrifice to marry into his family, scraped 
 together ^400, gave it to his daughter, and impoverished the 
 rest of the family for ever. Just like the Goldsmiths ; ^400 to 
 one, and beggary to the rest. 
 
 Oliver hated his menial position at Trinity : he had a savage 
 tutor, a loafing disposition, an ability to write ballads, sorne ability 
 to sing, and a fearful propensity to blow off steam through a flute. 
 
 In 1747, poor old Charles Goldsmith, to whom I make my 
 reverent bow whenever I read the "Vicar of Wakefield," died 
 Oliver, fortunately, had a kind uncle, named Contarine, who 
 helped him. Oliver now pawned his books, and wrote street- 
 ballads for five shillings a piece, sneaking out in the evenings to 
 hear them sung in the streets. The five shillings he seldom took 
 home with him, but yielded it up to the importunities of the 
 first beggar he met. One day he gave away his bed-clothes, and 
 then, as he felt cold, he ripped open the tick and got into the 
 feathers, and there he was found lying up to his chin in them. 
 Yet this man could sponge on his old mother, and on his uncle 
 Contarine. I love the man, for I cannot help it; but I am 
 ashamed of him. 
 
 He tried for a rich scholarship, but failed, and bagged an 
 exhibition of thirty shillings. Then, that very night, he got up a 
 dance in his own rooms in the college. The tutors would have 
 winked at it had there been no women present ; but jolly Oliver 
 didn't see the fun of two awkward male gabies waltzing by them- 
 selves, and so he invited a likely girl or two. The result was that 
 Mr Wilder, his tutor, walked in and knocked Oliver down, and 
 then Oliver pawned a few books for a shilling, and went to Cork. 
 He lived for three days on that shilling. There's a genius ! He 
 dined, after twenty-four hours' fast, on a handful of grey peas, 
 given to him by a girl at a wake, and then he went back to Lissoy. 
 His brother rigged him out afresh, effected a reconciliation with 
 his tutor, and sent him back to college. In 1749 he obtained 
 his B.A. Of course, he was at the bottom of the list. Then he 
 returned home to his mother at Ballymahon, and, having to wait 
 for two years before he could take orders, he spent the time as an 
 idler, helping his mother, writing scraps of verse, singing, fishing, 
 learning French from Irish priests, and throwing the hammer.
 
 180 Oliver Goldsmith. 
 
 Now I don't say that all this was a sign of genius, but I do say 
 that if Goldsmith had not had genius, he would not have weathered 
 the storm. People talk about the sins of men of genius, but they 
 never remember that it is genius which carries them through their 
 sins, and brings them out immortal at last. 
 
 The two years over, Oliver was old enough to present himself 
 for orders, but he had a disinclination for the clerical profession 
 he said he was not good enough for it. I like Oliver for that, 
 and 1 believe what he said, for deep down below all his nonsenses 
 there was a heart of goodness, which made him shrink back in 
 this case. But there was the bayonet of poverty behind him, 
 urging him on, and he went before the Bishop of Elphin, and was 
 plucked. Why ? He went up for ordination in a pair of scarlet 
 breeches, and what could scarlet breeches mean but the flesh ? 
 of the earth, earthy; of the flesh, fleshly! 
 
 His friends were now satisfied that he was utterly undone. 
 They pitied him because there was no harm in him, he was so 
 good-natured ; and then Goldsmith said, " When your friends 
 begin to advise you, they begin to despise you." What an 
 apophthegm ! His uncle Contarine, patient and true, got him a 
 tutorship, which he held for a year ; then he accused one of the 
 family of cheating at cards, and he was of course discharged 
 at once. 
 
 He started off again with ^30 in his pocket and a good 
 horse under him America in the distance. On his way to 
 America he went to Cork, and there he stayed for six weeks, 
 during which time he spent every penny he had, and exchanged 
 his good horse for one he appropriately named " Fiddleback." 
 Then he went back to his mother, who did not receive him alto- 
 gether cordially, whereupon he said, " And now, my dear mother, 
 after having struggled so hard to get back to you, I wonder you 
 are not more rejoiced to see me." This is one of his immortal 
 sentences, which is worth embalming, it is so deliciously simple. 
 In Cork, he said, he had taken his passage on board ship for 
 America ; but he went on a little country excursion, and, mean- 
 while, the wind changed, and the captain sailed off without him. 
 
 Then he started for London to study law, having with him 
 ^50, given to him by his uncle Contarine. But in Dublin he 
 met a friend, and with him he gambled till every stiver he had
 
 Oliver Goldsmith. 181 
 
 was gone. Then he wrote to his uncle, asking his forgiveness, 
 and went home to his mother again, who again did not welcome 
 him cordially. A prodigal son once in a way was all very well ; 
 but she could not stand a prodigal son always going away, and 
 always coming back. 
 
 Dean Goldsmith the only big-wig in the family then recom- 
 mended that Oliver should study medicine, so he went to Edin- 
 burgh as a student of medicine. Edinburgh medicine, London 
 law, Dublin divinity. What fine impartiality ! At Edinburgh he 
 preferred drinking whiskey and singing songs to the study of 
 anatomy. He was introduced to the Duke of Hamilton, but, 
 thinking he was taken rather as a jester than as a companion, he 
 " cut " the Duke of Hamilton, and I admire him for it. 
 
 Scotch bailiffs are the finest bailiffs going ; and as they were 
 always looking after Goldsmith, he made up his mind that he 
 would quit Edinburgh, and go to the University of Leyden ; so 
 he set off to go to Leyden via Bordeaux. At Newcastle he was 
 arrested for a Jacobite ; at Sunderland he was arrested by a tailor, 
 and so, fortunately, the ship sailed without him, for it was wrecked 
 at the mouth of the Garonne. At last he got to Leyden, and the 
 old story was enacted there carelessness, gambling, debt. He 
 borrowed money from a fellow-student, and spent it all but a 
 guinea in purchasing roots fronj a florist's garden, to send to his 
 uncle Contarine. Then he set out as tourist over Europe, with a 
 guinea, one shirt, and a flute. What cheerfulness ! Whenever he 
 approached a peasant's house at nightfall, he played one of his 
 merry tunes, and procured lodging and subsistence for the next 
 day. That tour produced the beautiful poem entitled " The 
 Traveller," one of the grandest poems in the English tongue, for 
 that "Traveller" of Goldsmith's is treasured by every man as 
 immortal. Then he was tutor for a while to a young man who had 
 had a fortune left him; but they parted company; and at Louvain, 
 it is stated, he obtained his degree of Bachelor of Physic. (I hope 
 this is true, but I doubt it.) Somewhere he met Voltaire, Diderot, 
 and Fontenelle. Soon he was again in London, and there he went 
 through much obscure misery. 
 
 He started as an apothecary to the poor ; but he was poorer 
 than his patients. A poor patient recommended him to Samuel 
 Richardson, the author of " Clarissa," and a publisher. Then he
 
 1 82 Oliver Goldsmith. 
 
 was a reader and corrector for the press in Salisbury Court. He 
 talked of going to decipher the inscriptions on the written moun- 
 tains of the East. It is true he understood nothing of Arabic, or 
 of the language written on the mountains ; but he could interpret 
 ^300 a year that was a hieroglyphic he could perfectly under- 
 stand. He did not go to the East, however. 
 
 Soon after this, Oliver was admitted as usher into Dr Milner's 
 academy, at Peckham. There, poor fellow, he gave all his money 
 to beggars, except what he spent in sweetmeats for the boys. 
 Bullied by his professor, snubbed by the doctor's wife because he 
 was ugly, abused by the boys because he was an usher, and com- 
 pelled to sleep with a French tutor, " who," he said, " disturbs me 
 for an hour every night in papering and filletting his hair, and 
 stinks worse than carrion with rancid pomatum when he lays his 
 head beside me on the bolster " this was his life. Poor Oliver 
 was up early and late. For what is the use of having a servant, 
 excepting to illustrate the propriety of burning a candle at both 
 ends ? Have them up at six, and keep them up till eleven ; that 
 is their destiny, for that they were born. Then Goldsmith falls in 
 with a bookseller called Griffiths, who comes down to dine at the 
 academy. Griffiths was on the look-out to bag authors cheap; 
 and, after a little conversation (for Goldsmith could not talk many 
 minutes to any but fools, without proving that he was not a muff), 
 it was settled that Oliver should write for the Monthly Review, 
 which Griffiths was publishing. So he leaves the academy, and 
 goes to board and lodge, with a very small salary, at Griffiths', 
 and to devote himself to the Monthly Review. Grub Street had a 
 new recruit, and literary hacks another addition. But there was 
 not only a Mr Griffiths, there was a Mrs Griffiths! and if you 
 have wandered as much about the world as I have, and have 
 visited as many houses, you will understand with what a fine 
 tremor a man is introduced to Mrs G. You write to Mr G., and 
 say by what train you will arrive. If a very courteous man, he 
 sends to the station to meet you ; if a business man, he meets you 
 at the door. How I have watched for the door opening to admit 
 Mrs G., knowing that fifty male Griffiths could avail me nothing 
 if Mrs G. were a tartar. Well, Mrs Griffiths thought she was 
 literary, by virtue of being Mr Griffiths' wife. He was not 
 literary, and she was less so ; but he thought he was, and she,
 
 Oliver Goldsmith. 183 
 
 being Mrs Griffiths, thought she was too. So, whatever Oliver 
 wrote, these unpleasant Griffiths tinkered and improved. Fancy, 
 Mrs Griffiths improving what Oliver Goldsmith wrote ! 
 
 I have no time to trace all the fugitive pieces he wrote while there. 
 Goldsmith never left London again, excepting for a short visit to 
 Paris. He was ready to do anything Jack-of-all-trades, master 
 of none, until, by-and-bye, he became master of the human heart, 
 and writer of two or three of the deepest, truest, sweetest things 
 men have ever written. 
 
 But he wrote anything. He would have written a Persian 
 grammar at a month's notice, though he didn't know where Per- 
 sia was. He wrote history of all sorts ; criticisms, essays, any- 
 thing. Things went on pretty well for some time, but Oliver 
 could not stand Griffiths, with the alternations of Mrs Griffiths. 
 Griffiths said Goldsmith was idle, and Goldsmith said that Griffiths 
 did not treat him with respect. What scrub ever found a servant 
 who was not " idle"? What she-scrub ever found a drab-of-all- 
 work who was not "a slut"? 
 
 So Oliver went back to Milner's Academy ; but here he was 
 required not only to teach the boys, but to thrash them. That 
 dear heart, who loved all things great and small, who wrote a pro- 
 test for dogs, must he thrash ? It was not in him, he could not 
 do it. But before he left Milner's there comes good news. There 
 is a chance of his getting a medical appointment, through inte- 
 rest, at a factory on the Coromandel coast. He knew nothing 
 about medicine, but that didn't matter ; anybody could learn it 
 very quickly, he thought. According to the Goldsmithian theory, 
 medicine did not embrace anatomy, it simply included a couple 
 of pages out of the pharmacopoeia, and a great deal of human 
 stupidity and human credulity. But before he could take the 
 appointment some sort of certificate was necessary, and he deter- 
 mined to go up to Surgeons' Hall to be examined. He looks at 
 his clothes won't do ; orders a new suit tailor doesn't respond 
 to the order until he sees some chance of payment. So Griffiths 
 comes in as security, the new clothes are sent in, and Goldsmith 
 goes up to the examination. The result is very pithily set forth 
 in the books of that admirable institution " James Barnard, 
 mate to an hospital ; Oliver Goldsmith, found not qualified for 
 ditto." That was a disappointment.
 
 184 Oliver Goldsmith. 
 
 Oliver then went to live in Green Arbour Court. " Pleasant 
 place," you say. Ah ! the tragedy of great cities is that the 
 sweetest names are usually the stinkingest places. If you hear 
 of a person who lives in Paradise Row, you may be sure he exists 
 in the depth of degradation and in the midst of stinks. People 
 who live in Elm Row don't know an elm from a cabbage. Green 
 Arbour Court, then, was a little, narrow, dirty, squalid, filthy 
 court : clo'hes-lines always about, perpetual washes on, infinite 
 children about for amongst the mysteries of nature is this one, 
 that where means are small, brats are many noise, soap-suds, 
 clothes-lines with all their numberless arrangements on, common 
 stair-cases, dirt, misery. Here was Oliver in a garret, dunned for 
 a milk score. His landlady, poor but kind, falls behind in her 
 rent, and the bailiffs take her husband. She goes up to her lodger ; 
 he has no money, so he strips off Griffiths' clothes and sends 
 them to "my uncle" no time to think if it were honest. He 
 places his books (also Griffiths') " with a friend." Griffiths chose 
 to call it fraud. Was it fraud? His landlady was in distress- 
 off with the clothes and away to the pawnbroker's. Well, 
 Griffiths was peremptory, and demanded clothes and books, or 
 payment of both. There was a wrangle, as usual, and at last they 
 came to terms Goldsmith must write a life of Voltaire, for which 
 he will be paid ^20, the price of the clothes to be deducted. 
 Griffiths, the scrub, kept two carriages got them out of the brains 
 of poor authors. 
 
 Now came an event. Dr Percy, member of the great Nor- 
 thumbrian family, dignitary of the Church, author of " Reliques 
 of English Poetry," and, above all, a gentleman, is introduced to 
 Oliver at a coffee-house, and Oliver invites him to visit him. 
 How ever the Doctor found his way to Green Arbour Court is a 
 mystery. When he got to the place there was only one chair, 
 which the Doctor sat upon, while Goldsmith sat upon the window- 
 sill. Whilst he was here a little girl came to the door to borrow a 
 handful of coals. But Dr Percy was a gentleman and a man of 
 sense, and he could see beneath these things. 
 
 Goldsmith went on writing for booksellers. He wrote in any- 
 thing. About twenty magazines came out, and he wrote in them 
 all. Then came The J3ee, of which Goldsmith wrote nearly the 
 whole. But in eight numbers the busy Bee had sucked all the 
 honey, and its day was over.
 
 Oliver Goldsmith. 185 
 
 Now Oliver commenced to rise not out of poverty ; he never 
 managed that but out of obscurity. Smollett was introduced to 
 him, and a better soul still Samuel Johnson. Dr Percy, whom 
 I mentioned just now ecclesiastic, aristocrat, and gentleman, was 
 to call for Johnson to go and see Goldsmith, and he found 
 Johnson, contrary to custom, neatly dressed. He had a clean 
 shirt on (a very rare occurrence), his wig repowdered, his breeches 
 buttoned, and his shoes buckled. Percy, astounded, asked him 
 what the change meant, and Johnson said, " I heard that Gold- 
 smith, who is a very great sloven, justifies himself by me." What 
 self-sacrifice ! Think of the agony to Samuel Johnson of dressing 
 neatly ! What must it not have cost him to save Goldsmith ! He 
 absolutely threw himself away on Goldsmith. He powdered his 
 wig, buttoned his breeches, buckled his shoes, for Goldsmith's 
 sake. But the best of intentions often lead to mischief, and this 
 rebuke on the part of Johnson, though well meant, had an unfor- 
 tunate effect, for from a sloven Goldsmith became one of the most 
 fantastic, egregious dandies that ever strutted about this world. 
 He came out in all the colours of the rainbow peach-coloured 
 coats and plum-coloured continuations and Johnson had to regret 
 having taught him to be a dandy to cure him of being a sloven. 
 
 And now Boswell appeared on the scene. Was there ever such 
 a trio seen in history? Johnson, big, ugly, mis-shapen, hideous, 
 half-blind, noisy, dogmatic, overbearing " Yes, but," said Gold- 
 smith, " only so far as the skin goes." Johnson represented 
 England, though there was not much of the rose in him ; Boswell 
 represented Scotland, though he was not much like a thistle ; and 
 Goldsmith was the Irishman. Johnson, Boswell, and Goldsmith ! 
 Johnson loved Goldsmith dearly ; let it be written on his tomb. 
 Boswell didn't care much for Goldsmith ; Oliver was rather too 
 much for him. Johnson preferred Goldsmith to Boswell, and 
 that vain, bloated, ridiculous, ineffable fool, that greatest of 
 toadies, that most wonderful of human asses how could he bear 
 to see it ? Who could wonder that Boswell was always impatient 
 of Goldsmith? 
 
 And now Goldsmith joined that famous literary club. Now 
 don't run away with the notion that it was a joint-stock eating- 
 house. This club consisted of twenty-one men or thereabouts, 
 who had brains. It meant a select circle, into which fools could
 
 1 86 Oliver Goldsmith. 
 
 not pass with a fiery sword drawn against fools. There were 
 few clubs greater than this. 
 
 Poor Oliver, no richer, at last went to lodge at Mrs Fleming's. 
 If ever there was a picture of an awful landlady a picture of a 
 woman who seems to get her living out of her lodgers that 
 picture was Mrs Fleming stern, severe, awful. Few things are 
 more touching than to get hold of a man's accounts when he is 
 poor. Here is one of Goldsmith's from his landlady : 
 
 Sassafras, - os. 6d. 
 
 Lent Goldsmith, is. od. for laundress. 
 
 Lent Goldsmith, os. lod. 
 
 Lent Goldsmith, is. 2d. 
 
 Lent Goldsmith, os. 6d. in cash. 
 
 Item For pint of ale, os. 2d. 
 
 For opodeldoc, os. 2d. 
 
 An earlier bill showed port wine, so that poor Goldsmith had 
 come down from port to beer. Look at these things ; see the 
 squalid distress and mean misery that they disclose, and then 
 wonder that any man could be merry under such circumstances. 
 Well, Goldsmith gets in a plight in a pickle ; his awful landlady 
 insists upon having her money ; the bailiff is in possession. What 
 shall he do ? He sends for Dr Johnson, who sends him a guinea 
 by the messenger, and afterwards follows himself, and, when he 
 gets there, finds that the guinea has already been partly expended 
 in the purchase of a bottle of Madeira. " Never mind to-morrow ! 
 Take the gifts that God provides ! Let's have a bottle of Madeira !" 
 Then it was that poor Goldsmith, at his wits' end, foraged about, 
 and told Johnson that he had "written a novel" than which 
 never truer or nobler book was written. So Johnson went out, 
 and sold " The Vicar ofWakefield" for ^60. Johnson was a 
 bad critic, and not a very good judge; nevertheless, he pledged 
 his word to the extent of ^60. Goldsmith paid his landlady, 
 but before she went away he gave her a downright good scolding. 
 He would say, " You wretched, mean, sordid person, it is true I 
 owed you a little money, but have I not given you an opportunity 
 of being generous and Christian ? " 
 
 It was fifteen months after this before that immortal book was 
 published. Poor Oliver went through more poverty and further
 
 Oliver Goldsmith. 187 
 
 borrowing. Do you wonder that men who borrow do not repay ? 
 It is a distinct gift this borrowing money. Do you expect Elijah 
 to return anything to the ravens ? Certainly not ! It was a pro- 
 vidential arrangement, and in the same way Oliver and Co. regard 
 the money they borrow as a providential arrangement. 
 
 Then came " The Traveller," and Goldsmith, who was getting 
 popular, thought he had better air his doctorship. Where he got 
 it from is not known. It is a question whether he ever got it 
 honestly. But that was no matter to Oliver. He could not be 
 expected, however, to maintain his doctorship in the same clothes 
 that he had before, so he breaks out in purple silk smalls, scarlet 
 continuations, full wig, sword and cane, and airs to match. He 
 never had but one patient, and that was a lady, who actually pre- 
 ferred a country apothecary to Dr Goldsmith. So Oliver deter- 
 mined to quit the profession. 
 
 Then came the publishing of " The Vicar of Wakefield." And 
 you will have to read in that wonderful book how Goldsmith put 
 there the graces he had and the graces he had not, how he 
 taught patience in suffering, reliance on God, heroism, self- 
 denial, gracious forgiveness. In all literature I know no such 
 touch of that heavenly charity, of which Christians prate so 
 much and know so little, as where Dr Primrose, on finding that 
 his daughter has been seduced, curses the seducer, and Moses, 
 with loving simplicity, rebukes his father. The old man replies, 
 " Did I curse him, child ? Then may Heaven forgive me and 
 him." What a gospel of forgiveness ! For this one single touch 
 I can forgive Goldsmith all his debts, all his faults, for this one 
 sweet touch (which theology can never do) in what fools call a 
 novel. 
 
 Goldsmith's influence on Goethe was marvellous. Shakespeare 
 made Schiller, and Goldsmith made Goethe. Shakespeare and 
 Goldsmith ! What more can old England want ? England will 
 live and grow, however, producing poets and great men, until 
 America is ripe, and Australia is something different to what she 
 is now. 
 
 After " The Vicar of Wakefield," Goldsmith wrote an English 
 grammar for five guineas. Though now he had got to the summit, 
 he was still very poor ; but he was a friend of Joshua Reynolds, 
 Edmund Burke, and Samuel Johnson. Though they laughed at
 
 1 88 Oliver Goldsmith, 
 
 him (who could help it?), though they quizzed him, yet they 
 loved him dearly. It was enough for any man to say, " I was a 
 friend of those three men." He was now novelist, dramatist, and 
 poet. He wrote " The Good-Natured Man," " She Stoops to 
 Conquer," " The Vicar of Wakefield," " The Traveller," " The 
 Deserted Village." And now money began to come in. He had 
 ^500 in a lump. What effect do you suppose this influx of 
 money had upon him? Did it make him a reformed character? 
 Not a bit of it. What is bred in the bone cannot be cured 
 by ^500. He never had so much money in his life ; it 
 embarrassed him. What did he do with it ? Invest it ? Put 
 it by for a rainy day ? No. What does a flower do when a blaze 
 of sunshine comes upon it ? It bursts out according to its nature, 
 displays its colours, gives forth its odour. So Goldsmith came 
 down from his garret, spent ^400 in a set of chambers, furnished 
 them with azure morine curtains, and everything en suite. He 
 lived in a garret no longer he never had done so from choice. 
 Of course he gets into debt ; he gets deeper and deeper in debt. 
 What is he to do ? Borrow? Of course. What a curious world 
 this is ! In the chamber beneath sat Blackstone, writing the 
 fourth volume of his " Commentaries," and he complained of the 
 noise in Goldsmith's room interfering with his studies. 
 
 Poor Oliver gets worse off than ever; still he is Johnson's 
 friend. What a lovely story that is of their walking to the Poets' 
 Corner, and, looking at that cemetery where lie the greatest souls 
 God ever gave to the greatest nation, Johnson says, " Forsitan 
 et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis," which means, " And perhaps 
 our names may one day be mingled with these." Goldsmith said 
 nothing, till at last they came to Temple Bar, where was a nice 
 assortment of Jacobite heads, whereupon the Irishman, with the 
 glorious wit of that glorious nation, said, "Forsitan et nostrum 
 miscebitur istis." " And perhaps ours may one day be mixed 
 with these" 
 
 Afterwards he wrote on "Animated Nature" (though he knew 
 very little about it), English history, Roman history, Grecian 
 history anything which came to hand. Then he wrote 
 " The Retaliator," in which he hit off all his friends. Genial, 
 splendidly foolish and joyous, he went on building up ^2000 of 
 debt. At his death he owed that moderate and modest
 
 Oliver Goldsmith. 189 
 
 amount. Poor Goldsmith died when he was only forty-five, and 
 Burke wept ; Reynolds threw down his brush, and could not work 
 again that day ; Johnson moaned and grieved. He was buried in 
 the Temple Church, and a monument was put up to his memory 
 in Westminster Abbey. 
 
 Such is a rapid outline of the man. Always poor, always in 
 debt, always cheerful, always imprudent, very often nearly dishon- 
 est ; always generous, forgiving, merciful. Some will say, " I 
 hope you are not going to praise him, because you might induce 
 some of us to imitate him." My friends, you cannot. " But/' 
 you may say, " if a man like that is so loveable, others may try to 
 imitate him." It is of no use trying ; you must be born a Gold- 
 smith to be one. Therefore, he may be analysed with safety. 
 He was incurably imprudent ; he would take anything from any- 
 body, and he was equally ready to give away everything he had 
 got. Of foresight he had none ; he belonged to the hour. It 
 would be rich to have heard anyone recommending life assurance 
 to Goldsmith. The agony of momentary sympathy, the hysterics 
 of the instant, the feelings of the moment carried the day. He 
 had no other side no reflection, not much conscience ; never 
 deliberately virtuous, never deliberately vicious, never deliberate 
 about anything ; unable to comprehend that there was such a thing 
 as to-morrow. If these things are not the excuse, they are at any 
 rate the explanation of the life of this wonderful man. Here is a 
 man sponging on his father without compunction, and at the call 
 of hysterical charity he gives away his bedclothes to a passing 
 beggar, and gets into the tick amongst the feathers. 
 
 High animal spirits, careless nature, readiness to give and receive, 
 gushing tenderness ; these were his virtues, and they are always 
 popular. For who can resist high spirits ? These qualities may 
 not be admirable ; but they are nevertheless loveable. Some 
 political economists may say, " These are only skin deep." That 
 is the wonder, that skin-deep qualities can produce such an impres- 
 sion ! But there is this peculiarity they are the outward bloom, 
 and, seeing the wear and tear of life, who does not doat upon 
 these high spirits, this readiness to be pleased and to give 
 pleasure ? Now and then comes a man who, with almost all 
 these charms, adds something of honesty, prudence, and 
 conscience ; but they are comparatively rare. Goldsmith was a
 
 1 90 Oliver Goldsmith. 
 
 big baby, a baby to the end of his life ; but, remember, he was 
 only half-baked, the reasonable side of his nature was never 
 developed ; he died before he had a chance of cutting his wisdom- 
 teeth ; he never did cut them, and he would have had to live to 
 the age of Methuselah before he cut them. Full of vanity, and 
 (according to wicked people) full of jealousy and envy. But 
 remember, that vanity was not altogether wrong. Not to praise 
 Goldsmith, not to pat him, not to pet him, was to put him out 
 into the cold, and make him shiver. He could not bear it. He 
 lived in the sunshine. His constant cheerfulness under all circum- 
 stances was the wonderful thing about him. I cannot esteem 
 Goldsmith. As a moralist and teacher my face is dead against 
 him. He is a warning, an example. But be not ashamed of 
 loving the man. " But he did not pay his debts." No ; but you 
 cannot be loved for paying your debts ; that is your spine ! Would 
 that Goldsmith had had more spine. I, for one, am thankful 
 that God sent Oliver Goldsmith into the world to teach, as he 
 has done by his life and writings, that mercy, charity, and slow- 
 ness to anger, which, through all his sad, mean, and miserable 
 life, he never failed to show.
 
 DR ERASMUS DARWIN AND 
 MISS ANNA SEWARD. 
 
 DR DARWIN, BORN 1731. DIED 1802. (FROM 4TH GEO. II. TO 42ND 
 GEO, III.) 
 
 Miss SEWARD, BORN 1747. DIED 1809. (FROM 20TH GEO. II. TO 49 
 
 GEO. III.) 
 
 T N this lecture I shall speak, first, of the noteworthy members 
 -^ of the society in which Dr Darwin lived. 
 
 There is nothing that I know of that lightens the spirits, as one 
 passes through streets that are dead, dull, uninteresting, imperti- 
 nent, and vulgar, like the remembrance that those streets have 
 been trodden by the great and mighty men of the past. I need 
 not tell you what Stratford owes to the memories of Shakespeare, 
 or point out how a dull place like the Old Square in Birmingham 
 is brightened by the recollection that Samuel Johnson used to 
 live there, poor, unfriended, and unknown, with the wide world 
 before him, and ignorant of what fate he would find in it. Then, 
 how the market-place of that red-looking Staffordshire town * 
 glows with glory, because the figure of the same great man, bare- 
 headed, stands up in sorrow to do penance for a sin of his youth. 
 That, too, is a poor-looking house in Shrewsbury, down a side- 
 street, and quite unworthy of notice, had not the great poet, 
 Coleridge, once preached there in his erratic days. So, when we 
 read in Mrs Schimmel-Penninck's book, " I was born in the even- 
 ing of the 25th November, in Steelhouse Lane," we feel how de- 
 lightful it is to meet with Steelhouse Lane in a book. Who 
 would have thought it ? I opened the book at random, and I 
 was so charmed that I read it from beginning to end. Then 
 there is her " grandfather's residence at Duddeston, a country 
 house a mile and a half from the town. My first recollection," 
 she says, " dates from 1782, when we removed to Hagley Road. 
 
 * Uttoxeter.
 
 192 Dr Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Scward 
 
 Hagley Road and the Five Ways were then the Clifton of Bir- 
 mingham." The Clifton of Birmingham ! It never struck one 
 before. After this, surely Birmingham people will be prouder of 
 that suburb than ever. She then removed to Great Barr, where 
 the common visitors at the house were Boulton, Watt, Eclgeworth, 
 Thomas Day, the great Priestley, the famous Dr Parr, Dr Darwin, 
 Herschel, Joseph Banks, the accomplished Bedington, and many 
 others. I have met few men in this town who know the bead 
 roll of the worthies who have walked its streets or glorified its 
 name ; but when Cockney scribblers in newspapers smile at this 
 town and its people, and speak of Birmingham men as people 
 who know nothing beyond the making of pins, pens, buttons, and 
 heathen gods, showing an ignorance equalled only by their inso- 
 lence, one is glad to remind them that there are more famous 
 men associated with Birmingham than they would care to under- 
 stand. 
 
 Well, Mrs Schimmel-Penninck describes how, when she was a 
 little child, Dr Darwin came to her mother's house at Great Barr. 
 He drove up in a carriage called a " sulky," because it only held 
 one, and outside was a large pail for the purpose of watering the 
 horses, and some hay and oats. In the carriage the Doctor wrote 
 most of his works, as he travelled. It was fitted up with appli- 
 ances for writing, also a knife, fork, and spoon. On one side was 
 a file of books, and on the other a basket of fruit and sweetmeats, 
 of which he was inordinately fond. It had a sky-light, and an 
 awning over. Dr Darwin was of an uncouth figure, vast and 
 massive ; his head was almost buried in his shoulders ; he wore a 
 scratch-wig, tied up with a little bob-tail behind, and he had a 
 habit of stammering, which rendered necessary the closest atten- 
 tion to understand what he said. His eye was keen and deeply 
 sagacious, so keen that it enabled him to trace the signs of dis- 
 ease with great accuracy. He had a great horror of fermented 
 liquors, and believed in eating largely, especially of sweetmeats. 
 On one of these visits he spent three hours over a table of hot- 
 house fruits, sweetmeats, and clotted cream, and, on hearing the 
 dinner-bell ring, expressed great satisfaction that dinner would 
 soon be ready. He tells some amusing anecdotes of his patients. 
 He had been consulted by the Duchess of D , who was suf- 
 fering from the effects of the white enamel which she used. He
 
 Dr Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward. 193 
 
 at once detected the cause of her illness, but it was tender ground 
 to trench upon. So he told her she was poisoned, and asked her if 
 she was quite certain of the character of her servants ? He minutely 
 examined all the cooking vessels. Then he told her that poison 
 might be absorbed through the skin, and made inquiries about 
 her gloves. At last she confessed that she used the white lead 
 enamel ; he supplied her with a vegetable cosmetic instead, and 
 she recovered. 
 
 It is to this man, physician, philosopher, and poet, who de- 
 fined man as an eating, drinking, and sleeping animal, and the 
 world as a material world, declaring all beyond that to be moon- 
 shine, it is to this large feeding, eccentric, clever man, that I wish 
 to direct your close attention. He was born near Newark, and 
 was educated at St John's, Cambridge, where he " performed some 
 poetical exercises." In 1755 he took his degree of Bachelor in 
 Medicine, and then pursued his medical studies in London and 
 Edinburgh. He first settled at Nottingham, but being unsuccess- 
 ful there, he removed to Lichfield at the age of twenty-five, where 
 he, according to Miss Seward, " brilliantly opened his career of 
 fame." There was near Lichfield a young man of family, fortune, 
 and fever (for in this disordered world neither family nor fortune 
 is a guarantee against fever), whose case the big-wig of the city had 
 pronounced hopeless. In despair, this young man, this failure 
 from Nottingham, was called in, and (again I quote Miss Seward) 
 " by a reverse and entirely novel course of treatment, Dr Darwin 
 gave his dying patient back to existence and health. The far- 
 spreading report of this judiciously daring and fortunate exertion 
 brought Dr Darwin into immediate and extensive employment, 
 and soon eclipsed the hopes of an ingenious rival, who resigned the 
 contest ; nor afterwards did any other competitor bring his cer- 
 tainly ineffectual lamp into that sphere in which so bright a lumi- 
 nary shone." Having cured the young man of fever, Dr Darwin 
 found business begin to flow in upon him, and he turned his 
 thoughts on marriage, and succeeded. He married Miss Howard, 
 " a blooming and lovely young lady of eighteen." What a couple 
 they must have been ! something like Beauty and the Beast. I 
 should have wondered how Miss Howard could do it, did I not 
 know the courage of woman in facing matrimony. " He was," 
 says Miss Seward, " somewhat above the middle size ; his form 
 
 N
 
 194 D r -Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward. 
 
 athletic and inclined to corpulence : his limbs too heavy for ex- 
 act proportion. The traces of a severe small-pox ; features and 
 countenance which, when they were animated by social pleasure, 
 were rather saturnine than sprightly ; a stoop in the shoulders, 
 and the then professional appendage, a large full-bottomed wig, 
 gave at that early period of life an appearance of nearly twice the 
 years he bore. He stammered extremely, but whatever he said, 
 whether gravely or in jest, was always well worth waiting for, 
 though the inevitable impression it made might not always be 
 pleasant/' and so on. 1 leave you to picture Dr Darwin ; but 
 there are things in a man which can counteract the effect of stoop- 
 ing shoulders, an ugly gait, and a stammering tongue. Safely 
 married to blooming Miss Howard, let us leave Dr Darwin and 
 view his surroundings. 
 
 There are few cities in England better worth studying than 
 Lichfield. Lichfield Cathedral is one of the most graceful and 
 lovely of all structures in the world a perfect femininity of archi- 
 tecture, the Venus of Gothic creation. If it could be spared, it 
 ought to be transported to the other end of Europe, in order that 
 Englishmen might go to see it. Close by your own doors, this, 
 one of the noblest structures in the world, standing to York 
 Minster as a fair woman stands to a man in all his glory, I ven- 
 ture to say that not one in ten of you who are here to-night have 
 ever been to see it. One of the fairest cities in this land is Lich- 
 field, and, at the time of Darwin, it had a galaxy of talent and 
 genius. I may dismiss Samuel Johnson, who was rather larger 
 than the people of whom I have to speak. Darwin and Johnson 
 never could get on well together, and, after one or two interviews, 
 they evinced a mutual dislike, and never met again. They were 
 like and unlike, but not enough of either. Dr Johnson wrote 
 several letters from Lichfield about this time, and Miss Seward 
 remarks that the name of Dr Darwin could not be found in them, 
 and that certain others were never mentioned. Poor Miss Seward 
 was not even named, although Sir Walter Scott said " she filled 
 an important place in the annals of literature." So, bowing John- 
 son out as too big for the company, let us look at the party who 
 used to meet around Miss Seward's tea-urn, or rather " tea-vase," 
 to use her own phrase. 
 
 First, there was Miss Seward herself, the daughter of the Rev.
 
 Dr Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward. 195 
 
 Thos. Seward. She was always described as good-looking. 
 Although Scott said she filled an important place in literature, it 
 was not in her blood. She sat down to it ; she had a sort of 
 literary sewing-machine, and you could see her set it to work. 
 Miss Anna Seward was a lady who was literary of malice prepense. 
 She was a poetess she " courted the Muses." She never sat 
 down to verse-making without saying something about "the 
 Muses." She tried her feminine pen at the ponderosity of John- 
 son. She wrote a poetical novel called " Louise." I think there 
 are three vols. of " Louise," but I have not had courage to read 
 them. I have read through most of her poems this summer, but 
 have not found them worth quoting. They bear the same relation 
 to true poetry that a sampler does to a true picture. She was in- 
 genious at ornamental needlework, and I admire the skill she has 
 shown in making her poems as much like her needlework as pos- 
 sible. She wrote epitaphs, epilogues, odes, sonnets, songs, epistles, 
 elegies, and what not. But had she inspiration? had she any- 
 thing to say ? Not at all. She had " literary pursuits," and Time 
 has taken the sponge and wiped her writings out of all living 
 notice, I recommend them as a legitimate dissipation, as the ut- 
 most attempt in which the human mind can engage without get- 
 ting any exercise of it. If that is your bent, then dip deep into 
 Seward. She never talked, she " exercised her conversational 
 powers." She never talked English not plain simple English 
 she always talked attitudinities. "There," she would say, " is one 
 that emulously and sedulously distilled the sweetness from the 
 classic fountain." Another " evinced an elevated mind." Fancy 
 evincing an elevation ! Another " showed an Attic spirit in her 
 conversation." Of another she would say, " Beware, for she often 
 sends out the shafts of ridicule," She called her school-master 
 her " revered preceptor." Of Mrs Darwin she said, " To her he 
 could with confidence commit the important task of rendering her 
 children's minds a soil fit to receive and bring to fruit the stamina 
 of wisdom and science." If she went for a walk, it would be, 
 " Let us ascend this umbrageous eminence." Of an arti- 
 ficial pool, which a blasphemer might call a puddle, she said, 
 " Notice the liquid concave." A dale in Derbyshire she called a 
 " salvatorial dale." One is puzzled, and thinks it means salubri- 
 ous ; but then comes the thought " Salvator Rosa " yes, that is
 
 196 Dr Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward. 
 
 it. A valley is " irriguous from various springs, and swampy from 
 their plenitude." What a word "irriguous!" You look upwards, 
 and she asks you, " Are you regarding the stellar host ? " I might 
 reply that I am, but I do not know it. So this wonderful lady 
 flowed on. She once said a good thing, and she said it to Dr 
 Johnson. She bearded that lion in his den, and he did not like it. 
 He was breathing out threatenings and slaughter about the Ameri- 
 cans they were rascals, pirates, and robbers; he would burn 
 and destroy them. Miss Seward said, " Sir, this is an instance 
 that we are always most violent against those whom we have most 
 injured." 
 
 It was pretty to see her sitting down to her needlework to her 
 verses and to study her " insertions." If you don't know what 
 " insertions " are, you can ask your wives. So Anna Seward went 
 on writing her pieces, and she left her remains I mean her lite- 
 rary remains to Sir Walter Scott, and he published them (who 
 would be an executor ?), and said, " She filled a distinguished place 
 in the annals of literature." There is no authentic portrait of 
 Scott when he wrote that, or I should like to have seen it. I am 
 sorry for Scott. I admire him sitting down to wipe out a moun- 
 tain of debt ; but sitting down with this lady's remains before him ! 
 I don't know how poor Walter Scott came to undertake the duty. 
 But he did his duty like a man, and brought out her poems and 
 three volumes of letters. Johnson told her that he did not know 
 anything equal in poetry to her description of the sea round the 
 North Pole, and her ode on the death of Captain Cook. Now, 
 either Johnson's knowledge of poetry was narrow, or his judg- 
 ment was not good as it was not. She wrote a life of Darwin, 
 and she described the Botanical Society because Darwin was a 
 member. Well, one of the company who met around Miss 
 Seward's tea-vase was Archdeacon Vyse, described by her as " a 
 man of prioric talents in a metrical impromptu." How lovely it 
 must have been between the tea-cups Vyse going off in a " metri- 
 cal impromptu ! " Another was Boothby, afterwards Sir Brooke 
 Boothby ; and another was Jackson. Miss Seward's descriptions of 
 Boothby and Jackson are ridiculously absurd. She said of Boothby 
 that he "wrote a convincing refutation of that splendid, dazzling, 
 and misleading sophistry, 'Burke on the French Revolution.'" 
 Am I to bow to Boothby ? What ! Burke bowled by Boothby ?
 
 Dr Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward. 197 
 
 convinced, refuted, put down, overthrown, defeated, done for, 
 killed by Boothby ? Never ! Another man was Mr Munday, 
 and another Mr Richard Lowell Edgeworth, father of Maria Edge- 
 worth. He was a mechanical philosopher, a member of the Irish 
 Parliament, and a good Irish landlord in the last capacity worth 
 chronicling, for the list of such has not been very long. 
 
 The next is a man to whom I, for one, owe many a sweet hour 
 Thomas Day, the author of " Sandford and Merton ; " a man 
 far more worth studying than any extinct reptile, or dodo, or any 
 other creature that ever pestered the world. He was a fine speci- 
 men of the doctrinaire ; and a doctrinaire is a man who, having a 
 theory correct and sound, on which he is entirely certain, insists 
 that all things shall be tested, tried, brought up, regulated, and 
 set in order by that theory. Facts he did not care for if they 
 agreed with his theories, well and good ; if not, " so much the 
 worse for the facts." He cared nothing for wealth, birth, or 
 society. Having been jilted in one engagement with the fair sex, 
 he set about the wonderful experiment of growing a wife for him- 
 self, and carried out the experiment by proceeding to Shrewsbury, 
 in company with his friend Bicknell, a barrister, and there choos- 
 ing, on certain liberal conditions, two little maidens aged twelve, 
 one dark and the other blonde, from the Foundling Hospital. 
 He called the fair girl Lucretia, and the dark one Sabrina. With 
 these he went to France, in order that, not knowing the language 
 of those around them, he might have them entirely under his own 
 training, and they might learn everything from him. Here they 
 led Day a dreadful life. They quarrelled, fought, called each 
 other ill names, and had the small-pox. Day attended to them 
 night and day. They returned to England, and it soon became 
 clear that he must part with one or the other. Which was he 
 to part with ? the dark Sabrina, or the fair Lucretia ? The dark 
 maiden was the favourite, and Lucretia was properly provided for. 
 So in eight months he had got rid of one of them. The other, 
 Sabrina, he intended to bring up in Spartan fortitude ; so he took 
 her to Lichfield, and set about putting her under a course of dis- 
 cipline. He poured hot wax upon her naked arms, and fired 
 pistols at her which she believed to be loaded. But she didn't 
 take kindly to the wax, and she screamed at the pistols. She 
 broke down under it. The experiment failed. She even told one
 
 198 Dr Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward' 
 
 of his secrets to the servants, and it was evident to him that one 
 who screamed under pain and who divulged his secrets could not 
 be his wife. He was the soul of honour, and he provided for the 
 girl. Next, he made love to Honora Sneyd, the sweetheart of 
 poor Major Andre, and she refused him. He immediately offered 
 himself to her sister, Elizabeth, who said she would try to love 
 him, if he were not so uncommonly odd-looking. So he went to 
 Paris, this rough wild man, to take lessons in deportment, in order 
 that he might not appear so uncouth before her ; and the conse- 
 quence was that he came back in a sort of pie-bald condition, 
 which caused Miss Elizabeth to say that she thought she could 
 have borne " Thomas Day, blackguard," as he used jestingly to 
 call himself, better than Thomas Day, fine gentleman. He then 
 gave her up, and at last married Miss Mills, a lady who sincerely 
 loved him, and who rendered the evening of Day's life charming 
 and happy. After his untimely death she never saw the sunlight, 
 and, at the end of two years, died of heart-breaking grief for hr, 
 loss. He fell a victim to a theory. He did not believe in horse- 
 breaking, but thought that if a colt were spoken to in a kind and 
 conversational way, his heart would be touched, and that he would 
 respond to the sentiment, and be as decile as a lamb. He tried the 
 experiment on a depraved animal, received a kick and died. 
 
 Almost the whole of a man's nature and a woman's peculiarities 
 go into their letters, therefore a letter is generally the greatest 
 betrayal of character that it is possible to get at. I have a letter 
 here of Miss Seward's. It is about the size of a newspaper, and 
 concerns the question of slavery, about which Josiah Wedgewood 
 desired to enlist Miss Seward's " muse." But Miss Seward's muse, 
 never very unwilling, seems to have declined the advocacy of our 
 black brothers. In this well-known letter, Miss Seward, after 
 touching on a host of subjects, pleasantly refers to Bentley's "dis- 
 criminating praise " of her productions. 
 
 And here is one of the equally well-known anecdotes told of Dr 
 Darwin by his Lichfield admirer and biographer. " On one occa- 
 sion, Dr Darwin had a large party to tea. His servant announced 
 a strange lady and gentleman. The female was a conspicuous 
 figure, ruddy, corpulent, and tall. She held by the arm a little, 
 meek-looking, pale, effeminate man, who, from his close adherence 
 to the lady, seemed to consider himself as under her protection.
 
 Dr Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seivard. IC/Q 
 
 ' Dr Danvin,' said she, ' I seek you not as a physician, but as a 
 belle esprit. I make this husband of mine ' (and she looked down 
 with a side-glance upon the animal) ' treat me every summer with 
 a tour through one of the British counties, to explore whatever 
 it contains worth the attention of ingenuous people. On arriving 
 at the several inns on our route, I always search out the man of 
 the vicinity most distinguished for his genius and taste, and intro- 
 duce myself, that he may direct, as the objects of our examination, 
 whatever is curious in nature, art, or science. Lichfield will be 
 our head-quarters during several days. Come, Doctor, whither 
 must we go ? What must we investigate to-morrow and the next 
 day, and the next? Here are my tablets and pencil.' 'You 
 arrive, madam, at a fortunate juncture. To-morrow you will have 
 an opportunity of surveying an annual exhibition perfectly worth 
 you attention. To-morrow, madam, you will go to Tutberry bull- 
 running.' The satirical laugh with which he stammered out the 
 last word more keenly pointed this shy yet broad rebuke to the 
 vanity and arrogance of her speech. Her large features swelled 
 and her eyes flashed with anger. ' I was recommended to a man 
 of genius, and I find him insolent and ill-bred.' Then, gathering 
 up her meek and alarmed husband under the shadow of her broad 
 arm and shoulder, she strutted from the room. After the de- 
 parture of this curious couple, his guests told their host he had 
 been very unmerciful. ' I chose,' replied he, ' to avenge the 
 cause of the little man, whose nothingness was so ostentatiously 
 displayed by his lady wife. Her vanity has had a smart emetic.' " 
 
 The doctor's successful treatment of the singular case of the 
 Countess of Northesk, and the carefully-related offer (not acted 
 upon, however) of Miss Seward to part with a portion of her own 
 blood for the contemplated injections, are also worth referring to. 
 
 But we must now look at Dr Darwin as a lover. He had mar- 
 ried a blooming girl of eighteen, and she died all too early, leav- 
 ing him three sons. Miss Seward's way of telling it is, that " the 
 frequency of her maternal situation probably shortened her days." 
 In 1778, there came to Lichfield Mrs Pole and her children, who 
 were " suffering from a dangerous quantity of ricuta?* Dr Darwin 
 
 * The name of the common hemlock. It is an active poison, producing 
 tremors, vertigo, a violent burning at the stomach, epilepsy, convulsions, 
 spasms of the jaw, a flowing of blood from the ears, tumefaction of the ab- 
 domen, and death.
 
 2OO Dr Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward. 
 
 took them to his home, and cured the little ones. Mrs Pole was 
 in the full bloom of her youth and beauty ; in fact, her youth was 
 young, and her beauty was great ; and Dr Darwin went through 
 the successive stages. He began with admiring; he passed on 
 to what is called " esteem ; " he ended with what is called " love." 
 He sent to Birmingham to order a tea-vase, and he wrote some 
 verses which were not so hot as I hope the tea was. He was 
 much given to pondering upon this lady, who herself fell ill of a 
 fever, and Dr Darwin was called in. Very naturally. He had 
 cured the children ; what more likely than that he should save the 
 mother, his inamorata ? He prescribed, and was then dismissed ; 
 and then this strange, hard, eccentric, extraordinary, cold-blooded 
 materialist, this man of science what do you think he did ? He 
 passed the whole night beneath a tree opposite her room, " watch- 
 ing the passing and re-passing lights." He broke out into verses 
 when he got home. In 1780 died Colonel Pole, and what was the 
 consequence? Dr Darwin's " adored Laura was now free." Ac- 
 cording to Miss Seward, however, he saw her "surrounded by rivals 
 whose time of life had nearer parity with her own." The fact is, the 
 colonel was twice as old as his lady, to whom he left ^600 a. year. 
 The blooming ladyrecovered from the fever, with ^600 a year ; and 
 still the doctor has hopes. " Early in her widowhood she was rallied 
 in a large company upon Dr Darwin's passion for her, and she 
 was asked what she would do with her captive philosopher. ' He 
 is not very fond of churches, I believe,' said she, ' and if he would 
 go there for my sake, I shall scarcely follow him. He is too old 
 for me.' ' Nay, madam, what are fifteen years on the right side ? ' 
 She replied with an arch smile, ' I have had so much of the right 
 side.' " That might have put out any man's fire, but still not the 
 doctor's. He was twice her age, clumsy, a stutterer, ugly, and, in 
 addition to his aboriginal ugliness, he had, in the pursuit of one of 
 his theories, acquired a lameness, which added to his natural 
 graces ; but he had brains. He succeeded in spite of his clumsi- 
 ness, stammering, lameness, and age, and Mrs Pole " descended 
 from her Laura eminence to wifehood ; " and all the young men 
 who were enamoured of her and 600 a year, found themselves 
 distanced by the man of science, the stuttering physician, the man 
 whose reputation was not very good in genteel circles. This 
 triumphant result, then, shows the power of brains, which are the
 
 Dr Erasmiis Darwin and Miss Anna Seward. 201 
 
 greatest power in this world. Brains won, as they always will win, 
 against every force or power that can be brought against them. 
 No matter how rich you are ; where there are plenty of brains 
 there is your master, and you had better own to it and give way at 
 once. But on one point the lady insisted, and that was leaving 
 Lichfield. I cannot tell why. Perhaps it was the recollection of 
 the children ailing from cicuta. So Dr Darwin yielded to love 
 and removed to Derby, where he was equally prosperous and suc- 
 cessful ; for patients continued to come to him from all parts. 
 
 On the morning of the i8th April 1802 he sat down to write a 
 letter to Edgeworth. He was apparently in good health ; but he 
 never concluded the letter, which in its unfinished state was sent 
 to Edgeworth, with the record on the empty page of the lamented 
 death of his correspondent. Once more Miss Seward " discharges 
 a last duty," and 
 
 " Sheds the tribute of a tear." 
 
 "Thus," she says, "in one hour was extinguished the vital light 
 which the preceding hour had shone in flattering brightness, pro- 
 mising duration such is often the cunning flattery of nature 
 that light which, through half a century, had diffused its radiance 
 and its warmth so widely ; that light in which penury had been 
 cheered, in which science had expanded, before whose influence 
 disease had continually retreated, and death so often turned aside 
 his levelled dart." For such a sentence it was worth while almost 
 to die. 
 
 Darwin was a far-seeing, hopeful, sanguine man. He was a 
 man who lived before his time ; he foresaw the future of steam, 
 of balloons, of the application of sanitary laws, and in some 
 respects he saw even beyond the present age. He foresaw the 
 triumph of the diver's art, and predicted that in half a century it 
 would be safer to travel through the ocean than over it. When 
 Franklin brought down the lightning, Darwin said that very soon 
 the rain would be brought down from the clouds. And why not ? 
 It is only because men are ignorant bunglers that the making of 
 rain is not a common thing. The day will come when people 
 will order showers. All these things are matters of strict law, and 
 chance has nothing to do with them. What seems chance is
 
 202 Dr Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seiaard. 
 
 men's ignorance and folly. Darwin understood what steam was, 
 and foresaw what it was to do 
 
 " Soon shall thy arm, unconquered steam, afar 
 Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car ; 
 Or, on wide waving wings expanded, bear 
 The flying chariot through the realms of air. 
 Fair crews triumphant, beaming from above, 
 Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move. 
 Or warrior bands alarm the gaping crowd, 
 And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud." 
 
 He foresaw steam dragging slow barges who would have thought 
 it possible ? He foresaw it years ago, and we have done it. Men 
 of science travel fast, and commerce drags lumberingly on behind, 
 He was a sanitary reformer long before it was understood in 
 theory, and it is not carried out much in practice yet in this 
 enlightened town. Hereafter it will be a source of wonder to us 
 how barbarous we must be to suffer the streets of the town to go 
 unswept day by day, when Darwin has pointed out long ago in a 
 beautiful sentence, that " the purity and healthfulness of the towns 
 may contribute to the fruitfulness and health of the surrounding 
 country." 
 
 But Darwin was before his time. He fore-shadowed in his life 
 the scheme which bears the name of his illustrious grandson the 
 transmutation of species about which good people are making 
 such a hubbub. We know that this theory of the origin of species 
 by means of natural selection has every scientific probability on 
 its side ; to say that it is settled would be to leap the leap of the 
 theorist before he is accompanied by the patient bearer of the 
 facts. But what is the hubbub all about ? Why don't you, my 
 dear friends, keep quiet. Some of you are afraid of Darwinism, 
 just as good people have been afraid of astronomy and geology, 
 and as they are still afraid of biology. They made a hubbub 
 about the astronomers ; but astronomy being established as a law- 
 ful nuisance, they came down upon the geologists, and the geolo- 
 gists won. Not to be a geologist now, is shameful. So biology will 
 establish itself as firmly upon scientific results as ever a science in 
 the world. What is the use of howling ? I have no fear of the 
 knowledge of God's laws men and women will be men and 
 women still, whatever they may be descended from. Will scientific
 
 Dr Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward. 203 
 
 knowledge ever do away with the loves, the passions, the fears, the 
 hopes of mankind? Never. You had better give in. What is it 
 to you ? God's law and man's love remain. If it is shown that 
 you and I are descended from apes, there is no diminution of our 
 feelings and powers. It is all the idle dream of alarmed people, 
 who never have penetrated to the science and source of things, 
 and who are alarmed at the slightest departure from the practices 
 of their fathers. It is well known to the great men of science that 
 the ebb and flow of the tide, the rising sun, the falling dew, the 
 coming frost, are governed by unchangeable laws. Of course, 
 here and there in this civilised country there are people who do 
 not believe this, who consider that every time we have an eclipse 
 the moon is undergoing a consumption. Well, if these things 
 are governed by unchanged cosmical law, why accuse any man ot 
 want of reverence because he believes that the growth of species 
 may also have been brought about by the intervention of agencies 
 of a similar nature ? Let us remember man was created " out of 
 the dust ; " and if I had to choose my great grandfather between 
 the dust of the earth and the ape, I should prefer the ape. But 
 man will remain man to the end, in spite of all discoveries. He 
 is not only related to the earth, and everything in it ; he is related, 
 on the other side, to all that is beyond it. You cannot alter that, 
 and you never will. Love will not die out, even if we become 
 learned in follicles. If you take the word " hair," I find it is thus 
 described : " The hairy covering of mammalia, composed of long, 
 delicate processes of a horny substance, which grow from bulbs in 
 or beneath the skin. Each hair is contained at the lower part in 
 a delicate sheath or follicle," &c. Would you put the hair of a 
 woman's head away, or refuse a curl because it was of " a horny 
 substance " ? or " grew from a bulb " ? No ; love will still go on, 
 and love-locks still be precious. 
 
 " Her brow, fit home for daintiest dreams, 
 With such a dawn of light was crowned ; 
 Arid reeling ringlets shower'd around, 
 Like sunny sheaves of golden beams." 
 
 I am very learned in eyes. I have in my time discoursed on 
 the optic nerve, the lachrymal apparatus, the maxillary fissure 
 and I know all about the lamina cribrosa, the sclerotic membrane,
 
 2O4 Dr Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward. 
 
 and, above all, I am great upon the choroid membrane. But to 
 a man not a shrunken miserable creature, dried up, behind a 
 pair of spectacles ; but to man full of life, and with warm blood in 
 his veins there is nothing so beautiful as a woman's eye. He 
 will not examine for the maxillary fissure, or bother about the 
 choroid membrane, but think on Ben Jonson. The man of 
 science gives way to the poet, for a greater than he has come, and 
 in Ben Jonson I read : 
 
 " Do but look on her eyes ! they do light 
 All that love's world compriseth. 
 Do but look on her hair ! it is bright 
 As Love's star when it riseth. 
 Do but mark her forehead 's smoother 
 
 Than words that soothe her ; 
 And from her arched brows, such a grace 
 Sheds itself through the face 
 As alone there triumphs to the life 
 All the gain, all the good of the element's strife. 
 
 Have you seen but a bright lily grow 
 Before rude hands have touched it ? 
 Have you marked but the fall o' the snow 
 Before the soil has smutched it ? 
 Have you felt the wool of beaver 
 
 Or swan's down ever? 
 Or have smelt o' the bud o' the briar, 
 
 Or the nard in the fire ? 
 Or have tasted the bag o' the bee ? 
 O so white ! O so soft ! O so sweet is she ! "
 
 CHAUCER. 
 
 BORN 1328. DIED 1400. (FROM 2ND EDWARD III. TO 2ND HENRY IV.) 
 
 T F Chaucer had had the good fortune to write in Latin or Greek, 
 the English nation would have given themselves great pains 
 to interpret his meaning ; but as he had the misfortune to write in 
 English at an early period, there are few, even educated people, 
 who put themselves to the trouble of comprehending his great and 
 glorious poems. 
 
 As our time is limited, it will be very wise to confine our 
 attention to two or three distinct points. I wish first to convince 
 you that Chaucer was not only a great poet considering his age, 
 but one of the five great poets the world ever produced. Then I 
 shall have to show you that Chaucer may be read fluently in his 
 own peculiar language, without the modernising aid of Dryden, 
 who was unequal to the task, or of Pope, who could not do it 
 though he tried. Afterwards I shall put before you certain pas- 
 sages to justify any eulogiums I may pass. 
 
 Of the man, very little is known ; and though whole quartos 
 have been written about him, like many other biographies there 
 is very little in them. Honestly speaking, the life of Chaucer 
 might be written in a very small compass ; but it is so mixed up 
 and involved with the political history of his noble friend and 
 patron, John of Gaunt, that if one does not know much of the 
 latter one cannot know much of the former ; and if one does, then 
 there is hardly any necessity to speak about Chaucer in this 
 respect. 
 
 We will, therefore, dismiss very briefly what is acknowledged in 
 the poet's career his education at Cambridge and Oxford, his 
 studies in the Temple, his admission to the splendid and brilliant 
 court of Edward III. as a page, his there becoming a prote'ge of 
 the powerful Duke of Lancaster, his rapid rise and growth in favour 
 with the chivalrous monarch under whom he served, his successful
 
 206 Chaucer. 
 
 mission as ambassador to Genoa, his subsequent rewards and 
 pensions, his acquisition of wealth, his reduction to poverty by the 
 death of John of Gaunt and the King, and, finally, his death in 
 quietude and seclusion in the country. When dying, he wrote 
 those beautiful and oft-quoted verses known as "The good coun- 
 sel of Geoffrey Chaucer," which will show with what true piety 
 and with what admirable knowledge of the world this good man 
 went out of it. 
 
 " Fly from the press, 1 and dwell with soothfastness ;- 
 Suffice unto thy good, 3 though it be small ; 
 
 For hoard hath hate, and climbing tickleness, 
 Praise hath envy, and weal is blent owre all; 4 
 Savour 5 no more than thee behove shall, 
 
 Rede 6 well thyself that other folk canst rede 
 
 And truth thee shall deliver, it is no drede. 7 
 
 " Paine thee not each crooked to redress, 
 
 In trust of her that turneth as a ball : 
 Great rest standeth in little business, 
 
 Beware also to spurn against a nail, 8 
 
 Strive not as doth a crocke 9 with a wall. 
 Doome 10 thyself that doomest others dede, 
 And truth thee shall deliver, it is no drede. 
 
 " That 11 thee is sent receive in buxomness ; n 
 
 The wrestling of this world asketh a fall : 
 Here is no home, here is but wilderness 
 
 Forth, pilgrim, forthe beast, out of thy stall. 
 
 Look up on high, and thanke God for all, 
 Weive 13 thy lusts, and let thy ghost 14 thee lede, 
 And truth thee shall deliver, it is no drede." 
 
 It is with Chaucer as a poet that we have most to do ; and I 
 do protest against an error which some people entertain relative 
 to Chaucer. When speaking of him, they are apt to say that, 
 " considering the circumstances of the age in which he lived, he 
 was a great poet." Now, don't let us make any allowance or 
 
 1 Crowd. 2 Truth. 3 Be satisfied with thy wealth. 
 
 4 Prosperity has ceased. 5 Taste. 6 Counsel. 
 
 7 Without doubt. 8 Nail. 9 Earthen pitcher. 
 
 10 Deem, judge. n That which. ls Civility, obedience. 
 
 10 Leave. w Spirit, or inward monitor.
 
 Chaucer. 207 
 
 apology of this sort for Chaucer ; don't say of him, as they did in 
 the time of Pope, that considering he was " the morning star," 
 he was a great poet. The fact is, Chaucer was absolutely one of 
 the greatest poets the world ever brought forth ; he was one of 
 the four great English poets ; and he was not merely one of the 
 first of these, but of the universe, and one of the noblest. 
 
 Before proceeding next to notice some of the distinctive 
 peculiarities of the ancient poet, I must pause to pay a tribute to 
 the patriotic benefit he conferred upon the English language and 
 the English people ; and in doing so I must advert to the Norman 
 Conquest, and the yoke put upon the bluff, hard-handed, simple 
 Saxons by their cool, chivalrous, gentlemanly invaders. Whilst 
 that yoke was new, and the hand of William was strong, there 
 were two languages spoken in the country the Saxon and the 
 Norman French. Saxon book-making was interrupted ; but the 
 Saxon spirit remained uncontaminated and untouched ; the 
 two rivers ran side by side unmingled. The consequence 
 was that by-and-bye the national life began to revive. Not 
 many years after the Conquest, the Norman gentleman had to 
 learn Saxon ; and, with the resuscitation of the national spirit 
 came the revival of the Saxon literature. Chaucer's lot was a 
 peculiar one. He became a national poet. He was Norman by 
 descent, a courtier by profession, a scholar by acquirement, a 
 favourite with the learned, and the darling of the nobles ; and 
 yet he became the poet of the people. There is so much talk 
 now-a-days about "poets of the people," that it is gratifying to 
 find in what respect this great man was essentially worthy of that 
 denomination. He combined the speech of the Norman gentle- 
 man with the Saxon poetry of the people ; he turned himself to 
 the people, and he did more than any other man in history in the 
 admirable task of binding together the classes of the nation. 
 That man does a more beautiful work who joins the hands of 
 classes, than he who, by irate or harsh language, causes them to 
 keep apart. Apart from being a poet, he laid his one white hand 
 in the open, broad, brown palm of the Saxon, and the other in 
 the fair hand of the Norman lady; he did wed together these 
 people; and he did choose to write in the great old English 
 tongue ; he was not only England's great poet, but he was Eng- 
 land's great patron.
 
 208 Chaucer. 
 
 Since his time the question has been settled that the man who 
 writes a great book must write it in the popular speech, in the 
 people's ways and manners. When Chaucer took up the people, 
 he discovered his burgher and his miller, and so made the 
 Canterbury Tales such a grand picture of national manners, as 
 that Homer himself might almost " pale his ineffectual fire " 
 before his genius. Homer lived early and sang about the early 
 Greeks ; Chaucer lived later, and he took some of the old stories 
 of England for his themes. If we cannot give him the credit of 
 being an inventor, yet he was the sweetest narrator of old popular 
 legends that ever lived. But Chaucer wrote for the people in the 
 language and spirit of a gentleman. In these days it is said you 
 must put on fustian and go down to the people. Chaucer did 
 not do that. His poems, to speak in a common phrase of the 
 present day, had a "run," and he familiarised the Anglo-Norman 
 in England. He himself said, " Let their clerks indite in Latin, 
 for they have propriety of sense and knowledge, and let the 
 French also in their French indite, for it is kindly in their mouths; 
 but let us show our phantasies in such words as we have learned 
 in our dame's tongue." To which I say a loud Amen. 
 
 Chaucer was the first author who discovered character, and 
 drew it individually. We often hear it said of a person, " He is 
 a character." This is no ill compliment; for it means that he is 
 original, strong, individual, unmistakable ; you cannot take him 
 for anybody else. He is no mere John Jones, but one by him- 
 self. Look at Chaucer's works. How thoroughly individual, how 
 truly flesh and blood his people are. There is as much difference 
 between Chaucer and Boccaccio as there is between Homer and 
 Virgil. Homer is grand, truthful, and life-like; Virgil is a delu- 
 sion, full of magic-lantern slides and shadows. Chaucer is the 
 Homer of England ; his characters are so thoroughly real and life- 
 like. He exercised a great influence on the drama, as he was the 
 first of modern writers who thoroughly individualised. 
 
 As Shelley said of Shakespeare, it may well be said of Chaucer 
 that he carries the palm over the Greek drama by the introduc- 
 tion of a large and genial humour into his poetry. Chaucer 
 abounds in pathos, but it only serves to lead to his humour; and 
 the flashes of his English humour only serve to show there are 
 slumbrous depths of true feeling and true sympathy beneath. He
 
 C/iaucei". 209 
 
 was best humoured amongst men. Let him go to a dance, and 
 all the girls wished he would dance with them first In battle 
 foremost, in retreat the last. In the house of God meek in his 
 humility, great in his piety. Such was Chaucer. Shakespeare 
 embodies the alternate play of passion, pathos, and humour; for 
 in the case of all English humour its tears and laughter are 
 happily intermingled : and all this is eminently displayed by 
 Chaucer. Whilst capable of touching pathos, he had a downright 
 hearty, genial love of fun in him. 
 
 Chaucer was the great national poet of olden time, and the 
 best, the fairest, the truest painter of nature. He was the Adam 
 of English poetry, and he walked in the early dew of the Paradise 
 of poesy. He was the Homer of England. He saw things as they 
 were, and wrote them down. He knew life well. If you wanted 
 a courtly pageant, he could depict it ; but if you wanted a portrait 
 of a man, Montaigne could not come up to him, nor could Swift 
 equal him. He was the type of all sorts of writers who came after 
 him. As it is said that an overture foreshadows the best part of 
 an opera, his was the solemn overture to English literature. 
 
 Chaucer was very unconventional; he was, moreover, frank, 
 and if he told his hearers a dull story he gaped and told them so. 
 It is perfect rest to get away from the laboured strains of Gray, 
 Pope, and company, and lend oneself for a while to the freshness 
 and sweetness of the verse of this early man. It may be said that 
 you cannot read him ; but I want to inspire you with faith enough 
 to attempt to crack Chaucer's quaint English. There is not half 
 the difficulty in reading Chaucer that there is in reading French ; 
 who then would be unrational enough to waste time over French 
 and whine that Chaucer is difficult? In illustration of this, I will 
 read you an exquisite passage from Chaucer's " Death of Emily," 
 in the original language : 
 
 " His beard was well begunnen for to spring ; 
 His voice was as a trumpe thundering." 
 
 Contrast this with Dryden's reproduction of the same lines : 
 
 " Whose voice was heard around 
 Loud as a trumpet with a silver sound." 
 
 As a sample of Chaucer's pre-Raphaelite and truthful delinea- 
 
 o
 
 2 1 o Chaucer. 
 
 don of Nature, I will read you an extract from the "The Flower 
 and the Leaf" : 
 
 " When that Phoebus his chair of gold on high, 
 Had whirled up the starrie sky aloft, 
 And in the Bull was entred certainly, 
 When showers sweet of rain descended soft, 
 Causing the ground, fele timis and oft, 
 Up for to give many an wholesome air, 
 And every plaine was yclothed fair 
 With newe green. 
 
 Up I rose three hours after twelve, 
 About the springing of the gladsome day, 
 And on I put my gear and mine array, 
 And to a pleasant grove I 'gan to pass, 
 Long ere the bright sun uprisen was ; 
 In which were oakes great, straight as a line, 
 Under the which the grass, so fresh of hue, 
 Was newly sprung, and an eight foot or nine 
 Every tree well from his fellow grew, 
 With branches broad laden with leaves new, 
 That springen out against the sunne shine, 
 Some very red, and some a glad light green. 
 
 On the sweet grass 
 I sat me down, for as for mine intent 
 The birde's song was more convenient, 
 And more pleasant to me by many fold 
 Than meat or drink or any other thing ; 
 Thereto the herber [grass] was so fresh and cold, 
 The wholesome savours eke so comforting 
 That (as I deemed) sith the beginning 
 Of the worlde was never seen ere then, 
 So pleasant a spot of none earthly man."* 
 
 As I have said before, I place Chaucer amongst the four fine 
 old fathers of English poesy, and I class Chaucer and Spenser, 
 Shakespeare and Milton, in one category. He was, in fact, almost 
 the best fruit the old English tree ever grew. Let us take his 
 
 * These extracts were missed by the reporter, and are here supplied con- 
 jecturally by the editor. But there can be little doubt about the identification, 
 as the reader may satisfy himself when he finds them quoted for the same pur- 
 pose in Rev. George Gillillan's Critical Dissertation.
 
 Chaucer, 211 
 
 works in proof of this. His merit is that he was the first poet 
 that drew character individually, well discriminated, and withal 
 correct. In reading the Canterbury Tales, the great charm is that 
 one can recognise every one of its people as every-day characters. 
 One knows the features of every individual even to the cut of his 
 nose, and can perceive all that glorious reality of life in them 
 which only a true artist can impart. Chaucer showed Shakespeare 
 how to depict : Shakespeare, it is true, delineated character well, 
 as he did everything well ; but Chaucer is the oldest, the truest- 
 hearted, most deep, pathetic, and unconventional poet England 
 ever produced. He was a new man, a first man, a fresh man, an 
 unconventional man. He wrote down things exactly as he saw 
 them, and as they had effect upon him not what correct people 
 now-a-days would say ought to have been the effect. Chaucer 
 was the sincerest poet that ever lived; and it is right pleasant to 
 get away into his hearty, frank, jolly, jovial verses, full as they are 
 of fine old unconventional English words. The man had a won- 
 derful idea of satire ; he was a dear lover of nature, and was, 
 moreover, an awful " quiz." He had all the merits of Montaigne, 
 more than the wit of Swift, and Wordsworth's love of nature as 
 well. Whether we begin with nature or go on to character, the 
 hand of a master is perceptible. 
 
 But he had one great misfortune to contend with he had the 
 bad luck to be an Englishman. If he had been a delicate Virgil, 
 or a feeble Ennius, people in the present day might have taken 
 the trouble perhaps to read him. But why should we not com- 
 prehend old English as well as Greek or French ? Chaucer wrote 
 in a language that is fast becoming dead to us who live in these 
 modern times. It is true it is awkward and annoying to be 
 obliged to turn to a dictionary in the middle of a line; but have 
 \ve not often to do that with Homer? How, I will ask, do 
 Englishmen read Burns? Many do, and do it by study. Why 
 not with a national poet like Chaucer? The excuse that you 
 cannot make out his language ought only to be made use of by 
 lazy people. The proper understanding of the value of words is 
 essential to proper speaking and proper writing ; and the best 
 study of primitive English will be found in Chaucer. Why should 
 we mouth over a Roman pot, or go " mooning " to Kenilvvorth, 
 if we neglect to familiarise ourselves with a curious and beautiful
 
 212 Chaucer. 
 
 antiquity like Chaucer's poems? In a word, we ought to be 
 acquainted with the language in which our forefathers talked, with 
 which they rallied in the battle-field, and in which they prayed and 
 worshipped. 
 
 To justify the view I have expressed of Chaucer's character and 
 writings, I will give you a series of selected and various quotations 
 from his pages. I give them to you as a few lessons in Chaucerian 
 reading, in the hope of convincing you of its ease and simplicity. 
 However, I will first of all lay down a few simple rules for reading 
 Chaucer with fluency. You must pay particular attention to the 
 plurals and genitives, and the variation of the final syllables. 
 You must be Teutonic in your pronunciation, and if you will call 
 " drops " " droppes/' and " streams " " streames," &c., you will 
 easily manage Chaucer. The language, partly Teutonic and 
 partly Saxon as it is, may in some cases be considered vulgar; 
 but it may be heard in use, by the country folk, in some counties, 
 even in the present day ; and it is so beautifully intermixed that 
 each word has its full meaning, whilst the harmony of the lines, 
 though occasionally short of a foot, perhaps is quite refreshing 
 and thoroughly English. 
 
 In illustrating Chaucer's characteristics, we will commence with 
 his love of nature, and for this we may take his exquisite lines on 
 "The Daisy"; while quotations from the "Canterbury Tales" 
 and "Troilus and Cresseide" will show his mastery in descrip- 
 tion of incidents in common life, and in delineating individual 
 character. First then, about the daisy : 
 
 "And as for me, though that I can but lite,* 
 On bookes for to read I me delight, 
 And to them give I faith and full credence, 
 And in mine heart have them in reverence 
 So heartily, that there is game none 
 That from my bookes maketh me to gone. 
 But it be seldom, on the holy day, 
 Save certainly when that the month of May 
 Is comen, and I hear the fowle's sing 
 And that the flow'res 'ginnen for to spring, 
 Fare well my book and my devotion. 
 Now have I then eke this condition 
 * Can but lite = know but little.
 
 Chaucer. 2 1 3 
 
 That, above all the flovv'res in the mead, 
 Then love I most those flow'rcs white and red 
 Such that men callen daisies in our town. 
 To them have I so great affection, 
 As I said erst, when comen is the May, 
 That in my bed there daweth me no day 
 That I n'am up and walking in the mead, 
 To see this flow'r against the sunne spread. 
 When it upriseth early by the morrow, 
 That blissful sight softeneth all my sorrow, 
 So glad am I when that I have presence 
 Of it, to do it all reverence 
 As she that is of all flow'res the flow'r, 
 Fulfilled of all virtue and hondur, 
 And ever alike fair and fresh of hue 
 As well in winter as in summer new, 
 This love I ever, and shall until I die 
 Al'* swear I not of this, I will not lie." 
 
 These beautiful lines, from the prologue to the Legend of 
 Good Women, may serve to illustrate Chaucer's love of nature. 
 
 [Prominent among the qualities of his poetry is the ruggedly 
 picturesque. Short and rapid strokes of the brush are usually more 
 powerful than they are polished : but in Chaucer the ruggedness is 
 compensated by the concentration. He crams into a big bulging 
 line the meaning which, in Spenser, would fill a stanza or a page. 
 In the description of the Temple of Mars, in the Knight's Tale, 
 every line is a picture, and resembles the boss upon a buckler, or 
 the knob on a rough goblet of gold : 
 
 " There stood the temple of Mars Armipotent, 
 Wrought all of burnedt steel, of which th' entry 
 Was long and strait, and ghastly for to see ; 
 The northern light in at the doore shone, 
 For window on the wall ne was there none, 
 Through which men mighten any light- discern ; 
 The door was all of adamant etern." 
 
 What figures are carved there ! There is 
 
 " The smiler with the knife under the cloak; " 
 * Although. t Burnished.
 
 214 Chaucer. 
 
 and 
 
 " The slayer of himself yet saw I there. 
 
 His hearte blood hath bathed all his hair ;" 
 and 
 
 " Woodness laughing in his rage : ' 
 
 and ghastlier still 
 
 " The sow fretting * the child right in the cradle ; 
 The cook yscalded, for all his long ladle. 
 Nought was forgot by th' infortune of Marte, 
 The carter overridden with his carte, 
 Under the wheel full low he lay adown." 
 
 When he follows the humourous style, Chaucer is equally 
 sententious and striking. Thus he says of his Franklin : 
 
 "Withouten bake-meat never was his house, 
 Offish and flesh, and that so plenteous, 
 It snowed in his house of meat and drink.' 1 ' 1 
 
 Of the Miller 
 
 " His beard as any sow or fox was red, 
 And thereto broad as though it were a spade, 
 Upon the cop t right of his nose he had 
 A wart, and thereon stood a tuft of hairs, 
 Red as the bristles of a sowes ears. 
 His mouth wide was as a furnace." 
 
 And of the Friar 
 
 " Somewhat he lisped for his wantonness, 
 To make his English sweet upon his tongue, 
 And in his harping, when that he had sung, 
 His even twinkled in his head aright 
 As do the starres in a frosty night." 
 
 In this broad yet condensed style of pictorial representation 
 Chaucer resembles Bunyan, as well as in some other qualities of 
 his brawny genius. Bunyan, too, writes like a man of business 
 deals in direct strokes puts much into few, and these simple 
 words has an eye for sly humour as well as for bold allegory 
 and with comparatively little fancy, has an immense deal of 
 essential imagination. How different at first view the Canterbury 
 
 * Devouring. t Top.
 
 Chaucer. 2 1 5 
 
 from the Christian Pilgrims the Friar from Evangelist The 
 Franklin from Great-heart the Miller from Christian the 
 Sompnour from Hopeful the Manciple from Gaius mine host 
 the Nun from Mercy and the Wife of Bath from Christiana! 
 And yet, in one very important point, they are alike ; they are no 
 cold abstractions no stiff, formal, and half-animated figures 
 they are, both the pious and profane, intensely natural, and 
 bursting at every pore with life. 
 
 " Troilus and Cresseide " is a lengthy poem in five books. It 
 tells essentially the same story with the play of Shakespeare 
 bearing the same name, but in a very different spirit. Shake- 
 speare's great object in his drama is to laugh; and he seems for 
 the nonce to exchange places with its real hero Thersites. 
 Chaucer, on the other hand, extracts the pathos that is in the 
 story, and uses it in his own fine way, " painting the afflicting 
 circumstances slowly and assiduously, and descending exploringly 
 into the caverns of tears." As a whole, however, the poem is 
 tedious, although fine passages are frequent. One often quoted 
 is that which describes Cresseide's yielding and acknowledging 
 her love : 
 
 "And as the now abashed nightingale 
 That stinteth first when she beginneth sing, 
 When that she heareth any herde's tale, 
 Or in the hedges any wight stirring, 
 And after sicker doth her voice outring : 
 Right so Cresseide, when that her dreade stent ; 
 Open'd her heart and told him her intent." 
 
 Let us quote, too, a passage in which we find the germ of his 
 coming " comedy " The Canterbury Tales : 
 
 " Go, little book, go, little tragedy ; 
 There God my Maker yet ere that I die 
 So send me might to make some comedy ; 
 But little book, make thou thee none envy, 
 But subject ben unto all poesy, 
 And kiss the steps where as thou seest pace 
 Of Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, Stace. * ] t 
 
 * Statins. 
 
 t The paragraphs in brackets are filled in conjecturally, from the source 
 before indicated. Some readers will say that the Editor has taken an un- 
 warrantable liberty; but others will be inclined to pardon him.
 
 216 Chaucer. 
 
 In conclusion, the object I have had in view has been to show 
 the completeness and universality of the man, and also to induce 
 you to read him for yourselves, in his own language for no 
 translation, however good, can do him justice. If you think well 
 of this, you may, in the course of the ensuing winter, form a 
 Chaucer club, and spend an evening now and then together, in 
 reading his works, and not pass a line without thoroughly 
 understanding every word in it.
 
 WILLIAM COWPER. 
 
 JJOIN 1731. DIED 1800. (FROM 4TH OF GEO. II. TO 40111 GEO. III.) 
 
 T HAVE this evening to set before you the history of a bruised 
 reed, or, perhaps better still, a broken flower, and to show 
 what wonderful results were brought about by the very bruise that 
 trailed the lovely flower in the dust. Had William Cowper lived 
 in the old Greek days, and had the scale of his life with regard to 
 its incidents been great, he would have formed the subject of one 
 of the tragedies which that wonderful nation produced. But 
 there is a triumph of genius higher than this. Cowper's life ran 
 in obscure places : Berkhampstead, Huntingdon, Olney, Weston, 
 Mundsley, and Dereham are all inconsiderable places, and yet to 
 all of them his connection with them has imparted a glory. Had 
 he lived in the days of Job, his life might have supplied a new 
 chapter in that wondrous questioning of God's ways, and that 
 wonderful protest against God's doings the Book of Job ; or had 
 he lived in the days of Christ, men would have said, " Which did 
 sin, this man or his father, that he should be so stricken ? " for he 
 was stricken indeed. 
 
 Though the greater part of his life was passed in obscurity, 
 pilgrimages were made to his house at Olney, and great sects 
 have fought and struggled over his ruined brain and almost broken 
 heart the one saying that he was a triumphant example of grace, 
 and the other that he was a most frightful result of fanaticism. 
 With this quarrel I will not deal, except to say that it is a pity the 
 people among whom Cowper lived did not better understand the 
 spirit of him who said, "The bruised reed I will not break, and 
 smoking flax I will not quench." What could wake Mrs Unwin, 
 Lady Austen, or Lady Hesketh into fame, except that they were 
 the friends of the broken, despairing enthusiast, who, nevertheless, 
 wrote poems which no change of fashion will ever dim poems 
 which have, perhaps, a wider range than those of any other man :
 
 218 William Cowper. 
 
 poetry that touches childhood, lays hold on manhood, and reaches 
 the strong man in those times of a strong man's life when his 
 mother's image, his father's teaching, and all the sweet influences of 
 childhood lay a hand upon him ; a poet of the fireside, the house, the 
 home ; of love, pure, and chaste, and true; a poet of the country; a 
 poet who delivered English verse from the graveclothes of French 
 apery, and bid it come forth and live its own natural manly life. 
 
 In these days of universal education, it would be, of course, 
 useless to go deeply into the biography of Cowper ; but it should 
 be a great comfort to know that the poet came of respectable 
 people, that he had among his ancestors a chancellor, judges, and 
 lawyers galore. His father was John Cowper, a doctor of divinity 
 and chaplain to King George II., who cannot be blamed if his 
 chaplaincy was of little effect, seeing that his Royal master knew 
 of no " visible church " except that of Harrow-on-the-Hill. His 
 mother, however, came of the good stock of the Donnes, one of 
 whom was that famous poet whose pious and anacreontic verses 
 are singularly combined in one volume, making one of the 
 mysteries of human nature, too deep to go into except amongst an 
 audience few and fitting. She could trace her descent by four 
 distinct lines (priceless privilege !) ; but her claim to fame rests 
 not upon this, but upon some verses which her son addressed to 
 her, and which placed her for ever among the constellations of 
 famous women. 
 
 This man's whole life was a long sadness. He was a man who 
 through life wanted a mother's love, yet, when he was six years 
 old she died, and left him to yearn in later years after the tender- 
 ness of which he had known so little and required so much. 
 Naturally delicate, coming into the world the victim of one of 
 those subtle diseases of the blood which the medicine of the time 
 could not detect or give a name to, he must go to school on his 
 mother's death ; and to school he went, and was there the subject 
 for a long time of that most hateful of all tyrannies that of a 
 schoolfellow, one of the most atrocious little wretches and vilest 
 little savages known, who was expelled the school on his conduct 
 becoming known. 
 
 At this time there began to crop up in Cowper's mind that 
 wretched superstition which stuck to him through life, a supersti- 
 tion which was nursed and encouraged by his schoolmaster.
 
 William Cowper. 219 
 
 At eight years he went to Westminster school, where he must 
 have read very hard, for, having left the school, he read very little 
 afterwards ; and yet his poems were marked by a wide knowledge, 
 which he must have gained at this period. 
 
 From school he went to his uncle's, in Southampton Buildings, 
 where he was supposed to learn law, in company with Thurlow, 
 afterwards Lord Chancellor, instead of doing which he and his 
 fellow-clerk spent the time in " giggling and making giggle " with 
 his uncle's three fair daughters, one of whom Theodora loved 
 him, and with a love which lasted through her life, though her 
 father " forbade the banns," a disaster which the poet, on the 
 other hand, lightly forgot, for he was soon afterwards in love 
 deeply with a lady from the West Indies, whom he could not and 
 did not marry. Thus Cowper lived an idle life, and this, again, 
 was one of the misfortunes which seemed to be his universal lot ; 
 for, on looking back from after years, no man can draw comfort 
 from such a life. 
 
 About this time he lost one of his best friends, Sir William 
 Russell, and losing him he seemed to give way to despair, and went 
 to live in the Middle Temple in seclusion perhaps one of the worst 
 things he could have done : for it takes a strong man, and not 
 one of his temperament, to live alone and yet be lively. Located 
 here, despair grew upon him apace, and he came to the settled 
 opinion, which never left him, that he was a doomed, damned 
 man, one who had committed an irreparable sin, and for whom 
 there was no redemption for evermore. 
 
 We shall pass over some of the succeeding incidents of the poet's 
 life, bearing always in mind the feeling of despair which ever seemed 
 to settle deeper and deeper upon him. At the age of thirty-two, 
 after his father's death, Cowper was offered by a friend two sine- 
 cure offices in the House of Lords, which approaching prosperity 
 drove him to attempt suicide twice. Following up the course of 
 events, he went to live with the Unwins at Huntingdon!, and from 
 thence to Olney on the breaking up of the Huntingdon home. 
 The last five years of Cowper's life were passed in perpetual gloom. 
 During those five years he is said never to have smiled. All the 
 superstitions of his ill-education, and all the mania of his defective 
 constitution, gathered over him towards the close ; and every 
 morning when he came out of his room he looked at his old Nor-
 
 220 William Cowper. 
 
 folk friend, Johnson, to see whether it was Johnson or the devil, 
 and according as he appeared to be the one or the other, Cowper 
 welcomed him with a sweet smile, or dismissed him with a look 
 of anguish and dread. When poor Mary Unwin died, there was 
 nothing to alleviate the anguish that had then reached its full 
 development. The most endearing friendship had subsisted be- 
 tween them, and the devotion of Mrs Unwin to her charge during 
 long years of overwhelming adversity is worthy of all praise. No 
 man who ever lived gathered around him womanly services so 
 constant and faithful as this poor, smitten man. All the people 
 who ever kne\v him seem to have been a long succession of patient 
 nurses ; and the painful part of it was that he seldom was able to 
 give anything for all he required. But some of the deep myster- 
 ies of the beautiful side of human life lie in this. His life was 
 a perpetual want ; and it is strange that a perpetual want of the 
 human heart is sure to draw out a perpetual supply ; for demand 
 and supply are happily not things of the dismal sciences only, but 
 things of the science of sciences the human heart. 
 
 We must now leave him, sleeping his last sleep in Dereham, 
 where Hayley has given him an epitaph,* and he himself gave 
 the world " The Task." Cowper's life was unfortunate in every 
 respect. Amongst bad scenery, and bad doctors of divinity, he 
 was trained in superstition, and was full of drivel himself, natu- 
 rally and artificially. If these things had been changed there 
 
 * The monument to him was erected by Lady Hesketh, who was his ad- 
 ministratrix. Hayley's inscription is as follows : 
 
 In memory of 
 
 WILLIAM COWPF.R, Esq. 
 
 Born in Hertfordshire, 1731 ; 
 
 Buried in this Church, 1800. 
 
 " Ye who with warmth the public triumph feel 
 Of talents, signified by sacred zeal, 
 Here, to devotion's bard, devoutly just, 
 Pay your fond tribute due to Cowper's dust. 
 England, exulting in his spotless fame, 
 Ranks with her dearest sons his favourite name. 
 Sense, fancy, wit, suffice not all to raise 
 So clear a title to affection's praise ; 
 His highest honours to the heart belong, 
 His virtues formed the magic of his song."
 
 William Cower. 221 
 
 might have been another William Cowper ; but who can say that 
 " The Task " would have been written ? The man might have 
 been happier, but the poet might not have been so true. 
 
 Cowper was beyond doubt the greatest letter-writer that the 
 world has ever seen the most witty, playful, genial, droll, 
 humorous, and superstitious letter-writer that ever lived. He 
 wrote about Olney, Mary Unwin, the postman, Weston fields and 
 gardens, balloons and flying, mackerel and its boiling. He wrote 
 about William Cowper and his little concerns ; and out of that 
 scanty material he contrived to make volumes of letters that will 
 live as long as the world has any taste for simplicity, affection, 
 genuineness, and true poetry, being spent where true poetry had 
 not before been much spent in ordinary life, and in what fools 
 call the dull routine of daily drudgery. It is a relief to turn from 
 the letters of Gray, Walpole, and Byron to those of Cowper, who 
 gave an account of the whole private life of a handful of people, 
 who seemed to have lived to love one another, who worshipped 
 one another, and who perhaps rather spoiled one another. The 
 wonder is that that dull old Olney and Mary Unwin were so interest- 
 ing in a little joint-stock society for mutual tickling and admira- 
 tion. Cowper filled one of the great offices of a letter-writer : he 
 set the ordinary flow of human life before us exactly as it was, 
 calmly and quietly. For length, for variety, and for constant 
 freshness, he was the best of letter-writers ; and there is a 
 womanly beauty about his letters. Women are great letter 
 writers, because their intellectual powers deal in and are very 
 much developed by the affections. When a woman sits down to 
 write a great poem, the greatest stimulus a woman can have is 
 wanting the affections are not interested ; but when she writes 
 letters her affections are aglow, and hence she excels, because by 
 habit of nature, and by habit of education and life, her intel- 
 lectual powers dwell in, and are developed by, the affections of 
 her heart. Some men are partly men and partly women in this 
 respect, and Cowper was one of them. It would hardly have 
 been surprising to see him knitting and stitching his own muslin 
 cap. Even his poems were matters of the affections. The 
 sunshine of Lady Austin's face brought " The Task " into life. 
 The sweetest lines he ever wrote were to his Mary. The majority 
 of his poems were offerings on the altar of affection. They were
 
 222 William Cowpcr. 
 
 written to, or for, someone whom he loved. In his letters when 
 his affections were aglow he took up the most insignificant 
 thing, as a bit of glass, and held it in the sunshine till it imitated 
 the diamond. 
 
 One very great task which Cowper accomplished was to teach 
 men of taste to believe that men of piety are not necessarily 
 dullards and fools, and to teach men of piety that they need not 
 be coarse and vulgar. He took his part in that great work which 
 Samuel Johnson helped to do and that was to make morality 
 fashionable. He had been in the world long enough to get 
 polished ; he went out of it early enough to be pure and unso- 
 phisticated. He knew both sides. He was a man of the world, 
 and a man of religion ; and he did this country an essential ser- 
 vice, which almost all the poets have been better for. Since 
 Cowper's days, the greatest poets have been " on the side of the 
 angels " men as timorous about wrong-doing as they are glori- 
 ous in the praise of right. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Tennyson 
 are in a direct line from Cowper. Glorious Robert Burns, who 
 lived at the same time as Cowper, is not to be forgotten ; but his 
 breath too often smelled of whiskey. It is a comfort to find a 
 poet so pious as Cowper was, and not a muff. 
 
 I have mentioned another great service which this poet ren- 
 dered to England, and that was to rescue us from the French 
 school of verse, and from " poetic diction," as it is called. I have 
 a great aversion to slang, except in the proper shop for it. Let 
 lawyers and theologians talk jargon among themselves ; but poets 
 are bound to clothe beautiful thoughts with beautiful words. 
 " Poetic diction " is inconsistent with the use of such a word as 
 "gun," for instance. "Murderous tube" is the equivalent for 
 this word in the poetic dictionary. What jargon and sham classic 
 Gray wrote : 
 
 " The attic warbler pours her throat, 
 Responsive to the Cuckoo's note." 
 
 What trash ! What is an " attic warbler " ? What is the mean- 
 ing of " pouring her throat ? " There used to be a verb " to sing " 
 in English ; but it is out of use. " Responsive to the cuckoo's 
 note ! " " Untaught harmony of spring ! " I will answer for it 
 that that was written in a garret it never occurred to any man in
 
 William Cowper. 223 
 
 the fields. Then there are " zephyrs," and something about " en- 
 chanting shells," oyster shells, perhaps. Then there are the 
 phrases borrowed from the haberdasher's shop, " velvet green," 
 " purple light of love," &c.* I have often wondered about that 
 " purple light." I like the phrase. I wonder what it is : that is 
 why I like it. Here is another line : 
 
 " In climes beyond the solar road." * 
 
 I have heard of the Holyhead Road, but never of the Solar 
 Road. Why cannot the man say what he means in English, in- 
 stead of translating it into " poetic diction," like old Samuel 
 Johnson, who translated his phrases into Johnsonese, as when he 
 said, " A dirty fellow leaped out of the bed in which we were to 
 sleep," but afterwards made it, " A man, black as a Cyclops from the 
 forge, emerged," &c. And then there is the classic slang. I hate 
 it. I heartily wish some of the knackers would put Pegasus out 
 the way. The Muses are a set of old frumps, and I heartily wish 
 somebody would pension off the whole " tuneful nine " of them, 
 so that I may never hear of them again. I am weary and sick oi 
 Mars, and Jove, and Helicon, and the Ilissus, and the whole col- 
 lection of stage properties. When I leave these for " The Task/' 
 it is like walking out of an evening party into the fresh moonlight, 
 under the glorious stars, and talking about them, not finely, but 
 simply, heartily, plainly, and truly. I regard Latin verse, Greek 
 verse, and piano-strumming as the three-headed Moloch to which 
 England offers up brains and sense. Cowper wrote English poetry 
 in the English language, acting upon the Aristotelian maxim : 
 
 " Loftily thinking, lowlily speaking, 
 The words of a people, the thoughts of a sage." 
 
 His painting of nature was minute, but entirely transparent. He 
 had the ability to set down exactly what he beheld. Christopher 
 North said that anyone who could describe water beginning to 
 change into ice was a poet. Burns did it : f 
 
 " The chilly frost, beneath the silver beam, 
 Crept, gently crusting o'er the glittering stream." 
 
 I do not care much for "silver beam." Thomson did it better. 
 * Gray's Progress of Poesy. t The Brigs of Ayr.
 
 224 William Cowper. 
 
 He was a great painter, but rather in the smudge and veneer 
 style : 
 
 " An icy gale, half shifting, o'er the pool 
 Breathes a blue film, and in its mad career, 
 Arrests the bickering stream, the loosened ice, 
 Let down the flood, and half dissolved by day, 
 Rustles no more ; but to the sedgy bank 
 Fast grows, or gathers round the pointed stone, 
 A crystal pavement, by the breath of Heaven 
 Cemented firm, till, seized from shore to shore, 
 The whole imprisoned river growls below." * 
 
 This will not do for Cowper. The scenes he describes are 
 gentle and tranquil, and the Ouse never growls : 
 
 " On the flood, 
 
 Indurated and fixed, the snowy weight 
 Lies undissolved, while silently beneath, 
 And unperceived, the current steals away." t 
 
 There are three pictures by three poets. He who can add a 
 fourth may account himself a fourth poet, on the authority of 
 Christopher North. 
 
 This man, Cowper, so gentle and so retired, was yet able to 
 blow a patriotic blast which was and is heard throughout England. 
 
 " England ! with all thy faults, I love thee still," 
 
 is the creed of Englishmen in all parts of the world, except a few 
 miserable people who dare hardly say, but would, that they love 
 any other country better. 
 
 In conclusion, I hope some of you will leave the puzzling poetry 
 of some great living men, or the passionate blare and glare of 
 Byron, to seek the holy shades and the quiet ways, and the 
 pleasant places where Cowper, the witty, wise, godly and true, 
 delighted to walk. 
 
 * Thomson's "Seasons:" Winter. 
 f The Task : Book V.
 
 POPE AND BYRON. 
 
 POPE: BORN 1688, DIED 1744. (FROM 3RD JAMES II. TO 17x11 GEO. II.) 
 BYRON: BORN 1788, DIED 1824. (FROM 28TH GEO. III. XO4XH GEO. IV.) 
 
 " T^IFTY years ago," remarked Lord Byron, speaking of Pope's 
 position and merits as a poet, " Italy neglected Dante, 
 but at present they adore him. Shakespeare and Milton have had 
 their rise, and had their decline." I am sorry enough to differ 
 with Lord Byron on the matter. Great poets have their ups and 
 downs, but they have no decline. They may be, like the sun, 
 liable to an eclipse ; many nobodies may eclipse a bright one for 
 a time. It is with poets, as with private people ; not every poet 
 is equally acceptable to us. There are poets we should be sorry 
 to see in a young woman's hands, and there are poets no young 
 man can possibly understand, he is not old enough, nor sad 
 enough, nor deep enough, nor wise enough. There are all tastes 
 to be pleased. Many people, 'for instance, admire the poems of 
 Robert Montgomery, and I have heard there are people who 
 believe Mr Tupper to be a poet. There was a day when Byron 
 was more popular than now not more popular than he will be 
 again. In other days Pope was looked upon as a great poet, but 
 different times, different circumstances, different feelings and tastes 
 make people glad that in Cowper they have something English 
 and wholesome. A few people there are who believe Wordsworth 
 a poet, but very few. 
 
 So, I will admit that Alexander Pope had his time of eclipse ; 
 nay, there are some who do not believe he was a poet at all. I 
 meet with many now. I wish to show you that he was supreme 
 one of the greatest we have ever had. One of the most talented, 
 clever, and ingenious books ever written and putting aside its 
 merits as a translation of Homer, one of the splendidest poems 
 the world has ever seen is Pope's " Iliad." And if ever a friend 
 who has been to college snubs one of you for liking Pope's
 
 226 Pope and Byron. 
 
 "Iliad," and says you know nothing of Greek, then admit that 
 you know nothing of Greek or Homer, but say it is Popes "Iliad " 
 that you like. That book brought its author .5,324, and although 
 it may be said that pounds are a sorry measure of the value of 
 poetry, yet they are pretty true indicators of popularity. The 
 highest men of his age looked upon Pope as supreme. He was 
 admired by Swift, and he had the aversion of Addison, who could 
 not bear that there should be two kings, and found he could not 
 be one if Pope were one. 
 
 Pope made his way from obscurity ; overcoming disadvantage 
 he became intimate with the great in wealth, in wit, in truth. 
 Look at that man, deformed and long diseased, unable to take 
 his own stockings off, and making up his legs with three pairs of 
 stockings so that people might think he had something to stand 
 upon. Look at him, a woman-nurse with him always. And yet, 
 with all these disadvantages, that man was the supreme man of 
 his age. Those who think of these things, who know what it is to 
 fight against a fickle body, will love the man's poems. 
 
 There is not over much to love him for morally. He was bitter, 
 personal, sensitive, fretful, vindictive, vituperous, parsimonious ; 
 always talking about his money a passion for getting, and not 
 too much willingness to spend it. There was an instance of this, 
 when he had two men to supper, and a single pint of wine for the 
 two. Mr Pope took so many small glasses, then retired to bed, 
 saying, "Gentlemen, I leave you to your wine." You will 
 remember, too, the severity he indulged in. They always turned 
 against the " Ruthless Little Tyrant," as Mr Thackeray has called 
 him, when he laid on with so ruthless a hand. He revelled in 
 the description of poverty and the poor poverty, its meanness, its 
 shifts. It is not a kind friend who holds up one's coat to show 
 the patch. And yet how Pope does it ! With such inimitable 
 skill, and with such savage bitterness, one can hardly keep from 
 hating him. It was Pope who made generations believe that 
 authors and rags, dirt and drink, gin, cobwebs, tripe, and poverty, 
 and duns and bailiffs, squalling children and clamorous matrons, 
 are always associated. It is not all due to Pope, however, tor 
 Goldsmith did much more. Pope laughed at it, but Goldsmith 
 practised it. 
 
 But we have to settle, as far as we can, the question, "Is Pope a
 
 Pope and Byron. 227 
 
 poet ? Is he a great poet ? and if so, why so ? " And in order to 
 do that, we will consider one or two things that are in the true 
 office of poetry, especially as there has been a great deal of dis- 
 cussion lately whether rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, are poetry, and 
 there is a book written to teach what is poetry. 
 
 Our human nature, our every thought, and our every emotion, 
 when it reaches a certain point, requires expression. The usual 
 vent is action. When people cannot act, they are obliged to 
 comport themselves as though they meant to do something ; they 
 do so by a gesture. Words are the supreme expression of emotion. 
 Poetry is a creative act. The great poet creates an ideal world as 
 God creates in the real, and man is in closest imitation with his 
 Maker when with a sheet of paper, blank or chaotic, he calls up 
 a " Paradise Lost" or a play of " Hamlet." It is the poet's duty 
 to dye everything in the colour of his imagination. The poet's 
 coat, like the coat we read of in the Pentateuch, must be of many 
 colours. 
 
 Poetry differs from prose, by what? Some say there is no 
 difference, and there are some of our great prose writers of whom 
 we may say this. There are passages in Jeremy Taylor that are 
 poetry. I don't say it is the best poetry, but simply because it 
 lacks the body of poetry rhyme and rhythm, and all those things 
 that differ in a bodily sense from poetry in its essence. These con- 
 stitute the body, and the more beautiful the body is, the greater 
 the artist, the greater the poet. I am one of those who entirely 
 dissent from the new school, who undervalue rhyme, rhythm, and 
 alliteration. Rhyme is a passion which I believe to be natural ; 
 children love it, the savage enjoys it. Dancing also is a natural 
 passion, and no young person need be ashamed of their love for 
 it. Music regulates and restrains the dance, and this is what I 
 require in poetry a rhyme, an alliteration, a judicious repetition 
 of words of the same sound. And in this sense, there are few 
 men who can regulate the dance better than Alexander Pope. 
 Rhymes are the hooks to hang great thoughts on memory. By 
 virtue of the verse which lives within us, we remember more of 
 poetry we read when children than of solid blocks of prose, 
 because memory, by the rhyme, is restrained and ordered. And 
 the higher a man's emotions are, the more certainly he loves 
 verse. If vou look at those marvellous love-letters, when women
 
 228 Pope and Byron. 
 
 go into court to show their broken hearts for a consideration, 
 you will find nearly all the men breaking out into verse. When a 
 man gets to a certain heat, verse seems a necessity to let it off. 
 We find it again as the expression of religious emotion. Fancy 
 trying to praise God with a block of prose ! Listen to some 
 men's prayers ; they are all prose, and prosy too. There is no 
 emotion in them. " Lord of the love that lifts the lowly into a 
 loving life with Thee." Put this into other words : " Oh, Lord 
 of that love which exalteth the humble into affectionate com- 
 munion with Thee." Which is the most beautiful ? Why is one 
 more beautiful ? Simply because the letter " L " begins so many 
 words, and it is a lovely letter. You may say it is a pitiable 
 trick. Why? If it gives men sweet pleasure, it is a glorious 
 thing. 
 
 You need not be ashamed of being fond of alliteration, of 
 rhythm, of rhyme. You need not be ashamed of being fond of 
 Pope or Byron ; these two masters sacrifice nothing for these 
 things. Read the third and fourth cantos of " Don Juan," and then 
 tell me Byron suffers from the trammels of the verse. There are 
 people who wish to narrow the field of poetry ; who do not care 
 for mere humanity, who want to go to the daisies, who want to 
 worship the mountains. What is the use of the mountain with- 
 out the man ? I maintain that the first thing is man, the second 
 thing man, always man. Nothing is worth anything until con- 
 nected with man. 
 
 Now, no man would put Pope along with Shakespeare, with 
 Byron, or Dryden even ; but when we have passed the fixed stars 
 of mighty magnitude, he is a star of infinite brightness. Those are 
 the greatest poets who deal most with man. What is the supreme 
 glory of this earth ? It is man's dwelling-place. And yet you run 
 down Pope because he only dealt with man. The great real poet, 
 Chaucer, was intensely human in his verse. And Shakespeare, 
 you do not find him dallying with prettinesses. Homer is beau- 
 tiful in a modern sense only accidentally. Do you think 
 Homer would give up a battle-field to talk about daisies ? Now, 
 people say of Pope that he is too Frenchified. If by that you 
 mean that Pope follows that nation to whom the gift is given of 
 making people know what they mean, then Pope is Frenchified. 
 He had an inimitable artistic power of making utterly lucid
 
 Pope and Byron. 229 
 
 everything he wished to make known, seen, and understood. 
 Then he was so artificial, you say. Do you who say so know 
 what it is to be natural ? A man and woman in a ball-room may 
 be as much the subject of poetry as the soldier on the battle-field. 
 You say his subjects are trivial ; he did not write tragedies. 
 Most of the modern running down of Pope is just this, that as he 
 did not select the highest subjects, he must be put down as an 
 inferior poet. But a poet, like other artists, is ranked for his exe- 
 cution, and not according to his branch of art. It were better for 
 a man to write a song that should live in the heart of the nation, 
 than try to write an oratorio and make a mess of it. Pope knew 
 something, and he wrote about it ; he knew that thoroughly, and he 
 wrote it well. He painted the artificial class of society, and he 
 sometimes painted little things, but in them he put sound sense, 
 large observation, gathered wisdom, treasured ethics, and set 
 them to sound epigram matical couplets, each of which is a quota- 
 tion, and has got to the tongues of those who have never read his 
 works at all. 
 
 Byron had a wider field, a deeper genius ; he was a greater 
 man than Pope. Those of you who fail to admire these two great 
 masters are very inexperienced in the world's ways, and the 
 sooner you get into the clear, bracing air of " Don Juan," or the 
 " Rape of the Lock," or the " Essay on Man," the better for you. 
 There are some poets who cannot descend to make us understand 
 what they mean if they mean anything at all. 
 
 It will be obvious that the main points of comparison I intend 
 to institute between Pope and Byron are those which distinguish 
 them as artists and poets rather than as men, though there are 
 one or two singular points of resemblance in their story. Both of 
 them had bodily deformity which vexes, annoys, and hinders 
 and both of them had a certain scorn of the world. When Pope 
 ran away from the world, he got into his grotto at Twickenham ; 
 when Byron got away from the world, he found it too strait for 
 him, as he had found England too narrow. Of course there is a 
 mighty difference in their range Pope of humble birth, Byron's 
 pedigree running up to the Norman Conquest, come of a noble 
 race, and proud enough of his lineage he was. Both of their 
 childhoods were, comparatively, unfortunate ; the education 
 of both sadly irregular ; the reading of both men strangely
 
 230 Pope and Byron. 
 
 discursive, as was the case with Swift, Goldsmith, and Samuel 
 Johnson. 
 
 No justice can be done to Byron, and very little mercy can be 
 shown to him, except we take a very tender, very patient, and 
 very merciful look at the singularly evil influences under which 
 that unhappy man was brought up. His father was a blackguard 
 and a bully. He married Byron's mother for the sake of her 
 money, and he had the want of decency to say so. After he had 
 got her money he spent it, and then sponged upon her, borrowed 
 from her, and when he had reduced her to poverty, he taunted 
 her with her poverty and the shallow circumstances that were the 
 result of it, insulted and deserted her and her boy for ever. 
 Strange it is that in time to come the boy should desert his wife 
 and child, and see them no more for ever. So much for the father's 
 side. And what is to be said of the mother's ? His mother was 
 a woman without judgment, without self-command ; a shrieking, 
 howling, red-faced, passionate, self-indulgent person; now spoiling 
 him by her ridiculous indulgences, now subjecting him to her 
 extravagant wrath. A ridiculous person, an absurd person, short 
 and fat. What a sight it was to see her in a rage, running round 
 the room after the lame boy, and he mocking, and dodging, and 
 hopping about ! Although that may be droll to hear, it was 
 tragical to suffer from, and there is much mercy to be bestowed 
 on a man whose father was a blackguard and whose mother was a 
 fool. The woman's head was full of nonsenses ; there was no 
 superstition too foolish for her ; and she was full of fantastic fears, 
 small dreads, petty shrieks, and all the other catalogue of absurd- 
 ities of which such people are guilty. There was scarcely a gleam 
 of beauty about the young life of the child, except what was given 
 by the faithful Scotch nurses honest, good souls, who loved him. 
 All too early he became a peer in his own right, and an heir, and 
 that was a bad thing for him. One , of the greatest misfortunes 
 that occurred to him was that he ever was a peer at all ; for when 
 a man is born to be a rebel, the higher he is the greater rebel he 
 will be. If he had been in a lower rank, he would have been 
 more easily held by the bonds of society, by the cords of custom. 
 As it was, he was free to enjoy every fancy and phantasy, and 
 every whim and riot that his rebellious spirit could possibly dictate 
 to him. At Harrow he was idle, fitful in study, like the great
 
 Pope and Byron. 231 
 
 men I have mentioned; and there he got large doses of Virgil 
 and scholarship, and was set down to grind the gerunds and 
 to study the niceties of language ; but he rebelled and declined. 
 Then came his marriage. Sometimes that is redemption for a 
 man. There have been cases where a happy marriage has brought 
 home a prodigal, overcome a penitent, regenerated a sinner, and 
 even saved a soul ; but this was to be one of the most unhappy 
 marriages of great men. His wife was an heiress, but only in 
 expectancy, and the first year of their marriage was shadowed with 
 debts and debtors and duns. His wife was prim, irreproachable, 
 pharisaic, self-righteous, prudish, carrying a pair of highly moral 
 scales regulated by the highest authority, in which she put his 
 faults and failings, and perhaps his sins, and everything was 
 weighed. When she reproached him with one sin, a spirit of 
 mischief caused him to confess two more ; and that is the worst 
 of prigs and prudes one is always tempted to anger them in 
 their wrath. These two people were incompatible. There might 
 have been a woman, who, though sinned against, could have seen 
 what might come beyond ; who, in mourning what happened, 
 would have prevented it happening again ; but that it was not so 
 with this highly-starched and very decorous female is lamentable. 
 There is scarcely any incompatibility that can be suggested which 
 is greater than this incompatibility in this sad man's story. And 
 so by-and-bye they parted, and the little child went with the 
 mother, and the father never saw it again. Here are the elements 
 of a tragedy ! The fountain of honour closed, for he could not 
 honour his father ; the fountain of obedience closed, for he could 
 not obey his mother ; his love affair disastrous, joined to an ice- 
 berg and chained to a prude ; the little child that might have laid 
 his hand on his father's sinful heart and brought him home 
 through tears to God, never seen by him again. Before I pass 
 from Byron's life, I must protest against the foul scandal perpe- 
 trated against his memory. I am afraid it is what that woman 
 told, and it was another woman who published it. Peace be to 
 her, nobody believes it, and the scorn of two nations is the reward 
 of the wife who whispered the shameful lie, and of the she-novelist 
 who reported it. It is an old story vamped up, which has been 
 inquired into earlier, and found to be false. Byron needs no 
 more blackening than he blackened himself; so let that lie rest,
 
 232 Pope and Byron. 
 
 that most detestable scar.dal that was ever uttered against any 
 man. 
 
 My object to-night is not the biography of Byron, but the 
 marvellous excellencies in his poetry, especially those in which he 
 and Pope are alike. The greatest poets have been lucid, 
 intelligible, and clear, and had nothing in them of that misty, 
 cloudy sentimentalism which marks what are called the metaphy- 
 sical poets of the time. The great poet won his wreath by 
 simplicity, terseness, clearness, divine melody, perfect art, a 
 mastery of all modes of expression ; and he did not pull up short 
 to moralise and twaddle. Over against the sins of the spasmodic 
 school, which some of you admire, I set Pope. Pope, as I have 
 explained, had limits. He lived in a narrow age, and was a 
 narrow man. It is admitted that he was a bon vivant, and that he 
 was a bitter and furious person, that his mouth was sometimes 
 foul and ofttimes indecent, his words sometimes unchaste, and 
 his pictures sometimes sickening. Grant all that, but it is 
 possible to join all these sins, and the fog I have spoken of. Pope 
 had his faults, still he was a man of downright good common 
 sense ; a pious man at bottom, who believed all this world was 
 ruled to order. And no transcendentalism can be better than 
 that in which he declared all discord to be harmony misunder- 
 stood, in which he vindicated the ways of God to man, and 
 showed that in all the tangles of this world there was simplicity 
 and beauty, and that it was not for man to say because he could 
 not see it that order was not visible, or because he could not 
 hear the music that the harmony of God was not audible. Pope's 
 " Essay on Man " is not very deep ; but a great deal of it is 
 admirably true, and it is expressed in the clearest, plainest, and 
 lucidest English, adorned with every beauty that art could teach. 
 There is scarcely a line in which the sense is ever sacrificed to 
 the sound ; he was such a consummate artist that it is difficult to 
 find anywhere a place in which the rhyme, or rhythm, or metre 
 could be altered to make the expression more clear. 
 
 He was a bitter man, of course, and in that the story of his 
 life resembles Byron's. Pope was savage. Perhaps he should 
 not have been, but what a set of dunces he was pestered with, 
 and Pope said the best way to deal with them was like Swift with 
 the flea, to cry, " I kill it, I kill it." Both Pope and Byron wrote
 
 Pope and Byron. 233 
 
 verses early. Pope's were the better of the two, and Byron's 
 early verses are only worth reading now for curiosity. But when 
 the Scotch Reviewers touched Byron, how he flamed out into 
 wrath ; and then you find out in a moment what poetry he 
 admired you can detect Pope when you come to the " English 
 Bards and Scotch Reviewers." As a dramatist, there is no doubt 
 Byron looked carefully into Shakespeare, and, like a wise man, he 
 knew Shakespeare was too big for him. But in Pope he found a 
 man after his own heart, and him he particularly admired and 
 defended. Reflection was not Byron's forte. Almost all his 
 works were pure inspirations. With Byron there was no warming 
 up of old matter, no renaissance or middle ages (they never will 
 be in the front rank who are the makers of hash and the warmers 
 up of old victuals) ; but there was this perfect originality. It is a 
 charm to see a man who has something to say in his own way, 
 who is not always visiting antiquity ; one doesn't want everybody 
 to have a passion for old china ; I have no patience with 
 artisan poets, who are everlastingly among bric-a-brac. Byron 
 knew just enough of the classics to save himself from being unlike 
 himself. There, of course, he was greater than Pope. Pope was 
 more a derivative man than Byron; but both of them had this 
 great perfection they said what they had to say in a distinctly 
 natural and original form. 
 
 One good thing about Byron is that the types of his women are 
 mostly good. Of course he has some women who are not good, 
 because there are two or three of such women in the world, and 
 they are apt to get in the way. The types of the women are 
 loveable, well and subtly drawn, admirably coloured, and they fill 
 up a great gap in old art, which mostly deals with men. In his 
 " Childe Harold," there are some of the wisest things said in the 
 sweetest fashion. He understood that great rule of art, that 
 works should not be called artistic unless there is beauty in them. 
 The artistic good sense of Byron is perfect ; you never get any 
 nonsense from him, and there is no affectation in his great poems. 
 He rages sometimes, but he is always plain ; and it is to be 
 remembered to his credit, that he never puts his faults, and the 
 consequences of them, forward as grievances. Byron broke the 
 law, " kicked against the pricks," leaped over every restraint, 
 violated every bond, would have his own will ; but there is no
 
 234 .Pope and Byron. 
 
 sentimentalism about him, and you never find him saying he has 
 been ill-used, and you get no passage of whining or cant from him. 
 Taking " Don Juan," there is a certain sense in which there is 
 a sanctity about the book. Byron sat there in an artificial calm, 
 and traced the gradual rotting, decay, and degradation of a man 
 without law, the slave of his own pleasures, the child of his own 
 desires, the rebel against society. Of course, if you go to " Don 
 Juan " to see what is foul, you will find it, especially if you carry 
 your own foulness with you. In " Don Juan " there is much 
 matchless description, and a laying bare of the human breast ; 
 and I will ask you to read it again, in the light of a terrible picture 
 of a great man going down hill. Read it with a tear, as I think 
 you ought to read it, and with an infinite pity that this man died 
 at thirty-six, and died in what looks to you, perhaps, a poor ex- 
 pedition, but which to Byron meant liberty, freedom, and deliver- 
 ance, for a great nation that had been. There are parts of 
 " Manfred," " Cain," and " Don Juan," in which, instead of a 
 whining sentimentalism against nature, shrieking out against God 
 and holding out his broken heart as something to be pitied, he 
 owns that what he suffers serves him right ; that he has left the 
 boundary, broken the law, degraded himself, and has been 
 degraded. That is the look you ought to take of " Don Juan," 
 instead of looking into it for something as foul as yourselves. If 
 you take that view, the book rises into splendour and almost 
 sanctity. It becomes a warning to you, and contains the com- 
 mandments, written anew, and by a poet who has broken them, 
 and who put them into fluent verses, so that men are charmed into 
 the reading of them. 
 
 In conclusion, I have vindicated both Pope and Byron, because 
 they had sound sense, true manhood, and an admirable way of 
 expressing their sense. They were artists in the best sense ; for 
 they never gave rough sketches, unfinished works, sloppy be- 
 ginnings, scratches, enigmas, or puzzles, but they gave true and 
 perfect works. The third and fourth cantos of " Don Juan " are 
 as good workmanship as any poet has turned out yet ; they are 
 unsurpassed in flow, scarcely surpassed in subject. . These two 
 poets turned out as much admirable work, each in his own way, 
 as any poet except the unapproachable one has ever yet 
 done.
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 
 BORN 1775. DIED 1834. (FROM 15x11 GEO. III. TO 4x11 WILLIAM IV.) 
 
 A MONGST the many ways in which a man may estimate his 
 ** love or respect for those who are departed, there is one 
 which is a quaint one, and that is, to ask himself for the sake of 
 what man he would like to be a little older in order to have seen 
 and known him in the flesh. There are some men I would not 
 like to have lost a tooth, or gained one gray hair, to have seen. 
 I am quite content that Napoleon Bonaparte died a little after I 
 was born ; I would not be a week older in order to have seen him. 
 But I do regret that I have never known Coleridge in the flesh. 
 One thing I remember of him, and that is going to hear an oration 
 on Coleridge, by a man on whom his mantle was said to have 
 fallen ; and the man was there, but not the mantle. I am happy 
 to have seen Wordsworth, and I pay respect to my own right 
 hand because it has been in the grasp of that immortal, glorious, 
 and holy poet. I think myself the better for the sweet chance 
 that took me to Rydal Mount, to have for a guide round the 
 place the only proper guide that could be had Wordsworth 
 himself; and because I have heard that great poet pour forth 
 page after page of his own verses, descriptive of the glorious 
 scenery from which he drew so much of his inspiration. I am 
 proud, too, of having listened to Edward Irving. But if there is 
 one man I would fain have been a little older to have seen, it is 
 Charles Lamb. That man was one of the most heroic of modern 
 times, when rightly understood ; one of the gentlest, tenderest, 
 rarest, and most delicate of English humorists, one of the sweet- 
 est of writers ; but, above all, one who taught heroism in lowly 
 places, who bore poverty for holy reasons, whose life was, upon 
 the whole, one of the noblest of modern date. 
 
 Born in 1775 in the Inner Temple, all his early days were cast 
 amongst the quaint places of London. You step out of Fleet Street
 
 236 Charles Lamb. 
 
 into one little gateway ; modern times are gone, and the Church 
 of the Old Templars greets you. Then, on the other side, you 
 step into the gloomy sanctuary of Gray's Inn. Lamb, who was to 
 live more in the eighteenth than the nineteenth century, could 
 not have been born in a better place. Crown Office Row was 
 the place of his birth. His father had three children. The 
 eldest, John, of very little good, was twelve years older than 
 Charles, and Mary ten. The father was clerk to a Mr Samuel 
 Salt. He was a barrister ; a bencher of the Inner Temple ; a 
 very gentle, dull man ; a briefless body, who had plenty of time 
 to walk up and down, and have his portrait drawn in the style 
 Lamb did it. When Charles was seven or eight years old, he 
 went to Christ's Hospital. Just the school for him. The spirit 
 of modern times has thrown it open to the gaze of the Goths ; in 
 old times it was the sanctuary. It was the very place to develope 
 the peculiarities of Lamb's genius. He remained at school from 
 1782 to 1789. 
 
 His name determined his nature. A man's name very often 
 determines his destiny. There are names against which a hero 
 cannot fight ; and there are other names which, to carry up and 
 down in the world, ought to cover a multitude of sins. There 
 are names which make lads the butt of a school, and turn them 
 cynics in old age. The name of Lamb sank down into the gentle 
 soul ; and he said of himself, " No deed of mine shall shame 
 thee, gentle name." Lamb by name, lamb by nature, was that 
 man. Everything about him helped to shape his nature. The 
 old Temple his birthplace, Christ's Hospital his school, gentle by 
 name (and, as a Shandean, Lamb believed there was great virtue 
 in his name), feeble his body, modest his spirit, stuttering his 
 tongue. It was a gracious stammer, not that which repels, one 
 that interested those who heard it; just a gentle hesitancy, a sort 
 of getting ready what was to come. It was often, with him, that 
 which lent a piquant charm to some of his sweetest jests. Lamb 
 was the father of many jokes that have gone abroad and owned 
 other parentage. It was little Lamb who, when Mary was 
 walking with him in a churchyard, looked up and said, " Where 
 do the naughty people lie?" Because he read in the church- 
 yard you know what a churchyard is like that there slept the 
 patriots ; there the husbands, who never sighed for divorce ;
 
 Charles Lamb. 237 
 
 there the wives, whose whole life was devotion ; children, who 
 kept the commandments; people who died, leaving irreparable 
 losses. But where were the devil's own? We are obliged to 
 ask, like Lamb, "Where do the naughty people lie?" 
 
 The lad was amiable, gentle, over-sensible, quaintly observant. 
 He had a clear brow, a mild countenance, and eyes not quite the 
 same colour. There is much meaning in this difference between 
 the colour of his eyes. A man sees things in different-coloured 
 ways. Those who have the misfortune of uniformity, why to them 
 there is not so much colour in life, as compared with a man with 
 a blue eye and a dark eye. Such a man has two ways of looking 
 at a thing. He has no need to pick up a piece of coloured glass 
 to make the world look different. When Lamb looked out of one 
 eye, life was all Claude Lorraine ; when he glanced out of the 
 other, life was all gloomy. He had clearly two ways of looking 
 at things, and a great deal in his works may be traced to that* 
 He had a slow and peculiar walk. He was not a boy for sports, 
 nor for the noise of boys. At school they always called him 
 Charles Lamb, never Lamb, and he himself was proud of it, 
 holding that there must be something amiable in all men who 
 were lovingly called by their Christian names. When he went 
 home on the gracious half-holidays, he returned to the same 
 quiet Temple. There he was turned into a fair and delicious 
 pasture, a closet full of good old English books, where he 
 browsed at will. He had in after life a holy horror of Mrs 
 Trimmer, and the whole school of enlightened writers of feeble 
 moralities for children. He rejoiced that he had read books 
 that were not proper. He exulted that he had conversed in 
 spirit with the grand old English novelists, where he found 
 goodness (not goodiness) ; strength and robustness, instead of 
 that little feeble kind of child's literature that seems to be the 
 product of a joint-stock effort a sort of a cross between a con- 
 sumptive curate and a young woman who knows nothing of the 
 world. 
 
 Lamb could not go to college, because the delivery of orations 
 
 was a necessary preparation, and he stuttered. He first got a 
 
 clerkship in a South-Sea house, and then, at seventeen years of 
 
 age, he got a berth in the East India Company's service, in 
 
 * Charles Lamb, though no oculist, would have been surprised to learn this.
 
 238 Charles Lamb. 
 
 Leadenhall Street. The very name of the street must have 
 pressed upon him, and was enough to make the work odious and 
 hateful. There he went as a clerk; salary small. Then his 
 father went to live in lodgings at 7 Little Queen Street, Holborn, 
 one of the dullest streets in creation, a street to depress a 
 man's soul. Lamb's mother had fallen into sickness, and was 
 bed-ridden. Poor Mary Lamb was tired out with the nursing 
 and needle-work. What a picture of dreariness the father fast 
 becoming imbecile ; the mother totally bed-ridden ; the sister 
 tired out ; John Lamb at a distance ! John, the elder brother, 
 called occasionally, but did not care to call often upon people 
 who were poor, and shabby, and dull, and moping, and melan- 
 choly. Mary bore it well; for, of all women in the world, she 
 was one of the most thoroughly devoid of selfishness. His father 
 had a little pension during the life of Mr Salt. An old aunt who 
 had an annuity threw it into the common fund ; but even then 
 the fund was small. 
 
 Into this melancholy house, this sad family, there then came a 
 calamity which, had it fallen into the hands of one of the old 
 Greek dramatists, ^Eschylus or Euripides, there might have been 
 framed of it one of those terrible plays of destiny, fate, and doom 
 that would have astonished the world. If it had happened in 
 Judea, men would have flocked around Christ to know "who had 
 sinned, this man or his parents, that such a calamity should have 
 fallen upon their honest poverty?" Insanity was hereditary in 
 the family. Charles himself had a touch of it, and was in an 
 asylum at Hoxton for a short time. His residence there he 
 mentions with sad humour in his works. Poor Mary inherited 
 the malady to a greater extent than Charles, and she had been 
 repeatedly attacked. On the 23rd Sept. 1796, frenzy came upon 
 her, and she took up a knife and chased her little apprentice 
 girl round and round the room ; seized the dinner-forks, hurled 
 them wildly about, wounded her father with a fork in the forehead, 
 and finally, mortally stabbed her own mother with a knife. 
 'Charles Lamb was there. He snatched away the knife. His 
 poor father was wounded ; the aunt lay apparently dead on the 
 floor ; the mother stabbed to the heart. And this was the dark 
 cloud that hung for ever over that tender, gentle, and noble soul. 
 The inquest was held : there was a verdict of lunacy, and poor
 
 Charles Lamb. 239 
 
 Mary Lamb had to be shut up for a while for safety. When she 
 recovered, and knew what she had done, she settled down into a 
 calm and serene grief. Her serenity was not" indecent or forget- 
 ful; it was the wise serenity of a faithful soul and a pure 
 conscience, knowing that what had been done was done in the 
 dark, and would not be condemned by those who looked upon it 
 in the light. With very short intervals she was subject to these 
 attacks. She lived to be eighty-two, and was never long free from 
 the malady. 
 
 In one or two of the earlier biographies of Lamb there is no 
 mention of this tragedy. Either the writers did not know oi it, 
 or from a wise reticence abstained from mentioning it ; for poor 
 Mary out-lived her brother. Or it may have been the silly 
 reticence by which men thought they did their hero service. 
 But whatever the cause of the omission, Charles Lamb's life is 
 unintelligible without that incident dull, commonplace, and 
 meaningless, until the lurid light of that awful story dawns upon 
 it. Knowing that, the continual flashes of his wit are seen to 
 be an endeavour to escape the gloom around him. The devotion 
 of his life is intelligible ; it is plain that he gave up all, in order 
 that he might wait with wondrous love upon his poor sister who 
 had been so good to him. The telling of that story enables us to 
 understand many things in his daily life. His inordinate love ot 
 tobacco ; and a failing that has been vastly exaggerated, his lifting 
 the glass too frequently to his lips ; all these things look different 
 in the light of that life-long sacrifice of love and tenderness to his 
 smitten sister. In the light of this calamity he was a hero, a 
 saint. Hearing of this, it is unnecessary to ask what creed he 
 held, what meeting-house he frequented. He had got so much to 
 do, that he had not much time to prate about religion. He was 
 a Unitarian, and avowed it later in life. He had got so much 
 practical divinity to get done ; he had to sell all and follow 
 Christ in nursing that poor sad sister of his. And he did it. He 
 laid down all things in order that she might never miss a faithful 
 arm upon which to lean. 
 
 What a plight for a young man of twenty-one to be in, alone ; 
 the lather quite imbecile ; the mother sleeping in her untimely 
 grave. Brother John was pretty comtortable, but he didn't ouen 
 look in, and when he did he shuddered and went away. There
 
 240 Charles Lamb. 
 
 was the old aunt, with her small income, but it was of very little 
 help. What was the poor lad to do ? He had the whole weight 
 of the family upon him, and he gave up even his love, that it 
 might not interfere with his devotion to his sister. There was a 
 girl who hovered about him shadowily, but he gave it up. If he 
 spent an hour pleasantly with a friend without his sister, he was 
 troubled with compunctuous visitings on her account. So in- 
 tensely, heartily, and thoroughly did he become her father, 
 brother, guardian, friend, that he said, " There is something of 
 dishonesty in any of the pleasures I have without her." When 
 she had one of her attacks upon her, he said, " Her rambling is 
 better than the sense and sanity of the world." 
 
 Who can read that story without calling to mind Olney? 
 There we see that gracious William Cowper, and that glorious, 
 saintly Mary Unwin, who gave up everything to wait upon him, 
 and nurse his sad soul, and watch him. When we read that 
 story, we began to think that, somehow, woman had the best of 
 it in nursing and watching ; but when we get to little Queen 
 Street, Holborn, we find that man can do it too. Charles Lamb 
 gave up all that he might give his love to his sister. The debt of 
 man to Mary Unwin was repaid to woman by the gentle Charles 
 Lamb, and it is pleasant to picture him walking the holy courts of 
 heaven hand in hand with sweet Mary Unwin ; for they were of 
 one stock not of flesh and blood, but of spirit. They were both 
 souls that showed the might of holy human love and pure self- 
 denial, and demonstrated that death and the grave are weak in 
 comparison. Here was William Cowper insane, and Mary 
 Lamb insane ; Mary Unwin devoted, and Charles Lamb devoted : 
 let them join their noble hands, for such a glorious quartette never 
 walked the world before or since. 
 
 Lamb's father, old and imbecile, became impatient, and the 
 only pleasure he had was in playing cribbage. When Lamb 
 returned home, he had to join him in the game, and if he rose to 
 leave, the old man would say peevishly, " If you won't play with 
 me, you might as well not come home at all." " That argument," 
 Lamb says, " was never answered." He immediately sat down 
 and recommenced the play. Poor Mary Lamb knew when things 
 were about to go wrong with herself, and told her brother ; and 
 then soon after were to be seen the two walking along the streets
 
 Charles Lamb. 241 
 
 together poor Mary going voluntarily to Hoxton Asylum, and 
 Charles carrying the straight waistcoat. What a spectacle. I can 
 imagine nothing that looks sweeter, nothing that is purer. They 
 were shabby-looking people, and yet there is nothing in the wide 
 world more touching than that young brother, leading his stricken 
 sister to be shut up from the light and from the pleasant haunts 
 of man. Knocking at the door of the Asylum, Charles would say 
 to the attendants, " I've brought Mary again;" and in Mary went, 
 and the brother returned to his lonely, lonely house, with none of 
 his courage and faith lost. And all his life long he went back to 
 Hoxton to fetch her out again, and bring her home. When the 
 time came round for Mary to leave the Asylum, Charles was at 
 the door to receive her. How I should like to have seen him 
 then, as he welcomed back his sister, and as she again took the 
 hand of her best lover, her truest friend ! 
 
 The old man every day grew worse, and he died, and the 
 pension stopped ; then the aunt died, and her little contribution 
 stopped. But Lamb loved her, and he had said, indeed, that he 
 was always her favourite, and that she seemed glad to come home 
 to die with him. At this period Lamb's salary was ^100 a year, 
 but fifteen years later it was increased by ^20. It is wonderful 
 that he mentioned it. It enabled him to devote more to his 
 beloved sister she in whom was centred all his love, all his 
 tenderness, all his care, and all his devotion. When bereft of her 
 society, her aid, and co-operation, then began his perplexities. 
 She was, he said, older, better, wiser than he was ; therefore he 
 loved her. 
 
 Lamb had many noble friends. There was Southey, and there 
 was Jem White. The latter was continually giving treats to 
 chimney-sweepers, and that was possibly one reason why Lamb 
 was such friends with him. To queer people who wanted love he 
 poured his love out ; and the divinest love is that which is given 
 to the lowliest and those who want love most. Jem White was 
 a dear friend of his ; but he died, and Lamb felt it. However, 
 there was his friend Coleridge. Lamb knew him at the school, 
 and when he went away to Cambridge. With Coleridge Lamb 
 used to go to a little public-house, near to Smithfield. And 
 what do you suppose was the sign? The Royal Arms? No, 
 catch Lamb at "The Royal Arms." Was it the Queen's? 
 
 Q
 
 242 diaries Lamb. 
 
 Pshaw ! He left such places for the degenerate snobs of the 
 present day who have nearly taken down all the old sign-boards, 
 and left nothing rare, nothing racy, nothing rich, nothing English 
 about them in their application to the inn. The new signs make 
 me think they have all stepped out of the Court Calendar. The 
 inn Lamb went to was "The Consultation * and Cat." That was 
 Lamb all over. The Consultation comes down from the oldest 
 times. It makes me think of the old mediaeval houses, where 
 the old monks went, and the Father Abbot took refreshments. 
 But that would not do for Lamb ; there must be a contrast. By 
 what strange influence did those two names get together. Who 
 consulted the cat ? What was the consultation about ? Or what 
 cat was it that was consulted ? How came the cat to be consulted ? 
 Of all the inns in England, that was the only proper inn for 
 Charles Lamb to be in. Can you imagine him meeting Coleridge 
 at the " Royal Hotel " ? But there is a fitness about the " Con- 
 sultation and Cat." There, in a little smoke-parlour, those two 
 marvellous men sat down, smoked their pipes not cigars ; wise 
 men don't meddle with them and talked and communed together. 
 There Lamb stammered and stuttered, and there Coleridge 
 talked, and talked, and talked so much that on asking Lamb, 
 " Charles, did you ever hear me preach ? " he received the reply, 
 " I never heard you do anything else." Afterwards when Cole- 
 ridge went away to lose himself in German metaphysics, he left 
 the well-remembered note for Lamb " Poor Lamb, if he wants 
 any knowledge he may apply to me." Lamb did not quite like 
 this, and he wrote that extraordinary letter containing the famous 
 proposition for Coleridge to solve. But Coleridge also died, and 
 the tie of friendship was broken. For fifty years these great souls 
 had dwelt together in perfect unity ; and to say that Lamb had 
 been for fifty years Coleridge's friend was enough to hand his 
 name down. Wordsworth was also a friend of Lamb's ; Southey 
 was a close friend, and so was Lloyd Lloyd, a native of Bir- 
 mingham whom we must not forget, for he was one of the little 
 band of literary men that has shed some lustre on the not 
 inordinate brilliancy of the literary fame of Birmingham. Hazlitt 
 was his friend ; Godwin was his friend in fact, the great men ot 
 the day. I don't mean archbishops and bishops, and the like 
 chamberlains and big-wigs of that kind but all the men with 
 * Sahttation would spoil the context.
 
 Charles Lamb. 243 
 
 brains, or pretty nearly all, loved Charles Lamb, and were beloved 
 by him. 
 
 About this time Lamb thought of turning Quaker. It is 
 wonderful how many great men have had a similar notion. 
 Byron well, he did not threaten to turn Quaker, but he wished 
 mightily to turn a Quakeress. Wordsworth thought something of 
 the matter. Coleridge would have been a Quaker if he had not 
 attended a meeting. That did for him. It finished him ; 
 he got angry. He read, however, with avidity the books pub- 
 lished by the Quakers, and many will remember the neat, 
 chubby, little books, bound in grey, that were published by the 
 Quakers. 
 
 We have now got to the year 1800, when another misfortune 
 fell upon Lamb. Old Hetty died. Who was old Hetty? Per- 
 haps some of you have never known the luxury of an old servant. 
 They tell me there are no such things. I know better. You will 
 all remember the story of Dr Johnson kneeling by the death-bed 
 of the old Hetty of his day, giving her a pious kiss, and then 
 recording, " We parted firmly, hoping to meet again." And those 
 who know what an old servant is, know what a darkness falls 
 upon a house ,when the servant dies. Charles was alone at the 
 time ; poor Mary was in the asylum, and there was nothing there 
 but the dead body of Hetty. It is little to be wondered at that 
 in the anguish of that time he should give out that one piteous 
 wail "I am quite sick; I don't know where to look for relief." 
 
 "I almost wish that Mary was dead." This was the 
 
 one solitary cry of anguish that brave heart uttered. 
 
 We next find him removed to Chapel Street, Pentonville ; but 
 we will not trace his wanderings, but look at him again in the 
 Temple. Here he had another touch of love, but it did not sink 
 deep it was platonic. He became a total abstainer for a short 
 time, " limping painfully after his sister, who had taken to water 
 like a badger." Then there were the famous Wednesday evening 
 parties ; and the establishment of the London Magazine, to which 
 Lamb, De Quincey, Thomas Hood, the two Hares, Coleridge, and 
 others distinguished in literature contributed. We now find 
 Lamb in possession of a house of his own, removed above that 
 poor voteless wretch the mere lodger. Then there was his visit 
 to Paris. Whatever took him to Paris I cannot discover, and I have
 
 244 Charles Lamb. 
 
 been at some pains to find out. I think it must have been rest- 
 lessness. 
 
 After he and his sister came back from Paris, the next thing we 
 find him doing is going to Cambridge, where he met the girl who 
 afterwards married Mr Moxon, and to whom, after his poor sister's 
 death, he left the reversion of the .2,000 which he had saved. 
 
 After thirty years, Lamb's servitude at the India House was 
 making him very weary. He sat like a nightingale, he said 
 himself, with his breast against a thorn the desk. "Thirty 
 years," said he, "have I served the Philistines, and my neck is 
 not subdued to the yoke." He hated the India House, but he 
 did his duty there faithfully and well of course, according to the 
 standard of the times. It would not do to say that he never 
 wrote letters in the India House, that he never used Indian 
 stationery in order to write epistles to Coleridge, or that he 
 carried his own peculiar pen in his pocket in order to save 
 the nibs of the East India Company. But then there is a 
 standard of all things, and what is understood is not always 
 necessarily right or wrong. 
 
 The next notable thing in his life is his only quarrel, and that 
 was with his friend Southey, who wrote a review, in which he 
 endeavoured, as he said, to do Lamb good by fostering or pro- 
 moting the sale of the famous Essays of Elia, but in which he 
 mentioned that they were " defective in sound religious tone." 
 You all know what that means. You may as well charge a man 
 with heresy clean out, as say he is "deficient in soundness." It 
 is a favourite phrase with religious people. " Sound views." How 
 charming ! And then they talk about " sound port," and an 
 auctioneer speaks of a " sound estate." You all know that it is 
 more effectual to damn a man with mild pity, than to hit him 
 right out. Southey did worse than this he attacked some of 
 Lamb's friends, and this he could not stand. Lamb was not to 
 be pitied nor cajoled over from his friends. He loved and 
 honoured Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, and nothing could induce him 
 to say he did not. So he sat down and wrote the only letter of 
 his in which there was much gall a letter to Southey, defending 
 himself and his religious views, and his friends. If there was a 
 shadow of another quarrel, it was only when he got a little angry 
 with Coleridge, on a different ground altogether.
 
 Charles Lamb. 245 
 
 Then came his deliverance from the India Office. One day, 
 when Lamb was repining in that leaden East India House, with 
 fear and trembling he received an intimation that he was wanted 
 by the Directors in the parlour a place very similar to what is 
 called the " sweating-room " in a bank. Lamb feared they might 
 be about to dismiss him. But no ; they were very gracious, and 
 after a long preamble, he was told that the Board were profoundly 
 grateful for his patient services, and that he would be pensioned 
 upon two-thirds of his salary, which pension, to be quite correct, 
 amounted to ^441 per annum. Oh, the delight of Lamb at 
 being thus set free ! He immediately broke out into all kinds of 
 lamblike raptures. Poor little man his stutter was worse than 
 ever. He " stammered out a bow," he said, and left the office at 
 ten minutes after eight, and went home for ever. Among other 
 things he said, " If I had a little son, I would christen him 
 "Nothing-to-do ;" but as he had not, he would leave it to those 
 of his readers who had that most desirable ability. Lamb said 
 that there was about his new and free position an incomprehen- 
 sibleness that overwhelmed him " it was like passing from time 
 into eternity." And so it must have been. Let some of you who 
 have to grind at your offices from day to day, imagine leaving 
 them, not for a short time, but for ever and ever. Mary awoke 
 every morning with an obscure feeling that some good had 
 happened to them. Lamb gaily and quaintly wrote to a friend. 
 " Would I could sell you some of my leisure ! " What a great 
 thought this was, and how characteristic of the man. And then, 
 more lamblike than ever, he says, " Positively the best thing a man 
 can have to do, is nothing, and the next to that, perhaps, good 
 works." But the enchantment was shortlived. Lamb was not 
 old enough nor stupid enough to do nothing. He had only one 
 chin, and that is fatal to a man doing nothing. His brain was too 
 restless, his life too active to do nothing. It takes a very peculiar 
 man to do nothing well. Most of us have a fine talent for it by 
 fits and starts but early in life Lamb got restless, and sighed for 
 his melting days. 
 
 It was at this period that Lamb picked up a new friend one 
 of the marvellous men who surrounded him ; for it was the glory 
 of this man that he was beloved by every man of genius in 
 England during his lifetime of course with the exception of the
 
 246 Charles Lamb. 
 
 bishops and other high divines, who could not flutter around 
 a man like Charles Lamb. This new friend whose acquaintance 
 he made, and whose love he won, was that marvellous man, 
 Edward Irving, whose epitaph was written by the greatest man of 
 the present day Thomas Carlyle who said of him, " But for 
 Edward Irving, I had never known what communion of man with 
 man means. He was the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul 
 mine ever came in contact with, the best man I have ever, after trial 
 enough, found in this world, or that I hope to find." This man 
 became Lamb's friend ; but Lamb had got not very old, but 
 sufficiently old to pay the penalty of age. A man who lives long, 
 must, by-and-bye, live lonely. A man who climbs the heights of 
 life is like a man who climbs a high mountain ; he has much 
 company at the base, much folk half-way up, few towards the 
 top, none scarcely at the summit. Thus he went on walking 
 about, and his leisure began to weigh him down. The streets 
 and the shops, in his frequent walks to London, were always the 
 same dreary sight ; but his friends were gone. The very books 
 began to grow stale for Lamb was no reader of new books. 
 He had no curiosity to read " Waverley " ; he did not care for the 
 Latins and Greeks he never liked foreigners of any kind but 
 he had a certain range of old English authors among whom 
 he revelled. An enthusiastic traveller once brought him a 
 wonderful collection of acorns from Virgil's tomb ; but Lamb did 
 not care for them. What did he do with them ? Why, believing 
 that of all humbugs those were the greatest who went gathering 
 scraps of mortar and bits of dirt from great men's graves, he 
 sat in his window and pelted the hackney coachmen, with them. 
 
 Eighteen hundred and thirty came, and then another great man 
 died poor William Hazlitt (one of the great misunderstood and 
 little-loved men of our time) went down and made little sign. 
 He was a man of strong prejudices, a grand Nonconformist, who 
 cared nothing for society ; and society took its little, pitiful revenge 
 upon him by caring nothing for him not doing much harm to 
 Hazlitt, but infinite injury to society. 
 
 Lamb now gave up housekeeping; for his poor sister Mary 
 grew worse and worse, and her fitfulnesses became more frequent. 
 Lamb described the landlord with whom he went to lodge with 
 infinite and characteristic humour, saying, "T. W. is 70 years of
 
 Charles Lamb. 247 
 
 age ; he has something under a competence one joke, and 
 a year, upon which he retires in a green old age. He laughs 
 when he hears a joke, and when (which is much oftener) he does 
 not. He has served the greater parish offices, and I have become 
 greater by being his lodger." What a beautiful picture of 
 parochialism it is that Lamb should gain a greater glory from 
 living with a retired beadle ! The village people looked up not 
 to Charles Lamb, but to the ex-churchwarden's lodger. Lamb 
 said, referring to this part of his life, "We have settled down 
 into lodgers, confiding ravens." Anyone could say the first part 
 of the sentence, but Lamb only the last. 
 
 And now that he was in the country, why went he there? 
 It did not suit him, and he pined for the town. " Do not let the 
 lying poets persuade you," he said, "to quit the town. The 
 country is all very well by candle-light, alone with one's books ; 
 but daylight and the green fields return, and it is the same country 
 again." He was essentially a Londoner. 
 
 In 1833 he removed to a little nearer London, and in 1834 
 came the great calamity of his life ; for in that year Coleridge 
 died another stroke of the warning bell, and the saddest and 
 solemnest of them all. For fifty years Lamb had lived in com- 
 munion with that marvellous man, without dissension, without 
 quarrel (of any moment), without estrangement; and when he 
 died there came upon Lamb a great, sad blank. He wandered 
 about the house, now jesting, now weeping over Coleridge's death, 
 but always the same low undertone, " Coleridge is .dead ; Cole- 
 ridge is dead." And Lamb knew it was time for him to go too, 
 as it is with every man, when, as time draws on apace, he sees 
 Jacob's wondrous ladder, with lovers and friends ascending, but 
 no angels descending to cheer his lonely life. Lamb understood 
 it ; and thinking, doubtless, of these things, he wrote those won- 
 drous lines, the simplest, naturalest, homeliest, and most beautiful 
 of modern English lines, which it were shame to quote "The 
 Old Familiar Faces." 
 
 And now his sister Mary's health became worse and worse, and 
 he again removed to London. Lamb's own light flickered faintly ; 
 he suffered, but if he complained, it was with quaint pathos. " I 
 have," he said, " two bedfellows cough and cramp ; we sleep 
 three in a bed." At the end of 1834 it seems but the other day
 
 248 Charles Lamb. 
 
 he stumbled and fell, and although he was but slightly hurt, 
 erysipelas set in, and he died this glorious soul, this troubled 
 heart sank to rest. 
 
 It is only necessary to give one other word to Mary Lamb. 
 Her affliction increased, the intervals between her fits of insanity 
 became shorter, but she lived thirteen years after her brother's 
 death, provided for in comfort, to the last, by him. 
 
 Now a word as to his character, and then another as to his works. 
 One of the most notable things under the first head is that he saved 
 2,000, notable because few literary men, and especially literary 
 men with incomes as small as Lamb's was, ever saved anything like 
 so much. It is the more remarkable in his case because it will be 
 remembered that this man was impulsive and erratic, sorely tempted 
 by a sensuous body; a man who smacked his lips over roast pig, 
 was nice upon brawn, luxuriant upon tripe, and apostrophised all 
 sorts of drinks. But all through life he kept his expenses within 
 his income. If he wanted to buy a volume of the old dramatists, 
 he wore his coat a month longer ; if he must keep his sister he 
 trudged instead of driving. He was a generous giver, and a warm- 
 hearted lender, yet he saved ,2,000, and a monument built of 
 these 2,000 pieces would be an honourable one in his case, 
 because every piece was saved by faithful conscientious dutifulness 
 out of poverty, threadbareness, and sadness, extending over thirty- 
 three years of patient, faithful work. 
 
 Lamb is a man to be admired for his patience, his persistence, 
 and his much-enduring. He was a sort of modern Ulysses. His 
 adventures did not carry him very far afield, but he knew what it 
 was to be tied to the mast, to hear the Syrens sing ; he knew the 
 rocks ; he had his Scylla ; he, too, had seen Charybdis ; and he, 
 too, holding his faithful, steadfast soul through all, steered his 
 barque eventually into the haven of assured peace. Lamb was a 
 man who, of all others, glorified the common-places of life, of 
 which he saw many ; he had to put up with the second best, 
 except in company, where he had the choicest, dearest, and best. 
 When I think of the temptations which Lamb had, and how few 
 were his faults, I can but lift up my hands in ineffectual envy, and 
 bestow upon him what, after all, is but halting praise. There 
 never was a man who was better able to attract the sympathy, 
 love, and respect of every ingenuous nature and to all others he
 
 diaries Lamb. 249 
 
 closed himself. Knaves, rogues, fools, prigs, correct people, var- 
 nished people, little genteel people, people with small bundles of 
 moralities, and the people unable to understand the larger right- 
 eousness that creates law, to these he had nothing to say, or, if 
 he had, he had a fine joke at them and passed on. Lamb was a 
 creature all compact of love. He showed that he could fight 
 when his blood was up, by his conduct of the quarrel with Southey, 
 but he loved all men. Charles Lloyd's lines on Lamb are doubly 
 interesting in Birmingham, and describe his character truly 
 " prudent, mad, sorrowful and glad." He loved the lowly, and had 
 true humanity not the little philanthropic thing called humanity, 
 but humanity in the sense in which Shakespeare had it, whose 
 great heart was big enough for Lear's sorrows, Macbeth' s cares, 
 Hamlefs speculations, Falstaff's fun, Caliban, and the witches in 
 " Macbeth." Shakespeare's intense humanity enabled him to 
 ascend to the highest, to perch himself upon the loftiest peaks of 
 human feeling, and to come down gently and lovingly to the 
 lowest things, and live with them and love them. Lamb had this 
 humanity : there was nothing too great for him to grasp, nothing 
 too little for him to love. Lamb's humour was marvellously com- 
 bined with pathos ; his fun was the sparkle and ripple and foam 
 of a richly-running river of humanity, pity, and tenderness. He 
 was an intense realist he did not like schemes, large philanthro- 
 pies, distant missions ; he was fond of relieving a beggar, but did 
 not believe in schemes for putting an end to beggary. This 
 realism, this contentment with life was so strong, that even the 
 offers of a " New Jerusalem " had no charm for him. The word 
 "new" spoiled it. He preferred the old Jerusalem. He wrote 
 to Wordsworth, " God help me ! I am a Christian, an Englishman, 
 a Londoner, a Templar. When I put off these snug relations, 
 and go to the world to come, I shall be like a crow on the sand." 
 He was afraid of a world where the things he had known should 
 not be. When he returned to London, and found all his friends 
 had gone, he said, " I tried ten days at a sort of a friend's house, 
 but it was large and straggling, and I returned, convinced it was 
 better to get home to my hole in Enfield, and hide myself like a 
 sick cat in a corner." And so the end came. 
 
 Well, we have followed the life of Lamb with something of 
 minuteness, because there never was a man whose life and works
 
 250 Charles Lamb. 
 
 were so thoroughly mingled together. The great peculiarity of 
 Lamb's writings is, that whatever his thoughts were, whatever he 
 saw or observed passed through his mind, and came out in his 
 writings very different from what it was when he observed it, saw 
 it, or heard it. Therefore, as he never transmitted any ray of 
 light in the way in which he received it, it was necessary to be 
 more than usually careful in examining the medium through 
 which that light had to pass. We have seen that he was born in 
 the Temple, and educated in Christ's Hospital ; that he became 
 a clerk, living in a dreary street, in a sort of genteel poverty, with 
 a father gray and imbecile, and a mother who was bedridden ; 
 and then came that terrible tragedy which, not to know, makes it 
 impossible to understand Charles Lamb, or to do him justice, but 
 by which, when we know it, his life is lifted out of the common- 
 place into the heroic, and he becomes an embodiment of the 
 spirit of all that is chivalric, pious, religious, Christian. We have 
 followed him through his whole life, and that following teaches us 
 the great lesson, " Judge not, that ye be not judged." 
 
 His writings may be described as the union, in their finest, 
 truest forms, of humour and pathos. These points, with the fine 
 use he made, when necessary, of hyperbole, may be seen in many 
 passages of Lamb's letters and essays. Among the latter, the well- 
 known " Dissertation on Roast Pig," is one of the most perfect 
 examples of the essay in the language. He said everything as no 
 other man could have said it, and never said anything as any 
 other man would have said it. Though time has not sufficed me 
 to deal as I should have liked with the works of Lamb, I hope 
 that the few words I have spoken may be just sufficient to send 
 some of my hearers to renew their study of them, and to make 
 you do more justice to this glorious man than you could possibly 
 have done if you had not known the tragedy of his life, which 
 trampled upon him so heavily, but in such a manner that, like 
 sweet herbs when pressed under foot, he gave out some of the 
 finest fragrance and sweetest odour that ever man yielded to a 
 loving world.
 
 THE POETRY OF WORDSWORTH. 
 
 BORN 1770. DIED 1850. (FROM IOTH GEO., Ill TO IJTH VICTORIA. ) 
 
 HP HE subject chosen for the present lecture is one of quiet 
 character, in the course of which I shall not be liable to agi- 
 tate you with disputed or party questions. I propose to abstract 
 myself from such matters not shrinking from them in their due 
 place and time ; but confining myself as much as I am able (not 
 loving confinement much in the abstract) to the immediate 
 subject before us. 
 
 And first of William Wordsworth himself. He stands, as it 
 appears to me, a remarkable example in an age of mental dissipa- 
 tion, in an age of attempts at universalism, often ending in shal- 
 lowness as a fine example of a man devoting himself, during a 
 long life, sedulously and strenuously, to what he believes to be the 
 mission of that life. He believes himself to be a poet, and to 
 that he has kept himself closely ; and though some of us may be 
 inclined to doubt whether a man has a right to abstract himself in 
 scholastic leisure from the business of the world, the results in the 
 few peculiar cases appear to vindicate such a course. If a man can 
 find out that in him is a faculty for some special work, he has a right 
 to pursue that and that only; and as this principle will give us but 
 a minority of men, we can safely trust to the fruits of their practice 
 to justify them. It has been said by Thomas Carlyle that there 
 is a parallelism between Goethe and Wordsworth in this particu- 
 lar matter, their determined attention to self-culture and their felt 
 vocation. True, at first sight, the great German appears an un- 
 loveable and unmoveable character, with scarcely enough of en- 
 thusiasm for most men ; that is, measuring enthusiasm by the 
 amount of attention that a man can give to the things of the day. 
 With young men, especially, Schiller is apt to be a greater favourite 
 than Goethe ; but let us remember how Goethe set before himself 
 the culture of his being, the discharge of his appointed duty, there-
 
 252 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 by rebuking those who, under the plea of philanthropy, or in the 
 attempt at doing everything for others, neglect self-culture, and 
 showing them that if they would wait, and cultivate the faculties 
 within them, the future fruits would be more really beneficent and 
 beneficial to the world than anything that can come of racing 
 about at the call of every cause and interest of the day- 
 
 Wordsworth's beginning was amidst sneers and laughter, con- 
 tempt and ridicule. The critics of the day would have none of 
 his poetry ; they pronounced it drivel and moonshine madness. 
 The man believed otherwise, and he presents one of the finest 
 instances in modern times of a wise disregard of the opinion of 
 others, when that opinion is opposed to deliberate and conscien- 
 tious conviction, a disregard which all men who strive to stand 
 before their brethren, not dumb, but speaking, should cultivate 
 from the beginning ; for whosoever will suffer himself to be moved 
 by every criticism, jest, sneer, or idle remark, will be like the 
 wave of the sea, tossed to and fro ; will become unstable as 
 water, and, therefore, will never excel. This man is one of the 
 finest cases of it. Sustained by an inward law, by the conviction 
 that his theory was right, he could afford to wait until public 
 opinion should roll round to him. He was not going, lackey- 
 like, to dog the heels of public opinion ; and, by altering his plan, 
 or adopting popular clap-trap, or yielding to prejudices in any 
 wise or fashion, to run after that approbation which was withheld. 
 He believed he was right ; that his theory of poetry was the true 
 theory true it was to him ; and he could bide his time. Sun- 
 like, he remained still, and the world has revolved to him, until 
 now he is felt to be the greatest luminary of this our modern 
 poetic world. For, verily, the thinking men admit that he is the 
 primate of all England, primate in the best sense of the word, 
 primate of those who have cultured thought, primate of those who 
 by age, character, and venerableness, by having done good service 
 to the common-weal, deserve well thereof. And this change has 
 been brought about by little alteration on his part. It may be 
 true that here and there some half expression, or weak passage of 
 his early poems, has been amended or left out, because deeper 
 experience showed him that they were juvenile errors ; but he has 
 made little change besides. In this peculiar course it appears to 
 me that Wordsworth does claim study, attention, and admiration,
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 253 
 
 by giving to every man a lesson that if he should work by a law 
 from within, upon principles thoughtfully arrived at, then to that 
 course he must hold on, say what men will, or come what may. 
 By way of a literary curiosity, I will read an extract from The 
 Edinburgh Review, to show the mode in which it speaks of 
 Wordsworth : 
 
 "This will never do. It bears, no doubt, the stamp of the 
 author's heart and fancy ; but, unfortunately, not half so visibly 
 as that of his peculiar system. His former poems were intended 
 to recommend that system, and to bespeak favour for it by their 
 individual merit ; but this, we suspect, must be recommended by 
 the system, and can only expect to succeed where it has been pre- 
 viously established. It is longer, weaker, and tamer than any of 
 Mr Wordsworth's other productions, with less boldness and 
 originality, and less even of that extreme simplicity and lowliness 
 of tone which wavered so prettily in the lyrical ballads, between 
 silliness and pathos. We have imitations of Cowper, and even of 
 Milton, here, engrafted on the natural drawl of the Lakers ; and 
 all diluted into harmony by that profuse and irrepressible wordi- 
 ness which deluges all the blank verse of this school of poetry, 
 and lubricates and weakens the whole structure of their style." 
 " A tissue," it says again, " of moral and devotional ravings, in 
 which innumerable changes are rung upon a few very simple and 
 familiar ideas ; but with such an accompaniment of long words, 
 long sentences, and unwieldly phrases, and such a hubbub of 
 strained raptures and fantastical sublimities, that it is often 
 extremely difficult for the most skilful and attentive student to 
 obtain a glimpse of the author's meaning, and altogether im- 
 possible for an ordinary reader to conjecture what he is about." 
 
 This was the order of criticism upon Wordsworth's poems, and 
 we naturally ask, what it is in these poems that provoked such 
 hostility. It has been said, and I think with truth, that if the 
 poems had not been accompanied by a theory, and a defence of 
 that theory, they would scarcely have received all this severe 
 criticism ; that the weak lines would have been set aside, and the 
 many beauties of the poetry as a whole would have redeemed it. 
 But Wordsworth propounded a theory, one that was to effect a 
 revolution in the poetry of the day. This came just after an age 
 of English poetry, when men manufactured verses. Some of you
 
 254 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 will remember the art of making verses at school and college, 
 where, by the use of the Gradus ad Parnassum, any extent 
 of verses, upon any possible subject, might be manufactured. 
 You know the mode. Having to write about spring, the Gradus 
 is taken up, the said word "spring" is looked out, and there 
 follow it sundry lines from Latin poets. By borrowing half a line 
 from Virgil, a quarter of a line from Horace, and putting in a 
 synonyme, borrowed from the same book, you eke out a tolerable 
 line, and this is "poetry." Now, to a great extent, English 
 poetry became like this. It was easy to get set epithets for any 
 and every possible occasion. A study of Gray or Darwin, and 
 other poets of the time, would give you just the proper epithet to 
 be applied. If any of you will take the trouble to look through 
 the English poetry of that time, you may draw up from it a 
 dictionary of phrases which would form a cant dictionary of 
 poetry. In the same way (as I have shown on a former 
 occasion *), almost every profession amongst us has its own 
 vocabulary ; and I have indicated how the journalists have their 
 cant phraseology ; how, if a man is burnt to death, he " falls a 
 prey to the devouring element " ; if drowned, he " meets a watery 
 grave" ; or if he is hung, he is "launched into eternity." And so 
 they run on, ringing their little changes, these being the stock 
 phrases which come in apt to the occasion, and, like symbols, 
 stand for things not expressed, and oftentimes not understood. So 
 almost all religious sects have their peculiar vocabulary too ; and if 
 the veriest barn used for public worship is to be enlarged, a man with 
 a grave face tells you they are about to " lengthen their cords and 
 strengthen their stakes," that being the orthodox mode of expres- 
 sion. This may also be done with poetry. Take the word "sun" for 
 instance ; open the page in our dictionary, and you find it is " the 
 golden fire of reddening Phoebus " ; the song of birds is " amorous 
 descant" ; grass is "green attire"; the produce of the earth, corn 
 and such like, is " the earth's wonted tribute," and so on ; " Attic 
 warblers," "Nature striking the lyre," "new-born flocks in rustic 
 dance, frisking blythe- their feeble feet." And so, instead of 
 natural and forcible words, we have this feeble, semi-classic, semi- 
 barbaric slang. So when a man prays, he never uses the word 
 " wife " ; it is always " partner in life," " yoke-fellow," or " help- 
 * See the Lecture on Cowper.
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 255 
 
 meet," anything but the good, simple, English word, "wife." 
 Or, when a man is gone abroad, he is never prayed for that he 
 may be preserved " upon the sea," but " upon the mighty waters," 
 or "the great deep." When these things are used genuinely, 
 when they bubble up from fresh feeling, who can object to that? 
 But when feeling deserts them, and, like ready-made garments, 
 they can either cover a skeleton or a living body, we must begin 
 to object to them. Nor were these faults confined to poetry. 
 Artificialness and finery were the characteristics of almost every 
 phase of life in those times ; and as the French revolution came, 
 and revolutionised dress, and thinking, and manners, and govern- 
 ment, so there came poets who revolutionised as strongly, and at 
 first as obnoxiously, the whole of this strange artificial dress of 
 metaphor and simile, mis-called poetry. Such was Wordsworth. 
 He was one of these great revolutionists, though by no means the 
 first. Cowper had done it in his measure, and Burns had also 
 done it discarding, to a great extent, this borrowed finery, and 
 talking poetical thoughts in good, simple, plain language. 
 
 But think how such a revolution would look to one of the 
 critics of the time ? I remember once seeing at a railway station 
 a party of men, one of whom had got sundry stripes of red cloth 
 on his dress, and seemed to think himself the largest man of the 
 party ; and another was a young man. In the course of their con- 
 versation, there came to this young man a woman, plain in appear- 
 ance and but shabbily attired. She saluted the young man, being 
 to all appearance his mother, and he leaving the town for a dis- 
 tance, and the others with him being his companions also taking 
 leave of him. On seeing the woman, there came from Red-stripe 
 and his fellows, one of those wicked winks and low malicious 
 sneers, with which a veritable vulgarian treats the exhibition of 
 any true, original, holy, and native feeling of the human heart. 
 But to the young man's honour, not being yet corrupted to the 
 extent that they were, he turned to this lowly-looking woman, as 
 to one who had just claims upon him, and as one who, having 
 risen himself, was not ashamed of the lower round of the ladder 
 by which he had climbed. He did not desire to kick it from him, 
 that fools might think he had reached by a single bound the 
 elevation which had cost him many long and laborious hours to 
 arrive at. Those winking folks remind me of the critics of
 
 256 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 Wordsworth's poetry. His rustics, beggars, leech-gatherers, &c., 
 were mauvais ton ; they ought not to come into good society. 
 And the Edinburgh Reviewer winked, and looked as if he 
 wondered how a poet ever could be found in such low and vulgar 
 company. In order to gain some idea of the horror with which 
 his earlier poetical productions were regarded, we have but to 
 analyse our own feelings when some one comes into our presence 
 in a dress decidedly out of the mode. Unless the fashion is set 
 by some great one who has a right to do it, we feel ourselves 
 bound to show dislike to any such attempts to intrude upon what 
 is orthodox and proper in the imperial domain of fashion and 
 propriety. Now Wordsworth did so offend against the fashion. 
 Poetry was duly tinselled and tricked out with its metaphors, to be 
 dressed & la mode. In the hands of Pope and others poetry had 
 forsaken nature and become artificial even its speech betrayed 
 it. Wordsworth came among them shorn of the fair-lined silver 
 " properties " of the time, cut down to an antique simplicity of 
 costume the flowing robes of state and ceremony were not there; 
 the train was missing, the train-bearer was not in attendance ; the 
 whole looked poverty-stricken and bare. Under this poverty- 
 strickenness and bareness, the sharp-sighted for heresy, the lynx- 
 eyed for a dangerous tendency, saw deep and deadly designs, 
 revolutionary principles, and republican doctrine. The critics at 
 once condemned this man as a driveller, as a semi-idiot, as one 
 who was not to be endured, and whose attempts at poetry were 
 to be ruthlessly laughed down. Happily the man was not moved; 
 he held on his way rejoicing, confidant that he was right. 
 
 Now this confidence should make us look deeply into its cause, 
 for in either of two cases it is a strange phenomenon. Either 
 the man had a theory which was true, and its truth bore him up, 
 or he had a theory which he believed to be true. It is worth our 
 study, if the thing was true, to ascertain the truth ; and if he only 
 fancied it was true, to see how such a man could possibly fancy 
 it to be true. 
 
 Probably most of you are acquainted with the preface which 
 lays down the principles of Wordsworth's poetry. In the criticism 
 of Wordsworth, as of most other books, style is the great matter. 
 If any one wants to write a critique on a man's works, he must 
 not trouble himself much about his thoughts. No, no ; go to
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 257 
 
 style ! The great matter is the length of his words, the place of 
 his commas, whether he uses colons or semi-colons ! Never mind 
 whether he thinks or not, if there are words, good and proper 
 Addisonian or Johnsonian words. The first outcry against Words- 
 worth was against his language, provoked, no doubt, by himself, 
 because a large part of his theory was a theory of poetic language. 
 He pointed out that what was called " poetic diction," which 
 would be found plentifully illustrated in the poems of Gray, 
 Darwin, and others of that school, was to be forsaken, and a 
 selection was to be made of the real language used by men in 
 real life. Much criticism on Wordsworth's language would never 
 have arisen if there had been a truer idea of the difference 
 between poetry and prose : that properly they are not antitheses 
 one to another. So far has error on this point gone, that if we 
 open a book and see that the printing only occupies part of the 
 page, like a stream meandering down the middle, it is called 
 "poetry." If it is a multiplication table set to rhyme for the 
 benefit of infant school children, to be duly chanted by them, it 
 is called "poetry." Never mind the thoughts. Hence we are 
 deluged with trash under the name of poetry, which would not be 
 so if the proper antithesis was understood, that the distinction 
 between prose and poetry is not a mere formal one, but a distinc- 
 tion between mere fact or science, and truth clothed by feeling 
 and imagination ; between what Bacon calls the lumen siccum, 
 and this lumen coloured by passion, emotion, feeling. For it is 
 denied that anything is poetry which is not in thought poetic ; 
 and if we will acknowledge that some of our greatest living and 
 past poets are prose writers, then much of this discussion concern- 
 ing Wordsworth's poetry need never have arisen. When men 
 make this wide and artificial distinction between prose and poetry, 
 the next stage is to appropriate a particular language to poetry in 
 the same way as, with any art or science, we appropriate to it in 
 course of time a technical dialect. There are cases in which 
 these technical dialects are of exceeding value. Every trade 
 should have its own, because it is unwise to adopt a circumlocu- 
 tion when a few short expressive words will explain the whole. 
 But when it is not a trade, not the affair of a mere section or 
 clique, but of humanity, we should always beware of adopting a 
 technical dialect. Wordsworth maintained that poetic thought
 
 258 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 was to be expressed in the ordinary language of man ; and, in so 
 doing, he was supported and backed by the greatest of poets. 
 He instanced himself Chaucer, the most beautiful parts of whose 
 works were those which would appeal to all, and which were 
 written in such simple words that we could understand them to 
 this day without dictionary or glossary. Throughout almost 
 all our great poets, the grandest thoughts are in simple and plain 
 words. There are but few passages of Shakespeare, and those 
 few not of the highest import, that are not expressed in the plain 
 and simple words of ordinary life. Still, to advocate this as a 
 theory was another matter, and it was the theory that was the 
 most attacked the poems, as illustrations of the theory, coming 
 in for the dislike and abuse of the theory. 
 
 Now, which is the right in this question ? Do men, under the 
 influence of strong passion, use the dialect which I have illus- 
 trated from the works of Gray [p. 223] ? This is a kind of mosaic 
 borrowed from other lands and times; expressive and beautiful 
 when it first arises into being, at the beck and summons of 
 original feeling and passion, but artificial, strained, and non- 
 natural when it is merely borrowed and tacked on to feelings, 
 instead of being, as it were, born, called for, and instituted by 
 their presence. In the common mode, the thought is sacrificed 
 to the words. Look at the couplets of Pope, for instance, in 
 which there is a sort of necessity that the voice should rise just 
 half way through the line ; a sort of see-saw, the middle of the 
 line serving as a pivot. All this Wordsworth set aside. He took 
 plain and simple words, advocating that a selection should be 
 made by which words of local and temporary interest, words 
 essentially vulgar, should be left out, and that the words chosen 
 should be those ordinarily used by men. It would be foolish, 
 Wordsworthian fanaticism, to assert that there cannot be found 
 in his poems a single line in which he carried it to an extreme. 
 The tendency of the human mind is, when we are in opposition, 
 to go as far as possible, mentally see-saw. We have just been 
 down, and the next thing is to go up as far as we possibly 
 can ; and perhaps Wordsworth may have gone too far. He has 
 himself proved this; because a comparison of his first editions 
 with the later ones will show emendations and alterations of this 
 nature, the substitution of words more authorised for those pre-
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 259 
 
 viously used. If so, this shows that at first the poet over strained 
 his theory, rode his hobby too furiously and too long. 
 
 But, leaving -style, I will come to the serious and grave charges 
 made against Wordsworth's choice of characters. The Edinburgh 
 Review tells us of Wordsworth setting leech-gatherers upon " the 
 everlasting hills," and the impropriety of making noble sentiments 
 come out of the mouths of pedlars ; and he was abused as much 
 for this, almost, as for the simplicity and boldness of his style, 
 Here, again, it is possible to overdo. If a man makes a theory 
 by which simple emotion, passion, and feeling are only to be 
 found with the poor, he errs, because rank and fashion often-times 
 ill conceal a deeply feeling heart ; and it is the fanaticism of 
 liberalism to see no beauty, worth, manly feeling, no true piety 
 about a man, because he happens to be associated with rank and 
 state. But if I were asked upon which side the deepest feelings 
 of humanity are usually found in the greatest purity, and where to 
 find some of the best exhibitions of the holiest feelings of human 
 nature, I might in truth say, "with the poor," for it cannot be 
 doubted that the tendency of fashion, and the observance of 
 custom, is to shame men out of the holiness of original feeling, 
 and make them borrow rules from the code-book of Almack's, or 
 the science of Rochefoucauld or Chesterfield, whose maxims 
 often smother the simple hearty feelings of their original nature. 
 For it is at our peril that we put down a spontaneous hearty feeling 
 at the bidding of a man-made law. If a man be right-minded, well 
 cultured, truly a devoted and pious soul, his safety is in obeying 
 an inward law. The perfection of a character, it appears to me, 
 will be the safety with which a man can obey his first thoughts, 
 feelings, impulses, and emotions. I must not be misunderstood, 
 however. I do not say it is safe to obey our impulses, or that our 
 first thoughts are always to be trusted. I only say what an ideal 
 man would be ; that if we were true and natural, then it would be 
 safe to trust to first impulses and emotions. Not unfrequently it 
 is safer to do this than to go to the cold and worldly codes of trade 
 and fashion to borrow our laws ; for it is but to look round on 
 social life, and see how the fear of man works upon us : how we dare 
 not go there, and dr.rst not be seen walking in the streets with that 
 man ; how we must not shake hands with the other man, because he 
 would not pass muster in such a coterie. We must, if we follow
 
 260 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 the rules of worldly politeness, forget any humble relatives we may 
 have the misfortune to be connected with. If our own father 
 himself happens to be a poor plain man, should he come near us 
 in the street, it would be well-bred to become suddenly smitten 
 with the inscription on some sign-board over a shop door, or to 
 have a sudden business down the left-hand turning, and give him 
 "the cut" direct, rather than endanger our gentility, respectability, 
 ban ton, fashion, or whatever other name we may use under which 
 to cloak this strangling of the best feelings of the human heart. I 
 am willing to give the true worth to manners and customs, but we 
 must feel that in this age we sacrifice too much at their altars ; 
 that we are not manly enough, because we are over-fashionable ; 
 that the fear of man, which always was a snare, and always will be, 
 does much to take true feeling out of us ; to make us apes of 
 fashion, and the mere slaves of conventional rules. These rules 
 and laws seldom quite crush the heart, but still it is their tendency; 
 and therefore it is, that among the poor, or those least amenable 
 to Almackian codes, we must look for primitive feeling, original 
 sentiment, true, hearty emotions, in the purest and most unadul- 
 terated state. The poetry current at the time when Wordsworth 
 came, had forgotten this. It was a poetry which had forgotten 
 the reverence due to man as man. It received a strong rebuke 
 from the bard of Scotland when he taught that 
 
 " The rank is but the guinea's stamp ; 
 A man's a man for a' that." 
 
 But this sentiment had not yet made that progress necessary to 
 bring about the better time in which we live, when by degrees we 
 are reducing the undue estimation of the mere outward stamp, 
 and asking questions as to the metal itself. Wordsworth laid 
 down in his theory, that among the poor and rustic, the original 
 emotions were best to be found ; that, associated as they were 
 with the great forms of nature, they were the best study for the 
 poet ; that the language of these men was the most homely and 
 heart-felt, in consequence of their being the exponents of these 
 original emotions in the unadulterated state, and of being 
 associated with the great and everlasting forms of nature. 
 
 Now, if this be pushed over-much, it goes into an error on the 
 opposite side, If we say it is only among the poor that original
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 261 
 
 emotions are to be found, then shall we have the vulgar cant of the 
 democratic pothouse, instead of the true philosophical declamation 
 of a watcher of human nature. For if a man denies that there can 
 be any heart in the life of the rich, he is a fanatic on the side of 
 the poor. If, on the other hand, he denies that there can be any- 
 thing delicate, reverential, or noble in the poor, he is a fanatic 
 on the side of fashion and rank. It does not seem to me that 
 Wordsworth over-strained the matter. He never denied the 
 presence of right emotion and passion in the rich and cultivated. 
 He merely stated that his object was, in his poems, to illustrate 
 the connection between our ideas and feelings while subject to 
 emotion ; and that he found the states of simple emotion best 
 exhibited among the poor and the rustic. 
 
 Here, then, was his theory ; if it were to be made the unique 
 and only theory of poetry, it would be faulty, because of its par- 
 tialness. He was suspected of making it the only one, and of 
 saying that men were not to seek for examples or heroes anywhere 
 but among the poor. This he did not do. He saw that the 
 tendency of the poetry preceding him was to the worship of the 
 gaudy, the fashionable, and the grand, at the expense of the 
 simple, the lowly, and the humble. He sought to raise up the 
 lowly and the humble to their proper place, and to teach men, 
 that " out of the mouths of babes and sucklings God hath 
 perfected praise." Herein, as it appears to me, Wordsworth 
 stands one of the best exponents of that peculiar feature of the 
 Christian faith a faith originally preached to the poor, that 
 sought its first heralds in the poor a faith whose Master laid it 
 down as one of the criterions of his being the Christ that " the 
 poor have the gospel preached unto them ; " one whose dwelling 
 was with the poor, whose sympathy was with the poor, and the 
 whole of whose teachings are calculated to bring out from the 
 poor whatsoever of indwelling nobleness and truth may be in 
 them. The poet has done this, and therein has been a preacher 
 not in vain. He has shown us that there may exist, under forms 
 of poverty, as high wisdom as ever came forth from the lips of the 
 sage ; not making a confusion between knowledge and wisdom ; 
 not making the poor peasant discuss scientifically upon matters of 
 knowledge, but discourse devoutly upon matters of wisdom for 
 many a man who has little knowledge has much wisdom. The
 
 262 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 truly wise are not always to be sought in high places ; not where 
 there is purple and soft raiment, not in kings' palaces, but often- 
 times in the desert, beneath the garment of camel's hair, and 
 subsisting upon such fare as locusts and wild honey. It would 
 not, I think, present much difficulty to trace many peculiar 
 features of the times in which we live up to the poetry of Words- 
 worth, as one amongst many originating causes; for sure, bad 
 enough as we are, we have improved. We are less regardful of 
 the mere external circumstances of a man, and more and more 
 regardful of the inner life ; we are less worshippers of rank than 
 we used to be ; there is more real manliness amongst us than there 
 was; more treating of man as man, and not as man and something 
 else; more looking at the primary, common, essential elements in 
 us, rather than at the circumstantial and accidental clothing in 
 which we may happen to appear. This feeling, a righteous 
 feeling, has gained much influence from these very poems. By 
 drawing lessons of wisdom and instruction from the poor; by 
 showing that amongst the poor there often dwell noble souls ; by 
 putting into the lips of men, externally mean, sentences and 
 sentiments of wisdom ; this great poet has done much to over- 
 throw the mere vulgar respect for rank, which inquires not often 
 whether that rank be sustained and supported by true nobility, 
 true goodness, and righteousness of life. Herein, then, must all 
 honour him; and let no talk about his conservatism, let no idle 
 babble about his change of opinions, no such terms as "renegade" 
 and " turncoat " applied to this man, blind you to the fact that he 
 is one of the greatest teachers of the true doctrine, that circum- 
 stances are subordinate to spirit ; that it is not the accidental 
 whereabout of the man, his geography, trade, clothing, or 
 profession, that make the man, but what is within him ; what of 
 energy, force, and power he has, and can direct towards the 
 pursuit of the high and noble ends of life. It is easy to speak 
 against such a man as Wordsworth, with reference to his changes 
 of opinion ; but remember it is given to but few old men to lead 
 or breast the tide of opinion to the last. It is only here and there 
 that an old man appears young to his dying day. It is seldom 
 enough that men remember the advice of Lord Bacon, that old 
 men should associate and consort much with young ones, in order 
 that they may be kept abreast of the opinion of the time. There
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 263 
 
 is this peculiarity about Wordsworth, that he has always been in 
 opposition. In the days when liberal opinions were unfashionable, 
 Wordsworth was a liberal. When the preservation of things as 
 they were was held as a strict bond by many of the best men, his 
 was the hand to loose it ; and who shall say that that wise intellect 
 does not now deem that the time is come when these bonds have 
 been loosed too much, and that we have lost strength in becoming 
 too liberal? He may see it necessary now to rein in. Such has 
 been the history of many a mind. Added to this, there is also 
 the feeling of disappointment which he has so well expressed at 
 the course of the French Revolution, which blazed up to the 
 young spirits of the last century, so full of hope and promise. 
 Most of you know what the crushing of early hopes is for a man ; 
 what a tendency it has to make him bitter and sour, and to make 
 him apostatise, as it were, from some of his better thinking and 
 higher aspirations ; how, when a great hope goes out, and dies in 
 darkness, man is apt to lose sight of many of those stars which at 
 first gave him light. There may be many reasons, accounting for 
 the changes that have come over the mind of the poet. At any rate, 
 it never can appear to me right, that the major services of a man, 
 what he did in the full bloom of his strength, should, through any 
 change of opinion, be obliterated and forgotten. For my own 
 part, I would never suffer the early struggles of Henry Brougham, 
 on behalf of popular education and the rights of man, to be 
 sneered out or laughed out by any criticisms upon the strange 
 vagaries of his later life. Though one may allow a hearty laugh 
 at any man, provided there is no malice and spleen in it, we may 
 not laugh at a long life devoted to the people's cause, and to the 
 advancement of man. Neither, in the case of Wordsworth, 
 should any opinion which people may feel themselves called upon 
 to pass upon his recent poetry, his ecclesiastical sonnets, or upon 
 his political manifestations in parish politics, cause us to forget 
 that he has been one of the noblest sons of liberty. Some of the 
 most trumpet-tongued declarations in favour of freedom have come 
 from his pen. There they stand among his sonnets, the noblest 
 that ever were written, in words the most soul-stirring, in thought 
 the most free and liberal, that man ever uttered ; and I will say, 
 let no cant terms of "renegade," or "conservative," make us 
 lorget the high purpose to which his works are devoted, and those 
 great ends and aims which he has so much served.
 
 264 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 There is one epithet which, I think, should be applied 
 peculiarly to Wordsworth, and that is "high-minded" not, of 
 course, in the sense in which the word is reprobated in Scripture, 
 when we are told not to be lofty, proud, or above our neighbours; 
 but in the sense in which we say a man is of high principle, lofty- 
 minded. In such a sense the word should be used in speaking of 
 any man who, whether in writing, in the development of art, in 
 daily conduct, in trade, in morals, or in religion, is in the habit of 
 constantly referring his actions and deeds up to some acknow- 
 ledged principles, for that is the proper meaning of a high-souled, 
 high-principled, high-minded man ; a man who has some great 
 principles, which he believes with all his might to be true, and by 
 which he is constantly in the habit of testing his daily work. 
 Such is the case with the greatest of artists ; they have some high 
 principles, both as to their aim and the mode of fulfilling it, to 
 which they keep referring all their works. Such is the case with 
 some of the greatest musicians. Beethoven was a high-souled 
 musician, a man who had lofty principles of musical art, high 
 views as to what music should do for man ; not looking upon it 
 as a mere entertainment, a pastime, but as one of the true modes 
 of cultivating the spirit, of lapping it in Elysium, that it might 
 become strong through the temperature, and inhaling the pure 
 ambrosial air. This high-mindedness in literature will often be 
 found in some of our earlier writers, in some of our great divines, 
 in whom there is a continual recognition of deep principles, saving 
 them from any mere catering to the peculiar tastes or vanities of 
 the day in which they lived. This is the rule for the action of 
 everyone that strives to do his duty manfully and faithfully ; he 
 must have his code of principles, not to be thrust into his 
 neighbour's face authoritatively and damnatorily if he does not 
 hold them too, but to be kept in the inmost sanctuary of his soul 
 for daily reference, that every day's action may be brought up 
 to it, tried by it, condemned by it if found wanting. By this only 
 can a man's life be high and noble ; for whosoever has no such 
 code or set of principles for himself, will be like a leaf on the 
 breeze, driven now east, now west, in accordance with whatever 
 way public favour or popular prejudice may happen to set in. A 
 low-minded man is a man with no such principles, who works 
 from a rule supplied from without, or from the lower part of his
 
 The Poetry of Wordsivorth. 265 
 
 nature. Hence, how many politicians of past ages, demagogues, 
 mere flatterers of public opinion, present this melancholy spectacle. 
 They have no high principles to guide them ; no great inward 
 law, written upon the heart, to try their actions by. The people 
 will this to-day, and they will it too ; and on the morrow the 
 people change their opinion, and they change with them. The 
 people learn to condemn such men at last. The man who is 
 whatsoever you will have him, the chameleon-man who takes his 
 colour from the things that surround him, is always in the end 
 condemned. Such men are the unstable and wavering. Such a 
 man was never William Wordsworth. He presents to our con- 
 templation one of the finest illustrations of a man of high prin- 
 ciple. He had a code of peculiar principles, which are laid down 
 in his Preface. These he believed in his soul to be true. Up to 
 them he continually brought his works, and tried them, and from 
 them he wavered not. Therefore was his poetry high-minded, 
 full of lofty purpose, obedient to a design that can always be seen, 
 and that design not suffered to be interfered with, but propounded 
 as a standard by which to try himself. And so, we should sup- 
 pose, the life of the man and his present opinions are tried too. 
 It is not for us to say that he is not now true to his standard. 
 The standard may differ from ours ; but let the great question be 
 with us, not to blame one another so much for the principles we 
 hold, as for the departures of each from his own principles ; for 
 though it is of the utmost importance that a man should have 
 right principles, a little self-consciousness and stern watching of 
 ourselves will show that in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred, 
 the faults and sins we commit are in violation of some of our own 
 acknowledged principles. This is true, not in matters of litera- 
 ture and art only, but in matters of morals, of daily conduct, and 
 of religious or irreligious life. 
 
 In connection with this, you must be aware that Wordsworth is 
 pre-eminently pure-minded. How many a page of our poets, or 
 how many a line, must a truly pure-minded man wish removed ; 
 but who ever dreamed of presenting to the public an expurgated 
 edition or a family edition of Wordsworth ? Not that I advocate 
 such things ; not that I deem that much good is done by 
 asterisks in the middle of a page, telling where the mischief is, and 
 where to seek it, for this is the effect of expurgated editions.
 
 266 The Poetry of Wordsivorth. 
 
 What are those rows of asterisks but saying, " Here you will find 
 something naughty, if you will but go and look at the right place," 
 and all know how much of that primitive curiosity to know what 
 is naughty dwells in all of us. Many a man whose purity of 
 mind would have passed over the asterisked passage in safety, is, 
 by this advertisement, both induced and enabled to find the 
 naughtiness therein. This is a lesson that few learn. Brand a 
 m?.n or his doctrines with a naughty name, and then people go 
 expecting to find evil, and keenly watch for it Consequently, 
 these well-meaning dunces do their best to spread the very things 
 they profess to regard as the most obnoxious poison. Still, 
 the remark that no man dreams of an expurgated Wordsworth 
 sho\vs the absence of passages which even the most fastidious 
 could think impure. It has been well said, that what the Sabbath 
 is to the other six days of the week, so poetry should be to the 
 rest of literature. I believe it, and would say that the law holds 
 good of poetry " Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy." 
 If poetry be the Sabbath of literature, have our poets kept it holy ? 
 Is it not in many of them a Saturnalia of devilry, licentiousness, 
 and debauchery, rather than pure-mindedness, and that which 
 thinketh no evil, and will bear no stain? How many of our 
 poets have consecrated their talents to the service of licentious- 
 ness and shame ! How often has poetry been the vinum d&momtm, 
 which the philosopher of old would have banished from his divine 
 republic. But this is not the case with the book before us. The 
 purest saint might read it thoroughly without the faintest blush- 
 ing ; the most trebly-refined and saintly man could find nothing 
 over which to show his own super-eminent highness. These 
 books are pure ; there is nothing in them to blush at, or to make 
 any ashamed. And this does not come of mere negation. There 
 are some people who are proper, simply because they cannot help 
 it ; mere bundles of negations ; virtuous, because they are never 
 tempted ; and right, because they never get the chance of doing 
 wrong. This is not properly virtue, the quality of the man, the 
 true manly thing; that only comes of struggle and temptation. 
 True virtue is born where the opportunity of doing wrong is 
 resisted. Virtue, according to the true etymon, is the property 
 or quality of the manly soul ; and manly souls are not made in 
 cloisters, hot-houses, or glass cases, in which they are carefully
 
 The Poetry of WordsworJt. 267 
 
 kept from harm, dust, and soil ; but in the midst of temptation 
 and trial, and difficulty, and discipline, and work. Wordsworth's 
 purity is not that of negation ; not that which has been saved 
 only by having no chance of being lost. 
 
 II. 
 
 The next point to which I will direct your attention, with 
 respect to the works of Wordsworth, is his theory, or rather his 
 practice, with regard to Nature. 1 confess there is extreme diffi- 
 culty in settling how much Nature teaches the mind, or how 
 much the mind puts upon Nature. It would be difficult exactly 
 to settle what Nature does for a man. Some seem to expect that 
 what we call Natural Religion, the teachings of Nature, should come 
 in the shape of a sort of proposition, and because when they go out 
 into the moods of Nature they do not come home possessed with 
 some good set sentiment, as, " To be good is to be happy ; " 
 because they do not see sermons actually engraved in letters upon 
 stones, and words upon leaves, they assert Nature can do nothing. 
 Granted, that for some people it can do nothing. Take, for 
 instance, the man who stood opposite Ben Lomond and declared 
 that it was a "well got up thing." His little upholstery ideas he 
 carried forth into Nature, and put them thereupon ; Nature could 
 do naught for him. We will admit that to do anything here, 
 there must be attuning of the spirit to learn from Nature. Nature, 
 like the sun, will make a portrait only when the substance to 
 receive the impression has been duly prepared. Chemistry must 
 make the plate ready, that the impression may be effected in the 
 sun picture; and so with mental chemistry, the mind must be 
 prepared before the sunlight of Nature will write the teachings of 
 Nature thereupon. Men go to Nature with an unprepared mind, 
 and Nature's teachings fall dead and flat upon them ; but the poet 
 goes forth prepared to be taught by Nature, and, consequently, it 
 teaches him, not a set of axioms and propositions, but a state of 
 being, what is sometimes called a " frame " or a " feeling ; " for the 
 office of Nature is not so much to lay down propositions as to 
 bring over us states of being. 
 
 By-and-bye, I shall show this at greater length ; and the 
 importance that wise men ought to put upon being, upon the slate
 
 268 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 of the mind, upon the state of our spiritual health and atmos- 
 phere, upon those feelings of the mind which may be said to 
 transcend knowledge ; similar to that peace of which it is so beau- 
 teously said, that it " passeth understanding : " " the peace of 
 God that passeth understanding." It is not a thing of possession ; 
 it does not come by fingering ; but it comes over a man, like the 
 stillness of a summer eve, like the gladness of a clear, bright frosty 
 morning. It is not had for the asking. It is not had when we 
 are pursuing it, but when we are doing something else. This 
 peace and by this peace I will illustrate generally what Nature 
 can do for a man is not sought directly, but must come, like 
 health, indirectly. Take the case of the valetudinarian, the 
 health-seeker by profession, who has got the doctor's fingers 
 always upon his pulse the man who is everlastingly with his little 
 scales and balances weighing out the proper quantity of food, and 
 regulating with his little graduated glass how much drink he 
 should take ; the man whose whole talk is about health-seeking. 
 Compare him with the man working in the fields, who never 
 troubles his head about his health, having no indigestion, and 
 knowing nothing about his " system." The man seeking for 
 health seldom gets it. The valetudinarian seeks health as health. 
 Like Seged and his ten days of happiness. He sought happi- 
 ness for ten days ; and found it not, because he sought happiness. 
 The workman seeks work, works away, does duty, and health 
 comes. He seeks one thing ; another is, as it were, added. So 
 it is with peace. Seek for it as peace, and the chance is you will 
 not have it. Work away, do right, follow duty, and, in doing 
 your duty, peace, like health, will come. Now, this illustrates 
 somewhat the mode of teaching of Nature. It will lay down no 
 axioms, preach no sermons, with heads and divisions, lastlies, 
 finallies, and " to conclude," followed by the " improvement ; " 
 but it will bring a state of being, a quickening of spirit, and a tone 
 of mind. 
 
 In justification of the condemnation I have passed on the 
 poetry and other literature of the time immediately preceding 
 Wordsworth, I will read a quotation from Carlyle, in which he 
 says, speaking of this very point : 
 
 " Nay, the literature of other countries, placid, self-satisfied as 
 they might seem, was in an equally expectant condition. Every-
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 269 
 
 where, as in Germany, there was polish and languor, external 
 glitter and internal vacuity ; it was not fire, but a picture of fire, 
 at which no soul could be warmed. Literature had sunk from its 
 former vocation ; it no longer held the mirror up to Nature ; no 
 longer reflected, in many-coloured expressive symbols, the actual 
 passions, the hopes, sorrows, joys of living men ; but dwelt in a 
 remote conventional world, in ' Castles of Otranto,' among 
 ' Epigoniads,' and ' Leonidases,' clear, metallic heroes, and 
 white, high, stainless beauties, in whom the drapery and elocution 
 were nowise the least important qualities. Men thought it right 
 that the heart should swell into magnanimity with Caractacus and 
 Cato, and melt into sorrow with many an Eliza and Adelaide, but 
 the heart was in no haste either to swell or to melt. Some pulses 
 of heroical sentiments, a few unnatural tears, might, with con- 
 scientious readers, be actually squeezed forth on such occasions, 
 but they came only from the surface of the mind ; nay, had the 
 conscientious man considered of the matter, he would have found 
 that they ought not to have come at all. Our only English poet 
 of the period was Goldsmith ; a pure, clear, genuine spirit, had 
 he been of depth or strength sufficient : his ' Vicar of Wakefield,' 
 remains the best of all modern idylls ; but it is, and was, nothing 
 more. And consider our leading writers ; consider the poetry of 
 Gray, and the prose of Johnson. The first a laborious mosaic, 
 through the hard, stiff lineaments of which little life or true grace 
 could be expected to look : real feeling, and all freedom of 
 expressing it, are sacrificed to pomp, to cold splendour; for 
 vigour we have a certain mouthing vehemence, too elegant 
 indeed to be turbid, yet essentially foreign to the heart, and seen 
 to extend no deeper than the mere voice and gestures. Were it 
 not for his 'Letters,' which are full of warm exuberant power, 
 we might almost doubt whether Gray was .a man of genius ; nay, 
 was a living man at all, and not rather some thousand-times 
 more cunningly-devised poetical turning-loom, than that of Swift's 
 philosophers in Laputa. Johnson's prose is true, indeed, and 
 sound, and full of practical sense : few men have seen more 
 clearly into the motives, the interests, the whole walk and con- 
 versation of the living, busy world as it lay before him ; but 
 further than this busy, and, to most of us, rather prosaic world, 
 he seldom looked ; his instruction is for men of business, and in
 
 270 The Poetry of Wordsworth* 
 
 regard to matters of business alone. Prudence is the highest 
 virtue he can inculcate ; and for that finer portion of our nature, 
 that portion of it which belongs essentially to literature, strictly 
 so called, where our highest feelings, our best joys, and keenest 
 sorrows, our doubt, our love, our religion reside, he has no word 
 to utter ; no remedy, no counsel to give us in our straits ; or, at 
 most, if, like poor Boswell, the patient is importunate, will 
 answer, ' My dear sir, endeavour to clear your mind of cant.' " 
 
 After this, of course, it would be worse than superfluous for me to 
 attempt to say anything further concerning the state of poetry at the 
 time Wordsworth began to write. Wordsworth saw and felt this evil, 
 and it is only by our more or less understanding the state of the 
 case that we can understand those novelties of manner, of diction, 
 of the choice of heroes and of sentiments, which made his poetry 
 so eminently repulsive to the fashionable men, the admirers of 
 the mode of the day. It is easy for us to understand the perfect 
 disgust with which Wordsworth and his beggar troop were 
 regarded by the critics of the day. I have spoken of his diction, 
 and shown what " poetic diction " means, giving a small page 
 from a dictionary of poetic cant, that is, words used whether the 
 feeling is there or not. A religious cant will enable a man to 
 pass muster without any religion ; a poetical cant will enable a 
 man to make a mosaic of words, and rhymes, and phrases, with- 
 out having a spark of poetry within him. Whenever a thing is 
 technical, whensoever it is a mere art or science, applicable to a 
 few, it is welcome to technical language ; but when the question 
 is one of the widest humanity of religion, which belongs to 
 us all ; of poetry, which should be in us all then we must have 
 no technicalisms or cant language. The words of humanity must 
 be used upon questions of humanity those simple words which 
 go never out of fashion ; those words which are always found on 
 the lips of those who feel simply and who feel deeply. The 
 characters which Wordsworth chose, to utter his words of 
 wisdom, were eminently distasteful to the critics of the day. 
 He has laid down, in one short sentence, the philosophy, not 
 only of his choice of characters, but his choice ot diction, and 
 much of the philosophy ot his style and opinions. That sentence 
 is : 
 
 " It has been said that each of these poems has a purpose.
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 271 
 
 Another circumstance must be mentioned which distinguishes 
 these poems from the popular poetry of the day; it is this, that 
 the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action anJ 
 situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling" 
 
 Upon the understanding of that little sentence depends our 
 ability to become masters of the peculiarities of Wordsworth. 
 Let us look at it a little. A relic, whether it be a tear of 
 a saint, or a thorn from the cross, gains its importance on 
 account of the place whence it comes; it is the external that 
 makes the thing important. The autograph in your book, of 
 Milton or Bonaparte, becomes wondrously worthful and signifi- 
 cant because one of those men wrote it. The signatures appended 
 to the death-warrant of Charles the First, or those to the Declara- 
 tion of Independence of the United States, give a meaning and 
 a worth to the most insignificant name that is there. In the 
 autograph book, it is the worth of the man, his greatness, that 
 makes the signature to become important. In the document I 
 have referred to, it is because the principles therein embodied are 
 of such mighty importance, that we become curious to know the 
 whereabout, the history of the most insignificant name attached to 
 it. There again is the distinction : the one borrows from without; 
 in the other case, the light and the ennoblement come from within. 
 In the case of the signature of a great man, it is the greatness of 
 the man, external to the signature, that gives it such importance : 
 in the other case, the signature becomes important, because it is 
 appended to such wonderfully significant words. " Wheresoever 
 this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also 
 this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her/' 
 says Christ of the Magdalen. It was the deed, its spirit, its 
 meaning, its indication of the deep feeling in her heart, that gave 
 the Magdalen her importance and historic place. Had she been 
 one of the great ones of the earth, the kneeling would have given 
 the deed its importance, because of the great importance of the 
 kneeler ; but she, an insignificant, unnoted, unknown woman, 
 rises to be one of the standing heroines of all time, by virtue of 
 the spiritual beauty of the deed which she did. Here, then, is 
 another case in which the actual and the outward gains its 
 ennoblement and meaning from the inward feeling of which it was 
 but the outward manifestation. Bonaparte's razor becomes curious,
 
 272 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 because it was his ; just as some stained and rusty swords become 
 gleaming, bright, surrounded with a halo., because they belonged 
 to certain hands. But, on the contrary, there are certain things 
 and persons not intrinsically noble, which become so by the 
 feelings they express. Now, which is the better mode of the two ? 
 Both are original and natural feelings with us. That action and 
 circumstance can give a meaning to a thing which otherwise would 
 have little, we all feel to be true ; but it is an inferior principle of 
 our nature, and an inferior work of art, to that which makes the 
 spirit throw its colour, meaning, and glory over the action and 
 situation. Those of you who understand the philosophy of 
 Christian faith will see clearly that this is its peculiarity ; that it is 
 very careful that the action, situation, status, outward rank, circum- 
 stances, of its first teachers, should not give any dignity, worth, or 
 meaning to its sentiments. Christ came poor and despised, that 
 his doctrines might gain nothing from the external. Peter must 
 be a fisherman, that his preaching might not borrow weight and 
 force from the outward circumstances in which he moved. And 
 this must always be the case when the doctrine is wholly divine 
 and true. It needs not to borrow dress ; its beauty is best seen, 
 with least of external trappings ; it is only when there is vacuity 
 within that you need to heap on dress without. This is the rule. 
 The wrinkled cheek asks for paint ; the more beauteous a thing is, 
 the less it needs to borrow from action and situation. When 
 there is light within, it rays out; where we have opaqueness or 
 vacuity, light must be drawn in. Christianity has that light 
 within it, so that it can ray it out ; it needs nothing from action or 
 situation. And so this great poet felt ; therefore chose he pedlars 
 and paupers, and out of their mouths he makes wisdom to 
 proceed. " Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, God has 
 perfected praise,'' that the very babyhood of the speaker may 
 relieve us from any undue attention to the mere externalities of 
 action and situation. Now, I trust, I have made this peculiarity, 
 this great distinction, plain ; and to this principle Wordsworth has 
 faithfully adhered. It may not have struck some of you before 
 why Wordsworth has so pertinaciously looked out for plain, com- 
 mon-place people to utter his sentiments through. It is that the 
 sentiments maybe all things; the speaker none, a feeling always 
 possessed by those who have a real message to convey. Mark
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 273 
 
 men in speaking, how short, brave, terse, energetic, the man is 
 that has anything to talk about ; and, on the other hand, how 
 wordy, mock eloquent, mock heroic, and how he saws the air, 
 the man who has little to say. The actual cases in Wordsworth's 
 poetry, illustrative of these truths, must be familiar to all. The 
 poet mentions himself "Poor Susan" and "The Childless Father" 
 as being particular exemplifications of his theory. I might refer 
 also to " Peter Bell." I have been surprised how the admirers of 
 Wordsworth speak slightingly and contemptuously of this, to me, 
 most extraordinary poem ; for to me it stands one of the most re- 
 markable of all the poet's works, a fine illustration of this theory 
 too; the very meanness, lowness, and vulgarity at starting of 
 its hero, gives the more weight and force to the spiritual revolu- 
 tion which it makes. The prologue to " Peter Bell " would, in 
 my opinion, do more to illustrate the peculiarities of Wordsworth, 
 than any talk of mine ; yet I have noticed the students of Words- 
 worth dismiss this prologue as a piece of light vagary. They do 
 not understand it. To me, it embodies the philosophy of the calm, 
 quiet, simple, thoughtful poems of common life he has given us. 
 " Peter Bell " will be too long to read ; however I may give you a 
 few verses of the prologue, in illustration of what 1 mean. 
 
 " There's something in a flying horse, 
 There's something in a huge balloon ; 
 But through the clouds I'll never float 
 Until I have a little Boat, 
 Shaped like the crescent-moon. 
 
 " And now I have a little Boat, 
 In shape a very crescent-moon : 
 Fast through the clouds my boat can sail ; 
 But if perchance your faith should fail, 
 Look up and you shall see me soon ! 
 **** 
 
 " Up goes my Boat among the stars 
 Through many a breathless field of light, 
 Through many a long blue field of ether, 
 Leaving ten thousand stars beneath her : 
 Up goes my little Boat so bright ! 
 
 " The Crab, the Scorpion, and the Bull 
 We pry among them all ; have shot 
 S
 
 2 74 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 High o'er the red-haired race of Mars, 
 Covered from top to toe with scars ; 
 Such company I like it not ! 
 
 " The towns in Saturn are decayed, 
 And melancholy spectres throng them ; 
 The Pleiads, that appear to kiss 
 Each other in the vast abyss, 
 With joy I sail among them. 
 
 " Swift Mercury resounds with mirth, 
 Great Jove is full of stately bowers ; 
 But these, and all that they contain, 
 What are they to that tiny grain, 
 That little Earth of ours ? " 
 
 It will be seen that the poet has wandered with the boat, in the 
 region of the high romantic, for a little time, through Mercury and 
 Saturn, Jove and the Pleiades ; and having been amongst the 
 stars, he says, 
 
 " Then back to Earth, the dear green Earth : 
 Whole ages if I here should roam, 
 The world for my remarks and me 
 Would not a whit the better be ; 
 I've left my heart at home." 
 
 This appears to me to be a fine rebuke on the high romantic 
 school, the Castle of Otranto school of poetry, that stands won- 
 dering amongst its own worlds of high dramatic splendour, with 
 much of burnt cork and melodramatic red fire, discoursing con- 
 cerning worlds of its own creating, it is just forgetting " what on 
 the earth is doing." I may be fanciful or otherwise ; but it 
 appears to me that the "little boat " of this prologue would re- 
 present this high romantic school, and the poet takes one voyage 
 in it and is sick and weary of it, and seeks to come down to " the 
 dear green earth " again. Having in this prologue, then, explained 
 and justified his preference of the dear old green earth, with its 
 simple tales; having stated to us that he needs none of the legen- 
 dary lore of the middle ages ; that sorrow will have a potent 
 enough wand, without calling up the magician to wave one ; that 
 repentance will do for the spirit ; and that the tear of repentance 
 is sufficiently supernatural he goes on with this marvellous tale cf
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 275 
 
 " Peter Bell." What does it essay to do ? To draw one of the 
 most solemnly marvellous parts of the history of the human mind, 
 to show how we do not need to make an objective supernaturalism; 
 that we do not need a legend, with hosts .of ghosts, and visible 
 action ; that we want no chains clanking on the genuine limbs of 
 clothes-supporting, though not material, ghosts ; that he could do 
 without all that ; that to raise up the natural supernatural, such 
 things were not wanted ; and he gives us, therefore, Peter Bell, a 
 low vulgar sinner ; a man who, in the midst of the fairest scenes 
 of nature, in the midst of his travels, has become hardened 
 and viler. A verse or two I will read, in order to show who the 
 potter is. 
 
 " ' A Potter,* sir, he was by trade,' 
 
 Said I, becoming quite collected ; 
 ' And wheresoever he appeared, 
 Full twenty times was Peter feared 
 For once that Peter was respected. 
 
 " ' He, two-and-thirty years or more, 
 Had been a wild and woodland rover ; 
 Had heard the Atlantic surges roar 
 On farthest Cornwall's rocky shore, 
 And trod the cliffs of Dover. 
 
 " ' And he had seen Caernarvon's towers, 
 And well he knew the spire of Sarum ; 
 And he had been where Lincoln bell 
 Flings o'er the fen that ponderous knell 
 A far-renowned alarum ! 
 
 " ' At Doncaster, at York, and Leeds, 
 And merry Carlisle had he been ; 
 And all along the Lowlands fair, 
 All through the bonny shire of Ayr ; 
 And far as Aberdeen. 
 
 " ' And he had been at Inverness ; 
 And Peter, by the mountain-rills, 
 Had danced his round with Highland lasses ; 
 And he had lain beside his asses 
 On lofty Cheviot Hills : 
 
 * In the dialect of the North, a hawker of earthenware is thus designated.
 
 276 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 " ' And he had trudged through Yorkshire dales, 
 Among the rocks and winding scars; 
 Where deep and low the hamlets lie 
 Beneath their little patch of sky 
 And little lot of stars : 
 
 " ' And all along the indented coast, 
 Bespattered with the salt sea foam ; 
 Where'er a knot of houses lay 
 On headland, or in hollow bay ; 
 Sure never man like him did roam ! 
 
 " ' As well might Peter, in the Fleet, 
 Have been fast bound, a begging debtor ; 
 He travelled here, he travelled there ; 
 But not the value of a hair 
 Was heart or head the better. 
 
 " ' He roved among the vales and streams, 
 In the green wood and hollow dell ; 
 They were his dwellings night and day, 
 But Nature ne'er could find the way 
 Into the heart of Peter Bell. 
 
 " ' In vain, through every changeful year, 
 Did Nature lead him as before ; 
 A primrose by a river's brim 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more. 
 
 " ' Small change it made in Peter's heart 
 To see his gentle panniered train 
 With more than vernal pleasure feeding, 
 Where'er the tender grass was leading- 
 Its earliest green along the lane. 
 
 " ' In vain, through water, earth, and air, 
 The soul of happy sound was spread, 
 When Peter on some April morn, 
 Beneath the broom or budding thorn, 
 Made the warm earth his lazy bed.' ; ' 
 
 He proceeds to catalogue some of this man's sins, and goes on 
 to give us the history of his transformation, repentance, and 
 regeneration ; and this effected by the power which the conscience
 
 The Poetry of Wordsivorth 277 
 
 has to put a colour of its own upon ordinary and natural things 
 and appearances. The mysticness in us will make a venerable 
 stump by the waterside into a hideous spectre of fear and terror ; 
 and the white tombstone, through the influence of indwelling fear, 
 can become the sheeted ghost. All in some degree understand 
 these feelings ; how, spite of his philosophy, manhood, strength, 
 and so forth, a curious feeling comes over a man at midnight 
 looking over the village stile into the village graveyard. These 
 feelings are the ground upon which the poet and the artist must 
 build up all their external and objective supernaturalisms. Words- 
 worth's aim was to show that he could do without the super- 
 natural in the common sense ; that the natural in the man could 
 work, through the bidding of a guilty conscience, and make the 
 same effect upon him as is fabled to come over men by visions 
 of the supernatural, as in the tales that men solemnly tell about 
 people being frightened, made to repent and become converted, 
 by the descent of some mystic spirit of another world, or by 
 the return of some relative, as embodied in the threat some- 
 times held out, that " If you don't do so and so I'll haunt you." 
 That is the objective external mode of working upon the mind. 
 Wordsworth does otherwise. He does all this for a man without 
 the summoning in of a single spectre or ghost; the man's guilty 
 conscience clothes commonplaces and external circumstances 
 with a form of dread and terror. The feelings in his mind in 
 these cases are strong and potent; and under their spell and 
 influence Peter Bell becomes a changed and reformed man. And 
 yet this is a poem at which most people sneer ; a depicting of one 
 of the most strange phenomena of our nature. Remember that 
 the regenerating of one single man like Peter Bell is worth more 
 as a piece of poetry, history, and spiritual teaching, than all the 
 mere tales of passion, melodrama, and romance that the fiery 
 genius of Byron ever put together, or that the Minerva Press ever 
 summoned into existence. 
 
 Peter Bell has become an important man. Why so ? Because 
 the poet has made him the outward and visible manifestation of 
 certain inward and spiritual graces or truths ; and here he is true 
 to his theory. The feeling lends the importance, dignity, and 
 worth to the sinning potter, who can give no dignity, importance, 
 or worth to the feeling. The same is the case with the far-famed
 
 278 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 pedlar of the " Excursion," of whom the Edinburgh Review asked, 
 " What should we think of a man, who, when we were having 
 measured yards of flannel, talked as the pedlar talked?" The 
 poet chose a pedlar, that his feelings should borrow no glory from 
 the pedlar, but should, by the transforming power of spirit, be 
 enabled to throw a halo around him. And so it is. There is in 
 the spirit of man a transfiguring power. We have all seen it to 
 some extent. Look at a countenance dull and meaningless, 
 when we first behold it ; touch the spirit within, call up its highest 
 powers, stir it to its very centre, and that dull eye lightens up, that 
 countenance actually beams ; and it is hard at times not to believe 
 that it has undergone even an actual and material transformation. 
 The spirit has always this power. It can throw over the material 
 its charm. It can take some dead and rusty piece of iron, and 
 make it shine like a star of beauty, because it was a sword which 
 had been lifted in the cause of truth and right. It can take the 
 mean and insignificant, the veriest relic, and make it, as the 
 ancients did, like a constellation in heaven. For what did the 
 Greeks body forth when they raised the earthly things and made 
 them constellations, but this transfiguring power of the spirit? 
 The poet's lyre translated into the heavens endures and shines for 
 ever ; and the cross of the south, so raised, is emblematic of the 
 transfiguring power of the spirit, and becomes to the mariner a 
 sign and a guidance. What were these simple wooden pieces 
 crossed before the time of Christ ? Simply a wooden cross, and 
 nothing more. But what have they been since ? A rallying sign 
 for Christendom ; the sign under which the Crusaders fought and 
 died ; the sign under which man bows, laments, repents, and 
 is sorrowful, is forgiven and is glad ; and the rallying sign it shall 
 be, even yet, for the truth of freedom, when the days of bigotry 
 and partisanship are over for ever. The rallying sign it has 
 become, through the transfusing of the feeling that it embodies ; 
 it has become, as it were, a spiritual constellation in the hemis- 
 phere of the world. Of itself, it was nothing ; but what was done 
 upon it and through it, has raised it high into glory, and made it 
 the sign of glory and of joy to the thoughtful of the earth. Who, 
 then, would part with Wordsworth's pedlar? Who would exchange 
 him for any Doctor, be he of Divinity, Science, or Philosophy? 
 What wise man among us would say, " Instead of this your
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 2 79 
 
 pedlar, let us have some man with titles, with external magni- 
 ficence, or one who makes up for his natural insignificance 
 by standing on some high pedestal upon which the dunces of the 
 age may have placed him." For there are little men who owe 
 their elevation not to their stature, but to their situation. Their 
 greatness comes not from within ; it is put upon them from with- 
 out. Men have always standing by them a row of pedestals, and, 
 by some unlooked-for accident, or high superhuman design, 
 in order that the world's discipline may be kept up, that the 
 righteous may not have always his desert, and the fool may 
 occasionally get into high places, upon a pedestal there is put up 
 some very little pygmy. Well, the man owes his greatness not to 
 the feeling, but to the action and situation. The truly great man, 
 pedestalled or unpedestalled, throws a halo around him. Wher- 
 ever a saint comes, the old painter makes a halo of light and 
 glory. The one man glorifies, and the other has glory thrust upon 
 him. The one man is made by circumstances, and the other 
 makes the circumstances. Let us, then, keep Peter Bell the 
 potter, and the pedlar of the " Excursion," rather than exchange 
 them for any bearded Doctor of Philosophy, or any of those great 
 ones from whom, only, the little will hear words of wisdom. There 
 is a single verse of Wordsworth's which expresses his peculiarities 
 even in plainer fashion : 
 
 " The moving accident is not my trade : 
 To freeze the blood I have no ready arts : 
 'Tis my delight alone in summer shade, 
 To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts." 
 
 I will now proceed to what I have just indicated before, the 
 teachings of Nature, as embodied by Wordsworth. I have already 
 warned you of the common mistake made by men, when they 
 profess not to be able to learn anything from Nature ; simply 
 because they expect Nature will teach them in the form of pro- 
 positions. They have heard that there are " sermons in stones," 
 and they have no idea of a sermon except it begins with its intro- 
 duction, and then the firstly, secondly, and thirdly ; and, having 
 got through the heads and divisions, comes to the '' lastly " ten 
 minutes, then " finally " five or ten minutes more, and " now 
 to conclude;" and then, having concluded, ends with a "iew
 
 2 So The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 words of practical improvement." Now, so prevalent is this 
 notion of a sermon, that if a man does not take a text, and give 
 the heads, people will say, "That is not a sermon; it is a lecture." 
 They say, " I should like to hear that on a Monday, but I don't 
 think it is quite proper for a Sunday." This is not fancy, but fact ; 
 and it has happened to me more than once, that because I had 
 not my heads prepared, assorted, and arranged, because the 
 discourse was not moving along in this orthodox, cut-and-dry 
 fashion, it was said not to be fit for Sunday but for Monday, and 
 not for a chapel but for a lecture-hall ; that it might do for such a 
 place as a Mechanics' Institute, but, verily, not for a Sunday 
 sermon. People expect something of this kind from Nature. 
 They say, " We have been out into Nature, and we never gained 
 much there." Verily, it was never intended they should. They 
 are Peter Bell sort of people : 
 
 " A primrose by a river's brim 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more," 
 
 whereas, to Wordsworth, the simplest flower could awake "thoughts 
 that do often lie too deep for tears." I have illustrated this 
 with the case of portraits taken by the sun. Plate after plate may 
 be put out to have a picture taken, but in vain ; because the due 
 chemistry has not been exercised on the plate beforehand, to 
 prepare it. So you may put man after man out into Nature, 
 expecting that it will write its beauty there, in vain. Peter Bell 
 was not prepared to have any portraiture made upon him ; and I 
 fear many are not much better prepared. The teachings of Nature 
 are like that peace which passeth knowledge, not to be had for the 
 seeking. For such is the spiritual law of things. Work ; do your 
 duty ; do right ; do the proper thing that comes nearest to you, 
 and the other will be added. It is but the philosophy expressed 
 of old, " Seek first the kingdom of God, and these things" that is, 
 bread, food, health, riches, "shall be added to you " given in, as it 
 were. Nature rather brings a state over us. it rather attunes the 
 
 O 
 
 soul, than lays down peculiar propositions or teachings. I will 
 illustrate this by a quotation from perhaps the most beautiful lines 
 which Wordsworth has ever written. A few people may feel them 
 tedious, but for those few I am not lecturing. They are here by
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth, 28 ( 
 
 accident, and as I am not bound to attend to the accidents, I 
 shall read the whole of the lines. What I wish to be principally 
 noted is, the exemplification they give of this teaching of Nature ; 
 that it is necessarily somewhat undefinable. They are those 
 beautiful lines composed near Tintern Abbey, on the banks of the 
 Wye. 
 
 '' Five years have passed ; five summers, with the length 
 Of five long winters ! and again I hear 
 These waters, rolling from their mountain springs 
 With a soft inland murmur* Once again 
 Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, 
 That on a wild secluded scene impress 
 Thoughts of more deep seclusion ; and connect 
 The landscape with the quiet of the sky. 
 The day is come when I again repose 
 Here, under this dark sycamore, and view 
 These plots of cottage ground, these orchard tufts, 
 Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, 
 Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves 
 'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see 
 These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines 
 Of sportive wood run wild : these pastoral farms, 
 Green to the very door ; and wreaths of smoke 
 Sent up, in silence, from among the trees ! 
 With some uncertain notice, as might seem 
 Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, 
 Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire 
 The Hermit sits alone. 
 
 These beauteous forms, 
 
 Through a long absence, have not been to me 
 As is a landscape to a blind man's eye : 
 But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din 
 Of towns and cities, I have owed to them 
 In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, 
 Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart ; 
 And passing even into my purer mind, 
 With tranquil restoration : feelings too 
 Of unremembered pleasure : such, perhaps, 
 As have no slight or trivial influence 
 On that best portion of a good man's liie, 
 
 * The river is not affected by the tides a iew miles above Tintern.
 
 282 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 His little, nameless, unremembered acts 
 
 Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, 
 
 To them I may have owed another gift, 
 
 Of aspect more sublime ; that blessed mood, 
 
 In which the burthen of the mystery, 
 
 In which the heavy and the weary weight 
 
 Of all this unintelligible world 
 
 Is lightened : that serene and blessed mood, 
 
 In which the affections gently lead us on, 
 
 Until, the breath of this corporeal frame 
 
 And even the motion of our human blood 
 
 Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
 
 In body, and become a living soul : 
 
 While with an eye made quiet by the power 
 
 Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
 
 We see into the life of things." * 
 
 I would call special attention to some of those words and phrases 
 which appear more particularly to illustrate the meaning of the 
 poet : 
 
 " Sensations sweet, 
 
 Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, 
 And passing into my purer mind 
 With tranquil restoration." 
 
 " Serene and blessed mood." 
 
 "We are laid asleep 
 
 In body, and become a living soul." 
 
 Not showing us the thing, so much as giving us vision power, to 
 see into the life of things. 
 
 Then he speaks of the power of Nature to calm, soothe, and 
 quiet the fevered mind, worn out by the thousand and one pains 
 of daily life, the fear of giving offence, and the continual harass 
 and care of the struggle of daily life. It has been said, and per- 
 haps well, that the poems of Wordsworth are hardly for youth ; 
 there is so little of passion in them. Young men who are deeply 
 charmed with Byron will care little for Wordsworth. His are not 
 the words of passion, thrown like sparks from iron, through the 
 heat thereof. They are for us when we have none of the world, 
 and are just a little tired of it. Wordsworth's poems do for a man 
 
 * As Wordsworth's Poems are so accessible, it seems unnecessary to quote 
 here the remaining two-thirds of these Lines.
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 283 
 
 what a quiet unworking Sabbath does to us, wearied out with six 
 days' work. He was right who said that poetry ought to be to 
 literature what the Sabbath is to the other six days. Wordsworth 
 has kept this Sabbath-day holy ; and the influences of his poems 
 come over us as gently as do the village bells upon a fair, un- 
 working Sabbath morning. He is a poet to come to, a day or two 
 after we have laid a dear friend in the tomb ; when the chill hand 
 of death has made us thoughtful, and predisposed us to wisdom, 
 and opened the heart to its lessons. The poems of Wordsworth 
 come upon us like a cool hand laid on a fevered brow. They 
 stay our restlessness, resembling the influence which Nature has 
 here, or the influence of her mother over her little child, by whom, 
 when it is vexed and irritated, it is at once calmed and brought 
 back to repose. Fretted and weary, what man ever went forth 
 into Nature that did not return soothed and refreshed ? How 
 strange the influence which a calm summer night will have in 
 allaying the heart-fever ! How the " voluntary " then played by 
 Nature seems to predispose the soul to worship, as a good volun- 
 tary, played by a wise musician, prepares the orator for a higher 
 strain than he would otherwise have attained. Herein has the 
 poet not studied Nature in vain ; for in literature he does that 
 which I have shown Nature to do. It is the book for the weary 
 and the worn. His is the nearest approach (and I say it rever- 
 ently) in poetry to the gentle words which say, "Come unto me all 
 ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." It 
 is the most beauteous prophecy in poetry (and I say it reverently) 
 of the land " where the wicked cease from troubling, and the 
 weary are at rest." For, in these poems, the din of passion is not 
 heard, the hot fever of the heart is not known ; they are gentle, 
 thoughtful, with a deep and quiet joy which makes them so 
 calming, beneficent, restorative, and refreshing 
 
 III. 
 
 I will now pass on to consider Wordsworth's doctrine of the 
 preparation of man to receive instruction from Nature. The 
 great proposition will be found to be the need of quietness and 
 silence ; he is an enemy to babble and talk ; and holds that in 
 order to be taught by Nature, we must be comparatively passive.
 
 284 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 Now, if this is a true law, it will explain why so few men are 
 taught by Nature ; for those who know how to be silent are un- 
 happily the exception among men, and in these times we seem 
 threatened with an over-doing of babble. Every man feels bound 
 to utter his small saying; and though I, of course, for my very 
 profession's sake, would be the last to speak against all speaking, 
 yet, unless a man has the faculty and talent of silence as well as of 
 speech, his talk will be apt to degenerate into the mere babble of 
 shallowness like a brook noisy through its lack of depth. I will 
 first quote several passages from Wordsworth, in which he pro- 
 pounds the preparation of the heart necessary to receive wisely 
 the instruction of Nature, and then endeavour to examine the 
 principle. The small piece called " The Tables Turned," will 
 show the doctrine, perhaps, pushed to an extreme. For instance, 
 take the verse 
 
 " One impulse from a vernal wood 
 
 May teach you more of man, 
 Of moral evil, and of good, 
 Than all the sages can." 
 
 At first sight this seems a startling proposition, one which the 
 experience of but few can verify. Can anyone assure me that 
 they ever knew what it was to be taught more of moral evil and of 
 good by a vernal impulse than by the sages ? Simply because 
 they miscalculate the nature of the two teachings ; the sages can 
 lay down proposition and rule, the impulses from the vernal wood 
 can make healthy the spirit. The sages can give their proposi- 
 tions to an unhealthy spirit, and leave it unhealthy. A man sickly 
 in body and soul may read the books of the sages, understand 
 their propositions, carry them with him, and remain licentious, 
 sickly, and unclean ; simply because the propositions, in order to 
 produce a state, must have a double action ; we must get the pro- 
 position, and then apply it of our own will, before it can operate 
 upon the moral being. The proposition may lie bedridden and 
 dormant in the mind, the mind being left in the same state in 
 which the prepositional teaching found it. But, on the other 
 hand, the influences of Nature do not so much put anything into 
 the mind, either pure or diseased, but they alter the character of 
 the mind. By thus going to the source of being, to the fountain-
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 285 
 
 head of our nature, Nature is enabled to do what the poet says it 
 does, " teach us more than sages can." 
 
 A thought of past experience will show this. All must be aware 
 of the influence which the scenes of Nature produce upon the 
 mind, the calming and the quieting which they exercise. And 
 they even go further and deeper than this. History is full of cases 
 in which men of hardened nature and of sinning life, when 
 suddenly brought into the midst of the sublime and beauteous 
 scenes of Nature, have been awe-stricken or conscience-smitten, or 
 have felt for a time devout. You will know the influence which 
 certain scenes have in producing devoutness of feeling and kindli- 
 ness of heart. The state is reached immediately, whereas a book 
 can only reach it medially. The very nature of the teaching 
 of Nature makes it difficult to reduce it into formal words. The 
 proof of all such things may lie in a man's own experience ; the 
 proof of Wordsworth being right or wrong must lie with ourselves. 
 We must look back upon past life ; upon the cases in which we 
 have held communion with the works of Nature, and sum up what 
 they have done for us. Never mind how fleeting and evanescent 
 was the emotion ; did they summon up any moral feelings? Did 
 they incite to any devout wishes, tend to check evil, and bring a 
 longing for good ? Most of you will have seen how strangely 
 ignoble appears to be much of our life, when we take it out of the 
 dens in which it is carried on, into the fresh air of Nature. For 
 it is to the mind, as it happens in common life. The bright sun- 
 light of the morning is let into the room where the evening's 
 feasting has been ; and verily the romance goes out of it, and that 
 which looked glorious at night time is hideous and contemptible 
 by natural morning light. So with much of our life. It seems to 
 fill the whole canvass ; by artificial light it seems good and true ; 
 but let in the sunlight upon it, and it becomes detormed and 
 hideous ; what there looked freshness and bloom, is iound to be 
 but spectral deformity. Such contrasts are healthful lor the soul. 
 Whatsoever tends to make the truly mean look mean, to make the 
 conventional merely conventional, to reduce the spectre to its 
 proper deformity, is a healthful teaching for the mind. This, 
 communing with Nature does. It reduces art and artifice to their 
 proper places. 
 
 \Ve may go further than this ; and having been brought into a
 
 286 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 certain state or feeling by Nature, we may proceed to Nature again, 
 and get not a proposition, but the confirming of a proposition ; 
 and though we may not learn an opinion, we may always learn 
 manners and method. It matters little (as I have said before), 
 whether we receive opinions ready-made from Nature, or whether 
 Nature becomes the origination of certain valuable thoughts, 
 feelings, imaginations, and opinions in us. Many are the confir- 
 mations of thought which a thinker may receive from natural 
 objects. We may wish to know, for instance, the method of the 
 common-weal : how society shall best attain that harmonic beauty 
 which it ought to have. Look over the surface of the green grass 
 lawns, and see how smooth and level the whole is, and then pene- 
 trate to its law, and remember that this velvet-like smoothness is 
 made by the shooting up of separate and individual blades. So is 
 it in the well-ordered common-weal or society. The erection of 
 each man in a perfect individuality ; the keeping of each man in 
 his due and proper place, position, and duties ; each is a grass- 
 blade, fully formed, to a certain degree independent of its neigh- 
 bour ; fulfilling its own functions, obedient to its own laws, keeping 
 duly apart from its neighbour, and maintaining its right as an 
 individual. You may say that this is fanciful. Granted; but 
 yet it may confirm and illustrate a truth. 
 
 From another poet I may read a few lines, which may help to 
 indicate the somewhat mystic teachings of Nature, and also the 
 quiet spirit in which they are to be received. 
 
 MIDNIGHT. 
 (By JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.) 
 
 The moon shines white and silent 
 
 On the mist, which, like a tide 
 Of some enchanted ocean, 
 
 O'er the wide marsh doth glide, 
 Spreading its ghost-like billows 
 
 Silently far and wide. 
 
 A vague and starry magic 
 
 Makes all things mysteries, 
 And lures the earth's dumb spirit 
 
 Up to the longing skies, 
 I seem to hear dim whispers, 
 
 And tremulous replies.
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 287 
 
 The fireflies o'er the meadow 
 
 In pulses come and go ; 
 The elm-trees' heavy shadow 
 
 Weighs on the grass below ; 
 And faintly from the distance 
 
 The dreaming cock doth crow. 
 
 All things look strange and mystic, 
 
 The very bushes swell 
 And take wild shapes and motions. 
 
 As if beneath a spell, 
 They seem not the same lilacs 
 
 From childhood known so well. 
 
 The snow of deepest silence 
 
 O'er everything doth fall, 
 So beautiful and quiet, 
 
 And yet so like a pall, 
 As if all life were ended, 
 
 And rest were come to all. 
 
 O wild and wondrous midnight 
 
 There is a might in thee 
 To make the charmed body 
 
 Almost like spirit be, 
 And give it some faint glimpses 
 
 Of immortality ! 
 
 The reason will be obvious why such teachings can only be 
 received by quietness and passiveness. If they are looked upon 
 as healings, then must we borrow a phrase from the medical art, 
 and the person to be healed must be a " patient," or a " sufferer." 
 Were Nature a thing understood, a book, then must we bring 
 to it certain activities ; but as its influences are rather those of an 
 inspirer, or of a physician, its character healing, calming, and 
 curative, we must be patient, and submit thereto. Under the 
 plea of industry, and under protest against idleness, few men do 
 cultivate, as they should, passiveness of soul. You know how 
 Utilitarianism will come in, and, seeing a man upon the grass on 
 a sunny day, resigned to the wise passiveness of Wordsworth, will 
 proceed to read him a long moral lecture on idleness ; will tell 
 him of some study, or good philanthropic scheme that he might be
 
 288 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 working out, or some trade speculation that he might be carrying 
 on. Now, we have carried activity, perhaps, too far. Un- 
 mitigated activity will make us noisy and hot. It will cause to 
 arise a set of men so busy as to neglect the wants of the inward 
 life. Therein has Wordsworth been a notable teacher for this 
 age ; for it is an age of activity and noise. There be few deep, 
 quiet, and meditative natures amongst us. Our very study is of 
 this noisy kind. We catalogue the amount of our studies by the 
 quantum we get through, and not by the amount of thinking 
 which is called up. To get through books is the object ; not to 
 have a life created and sustained within by them. Now this 
 activity, noisiness, haste, are all thrown away upon Nature. 
 It will not answer to any babbling interrogatories ; and he who 
 will be taught, must be silent and quiet. 
 
 This doctrine, applied to religion and other matters, will be 
 called mysticism, or quietism, exemplified in Madame Guyon, 
 whose cardinal doctrine is the necessity of aspirants being quiet 
 and remaining passive, in order that the teachings of the Spirit of 
 God may come to us. It will be found necessary to guard care- 
 fully against confounding the idleness of vacuity and the passive- 
 ness of a wise man. Between real idleness and passiveness or 
 quietism, there is a broad distinction. The true and essential 
 nature of idleness is to do nothing when there is something to be 
 done. A lazy man is one who, when there is work, does not do 
 it ; an idle man is one who, when he ought to be active, is not. 
 But remember, that to a wise man there are times when he ought 
 to do nothing; therefore, in such case, to do nothing is not to 
 be idle ; times, when he should be passive, and, therefore, pas- 
 sivity is not a sin. There is an historic proof of this found in the 
 lives of the greatest thinkers, that they are oftentimes the quietest 
 of men. They have all left their testimony that the man who does 
 not at times cultivate solitariness, who cannot be alone, who does 
 not willingly be alone, never will be the producer of high and 
 great thoughts. A man must go into the desert, in order to be 
 fit to guide the people. So it is written of John the Baptist, of 
 Elijah, and of Christ himself; they sojourned there, in their 
 solitariness and passiveness, resigning themselves to spiritual 
 influences, that they might be tempted and become strong. 
 Those who would be teachers of men must have certain periods
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 289 
 
 of quiet and meditation. Quietism and passiveness are to the 
 soul what sleep is to the body. Sleep refreshes the body, because 
 during it the body remains comparatively passive and quiet. 
 Due hermitage, solitude and quietism, passiveness and resigna- 
 tion, are the sleep of the soul ; and the soul needs this sleep as 
 regularly as can the body possibly need its rest. What is the 
 effect on a man who has physically neglected sleep ? His nerves 
 at last become deranged, he becomes a hypochondriac, and his 
 life must be a continual feverish attempt, by the supply of small 
 stimulants, to get up energy enough for the pressing occasion. 
 Such, too, is the life of those minds who do not give themselves 
 the due quiet, passiveness, and solitude. They must always have 
 a stimulant immediately applied, in order to get any work from 
 them. Some of you may know what it is to sit down to think on 
 a subject, and find that not a thought will come until you take 
 down some book relating to the subject ; and then, by reading 
 the thoughts of the writer, you are enabled to fill up the blank 
 and vacuity there would otherwise have been. When this 
 happens not to a child, but to a man, it tells a tale ; it shows us 
 that the man must have an immediate stimulant that unless he 
 can get a ready-made thought, nothing will come from him. 
 This arises from the neglect of meditation and quiet. Few men, 
 now-a-days, understand what meditation means. They confound 
 it with reasoning, with thinking, but it is neither. Meditation 
 is almost a passive state ; it is the resignation of the mind to be 
 played upon by influences, whether spiritual, from above, or 
 whether terrestrial, of the earth. It is not mere vacuity ; it is not 
 the mere "thinking of nothing" of the countryman, but it is an 
 exercise of the mind, "which gives us no matter for criticism 
 or doubt, but everything for wonder and for love." Many of us 
 think, few of us meditate ; the fear of being idle keeps many of 
 us from being duly meditative. I will read an extract from 
 Coleridge, which will set these matters before you : 
 
 "But it is time to tell the truth, though it requires some 
 courage to avow it in an age and country in which disquisitions 
 on all subjects, not privileged to adopt technical terms or scientific 
 symbols, must be addressed to the public. I say, then, that it is 
 neither possible nor necessary for all men, or for many, to be 
 philosophers. There is a philosophic (and inasmuch as it is 
 
 T
 
 290 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 actualized by an effort of freedom, an artificial) consciousness, 
 which lies beneath, or (as it were) behind the spontaneous con- 
 sciousness natural to all reflecting beings. As the elder Romans 
 distinguished their northern provinces into Cis-Alpine and Trans- 
 Alpine, so may we divide all the objects of human knowledge 
 into those on this side, and those on the other side of the spon- 
 taneous consciousness ; citra et trans conscientiam communem. 
 The latter is exclusively the domain of pure philosophy, which is 
 therefore properly entitled transcendental, in order to discriminate 
 it at once, both from mere reflection and representation on the 
 one hand, and, on the other, from those flights of lawless specula- 
 tion which, abandoned by all distinct consciousness, because 
 transgressing the bounds and purposes of our intellectual faculties, 
 are justly condemned as transcendent. The first range of hills 
 that encircles the scanty vale of human life is the horizon for the 
 majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges, the common sun is 
 born and departs. From them the stars rise, and, touching them, 
 they vanish. By the many even this range, the natural limit and 
 bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents 
 are too often hidden by mists and clouds from uncultivated 
 swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to penetrate. To 
 the multitude below, these vapours appear, now as the dark 
 haunts of terrific agents, on which none may intrude with im- 
 punity ; and now, all aglow with colours not their own, they are 
 gazed at as the splendid palaces of happiness and power. But 
 in all ages there have been a few, who, measuring and sounding 
 the rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls, 
 have learnt that the sources must be far higher and far inward ; 
 a few who, even in the level streams, have detected elements 
 which neither the vale itself, nor the surrounding mountains con- 
 tained, or could supply. How and whence to these thoughts, 
 these strong probabilities, the ascertaining vision, the intuitive 
 knowledge may finally supervene, can be learnt only by the fact. 
 I might oppose to the question the words with which Plotinus 
 supposes Nature to answer a similar difficulty : ' Should any one 
 interrogate her how she works, if graciously she vouchsafe to 
 listen and speak, she will reply, It behoves thee not to disquiet 
 me with interrogatories, but to understand in silence, even as I 
 am silent, and work without words.'
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 291 
 
 Likewise, in the fifth book of the fifth ^5nead, speaking of the 
 highest and intuitive knowledge, as distinguished from the dis- 
 cursive, or in the language of Wordsworth 
 
 ' The vision and the faculty divine,' 
 
 he says ; ' It is not lawful to enquire from whence it sprang, as if 
 it were a thing subject to place and motion; for it neither 
 approached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other 
 place ; but it either appears to us or it does not appear. So that 
 we ought not to pursue it with a view of detecting its secret source, 
 but to watch in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us ; preparing 
 ourselves for the blessed spectacle, as the eye waits patiently for 
 the rising sun.' "* 
 
 The extract is clouded, rather, by some peculiar words of philo- 
 sophy, but the similes employed in these matters are beautiful ; 
 that on the common appearances, the hills that bound the horizon 
 of life, the sun seemed to rise and set ; but that men in the valleys 
 below found in the rivers grains of a precious metal not belonging 
 to the valley ; and this led them to the belief, that beyond the 
 valley there lay sources of knowledge and wisdom, hills of eternal 
 truth. That the quiet teachings of Nature must be met by 
 quietism, our own experience will teach us, if we note the effect of 
 the beautiful scenes of Nature ; how they hush and quiet men ; 
 how the grander scenes will reduce a babbling party to silence ; 
 and how excessively annoyed, teased, and tormented we are, when, 
 in the midst of scenery of great beauty, we are bestirred by the 
 companion at our side, who will run through the same common- 
 place adjectives, not because he feels much, but because he feels 
 little, and supplies his scanty feelings by long, loud, and liberal 
 phrases. Of all the bores a man can meet with, none pester the 
 thoughtful man so much as he who is continually exclaiming, 
 "How beautiful"! or "How sublime"! as it may chance. 
 Coleridge, once, by the Falls of Clyde, could not find the proper 
 word to express himself, when someone by his side immediately 
 gave it him, and Coleridge turned round to thank him. However, 
 he immediately followed it up by an adjective so misplaced, that 
 he showed himself to be merely going through the picturesque 
 traveller's prepared cant, which may be found in guide books and 
 
 * COLERIDGE : Biographia Literaria, chap. xii.
 
 292 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 in guides, who, not content with showing you a thing, tell you how 
 you should feel about it, how such and such emotions should 
 arise in your mind. I remember a friend being at Berlin, a place 
 not distinguished by beauty of scenery, and the guide took him 
 into some small tea-gardens in the suburbs, where there was an 
 artificial mound. As they were about to ascend the mound, the 
 guide said, " Now prepare for sublime emotions " ! and led him up 
 the small elevation, wrapped, of course, in sublimity of emotion. 
 All this babble is destructive of the teaching of Nature. The very 
 fact that in still nights, amid beautiful scenery, the tongue learns 
 to be quiet, almost intuitively, gives a law for the student of 
 Nature. Whatsoever comes spontaneously when a man, not 
 hardened and spoiled, stands in the midst of the more beautiful 
 things of Nature, is the rule and the law for the artificial culture. 
 Now I find that in such situations we want to say nothing, talk is 
 an impertinence, babble a bore ; and a companion who will utter 
 what all feel, is the greatest nuisance that can come upon us. 
 This, then, gives the law, that if we would have these teachings 
 of Nature which produce frames and feelings, and which have a 
 curative and a sanative influence upon the soul, we must be 
 resigned ; we must be patient, that Nature may speak. The same 
 doctrine is laid down in Scripture, with regard to the doings of 
 God. " Stand still, and see what God will do ; " never, of course, 
 countenancing indulgence or inactivity, in the sense I have named, 
 but merely indicating that that still small voice which came to the 
 prophet with a mightier power than the whirlwind, the tempest, or 
 the storm, can only be heard when there is a lull and a hush of 
 the outward, the accidental, and circumstantial. The solemn 
 ticking of the great clock of time can only be heard when the 
 wheels and the hum of the great city are unheard. At night-time 
 we hear the march of time best. Nature, teaching with a still 
 small voice, will only be heard by minds that have laid asleep the 
 turmoil of passion, the hum of active life, and who are thus, in 
 quiet and stillness, resigned to her teaching. The culture of pas- 
 siveness will make one of the chief doctrines of what is called 
 the mystic school ; and to a certain extent Wordsworth is a 
 mystic. 
 
 When does mysticism run into excess? When it not only 
 strives to make the subjective (that is, what is true within a man)
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 293 
 
 objective, by writing it down in words, or painting it in a picture 
 but when it strives to make this, true of the man, also true of his 
 neighbour. Mysticism is holy and beautiful, if it does not become 
 authoritative and damnatory. It is usual to sneer at mysticism, 
 whether represented by Boehm, or Swedenborg of more modern 
 times ; the ardent visions of Dante, or the calmer and quieter 
 mysticism of Wordsworth. But mysticism is a thing which belongs 
 to great men. There goes on within them a life to a certain 
 extent independent of the outward ; and wheresoever a man refers 
 outward things to inward feelings, wheresoever he clothes the out- 
 ward with dress borrowed from history that happens within him, 
 to a certain extent he is a mystic. If he goes further than this, 
 if, having succeeded in reducing to outward form what goes on 
 within him, he requires that another man too shall dream the same 
 dreams, and have the same visions; and if he lays down the 
 inward truth as an outward reality, then has his mysticness trans- 
 cended the bounds of sanity, or at least of wisdom. There need 
 be no outcry against mystics, for the people are not obliged to 
 believe their visions. The man who can sneer at or despise the 
 sublime mysticism of the men I have mentioned, may go quietly 
 on his little way, their visions are not for him, he will never 
 understand them. They may not be intelligible, but he is not 
 intelligent. But for those who do watch much the interior life, 
 there can scarcely be found a set of books of more real value, of 
 more use, than those which portray the phantasmagoria of a great 
 man's mind, and bring out the pictures which Nature, History, 
 Religion, Time, and Life, write upon the mind of a great man. 
 It is one of the most valuable portions of human lore, that one 
 man shall be allowed to look upon another's mind, and see the 
 shifting picture ; the outward life written there. It has the use 
 which the circular mirror has. The prospect is too wide, or too 
 bright, and we wish to reduce it to such a form as can be used for 
 daily purpose. We turn from the scene to the mirror, and by its 
 contracting, yet faithful representation, we have a vision, in petto, 
 of that which is too gigantic for us. The camera has its use, to 
 reduce that which is too great for our gaze, and present it in a 
 smaller form. So with some revelations of the inward life of a 
 great man. For most of us, human life presents too wide an 
 horizon, its problems are too many, and too intricate for our grasp.
 
 294 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 The poet or author comes before us, and in the mirror of his 
 mind, the camera of his intellect, he reduces, yet more or less 
 faithfully, this picture which is too vast for our limited know- 
 ledge. 
 
 You may blot out all history if you will, but shut not out mystic 
 poetic lore. Poetry is a far truer thing than history. History may 
 deal with facts, but poetry with truths ; for facts are not necessarily 
 truths. They may be true, but it takes many of them to make a 
 truth. You know how, in chemistry, many a flower must be put 
 into the still before one drop of precious essence can be got at the 
 other end ; so, into the still of the thinking mind, must be poured 
 many a fact, before one precious truth will distil and drop. These 
 mystics, then, oftentimes utter truths, they utter their revelations, 
 they tell us how life looks to them,. what Nature does for them, 
 what it has wrought upon them ; and in this sense Wordsworth is 
 a mystic. He clothes natural appearances with what they do for 
 him. He tells us what such a flower teaches him, what such a 
 scene produces in him. He has gone through certain geographical 
 localities, and hung upon them colours borrowed from inward life ; 
 and where many of us would have found but the dead fact, having 
 read his works, we go and find living truth. Many a man may 
 have looked at the scenes of Westmoreland as a mere fact ; but 
 now Wordsworth has hung upon each of them a precious gem of 
 truth. He has associated, by the power of genius, fact and truth 
 side by side : so that is done for us by secondary means, which, 
 by primary influence, genius does for him. Here is the use of a 
 teacher. The poet comes and brings the truth ; Nature supplies 
 the fact. They then rise up together, the one given, the other 
 comes. Oftentimes we have the fact, but no truth will come. 
 There is a fountain, and it remains a fountain. It was there when 
 we came, and will be so when we go. But when the poet comes, 
 he points out a truth thereby hung. When a simile, a law concern- 
 ing purity, has been drawn therefrom, ever afterwards with us, 
 when the fact, the fountain comes, the truth of which it is illustra- 
 tive comes too. Thus it is the poet's duty to double all things, 
 like the water of a lake. We have the sky above, and in the 
 watery hemisphere below we have sky again. This dualism runs 
 much through Wordsworth's works. We not only have the blue 
 sky as blue sky, but we have it in the mind of the poet, which lies
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 295 
 
 calm and quiet like, to reflect the beauty and blessedness of 
 Nature. Therefore should men be thankful to their poets. God 
 has not given poetic power to all. Thoughts and facts do not 
 suggest one another to us all. The poet comes and weds together, 
 for ever and for all, thought and fact, truth and mere visua 
 appearance, so that by him Nature becomes, even to those of the 
 smallest original and creative power, a true teacher, a prophet, and 
 a minister. 
 
 IV. 
 
 I have spoken somewhat of the time when Wordsworth's poems 
 best come and are of most use to us ; not when the fever-fit of 
 youth is upon us, and the world is all untasted and untried ; but 
 just when a man is recovering from his first great sorrow, his first 
 great eclipse, whether mental or external. Then is the time to 
 take up this book, and in its still, sad, and yet oft-times joyous 
 music, in its quiet, clear teaching, its calm, high, philosophic 
 tones, repose and relief will be found. Especially, too, it is a 
 book to be read when a man has been over-much in the world, 
 and is oppressed by the work of the world. The poet seems to 
 have designed it to be a curative or corrective of that over- 
 attention to material and external interests, in which many of us, 
 against our will, are involved. How piteously he laments this 
 influence of worldliness over us ! How he protests against it, in 
 that noble sonnet he begins 
 
 " The world is too much with us." 
 
 I'll read the sonnet : 
 
 " The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
 Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers : 
 Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 
 We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
 This sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; 
 The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
 And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers ; 
 For this, for every thing, we are out of tune ; 
 It moves us not. Great God ! I'd rather be 
 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."
 
 296 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 Of course the poet must be answerable for the shocking, un- 
 theologic, impiety of wishing himself a Pagan. But there are 
 passages in it which will confirm what I have been saying of the 
 influence of Nature. He says worldliness has put us "out of 
 tune," and the only cure is to go forth into Nature thinking 
 nothing about it ; to go out in the aimless spirit in which a man 
 strolls out in a summer evening, because it is fine. This will re- 
 tune ; it will restore that quietness and placidity, which is a soul 
 sleep, enabling us to gather up and cultivate those powers which 
 "getting and spending" have laid waste. I propose to read a 
 few of Wordsworth's sonnets, not only as embodying his peculiar 
 opinions, but as also teaching some of the great truths concerning 
 freedom. 
 
 " Wings have we, and as far as we can go 
 We may find pleasure ; wilderness and wood ; 
 Blank ocean and mere sky, support that mood 
 Which with the lofty sanctifies the low, 
 Dreams, books, are each a world ; and books, we know, 
 Are a substantial world, both pure and good ; 
 Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, 
 Our pastime and our happiness will grow, 
 There find I personal themes, a plenteous store, 
 Matter wherein right voluble I am, 
 To which I listen with a ready ear ; 
 Two shall be named, pre-eminently dear, 
 The gentle Lady married to the Moor ; 
 And heavenly Una with her milk-white Lamb." 
 
 If any are displeased with the slighting mode in which Words 
 worth speaks of books, in comparison with Nature, their restora- 
 tive will be found here, in which he gives such pre-eminence to 
 books, and winds up by giving two of those he loves best. For 
 stateliness of language and loftiness of sentiment, perchance the 
 next sonnet stands above all in the world. I am not aware that 
 any sonnets in the language can be compared with the best of 
 Wordsworth's. Even Milton looks somewhat pale by the side of 
 five that might be culled out of the choicest of Wordsworth's 
 works. 
 
 " Milton ! thou should'st be living at this hour : 
 England hath need of thee ; she is a fen
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 297 
 
 Of stagnant waters ; altar, sword and pen. 
 
 Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bovver, 
 
 Have forfeited their ancient English dower 
 
 Of inward happiness. We are selfish men ; 
 
 Oh ! raise us up, return to us again ; 
 
 And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. 
 
 Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart ; 
 
 Thou had'st a .voice whose sound was like the sea : 
 
 Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, 
 
 So did'st thou travel on life's common way, 
 
 In cheerful godliness ; and yet thy heart 
 
 The lowliest duties on herself did lay." 
 
 There is one sonnet to which a recent painful event has attached 
 a painful interest, and which I heard the great poet himself speak 
 of as having struck him with its strange and unexpected prophetic 
 tone. It is that in which he addresses the lamented Haydon ; the 
 man who bore up against much, and bore it long, but not quite 
 long enough, he who gave way at last to that adversity and 
 neglect against which he long battled so bravely. There is a 
 mournful, prophetic sort of warning to the artist in the sonnet. 
 One line is expressive of all Haydon's troubles, " The long-lived 
 pressure of obscure distress." 
 
 " High is our calling, Friend ! Creative Art 
 (Whether the instrument of words she use, 
 Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues), 
 Demands the service of a mind and heart, 
 Though sensitive, yet, in their weakest part, 
 Heroically fashioned to infuse 
 Faith in the whispers of the lonely Muse, 
 While the whole world seems adverse to desert. 
 And oh ! when Nature sinks, as oft she may, 
 Through long-lived pressure of obscure distress, 
 Still to be strenuous for the bright reward, 
 And in the soul admit of no decay, 
 Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness 
 Great is the glory, for the strife is hard ! " * 
 
 * Poor Haydon's end is thus referred to in Chambers' Book of Days : 
 " One morning in June [1846] the hapless man was found in his painting room 
 prostrate in front of his picture of ' Alfred the Great and the First British 
 Jury.' His diary, a small portrait of his wife, his prayer-book, his watch, and 
 letters to his wife and children, were all orderly arranged ; but, for the rest 
 a pistol and a razor had ended his earthly troubles."
 
 298 The Poetry of Wordsworth, 
 
 There is a passage or two of " The Excursion " bearing on my 
 previous assertion, concerning the principles of Wordsworth, with 
 respect to the getting of wisdom from Nature rather than the 
 getting of mere knowledge from study. 
 
 " Such was the Boy but for the growing Youth 
 What soul was his, when, from the naked top 
 Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun 
 Rise up, and bathe the world in light ! He looked 
 Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth 
 And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay 
 Beneath him : Far and wide the clouds were touched, 
 And in their silent faces could he read 
 Unutterable love. Sound needed none, 
 Nor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank 
 The spectacle : sensation, soul, and form, 
 All melted into him ; they swallowed up 
 His animal being ; in them did he live, 
 And by them did he live ; they were his life. 
 In such access of mind, in such high hour 
 Of visitation from the living God, 
 Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired. 
 No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request ; 
 Rapt into still communion that transcends 
 The imperfect offices of prayer and praise, 
 His mind was a thanksgiving to the power 
 That made him ; it was blessedness and love ! " 
 
 Small criticisms have been spent upon the passage ; and I have 
 heard of its "dangerous tendency," as, instead of affirmative 
 religion, giving us a kind of obscure religiousism. Very few need 
 take alarm. Very few know what it is to be wrapt in communion 
 that transcends them. The mind which is capable of such feel- 
 ings as the poet describes, is just the one that will not in the 
 least be injured by the absence of the verbal expression so essen- 
 tially necessary to minds of a lower calibre ; for some minds 
 must speak. To some, their safety of a feeling is talking about it. 
 There are some to whom the uttered words of prayer are the 
 summoners up of the inward devotion. But there are some who 
 know what it is to be wrapt in communings, in which the very 
 fulness of feeling prevents speech. For them alone does the poet 
 write such advice as I am about to read.
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 299 
 
 " For, the Man 
 
 Who, in this spirit, communes with the Forms 
 Of Nature, who with understanding heart 
 Both knows and loves such objects as excite 
 No morbid passions, no disquietude, 
 No vengeance, and no hatred needs must feel 
 The joy of that pure principle of love 
 So deeply that, unsatisfied with aught 
 Less pure and exquisite, he cannot choose 
 But seek for objects of a kindred love 
 In fellow-natures and a kindred joy. 
 Accordingly he by degrees perceives 
 His feelings of aversion softened down ; 
 A holy tenderness pervade his frame. 
 His sanity of reason not impaired, 
 Say rather, all his thoughts now flowing clear, 
 From a clear fountain flowing, he looks round 
 And seeks for good ; and finds the good he seeks : 
 Until abhorrence and contempt are things 
 He only knows by name ; and, if he hear, 
 From other mouths, the language which they speak, 
 He is compassionate ; and has no thought, 
 No feeling, which can overcome his love." 
 
 In these few lines are summed up what Nature has done for 
 the poet, and what he has done for us in his works, the gradual 
 mellowing of the character, the taking away of its roughness and 
 sharp angles ; and bringing in that calm, quiet, not dispassionate, 
 but yet not angry, frame and feeling, which would regard all men 
 with loving-kindness ; nay, which would go further than man, and 
 throw the mantle of gentleness and love, not only over things 
 animate, but come to look upon Nature with the feeling expressed 
 by Goethe when he speaks of seeing a brother in the damp bush. 
 For the poet would bring us into that state that we feel ourselves 
 one and at home with Nature. Nature's work is done when it 
 has brought us to the same point that true religion seeks to bring 
 us to, reconciliation and restoration. For the doings of Nature 
 are but a continual effort at reconcilement. We put up some 
 new erection, ugly and angular, in the midst of some beauteous 
 scene. Nature will soon be at work, and if possible bring about 
 harmony again. There is whitewash, white as it can be ; there 
 are angles, sharp as they can be ; and everything is a mar and a
 
 300 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 blot upon the fair scene. Nature will stain the whitewash, fritter 
 away the angles, and incessantly labour to reduce that hideous 
 eye-sore into harmony with its own tints and forms. The ivy on 
 the ruin is another reconciling effort of Nature. It attempts to 
 reduce the sharp forms which man has put upon it, and bring it 
 back again to the beauteous and gentle curves which Nature loves. 
 This it does also with the mind of man. Sometimes we go 
 forth into Nature and feel so unfit to be there, so out of joint, 
 out of tune; that even the sunshine is troublesome, because 
 there is darkness within ; we feel unnatural, not a part of nature, 
 but like some picturesque tourist to have come into it. The 
 poet here has been brought into harmony with nature. His 
 passion is tempered down ; his angles of prejudice and hatred 
 rounded off; the parts of his nature which are rugged, clothed 
 over. 
 
 It would be doing injustice to Wordsworth if any were suffered 
 to believe concerning his poems that they are all dealing with 
 what is common-place or small. It is true that, to use a simile, 
 he is the poet of the microscope ; that his poems are purposely 
 microscopic; that he finds it to be his duty so to do ; seeing that 
 it is easy enough to see the poetry of the vast ; that the Colossus 
 of Rhodes is the colossus to everyone, and Alexander the Great 
 is a mighty man to everybody. He does what few can do. He 
 goes to the small and the neglected, to give us the poetry found 
 there. Out of the smallest branch of entomological science, the 
 man who is not a mere science-catalogue maker, but a real 
 student, can draw vast deductions and mighty theories. The 
 revelations of the microscope can excite feelings of adoration and 
 veneration as strong as can be brought down from above by any 
 contemplation of the starry heavens. The poet, having looked 
 upon the small, rises to the contemplation of the vast, and we see 
 how he who can so clothe the unknown and despised with a halo 
 of moral beauty, is yet enabled to lead us into that highest realm 
 of thought, fancy, and hope, which has been regarded as pre- 
 eminently the land of the great masters of poesy. I need but 
 turn to that ode, the most beauteous in the English language, 
 "The intimations of Immortality, from recollections of early 
 childhood." The old Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 301 
 
 the soul is beautifully put by Wordsworth, in the passage com- 
 mencing : 
 
 " Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : 
 The Soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 
 And cometh from afar : 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 And not in utter nakedness, 
 But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
 From God, who is our home : 
 Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! 
 Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
 
 Upon the growing Boy, 
 But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, 
 
 He sees it in his joy ; 
 
 The Youth, who daily farther from the east 
 Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, 
 And by the vision splendid 
 Is on his way attended ; 
 At length the Man perceives it die away, 
 And fade into the light of common day." 
 
 Few of you, perhaps, are familiar with the works of an old 
 English poet, Henry Vaughan.* It may, then, be interesting to 
 hear how the same notion is put by a poet of an earlier age. I 
 do not say that Wordsworth borrowed it therefrom, because a 
 thought that belonged to Plato lies borrowable to every succeed- 
 ing poet, t I will read you an extract from this author. 
 
 * A native of Brecknockshire. Born 1614, died 1695. He studied the law 
 but afterwards adopted the medical profession. His poems were first published 
 in 1651. 
 
 + The experience also which occurred to Plato remains essentially possible 
 to succeeding poets, and may have occurred to Vaughan. As an example, 
 take the following from Sir Walter Scott's diary, under date Feb. 17, 1828 : 
 I cannot, I am sure, tell if it is worth marking down, that yesterday, at dinner- 
 time, I was strongly haunted by what I would call the sense of pre-existence, 
 in a confirmed idea that nothing which passed was said for the first time ; that 
 the same topics had been discussed, and the same persons had stated the same 
 
 opinions on them The sensation was so strong as to resemble what 
 
 is called a mirage in the desert, or a calenture on board ship .... It was 
 very distressing yesterday, and brought to my mind the fancies of Bishop 
 Berkeley about an ideal world. There was a vile sense of want of reality in 
 all I did and said. LOCKHART'S Life of Scoti.
 
 302 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 THE RETREAT. 
 BY HENRY VAUGHAN. 
 
 " Happy those early days, when I 
 Shin'd in mine angel infancy ! 
 Before I understood this place 
 Appointed for my second race, 
 Or taught my soul to fancy aught 
 But a white, celestial thought 
 When yet I had not walked above 
 A mile or two from my first love, 
 And looking back, at that short space, 
 Could see a glimpse of his bright face 
 When on some gilded cloud or flower, 
 My gazing soul would dwell an hour, 
 And in those weaker glories spy 
 Some shadows of eternity : 
 Before I taught my tongue to wound 
 My conscience with a sinful sound : 
 Or had the black art to dispense 
 A several sin to every sense, 
 But felt through all this fleshy dress 
 Bright shoots of everlastingness. 
 O how I long to travel back, 
 And tread again that ancient track ! 
 That I might once more reach that plain 
 Where first I left my glorious train ! 
 From whence the enlightened spirit sees 
 That shady city of palm trees. 
 But ah ! my soul with too much stay 
 Is drunk, and staggers in the way. 
 Some men a forward motion love, 
 But I by backward steps would move ; 
 And when this dust falls to the urn, 
 In that state I came, return." 
 
 Confessedly, what I have said in this lecture, has been an 
 attempt not to criticise the whole of the poet's works, but to do 
 what I think is more needful, to illustrate some of the many prin- 
 ciples which run through them. There were two ways open to 
 me ; to repeat the usual things said concerning Wordsworth, to be 
 gained by a careful collation of all the reviews of his works, 
 plentifully illustrated with passages, which you can read at home.
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 303 
 
 I might have supplied you with an " argument " of the whole, a 
 catalogue of his works, and illustrations. But it appeared to be a 
 better plan to dwell on some few of the leading principles of the 
 poet, and strive, by such power of explication as I might have, to 
 make them clearer and clearer. My office of criticism upon such 
 poets is not to dissect them ; it is not to spend too much time 
 upon the particular beauties, upon select passages ; but rather to 
 attempt to reproduce in you, by simpler and plainer means, the 
 feelings which they have striven to embody in their works. I 
 have selected but two or three principles, and they are these : 
 the lessons to be learned from small things ; the great principle 
 that the feeling gives dignity to the situation and action, rather 
 than that the feeling borrows dignity from the action and situation. 
 I have endeavoured to show, by the state of poetic literature at 
 the time when Wordsworth began to write, the necessity of that 
 lesson, and even if the poet pushed it to excess, its excess was 
 caused by its previous deficiency ; that in the choice of his heroes 
 pedlars and beggars he was guided by this principle, which 
 guided the selection of the earlier preachers of the Christian faith, 
 that the thought should not have greatness thrust upon it, but, 
 by its inherent greatness, should put a glory on the external. 
 Here teaching the transfiguring power of the spirit, that where 
 there is light within, that light will ray out and cover the external 
 with its glory ; but where there is vacuity of mind, though there 
 may be rank, dress, all the environing things of pomp and circum- 
 stance, that the vacuity of thought may be supplemented by the 
 gorgeousness of the clothing, there is no true glory. A large part 
 of poetry owes its attraction to this, to dealing with the external. 
 It is often but a poetical catalogue, somewhat similar to that given 
 by the Court Journal after a court day, or a court ball, specifying 
 the colour of the trains, the pattern of the dresses, and all those 
 things which fill up the pomp and pageantry of state. I could 
 indicate poem after poem which is nothing more than a mere 
 catalogue of external glory. The whole of this Wordsworth 
 eschewed ; the old pomp of Grecian mythology he did not 
 attempt to warm up and re-present. He did not attempt again to 
 give us the " Nine," the " tuneful Nine," and " Phoebus' hill " and 
 " Phoebus' rill." Not because he could not understand the spirit 
 of the old Greek mythology. If any of you would fain see a
 
 304 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 poetical exemplification of the soul of the old Greek mythology, 
 you must search for it in a beauteous passage in " The Excursion " 
 (which time forbids me to read, but which, to those familiar with 
 the poem, is well known), in which the poet shows that he has 
 done more than merely master the details of the Classic Dic- 
 tionary, that he has penetrated more into the Greek spirit than 
 editors of the plays were apt to do ; but he saw that the gods of a 
 past day were not reproducible now ; that too often their very 
 names have degenerated into poetical cant ; that " the tuneful 
 Nine " figure on the page where there is little of tunefulness ; and 
 that, therefore, it is time to dismiss the pomp and greatness of 
 bygone time. He reversed the usual rule ; did away with outward 
 pomp, and on set principle chose lowly exponents of his doctrine, 
 that attention might be centred on the doctrine, and that the 
 power of right feeling and of spiritual truth might be seen in trans- 
 figuring that, which would be mean without it. Much of literature 
 is like the creation of the giant monster in " Frankenstein ; " the 
 body is made first, and the soul, the vitality, is hunted for after- 
 wards. Not so with this poet. Vital thoughts, spiritual meanings, 
 clothing themselves in natural and appropriate costume, they wear 
 but a thin array of fleshly dress. He has not oppressed the spirit 
 of his writings with cumbrous adornment. I have shown you also 
 Wordsworth's calmness and quietness. No Byronic fever; no 
 melo-dramatic fire ; no loud outcry and groaning of a miserable 
 spirit within ; no morbid anatomy of his own soul ; but a healthy, 
 quiet, calm, leading of us forth into the presence of Nature, and 
 teaching us not to babble, but be quiet ; to wait that Nature may 
 teach us, rather than ask impertinent questions which would fail 
 to have an answer, for Nature is not an echo, to repeat any babble 
 that may be uttered to it ; Nature can wait, and will wait ; and 
 those who would be taught must wait upon it. It is a great 
 teacher, and those who would learn of it must sit at its feet. 
 
 These, it appeared to me, were the main principles that wanted 
 illustrating the philosophy of his choice of subjects and diction; 
 the true understanding of what sort of teaching ought to be 
 expected from Nature, and of what disposition the student 
 of Nature must have. I might go on for hours, touching the 
 peculiar opinions which Wordsworth has advocated or brought 
 forth. I might go would it not weary you into the whole of
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 305 
 
 the sonnets ecclesiastical, or into the sonnets in favour of death- 
 punishment. But all Wordsworth's admirers put them aside. 
 They see that they are a lawful localism of a great genius. 
 Wordsworth first writes for the world, as a poet and man, and 
 then writes his little sonnets to show what sort of man he is 
 that he is an Englishman, a churchman. Turn we to him as poet 
 and man : let him keep his ecclesiastical sonnets, as I would have 
 everyone hold his own peculiar tenets, but thrusting them not 
 upon others. Begin not at the wrong end with Wordsworth, do 
 not start with his specialities and peculiarities, and so unfit your- 
 selves for the contemplation of him as the great priest of Nature, 
 as the great assertor of freedom of humanity, of passiveness, and 
 wise quietness. Let his ecclesiastical sonnets or other localisms 
 define the man as English Churchman, or as man of the nineteenth 
 century, but do not, according to a carping criticism, suffer the 
 remembrance of him as Englishman, or as nineteenth century 
 man, to blind you to the fact that he is a man for all times and 
 all lands, that his name will flow on with increasing glory to the 
 end of time, for his is this peculiarity that beginning in opposi- 
 tion to his age the ages will continually come nearer and nearer 
 to him. 
 
 By expressing what was abstract, then, he will live on; whereas 
 Byron has begun to go down. The star of Byron is setting ; that 
 of Wordsworth is rising. Why is this ? The one was the mighty 
 voice that uttered the cry of a mighty but temporary disease; 
 Byron's was that mighty tongue that gave utterance to the felt 
 maladies of Europe. Europe was tainted and distressed disease 
 had gone to its vitals ; and his was the mouth through which came 
 its mighty Titanic groans. But men cannot groan for ever. 
 When the pain is gone, the groaning is dismissed, as equally dis- 
 agreeable with the pain. The groans of Europe are disappearing 
 before a wiser faith and a deeper spiritualism. Dynamical teach- 
 ing is taking the place of mechanical reform. Byron's greatness 
 belongs to the past, and though his works will be taken down, 
 because they do give the best emblem and poetic expression of 
 the peculiar phases of European history at the time, yet, of 
 necessity, they will be local they will belong to those only who, 
 in times of darkness and doubt, would therefore seek some 
 " power-man " to groan lustily for them. Byron is, as it were, the 
 
 u
 
 306 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 
 
 groaning power of humanity, or of individual, single man , but 
 this will be necessarily temporary. We can read Byron, with 
 pleasure, only once in our lives that is, as a whole ; there are 
 passages that will always be true, but the Byronic fever comes 
 over a man only once. Most of us have had our Byronic time, 
 and we are heartily glad to get out of it. It was the time of 
 protest and disgust, when we gathered ourselves up majestically, 
 and fancied ourselves some mighty Manfred, upon our lonely 
 mountain-top of solitariness and grandeur. That day, and its 
 uneasiness, have passed away ; and having thus, as by some 
 eruptive feverish attack, ridded ourselves of that " perilous stuff 
 which weighed upon the brain," we turn with open, longing hands 
 to this calm, wise, cool prophet of humanity ; and, having thus 
 cleansed ourselves from what was dark and perilous, we are 
 prepared to receive the pure, the healthy, the wholesome, and the 
 sanitary. The one was a mere negation, striving to protest ; the 
 other is a building up in the vacant places, in the waste and 
 howling wilderness which protest has left, of a fair, quiet temple 
 of calm wisdom, of deep feeling, without the fire, and fury, and 
 phantasy of the days of our youth, when scepticism, and darkness., 
 and doubt were upon us. This, then, is Wordsworth's peculiar 
 position. When our first youthful fancy is over, he will come to 
 us and be beloved. 
 
 If any of you, through the mood being upon you which is 
 termed Byronic, love not Wordsworth, I would say to you, Bide 
 your time ; you will be glad of him yet. Let the book lie there ; 
 you will want it, if you are worthy to make use of it. The time 
 will come when your soul will have a want, an appetency, which 
 Wordsworth among our poets can only supply. For the poets 
 stand waiting; they should not be read in a hurry, beginning, 
 as some people do, with the beginning, and going through. 
 The characters of the poets should be known for this reason, 
 that to understand them thoroughly, we should not read them till 
 we want them. Wordsworth will be wanted when vacuity is felt 
 as the first result of loud and long protest. When the fever of 
 youth is beginning to desert us ; when the world has played us 
 false a time or two ; when we are beginning to care little for 
 people's praise, and less for their blame ; then will the poet, who 
 comes with something positive, calm, and quieting, be wanted,
 
 The Poetry of Wordsworth. 307 
 
 and be deeply felt to have been sent to fulfil the high mission of 
 making us meditative, calm, thoughtful, quiet, deep-feeling, pious, 
 charitable, and devout men. 
 
 I have not time to go into the objections made against* Words- 
 worth, as to his not teaching sufficiently the peculiar doctrines of 
 the Christian faith. His teachings are borrowed from Nature; 
 and when Nature teaches the Apostle's Creed ; when Nature has 
 written upon it any creed whatever ; when the Ten Command- 
 ments are seen blazing in the sky in letters of good Gothic print, 
 then will be the time to accuse Wordsworth of having forgotten 
 his faith, because the poems do not contain a poetic catalogue of 
 articles of doctrine or creeds of faith. He learned of Nature, 
 he teaches from Nature ; and he seeks not so much to instruct 
 as to make and mould us. He has not striven so much to give us 
 knowledge as to give us wisdom ; he does not strive to make us 
 men professing this, but men being that. His effort is not to give 
 us ready-made professions to utter and quote, but to go behind 
 peculiar differences, and by an appeal to all that is common to every 
 one of us, prepare us the better for seeking manfully, for living 
 reverentially, charitably teaching and insisting upon those after 
 peculiarities of opinion and feeling and sentiment which study and 
 thought may reveal to us as true. Wordsworth prepares the back- 
 ground, upon which each of us may paint his own picture as he 
 will. He gives no picture list of articles of doctrine or of creed. 
 He prepares a canvas, gives us colours, and teaches each to 
 paint for himself, Nature, Faith, Religion, and the World, as they 
 represent themselves to each of us. Wordsworth's teachings 
 come before the peculiarities of a sect ; they are appeals to the 
 being ; they are not so much teachings of doing as of being; they 
 are a continual attempt to make us better men, rather than better 
 scholars an attempt to make the mind healthy, that afterwards 
 it may get knowledge. They are not so much a laying down of 
 peculiar opinions, for us to take up and assert, as of that general 
 healthiness, strength, and power, which each of us can use for the 
 particular life-purposes for which the best circumstances, study, 
 and discipline may incline us to use them.
 
 THE POETRY OF S. T. COLERIDGE. 
 
 BORN 1772. DIED 1834. (From I2th Geo. III. to 4th William IV.) 
 
 T N lecturing on the poetry of Coleridge, I find greater difficulty 
 A than I have previously felt in addressing you on almost any 
 of the subjects which it has been my duty to discuss ; and this on 
 account of the difficulty in the subject, on account of the frag- 
 mentary nature of the poems, and especially on account of the 
 remarkable character of the man of which they are but the brief 
 expression. For a more strange and wondrous mind, than that 
 of Coleridge, modern times have not produced ; a man who seems 
 to have set himself the herculean task of combining in himself 
 almost all knowledge ; of laying tributary every source of informa- 
 tion, no matter how patent, or how abstruse and remote. It is 
 easy to find fault with Coleridge for this encyclopedic tendency ; 
 and for some of those whose mental constitution inclines them 
 always to move in a lineal measure, those who have no breadth, 
 whose excellence (I cannot call it a great one, though it is an 
 excellent excellence) is to see some point clearly before them, and 
 to march continually and contentedly towards that point ; men 
 narrow, but useful because very narrow ; it is easy for these men 
 to say what Coleridge would have done if he had not been discur- 
 sive, and if he had been more industrious. Coleridge, in his 
 sadder and wiser moments, was the first to allow that he had lost 
 time, mis-spent opportunities, and wasted many a high occasion, 
 upon which he might have done better. But such criticism may 
 be overdone. Every man, it appears to me, has his peculiar voca- 
 tion ; if he can make that out, let him manfully adhere to it, 
 whatsoever opinion neighbourly critics may possess as to the 
 particular worth of that mission, or as to how well he would have 
 accomplished some other mission. These minds are not able to 
 measure Coleridge ; few are able to do it; for fully to understand 
 such a mind, the circle of our own had need be larger. Particu-
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 309 
 
 larly here, then, do I only essay to give such hints as may throw 
 such light upon these poems, or upon their author, as may afford 
 you merely aid in your own study thereof; for to enter into a 
 thorough and profound criticism of this man, one had need be 
 mightier than he. 
 
 I would that it came within the scope of my subject to say 
 something concerning the life of Coleridge, and especially concern- 
 ing his prose works, a task which I hope will even yet be given 
 me to attempt ; for my opinion of the use, not to say the beauty, 
 of this man's prose writings, is high. Lofty- minded are his writ- 
 ings, in the sense in which I have expounded that term with 
 respect to literature, showing that they are the high-minded and 
 lofty-souled of literature who write for no temporary purpose, and 
 are guided by no temporary laws, but who endeavour to make 
 every part of their literary duty an exponent of some principle 
 which they have searched deeply and found to be true, and to 
 which they manfully adhere. 
 
 It is Coleridge's endeavour to reduce everything to its idea. 
 The Platonists would assert that ideas were certain archetypal 
 things ; that the idea precedes an existence, and, in accordance 
 with it, the existence comes to be ; the ideas existed bodiless, but 
 not the less marked and known for that ; and all created things 
 were created in accordance with these primary ideas. We need 
 not adopt the Platonic theory with respect to the works of God. 
 It is perfectly possible that an autocratic, self-existent Being, may 
 find within himself, in laws of his own framing, a sufficient reason 
 or idea for the making of all things ; there needing no outer law, 
 no outer idea, in accordance with which creation is to go on. But 
 with respect to all the works of man, be they what they will, there 
 does exist, as Coleridge expresses it, some primary idea. If man 
 could but get the divine idea or vision of these earthly things, the 
 absolute idea would be gained. If he could see how life looks to 
 the Divine Being, how creation looks to God ; if he could get a 
 glimpse of how his life looked when set in the light of God's 
 countenance ; then should he have gained the idea of his life, the 
 mould and pattern and standard of his life ; and, by its conformity 
 or otherwise to that standard, he should be enabled to gauge its 
 worth or worthlessness. 
 
 Now, behind all human institutions, there is an idea of what
 
 3io The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 they should be, what they should do ; and a high-minded litera- 
 ture will be that which continually removes great subjects from the 
 mere outward dress in which the circumstances of life and of the 
 day may have clothed them, and takes them into those high 
 regions of pure thinking and of the abstract ideal. This it was 
 Coleridge's aim to do. He had set himself a herculean and 
 gigantic task. Hear his own words on the subject : 
 
 " My system, if I may venture to give it so fine a name, is the 
 only attempt, that I know, ever made to reduce all knowledge into 
 harmony. It opposes no other system, but shows what is true in 
 each, and how that which was true in the particular became error 
 because it was only half the truth. I have endeavoured to unite 
 the insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to frame a perfect 
 mirror. I show to each system that I fully understand and rightly 
 appreciate what that system means ; but then I lift up that system 
 to a higher point of view, from which I enable it to see its former 
 position, where it was, indeed, but under another light, and in 
 different relations, so that the fragment of truth is not merely 
 acknowledged but explained." 
 
 After reading such an extract, you will see what I mean when I 
 say that the task which Coleridge set himself was gigantic ; that 
 into his mind was to stream all knowledge, all sectarian history, 
 all party and polemic rule ; and his was the mind that was to take 
 these insulated things, and with rejection, according to the idea, 
 rejection from them of what is false, temporary, and fleeting, to 
 form from them a system, perfect and complete. Remember, that 
 with respect to the past, this is the highest vocation a scholar can 
 set himself; and there is no philosophy which needs more advo- 
 cating than this, the philosophy of wise choosing ; the philosophy 
 which endeavours from all precedent systems to gather such parts 
 of them as were true. I say with respect to past history chiefly, 
 because mere eclecticism, the mere choice between already existing 
 systems, the mere selection out of party and sect of what is true 
 in it, will not make us possessors of the realms of the future. It 
 will enable us to work among the great past, to live upon it, to be 
 supported up to a certain point, by it ; but it will scarcely afford 
 a rule of progress, a law by which to walk in as yet undiscovered 
 realms. This Coleridge set himself to do ; and this, to a great 
 extent, he succeeded in doing.
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 3 1 1 
 
 His knowledge was varied and encyclopedic ; perhaps too varied 
 to enable him to bring that concentration of power upon certain 
 objects, which leaves great and lasting works in the world. His 
 mission, perhaps, was rather to teach an initiate few, who should 
 again become the teachers of a still-widening circle, than at first to 
 address the great public, and to throw his words off-hand, as it 
 were, in such form and shape as they might understand. For 
 remember, there is one spirit, many manifestations. In the Scrip- 
 tures, it is said that to one, God giveth the gift of prophecy, to 
 another that of miracles, to another that of ministration, and so 
 on ; each rank having a duty to do, not supplied or fulfilled by 
 the rank immediately preceding him. There are men whose duty 
 it is, not to address the public primarily, but to gather around 
 them a small band, to whom they may discourse in not dilute lan- 
 guage, but in the high, abstract language that the highest and 
 abstrusest thought may rightfully demand. And say not, accord- 
 ing to the common criticism, because a man does address but a 
 few, that, therefore, he does but little. Here the law is this, the 
 widening circle ; he teaches his band, and they teach the multi- 
 tude; the law primarily laid down to them, they, as it were 
 interpreters between the sage and the people, do, by virtue of 
 their understanding in part the language of both, make patent and 
 plain to the world at large. We recognise many orders ; we do 
 recognise the esoteric philosopher, whose words are for the few ; 
 and then the interpreter, who, not so great as his master, has yet 
 enough of his spirit to be able to understand the language he 
 speaks, and, on the other hand, as much of the proper spirit, as 
 much knowledge of the common language of mankind, as to 
 safely stand between the sage and the people ; going now to the 
 sage and hearing his winged words, and turning next to the people, 
 and reducing those high words of abstruse knowledge into plainer 
 and more ordinary dialect. Coleridge was scarcely this inter- 
 preter ; he was rather the sage and the seer. And (as I have said 
 before), say not that he did little ; for many of the choicest spirits 
 of the day are men trained at his feet, men who took from him his 
 wisdom, and who have been reproducing it in varied forms ever 
 since, 
 
 As a talker, he is allowed to have been the first. I have heard 
 many men say what it was to sit an hour or two to hear Coleridge
 
 312 The Poetry of S T. Coleridge. 
 
 talk. We know that the men he gathered round him were men of 
 varied minds themselves, men of gigantic intellect. Amongst 
 them we see Edward Irving, sitting, child-like, at the feet of the 
 sage, to be instructed by him. And, remember, Irving is one to 
 whom justice has not yet been done, a man whose soul was cast 
 in an antique mould ; one who (it has been said), in modern 
 times, and in unfavourable times, strove to be a Christian priest ; 
 whose aspect reminds us of the Hebrew prophets of old ; whose 
 words were those of earnestness and fire, and before whose tongue 
 painted hypocrites shrunk in shame ; but who, in the later period 
 of his life, because his imaginative powers gained the mastery, was 
 dismissed as an enthusiastic madman, whose words were not 
 worth listening to. Let us hear what Christopher North says of 
 Coleridge (An Hour's Talk about Poetry) : 
 
 " Let the dullest clod that ever vegetated, provided only he be 
 alive and hear, be shut up in a room with Coleridge, or in a wood, 
 and subjected for a few minutes to the ethereal influence of that 
 wonderful man's monologue, and he will begin to believe himself 
 a poet. The barren wilderness may not blossom like the rose, 
 but it will seem, or rather feel to do so, under the lustre of an 
 imagination exhaustless as the sun. You may have seen, perhaps, 
 rocks suddenly so glorified by sunlight with colours manifold, that 
 the bees seek them, deluded by the show of flowers. The sun, 
 you know, does not always show his orb even in the day-time 
 and people are often ignorant of his place in the firmament ; but 
 he keeps shining away at his leisure, as you would know were he 
 to suffer eclipse. Perhaps he the sun is at no other time a 
 more delightful luminary than when he is pleased to dispense his 
 influence through a general haze or mist softening all the day, 
 till meridian is almost like the afternoon, and the grove, anticipat- 
 ing gloaming, bursts into ' dance and minstrelsy ' ere the god go 
 down into the sea. Clouds, too, become him well, whether thin 
 and fleecy and braided, or piled up all round about him castle- 
 wise and cathedral-fashion, to say nothing of temples and other 
 metropolitan structures ; nor is it reasonable to find fault with 
 him, when, as naked as the hour he was born, ' he flames on the 
 forehead of the morning sky.' The grandeur, too, of his appear- 
 ance on setting has become quite proverbial. Now in all this he 
 resembles Coleridge. It is easy to talk not very difficult to
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 3 1 3 
 
 speechify, hard to speak ; but to ' discourse ' is a gift rarely 
 bestowed by Heaven on mortal man. Coleridge has it in perfec- 
 tion. While he is discoursing, the world loses all its common- 
 places, and you and your wife imagine yourself Adam and Eve, 
 listening to the affable archangel Raphael in the Garden of Eden. 
 You would no more dream of wishing him to be mute for a while, 
 than you would a river that ' imposes silence with a stilly sound.' 
 Whether you understand two consecutive sentences, we shall not 
 stop too curiously to enquire ; but you do something better, you 
 feel the whole just like any other divine music. And 'tis your 
 own fault if you do not 
 
 ' A wiser and a better man arise to-morrow's morn.' 
 Reason is said to be one faculty, and imagination another ; but 
 there cannot be a grosser mistake ; they are one and indivisible ; 
 only in most cases they live like cat and dog, in mutual worrying, 
 or haply sue for a divorce ; whereas in the case of Coleridge they 
 are one spirit as well as one flesh, and keep billing and cooing in 
 a perpetual honeymoon. Then his mind is learned in all the 
 learning of the Egyptians, as well as the Greeks and Romans ; 
 and though we have heard simpletons say that he knows nothing 
 of science, we have heard him on chemistry puzzle Sir Humphrey 
 Davy, and prove to his own entire satisfaction, that Leibnitz and 
 Newton, though good men, were but indifferent astronomers. 
 Besides, he thinks nothing of inventing a new science, with a 
 complete nomenclature, in a twinkling; and, should you seem 
 sluggish of apprehension, he endows you with an additional sense 
 or two, over and above the usual seven, till you are no longer at 
 a loss, be it even to scent the music of fragrance, or to hear the 
 smell of a balmy piece of poetry. All the faculties, both of soul 
 and sense, seem amicably to interchange their functions and their 
 provinces ; and you fear not that the dream may dissolve, per- 
 suaded that you are in a future state of permanent enjoyment. 
 Nor are we now using any exaggeration ; for if you will but think 
 how unutterably dull are all the ordinary sayings and doings of 
 this life, spent as it is with ordinary people, you may imagine how 
 in sweet delirium you may be robbed of yourself by a seraphic 
 tongue that has fed since first it lisped on ' honeydew,' and by- 
 lips that have 'breathed the air of Paradise,' and learned a 
 seraphic language, which, all the while that it is English, is as
 
 3 1 4 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 grand as Greek and as soft as Italian. We only know this, that 
 Coleridge is the alchymist that in his crucible melts down hours 
 to moments and lo ! diamonds sprinkled on a plate of gold." 
 
 But, as I have said before, my precise subject forbids me 
 dwelling upon either the man and his strange and varied life, or 
 his strange and varied works. I must, in obedience to my duty, 
 turn now to the poems of Coleridge. A great poem he has not 
 written ; long poems he has not written ; and the first peculiar 
 characteristic I shall indicate, is that Coleridge has represented 
 in poetry certain states of mind, or phases of being, that, either on 
 account of their vague nature, or on account of their seldom coming, 
 other poets have neglected, or perhaps have neglected because of 
 its being as difficult to seize them, and to write them down upon the 
 page, as it would be to seize any of the airy spirits of romance and 
 bend them down to do task-work, as the servants of the house. 
 
 Coleridge has been peculiarly successful in reducing, as it were, 
 into fetters of time and place, certain things, in their nature 
 evanescent. There are certain moods lasting but a little while, 
 which cannot be explained by any patent mental philosophy that 
 I am aware of. They are not dignified enough for philosophers, 
 they are not important enough, they are too imaginative, dreamy, 
 mystic, for men whose great province and object it is only to 
 present the " rational " part of our nature. Many of our poets, 
 and especially of our philosophers, have been a great deal too 
 dignified for common-place people like ourselves. The fact is 
 that they are monsters, all head, as we sometimes see repre- 
 sented in caricatures, where all the strength of the body is run 
 away with to make the head gigantically large ; so, by virtue of 
 their " reason," they are sublimed and raised above these feelings 
 of which I am speaking. Such states which come over us, the 
 beginning of which we cannot exactly put our finger upon, and 
 the end of which we cannot exactly trace out, moods of the 
 mind, are truly fantasies certain possessions of the spirit of man 
 which he cannot account for by the presence in his mind of any 
 known previous cause. There is always a class which dismisses 
 certain feelings as vague and mystic ; or, if they acknowledge 
 their presence, they look upon them as palpable weaknesses, 
 against which the intellect should be always upon the watch, and 
 for the " putting down " of which the reason ought always to be
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 315 
 
 sitting upon the bench, ready and able. They are above wonder- 
 ing, they have done with the vague.; unless you can show them a 
 plain proposition, with practical bearings, and a good moral and 
 a useful end, they will none of it. These men are more useful 
 than agreeable. I do not like a man with no passion, feeling, 
 enthusiasm, fancy, sentiment, vagaries, or dreams ; I do not like 
 these pure intellectual monsters, the men of nothing but logic, 
 Euclid, and propositions, with nothing of imagination in them, 
 with no colouring about them cold, dry, dead ; they are not the 
 men to my taste. I like men and their feelings ; I like men to 
 walk with a few " weaknesses " yet about them, for then we can 
 lay our hands in theirs and say, " Here is a brother, here I feel a 
 like warmth with that which is in my own heart." The other 
 class of men are such as I have indicated men with weaknesses, 
 if you are pleased so to call them men not unwilling to surrender 
 themselves to fantasies, and to be easily persuaded, they know not 
 why or how. They are not smitten with that modern malady of 
 accounting for everything. It is an exceedingly good thing to 
 account for everything : it is well to account for the rising of the 
 sun, it is well to account for the going down of the same ; but 
 verily I would rather be able to account for neither than that the 
 ability to account for them should take away the mystic glory of 
 the rising sun, or that strange and balmy influence of the setting 
 sun. What Arnold says about other matters I would say about 
 this : I would rather have my sons ignorant of science ; I would 
 rather they should think the sun went round the earth, and that 
 the earth stood still, than that I should have them men so merely 
 scientific as to be unable to take interest in the great questions of 
 humanity, in those great questions of passion, enthusiasm, fancy, 
 and feeling by which we are surrounded. I know how to reverence 
 science you will not suspect me of putting any slight upon it 
 but I do say that science has withdrawn too many away into a 
 cold-blooded seclusion from the life and interests of the fellow- 
 sinners by whom they are surrounded. Those of whom I am 
 speaking are not smitten with the mania of accounting for things ; 
 they do not refuse to believe anything that they cannot account 
 for, they have no & priori rules that there could not be, and should 
 not be, any such things as spectres and apparitions ; they do not 
 settle beforehand that Mesmerism is a farce, that all sympathy of
 
 3 r 6 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 soul with soul, except through some good patent medium, which 
 they can touch, or look at, or pull about, is an idle dream ; they 
 are not the men who have made up their minds to deny all these 
 things. I have sufficiently indicated these two classes of men ; 
 right and left you can find specimens of either. Look at them, 
 touch them, turn them round, and say which you think is the 
 more amiable and more truly philosophic. 
 
 Now this, as it appears to me, is the peculiar vocation of 
 Coleridge's poetry. It recognises certain states or phases of 
 being that cannot be very easily accounted for ; such, for instance, 
 as the " lapping the soul in Elysium " from music ; you cannot 
 particularly account for it, though you may have a philosophic 
 theory upon the effect of sound upon the auditory nerves. We 
 shall have had one of Beethoven's symphonies played to us, and 
 almost before the sounds have ceased our philosopher will get up 
 and open his sermon upon the effect of music upon the auditory 
 nerves ; what are the effects of the vibrations of the piano-strings 
 and those of the air ; and account for the peculiar effects which 
 some of us sensitive to music do feel. 
 
 These philosophers, again, do not recognise that peculiar, 
 somewhat dreamy kind of state into which we are sometimes 
 brought by communing with Nature. There are times when we 
 reach that wise passiveness that Wordsworth speaks of; when we 
 are content to lie upon the bosom of nature, and be carried with 
 it, and breathe along with it, and be pleased with it, and be 
 improved by it, without "accounting" for it. We do not enter 
 into nice and elaborate medical calculations of what fresh air does 
 for a man. No, we have done with those things ; we have left 
 "accounting" at home in the study, and we have come out 
 simply to be; and being is above thinking and doing. To be 
 to be aright to be in harmony with nature ; to feel that between 
 it and its blessed influences upon ourselves there is no gulf, no 
 alienship, no want of harmony, this is the perfection, not of 
 happiness, but of true blessedness. 
 
 There is also another class of these things, very unphilosophi- 
 cal, I admit, which Coleridge has noted for us. You shall sit 
 round the fire at Christmas-time, good men and true every one of 
 you ; you shall come there armed with your patent philosophy ; 
 that creak you have heard, it is only the door the list is not
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 317 
 
 carefully put round the dour, and it is the wintry wind that 
 whistles through the crevices. Ghosts and spectres belong to the 
 olden times ; science has waved its wand and laid them all. We 
 have no superstition about us ; we walk enlightened nineteenth 
 century men ; it is quite beneath us to be superstitious. As 
 Carlyle says, we have caught the great sphinx that set the riddle 
 of the world, and torn off his stuffed hide ; and there is now 
 nothing wonderful in anything. We have done with wonder; 
 it belongs to the early ages of the world, to the dark ages, to the 
 times when popular education was not. By-and-bye, one begins 
 to tell tales of ghosts and spirits ; and another begins, and it 
 goes all round ; and there comes over you a curious feeling a 
 very unphilosophical feeling, in fact, because the pulsations of air 
 from the tongue of the story-teller ought not to bring over you 
 that peculiar feeling. You have only heard words, tales con- 
 fessed by the story-teller himself to be only a tale, such as may 
 figure in the next monthly magazine for pure entertainment and 
 amusement. But why do you feel so, then? If you say that 
 these things are mere hallucinations, vague air-beating or tale- 
 telling, why, good philosopher, do you feel so curious, so all- 
 overish, as it were ? Again, you are a man without the least 
 terror in you, as brave and bold a man as ever stepped : living 
 man cannot frighten you, and verily the dead rise not with you. 
 But you are brought, towards midnight, to the stile over which 
 is gained a view of the village churchyard, where sleep the dead 
 in quietness. Your manhood begins just to ooze away a little; 
 you are caught occasionally whistling to keep your courage up ; 
 you do not expect to see a ghost, but you are very ready to see 
 one, or to make one ; the white cow, peacefully grazing, or the 
 old pollard willow stretching out its arms, needs but a little 
 of the subjective magic, a little of the enchantment that dwells 
 in us, speedily to become the sheeted ghost or the irowning 
 spectral form. Why is that ? Account for it, if you please : 
 tell us what is the feeling ? However, there is the feeling ; and 
 the poet has seen that it being a feeling, a real feeling, it should 
 find its representative in art. 
 
 For I look upon it as an undeniable canon, that every feeling 
 that ever did or does exist in large classes of men, nay, even in 
 a single mind, must be, sooner or later, reproduced in art ; for it
 
 318 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 is the province of art to reproduce, according to its laws, and for 
 particular purposes, all the foregone things of man ; the feelings, 
 forms, sentiments, the appearances of nature and the doings of 
 historic life. Here is Coleridge's peculiar mission as the artist, 
 to give them a place on the page ; to, as it were, catch such 
 " airy nothings," and bind them syllably down ; to make them 
 become manacled by words ; to make them, as it were, so live in 
 this book, that, by their very objective being, they should produce 
 in you those strange subjective feelings which first gave them 
 birth. See the history of such a poem, for instance, as " The 
 Ancient Mariner." There is, as it were, a good back-ground of 
 superstitiousness (I will call it so, to please you) in us all ; a 
 certain amount of floating capital for the ghost-seer to build upon, 
 in us all. We all give him a little ; we are excitable to a certain 
 degree ; all superstitious to a certain degree. Now, the presence 
 and existence of these feelings in the minds of men summons up, 
 on the part of the artist, a world of superstition, of unreal beings, 
 of romantic life. The " ghosts " of the Middle Ages are the 
 objective, the exterior, formal outside representations, of all these 
 strange, dreamy, inward, subjective feelings of man. Had we not 
 been able to feel a ghost, art or nursery legend never would have 
 created a ghost. It appears to me that this principle of art must 
 be well understood, that no outward thing can be found, except 
 it be an exponent of some inward verity. I am leaving out of 
 view the lower branch of art, the Dutch school of art. I do not 
 say, that for a man to paint an onion, he must have felt a sensi- 
 bility peculiar to the onion in him. An onion, painted by a Dutch 
 painter, is just the portrait of an onion, and nothing more. But 
 when we go into high art, into the aesthetic and the imaginative 
 branch of art, the artist cannot, by any power, whatsoever, make 
 or create a form that had not the call for its creation, previously, 
 in the soul or feelings of the man. The Ariel of Shakespeare had 
 not been, but that man had felt Arielish, so to speak. Caliban 
 had not come, had not each one of us, or at least many of us, a 
 portion, as it were, of Calibanism in him. The Caliban or Ariel 
 of the objective poetic world, is the form in which the poet, by 
 his high art, has bound the subjective vague feelings of the human 
 mind. Ariel stands there for future ages the symbol of certain 
 feelings of the human mind. It is the same with the nursery
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 319 
 
 legends, those books which modern education has unwisely shut 
 out and excluded ; those wondrous old legends that do more for 
 us than any "philosophy made easy." These books are all 
 obedient to such a law ; and here I am supported by the testi- 
 mony of great man after great man, that I would rather have 
 parted with many of my spelling-books, than give up the tale of 
 Cinderella, or that of wondrous Jack, the great giant-slayer of old. 
 So far, then, have we advanced, as to see that these creations of 
 the poet and the artist, are results of foregone conclusions in 
 the mind. 
 
 The next process is to see how they react. First, the soul of 
 man, with certain feelings ; then the poet, with certain creations, 
 those creations owing their being to the feelings in the mind. For 
 these creations of the poet are to the fluent spirit that created 
 them what the ice is to the water, a bonding and a binding of it 
 they have gained what they had not before. These vague 
 feelings which in men's minds are fluent, not subject to any 
 material laws, when they come upon the page of the poet or 
 artist, lose somewhat of their fluency, and come to be constricted 
 in the bonds of time and space. They have passed out of being 
 pure spirit into being body and spirit. These feelings, in the 
 poet's page get them a body, they become flesh, they are, as it 
 were, put into being, and then comes their afterwork. First the 
 feeling, then the poet, then the creation of the poet, because of 
 the existent feeling, and then the summoning of the feelings 
 again through the ministry of the symbols created by them. Have 
 I made this clear? First, there are within us certain vague and 
 misty feelings which we cannot yet, in the present state of science, 
 account for ; that it is the mission of the poet, the artist, to give 
 them a form and body, so that we can look at them. Such 
 Shakespeare has done in his fair)- world. He has caught, as it 
 were, a fairy, and there it is ; you can open the book and inspect 
 it at your leisure, he has museumed it, so that all future ages shall 
 be able to look upon it. But he has not put it there merely for a 
 raree-show, he has not set it there merely for fools to stare at, or for 
 critics to comment upon, but that it may call back that feeling of 
 which it is but a symbol, and but for which it never had been. 
 Remarkably has Coleridge d'.ne this. Certain feelings, which he 
 understood so well, produced " The Ancient Mariner," and then
 
 320 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 " The Ancient Mariner " produces at will those feelings. For I 
 defy any man of imagination or sensibility to have it read to him, 
 by the flickering firelight on Christmas night, by a master mind 
 possessed by the mystic spirit of the poem, and not find himself 
 taken away from the good, regions of " ability to account for," and 
 taken into some far-off dream-land, and made even to start at his 
 own foot-fall, and almost to shudder at his own shadow. 
 
 People may say, "What is the use of all this? What good 
 utilitarian purpose can all this be turned to ? " I would say that 
 the man who asks that question is just the man we must decline 
 answering. A man asks, " What is the use of music ? " I never 
 answer that man. The use of music ! I could discourse to him 
 on the use of bacon; I could tell of the use of geography; I 
 could, in my humble measure, tell him of the use of chemistry ; 
 but the use of music ! That man will ask us next, " What is the 
 use of the smell of the rose ? " or, " What use is there in birds 
 singing ? " He is the man who will enter into a long disquisition 
 upon the probable uses of the song of the nightingale. And he 
 will be reduced to a puzzle by it, too, for that said nightingale 
 begins to sing at unseemly hours, she is apt to keep men out of 
 doors on chilly evenings, from which they are led to take cold. 
 Such a man is one of those of whom Richter says, they like 
 nightingales, but roasted ; and myrtles, in the same way that the 
 Spanish bakers do to light their ovens with. Never trouble 
 yourselves to explain uses to these men, they are of no use to 
 them. Music, the smell of the rose, the songs of birds, have no 
 uses; nightingales, for aught I know, have no use, except just 
 simply to be nightingales. Such things have no end or beginning, 
 they are mere ecstacies of being, circles, whirlpools. Grant at 
 once that they have no use, and so have done with the utilitarian 
 school. This is a way of ending many debates, for there are 
 certain men as to whom it is best always to allow them everything 
 they ask for. If they say " Music is useless," say, " Granted;" and, 
 just when they are beginning to crow in their pride, say, " What 
 then?" 
 
 Having safely got rid of that sort of utilitarian school, we may 
 yet inquire what is the use of this vagueness, this mysticness of 
 our nature ? Why should the poet give them body and form ? 
 Why should he strive to reproduce and recreate them ? It does
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 321 
 
 appear to me that there is a high and holy end which these things 
 serve. They keep us and our sensibilities alive to another world 
 than our own. They are like a sense of the soul, which brings 
 us into communion, mystic and dim, but real, with the spirit of the 
 past and the spirit world that surrounds us. For many of us do 
 believe that the world we see is not the only world we may know ; 
 that not what can be measured out by rule, or looked at through 
 spectacles, is all that has being ; but that there are certain things 
 that reveal themselves to us in the mode in which the ancients 
 deemed they did, when they held that the involuntary shudder of 
 the body was caused by the tread of an unhallowed foot upon our 
 grave yet to be, these things which lead men to believe that the 
 soul here, and there, can yet hold soul-communion ; that, as in the 
 dream of the night, the spirit can transcend the body and be 
 without it for a time. It does appear to me that these strange 
 and vague feelings are instruments to keep alive within us our 
 faith in the unseen and spiritual world. I do not say that they 
 are arguments for an unseen world. Many of us are thankful 
 that we want few arguments about it ; and we give thanks that we 
 want few arguments about the immortality of the soul, spiritualism, 
 and the life everlasting. We are content to feel it, and to hold it 
 when we have been argued out of it. We are content to be 
 obstinate about such things, to let people argue it patiently and 
 demonstratively that there is no such thing, and yet, when they 
 have gone, to be as firm in the faith as before ; because there are 
 instincts within us that lean toward such things, strange pro- 
 phetic questionings of another world, instincts that have not 
 their origin in propositions, and which do not find their result in 
 demonstrations ; that we are finely attuned to an invisible world ; 
 that these feelings, vague and mystic, fan the flame of- faith, and 
 keep it alive amid the conflicting words of many doctrines, pro 
 and con, with which philosophers or others may assail it. For the 
 flame of faith needs an inward feeding : blown upon here by the 
 chill breath of scepticism ; and there, by the hot and exhausting 
 breath of fanaticism, bigotry, and superstition, the flame of faith 
 needs to have an upward motion from its own imvard generation ; 
 though it may for a moment go northward and then southward, 
 because the wind has changed, yet to be continually upspringing, 
 and thus be enabled to defy the assaults of cold unbelief and of 
 
 x
 
 322 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 that suffocating simoon, superstition, bigotry, and want of 
 thought. 
 
 But I am forgetting the poet. Confessedly, however, with the 
 works of Coleridge before us, it is lawful to go into dreamland. 
 I will begin with that beautiful sonnet in which he has bodied 
 down for us a mood, which will not be admired by those good 
 industrious people who think man is never doing his duty if he 
 is not working at something which he can hold up to be looked 
 at, which he can put down on the counter and say, " Here is my 
 work ; pay me my wages." Though it will not be admired by 
 such people, it is right beautiful. 
 
 FANCY IN NUBIBUS ; 
 
 OR, THE POET IN THE CLOUDS. 
 
 O ! it is pleasant, with a heart at ease, 
 
 Just after sunset, or by moonlit skies, 
 To make the shifting clouds be what you please, 
 
 Or let the easily persuaded eyes 
 Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould 
 
 Of a friend's fancy ; or with head bent low 
 And cheek aslant see rivers flow of gold 
 : Twixt crimson banks ; and then, a traveller, go 
 From mount to mount through CLOUDLAND, gorgeous land ! 
 
 Or list'ning to the tide, with closed sight, 
 Be that blind bard, who on the Chian strand 
 
 By those deep sounds possessed with inward light 
 Beheld the ILIAD and the ODYSSEE 
 
 Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea. 
 
 There is nothing more beautiful than this in English poetry. 
 It is an example of what I have been telling you about. What is 
 the use of a man's writing of how one looks at the clouds after 
 sunset; of a man's half-closing his eyes and travelling through 
 cloud-land ; or sitting with his eyes shut at the sea-side, that he 
 may fancy himself the blind bard ? There is no use in it, but it 
 is there. It comes not of man's making. It is an attuning, 
 granted by the Creator, between the glories of nature and the 
 powers of the soul. It is a beautiful harmony of the many- 
 stringed ^Eolian harp of man with the winds and airs which God 
 has caused to breathe through nature. It is too holy and beautiful
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 323 
 
 to have stupid questions asked about its use. It is there for 
 refreshment. It is there, when tired with propositions, to lose 
 ourselves in being, to refresh us from reasoning, and to bring us 
 back strong men, by its being something of a sleep, a thing that 
 we know has happened afterwards when we come to think of it, 
 but of which during its blessed trance we are blessedly ignorant. 
 I shall afterwards have to point out other examples, especially 
 when I come to comment on "The Ancient Mariner." Coleridge 
 holds the first place among English poets, in this objective teach- 
 ing of the vague, the mystic, the dreamy, and the imaginative. 
 He was also eminently successful in reducing to the objective 
 form certain single states of the mind. He took a single phase of 
 the mind, made it isolated, and put it down like an anatomical 
 specimen, that we might be the better able to examine it. For 
 with respect to the human body, the skeleton, as a whole, can be 
 only looked upon generally, but to understand it thoroughly, bone 
 must be taken from bone, and each subjected to a thorough 
 examination. A wise metaphysician does not murder in order to 
 dissect, but dissects in order the better to understand the mind of 
 man. To-day will be laid upon his table hope, to-morrow fear, 
 joy, agony, conscience, and pain; that each of them, by this 
 solitary manipulation, may be the better fitted into the complete 
 whole. If a man looks upon the human mind as a bundle of 
 different properties, one of which may be, and the other not be, 
 and so on, he commits an error ; he has murdered for the sake of 
 dissecting ; but the wise anatomist dissects that he may, by a 
 thorough knowledge of the parts, gain the only complete know- 
 ledge of the whole. In poetry, Coleridge has done this ; he was, 
 as it were, a skilful anatomist of the parts of the human mind. 
 He lays a passion bare before us, isolates it, segregates it from its 
 fellows ; he gives us to-day joy, to-morrow hope ; he turns them 
 round, knows them, classifies them thoroughly, and is enabled 
 exactly to place them aright, and so to constitute that wonderful 
 whole, the soul, spirit and body of a man. An extract which I 
 will read to you, and which is called " Youth and Age," will 
 explain this last of Coleridge's peculiarities. It represents certain 
 evanescent feelings common to most of us.
 
 324 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 YOUTH AND AGE. 
 
 VERSE, a Breeze 'mid blossoms straying, 
 Where HOPE clung feeding, like a bee 
 Both were mine ! Life went a maying 
 With NATURE, HOPE, and POESY, 
 
 When I was young ! 
 
 When I was young ? Ah, woeful WHEN ! 
 Ah for the Change 'twixt Now and Then ! 
 This breathing House not built with hands, 
 This body that does me grievous wrong, 
 O'er aery Cliffs and glittering Sands, 
 How lightly then it flashed along : 
 Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore, 
 On winding Lakes and Rivers wide, 
 That ask no aid of Sail or Oar, 
 That fear no spite of Wind or Tide ! 
 Naught cared this Body for wind or weather 
 When YOUTH and I liv'd in't together. 
 
 FLOWERS are lovely ; LOVE is flower-like ; 
 FRIENDSHIP is a sheltering tree ; 
 O the joys, that came down shower-like, 
 Of FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, and LIBERTY, 
 
 Ere I was old ! 
 
 Ere I was old ? Ah woeful ERE, 
 Which tells me, YOUTH'S no longer here ! 
 
 YOUTH ! for years so many and sweet, 
 'Tis known, that Thou and I were one, 
 I'll think it but a fond conceit 
 
 It cannot be that Thou art gone ! 
 Thy Vesper bell hath not yet toll'd : 
 And thou wert aye a Master bold ! 
 What strange disguise hast now put on, 
 To make believe that thou art gone ? 
 
 1 see these Locks in silvery slips, 
 This drooping Gait, this altered Size : 
 But SPRINGTIDE blossoms on thy Lips, 
 And Tears take sunshine from thine eyes ! 
 Life is but Thought : so think I will 
 That YOUTH and I are House-mates still. 
 
 Thus, as I have said, certain feelings of the mind, vague and 
 indistinct, and the cause of which we cannot very definitely lay
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 325 
 
 down, are expressed in the poems of Coleridge, and receive there 
 their outward embodiment. For it appears to be a rule of art, 
 that whatsoever is true of a mind, and especially of a large class 
 of minds, should receive by the artist an outward embodiment ; 
 so that the feelings which gave it birth may be reproduced. 
 
 II. 
 
 In English literary history there is a peculiarity which has been 
 noticed by a recent writer, that in the time of Bacon, and Jeremy 
 Taylor, and others, there was a beauteous union of powers and 
 gifts in the authors. That the scientific man was then the poet ; 
 that the divine was no crabbed theologian only, but knew how to 
 steep his theology and divinity in the rarest dyes of poesy and 
 imagination, and to strengthen the whole by sense and by learning 
 the furthest off and most abstruse. If any man would see an 
 example of this, he must read the works of Jeremy Taylor, in 
 which we have eloquence and poetry of the rarest order, coupled 
 with strength of reasoning, force of logic, and abstruse learning 
 seldom met with in modern times in one man. There were few 
 of the philosophers of that day who were not also poets, and few 
 of the poets who were not also philosophers. There came a 
 divorce in English literature, however: imagination and science 
 parted company, and the result was, in the last century, a race of 
 men who had only one or more parts of this compound nature. 
 Take, for instance, Locke. With all his excellence, he was defec- 
 tive, partial ; he had no poesy or imagination in him ; and often- 
 times, the poet of that day was as destitute of the metaphysical 
 element. Such men are common even yet; men all head, all 
 logic, proposition, demonstration, and conclusion ; no fancy, no 
 imagination ; men who think all poetics waste of time, unprofit- 
 able stuff; who look, like some political economists, upon the 
 poet as a sort of unproducing animal, which consumes, and which 
 it is doubtful whether or not the State ought to encourage. That 
 time passed away, and brought us to modern times, in which we see 
 the rare old union again ; for we have men living amongst us who 
 strangely combine the powers of the metaphysician with the 
 imagination and the fancy of the poet; and chief of the men of 
 this century who have so done is Coleridge, one of the rarest
 
 326 The Poetry of S. T, Coleridge. 
 
 combinations of the metaphysician and poet the world has known. 
 This is shown in his poetry ; for there he combines two classes of 
 poetry that had been distinct previously. He was both meta- 
 physician and poet : yet sometimes poet without being meta- 
 physician, and sometimes metaphysician without being poet. 
 There are certain poems of Coleridge's which answer to the old 
 meaning of poetry, when it was looked upon as an inspiration or 
 possession. The time was when the poet was looked upon as 
 forced to speak, when he could not help but speak; and the 
 poetry which will always be most popular with man, is that 
 when the poet seems so possessed with his subject. It was 
 said of some of the old prophets that they resisted the spirit of 
 prophecy, but they were forced to yield to it. So with the poetry 
 most moving to the people, the poet will be forced to speak, 
 whether his will is there or not. It is a bubbling up of a spirit 
 within the man. Wordsworth had little of that characteristic 
 about him. He seldom spoke as if possessed ; but rather wrote 
 as a man recording past inspiration or possession. Byron wrote 
 as if possessed. What sort of demon he was possessed with is 
 another question ; but, certes, many of his poems appear a pouring 
 forth simply because the demon has so thoroughly mastered him. 
 I might compare the two classes thus : The one stands like a 
 priest of old to take down the words of the Pythoness, whereas the 
 other mounts the tripod, and becomes the mouthpiece through 
 which the inspiration gains its utterance to man. This points out 
 the division of almost all our poets, into those who play the part 
 of the Pythoness themselves, or those who are merely ministering 
 priests, to write down the words of others, or to record a past 
 possession. But both of these are found in Coleridge. There 
 are poems of his which seem to be utterances, simply because he 
 could not avoid it ; like the speech of man under the influence of 
 a strong passion, eloquent, not through study, but through the 
 fulness of the spirit, and the power which the spirit has when it is 
 in its full, to overcome obstruction, and which seems to give man 
 a faculty and force he otherwise has not. I have heard that the 
 Germans usually do not like the poetry of Wordsworth, because, 
 I presume, they take the theory of poetry, which regards it as an 
 irresistible impulse, as an utterance, not of set theory, but of 
 passion. Wordsworth, writing his poems in obedience to theory,
 
 The Poetry of S. T.Coleridge. 327 
 
 may appear to them rather to build up a lofty rhyme, than to utter 
 the fulness and depth of his passion. 
 
 In the poems of Coleridge, he notes down, and he utters. 
 Many of his poems are nothing but an utterance. They come 
 simply because the feeling in him was so full ; and there are, so 
 far as I know, no " uses " in many of his poems. He says 
 himself: 
 
 " Mrs Barbauld once told me that she admired ' The Ancient 
 Mariner ' very much, but that there were two faults in it, it was 
 improbable, and had no moral. As for the probability, I owned 
 that that might admit some question ; but as to the want of a 
 moral, I told her that, in my own judgment, the poem had too 
 much, and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the 
 obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader, as a 
 principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. 
 It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale 
 of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, 
 and throwing the shells aside, and lo ! a genii starts up, and says 
 he must kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date shells 
 had, it seems, put out the eye of the genii's son." 
 
 Thus we see the difference of opinion between Coleridge and 
 Mrs Barbauld on the subject of " The Ancient Mariner." There 
 is a moral in " The Ancient Mariner ; " Coleridge says it is too 
 obtrusive, and probably it is ; because it obtrudes itself into a 
 region where we do not want a moral. It is an objective render- 
 ing of the phases and feelings of the human mind ; it is a most 
 masterly delineation of that great passion of remorse which 
 Coleridge has drawn at greater length in his drama. There is a 
 beauty about the vagueness of " The Ancient Mariner." Some 
 have said how strange and vast is the tale to build upon the 
 simple killing of a bird. Therein is seen how a little sin will 
 generate huge remorse. He would have shown himself a less 
 skilled man, and to know far less about the human mind and its 
 passions, had the great remorse only sprung from a great crime. 
 But he knew too well what remorse is. In his prose he had 
 written it too often. Painful knowledge it was, but he knew that 
 a little crime will, by the power of the conscience and the mind, 
 raise up a haunting spirit that shall be with us even until death. 
 His moral he thought too obtrusive, and so vindicated that class
 
 328 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 of knowledge of which I have been speaking, which has no end 
 but simply to be, and which there is no more need of accounting 
 for than good health, good spirits, laughter, or weeping, The cry 
 made about the moral and the use of such poems is very similar 
 to what all have sometimes seen. A child is thumped, and it 
 cries. Some sapient person says, " It is no use to cry ; it will do 
 you no good." Who thought it would? The crying does not 
 come to do good, but it is the natural result of a feeling. Many do 
 not laugh to do good. They are not smitten with any impulses, 
 passions, and feelings thus. The child cries in fulfilment of a law 
 of nature, that an inward feeling should struggle towards an out- 
 ward birth. Life and nature are made up of this, a continual 
 struggle of the invisible to body itself in the visible ; a continual 
 effort on the part of the unseen to make itself a symbol in the 
 visible and seen. The crying comes that there may be a presence 
 in both worlds ; that in the world of the spirit grief may be, and 
 in the world of matter sound expressive of the grief may be. 
 A dualism must be in these things. The feeling must exist in the 
 mind, and have expression. So with such poems : the spirit of 
 them is in humanity, the law of them is in the soul, and the poet 
 gives to them tongue and utterance. All the feelings in " The 
 Ancient Mariner " are in humanity ; the poet summons up that 
 strange weird being, and so gives outward expression to the 
 inward feelings of humanity, and then comes the after action of 
 that outward expression to summon up those very feelings in the 
 mind from which it gained its origin and birth. Coleridge was a 
 metaphysician in his poetry ; not that he, like Lucretius of old, 
 put a system of metaphysics into verse. I do not say that any 
 one will, by any process of distillation, get a system of metaphysics 
 out of the poetry of Coleridge. Poetry is not the place for a 
 scientific rendering of metaphysics ; but yet there may be a mode 
 of teaching them, in which the poem is only the outward expression 
 of a deep metaphysical feeling. How beautifully he illustrates 
 most of the grand passions of humanity ; taking a single 
 passion, as it were, and isolating it, letting us look at it by 
 itself, and only for the purpose of afterwards completing the full 
 man. Take such a feeling as that of dejection, and see how it 
 has been rendered in those words (unsurpassable in any poetry), 
 commencing, " A grief without a pang."
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 329 
 
 " A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, 
 A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, 
 Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, 
 In word, or sigh, or tear 
 
 Lady ! in this wan and heartless mood, 
 To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd, 
 
 All this long eve, so balmy and serene, 
 Have I been gazing on the western sky, 
 
 And its peculiar tint of yellow green : 
 And still I gaze and with how blank an eye ! 
 And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, 
 That give away their motion to the stars ; 
 Those stars, that glide behind them or between, 
 Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen : 
 Yon crescent moon as fixed as if it grew 
 In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue ; 
 
 1 see them all so excellently fair, 
 
 I see, not feel how beautiful they are ! 
 
 " My genial spirits fail, 
 
 And what can these avail 
 To lift the smothering weight from off my breast ? 
 
 It were a vain endeavour, 
 
 Though I should gaze for ever 
 On that green light that lingers in the west ; 
 I may not hope from outward forms to win 
 The passion and the life, whose fountains are within." 
 
 The same thing has also been done by Coleridge for the passion 
 of love, which in few and simple lines he has painted : 
 
 "All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
 Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 
 All are but ministers of Love, 
 And feed his sacred flame. 
 
 Oft in my waking dreams do I 
 Live o'er again that happy hour, 
 When midway on the mount I lay, 
 Beside the ruined tower." 
 
 and if any of you want a poetic exercise, you may take some of 
 the mediaeval age of English poetry, and compare them with those 
 lines, not anatomising; the passion, or cause of the passion, but
 
 330 The Poetry of S. 7\ Coleridge. 
 
 just the simple uttering of a man who was so full thereof that he 
 must tell his tale. The iteration in poems of the beauties of eyes 
 and so forth, until it becomes looked upon more like a catalogue 
 of external beauties, than the expression of a man full of true 
 feeling, presents a woeful contrast to these simple and beauti- 
 ful lines. The love found in Byron's poems is a mixture of sen- 
 sualism and sentimentalism ; the passion of the animal, with the 
 refinement of the poet superadded ; an attempt to put poetic 
 colouring over the lower form of the passion of love. It is fire 
 offered on the altar of a false god an attempt to light up the 
 altar, not of the true Greek Cupid, but of the 'Ampos, which was 
 known of the ancients to be an enemy rather than a friend to the 
 true epog, or love. I will now read you the whole of the ex- 
 quisitely beautiful poem of " Genevieve." 
 
 " Maid of my Love, sweet GENEVIEVE ! 
 In Beauty's light you glide along : 
 Your eye is like the star of eve, 
 And sweet your voice, as Seraph's song. 
 Yet not your heavenly Beauty gives 
 This heart with passion soft to glow : 
 Within your soul a VOICE there lives ! 
 It bids you hear the tale of Woe. 
 When sinking low the sufferer wan 
 Beholds no hand outstretcht to save, 
 Fair, as the bosom of the swan 
 That rises graceful o'er the wave, 
 I've seen your breast with pity heave, 
 And, therefore, love I you, sweet GENEVIEVE ! " 
 
 These extracts might be greatly multiplied, each of them a perfect 
 gem, and the result of the full possession of the mind of the poet 
 of the particular feeling which he was instancing. 
 
 I will now pass on to that remarkable part of his poetry which 
 must be pronounced to be the result of what Coleridge very much 
 was a dreamer. No one will suspect me of using the word 
 "dreamer" in an obnoxious or abusive sense. Some of the 
 greatest men the world ever had were dreamers ; and old John 
 Bunyan has made dreaming too beautiful for any wise and 
 thoughtful man to sneer at it, as if it were a waste of time, or an 
 unhealthy and unnatural exercise of the soul. I use the word in
 
 The Poetry of S. T.Coleridge. 331 
 
 the sense of those men who have surrendered themselves to their 
 own spirits, and have given to us as the result, the phases, the 
 changes, and the feelings of their inward being. For this is, as it 
 were, the spirit's dreaming, and the laws of such dreams as these 
 must be very like the laws of dreams with which all are familiar, 
 which often pass away from the rules of logic, and which are 
 sometimes so strangely involved that a man dreams he is dream- 
 ing. Now there is a waking dreaming, transcending the usual 
 laws of thought and logic, as does the nightly dreaming transcend 
 the customary rules of thinking. It begins in meditation, that 
 particular temper of the .mind which so few know how to distin- 
 guish from thought, or attention to study ; for meditation is neither 
 of these. It is like throwing the reins on the horse's neck to let 
 him go where he will. By no logic-rein does it strive to keep the 
 mind in. By no whip or spur of an end to be gained, a utility to 
 be served, does it strive to goad on or restrain the spirit. But it 
 is a surrendering ourselves to ourselves, a suffering the mind to 
 do as it will, and to be " easily persuaded " by whatsoever 
 feeling may come across it. For I believe there is a weather oi 
 the soul, the laws of which are about as little understood as are 
 the laws of our own atmosphere. There are purposes of the 
 mind, directions of the intellect, operations and studies of the 
 mind, which can be made to attend at pleasure, and to come to 
 an end at pleasure ; but beyond that there is a certain atmosphere 
 or weather of the soul, which does not come at our bidding, but 
 by laws we have not yet made out. It is rather a mode of being, 
 than a particular state of doing. It goes beyond this. This 
 supplies but the atmosphere, and this peculiar background is 
 drawn upon certain imaginings, certain fancies or visions, which 
 are not amenable to the ordinary laws of logical reasoning. The 
 man is possessed by imaginings ; he sees strange sights which 
 others do not see ; and, by very virtue of these sights not being 
 visible to others, not being amenable to the laws of intellect, the 
 whole phase of being may be pronounced to be a dreaming. It 
 is rather something done in us than by us ; something to which 
 we are obliged to surrender ourselves, rather than something 
 which we bring into us to work out a stated end. But I cannot 
 define this matter. To those who know not by a mere hint what 
 this dreaming is, I am hopeless of explaining it by any lengthened
 
 332 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 speech. Certain it is that Coleridge was a dreamer ; that he was 
 possessed by these strange feelings, things that are not answerable 
 to the usual law; and his poems present us the most beautiful 
 picturings of the waking day-dreams of an imaginative spirit that 
 literature possesses. Take " The Ancient Mariner " again. 
 What a strange and weird dream is that ! How perfectly original 
 is that mariner ; how unborrowed is the whole thing from any 
 previous source ! " A nameless ship, with a nameless crew ; " 
 an albatross winging its way across the lone heavens ; a freak of 
 mind inclining the mariner to shoot the bird ; a spirit, the friend 
 of the bird, which haunts him ; and those two strange figures 
 upon the deck, dicing, as it were, for a human soul ; then the 
 ship, " as quiet as a painted ship upon a painted ocean ; " and 
 the impulse of this strange being to travel the world over, and 
 seize on some one to hear his tale to an end. Make what you 
 will of it, and it remains a dream. And who can say by what 
 law it was that " The Ancient Mariner " rose in such a strange 
 bodily being, before the mind's eye of the poet ! For we can 
 scarcely imagine that this was a thing of mosaic, of purposing, 
 and contrivance, the result of manufacture. It is no snow man, 
 made by continually piling up. But we can scarcely help thinking 
 this ancient mariner rose up before him, without asking leave, 
 coming when it would, and departing according to its own rule, 
 merely asking from us that we should give it a temporary habi- 
 tation, and a fit audience of its mystic utterings. In this class of 
 literature, the expression in the outward of the mystic and more 
 supernatural feelings of the human mind, " The Ancient Mariner " 
 stands pre-eminent ; it is one of those unfinished fragments the 
 law of which we do not understand. It obeys the usual 
 inclination of Coleridge's mind, to be fragmentary, for, 
 unfortunately, Coleridge has finished nothing. A recent critic 
 said this was the age of fragments, the age of great beginnings 
 and small conclusions : and many of the most remarkable poems 
 and other works of this century are unfinished. All Coleridge's 
 poems are beautiful snatches, fragments. A curious problem 
 would be to ascertain whether the characters of our age supply a 
 reason for this ; to ascertain what there is in the character of the 
 minds of the men of to-day, in the temper or circumstances of the 
 age, to cause the fragmentary appearance of the works of some
 
 77ie Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 333 
 
 of the greatest poets and writers. " The Ancient Mariner ; ' 
 most of you are familiar with, and it has held you intensely, 
 whether you would or not, until its weird tale was told out. The 
 results of such a poem justify its being, explain its meaning, and 
 give its laws. If any of you wish to know why it is, what it is, 
 and what it has to do, you must read it quietly, or have it read 
 quietly to you, at night-time. The chances are you will be 
 spell-bound ; there will be a strange, creeping kind of feeling 
 over you, you will almost look around to see whether or not the 
 spirit world has become manifest ; or there will be a shrinking, a 
 strange chill of the blood, a listening at the next door creaking, 
 to see what will come of it. If it does this, you know all that 
 can be said in explanation of the poem. The question, then, 
 will be removed from the poem to the feelings themselves, and 
 then a fruitful source of thought will be to find why we have such 
 strange feelings within us. What is it that makes a man, in 
 spite of all his philosophy, still a supernaturalist ? Such feelings 
 serve, probably, to keep alive in us that veneration and wonder 
 without which the study of nature, of providence, and of God, is 
 almost hopeless. Those familiar with the works of Carlyle will 
 remember how this ability to wonder, and this state of veneration, 
 are insisted upon as necessary conditions in the study of nature. 
 For nature and life, having their roots in mystery, in the infinite, 
 can only be studied by such minds as feel veneration, and have 
 not lost the ability to wonder. Were there, then, no other 
 purpose served by such poems, and the feelings which they 
 generate, than that of just keeping wonder alive in us, they would 
 do well ; for a defect it always is in education, when, through 
 any pretence of being scientific, of having philosophy made easy, 
 or of being delivered from superstition, of being wiser than our 
 forefathers, of being the educators of an enlightened nineteenth 
 century, of being the result of utilitarianism, whether through 
 these or any other causes, an education which neglects and lessens 
 the wonder-power of the human mind, is a mischievous education. 
 As I said before, many great men have asserted that the nursery 
 tales did more for them than all the "science made easy" which 
 was inflicted upon them; that the wonderful tales of the 
 giganticide of old, of the German mythology, and our own 
 rich nursery lore, were of more use to them, did more to make
 
 334 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 them what they were, poets, seers, and interpreters of nature, 
 than did " mathematics made easy," or any patent science 
 catechism whatever. What is the result of the two different 
 classes of education? As far as I have noticed it but I may 
 be wrong a child brought up with no culture of the wonderful, 
 whose imagination is rather repressed than fostered, comes out 
 at last a hard, dry, cold, frigid, narrowed intellect ; a mere 
 logician, a person never content only to enjoy, but pestered with 
 a great desire to " account for ; " who not only would be happy, 
 but must account for it ; who would almost refuse to be happy, 
 except he could account for it. And it makes oftentimes a 
 pedantic and unruly spirit, a spirit which will have no faith ; 
 which must have sight ; that demands to be able to touch 
 and smell everything it is to believe ; that will not trans- 
 cend such little bounds as its own philosophy can give. 
 Such have been the results of an education which neglected the 
 wonder-power of man, which failed to cultivate the imagination, 
 and which, under wise pretence, put down as levity or waste of 
 time the tales of our youth, and the wondrous history in which at 
 first we so faithfully believed. It is wrong, because it is against 
 what is visible to all, that imagination is the strongest faculty in 
 a child. What are all our discussions about the drama and 
 romance ? Sit down and watch the child in a corner, and see the 
 drama it creates between itself and its doll. The child will hold 
 up the doll ; the doll now will speak, and now the child ; and 
 thus a dialogue and drama, with two or three scenes and acts, 
 will go on with such small machinery as one child and one doll. 
 The child is dramatic, of course, because we have settled that the 
 drama is useful, or that it is an allowable form of expression ; of 
 course the child has studied all our philosophical disquisitions on 
 the matter. Verily, no ! The drama came because the child 
 was dramatic, and not because we have settled some law about 
 the drama. The child was an actor before there came play- 
 wrights, and is not an actor because plays are written. So with 
 imagination. How a few chairs will make the child a castle ; and 
 how some few slices of apple will make the child a banquet with 
 which to feast all its friends. There is in imagination, weird 
 power, magic; there is in germ and in petto, magic, wonder- 
 working, creative power, vision, and faculty. The poets came
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 335 
 
 at the bidding of this, and not this at the bidding of our 
 poems. 
 
 It is not beneath us, then, to learn a lesson therefrom ; to see 
 that as we have not the ordering of this, we must be content to 
 be ordered by it. We did not settle what faculty should be pre- 
 eminent in the mind of a child ; probably if we had, we should 
 have made it a logical or enlightened one ; one that would have 
 maintained that apple-slices were apple-slices, and not a feast; 
 that the doll was wax, and not a living being. The child would 
 not have stated that the doll did sleep, that she saw it sleep, and 
 that she helped to awake it. Had we had our own will, the wax 
 doll would have been a wax doll, and the child would have been 
 a nice little nineteenth-century child, and would have believed in 
 no such fancies whatever. But as it is not of our making, we 
 must be content to be made thereby. These feelings originated 
 the laws of such literature, and to thoughtful men they are a 
 sufficient reason for the matter. The wonder-power, therefore, 
 being in the child, imagination being its foremost and first power, 
 that is a mistaken education which leaves them out of the ques- 
 tion, strives to cramp them, or which would negative them in 
 their exercise. They are there, and they are there for a reason ; 
 they are not put there, like a man's beard, to give the man the 
 trouble of shaving it off, according to the modern European 
 practice. They are there as the first buddings of the feeling of 
 the wonderful, of the feelings which help to keep alive, and to 
 keep warm, faith. The other education wisely cultures them. 
 It is not wiser than the maker of the child ; it does not presume 
 to say fiction is wicked and wrong, because it sees the child make 
 fictions from the beginning; it does not make confusion between 
 the modern stage and the principles of the drama ; it does not 
 make a confusion between an ill-managed theatre and the prin- 
 ciples of dramatic representation. It cultures the wonderful, 
 puts it, as all powers must be, under due subordination, but does 
 not seek to remove it. What is the consequence with such a 
 mind ? Those so trained are generally the warm and full of 
 faith ; able to wonder, able to be children up to their dying day ; 
 carrying the boy's heart far away into advanced life, generally to 
 the last; men who do not ask sight in all cases, but who are 
 content sometimes to walk by faith in the invisible and unseen.
 
 336 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 Such poems, then, have great use and meaning. They keep alive 
 the old feelings of imagination and wonder. I would not have 
 all the wonder taken out of the world ; and if it were, then I fly 
 to the poets, the dramatists, and the painters, that I may find an 
 ark of refuge there. One of the first operations, though but a 
 temporary one, of science, is to take the wonder out. How 
 pathetically has one of our poets lamented over it, when he tells 
 us that there was once an awful bow in heaven, and goes on to 
 say how philosophers have told us its woof and texture. There 
 are three states in this matter : First, wonder, from ignorance ; 
 second, no wonder, from shallowness ; and third, all wonder, from 
 depth and profoundness. Think on about science, and wonder 
 will come back. In olden times, the planets were wonderful 
 things, men knowing little about them ; in the middle state, they 
 are not wonderful, because Newton and others have told us their 
 weight ; but think on deeper, and in the very fact that we can 
 know their weight, and see their vastness and the beautiful 
 regularity with which they move, we may again find cause for 
 mute astonishment. 
 
 In obedience to the usual critical law, I ought to indicate some 
 faults in my poet. There are some, doubtless. But I would 
 prefer that he should indicate them himself. There are three 
 sonnets which I will read from the " Biographia," * in which he 
 has pointed out the sins of his own poetry. 
 
 SONNET I. 
 
 Pensive at eve, on the hard world I mused, 
 And my poor heart was sad ; so at the moon 
 I gazed and sighed, and sighed : for ah how soon 
 Eve saddens into night ! mine eyes perused 
 With tearful vacancy the dampy grass 
 That wept and glittered in the paly ray : 
 And I did pause me, on my lonely way 
 And mused me, on the wretched ones that pass 
 O'er the bleak heath of sorrow. But alas ! 
 Most of myself I thought ! when it befel, 
 That the sooth spirit of the breezy wood 
 Breathed in my ear -. "All this is very well. 
 But much of one thing is for no thing good." 
 Oh my poor heart's inexplicable swell ! 
 
 * Biographia Literaria, Chap. I.
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 337 
 
 SONNET II. 
 
 Oh I do love thee, meek Simplicity ! 
 
 For of thy lays the lulling simpleness 
 
 Goes to my heart and soothes each small distress, 
 
 Distress though small, yet haply great to me. 
 
 Tis true on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad 
 
 I amble on ; and yet I know not why 
 
 So sad I am ! but should a friend and I 
 
 Frown, pout and part, then I am very sad. 
 
 And then with sonnets and with sympathy 
 
 My dreamy bosom's mystic woes I pall ; 
 
 Now of my false friend plaining plaintively, 
 
 Now raving of mankind in general ; 
 
 But whether sad or fierce, 'tis simple all, 
 
 All very simple, meek Simplicity ! 
 
 SONNET III. 
 
 And this reft house is that, the which he built, 
 
 Lamented Jack ! and here his malt he piled, 
 
 Cautious in vain ! these rats that squeak so wild, 
 
 Squeak not unconscious of their father's guilt. 
 
 Did he not see her gleaming through the glade ! 
 
 Belike 'twas she, the maiden all forlorn 
 
 What though she milked no cow with crumpled horn, 
 
 Yet, aye she haunts the dale where erst she strayed : 
 
 And aye beside her stalks her amorous knight ! 
 
 Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn, 
 
 And through those brogues, still tattered and betorn, 
 
 His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white. 
 
 Ah ! thus through broken clouds at night's high noon 
 
 Peeps in fair fragments forth the full-orbed harvest-moon ! * 
 
 * It may be well to quote here what Coleridge says of these sonnets : 
 " Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an 
 excess, that itself will need reforming. The reader will excuse me for noticing 
 that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto, the three sins of poetry, one 
 or the other of which is the most likely to beset a young writer. So long ago 
 as the publication of the second number of the Monthly Magazine, under the 
 name of Nehemiah Higginbottom I contributed three sonnets, the first of 
 which had for its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful
 
 338 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 I think these sonnets will sufficiently indicate the chief faults of 
 Coleridge ; an occasional turgidity ; a multiplication of epithets 
 prior to the feeling of which the epithets should be but the ex- 
 pression, a sin with which most of our poets are chargeable; 
 sticking in the feelings, as it were, rather than having them the 
 true cant of poetry ; getting up the feeling to order. There is a 
 substantive wanting an adjective, and it is put in, not because the 
 feeling in the mind dictates the adjective ; but that for the sake 
 of making it encomiastic or enthusiastic, it was proper that no 
 poor substantive should be left to shift by itself, but thus be 
 attended by a valet in the shape of an adjective or two. Cole- 
 ridge's poems, like his prose, are doubtless sometimes obscure. 
 There are reasons for this in the peculiar structure of Coleridge's 
 mind, that eternal discursiveness which is so often troublesome 
 to his reader. For Coleridge seldom moves in straight lines ; in 
 order to reach a point, he walks round and round it. Every 
 flower by the way he starts off to pluck, every butterfly he runs 
 away in chase of; and his much-bewildered reader, not smitten 
 with the love of butterflies, or not being a botanist or a lover of 
 sweet scents, wishes to be kept straight on the road, and finds 
 himself confused amid the vagaries of the author. This is mostly 
 the case ; it is very few that can keep up with him, not so much 
 on account of the rapidity of his movement, as of the wide circles 
 into which he digresses. A critic has explained this, I think, in 
 the Quarterly Review, by saying that unexpectedness is one of his 
 peculiar characteristics ; that not only the reader, but the author 
 himself, appears startled now and then with thoughts which he did 
 not contemplate ; that the utterance of a word seemed to raise up 
 a whole series of thinking and illustration, which startled himself 
 as much as his hearers. To explain the reason why a mind can 
 be startled with its own thoughts, would lead me a long journey 
 from my purpose. There is such a thing. Those who are true 
 poets and artists are often more struck with the words they have 
 uttered, the things they have written, the pictures they have 
 
 egotism, and the recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double defect of 
 being at once trite and licentious. The second on low, creeping language 
 and thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity. And the third, the phrases of 
 which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate use 
 of elaborate and swelling language and imagery."
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 339 
 
 painted, than any amateur or critic that comes to look upon them. 
 Many of their works do not seem to be their own, and they are 
 therefore astonished at the beauty and goodness of the thing they 
 have done. What doctrine this points to I will not stop to tell, 
 nor make myself answerable for the misconstruction which would 
 be put upon any explanation of this, one of the most strange 
 phenomena of the mind. The starting of a man at his own words, 
 and the absolute wonder that comes over him, how he could say 
 anything so good and strange poets and artists know what this 
 means. The artist paints away to-day in obedience to a feeling 
 that bubbles up within him, to-morrow he comes back and starts 
 at the beauty of it. Poets seem to have great thoughts given to 
 them, and when they come in cool blood to look upon their 
 works, when the heat of the occasion is over and gone, they smile 
 upon their beauty, and cannot account for their origin. So it was 
 with this great mind ; unexpectedness in his works startled him as 
 it does the reader. For with ordinary writers, the thing goes on 
 in an easy noiseless flow ; this sentence is there because the other 
 goes before it, and because between the two there is a certain 
 chain link of connection. But there is nothing of this kind with 
 Coleridge. You may find here a sentence, and then following it 
 one the connection of which can scarcely be seen, and for the 
 understanding of which we must be content to wait for a long 
 time. Oftentimes it seems as if there were a whole series 
 of middle sentences left out, and he comes almost to the end 
 before he has got at the beginning. This will explain much 
 of the mysteriousness of Coleridge. We have dropped some 
 links; perhaps he has dropped them himself; for some minds 
 come intuitively to the conclusion, and others must be con- 
 tent to progress to it with slow and painful steps. When 
 this is the case, all that can be done is to wait and study fre- 
 quently, and then perhaps the power of the author will be such as 
 to inform us with his spirit, so to make our intellect akin to his, 
 that though we may not supply the lost link, we may hope to 
 gain the power of making the same eccentric bound that he does. 
 In German literature, Richter's writings afford many such cases, 
 where intermediate links are gone ; where he starts off, and we 
 are left panting in the vain hope to see the consequence. There 
 is a law in this, but it is a recondite and abstruse one. The only
 
 34O The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 mode by which to learn the effect is by constant and diligent 
 study, and so, if possible, not by theory, but by practice, to 
 master the method of the teacher, and to do that by instinct and 
 impulse which he has already done. 
 
 III. 
 
 I was speaking of one peculiarity noticed by a critic, which he 
 calls " unexpectedness," as being a characteristic of Coleridge's 
 genius ; that many of his thoughts seem to be both unexpected 
 by the poet and the reader. This has been accounted for by 
 another critic, by what he calls the tangential character of Cole- 
 ridge's mind. He was always flying off at a tangent ; and this, 
 though lending much charm to his conversation, oftentimes pro- 
 duces obscurity in his writings. The effects of this peculiarity 
 are found in his poems, in that he has not written a great poem. 
 His poems are sun-beams or sun-glances, thrown on peculiar 
 salient points. Everything he touches is made light and glorious; 
 but by the very uncertainty, irregularity, want of set purpose and 
 design, we are supplied with a number of minute pictures, with a 
 depth of shadow quite Rembrandtish, rather than with great 
 works like those of Raffaelle. Certain points are " picked out " 
 in light, and the rest of the picture left comparatively dark, for 
 us to fill up as we please. This is seen in the full flood of light 
 which he pours upon particular passions or feelings of the human 
 mind ; the cabinet pictures he gives of peculiar feelings. Like 
 Wordsworth, he rises above that which is little, into the highest 
 and sublimest poetic strains. This will be found in that speci- 
 men of what a hymn really is and should be, the verses composed 
 in the vale of Chamouni. It is affectation of criticism to refuse 
 to call anything a hymn but that which is reputed a hymn. The 
 true meaning of a hymn should be the utterance of a thoroughly 
 rapt and communing soul. But there are few men rapt now-a- 
 days. It has well nigh gone out from us. Spiritual communion 
 has been put down, under plea of idleness, and for a man to pro- 
 nounce himself " rapt " as the ancients were in that state of 
 ecstacy of spirit which is possible would be, in modern times, to 
 proclaim himself a fit subject for a lunatic asylum. Nevertheless, 
 there is sucJi a state of feeling, when purpose, thought, logic, and
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 341 
 
 reasoning are not ; when they sink into nothingness ; when, in 
 the fulness of feeling, there is little thought left for any orderly 
 and systematic utterance ; but the man must pour forth his words, 
 owing to the fulness of feelings, and the plenitude of spirit that 
 bids him utter. Such are some of the highest strains of olden 
 time the mere ecstacy and pouring forth of an overcharged 
 spirit. In them will be found little of system, because on 
 account of their very origin they necessarily transcend the rules 
 of logic. They are earlier than such, beyond them, and out of their 
 province. " Hymns " usually are not of this rapt character, they 
 are often like our prayers, too full of preachments, too full of 
 doctrine and discussion ; rather thinkings than spiritual utterances. 
 The reason why there are so few true hymns is, because there are 
 so few who really feel this rapt communion with God. Standing 
 in midst of one of nature's grandest scenes, the poet appears merely 
 to be the utterer of the great emotions summoned up thereby. 
 I will read you a portion of the " Hymn before Sun-rise in the 
 Vale of Chamouni," to show what it truly is an unreasoning, 
 non-logical (not illogical), unpreaching utterance ; an utterance 
 which comes because it cannot well avoid it, a fulfilment of 
 the saying, that "out of the fulness of the heart the mouth 
 speaketh." 
 
 " Awake, my soul ! not only passive praise 
 Thou owest ! not alone these swelling tears, 
 Mute thanks and secret ecstasy ! Awake, 
 Voice of sweet song ! Awake, my Heart, awake ! 
 Green Vales and icy Cliffs, all join my Hymn. 
 
 Thou first and chief, sole Sovereign of the Vale ! 
 O struggling with the Darkness all the night, 
 And visited all night by troops of stars, 
 Or when they climb the sky or when they sink : 
 Companion of the Morning Star at Dawn, 
 Thyself Earth's ROSY STAR, and of the Dawn 
 Co-herald : wake, O wake, and utter praise ! 
 Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in Earth ? 
 Who filled thy Countenance with rosy light ? 
 Who made thee Parent of perpetual streams?" 
 
 The following verses, " Lines composed in a Concert Room," 
 express another evanescent mood of the mind :
 
 34 2 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 " Nor cold, nor stern, my soul ! yet I detest 
 
 These scented Rooms, where, to a gaudy throng, 
 Heaves the proud Harlot her distended breast, 
 In intricacies of laborious song. 
 
 " These feel not Music's genuine power, nor deign 
 
 To melt at Nature's passion-warbled plaint ; 
 But when the long-breathed singer's upheld strain 
 Bursts in a squall they gape for wonderment. 
 
 " Hark ! the deep buzz of Vanity and Hate ! 
 
 Scornful, yet envious, with self-torturing sneer 
 My lady eyes some maid of humbler state 
 
 While the pert Captain, or the primmer priest, 
 
 Prattles accordant scandal in her ear. 
 O give me, from this heartless scene released, 
 
 To hear our old musician, blind and grey, 
 (Whom stretching from my nurse's arms I kissed), 
 
 His Scottish tunes and warlike marches play, 
 By moonshine, on the balmy summer night, 
 
 The while I dance amid the tedded hay 
 With merry maids, whose ringlets toss in light. 
 
 " Or lies the purple evening on the bay 
 Of the calm glossy lake, O let me hide 
 
 Unheard, unseen, behind the alder-trees, 
 For round their roots the fisher's boat is tied, 
 
 On whose trim seat doth Edmund stretch at ease, 
 And while the lazy boat sways to and fro, 
 
 Breathes in his flute sad airs, so wild and slow, 
 That his own cheek is wet with quiet tears. 
 
 " But O, dear Anne ! when midnight wind careers, 
 And the gust pelting on the outhouse shed 
 
 Makes the cock shrilly on the rain-storm crow, 
 To hear thee sing some ballad full of woe, 
 Ballad of ship-wrecked sailor floating dead, 
 Whom his own true-love buried in the sands ! 
 
 " Thee, gentle woman, for thy voice remeasures 
 Whatever tones and melancholy pleasures 
 
 The things of nature utter ; birds or trees 
 Or moan of ocean gale in weedy caves, 
 Or where the stiff grass mid the heath-plant waves, 
 
 Murmur and music thin of sudden breeze."
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 343 
 
 Some of you will probably find comfort in having such a high 
 poetic authority for some of your musical heresies ; for I cannot 
 doubt that your verdict on much that passes in the concert-room 
 will be much like the poet's. Of course you know full well to 
 what he alludes when he speaks of the people "gaping for 
 wonderment," when, as a very wise man who spoke common 
 sense and not fashion, said, it would be just as reasonable to 
 applaud the man who could keep his head in a bucket of water 
 longest ; for those shakes and trills of our singers which, to the 
 shame of our vocal taste, gain so much applause, are often mere 
 physical manifestations of the physical power of holding [the 
 breath for a long time. And many agree with the poet, that they 
 would rather hear one of those " sad airs so wild and slow," 
 that "wet the cheek with quiet tears," some simple English 
 ballad, than all this mockery of music, this strange exhibition of 
 mere physical power and long-breath hardihood. The same 
 thing was said long ago by Robert Burns, in the " Cotter's Satur- 
 day Night," in which he tells us how certain old Scottish strains 
 moved him more than the trills of Italian music ; a lesson which 
 might be learned by some that if the object be to make music a 
 culturer of the best feelings of the mind, to entrance and enwrap 
 us in Elysium, it is better gained by the simple old ballad or the 
 soul-stirring hymn, than any poor attempts at the rivalry of that 
 which some half-guinea paid at the opera will enable us to hear 
 in perfection. To me, Italian music is well enough in its season, 
 but from lips which would interpret an old ballad better, it is an 
 affectation unworthy of the simplicity and home-feeling by which 
 our nation has long been characterised. 
 
 Another of these feelings, the love of country, is most beauti- 
 fully rendered by the poet, so beautifully as almost to re-hallow 
 that patriotism, the genuineness of which one is sometimes 
 tempted to doubt, when we look back and see that patriotism in 
 past history has meant the elevation of one country by the depres- 
 sion of others, for unfortunately the word patriotism has had this 
 meaning. The patriot has too often been a man who loved his 
 country exclusively, in a partizan spirit, and by that wicked rule 
 from which we are not yet clear, that one nation is exalted by the 
 depression of another. Instead of that, we are now teaching 
 that the raising of all nations is the raising of each, and that is the
 
 344 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 most noble patriotism which has such confidence in its own people 
 as to be able to afford that other nations should have its advan- 
 tages, and other people enter into a fair race with it, and feel that 
 in the end the truest and best and most vigorous racer will win 
 the fight. I will read a passage from the " Sibylline Leaves," 
 illustrative of this feeling in Coleridge. 
 
 " When France in wrath her giant limbs upreared, 
 
 And with that oath, which smote air, earth and sea, 
 
 Stamped her strong foot and said she would be free, 
 Bear witness for me, how I hoped and feared ! 
 With what a joy my lofty gratulation 
 
 Unawed I sang, amid a slavish band : 
 And when to whelm the disenchanted nation, 
 
 Like fiends embattled by a wizard's wand, 
 The monarchs marched in evil day, 
 And Britain joined the dire array ; 
 
 Though dear her shores and circling ocean, 
 Though many friendships, many youthful loves 
 
 Had swol'rt the patriot emotion 
 
 And flung a magic light o'er all her hills and groves ; 
 Yet still my voice, unaltered, sang defeat 
 
 To all that braved the tyrant-quelling lance, 
 And shame too long delayed and vain retreat ! 
 For ne'er, O Liberty ! with partial aim 
 I dimmed thy light or clamped thy holy flame ; 
 
 But blessed the pasans of delivered France, 
 And hung my head and wept at Britain's shame."* 
 
 This sympathy with another nation does not lessen his love for 
 his own country c 
 
 " But, O dear Britain! O my Mother Isle ! 
 Needs must thou prove a name most dear and holy 
 To me, a son, a brother, and a friend, 
 A husband, and a father ! who revere 
 All bonds of natural love, and find them all 
 Within the limits of thy rocky shores. 
 O native Britain ! O my Mother Isle ! 
 How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy 
 To me, who from thy Jakes and mountain-hills, 
 Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas, 
 Have drunk in all my intellectual lile, 
 
 * France : an Ode.
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 345 
 
 All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts, 
 All adoration of the God in Nature, 
 All lovely and all honourable things, 
 Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel 
 The joy and greatness of its future being ? 
 There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul 
 Unborrowed from my country. O divine 
 And beauteous island ! thou hast been my sole 
 And most magnificent temple, in the which 
 I walk with awe, and sing my stately songs, 
 Loving the God that made me !"* 
 
 I need not say how these lines illustrate what I have endea- 
 voured to show as to the teachings of nature. Here is another 
 great mind showing what can be gained from nature, and in his 
 own case proving it ; showing that it is the source of " all 
 ennobling thoughts, all adoration of God in Nature, all lovely, 
 and all honourable things." And from this, wise men will not 
 suffer themselves to be driven by any attempt to put down such 
 teaching or feeling as vague and mystic, or as detracting or taking 
 away any of the reverence which is due to the more special 
 revelation given in the Word of God. 
 
 One of the most extraordinary things about the poems of Cole- 
 ridge is their exceeding melody ; looking not so much to the 
 thought, as to the expression of the thought, the words. It passes 
 the power of criticism thoroughly to find out the secret of Cole- 
 ridge's melody. The attempt has been made, but has never quite 
 succeeded. Some of the poems seem to have a beauty almost 
 independent of the sense. To hear them would be a song of 
 melody and words of music. They resemble in that the Italian 
 language, which to men who know nothing of it is yet musical and 
 beautiful. Its very sounds are pleasant. The melody in Cole- 
 ridge's poems arose from some fine attunement in the ear of the 
 poet, the law of which he would find it as difficult to give as we 
 should find it to supply. I will take up two or three passages 
 which illustrate its exceeding beauty. I am not, however, going 
 to enter into the question of the importance of rhyme or the lack 
 of rhyme. Certainly the form must not be neglected, because it 
 has been well said that the form of poetry is one of the fences 
 
 * Fears in Solitude.
 
 346 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 which help to define the region of art from that of reality. And 
 such a purpose does the melody, rhythm, or even rhyme of poetry 
 ever serve. Poetry must be kept apart from mere reality, from 
 historic recording. Art must always be allowed certain liberties 
 to show that it is art. Hence we do not call a common-place 
 portrait, where the object of the artist was just to picture down a 
 man, a work of art ; nor do we call a daguerrotype a work of art. 
 It is but a cataloguing of actual realism. Common-place portrait- 
 painters are not artists, They reproduce on canvas what they 
 have seen, and no other. In taking of portraits, one goes all for 
 likeness, and is angry as soon as the true portrait-painter comes, 
 and paints the countenance, because he has not made it like. 
 The true portrait-painter does not seek merely to copy the head, 
 but to bring it into the region of art by idealising it. There are 
 Sabbath times, as it were, with a man, when he stands as high as 
 he possibly can ; and such times will have a particular expression 
 which will not be always there. The true artist will seek to em- 
 body that. He will seek to gain the best possible appearance 
 from the man, and catalogue that upon the paper. As soon as he 
 has done that and passed out of the region of mere reproduction, 
 into that of idealism, then, for the first time, he gives us a work 
 of art. It is so with poetry. Were it a mere cataloguing down of 
 facts, or even of thoughts, it would have no distinction from his- 
 tory, or mere theological or metaphysical writing. Undoubtedly, 
 many of our prose writers have been poets, and whenever they 
 have been so, it will be found that they had the true peculiarities 
 of poetry ; but they rejected the form, and in doing so they have 
 oftentimes rendered themselves liable to misconstruction, for they 
 voluntarily remove one of those fences which serve to keep apart 
 reality and poetry. The one may be dry matter-of-fact, and the 
 other the same fact, but wedded to truth, or imagination, or 
 romance. The rhythm of poetry helps to preserve this distinction. 
 It is one of the modes by which it passes from mere portrait- 
 painting into art; and the uses of this Coleridge appears to have 
 been well versed in. Even rhyme itself is not the mere artificial 
 and barbarous thing which some modern critics would have us 
 think. It has a lower excellence, but it would not have come had 
 there not been a feeling in us which called for it, which feeling is 
 gratified by the recurrence of the rhyme. Perhaps one of the most
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 347 
 
 remarkable specimens of this melody, independent of the thought, 
 is found in " Kubla Khan," a mere vision or dream. There is no 
 finished or connected tale, scarcely any connected thoughts, yet 
 it reads beautifully. I shall preface the poem with the history 
 which the poet gives of it, because, by so doing, it becomes a 
 strange psychological curiosity, supposing you believe the account 
 that Coleridge gives of the lines : 
 
 " In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill-health, 
 had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, 
 on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In conse- 
 quence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, 
 from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment 
 that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same 
 substance, in ' Purchas's Pilgrimage : ' ' Here the Khan Kubla 
 commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. 
 And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.' 
 The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, 
 at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most 
 vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from 
 two to three hundred lines, if that indeed can be called composi- 
 tion in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a 
 parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any 
 sensation or consciousness of effort" 
 
 In this historic piece concerning these lines, I think those who 
 have listened carefully will see an indication of the distinction 
 between the two classes of poetry of which I have spoken, where 
 the one man merely records things as if watching them, and "builds 
 up the lofty rhyme " step by step ; and the case where that man 
 is possessed, where the poem or the thoughts of it rise up before 
 him, where, as Coleridge has it, he composes, " if that can be 
 called composition where all the ideas rise up before him as things." 
 
 " On waking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection 
 of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and 
 eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this 
 moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business 
 from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his 
 return to his room found to his no small surprise and mortification 
 that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of 
 the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some
 
 348 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed 
 away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone 
 had been cast, but, alas, without the after restoration of the latter." 
 Then come the lines which Coleridge says were "given to him." 
 What peculiar word we may choose out of the dictionary to ex- 
 press the " giving " to a poet, I will leave you to settle. I will 
 not supply the word which will rise up most readily, but I will 
 leave it for each of you, in accordance with your own metaphysical 
 theory, to supply the word which expresses that peculiar phase of 
 being when something is breathed into a man, when it is " given 
 to him," not dug up, built up, or elaborated by him, or spun out 
 of him, but, as Coleridge has it, " given to him." There are two 
 sources, according to theologians, for gifts God and the devil. 
 There are no other sources or origins for anything that I am aware 
 of. Either they come from "the Giver of every good and perfect 
 gift," or from the prince of darkness. I will leave it to you to 
 settle for yourselves to which of these two parentages these lines 
 must be ascribed. They run thus : 
 
 "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 
 A stately pleasure-dome decree : 
 Where ALPH, the sacred river, ran 
 Through caverns measureless to man 
 
 Down to a sunless sea. 
 So twice five miles of fertile ground 
 With wall and towers were girdled round : 
 And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills 
 Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ; 
 And here were forests ancient as the hills, 
 Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. 
 
 "But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted 
 Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover ! 
 A savage place ! as holy and enchanted 
 As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted 
 By woman wailing for her demon-lover ! 
 And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, 
 As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, 
 A mighty fountain momently was forced : 
 Amid who?e swift half-intermitted burst 
 Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, 
 Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 349 
 
 And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever 
 It flung up momently the sacred river. 
 Five miles meandering with a mazy motion 
 Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, 
 Then reached the caverns measureless to man, 
 And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean : 
 And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far 
 Ancestral voices prophesying war ! 
 
 " The shadow of the dome of pleasure 
 
 Floated midway on the waves ; 
 
 Where was heard the mingled measure 
 
 From the fountain and the caves. 
 It was a miracle of rare device, 
 A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice ! 
 
 A damsel with a dulcimer 
 
 In a vision once I saw : 
 
 It was an Abyssinian maid 
 
 And on a dulcimer she played, 
 
 Singing of Mount Abora. 
 
 Could I revive within me 
 
 Her symphony and song, 
 
 To such a deep delight 'twould win me, 
 
 That with music loud and long, 
 
 I would build that dome in air, 
 
 That sunny dome ! those caves of ice ! 
 
 And all who heard should see them there, 
 
 And all should cry, beware ! beware ! 
 
 His flashing eyes, his floating hair ! 
 
 Weave a circle round him thrice, 
 
 And close your eyes with holy dread, 
 
 For he on honey- dew hath fed, 
 
 And drunk the milk of Paradise." 
 
 Such dreams as that visit but few of us. As a psychological 
 curiosity, it is worth your study. The laws of dreaming have not 
 yet been expounded, and, naturally, it is difficult to expound 
 them, for that which would give the explanation is not present 
 when the dream is present. Herein is the difficulty of accounting 
 for dreams. The dreaming is done by one, the accounting for it 
 by another power; but the accounting power is not present 
 during the dreaming time, and therefore all we know about 
 dreams is their reproduction by imagination or memory. To
 
 350 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 some, dreams help to confirm faith ; for the dream which goes on 
 without us, that ability to be when we are not, confirms their 
 belief that the present conditions of mortality are not needful to 
 the existence of that principle within us which is called spirit or 
 soul. For when a man is wakeful, he is mortal, corporeal, 
 fleshly ; and when he sleeps, in a sense, he has ceased to be ; yet 
 there has gone on something of which only memory gives him 
 cognizance. Dreams seem to hint things unseen, and to sustain 
 faith, that it may not degenerate into vision and sight : for if 
 everything were made as plain and clear as some people wish, 
 the province of faith would be gone. If man could walk by 
 sight, if the world to come could be looked at as through the 
 glasses of a show, if a man could see it actually and visibly, then 
 walking by faith, that sublimest instinct of a man's nature, 
 which tells of a hereafter, though it sees it not, would be 
 impossible within him. Dreams seem to do what dreaming 
 poetry, such as Coleridge's, does, they help to keep alive and 
 foster the instinctive feelings of the soul. They help to keep the 
 wonder-part of a man's nature alive ; they help to keep us super- 
 stitious (if you will have it so), or, as some would render it, full 
 of veneration, full of wonder, and full of faith in the invisible, 
 intangible, and unseen. 
 
 There is but one passage which I can remember in modern 
 poetry, comparable in point of melody to Coleridge, and that 
 occurs in one of Tennyson's poems, and I will read it, as 
 illustrative of the difference between melody as the outward form 
 of expression, and the thought of which it may be the expression. 
 It is the chorus in "The Lotos Eaters." 
 
 " Hateful is the dark-blue sky, 
 Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea. 
 - Death is the end of life ; ah, why 
 Should life all labour be ? 
 Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast, 
 And in a little while our lips are dumb. 
 Let us alone. What is it that will last ? 
 All things are taken from us, and become 
 Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past. 
 Let us alone. What pleasure can \ve have 
 To war with evil? Is there any peace
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 351 
 
 In ever climbing up the climbing wave ? 
 
 All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave 
 
 In silence ; ripen, fall and cease : 
 
 Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease. 
 
 " How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, 
 With half-shut eyes ever to seem 
 Falling asleep in a half dream ! 
 To dream and dream, like yonder amber light, 
 Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height ; 
 To hear each other's whispered speech ; 
 Eating the Lotos day by day, 
 To watch the crisping ripples on the beach, 
 And tender curving lines of creamy spray ; 
 To lend our hearts and spirits wholly 
 To the influence of mild-minded melancholy ; 
 To muse and brood and live again in memory, 
 With those old faces of our infancy 
 Heap'd over with a mound of grass, 
 Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass !" 
 
 I have not read the whole of the piece, which I would commend 
 to your attention, as one of the finest studies of the melody of 
 language. You will see that it is almost impossible to replace a 
 word without marring the beauty. 
 
 As a dramatist, Coleridge does not excel ; that is, if the drama 
 is looked upon for the purpose of being theatrically rendered. 
 As reading-dramas, his are good ; as acting-dramas, they are 
 perhaps impracticable. But everyone acquainted with the drama 
 in this country knows, that for a thing to be pronounced very 
 actable, does not necessarily speak very highly of it as a play. 
 For, unfortunately, noise often makes up for meaning, and with 
 the drama, bustle and effect go further, and tell more with the 
 audience than any deep passion, just on the same principle as 
 the squeals of music of which I have spoken before. These 
 dramas are not the highest works of Coleridge ; they contain many 
 beauteous passages, but there seem to be reasons in the mental 
 constitution and peculiarities of the poet, which unfit him for 
 being a great dramatist. He is too apt to dwell upon subjective 
 feelings for the purposes of the drama. The drama must not do 
 this ; though it is permitted for a few plays such as Hamlet to 
 dwell upon, to detail and point out the subjective feelings, yet
 
 352 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 surely the rule of the drama must be to deal with objective mani- 
 festations of foregone feelings, or the outward rendering of certain 
 inward histories. We must not so much have a laying bare of 
 the inward spirit, in order that the audience may see its workings, 
 as an utterance of the spirit, in order that the same feelings may 
 be called up and summoned in them. 
 
 As a translator Coleridge is unrivalled. Happy is the poet 
 who gains such a translator. His translation of Schiller's 
 " Wallenstein " is admitted by all who know the two languages to 
 be unequalled. Some have said it excels the German. It has also 
 been said that Schiller rendered back into German some of 
 Coleridge's improvements. It is certain, however, that he did 
 Schiller justice ; and he has given, in the English version, some 
 lines not be found in the German, and those are of the highest 
 beauty. Take, for instance, those lines in which there is, as it 
 were, a heart-appeal to the old mythology and astrology. 
 
 " Max. O never rudely will I blame his faith 
 In the night of stars and angels ! 'Tis not merely 
 The human being's pride that peoples space 
 With life and mystical predominance ; 
 Since likewise for the stricken heart of love 
 This visible nature, and this common world, 
 Is all too narrow : yea, a deeper import 
 Lurks in the legend told my infant years 
 Than lies upon that truth " we live to learn." 
 For fable is love's world, his home, his birth-place. 
 Delightedly dwells he 'mong fays and talismans, 
 And spirits ; and delightedly believes 
 Divinities, being himself divine. 
 The intelligible forms of ancient poets 
 The fair humanities of old religion, 
 The power, the beauty and the majesty 
 That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain, 
 Or forest, by slow stream, or pebbly spring, 
 Or chasms and wat'ry depths ; all these have vanished. 
 They live no longer in the faith of reason ! 
 But still the heart doth need a language, still 
 Doth the old instinct bring back the old names. 
 And to yon starry world they now are gone, 
 Spirits or gods that used to share this earth 
 With man as with their friend : and to the lover
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 353 
 
 Yonder they move, from yonder visible sky 
 Shoot influence down : and even at this day 
 'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great, 
 And Venus who brings every thing that's fair. 
 
 Theckla. And if this be the science of the stars, 
 I too, with glad and zealous industry, 
 Will learn acquaintance with this cheerful faith. 
 It is a gentle and affectionate thought, 
 That in immeasurable heights above us, 
 At our first birth, the wreath of love was woven, 
 With sparkling stars for flowers. 
 
 The parallelism between the sonnet of Wordsworth which I 
 have read to you,* in which, with shocking impiety, he prefers 
 rather to be an old pagan, so that he can read nature in the light 
 of poetry rather than in the mere science, is borne out by this 
 beautiful passage from Schiller. Many of his passionate exclama- 
 tions for the old poesy, if translated by any narrow and cribbed 
 rules, would make Schiller appear to be a pagan. They are, 
 however, but longings that science should keep itself in its 
 proper place, and not lay its fingers upon all that is poetic and 
 imaginative. In Schiller's time, the tendency, the mania, of 
 accounting for everything, was rampant ; and it was against this 
 that Schiller, Coleridge, and Wordsworth continually protested ; 
 a prayer that they would leave just a little poetry in the world ; 
 a preference rather to have the old mythology back again, than 
 to have the godless system of "Nature." It is a passionate 
 protest against the class who would " peep and botanize upon 
 their mother's grave." 
 
 But quotations from Coleridge I must not multiply. The 
 question, now, is the relative place which I will assign Coleridge 
 among his brother poets. With all my reverence for him as a 
 man, I must make him one of the dii minores of poetry. He 
 stands inferior to Wordsworth and to Shelley to Wordsworth, as 
 a thoughtful and meditative metaphysical poet, and to Shelley, as 
 an impulsive, rapt poet. Coleridge's poems are but few ; they 
 make us sorry he did not do more. But being but fragmentary, 
 sun-lights upon particular bits of the picture, they give us a suc- 
 cession of pleasures, without doing for us the high ministration 
 
 * Page 295. 
 
 z
 
 354 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 that the continued strain of Wordsworth effects, or bringing us 
 into that rapt communion with Nature which Shelley's poems do. 
 I put Wordsworth and Shelley as the representatives of two very 
 different modes of poetry. The one is more like the standing of 
 the priest near the Pythoness, to record her utterance ; whereas 
 the other is the mounting of the tripod, and being the mouth- 
 piece through which the afflatus should come. The one Words- 
 worth calm, quiet, and unimpassioned, a noter down of the 
 utterances of the priestess Nature ; while, on the other hand, 
 Shelley is passionate and impulsive, lending himself to be a 
 mere uttering-power for deep feelings, which rise up in weird and 
 mystic form. Neither of these does Coleridge excel. He does 
 not come up to Wordsworth as a calm, philosophical writer, nor 
 to Shelley as an utterer of the passionate and impulsive. 
 
 I have dwelt long upon the peculiarities of Coleridge's poetry ; 
 his rendering into the objective the less defined and the less definable 
 feelings of humanity. The dreaminess, the mystery, the subjective 
 superstitiousness of our nature, the strange feelings upon which 
 the dramatist, the poet, and the romancer must build up their 
 fictions ; these things have been rendered by Coleridge. During 
 conversations upon poetry between Wordsworth and Coleridge, 
 previous to their removal to the Lake country, a kind of stipula- 
 tion or agreement was entered into between them. Wordsworth 
 was, through common-place things and common-place incidents, 
 subject to the colouring and working of Nature, conscience, 
 and the mind, to do the effect of the supernatural without 
 employing supernatural agency. This he has done in " Peter 
 Bell," where all the effects of supernaturalism are brought 
 about without a single unconditional supernatural occurrence. 
 Coleridge was to take the other department, and, by a supernatural 
 agency, produce supernatural feelings. Wordsworth, by natural 
 feeling, was to bring about supernaturalism : Coleridge, by 
 supernaturalism, was to bring about the same effects. Therefore, 
 " Peter Bell " and " The Ancient Mariner " ought to stand side 
 by side. Probably, you have never linked them before; but, 
 upon metaphysical as well as poetical principles, they are 
 pendants the one to the other. " Peter Bell " the working 
 upon the soul through the medium of natural objects, coloured, 
 made romantic and strange by conscience, by the common
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 355 
 
 indwelling powers of our nature ; " The Ancient Mariner," on 
 the other hand, an invocation of the unreal and supernatural, in 
 order to bring over us a weird spell. In their way, they are both 
 equally successful ; in their peculiar walk, both equally beautiful. 
 To my mind, they both succeed, to a certain extent that leaves 
 nothing to be desired. " Peter Bell " becomes a man regenerate, 
 though roughly altered, by the power of the soul transfusing its 
 own feelings into the commonplace forms of natural phenomena. 
 On the other hand, "The Ancient Mariner "just casts over us a 
 spell, very illogically or unlogically, and it comes in spite of 
 logic. We may reason ourselves into the most logical state 
 possible, summon all our philosophy, manhood, anti-superstition ; 
 and they will each of them flit away under the tale of " The 
 Ancient Mariner." He shall lay his finger upon us, and fix his 
 glance upon us, and our determinations not to be imposed upon 
 by dreamers or poets all these will be laid ; they will be the 
 ghosts, and the ghosts will lay them ; and this in spite of all we 
 can do to the contrary. 
 
 I have dwelt on the other peculiarity of Coleridge the ob- 
 jective form he has given to many feelings of our mind, which 
 are only phases of being. He has, as it were, called down the 
 fleeting clouds of the soul of man, and rendered them into a 
 shape and form ; feelings that only come now and then ; tran- 
 scendental, they come over us, rather than come at our beckon- 
 ing ; that rather take possession of us, than are called up and 
 invoked. Coleridge is the barometer of the weather of the soul ; 
 and his poems are its variations. There is a difference between 
 mental operations. I can bring myself into a logical state at 
 will or call; I can summon certain intellectual powers of my 
 nature into action, by giving them the due pabulum ; but, again, 
 there are certain other things which come whether we will them 
 or not. The mind is subjected to impulses. A man is some- 
 times joyous, he knows not why ; or bowed down, he cannot tell 
 how : trembles, when he sees no cause for it, and feels feelings 
 which pass knowledge. The poet has rendered these into verses 
 of such a form as to enable us to produce the feelings which gave 
 them birth almost at pleasure. 
 
 Some of Coleridge's poetry is artificial, rather than natural ; 
 much of it again is the most natural utterance that can be, as
 
 356 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 natural and unreasonable as the laugh of a child, and for which 
 no more reason should be asked, or given, than for the laughter 
 of a child or for the shriek of pain. Utilitarian laws applied to 
 Coleridge will find themselves sent home without an answer. 
 He is the poet and writer that will bear least that kind of 
 measurement. Some of his poems simply are, because the 
 feeling was : he can give no other reason or law for them than 
 this. He has pointed out his own faults, in the sonnets 
 which I read to you a turgidity of style, a multiplication 
 of epithets for the sake of the epithets a fault which besets 
 young poets when they do the epithets to order when, given the 
 substantive, they find the necessary adjective for it. The sub- 
 stantive comes bare and alone ; it would not do to usher it into 
 respectable company in so very nude a state, and, therefore, the 
 poor poet is obliged to fish for an adjective with which to clothe 
 it. What is the consequence ? You can shift the adjectives from 
 the substantives without doing any damage. They are not a 
 skin, but a coat ; they are not the natural dress in which the 
 thought would express itself, but a piece of borrowed finery, got 
 from the second-hand clothes shop, the rhyming dictionary, or 
 from previous poets. Into this fault Coleridge fell in his youth ; 
 but he has himself been the severest exposer of this very fault. No 
 man has said severer things of his own poetry than Coleridge 
 has, nor better criticised the poetry of others. If you would 
 wish to see the best criticism on some of the peculiarities of 
 Wordsworth, you will find them in Coleridge's " Biographia 
 Literaria." The same laws of criticism apply to Coleridge's 
 own poems, and I commend this remarkable chapter to your 
 attention. 
 
 I will repeat the intimation, that I have not striven to go through 
 the works to bring up before you the " beauties," or to make a 
 selection from the "gems" of these poets, but merely to illus- 
 trate, in such wise as I could, some of those principles which are 
 most peculiar or distinctive in them. You may think I have 
 sometimes wandered away from my text. Purposely I have ; in 
 order to make those peculiarities as clear as might be. What I 
 have striven to do, has been simply to prepare those of you who 
 were not students of these poets to a more thoughtful study of 
 them, and to revive, for most of you, their teachings ; and I have
 
 The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. 357 
 
 given (as is done sometimes upon the walls of Pompeii By 
 throwing a little fresh water over them an old Roman painting is 
 brought out again, and lives in its old freshness) a dash, then, of 
 water, perhaps with a careless and unskilful hand, at the mental 
 pictures written long ago, in the days of youth, by Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge. If I have made the colours live again but a 
 little, in their old beauty and freshness, I have done my work.
 
 THE GENIUS AND WORKS OF THOMAS 
 CARLYLE. 
 
 BORN 1795. DIED 1881. (FROM 35x11 GEO. III. to 44x11 VICTORIA). 
 
 I. 
 
 TT may appear singular to choose for my subject the works of a 
 * living author, but in favour of this choice much might be 
 said. I see not the advantage of waiting till a man be dead 
 before any due attempt is made to appreciate his labours, or to 
 give him the meed of praise he deserves. Though I am not foolish 
 enough to suppose that anything of praise or blame I can offer 
 will move the man whose works I am to consider ; yet, if any- 
 thing I should say should influence or move you, perchance my 
 author may thereby be stimulated to continue those labours as 
 far as they are good, or to remodel those things which are felt 
 to be, or which appear, unworthy of a man so great as Thomas 
 Carlyle. For my own part, I cannot profess to review thoroughly 
 the works of that writer, but am content rather to play the part 
 of a humble sign-post, and direct your attention to the man ; or 
 to attempt, at least, to do as soldiers at a siege, who lay their own 
 dying bodies in the breach, in order that others, to whom fate has 
 behaved more kindly, may pass over them. If I fail, my failure 
 even may help some of you to a better understanding of that 
 great man and his writings. I will pass on to those writings, and 
 in doing so will briefly notice the spirit of the age that is past, 
 and the spirit of that which is before us, the spirit of yesterday 
 and to-day. 
 
 You know that the spirit of English literature during the latter 
 part of the past century had almost totally forgotten its high and 
 noble profession. Its poetry had become a thing completely 
 artificial, with no sympathy for the great mass of the people, find- 
 ing its seventh heaven in the frivolities of a court, and rejoicing
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 359 
 
 in the sunshine of court favour ; caring nothing for the people, 
 whom it regarded only as the swinish multitude, the ignorant and 
 unwashed crowd. A little reading of the works of Pope would 
 show you the style of thought in that age ; that those men con- 
 centrated their thoughts upon the fripperies of the day, that they 
 had forsaken nature, and driven away from them whatever was 
 original and beautiful in human life, in order to hold up to admira- 
 tion the fripperies and follies of the age. Following upon that 
 style of literature came that other brood of the writers preceding 
 the French Revolution, whose works tended to reduce all to a 
 dead and cold materialism ; who would have had no such words 
 as "God," "the soul," "heaven," or "immortality;" who treated 
 all high and holy things as mere inventions of priestcraft, intended 
 to deceive the people. Believing nothing that it could not see 
 or feel, it treated as childish, idle, foolish, and feeble, the man 
 who believed anything beyond what his own good five senses 
 showed to him. One of the great Germans, speaking of their 
 materialistic philosophers, says : 
 
 " They came, saw, and conquered, all who were at table 
 expecting them. Heavens ! they were enlightened eighteenth 
 century men. They stood up stoutly for moderate freedom and 
 good amusing reading, and moderate Deism, and moderate Philo- 
 sophy. They delivered themselves most clearly against the ap- 
 parition of spirits, against all illusions, and all extremes. They 
 liked very well to read their poets, as models of style to be 
 advantageously used in business, and as relaxations from solid 
 affairs ; they relished nightingales roasted, and liked myrtles as 
 Spanish bakers do to heat their ovens with ; they had killed the 
 great sphinx who sets us the riddle of life, and carried off the 
 stuffed hide, and they held it for a wonder that anybody else 
 would now submit to be puzzled. Genius, said they, we would 
 certainly not throw away we would keep it for sale ; and their 
 icy souls burn but for one object for the body : this is solid and 
 real ; this is the true State, and Religion, and Art" 
 
 And a still severer sentence is passed upon them by the same 
 great man, when he says, the day will come " when of the World 
 will be made a world-machine, of the ^Ether a gas, of God a force, 
 and of the Second-World a coffin!" Thus was it that during 
 the French Revolution they passed a law one day decreeing that
 
 360 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 there was no God, and the next another, declaring that there is to 
 be a God. They decreed this because it was a good thing for 
 the people ; not because of any real belief they had themselves 
 in a God, but because they found there was so much of what they 
 called " the old leaven" left that the people could not be man- 
 aged without a restoration of these " old fables," in which men 
 ,had so long believed. 
 
 A remarkable thing about this literature was its utter failure to 
 distinguish its end from its means. Men wrote books or verses, 
 and spoke speeches, not as ministers to bring about any high and 
 holy ends in the earth, but to exercise what was termed their 
 " wit and parts," to amuse the age, or to teach some very small 
 parts of morality or manners. Now, in this respect, our age is 
 eminently distinguished above that ; and, especially of late, men 
 of great minds have consecrated their talent to the use of the 
 people. Many of you must have seen a translation of a great 
 German's work upon "The Nature and Office of the Scholar,"* 
 where he shows that the scholar should stand up the true priest 
 upon earth, the minister between the material and immaterial ; 
 that it is his mission ever to stand up a tribune of the people ; to 
 uphold the rights of man against whatsoever is tyrannical or 
 oppressive. 
 
 He endeavours to show that authors of the present day have 
 a high priesthood ; and whensoever they forget their mission, and 
 fail to make their work tributary to such great end, then they are 
 no longer to be ranked amongst the ornaments of the earth, but 
 are to be esteemed as of that Grub-street fraternity, who write to 
 live, to minister to the wants of the body, or to the calls of their 
 ambition. There are in being, especially now-a-days, a class of 
 men in society who pique themselves on being practical men. I 
 have all respect for practical men when in their proper place ; but 
 the mistake of them is, that they sneer at the writers of abstract 
 writings, or the thinkers of abstract thought. These busy, bust- 
 ling men, think that they manage the world, and can very well 
 dispense with poets, preachers, and writers, all of whom they re- 
 gard as visionaries. The members of their order believe and 
 look upon the world as a good counting-house, to which nothing 
 
 * Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Translated by William Smith. London : 
 Chapman.
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 361 
 
 is wanting but well-skilled clerks to carry on the business nicely, 
 and to finish the work comfortably at the close of day. Now 
 these men are grievously in fault, for after all they are but the 
 chessmen on the board, the mere pawns, moved by the great 
 thinkers of the age. And this sublime revenge have the great 
 thinkers upon these practical men, that to future ages they only 
 reign, and the practical people are forgotten. Many cities of 
 Greece quarrelled about the birth-place of Homer, after his death, 
 though, while living, they suffered the blind old bard to beg in 
 their streets. Robert Burns was almost starved; and Samuel 
 Johnson, at one part of his life, had scarcely shoes to his feet, 
 and yet he was proud enough to throw the shoes proffered to him 
 ignobly and officiously right out of the window. Practical people 
 sneer upon these men ; poets perish in penury, and prophets are 
 turned into martyrs ; but God takes care that his innocent ones 
 shall not go unrevenged, for after they die they are canonised. 
 As Christ told the Jews long ago, who first stoned the prophets 
 and then canonised them, " Ye build the sepulchres of the pro- 
 phets, and your fathers killed them." 
 
 Yet not altogether have these men been neglected : the lords 
 of action, at different times in the world's history, have paid due 
 homage to the lords of thought. This is true of the poets; 
 especially true of the prophets. The true kings of the earth have 
 always been the poet, the so-called visionary, and the seer. We 
 read in the old time, that the recital of a few verses of a Greek 
 poet saved a prisoner from destruction ; we find that such was 
 the influence of the blind old beggar bard, that he could make an 
 Alexander imitate even the worst things that Homer's heroes had 
 ever done. In the middle ages, a somewhat despised man was 
 at last so recognised as to ride laurel-crowned and triumphant 
 throughout the streets of the Eternal City. Old John Milton, 
 blind and beggared, was yet the moulder, and to a great extent 
 the maker of the age in which he lived. Many a king and 
 emperor now lies so forgotten that his name is not recognised ; 
 whereas, these great men, standing here and there in history, are 
 those before whom we to this day bow, and to whom we pay a 
 grateful tribute. Was George the Fourth or Walter Scott the 
 true king of their time? The one, it is true, reigned, nominally 
 at least, over the kingdom : but the other reigned by the firesides
 
 362 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 and in the hearts of the people, and they paid tribute to him. 
 This is the revenge which the great thinkers have upon the age 
 that neglects them, that that age is at last obliged to confess 
 that, to a great extent, it was made and moulded by those very 
 men whom it despised. 
 
 I have indicated a change between the spirit of the last age, or 
 of yesterday, and that of to-day : in their literature that change is 
 striking. To whom is the honour due of effecting that change ? 
 First and foremost, to our great poet, Wordsworth. He was one 
 who, despising the artificial poetry of the last century, endeavoured 
 to restore man to the old standard of Nature, which distinguished 
 him before frivolous and hollow scepticism, and shallow infidelity, 
 came into vogue amongst us. It is said that " familiarity breeds 
 contempt." and thus with Nature, men neglect it, see nothing in 
 it but a well-got-up stage for them to act on ; forgetting that 
 Nature is a veil, partly to hide God and partly to reveal him. 
 The spirit of poetry and the spirit of the age had come to be that 
 which Wordsworth gives to one of his heroes,* when he says 
 
 " A primrose by a river's brim, 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more." 
 
 He could see none of the dimly-revealed things behind it ; 
 nothing to tell him of the grace and beauty of its existence, or of 
 the goodness and beauty of God : to him it was just a yellow 
 primrose. The same spirit is expressed in Schiller's epigram. 
 One of the old goddesses of the Egyptian faith being worshipped 
 under the form of a cow, he says 
 
 " To some she was the goddess great, 
 To some the milch-cow of the field, 
 Their wisdom was to calculate 
 What butter she would yield." 
 
 This was the spirit of those men of the last age, who looked at the 
 great, and high, and noble, only for what could be made of it ; 
 not as enabling them to ascend to something else. Then came 
 the worship of Utilitarianism, a thing very useful in itself, but 
 an utter mockery when set before men as the great guiding 
 principle of human life. 
 
 * Peter Bell.
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 363 
 
 To overthrow these things, and also that painful conventionality 
 which can see no greatness but in things stamped great by the 
 hands of men; which can see no beauty in the meaner things 
 around us; which forgets the Scripture precept, "honour all 
 men," and bestows its thanks and its praise only upon the vulgar 
 great, to overthrow these things was the great end which Words- 
 worth set before him. Hence, some of his poetry seems to be 
 ridiculous till it gets to be understood. He purposely chose the 
 low and the mean, to show that with them dwelt the high and 
 holy. He may have pushed it to extremity ; he may have thrown 
 down, as has been said, a clod of earth before the men of the age, 
 and said, " Lo ! here is a god," and so may have erred ; but he 
 was perfectly right in taking up some of the little things of the 
 earth, to show a "flunkey age," as Carlyle expresses it, what 
 things they worshipped if only they were adorned with gold, to 
 show that age that, in the little, mean, and neglected things around 
 us there dwells a divinity, a high possibility, a capacity of becom- 
 ing truly noble and great. Of course, the poet was sneered at, 
 at first ; he was treated as a visionary, mocked, and laughed at ; 
 but he went on his way ; he was one of the strong souls who care 
 little for other people's opinions, relying upon their own conduct 
 and conscience ; so he went on his way rejoicing. 
 
 He was seconded by that greatest of modern Englishmen, as 
 far as intellect is concerned Coleridge ; who took for his task to 
 revive the faith of men, even in the dreamy, the mysterious, and 
 the invisible. Wordsworth and Coleridge made an agreement : 
 the one was to put beauty and vitality into the meaner things of 
 nature, the other to revive the old fairy tales, dreams, and 
 necromancy of the middle ages ; and no man with a soul can 
 read his "Ancient Mariner" without feeling a weird influence, 
 and rising into a region quite other and different from that every- 
 day region in which the business of life calls us to move. This 
 man did much to revive a study of the German language and 
 literature amongst us. Not so many years back in this country, 
 the opinion of German literature was that it was composed of bits 
 of metaphysical transcendentalism and other glimpses of cloud- 
 land. We are not far enough off from this prejudice to have for- 
 gotten it. We are still called upon to enter into a serious defence 
 of German literature ; for every now and then pious men lift up
 
 364 The Genius and Works of Tliomas Carlyle. 
 
 their hands in horror at the idea of sending a student to any of 
 the German Universities. Ugly names are applied, and these are 
 generally efficacious ; and these people have now got hold of the 
 term " Neology," and by their talk of a " neological and heathen 
 literature," they succeed in frightening some. These stock names 
 are always kept by men, as good extinguishers to clap over every- 
 thing which they do not like ; men keep an assortment of them 
 by them ; and if a man comes forward with any scheme or pro- 
 ject of which they do not approve, they have only to call him a 
 " dreamer," and he is put out at once. If a writer states anything 
 not pleasing to them, or an inventor exhibits to them his plan, if 
 they like it not, they have only to call him " enthusiast " or "vision- 
 ary," and he is gone at once. If he would be a reformer in morals 
 or religion, they have only to call him " hypocrite " or " infidel," 
 and to brand him as a " dangerous person," and he is very 
 quickly disposed of and done with. Many do not like this 
 German literature, so they have only to call it infidel, metaphysical, 
 pantheistic, and neological, and it is quite completely done with, 
 for those who will not think for themselves. But mark the change 
 in this respect ; we are obliged to allow that the German literature 
 is at present the best worth studying ; the thoughtful studious men 
 of this country prefer to learn the German language, and although 
 it may shake the pride of us Englishmen, it cannot be denied that 
 in almost every department of Literature and Science, the most 
 valuable books are to be imported from Germany. The number of 
 great men in Germany of late, including those of the first order, such 
 as Schiller and Goethe, we are able only to match, and excel, by 
 bringing forth the greatest names the world ever produced. Now, 
 instead of Germany being tabooed, sneered at, every studious man 
 of any mark has a knowledge of the German language and 
 literature; our theologians find they must understand it; our 
 divinity tutors find they must instruct their students in it ; and, as 
 we are coming to that state of things when men are not to be 
 treated as children, to be dogmatised to, to be told only one side, 
 to be watched and guarded for fear they should hear something 
 naughty, or mistake poison for food, this study of German will 
 necessarily progress and increase. Even now, strange to say, our 
 thoughts are becoming impregnated with its spirit. We are getting 
 German in our phraseology, we begin to take their authors for
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 365 
 
 our guides, following the example they long ago set us, for our 
 Shakespeare was never thoroughly understood in this country till 
 we received him back illustrated and explained from Germany. 
 They took our great idol ; removed the paint daubings of small 
 critics and commentators, and, having crowned him with a wreath 
 woven by their noblest men, sent him back to us, so that we could 
 love and admire him more than before. 
 
 How was this great change brought about ? Partly by Cole- 
 ridge; but chiefly by the man about whom I am to lecture 
 Thomas Carlyle. At first, he came before the public as a trans- 
 lator from the German, and so thoroughly had he studied the 
 works of Germans "he wrestled," says one, "so long with Jean 
 Paul, to master his spirit, that, like Jacob of old, his thigh has 
 been put out, and he has halted in his English ever since." 
 
 This, to some degree, is the truth ; for he has never walked 
 thoroughly like an Englishman since. 
 
 Proceeding to the more immediate subject of my lecture, I am 
 not here to gossip of the man and his pursuits, and daily habits of 
 life. When he was born, where he lived, at what time he rose in 
 the morning, what he ate and drank, and how many pipes he 
 smoked, must be left to be chronicled in some of the gossiping 
 books that delight the age in which we live. ' My duty is to lecture 
 upon his genius and his works. I find him first appearing before 
 the public by writing a life of that great German, Schiller. This 
 book bears few traces of Carlyle's English style ; almost anyone 
 would read it without being puzzled ; and what is singular, as has 
 been remarked by Professor Longfellow in his " Hyperion," in 
 this life of Schiller, Carlyle has written a sentence actually con- 
 demnatory of the course he afterwards took himself. He says : 
 
 " Often a proposition of inscrutable and dread aspect, when 
 resolutely grappled with and torn from its shady den, and its 
 bristling entrenchments of uncouth terminology, and dragged 
 forth into the open light of day, to be seen by the natural eye, 
 and tried by merely human understanding, proves to be a very 
 harmless truth, familiar to us from of old sometimes so familiar 
 as to be a truism. Too frequently the anxious novice is reminded 
 of Dryden in the ' Battle of the Books : ' there is a helmet of rusty 
 iron, dark, grim, gigantic ; and within it, at the farthest corner, is 
 a head no bigger than a walnut."
 
 366 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 In his after works his style is undoubtedly peculiar, but this 
 point I shall in great part hand over to those whose duty it is to 
 " chronicle small beer." It has been expounded, commented on, 
 and sneered at by various writers. Reviews, that should have 
 known better, have spent more of their pages upon his style than 
 upon what the subject matter, conveyed in that style, intends to 
 teach. But now, forsooth, one man is told to read Addison to 
 form a style ; another is told to read Johnson to form a style ; 
 and a host of young men are doing their best in following the 
 style of that preacher, or the other writer, forgetting that if you 
 follow the style carved out for himself by another you only 
 exaggerate it. A man wishing to plough, and following in the 
 same furrows which another has previously made, will find that 
 the wriggle of the first furrow has got itself sadly magnified in the 
 second. For my own part, I do not see how men can studiously 
 follow one another's styles; there appears to me too much 
 imitation already amongst us. Addison's style is good, Johnson's 
 may be good, but the best English style I know is old John 
 Bunyan's, which is the most nervous, hearty, vigorous, racy, 
 English style perhaps ever witnessed. 
 
 One peculiarity of Carlyle's style deserves notice his revival of 
 many of the old Saxon words, for none of the semi-French and 
 semi-Latin words imported of late so strike upon an Englishman's 
 heart and feelings as the good old Saxon : they sound homelike, 
 not like the fripperied follies of modern times, but like the earnest, 
 hearty days of our fathers, under the best development. I am for 
 their revival, therefore, especially as it would enable us to revive 
 the significance of many an old thought and old feeling. Those 
 who are students of language must have observed how words get 
 clothed upon with ideas which they did not originally express, till 
 at last the original beauty has gone out of them, and they express 
 something different from their original signification. Going back 
 to those old meanings, sometimes, is almost as good as a new 
 thought. This Carlyle has frequently done, and Coleridge recom- 
 mends the study of the etymology of words as one of the best 
 studies in which a young man can engage. In one ot his works 
 he gives an example of this. He takes the word " heresy," and 
 shows that its old Greek meaning was a lifting up of something, 
 and that, therefore, the definition of heresy is when a man lifts a
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 367 
 
 meaning or idea of his own and makes it a rallying sign or the 
 symbol of a party. If this definition were true, we should find in 
 our lists of those called heretics many a man who has a claim 
 rather to be a judge of heretics than a heretic himself. In one 
 respect I think Carlyle has improved the English language, and 
 that is in the use he makes of words banded and coupled together 
 as epithets. The Greek language is probably the noblest and 
 fullest in this respect of any, for where we have to put three or 
 four words, it renders them into one long, compound, musically- 
 sounding word. Compound words are too few in the old language 
 of England ; the old Saxon tongue did not rejoice in long words, 
 and stood gather in dread of them ; but we now need compound 
 words, in order to avoid that diluted style, which the writings of 
 the last half century have supplied something bv which our 
 thoughts may be more compressed, masculine, and energetic 
 and this Carlyle has done in some of the singularly beautiful 
 epithets which he has strung together into these compound 
 words, in which the Greeks and Germans were thought to have 
 the pre-eminence, but which he has demonstrated the English 
 language is quite as capable of showing, and being rightly used 
 under, as either of those tongues. 
 
 Of course, one charge against the style of Carlyle is that it is 
 hard to be understood. Doubtless it is so ; and this is to be 
 lamented, because it mars a man's usefulness. But this is less an 
 evil than may be supposed; for a man who will not take the 
 trouble to penetrate the style, is not the man to be blest by such 
 writing. A man used to the shallow style of to-day, if he finds 
 himself too lazy to crack this singular shell, in which a goodly 
 kernel is enveloped, why, he may content himself with the convic- 
 tion that the kernel is not for him. Nay, I rather think there is 
 some use in this shell with which Carlyle has surrounded himself; 
 it frightens certain people away from him, -for there are some in 
 the world who do not fully understand, but run away with a bit 
 here and a bit there ; and to them, and through them, what taken 
 in connection is sublime utterance, becomes utter folly. 
 
 There are certain men respecting whom it may be said, without 
 any offence being meant to them, that we must not cast our pearls 
 before swine ; they have no understanding for such matters ; all is 
 lost and wasted upon them. By surrounding these great, and, in
 
 368 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlylc. 
 
 such hands, dangerous thoughts, with a triple fence of curious 
 style, these lazy, indolent, and unthoughtful people are kept in 
 their proper places. They are very good outer-court worshippers ; 
 good for taking up a shout when it is raised, and for carrying it on 
 when commenced ; very useful to read the small novels of the 
 day, but clearly not the people to penetrate into the Holy of 
 Holies. Those who can reach there may come forth, and put 
 into some homely and popular dialect so much of the truth as 
 these smaller souls can understand. There are things in Thomas 
 Carlyle hard to be understood ; and if such people were to get 
 hold of them they would find that they would not fit them at all ; 
 to them they would be like the two-handed swords of- a by-gone 
 age, which their puny arms could not lift. These men are fright- 
 ened away from Carlyle by his style, which operates on them as a 
 warning not to trespass there. Though Carlyle, therefore, has 
 been blamed for his style as marring his usefulness, it does not 
 mar it so much as is thought, while its singularity gives a warning 
 to the idler and the lounging reader, " Keep off these premises ; 
 there is nothing inside for lazy people." Carlyle admits his readers 
 into a workshop, where they must be prepared to labour diligently, 
 and not into a lounge or fashionable book-shop, where they may 
 read here a page and there a page, and then go forth in their 
 pride to talk shallow nonsense about everything, and to slander 
 those they imagine more witless or less informed than themselves. 
 It is as if Carlyle had said, " I hate the profane vulgar, and would 
 drive them from me." It seems as if his singular style is like the 
 conditions put by the hierophants of old to those whom they would 
 initiate into their mysteries ; and except they choose to go through 
 the ordeal, they have nothing to do there. So, before the knight 
 of ancient chivalry received his knighthood, he had to watch 
 through the night in some chapel, in lonely silence and prayer ; 
 and, having done this, he received from some superior the 
 acolyte and the spurs. And here is Carlyle ready to knight 
 anyone, to make him a possessor and participant in the great 
 realm of thought, and to admit him into the sublime dreams and 
 visions of good, given by the great powers to him ; but if the 
 aspirant is not content to wait and watch in his style, and to do 
 what his pride may not like to read some sentences many a time 
 over, he is not worthy to be made a true knight, and must be left
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 369 
 
 to find his fill of enjoyment in the small magazine literature, with 
 which the works of Carlyle should not be in the slightest degree 
 compared. One great difficulty of this style to Englishmen arises 
 from their not being previously acquainted with German, so that 
 the style strikes them as foreign ; but those acquainted with Ger- 
 man soon learn to see that under this singular mask there are 
 features beautiful and captivating to all the lovers of beauty and 
 truth. A resolute intention to master Carlyle's works would soon 
 enable anyone to discover that the mysteries of his style may be 
 surmounted. That it is singular and difficult, I admit, but that 
 Carlyle can utter his thoughts in any other I deny. It is said in 
 the story of Saul, that he stood above the people by the whole 
 head and shoulders ; and so, in these crowded times, if a man 
 would gain any notice he must stand above the people by his 
 whole head at least. This, Carlyle's style, has done for him ; it 
 is to him the herald's trumpet proclaiming high announcements to 
 come. 
 
 Now, as to the genius of the man. One of his greatest and, as I 
 think, his sublimest attempts, is to revive each man's faith in 
 himself and in his individuality. It appears to me that one of 
 the diseases of to-day is that man has lost faith in what a single 
 stout heart and strong hand can accomplish ; that men have come 
 to be fractional units, and that you must put some twenty thousand 
 of them together before it is believed to be safe to move. " What 
 can a single man do ? " is often piteously asked. Look into 
 history ; and there you will see that the greatest things of this 
 world have been wrought out by single men, and often in 
 obscurity ; and that your clubs and associations do, in reality, far 
 less than single men. It is sometimes said jestingly of the men 
 of a certain trade, that it takes nine of them to make a man ; but 
 let us look to see if this does not, to some extent, hold good of 
 all of us. This is a diseased want of manhood, of self-reliance, 
 and self-trust ; and to overthrow this Carlyle has done much. 
 He has pointed to single men, to what they have done single- 
 handed, and shown that the whole world lies before the single 
 man, and tried to get you to look inwards into the soul. It 
 appears to me that the soul of a man and the inward life are the 
 true key and exposition of all things, past, present, and to come, 
 and that a man cannot too much cultivate the dignity and noble- 
 
 2 A
 
 37O The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 ness of his nature. I am aware that certain professors of theology 
 find fault with these doctrines. They say, when a man talks of 
 showing a becoming pride, that it is contrary to the doctrine of 
 the depravity of his nature. Now, I am willing to confess that a 
 man's possibilities are high and mighty ; his actualities little and 
 small. Paul expressed this very sentiment long ago when he said, 
 " Of myself I can do nothing ; but I can do all things through 
 God, who strengtheneth me." The possible before him was wide 
 and boundless ; the actual and real was little and small. What 
 Carlyle has done, and what we should all wish to do, is to revive 
 this sense of the dignity of the soul. A man should say to him- 
 self, " Mark how God hath taught me this lesson : here is my 
 soul, royal and kingly, a true monarch ; king, poet, philosopher, 
 or sage, may not enter into my soul, without paying to me tax 
 and tribute. Everything must enter my spirit upon the condition 
 of taking the colour thereof." Hence, every man is the judge, in 
 one sense, of the whole earth, and of things past, present, and to 
 come. Hence arise differences of opinion on religion and 
 politics. My soul is one ; yours is another ; and though the 
 same truth may enter both, my door may be lower and narrower 
 that yours, and thus, to enter it, truth must stoop lower, and 
 divest itself of something, which the loftier and wider porch of 
 your intellect allows it room to bear along with it. 
 
 Now, to illustrate my meaning, that the inner life of a man is 
 the key to all things, past, present, and to come, let us take a 
 problem in history or theology. You wish to understand past 
 history, its soul and spirit, I mean, for we have now done, I 
 trust, with the old style of history, which merely relates a thing, a 
 bare fact, while modern history tries to make old times live before 
 you ; it makes men, not shadows, but actual breathing realities. 
 The mere facts of history are perfectly useless ; it is of no manner 
 of use to know that William the Conqueror died on such a day, of 
 such a disease; that is mere lumber. The mere facts of history are 
 like the beads of a rosary, with no string to keep them together; 
 there must be some connection, some train of thought, something 
 linking them together, and making of them either a necklace of 
 ornament for the body, or a rosary of prayer, by which the soul 
 takes or keeps account of its devotion. I find all the facts of his- 
 tory interpreted by my own spirit. I wish to understand the old
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 371 
 
 account of the fall of man. I go back, in my own life, and re- 
 member the day, when after keeping a character for avoiding some 
 particular sin for some time, I first fell into it ; and here was acted 
 for me, in my own soul, the fall of man. You have only to remem- 
 ber the first day you fell into this snare or that vice, and you will 
 then realise to yourselves the fall of man. Take another instance. 
 How will you understand this passage ? " God's voice was heard 
 in the cool of the evening, and Adam hid himself." Many of you 
 may have known what it is to hide from a father's eye, from a 
 mother's look, when you have sinned or fallen ; have understood 
 what it is to be cast out of the Paradise of a quiet soul ; to desire 
 to hide from the eyes of a family who before thought you spotless 
 and blameless ; in short, you have felt what it is to be ashamed to 
 meet the image of God, in the soul of the true man ; and thus your 
 own souls may interpret to you the history of the fall of man. Sup- 
 pose we wish to understand the spirit of the many rebellions, revolu- 
 tions, and overthrows there have been in the earth. Let us remem- 
 ber a part of our own history as young men ; how at certain times 
 we did not like to give in to forms of society ; how very much we dis- 
 liked sitting in pews on Sunday, and being obliged to conform to 
 other people's rules ; how we protested, and at times got very bitter 
 against it, and made efforts to throw it off ; we did not like the old 
 people having so much authority over us ; we thought they claimed 
 too much. Well, here is the spirit of revolution and rebellion. 
 You do not like the authority placed over you ; you are a Jacobin 
 for the time. You do not like that a man should rule over you ; 
 here you are a tnie republican. You do not like, again, that cer- 
 tain men should get to the top of society : you cannot understand 
 why, in addressing them, you may not speak what you like ; why 
 a man should exact outward forms of respect and deference, and 
 even submission from you ; here you are a complete leveller and 
 democrat. In this way, by looking into your own soul and your own 
 past history, you will yourselves understand the revolutionary spirit 
 of all times. It is but for a number of men to feel this ; it is but 
 for the burden to get too oppressive, for the last hair to be put on 
 the camel's back, and then revolution breaks forth, a protest and a 
 dissidence against things as they are. A young man enters into 
 the world, and examines the forms of religion and truth set before 
 him ; he is astonished at the number of sects and parties in the
 
 372 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyte. 
 
 world; he has been bred up in one, and he learns to dislike the 
 others; and herein, in all probability, he acts foolishly, if he forgets 
 the great religious truth, that there never did exist a sect or party, in 
 religion or politics, that did not exist rather by the truth that was in 
 it than by the falsehood. The history of a new sect is, that the domi- 
 nant sect has forgotten some truth which the new one has brought 
 forth, and, by virtue of being the only reviver of it, thus makes too 
 much of it. We want to understand, in a catholic spirit, the reli- 
 gious changes and doctrines of bygone times : let us look into our 
 own spirits, and we see them all. You wish, for instance, to under- 
 stand the tenets of John Calvin. It is only for you to see in things 
 around you only the hard destiny of fate ; to sigh over circum- 
 stances which you wish better ; to remember how many times you 
 have felt sad, as, bowed down by work, or surrounded by the 
 difficulties of poverty, or obscurity, or want of knowledge, you 
 have felt the iron hand of destiny upon you, and at times you have 
 almost rebelled under it ; do you not see how a man, whose view 
 is continually directed to this side of life, will therein propose to 
 himself a theory of stern fate ? At other times, you know you are 
 free, and feel it; you rejoice in a free choice ; and if a man were 
 to say that you have no choice, you would deem him to be uttering 
 a treason. Herein you understand the other side of this theolo- 
 gical debate ; you can understand how this phase of your own 
 soul's history has gotten itself to be made into the creed of a party, 
 and the religion of a sect. 
 
 We might show, too, that often circumstances of history which 
 are obscure can be explained by our own hidden light. The old 
 doctrine of the microcosm of man's soul, the little world within, 
 which is so closely connected with the great world without, has 
 been revived by some modern philosophers, who say that the 
 blood of any man is found to consist of small globules, each of 
 which, when examined minutely, is found to be the type of all the 
 species or genera. Perchance that is only a hoax or a dream, but 
 with respect to the soul of man it is a truth. The soul of man is 
 a mirror, wherein the whole world or universe of nature may get 
 itself represented ; true, it is small, but yet it is minutely correct. 
 
 There is a certain truth in the doctrine of the community of 
 soul, that we have but one soul in us all; and if that is true, or 
 near the truth, then we are right in saying that we should care-
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 373 
 
 fully watch man's own hidden life, for it will give him a key by 
 which to unlock all mysteries. With respect to the outer culture 
 of man, some of you, say, are stiff and stern Protestants ; you can- 
 not understand the gorgeous and scenic worship of the old church. 
 But only let us wish ourselves walking in the sublime cathedrals 
 of this or other lands; only let us read the description of the 
 performance of the Miserere, in the Sistine chapel at Rome, in 
 the holy week ! But there are times in our lives when we find 
 ourselves higher than the mere forms and pageants of the out- 
 ward worship, and when we call it a mere child's bauble ; when, 
 by the waving of a magic wand, we get into the exaltation of that 
 worship, after all the sublimest, where a man, withdrawing him- 
 self into his own inner sanctuary, worships God in quietness and 
 silentness of spirit ; for Jeremy Taylor has said that every man 
 may have an altar of sacrifice, and every foot of land he treads 
 on the earth's surface may be consecrated ground. Herein he 
 wanted and Carlyle has done this eminently to revive every 
 man's attention to the soul within him, that hidden life within, 
 which is a higher, nobler, more important life than the outer one. 
 Mark how men forget this. If they sit down to write the biography 
 of anyone, they are most careful to tell the day, nay, the hour of 
 his birth ; whether he was a sickly child or a strong one, they will 
 give you all the little facts of his outward life ; but these are the 
 mere accidental circumstances of his life ; what we cannot see is 
 really the true life of the man ; these are the parts of a man's life 
 which we cannot hope to know; it does not lie within the reach 
 of the biographer to know the man, what he did of choice, and 
 what he did of necessity ; what he felt and what he thought. 
 Every man should mentally, if not in form, keep an account of 
 the weather of the soul. We take heed of the clouds that come 
 over the fair face of the atmosphere, but few are wise enough to 
 watch the weather of the soul ; to see the clouds and mark whence 
 they come ; to feel the cold winds that chill us, and to know their 
 cause ; and to give thanks for those warm airs of the spirit when, 
 having done what is right, we feel ourselves not happy, but, what 
 is far better, blessed. How is this neglect of the soul brought 
 about? Because men have taken latterly to worship the outer 
 circumstance. Tire high road to worship in this country is to get 
 rich. Let a man get rich, and let him be knave or fool, he is in
 
 374 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlylc. 
 
 a certain degree to be respected ; he hath a status in society and 
 a place. We would teach men the sublime lesson that, in order 
 to ascend, we must first descend. If we wish to strike a hard 
 blow with a soft thing we must first depress it. All true nobleness 
 comes of self-renunciation, whereas our moderns attempt too much 
 and glide into self-sufficiency. Thus in this country men have too 
 often forgotten the nobleness of their position, and have neglected 
 their duty, to the waste of their time and the embitterment of 
 their temper, because they cannot realise those things which 
 they are foolishly taught to look upon as the summum bonum 
 of human life. When a man is taught thus to worship the 
 outward; when he is brought up in a due veneration of the 
 accidental in life, he comes to be too modest ; to be, in short, 
 mock-modest ; thinks that his soul goes for little worth, be- 
 cause, perchance, the body, in which it dwells, may not be well 
 clothed, or the house in which he shelters may not be of a good 
 order. But we are changing in this respect; our working and 
 poorer classes thanks to the poets that are born and bred among 
 us understand the injunction " Honour all men." Burns, in 
 those words that ought to be honoured of men in all ages, " A 
 man's a man for a' that," uttered sentiments which teach that 
 royal hearts are working beneath ragged robes, and which show, 
 that sometimes in the lowest is to be found the noblest ; that 
 forth from the lowly, God calls the highest ; and that the world's 
 organization never came from the outwardly great men, but from 
 those whose greatness of the inner spirit was hidden by the little- 
 ness of its outward development. These circumstances of the 
 outward rank of a man, are, in Carlyle's phrase, only the clothes 
 which his soul or spirit may wear. 
 
 II. 
 
 These doctrines, taught as they must or should be to every man 
 in this land, are charged with being revolutionary, overthrowing, 
 and subversive ; as making young men too forward ; as stirring up 
 a spirit of discontent in the lower orders ; and we must note this 
 as one charge brought against our author. Very piteous are the 
 Jerimiads uttered, that there is no such thing as getting good 
 servants now-a-days ; and very piteously too, do some attribute to
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlylc. 375 
 
 the fact of men being able to write and read, that there is no man 
 to be trusted ; and a large part of the conversation in private 
 society consists of a catalogue of woes, of wrongs done to masters 
 by their workmen, or of wrongs suffered by mistresses at the hands 
 of their housemaids. It is said that the lower classes of this 
 country are getting insubordinate; that now there is no such 
 thing as governing or ruling them. If that be true, whose fault is 
 it ? Whose fault is it that when the blind man gets his sight, he 
 sees things indistinctly ? To whom was the blame due that the 
 blind man, when restored to sight, should have seen " men as 
 trees walking " ? Was the blame due to the curer or to the 
 disease? If men do not see their duties clearly, whose is the 
 blame ? The finger that touches them to open their long-darkened 
 eyes, or the long darkness in which they have been kept ? Is it 
 the blame of the prophet or the seer, who revives their knowledge 
 of the old lights ; or is it the blame of an idle and ignorant age 
 that locked them up in darkness ? As to all this lamentation and 
 abuse, I expect it, and rejoice in it ; for it is a sign of brighter 
 things to come. There must be, in what the geologists call a 
 transition state, a breaking up of the old landmarks. I have 
 never seen an old house pulled down in order to build a new one, 
 without much dust accompanying the operation. People are 
 obliged to get rid of the old house before they can build the new 
 one on its site, and these insubordinations are the necessary dust, 
 caused by taking down the venerable structure of the ignorance, 
 the superstition, the tyranny, and the domination of the age that 
 is past. Just bide your time a little, and the dust will settle ot 
 itself; and when you hear the talk and the clamour raised on the 
 one hand against the lower classes, do not forget that, as in other 
 discords, there is a little blame due to both sides. When, again, 
 we hear complaints against servants, and it is said the masters or 
 mistresses are not to blame, that the whole fault is in the people : 
 it is not so. These things we say, to explain why the teaching of 
 these doctrines of individualism, of the divinity of the soul of man, 
 of the soul of man being a key by which to explain all things, 
 past, present, and to come, why such doctrines cause for a time 
 something like confusion, and of necessity cause something like 
 arrogance or want of respect. You keep a man locked up and 
 fettered long ; then give him his freedom, and perchance you will
 
 3/6 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 find that in the first few hours of his liberty he will abuse it. 
 Yours is the fault, and not his. 
 
 Of Carlyle's " Life of Schiller " it is not necessary to say much. 
 Schiller was one of the noblest of modern Germans, and it has 
 always seemed to me one of Carlyle's caprices that he should 
 prefer the cold, icy spirit of Goethe to the sublime soul of Schiller. 
 He waked Germany as from a trance by the publication of that 
 sublime drama, The Robbers, which sounded through the land like a 
 trumpet, and from it is to be dated the dawn of that earnest spirit 
 which now distinguishes that people. He was one of those men 
 who redeem the office of the scholar, who have given utterance to 
 the truth that the scholar and the student is a priest on the earth, 
 that he comes to do a great work and to fulfil a noble avocation, not 
 to supply the printer with copy or the public with a book to read 
 that may amuse, but to teach men high and holy things, to stand 
 between heaven and earth, to understand, by virtue of his genius, 
 the sublime language of the other world, and to put it, by virtue 
 of his office and power, into the lower language of the world that 
 is. He stands, if he be a pious and a true heart, between God 
 and the people : like Moses of old, it is for him to go up into the 
 mountain and to receive the table of the commandments, and 
 lovingly to bring it down in his arms to the people. Such are 
 some of the great Germans. God has given them a soul to see 
 far into the future ; they are of those to whom the old Hebrew 
 name shall be given, for they are seers; they walk by faith and 
 not by sight ; they have changed the face of the people, and they 
 are fast changing the authorities of the world's veneration amongst 
 us, and especially in the great and broad land of America. 
 Suffice it that this work of Carlyle's is not very distinctive of 
 him does not bear his peculiar mark but is a valuable con- 
 tribution towards the life of Schiller for it is not by any means a 
 full, ample life of the man. Anyone desiring further information 
 as to Schiller will see something in Bulwer's "Preface to his 
 Translations," though that is not full and complete, but it gives to 
 anyone who takes an interest in the life of that great German, 
 much that will inform and gratify him. 
 
 Then Carlyle has translated Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," a 
 book, one of the most singular I have ever read, and one that 
 few Englishmen like, a book that novel readers take up under the
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 377 
 
 expectation that they have got a nice romance in three volumes, 
 and they lay it down with a yawn. It is not a Minerva Press 
 kind of book at all ; you cannot get through it at a sitting ; nor is 
 it a book to lie on a sofa, with a headache from late hours, and 
 glance over by way of light reading. It contains a deep thinker's 
 views of some of the deep thoughts and things that relate to the 
 peculiarities of modern life ; made up here of a laugh, there of a 
 weeping ; here of a funeral, there of a birthtime and a marriage. 
 It is motley and piebald, as a man's life must always be ; but it 
 will make people think if they will only read. Carlyle and 
 Edward Irving have declared that it contains the best picture of 
 Jesus Christ of any book after the Scriptures; and the sublimest 
 criticism on any of Shakespeare's plays is contained in its notices 
 of Hamlet. The play was not understood in this country (if it be 
 fully understood yet) till this criticism was published. The book 
 is translated well by one who thoroughly understands German, 
 and who puts the original into a faithful form for the English 
 reader. To comment longer on this work, however, would be 
 rather to speak upon Goethe than upon Carlyle. 
 
 The next book of Carlyle's is his " Miscellanies ; " a collection 
 of papers published in reviews and magazines, and certainly one 
 of the richest and raciest of Carlyle's works. To describe it fully 
 would require me to talk all night. It contains papers on all the 
 great Germans, on many English authors, and on many of the 
 Frenchmen of the time of the revolution. Especially would I 
 .call attention to what Carlyle says of Robert Burns. He reviews 
 his life, and puts him upon his proper level and footing ; driving 
 away those idle tales which the righteous-overmuch had gotten 
 up against that noble heart ; overthrowing the fabric of their 
 falsehoods ; exposing the hypocrites who went to seek out what 
 was wrong in him, and to forget what was noble and true ; for 
 the most righteous men are also and always the most merciful, 
 and the man who is most conscious of his own faults, who is the 
 most loyal and moral, will give most credit to others ; and, if you 
 examine the criticism of any country or time you will always find 
 that those who are the severest upon their brother's faults, when 
 you have gotten the chance of seeing their own inner life, are 
 some of the most faulty themselves. Robert Burns, both in this 
 article in the " Miscellanies," and in the " Hero Worship," has
 
 378 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 his due given him by Carlyle, as one of the truest children of 
 earth ; who went furthest into the realities of things, who suffered 
 not his vision to rest upon mere externals, and was one of the 
 foremost to teach this age the native dignity of man ; that every 
 man is a great original fact ; to show that each of you walks upon 
 God's earth, and that the great blue heavens and the glorious 
 stars are next to you, with nothing between them and you ; that 
 God and eternity are near enough to all of us ; a remembrance 
 which, if borne in mind, would long ago have checked the idle, 
 foolish notions concerning the educational rights of the people, 
 and other matters often discussed. For, strange to say, we yet 
 meet at times with some of those thorough antediluvians, steeped 
 in the spirit of the past, who appear to think a person is called 
 upon seriously to entertain the question whether ploughmen, work- 
 men, artisans, should be educated ; forgetting that God settled 
 that question long agone; that He bestows upon all men the 
 knowledge of Himself, of eternity, the soul, and the resurrection 
 of the body. And yet people go on questioning whether these 
 men, upon whom God has bestowed so high a destiny, ought to 
 learn a little geography and grammar, and some small facts about 
 astronomy. For this is the light in which we must put many of 
 the trumpery discussions on the education of the people. God 
 has educated all mankind, and has given them a book, simple in 
 style and statement, for their guidance and direction in the most 
 solemn affairs of time and eternity. You are anxious that that 
 book should be possessed by everyone ; but we have known those 
 who have been leaders in attempts to put the Bible into the 
 hands of the common people, and yet have thought it not right 
 to put a pen into their hands. And this, though by their acts 
 they are confessing that when God gave us the Bible, He founded 
 a university in which every man might, if he desired it, take a 
 degree in the sublimest knowledge in which the old seers were 
 instructed. Is it not, then, a pitiful mockery for small men to 
 enter in solemn, serious conclave, into such questions as whether 
 a man, to whom the doctrine of the resurrection of the body has 
 been revealed, should be instructed in the theory of physics, or 
 should know anything about physiology or anatomy ; whether a 
 man to whom God has revealed the mystery of the world to come, 
 in whose hand are the sublime rolls of prophecy, that he may
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 379 
 
 read from them and study the deep mysteries of the events crowd- 
 ing the political histories of all times, whether he shall be in- 
 structed in history, or made acquainted with what we are pleased 
 to call education, but what would be better called some little 
 facts, contributive to education? This man Burns was one of 
 those who led much to a changed spirit in our time, and to him 
 Carlyle has done justice. 
 
 Another paper in the " Miscellanies " treats of Jean Paul, who 
 was certainly one of the Germans whom we must, when we know 
 him, love best; one who was not ashamed to eat and laugh 
 heartily, and to pray earnestly and devoutly; who knew that 
 religion does not consist in sourness of visage or longness of 
 face, or in walking about God's earth with crape on our faces 
 that everything shall look dismal; one who knew that God 
 bestows on man not only the power of weeping, but gave him also 
 the power to laugh ; one who learned to look upon laughter as 
 something not to be condemned, but rather commendable, as a 
 sign of a cheerful spirit. This was Jean Paul ; a good, honest, 
 hearty, upright, strong, earnest, pious man, a man who worshipped 
 his God and loved his brother; a man who could reveal the 
 deepest thoughts, and who could rejoice and joke well. Religion 
 has been made to talk so technically and to look so sour upon 
 men, that they have come to look shy upon it and to dread it ; it 
 hath become a thing technical and commonplace, a thing lacking 
 fresh air, and these great Germans, simple, stout-hearted men, 
 they have taught to this age a lesson which I trust our young men 
 will soon learn, that a man may be religious, though he should 
 be merry. There is a deep lesson in the old song, "Be merry 
 and wise." And what says the deep verity of the Christian 
 Scriptures? It says of the Lord, that He "came eating and 
 drinking :" yet men have forgotten this, and have changed the fair 
 face of our religion into the countenance of a hard and sore task- 
 master; have called this fair world of God, "a waste, howling 
 wilderness ; " forgetting that this would be a very beautiful world 
 if men would not spoil it. Nay, and carrying out these mistaken 
 and gloomy notions, they have come to talk of themselves as 
 worthless and miserable worms, and of their souls as poor paltry 
 nothings. The Word of God never said anything of the kind ; 
 but it has said that the soul is everything, and that everything
 
 380 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 about it, as compared with it, is as nothing. What is the sun, 
 what are all the worlds, compared with my soul ? Christ said long 
 ago, "what will a man give in exchange for his soul? or what 
 shall it profit him if he gain the whole world and lose his own 
 soul?" These Germans overthrow those debasing conceptions of 
 the soul of man ; they tell every man that he is a king, a great and 
 high fact, the highest fact ; they teach that religion and joyousness 
 go hand in hand ; that the world hath not lost its beauty, but that 
 men have lost the sense by which to discern that beauty ; and 
 they show that, though cast out of Paradise, there is a possible 
 return there. You will find "The Miscellanies" of Thomas 
 Carlyle are as a vestibule to admit you into that broad and rich 
 land of German literature, in which it will be both your pleasure 
 and profit many a time to walk. 
 
 One of the earliest and most striking of Carlyle's works is the 
 " Sartor Resartus," which may be considered a revelation of the 
 interior life of a truly earnest and thoughtful man. When 
 autobiography is written in a true spirit, it forms a most valuable 
 contribution to self-knowledge and to the knowledge of human 
 nature. We have had many kinds of autobiographies ; some like 
 that of Rousseau, written with an evident eye to effect, in which 
 there are many things got up ; others, again, like that of John 
 Bunyan, describing the struggles through which the minds of 
 earnest believers have been often called to pass, in reaching their 
 belief. Of this latter class is this book of Carlyle's. The form 
 into which he has thrown it, is both grotesque and picturesque. 
 He summons up a certain eccentric German professor who dwells in 
 a university town, which, as is sagely remarked by one of Carlyle's 
 American reviewers, is not to be found in the map of Germany. 
 This professor has undertaken to teach the great and important 
 science of " Things in general." The first great lesson which you 
 should learn from this book is the right treatment of the sceptic 
 and the doubter. The usual method pursued, especially by the 
 religious, is rather to anathematise than to attempt to convince ; 
 proceeding upon the assumption that unbelief is always wilful, and 
 that scepticism is always a crime. For a man to be uncertain 
 concerning any particular doctrine, is to run the risk of losing 
 fellowship and kindliness, and of being pronounced one of those 
 who are dangerous and pestilent in society. If the conduct of
 
 The Geimis and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 38 1 
 
 Christ in this matter be looked to, different, very different, will be 
 our treatment of the doubter. Amongst His apostles He had one 
 of the material school ; one of those men who are not to be taken 
 in ; who believe nothing that has not occurred in their experience, 
 or which is not revealed to them by their good five senses ; a man 
 with a supreme contempt for the supernatural ; one who, when 
 Peter told of a deserted sepulchre, an empty grave, would " believe 
 none of these things," and demanded material evidence of a state- 
 ment by no means in accordance with his previous experience. 
 Christ meets him; instead of reproaching, He reasons with him ; and 
 " condescending" to this man "of low estate," He supplied him with 
 the evidence which his peculiar constitution of mind, or his peculiar 
 philosophy, demanded. "Reach hither thy finger," says Christ, 
 "and behold my hands ; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into 
 my side, and be not faithless, but believing." It has yet to be under- 
 stood that a man may be a religious doubter, a pious sceptic, and an 
 earnest infidel ; for surely it is religious to doubt, as long as a thing 
 seems doubtful, it is pious to refuse to give the soul's assent to 
 that which appears to the soul a lie. The firmest believers are 
 those who have passed through the darkness of unbelief; for 
 nothing so convinces, as the knowledge of a thing gained by having 
 at one time doubted it. In this book of Carlyle's we have the 
 autobiography of one who passes through a very " slough of de- 
 spond." We are furnished with the process leading to this, and 
 also with the road leading from it. The paramount idea of the 
 work is to show how human ideas get themselves clothed upon 
 with garments of circumstance, accident, and non-essential. These 
 garments it becomes needful at times to remove, in order to restore 
 the primitive ideas, which they have sometimes not only enveloped, 
 but threatened, "by their very weight, to kill and destroy. Hence, 
 we are told to picture many of the great things which men are 
 accustomed to worship, as deprived of their outward trappings. 
 On one occasion of state, we are bidden by magic touch to cause 
 the outward adornment to remove, and then to see what result 
 Imagine a coronation procession stripped of its outward clothing ! 
 Garments, churches, armies, all are regarded as the clothing in 
 which certain great ideas of society do appear for us. In the 
 course of the chapter headed "Aprons" we are told "How 
 much has been concealed, how much has been defended in aprons?
 
 382 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 Nay, rightly considered, what is your whole military and police 
 establishment, charged at uncalculated millions, but a huge scarlet- 
 coloured, iron-fastened apron, wherein society works (uneasily 
 enough) ; guarding itself from some soil and stithy-sparks, in this 
 devil's smithy (Teufels-schmiede) of a world ? But of all aprons the 
 most puzzling to me hitherto has been the episcopal or cassock. 
 Wherein consists the usefulness of this apron? The overseer 
 (Episcopus) of souls, I notice, has tucked in the corner of it, as if 
 his day's work were done ; what does he shadow forth thereby ? " 
 
 After showing us the world clothed, we are bidden to look at 
 the world out of clothes. We now follow the thinker through in- 
 tellectual doubt and heart-sorrow, until he comes to that peculiar 
 position which the author has called " The everlasting No," 
 which is the negation of almost all the belief of early years, the 
 loss of faith, the triumph of doubt, the true night and darkness of 
 the spirit. This is the Slough of Despond itself. Prevented by 
 an " after-light " of Christianity from committing suicide, our hero 
 reaches the " centre of indifference," which is the turning point, 
 where darkness begins to flee, and light appeareth ; reminding us 
 of the description given of the sun in a northern clime, where it 
 has been watched in its downward course, then for a moment or 
 two seen to stand still, and then to begin its upward eastern journey. 
 The centre of indifference is this standing still of the sun of the soul. 
 The central thought, upon which this revolution turns, is the idea of 
 the Me, a something different and other from the world without; 
 a something holding power, able to conclude this doubtful state 
 by an act of freedom, an act of suicide. This feeling of freedom, 
 of self, of will, and of power, is the single idea upon which turns 
 the salvation of the soul. Having shown us this, we are led again 
 into the fair regions of belief. This single idea becomes the key 
 to unlock the many problems of fate, destiny, and duty ; and, by 
 its kindly ministration, the doubt is laid again, in an understand- 
 ing of the great problem of life, coming at length into "The 
 everlasting Yes ; " which is duty clear, immortal, discerned, and 
 the true influence of infinity and eternity felt upon human life. 
 This is a rapid and imperfect key to the book. Its best in- 
 terpretation must be gotten out of the interior life of those who 
 have passed through such struggles, understood such doubts. To 
 them the book will come thrice blessed, as showing how a maturer
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 383 
 
 mind than their own has had to struggle through the same 
 darkness, has had to stoop before it could arise. And if 
 friends have been chill, and the world has frowned, and the 
 church has cursed, with this book we may retreat, and find 
 in it an interpreter of this inner life, and a guide into the 
 land of light. One other lesson let us learn from the book, 
 to cherish the inner life of the soul ; to take a high and 
 noble view of its worth and importance ; to see how, in truth, 
 all the outward things are subordinate to this ; how the fair 
 face of nature can give little delight, if the light within be dark- 
 ness. Let it teach those who doubt, to doubt on to the light ; to 
 submit to none of those smothering processes, so often recom- 
 mended ; to believe that no regimen of mere moral willing can 
 prove effectual in overcoming those faults, which the very 
 mystery of life, in certain minds, necessarily produces. Let us 
 be careful always to maintain earnestness and sincerity ; to search 
 ever for the truth ; to bide our time, believing that the darkness of 
 the night is but the prelude to the coming dawn. 
 
 I must now pass on to the " Hero Worship," a book which 
 exhibits one of the daring attempts of genius. In it we see a 
 man, single-handed, unassisted, undertaking to reverse the sentence 
 of the ages upon some of those whom he honours with the title of 
 heroes. In these days, when men renounce their individuality, 
 and can do nothing but by association, it is somewhat soul- 
 refreshing to see a man set out, alone, to do that which historians, 
 who should have known better, have neglected to do. This we 
 consider one of the noblest works ever undertaken by genius. 
 The importance of the object of " Hero Worship " cannot be 
 over-estimated. Men must have their heroes ; all must consent 
 to worship more or less; and all dreams of democracy, re- 
 publicanism, or equality, which would teach men that the day is 
 to come when there will be no heroes or no governors, Thomas 
 Carlyle has essayed to disprove. All equality dreams he shows 
 to be idle dreams, and common sense might show this to anyone; 
 for if to-night all could be reduced to a dead level of wealth, 
 power, knowledge, &c., he who should rise at six instead ot eight 
 to-morrow morning would utterly destroy that level, provided he 
 worked while others snored. So there can be no equality, in that 
 sense, no level of the kind ; they are but idle dreams invented by
 
 384 The Genius and Works of TJionias Carlyle. 
 
 demagogues to deceive and to ruin a people. With respect to 
 these heroes, and the worship Carlyle says ought to be paid to 
 them, they seem to serve like the rounds of Jacob's ladder, to lead 
 men gradually up from the earth to the great Lord of the earth. 
 In such sense they have their uses ; and there is small fear that 
 men, in giving worship to the heroes of the world, will neglect to 
 give due reverence to the Maker of the heroes. The prime prin- 
 ciple sought to be established by the book is, that no sham ever did 
 live long in the world. He gives the lie to the accepted and 
 registered judgments so long passed upon Mahomet and Cromwell. 
 He takes the Prophet Mahomet, whom we were taught in our 
 school-days to regard as an impostor, and the greatest hypocrite 
 the world ever had, a mean liar and deceiver. To reverse this 
 decision, Carlyle has not laboured in vain. The accepted version 
 of this man's character is mercilessly shown to be false, Carlyle 
 proving him to have been a truthful, earnest, deep-hearted son of 
 the desert, who achieved what he did by virtue of this earnestness, 
 by virtue of his adherence to the truth of things, and to those 
 sublime visions which visited his spirit. The great use of this 
 attempt is to teach us that lesson, upon which Carlyle so often 
 insists, that the world in the long run has not been duped, has not 
 been imposed upon. All philanthropic exertions and attempts at 
 political and social reform must be a labour of vexation and 
 " vanity of vanities," could men be so easily duped and taken in. 
 It cannot be believed that so many millions of our fellow-creatures 
 have passed through this life under the guidance of such an 
 unmitigated lie, as the life and writings of Mahomet are usually 
 believed to be. We may learn from it the lesson that all creeds, 
 parties, sects, have existed in this world rather by virtue of what 
 truth there is in them, than by the falsehood or error they hold. 
 When this principle is understood, miserable party spirit shall go 
 far to become extinct ; for the essence of all party spirit of the 
 wrong kind is to believe that it. is right, while all beside is un- 
 mitigated wrong ; that it is sincere, and other men only pretend ; 
 that it is the true thing, and all others are but hollow and deceptive. 
 This is a simple mode of getting rid of ever) thing but our own 
 belief, to say that all else is a deception, a hollowness, and a 
 sham. Now, if we can prove that all past creeds, political and 
 social principles, have lived and flourished among men by virtue
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 385 
 
 of the truth in them, and not the falsehood, then have we gained 
 a great point, and the reformer's prospect begins to get hopeful. 
 The history of a new sect is easily understood. Power produces 
 blindness ; the dominant party, wedded to some particular truth, 
 have neglected some other, and a protesting sect arises to supply 
 the neglect, and to supplement the doctrine of those in power. 
 The habit of looking at that truth alone, towards which our 
 mental constitution is inclined, produces one-sidedness and par- 
 tiality. The other side must be supplemented, the reverse 
 supplied ; and it rarely happens that men take an equally just 
 view of both sides of any great question. Hence, perhaps, these 
 differences are but the result of what the Apostle Paul says, " Now, 
 we know in part, and we see in part." Mahomet taught some 
 great neglected truths, revived faith in some forgotten verities, 
 and surely did teach to his people a higher rule of life, and a 
 nobler aspiration of the soul, than they had had before. Carlyle 
 has taken the character of Mahomet, and shown, by a special 
 attention to the neglected portions of his history, what a sincere 
 and earnest child of the desert he was. He has brought up 
 several beautiful facts of his life, which are quite other than the 
 usual traits of deception and imposture. He proceeds with the 
 hero under many other manifestations, and here is another great 
 principle of the book, that there is but one spirit under diverse 
 manifestations, that the same kingly, heroic, and royal spirit 
 animated the old god Woden, the prophet Mahomet, the king, 
 and the poet Burns, Johnson, and many other great men ; that 
 the same force was behind them, energy, strong will, an 
 earnest and a truthful heart. 
 
 It has been thought by some that the praise bestowed upon 
 such men is dangerous, apt to subvert the strict rules of morality ; 
 but we have no such fear. None of us are in danger of becoming 
 Mahometans, because the true elements of that man's character 
 are indicated and admired. Such censure belongs to a weak and 
 effeminate morality, not learned of nature and of life, in which 
 we find small care taken to prevent us struggling through pain, 
 trouble, and difficulty, in order to reach a high and safe position. 
 Such censures belong to the hot-house school of life, in which they 
 strive to raise us as delicate plants, from which are to be carefully 
 excluded every biting wind, every genial beam, lest the one should 
 
 2 B
 
 386 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 wither and the other burn ; a morality which deems that virtue 
 which is but the negation of vice, and deems that strength which 
 has never been tried. Strange contrast to those teachings which 
 bid us " count it all joy when we fall into divers temptations." 
 The great lesson to be learned from this book is, the importance 
 of true heroes and of true worship. It may always be said with 
 truth, " Given the gods of a people, we can find the people." 
 The old worships of Rome and Greece show this. As the god, 
 so will the worshipper become. With the demigods this, too, 
 is true ; with the heroes, with whatever is worshipped or rever- 
 enced. This being the case, it is of the highest importance that 
 an age have its heroes truly found. Nothing can be more need- 
 ful than to define clearly who shall be worshipped ; who, not 
 reverenced. The heroes whom men have honoured, have been 
 too often little worthy of that rank ; and he who can give us a 
 new race of heroes, who can uncrown the worthless and enshrine 
 the noble, will thereby exercise upon the people an influence 
 tending towards all which is true and worthy in those heroes 
 themselves. To do this, Carlyle has shown us the hero spirit as 
 exhibited under the many diverse manifestations of divinity, king, 
 priest, poet, literary man, pointing out in all some great prominent 
 characteristics, exhibiting their unity under divers forms, teaching 
 us that there is one spirit, many manifestations. In them all, is 
 to be discerned that earnestness which goes so far to make a great 
 and heroic character; that conformity to the truth of things 
 which is the secret of their success. 
 
 It has been objected that Carlyle's worship is too indiscriminate 
 that it appears to be a worship of blind force. Were this 
 correct, it would but savour of that extreme into which a man 
 who deeply feels a neglected truth is apt to push that truth, in 
 order that it may be the more looked upon and regarded by those 
 who have forgotten it. In a time when individual force and 
 power have been resigned to associations, when hollowness and 
 shamming have become so common, it is needful strongly to 
 insist upon the ultimate triumph only of that which is real, 
 earnest, and true. But this reproach I do not believe to be of 
 much force or value. A recognition of the noble primary elements 
 of a man's character by no means obliges us to admire every act 
 and deed of the man's life. This very fault, if fault it be, is a
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 387 
 
 teaching of that true Catholicism in which alone the cure of 
 narrowness, bigotry, and party-spirit can be looked for. To 
 discern the good and the true, in places previously deemed 
 unlikely to exhibit it, is to show a clear sense of that goodness 
 and beauty in the discoverer. Too often criticism has been the 
 dissection of the unsound, teaching a sad lesson concerning the 
 critic, for "like seeks like." The divining rod, when held by an 
 untrue man, will always point to the untrue ; but in the hands of 
 a great spirit it will tell of nought but the sterling gold hidden 
 beneath the earth's surface. To find, then, truth and beauty in the 
 diverse men whom he has selected shows Carlyle himself to be good 
 and true, and whosoever following Carlyle's guidance can with 
 him see the admirable in the many heroes he gives us, may be 
 sure that he too has mastered the understanding of what con- 
 stitutes a noble character, if to worship the true is to be true, and 
 to see the godlike is to be pure. It is not sufficient to worship 
 mere force. The earthquake must then find its devotees, and the 
 volcano should have a large number of worshippers around it. 
 All these tilings should have their due respect, because they are 
 a needful part of the world's history, but seeing that they are but 
 the force of destruction and overthrow, and seeking nothing 
 benevolent, there should be distinction made between the worship 
 paid to them and to things benevolent in intention, in the mode 
 of carrying them out, and in the fruits they have brought forth. 
 
 But these objections will be corrected if another of Carlyle's 
 doctrines is considered namely, that ultimately might and right 
 are identical. At first this seems a strange proposition; men 
 look round the world and see many unrighteousnesses that rule 
 and are endured in it, many slaveries, much oppression and 
 tyranny under which they groan, and it seems strange to be taught 
 that might and right are identical. But if the former proposition 
 be once carefully established that men are not duped long, 
 that hollow and false things are short-lived then does it become 
 developed that might and right are identical, because that which 
 finally establishes itself is right : the hollow and false may live a 
 little time, but that which does live long, and does much, must 
 do it by virtue of its being right, for it has the might, and God 
 has ordered it that nothing but the right shall have the full and 
 final might in it. This doctrine is needful for the reformer to
 
 388 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 understand, and satisfactory when he has understood it, for it 
 teaches that whatsoever wrong is in the world has got its verdict 
 of departure written upon it ; it teaches men to look little for the 
 outward might, while it brings us to the old doctrine that the 
 right thing, the due thing, what a man owes duty is the one 
 sole and only thing about which a man should concern himself. 
 To do the due thing, or the right thing, is to do the mighty 
 thing ; for if the world be so ordered that finally the mighty 
 thing shall triumph, and that nothing is truly mighty but the right 
 thing he who does the due thing, or the duty, the owed thing, or 
 the obligation is the conqueror, the mighty man. Carlyle shows 
 us, then, under the diverse forms which the hero and the heroic 
 spirit has taken, that in having might they have, more or less, right. 
 With respect to the objection brought against Carlyle, of the 
 undue worship of force, it must also be remembered that the 
 majority of men are not subjected to the rights of trial of which 
 he speaks. There are two judgments to which men should be 
 subject, that of their peers, and that of their superiors. Now, 
 in blaming men, the true and generous spirit will always try them 
 by their peers. If I wish to settle what measure of blame is due 
 to a man of the past age, I must not try him by the principles of 
 the present day. If I wish to show what position Socrates should 
 take, I must not drag him up and try him by the New Testament. 
 That would not be trying him by a judgment of his peers, but of 
 his superiors. Take this as a rule in all historic judgment : when 
 you wish to understand what blame is due to a man, try him by 
 the Shaster, the Avesta, or the Spirit he worshipped, and not by 
 your times, morality, Scripture, or laws. But if the question be 
 what place he shall take in the great Valhalla of the world, what 
 niche he shall occupy among the true spirits, what place he shall 
 take in the heaven of history, then must he consent to be tried 
 by his superiors ; because it is to be settled what place that man 
 must take in the great gathering and church of the blessed ones 
 of all time, and he must be tried by an abstract, absolute law, by 
 his superiors, by the old and eternal law of right and wrong, as 
 embodied in the best transcript of it that can be found for us. 
 The absurdity of many of the usual judgments passed upon 
 such men is, that they are tried by a standard which they 
 never had ; sentenced by a law to which they were never
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyie. 389 
 
 amenable ; executed for not obeying a precept which they never 
 heard. Carlyie shows, in respect to Mahomet, that he had a true 
 and an earnest heart ; that because he did not teach Christianity, 
 it does not follow that he taught an unmitigated lie ; that because 
 he had not our book to reverence, it does not follow that the 
 book he gave out had nothing reverenceable in it. 
 
 This book on hero-worship, in common with Carlyle's historic 
 works, has the singular beauty of making all these heroes live and 
 move before us. We are not presented with a set of fleshless 
 abstractions, but have the very men living again before our eyes. 
 And this is done by the ability to supply the whole man, from a 
 knowledge of some of his deeds, thoughts, and words. A marked 
 change has come over our historic works of late. Instead of dry 
 narratives, furnished by the school histories of our childhood, we 
 have now the dramatic form. This change has been attributed 
 sometimes to Walter Scott, who summons up the actual men of 
 the past, and makes them live. But it has been better done by 
 Carlyie, who does not strive to give us a finished picture, losing 
 its power by its very finish, leaving nothing for the imagination 
 to do, because so elaborated ; but, like the sketch of a great 
 master, teaching as much by what it leaves out as by what it 
 supplies, for it is a principle true here, that where the imagination 
 has nought to do, mental impression will be comparatively 
 weakened. Look around your Pantheon, and see by whom its 
 many niches are filled ; and question yourselves whether you are 
 rendering " honour to whom honour is due." Should you find 
 any false hero enshrined there, I trust you will as speedily as may 
 be remove him, to give place to some of those truthful spirits by 
 whom humanity has been blessed and the truth taught, some of 
 those great ones, "of whom," it is said, "the world was not 
 worthy." 
 
 III. 
 
 I will now pass on to what may be called the applied science 
 ot Carlyle's writings. I have seen, in a certain review concerning 
 the " Chartism" of Thomas Carlyie, that " they are surprised he 
 should come down into the arena of political discussion, and thus 
 put all his reputation at stake." Mournful sentence, that a man 
 should stake his reputation by applying his wisdom to some
 
 39 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 goodly purpose in life ! But this is the cant of an age of criticism 
 fast departing, which has held that to apply science is not digni- 
 fied, but that to dream away life in abstractions, that neither bless 
 the dreamer nor anyone for whom he is dreaming, is worthy of 
 renown. I hold with Algernon Sidney, that the two things worthy 
 of a man's study are religion and politics ; when they are gone 
 almost everything is gone worthy of studying. With respect to 
 art, science, and literature, unless we have religion and politics 
 around which to group them, we can scarcely class them higher 
 than amusements. Life is too short for such matters, and though 
 it is needful that every age should have men devoting themselves 
 to one particular science, yet they should do it with a view to its 
 being applied by other thinkers to some benefit and blessing to be 
 bestowed upon their fellow-men. Instead of Carlyle's risking his 
 reputation by applying his knowledge to political reform, I think 
 he first made his reputation then. For surely a man is noble 
 when he begins to do the work of humanity, to plead for the 
 oppressed, to speak for the lowly, and those who are dumb 
 and have no tongue to speak for themselves ; when he descends 
 from his high philosophic chair of abstraction, where he found 
 "audience fit, though few," amongst the esoteric spirits of his 
 time, to wield a very Hercules' club against the serpents, giants, 
 and other monsters by which society is oppressed. I am not 
 about to inflict upon you anything that the laws of your society 
 will necessarily shut out ; but it is mournful that in this free land, 
 in this age, foremost in the rules of the discussion and debating 
 societies of our Athenaeums and Mechanics' Institutions, it is 
 found needful to write " Religion and Politics not discussed here." 
 To my mind it is one of the weakest and puniest symptoms of a 
 puny age. What is there well worth wasting time about when 
 these two things arc shut out. What care the poor for our nice 
 discussions about optics, &c. ? The great blunder (and I say it 
 in kindness) made by Mechanics' Institutions in this country is 
 in supposing that after fourteen or sixteen hours' work in a factory 
 or mill, a man will get home, and having washed his face and re- 
 duced himself to a proper state of cleanliness, will come to hear 
 some man discuss concerning the refraction of light, friction, and 
 other matters, useful in their proper place. No ; working men 
 are not interested in such things yet. They will come together
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 391 
 
 to hear the duty of life explained, to hear what are the rights and 
 the duties of government ; eighteen hours' work will not prevent 
 them from coming to hear that. I would be bound for experi- 
 menting in any town in this kingdom, inhabited by working men, 
 to gather them together at an evening lecture upon points of 
 politics, morality, and religion, after any number of hours' work, 
 when optics, botany, and bits of other sciences should fail to get 
 a room half full. Why do I complain of this excluding rule ? 
 Because it seems to say that Englishmen are not manly enough 
 to differ yet. Why are these things shut out ? " For fear," it is 
 said, " men should get excited and angry." As if there was any 
 harm in excitement at any time ! It is a sickly sentimentality 
 that talks against excitement. Why, life is one history of excite- 
 ment, the excitement of the finite striving to understand the in- 
 finite ; the excitement of the man limited striving to work in spite 
 of those limits. The day will come soon when these things will 
 be altered, but seeing such are the laws we must for the present 
 conform to them. 
 
 I am going to inflict no party politics upon you, for I love them 
 not. It is a sad scene in English society, that the sublime science 
 of politics, as understood by the great Greeks and our forefathers, 
 has died out amongst us ; and if nine men out of ten were asked 
 what politics means, their talk would be of newspapers, elections, and 
 lists of parliamentry majorities of material interests rather than of 
 spiritual, of men more than principles. This, however, is not what I 
 mean when I talk of politics. By politics, I mean the whole rights 
 of man in a social state, the rights of the governors and the governed, 
 and the right of the governed to be governed wisely and well ; the 
 whole well-being of man social. Another great evil amongst us is 
 the separating of men into a great number of spheres, making 
 religion, politics, &c., technical things. There are certain buildings 
 in which a man can be religious, and others in which he can not. 
 Politics and religion are things of latitude and longitude ; things 
 of garment ; holiday garments to be put on on certain days of the 
 week, and then laid aside, until the turn of the day brings them 
 into requisition and use again. In respect to this, I would recom- 
 mend you to read Emerson's lecture on "Man Thinking," in 
 which he draws a very settled and clear distinction between " man 
 a thinker," and " man thinking," showing that there ought to be no
 
 39 2 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 thinkers, but that every man ought to be thinking. Thinking 
 must not be made a profession, but it is the first prime duty of 
 every one of us ; so shall we get rid of the nonsense of there being 
 a profession of politics. In a free country, everybody should be 
 professed politicians; everyone should be grateful to God for 
 putting him in a free land, and should show his gratitude by mak- 
 ing use of the blessing. It is as absurd for men to live in a free 
 country and refuse to take part in its management, as for a man 
 with the power to eat refusing to exercise it. If a man lives under 
 the English constitution, it is to enjoy the blessings that constitu- 
 tion has put him in possession of ; if he lives in a free country, it 
 is to be a freeman. And my advice oft repeated, but yet here 
 to be repeated once more is, to all those good, quiet, and easy 
 souls, who, under any pretence whatsoever (whether in not liking 
 excitement, love of peace, or religion), say a man has no business 
 to mix in politics to take the first shipment they conveniently can, 
 and to bestow themselves into some of the broad lands of the 
 Emperor of Russia, where their political duties will get narrowed 
 down very considerably and quickly, and their whole duty will be 
 just to be quiet, and believe the Emperor to be the best incarna- 
 tion of all that is true, wise, noble, and generous, the world ever 
 had. 
 
 This book, " Chartism," starts with a chapter on the " Condi- 
 tion of England question," and Carlyle goes on curiously to show, 
 that in this country we have had all manner of questions but this 
 one ; we have inquired into everything but into the not very simple 
 and slight matter the condition of the people. Here is the great 
 question of the times. I care not what politics men are of, 
 the condition of the people must be inquired into ; it is the 
 duty of the people to inquire into that condition; whether they 
 are high Tory, Whig, or Radical, it is pressed upon their attention 
 that this question must be examined into. Carlyle goes on to 
 show that rebellions, chartist riots, mill burning, strikes, and insur- 
 rections, are seldom wisely treated, because men do not see that 
 they are indications of something beneath. Too often, rebellion 
 or a riot is an indication of a disease : but having removed or re- 
 pressed the symptoms, there is no trouble taken to cure the blood 
 from which it sprang. This is one of the fatalisms ; they look 
 upon rebellion as if men rebelled for the sake of rebellion ; they
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 393 
 
 look upon a strike as a sort of ebullition of ill temper, which ought to 
 be treated as a child sulking, that the sulk is to be put down by a 
 carefully bestowed sugar lump, or reduced to a muttering quietness 
 by a due application of birch. Men do not rebel for the sake of 
 doing it, they strike or rebel to show that they are wronged. 
 Carlyle shows that men will bear almost anything but an injustice. 
 All of us can put up with hunger, and famine, and illness, but 
 injustice is a thing that the soul of man cannot long bear, and 
 which it is not intended he should long bear. The book shows 
 that all strikes and rebellions should be regarded as symptoms of 
 disease. The symptom may be treated and got rid of, but instead 
 of merely doing that we should go deeper and attempt to get rid 
 of the disease. Carlyle points to the Chartist movement of the 
 people, as indicating a great discontent in the people, a sense of 
 injustice or wrong. He proceeds to show that the injustice or 
 wrong must sooner or later get looked into. He treats the 
 doctrine, that the government should let the people alone, as an 
 absurdity ; and I would warn any who are deeply imbued with 
 Democracy, that in this book they will find many unpleasant 
 things ; for he teaches that democracy is nothing but a reduction 
 of the world to a vacuum, in order to start fresh and fair again. 
 It would be well if all of us would look into this point. The 
 assertion seems startling, and what Carlyle urges is, the necessity 
 that the people should always have guides and governors ; that 
 the less educated men must always seek guidance from the better 
 educated, and that the great problem we should try to solve is, 
 " How shall governance and guidance be best supplied ? " With 
 respect to the Church, Carlyle has several curious things to say. 
 He says it professes to be a guidance, and that the friends of the 
 Church should look and see whether or not it is truly guiding the 
 people. With a vein of sardonic humour that besets this man at 
 times, he ventures to suggest whether Birmingham might not 
 supply a few " cast-iron preachers." There is something signifi- 
 cant about this it is at least a very unpleasant insinuation which 
 it becomes the order of the clergy to look into, and ask what he 
 means by suggesting that the day has come when we may have 
 cast-metal pastors. With respect to kings, he makes his great 
 German professor to laugh but once ; and then he laughs because 
 Jean Paul suggests whether it may not be desirable to look out
 
 394 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 for some " cast-metal kings." These things may look absurd, but 
 they are significant, because they teach us that one of the greatest 
 thinkers dares to insinuate that a great deal of kingship or govern- 
 ance, and churchship or guidance, is now no governance or guid- 
 ance, its vitality having gotten out of it, and that it would be a 
 salvation, if preaching for the future were done by steam, or if 
 governing were done by some cast-metal organisation. 
 
 A thing that will strike one early in the book is the contempt 
 poured upon much that is called Political Economy : and here he 
 does but verify what I have stated before, that these bare and 
 barren sciences can do little for men. I am sorry to say it, but 
 it is my belief, that a large part of what has passed for political 
 economy is just anything but worthy a man's reasoning or atten- 
 tion. It is an attempt to negative a large part of our nature, and 
 to reduce the infinite soul of man to some algebraic formula, by 
 which a man, taking his Ready Reckoner out of his desk, may 
 settle the affairs of the nation at once tell exactly the state of a 
 people, and how they should be governed. Carlyle has a great 
 contempt for Statistics, as too often used, when a man attempts to 
 establish everything by statistics. Are the people religious ? The 
 books of different chapels and churches are examined, and it is 
 pronounced that so many people attend this place or that on a 
 Sunday, and so many do not. Are the people moral ? A list is 
 made out of the amount of gin drunk, or prisoners committed, 
 and according to these they are pronounced moral or not. The 
 opinion of Carlyle with respect to statistics is that they are a " net 
 and a snare to men." Statistics have their uses, but when applied 
 to that which is not measurable by a formula they are wrong ; 
 they may be indications, but they are not the thing. They may 
 be used as an approximation to a fact, but any attempt to settle 
 the condition of the poor by statistics must be empty, hollow, 
 deceptive and vain. Speaking of Ireland he says : 
 
 " There is one fact which statistic science has communicated, 
 and a most astonishing one, the inference from which is 
 pregnant as to this matter. Ireland has near seven millions of 
 working people, the third unit of whom, it appears by statistic 
 science, has not for thirty weeks each year as many third-rate 
 potatoes as will suffice him. It is a fact perhaps the most 
 eloquent that was ever written down in any language at any date
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 395 
 
 of the world's history. Was change and reformation needed in 
 Ireland? Has Ireland been governed and guided in a 'wise and 
 loving ' manner ? A government and guidance of white European 
 men which has issued in perennial hunger of potatoes to the third 
 man extant ought to drop a veil over its face, and walk out of 
 court under conduct of proper officers, saying no word, expecting 
 now of a surety sentence either to change or die. All men, we 
 must repeat, were made by God, and have immortal souls in 
 them. The sans-potato is of the self-same stuff as the super- 
 finest Lord Lieutenant. Not an individual sans-potato human 
 scare-crow but had a life given him out of heaven, with eternities 
 depending on it for once and no second time. With immensities 
 in him, over him, and round him ; with feelings which a 
 Shakespeare's speech would not utter, with desires illimitable as 
 the autocrat's of all the Russias ! Him various thrice-honoured 
 persons, things, and institutions have long been teaching, long 
 been guiding, governing, and it is to perpetual scarcity of third- 
 rate potatoes, and to what depends thereon, that he has been 
 taught and guided. Figure thyself, O high-minded, clear-headed, 
 clean-burnished reader, clapt by enchantment into the torn coat 
 and waste hunger-lair of that same root-devouring brother man ! " 
 
 Now this passage is, after all, one of the most significant in the 
 book, and much to be thought upon. That these men are to be 
 looked upon as infinite and eternal, as brethren, and then to 
 reflect that all our governing, guiding, praying, preaching, teaching, 
 has brought them to this state, that they cannot get third-rate 
 potatoes for thirty weeks out of the fifty-two. This comes home 
 to each of us, for it is an evil partly within the cure of each 
 one. 
 
 What does he recommend each one to do but to cultivate 
 themselves, their sphere, their degree of knowledge; to become 
 true men, and to do whatsoever of labour may lie around them ? 
 Many strive only to get through life in the most respectable way 
 possible, but the doing anything for this starved and oppressed 
 people has never occurred to them. It is scarcely right people 
 should be in this earth of God's except to make it better, for the 
 men of other ages have toiled for us, and it becomes us to toil for 
 those who must come after us. He would have all men to be 
 toilers and workers ; and by every man's toiling on part of this
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 great earth of God's, by teaching the true thing, and acting to it, 
 showing that no truth is possessed by a man for himself. And 
 here our Scriptures teach us a great lesson, for they represent a 
 man as but a steward, holding for the good of all ; as a trustee to 
 hold property, not for himself, but for other men. This doctrine, 
 as to property, is sometimes well explained and enforced; but with 
 respect to knowledge, it is much neglected. Hence men spend 
 many studious years in accumulating learning, but none become 
 the wiser for it except themselves. Hence so few able to appre- 
 ciate education, and therefore not regarding it and its teachers 
 with respect. For in this country to become an educator is to 
 enter one of the worst paid and least respected ranks or profes- 
 sions of society. Modern English people, if they are reduced in 
 circumstances, the first place where they begin to pinch and 
 screw is the schoolmaster's bill. Yet they are an enlightened 
 people, very much alive to the importance of knowledge ; and, as 
 Carlyle puts it in one of his books, he has never yet seen a place 
 in which it would be desirable for an educator to walk abroad 
 with his educating tools by his side, while it is highly honourable 
 to a soldier to strut about the streets with his butchering tools by 
 his side. A sword is honoured, where a pen is sneered at. The 
 schoolmaster is one of the drudges of society ; and, while other 
 men, of whose uses it would be unpleasant and difficult to say a 
 true opinion just now, get themselves honoured, the schoolmaster 
 is scorned. These are matters within the cure of each one of us ; 
 to settle these on another basis, to show that we understand the 
 spiritual and the true reform, lies in the hands of all and every 
 one of us. 
 
 It is in this book, " Chartism," that the doctrine of rights and 
 mights is best expounded. He says, " If men can get themselves 
 to feel a thing inevitable, they cease to quarrel with it," and he 
 tells us that " an expedition was fitted out against the Simoom or 
 south wind, but there were never two expeditions, because men 
 found it was not to be put down ; it was one of those things not 
 to be got rid of." Again, he puts it very strongly " If men had 
 lost belief in a God, their only resource against a blind no-god, of 
 necessity and mechanism, that held them like a hideous world- 
 steam-engine, like a hideous Phalaris' bull, imprisoned in its own 
 iron belly, would be, with or without hope revolt. They could,
 
 The Genizis and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 397 
 
 as Novalis says, by a ' simultaneous universal act of suicide,' 
 depart out of the world-steam-engine, and end, if not in victory, 
 yet in invincibility, and unsubduable protest that such world- 
 steam-engine was a failure and a stupidity." 
 
 This is a thing to be thought upon, supposing all men were to 
 agree to depart out of the world by suicide ; but the fact that 
 men cannot be got to agree, proves that they have yet left 
 the last gift of hope ; they believe something better is to come 
 towards them. That hope sustains them, and shows there is a 
 dim belief that right and might shall ultimately be proved to be 
 one and the same. The doctrine which Carlyle calls " Laissez 
 faire" or leaving the world alone, he proves will not do ; that 
 men demand from us governance and guidance. The problem 
 is, how shall we get an aristocracy ? and here, of course, there is 
 much idle talk in all political meetings, men not thinking that 
 even in a democratic form of government, some aristocracy must 
 exist. The question is not whether this political aristocracy or 
 that is good, but how shall we find the best aristocracy? The 
 book but suggests a number of problems, and this is one : " Given 
 the number of inhabitants in a city, how should it find its best 
 men ? " He goes on to speak, also, of cash payment being the 
 only means or bond of political science, in modern times, and 
 leaves it as a suggestion, whether or not this is right ; and to this, 
 modern science has brought us. It will be seen in many books 
 that the great end of government is to protect property. Carlyle 
 puts the matter beautifully, when he says 
 
 " Another thing, which the British reader often reads and hears 
 in this time, is worth his meditating for a moment : that society 
 ' exists for the protection of property.' To which it is added, 
 that the poor man also has property namely, his ' labour,' and 
 the fifteenpence or three-and-sixpence a day he can get for that. 
 True enough, O friends, 'for protecting property;' most true: 
 and indeed if you will once sufficiently enforce that eighth com- 
 mandment, the whole ' rights of man ' are well cared for ; I know 
 no better definition of the rights of man. Thou shalt not steal; 
 thou shalt not be stolen from : what a society were that ; Plato's 
 Republic, More's Utopia mere emblems of it ! Give every man 
 what is his, the accurate price of what he has done and been, no 
 man shall any more complain, neither shall the earth surfer any
 
 398 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 more. For the protection of property, in very truth, and for that 
 alone ! " 
 
 Hence, in the commencement of "Past and Present " we are 
 presented with a picture in this country, of a number of able- 
 bodied men unable to work, and Carlyle pronounces this to be 
 the most unjust, wicked, and ruinous sight this world has ever 
 yet produced. He is a great upholder of the strict old law, that 
 those who will not work shall not eat ; and the most merciful and 
 righteous man is justified in putting it to the entrance. If a man 
 will not work, let him be starved out : but it must be considered 
 how it is that willing workers are not able to work ; whether 
 this patent government as quiet and as good as it seems 
 whether, in protecting the property of the rich, it does not 
 enable the poor man to put his little property his strong arm, 
 his able hand, his willing spirit to put that property out to 
 interest, whereby he may gain life, or the means of living. How 
 is it that, under an enlightened Government, men can be found 
 willing to work and yet unable to find work? Another great 
 lesson he teaches, and one which, in political matters, ought 
 to be learned is, that the true reform of politics, and everything 
 else, is more in getting a right spirit, than in an over-attention to 
 getting the right form. It is perfectly possible that a political 
 reform may come a great deal sooner than it is wanted. There 
 have been such cases in history. This may seem paradoxical ; 
 but a few enlightened men may produce a change, for which the 
 spirit of the people is not prepared ; and what is the consequence? 
 If the two spheres of life, the inner and the outer, do not fit one 
 another, there must be hollowness and decay. Such a man is 
 said to be hollow, what does that mean ? That the true life of 
 the man does not exactly fit his profession. A man professes a 
 thing; but, unfortunately, he has not the thing there. There is a 
 full circle of profession, and an inferior or broken circle of reality. 
 Where the inner circle does not exactly fit the outer, when such a 
 man is tapped, it is said that he sounds hollow, he is hollow- 
 hearted. This may be illustrated by reference to a nut : if the 
 kernel within fills up the shell, if the shell has grown around the 
 kernel, there will be no hollowness, because the internal life, the 
 kernel, will be exactly expressed by the external life, the shell. If 
 the kernel is shrivelled, and not full grown, then there is hollow- 
 ness because the shell is not filled up by the internal life. Such
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 399 
 
 is the way with man. Apply the same thing to politics ; people 
 may be found with a very fair outside appearance, but the spirit, 
 the kernel, is wanting. This may teach all men a great lesson, to 
 get the spirit and the truth ; forms always take care of themselves. 
 The spirit is the centre, and when that is filled, it is quite certain 
 the circumference will take good heed of itself; circumferences 
 having been generally in the habit of getting accommodated to 
 centres. The true political reform which Carlyle advocates, is 
 not so much the loud clamouring against any particular thing, but 
 the incessant struggle to change the spirit of the thing. 
 
 This is borne out by the philosophy of the Christian verity. It 
 must have struck some of you that Jesus Christ never said any- 
 thing about political abuses ; concerning slavery, we never detect 
 any speech that has fallen from his lips. He never protested 
 against absolute government, and the abominations by which men 
 in his day, and in ours, have been trodden down. And why so ? 
 Lecause he put down this great truth, change the spirit, and the 
 thing will go. All ghosts get themselves away when the morning 
 star arises : his doctrine was the morning star, " I am the light 
 of the world ; " get the light of the world and the ghosts and 
 hideous spectres must vanish away. Get the spirit of a man 
 right, and you rectify everything in the man. Hence the sublime 
 doctrine of the Scriptures, when they speak of converting the 
 inner life of a man. Change that and all is changed. Teach the 
 soul of a man, and all the outward circumstances, doing, every- 
 thing, thinking, speaking, dressing, all will change. Hence comes 
 in the sublime scriptural doctrine that a man is born over again, 
 starts life afresh with a new soul. And what matters it quibbling 
 that the body is the same, if in that body a new spirit, a new 
 soul, a new man, hath gotten ? This is the philosophy taught as 
 the true Christian reform : Earnestly labour to convert the 
 people ; to alter their way of looking at life ; change the soul of 
 the people by incessant teaching of the upright, noble, and true, 
 by incessant education, and remember that it is a noble people 
 that makes a noble government, and not a noble government that 
 makes a noble people. 
 
 One of the great blunders into which we are apt to fall is mak- 
 ing by far too much of government ; ,a great deal of politics is 
 concerned in the upsetting or forming of governments ; in fact,
 
 400 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 many have reversed the order of things, and government, which 
 is but the expression of the soul, has got to be the soul ; and this 
 is the fruit of absolute and such other governments that the people, 
 the soul of the thing, are made to bow down to the government, 
 the expression of the thing. Some will object to this doctrine, 
 and say, " Are we to carry on no crusade against an unjust law? 
 Are we to let the laws remain as they are till we get a righteous 
 people?" Truths at first seem paradoxical, but generally har- 
 monise when fully looked into. The same is said of religion, " It 
 is of no use to make men temperate if they are not first made reli- 
 gious." It is a great mistake that. Before Christ John the Baptist 
 came, to make a way for the Lord, to level the mountains, to 
 bring up the plains, to make a straight path for His feet. Such 
 are the crusades of modern times in politics ; they go before the 
 true reform of the people, to make straight their path. Crusades 
 against any particular evil capital punishments, or whatever else 
 this is not the final reform, the making a people righteous and 
 noble, but a smoothing of the highway along which the great car 
 of humanity will roll. Let no man be industrious, and no way is 
 made.. Every bad law is a large stone in the road, and every one 
 gotten out of the path is much done. Rest never in educating, 
 in teaching men to read and write, for it is perfectly possible to 
 make a blackguard do both, and to make a housebreaker discuss 
 latitude and longitude. This must be looked to, and the sphere 
 of outer reform must not be mistaken for the true sphere of inner 
 or spiritual reform. A bad law should be cleared out of the way, 
 in order to make ready for a future development ; but the best 
 exertions of a man's life ought to be given to the inner soul of a 
 people, to the change of the spirit of the people. Take it as a 
 principle laid down by Carlyle that governments are the expres- 
 sion of the people, that a righteous people and an unrighteous 
 government cannot exist. And men should remember that every 
 wrong thing in government is a sentence passed upon themselves. 
 The free cannot be ruled by a tyrant. It is because men are base 
 that a foot is put upon them. If the people find themselves at 
 any time in slavery, let them see whether they are not somewhat 
 slave-like. If they are oppressed it is a two-edged verdict that 
 shows something oppressible ; when a man is bound, it shows 
 there is something there able to be bound. This brings us to
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 401 
 
 Carlyle's favourite doctrine to reduce man to himself, and to 
 show him that it is useless to clamour about government and re- 
 form without if there is not reform from within. If he has not 
 reformed himself, how shall he be able to reform another? 
 " Physician, heal thyself," is as true in politics as in religion ; and 
 it teaches us that all political reform lies at the heart, whether or 
 not the laws for which we clamour have been carried out in our 
 own sphere. Singular bipeds present themselves lo the student 
 of natural history at times ; and it has been our fate to meet with 
 such : loud criers out for liberty in public, carrying out the 
 tyrant and domineering at home. 
 
 It is these lies, shams, and hypocrisies, that do so much harm. 
 It is in vain to preach harmony and Christianity, if it is to be 
 undone by the perpetration of so many living lies before us. The 
 greatest lie of all in this country is to call this people a Christian 
 people, and to see on our law-book that there are unchristian 
 laws ; for the great reason why the mass of people in this country 
 are not religious, is because they are too shrewd to be taken in. 
 When they hear proclamations, by Act of Parliament, of the 
 goodness of religion and the propriety of reading the Bible, and 
 when people come forth, recommending them to subscribe for 
 the conversion of the heathen, while there are so many heathen 
 among themselves, who for thirty weeks out of the fifty-two have 
 not potatoes, they are apt to say, " Physicians, heal yourselves," 
 " By their fruits we will know them," " Thou can'st not hold up 
 this thy faith, and treat me so ; if you believed the religion of 
 Christ and the Bible, you would not serve me so ; " and this is 
 the secret of the loss of religious influence over the working 
 classes. They are well able to try the religious by their own 
 books, and find them wanting. This thing, therefore, is open for 
 men to do : to understand that the great problem of this age is 
 the applied science of Christianity. We understand pretty 
 fully what Christianity can do for a single man. But, as 
 the late Dr Arnold thought, the problem still remains, "What 
 can Christianity do for a nation " ? It should be asked by all 
 true thinkers, " How is it that, with Christianity amongst us, we 
 are governed by so many unchristianities ? " This, it is high 
 time to begin to think and speak about. Side by side with the 
 luxurious homes of the rich, there are places for the poor, in 
 
 2 c
 
 402 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 which the rich man would not suffer his beasts to dwell ; for, as 
 Carlyle says, " There is not a horse willing to work but can get 
 food and shelter in requital ; a thing this two-footed worker has 
 to seek for, to solicit occasionally in vain." Mark that this occurs 
 in a very Christian country, in the nineteenth century ; in an 
 enlightened country in which there are discharged every year 
 between three and four millions of sermons, concerning the 
 precepts and principles of the Christian faith. This is not party 
 politics, but the politics which every true man should investigate ; 
 and I care not now how you essay to cure the diseases whether 
 by becoming more aristocratic or more democratic ; if you cure 
 them, you do right. All Carlyle strives to do is to get the people 
 deeply to feel these things, to get them graven in their souls. 
 He would make these things live like fire-characters like the 
 writing on the wall before Belshazzar, which forbade him to 
 sleep until some great and wise man was brought forward to read 
 the characters, and tell the meaning of them. Think of this, a 
 Christian country in the nineteenth century, with millions-sermon- 
 power going on within it horses well fed, and houses over their 
 heads, groomed and cared for, and men dying of starvation, 
 uninstructed ; dying as a criminal did in this country not long 
 ago, who, before he was hung, had the cup of the holy com- 
 munion put into his hands, which he received with right good 
 will ; and, lifting it up, he wished good health to all around. He 
 had not so much as heard of the cup of the New Testament in 
 Christ's blood, but in perfect good faith drank it to the bottom, 
 thinking it was a parting cup of good-fellowship. The office of 
 showing these things is not a pleasant one, but if men will sleep 
 they must be awakened ; and when people sleep soundly, it is 
 sometimes necessary to shake them somewhat roughly, and many 
 of these unpleasan tries Carlyle has uttered may seem like an 
 untimely calling out of sleep. 
 
 IV. 
 
 I NOW pass on to the book called " Past and Present," which is a 
 remarkable work, showing the great power of the artist, to take 
 an old, musty, and dry record of an ancient time, and make it 
 stand up before us, life-like and warm. The book is founded 
 upon an old Latin MS. published by a learned society, giving an
 
 The Genius and Works of 7^/tomas Carlyle. 403 
 
 account of sundry matters which happened in a monastery several 
 hundred years ago. The Latin itself is the driest and crabbedest 
 belonging to the Dry-as-dust school, a piece of good antiquarian- 
 ism ; a true and veritable murnmy, having nothing modern or 
 vulgar about it But then comes the great artist, who brings the 
 men down from their den and puts life in them, and instead of a 
 mummy we are presented with a living and a moving thing. I 
 remember no case in literature in which the powerof genius has been 
 more shown than in causing Abbot Samson to move before us. And 
 this is done, not so much by supplementing anything or imagining 
 anything, but by looking to the little things in the old MS., and hav- 
 ing the power of a Cuvier to solve the problem : " Given, a joint 
 of a beast's tail, to tell what the beast was." This is possible ; for 
 the great masters in anatomy can speedily tell, from any bone, the 
 order and genus and habits of the creature ; and as in some of the 
 beautiful indications of modern geology, we can tell the habits of 
 the beast by the inspection of some few joints of its body, in 
 things moral and historical the same can be done by a great 
 genius. Give him some drawing of the man and he can tell 
 something ; give him two or three facts or thoughts, let him hear 
 a few speeches of this man, and he can proceed to sketch his 
 lineaments. This Carlyle has done in an eminent degree; he 
 took some deeds, some dry speeches of the man, and produced a 
 living picture. This was effected by an intense study of man. 
 He saw that, in the majority of cases, such actions followed such 
 a feeling ; that such a movement of the countenance indicated 
 such an internal feeling ; so that if the outward movement was 
 given the inward feeling could be known. How Carlyle has pre- 
 sented us with the internal life of this old monastery ! We see 
 the monks before us ; the election day is coming on ; who shall 
 be their abbot ? and their great difficulty is, to find out their true 
 abbot. We have a picture of the man striding away from the 
 monastery, in order to go up to the king upon certain matters 
 concerning it. 
 
 It will be asked, " What is the use of reviving all this ? " I 
 remember two verdicts which have been passed upon this book. 
 One says, if all that antiquarian stuff were left out, it would be 
 good ; and the other says, the only things beautiful in it are these 
 Jong antiquarian episodes. But what is the use of masquerading?
 
 404 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 Simply, that a man with a mask may do many things, which a 
 man cannot do without a mask. Dr Johnson said, if a man 
 would get a good character for eccentricity when young, he might 
 sit in an easy-chair the rest of his life. Somewhat on this principle 
 Carlyle puts on this masquerading. People will let curious truths 
 in under a mask. I, in lecturing, always strive to take people in ! 
 By lecturing on Carlyle's works or any other subjects, I am striv- 
 ing to inculcate great principles which I think needful for the 
 people's well-being. I regard this as my wooden horse which I 
 get within the walls of Troy, but out of which I cause to issue as 
 many armed men as I can, to do fight against prejudices and 
 customs, laws and institutions, as far as I deem them to be wrong, 
 unrighteous, or untrue. So as to this tale : this old Abbot Samson 
 is Carlyle's wooden horse ; many a man will let it in ; it is 
 grotesque and pleasant, with a touch of imagination and romance. 
 By and bye the horse begins to open, and there come out some 
 strong-armed men, who play sad havoc amongst the readers. 
 There is use in this, and the man's tale would not have been 
 heard without this masquerading. 
 
 There is nothing more remarkable concerning Carlyle, than 
 that, for some years, he completely mystified some people. 
 His " Sartor Resartus." after all one of the most democratic of his 
 works, made its appearance first in FrazeSs Magazine. He got 
 the people to hear him, because they thought he was half-cracky, 
 as men will admit a half-idiot into their society, like our fore- 
 fathers with their fools and jesters, who did not always speak 
 folly, but found ample opportunity to rebuke, and to teach truth. 
 So these men put up with Carlyle, little expecting to find the fool's 
 baton will be changed into a two-edged sword, and that with these 
 same bells, which they think he intended to ring for amusement, he 
 intended to ring out a solemn warning peal against a dying and 
 death-like age, a false and hypocritical religion, and against the 
 oppression under which the poor are suffering. This plan 
 certainly has succeeded ; for a dry disquisition upon the matters 
 contained in the book would not have been read, whereas many 
 a man takes it up, expecting to be pleasantly amused, and lays it 
 down again finding he has been unpleasantly instructed. This 
 masquerading I do not object to. Under it, Carlyle manages to 
 convey truth and teach a sublime lesson that the true mode of
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 405 
 
 interpreting history, is to suppose that the same principles, passions 
 and affections have animated humanity in all times, lands, and 
 places. Except this belief is in us, we can never read history to 
 advantage. Stringing together catalogues of facts, dates, and 
 chronology, is one of the most empty things with which man can 
 trouble himself; and yet this makes up a large portion of modern 
 education, that people can run down a list of kings. And when 
 some small child can do this, its wondering mamma holds it 
 forth as a prodigy; it can tell when King Stephen lived; 
 how he lived, and of what disease he died ! What has King 
 Stephen's death done for the child? and yet this is what, in 
 modern times, gets itself called education. These dates only 
 become valuable when they are proving something; and these 
 facts are valuable if they prove or illustrate some great law. 
 When we find this monastery and its abbot influenced by the 
 same passions as influence the public to-day, and that licentious- 
 ness, squabbles, briberies, and manoeuverings went on in that small 
 sphere ; then do we understand the key to history, to read it by 
 the light of our own spirit, and to use the interior life of every one 
 of us as a clue through the labyrinth of the past ; for when one 
 watches his own life, he watches all life ; he has mastered the key 
 of the thing, and is able to decipher all hieroglyphics by being 
 able to decipher the infinite life that goes on within him. 
 Carlyle then proceeds to tell the people some sharp and severe 
 things concerning the state of the country, and warns the aristo- 
 cracy how there did happen such a thing once as men clothing 
 themselves in breeches made of the skin of the aristocracy : how 
 such things have happened in the olden time, as liberty running 
 mad, and turning into murder and license ; and he warns us, in 
 solemn prophetic warning, like a true prophet, of the state of the 
 times we are living in, and, having fully alarmed his reader, he 
 leaves him to struggle towards the root of things. 
 
 Now I come to the great grumbling of all critics, that Carlyle 
 does not construct ; he is only destructive. Supposing that were 
 true, who said he ought to construct ? Who says that one man 
 can do everything? It may be his mission to destroy; it is 
 always ordained that there shall be destructives in the earth. God 
 has always taken care to furnish the world with men whose 
 duty it is to overthrow and raze, even to the foundation. There 
 must come John Knoxes into the world, to knock the crows'
 
 406 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 nests about the crows. We ma y blame the spirit of the man, but 
 if the thing is got by destroying, then it is his misfortune ; he is 
 one of the great band of destructives, and must be honoured 
 accordingly. There is no complaint due to Carlyle, on the 
 supposition that his books only indicate what is wrong, and 
 destroy that. He is not called to construct. Then why should 
 he construct for us ? Why should this man be called upon to 
 make us a law after he has shewn that we have broken one ? We 
 must do it ourselves. This may be the spirit in which Carlyle can 
 be defended; but he may also be justified on other grounds. This 
 cry against him augurs badly. The majority of men are infested 
 with mental laziness. Thinking is not liked by men ; as witness 
 the books that they read just the washiest they can get : just the 
 fault that Paul finds with them when he says, " I expected that 
 by this time ye would have been able to eat strong meat ; but ye 
 must still be fed with milk as babes." This mental laziness is the 
 origin of this cry against Carlyle ; men want him to give them 
 some nice, short, patent way of setting all things right. They are 
 fond of a formula, and they grow waspish and pettish with a man 
 who, having knocked some favourite rubbish about their ears, 
 does not build up something in its place. Why, if you take away 
 the house a man is living in, because it is likely to fall upon him, 
 it is not your duty to find him another ; let him do that for him- 
 self. It is a successful point gained, if Carlyle can make us see 
 how wrong we have been ; but we would rather that he should 
 struggle for us. The greatest folly that besets men, is to attempt 
 to do things easily, or to discover railroads to anything. People 
 think they do a young man a great kindness to leave him a large 
 fortune ; but it will be found that they understand life most, enjoy 
 it most, and make out its problem best, who struggle for them- 
 selves ; who have nothing but what they have made for them- 
 selves. There be many proverbs in the world on this subject of 
 striving " Strive and thrive ; " " Easily come, easily go ; " " What 
 cost nothing is easily gone ; " and so on. When there is this 
 restless, feverish wish in men ; when the mind, too, savours of 
 this quackable spirit, which distinguishes the people of this 
 country, they are always looking out for this pill, and that 
 nostrum, whereby they may be cured without trouble. Physicians 
 know that men would rather take a dose of physic, however
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 407 
 
 nauseous, than be limited as to diet, take exercise, sleep hardly, 
 and keep themselves quiet from all undue excitement and feverish- 
 ness. Why so ? Because they are lazy, and it is a much easier 
 thing to swallow the nostrum of a quack than the discipline of 
 nature ; to take a pill, and so get rid of the thing, than to alter a 
 course, or renounce a habit. The same in politics ; they would 
 rather have a nostrum by a quack, than a regimen by a wise man. 
 So about Carlyle : they grow angry, because he gives them no 
 patent pill, by which all political diseases can be cured at one 
 taking. No ; he does well in finding no remedy. Why, if I were 
 to show an individual that he is diseased to-night, and cure him 
 to-morrow, it would make small impression upon him ; he must 
 lie many days upon the bed of sickness before he knows what 
 good health means. And then, each one must work his own way 
 towards the light ; nothing is so harmful for a man as that which 
 saves him discipline ; and for Carlyle to indicate, in some short, 
 off-hand and trite method, a cure for the evil, would be to save 
 us from the discipline of working it out for ourselves. We know 
 it is best that we should knock our house down ourselves ; for the 
 chances are that we shall build it up stronger, better, and more 
 wisely, from having been left to do it for ourselves, and at the 
 instigation of the piercing frost and cold east wind. I rather 
 think the man is wise in confining himself to the destructive ; for 
 had he been constructive he had but skinned over the wound, 
 instead of leaving it deeply probed, so as to bring it to its 
 final healing. The march of nature is always slow; that of 
 quacks is always quick. Nature does not take this over care of 
 its children; Nature makes no provision that you should not 
 knock your head against this thing, and stumble against that, and 
 fall down and get wounded, because it knows full well that forth 
 from stumbling wisdom comes, that the blueness of the wound is 
 the healing of the man ; therefore, in all the true prophets, there 
 is much of the destructive and of stripes. You should therefore 
 thank Carlyle, that, when he points out the evil, he does not give 
 you a cure ; for if you faithfully commune with yourselves, you 
 will find that it is because you are so lazy, and because his cure 
 would have saved you from thinking. 
 
 But he does indicate one great cure in the "gospel of work." 
 Carlyle at one time seems to take great delight in narrowing man's
 
 408 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 sphere ; at others he takes delight in enlarging it ; he shows us 
 eternity, and he compares it with time ; he shows how little the 
 span of our life is, and how much of that little span is made up of 
 disappointment ; he brings a man down till he sees how small he 
 is, and then he builds him up again ; he shows him the inde- 
 structible principle within, and points out the power to create a 
 world of thought out of our own nature ; and teaches that all the 
 great things and acts of the world must be done by work. He 
 brings us to be helpless, in order that we may become helpful ; he 
 takes delight in shaking about our ears the small philosophy and 
 science, which talks about accounting for things, which, when it 
 has found a learned Greek name for it, imagines that it takes the 
 wonder out of the thing, and that it has satisfactorily explained 
 the phenomena and spirit of the thing. Now, to get rid of this 
 idle conceit, he has first to show you, that you know next to 
 nothing ; that with regard to the infinite creation of God, you are 
 a very speck ; and with regard to eternity your life is a poor little 
 span. There is no exaltation without a bending ; no man can 
 stand thoroughly upright that hath not bowed first ; all great things 
 must come of stooping. Carlyle makes you stoop in the dust, and 
 confess " I am little ; I am no thing ; my knowledge is speck-like ; 
 I have nought ; I can do nought." And then, having reduced us 
 to proper humility, he proceeds to elevate us. He shows you that 
 there is still freedom for you ; that you have power to do the work 
 of God, to which He hath appointed you, and he shows you how 
 modern world-erections are brought about by the incessant work 
 of a small number of men, little noted or little known. There is 
 a beautiful passage in his works, where he takes the things of the 
 present, and shows that they are the results of the labours of other 
 men. He speaks of such towns as this ; and shows how many 
 great men must have thought and struggled before a single steam 
 engine, or manufactory, or Macadamised road, or railroad, could 
 have been laid down. He reduces man's duty to this simple 
 thing, to work continually and incessantly ; to take little heed of 
 outward circumstances ; to bide his time ; to remember that no 
 work is lost, that there is no seed that is true but it produces fruit ; 
 and to learn and teach the great gospel, that quackery, imposture, 
 hollowness, shamming and puffery, never did live long in the world. 
 He tells you that nature is so constituted, that if you throw chaff
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 409 
 
 into the bosom of the earth, you will get nothing but chafl again ; 
 but put wheat in, and the wheat that men put in is faithful 
 and loving word and deed, do this, in obscurity, quietness, 
 and loneliness, and it shall bring forth an abundant harvest a 
 harvest wherewith this one Carlyle has blessed it, and other 
 men are also made to bless it. This, I think, will explain 
 to you many things that will appear unpleasant in his writings, 
 as the mockery which at times he puts upon us, and upon 
 our science of political economy. They are all the diligent and 
 careful teaching of humanity. He knows very well that the 
 first lesson is to teach a man that he knows nothing ; for ot all 
 the helpless people in the world, those are the most helpless who 
 think they know much. It is sometimes our lot to have to teach, 
 and we find that there come two classes to be taught : one says 
 humbly, " We know nothing ; " the other gives you to understand 
 that he knows everything. They are like the stiff-necked 
 Hebrews of old ; you can tell them nothing but they know it 
 already. Now these, as it occurs to me very often, are the help- 
 less people of the world. Waste no labour on them ; you will do 
 little or nothing with them ; therefore does Carlyle laugh, sneer, 
 and mock at them, in order that man may be gotten into that 
 comfortable position wherein he says, " I know nothing ; I am 
 nothing ; I can nothing ; " and then, having reduced him to 
 proper humility, he turns the tables to show him that he may also 
 truly say, " I know all things ; all things lie open and possible to 
 me, if I will only put myself in communication with the soul, the 
 fact, the great inner power and life of humanity and of good." 
 He endeavours to draw attention to those practical duties 
 which it is too much the fashion for us to put upon politicians as 
 a profession, and whose duty it is, therefore, to attend to these 
 matters, and thereby taking license to ourselves to neglect them. 
 But if I understand the spirit of this age, it is fast tending towards 
 breaking down these technicalisms and professions. Men have 
 too long given up theology and politics, and other kindred 
 matters, to men who make it a profession ; and, consequently, 
 though those men, by that reason, cultivate it to a greater degree 
 than otherwise they would do, yet these things assume a technical 
 air, and our part in them is resigned and done by proxy, forgetting 
 that, in God's great army of those whose duty it is to fight the
 
 4 1 o The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 battle of truth against falsehood, there can be no substitutes 
 gotten. If we are drawn for an earthly militia, we may purchase 
 a man to serve in our stead, but in and for the great army of light 
 and truth, there is no substitute to be hired. Each man must do 
 his own work. Now, subscriptions to charitable objects accord- 
 ing to the fashion of the day, will by no means absolve us from 
 other duties ; but such is modern benevolence. It gives a guinea 
 to get its work done for it; it hires a man to do its duty ; and, 
 as we find that compensations in the law of God are hung very 
 truly, we must suppose that those who do the work will get the 
 pay ; and if you hire a man to do your duty for you, you must 
 consent to hire him to be rewarded for you. I would suggest that 
 each of you should turn your attention to these sad matters ; to 
 this heathendom within Christendom ; the gross ignorance of 
 religion in this country ; and the fact, as put in the " Chartism " 
 of Carlyle, that there are in this country large numbers of people, 
 who, for thirty weeks out of the fifty-two weeks, get nothing to 
 eat but third-rate potatoes. All these may be tolerable in bar- 
 barous lands ; but with you, who are piqueing and pluming your- 
 selves on your greatness and your Christian dignity, this is sad in 
 the extreme. Trusting, therefore, that one thing hath been gained 
 for you, that your attention will be directed for the future to these 
 matters, and that you will see how this problem is to be answered, 
 how those who are willing to work may get work, and how all 
 may find a true church and priesthood, a true guidance and 
 governance, we pass on to Carlyle's great historical work, "The 
 French Revolution." 
 
 V. 
 
 In this book the cavillers about style must drop their cavils ; 
 for we are sure that, had Carlyle planned a style to narrate the 
 French revolution in, he had not chosen a better. For this great 
 subject is not to be discussed in nicely-balanced periods, with 
 pretty euphuisms, or verbose magniloquence, nor written on in 
 the style of the Minerva Press or the glazed-paper school ; not to 
 be indited on paper perfumed with rose-water, and with pretty 
 blue borders, or any other of the sentimental fripperies of man- 
 milliner authorship. To write of the French Revolution, it would 
 need that the man's style should be revolutionary too ; for of true 
 art, it is a principle that the medium should agree with the thing
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 4 1 1 
 
 chosen to be conveyed through that medium. A more revolu- 
 tionary style than this of Carlyle's in this book, man never did 
 invent. He stalks along the pages, giant-like and colossal ; you 
 hear his thundering tread ; you see its form disjointed and broken. 
 Not only has he chosen his subject well, but treated of it in a 
 style befitting its own character, like to that of Salvator Rosa 
 among painters; rugged, massy, disjointed, and dark; forming 
 exactly the state of feeling indicated in the book, and bodying 
 forth for us, not only the things themselves, but even the air, the 
 very atmosphere and spirit of the times of which he speaks. The 
 disadvantage of the book is, that it is useless for a man attempt- 
 ing to read it understandingly, unless he is well informed as to 
 the men and events of the French Revolution ; for the air with 
 which Carlyle speaks of the facts of the time, is that of a man 
 thoroughly acquainted with them, and supposing his readers to 
 be the same. It is not a nicely cut and dried narrative, after the 
 manner of the histories for children. In no such mode does he 
 narrate this tale ; he sets the men living, moving, breathing before 
 you, drawing them vividly and full of life, with relation to the 
 world intellectually, morally, and spiritually. 
 
 With regard to the French Revolution itself, it is our fate, 
 down to to-day, to hear much sentimental twaddle talked. It is 
 strange that men fail to read the sublime lesson it reads to us ; 
 because, perchance, their eyes are not piercing enough to see 
 through the turmoil, terror, and bloodshed by which it was sur- 
 rounded and accompanied. Some of our great writers have 
 entered into pitiful jeremiads over the amount of slaughter, and 
 have carefully numbered the heads that fell under the guillotine. 
 These things, doubtless, are sad enough, but legitimists should 
 remember, that in this land of ours, in the reign of Henry VIII., 
 more martyrs fell by violent deaths, than during the whole 
 of the French Revolution. Religion (so-called) has made 
 more martyrs than Democracy throughout its course; and 
 the pitiful discussions between different classes of theologians, 
 have caused more bloodshed in God's fair world than ever 
 did the French Revolution. But it suits the policy of some to 
 sink all the glory it had ; to forget all the nobleness it had ; to 
 frighten silly people by continually talking only of the discords, 
 and overthrowings, and bloodsheds by which it was marked. But 
 let it be borne in mind, that when bloodshed comes, it is, for the
 
 412 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 most part, rather the fault of those against whom it is committed, 
 than of those who commit it. If a thing, in rebounding, re- 
 bounds far, it tells a tale of the weight by which it has been 
 pressed down. If when certain weights, fetters, and chains were 
 taken off the French people, they rebounded into license, violence, 
 and bloodshed, it does but indicate to the thinker, how great 
 were the weights, how heavy the fetters, and how galling the chains 
 by which they were bent down. For the French people suffered 
 all these things, under arbitrary, wicked, and unjust laws, laws of 
 which we have a dim haunting, when it is proposed to repeal a law 
 by which it was forbidden to a siegneur, upon returning from hunt- 
 ing, to kill more than two of his vassals, that he might refresh his 
 weary feet with their warm bowels and blood one of the feudal 
 laws which taught singular things to the French peasantry, when 
 they got the upper hand. Legal murders, burnings, inquisitions, 
 and autos-da-fe, altogether taught the people a singular lesson. 
 When we find the upper classes in society appealing to the torch, 
 in order to get rid of what was disagreeable, those upper classes 
 must not get irritable, if, when the day of the people comes, the 
 torch is applied, not by, but to themselves. This bloodshed soil of 
 the French Revolution tells a tale of what preceded it, and therein 
 teaches a lesson one that was taught before, with respect to the 
 unfavourable signs of this age namely, that we are in a transi- 
 tion state, and that these unfavourable symptoms tell to the wise 
 man rather how bad times past were, than how sad times future 
 are likely to become. 
 
 Of course, I am not defending the bloodshed and cruelty of the 
 French Revolution. It was one of those "fiery baptisms," in 
 which humanity and the world must be at times immersed ; it was 
 one of those " purifications," which never have been done but 
 " by fire ; " one of those stern necessities which the sins of the few 
 cause to be treasured up in the hearts of the many, to be visited 
 in heavy retribution upon their own heads. It is high time for us 
 now to drop this sentimentalism ; men have wept quite sufficient. 
 Burke played the sentimental long enough ; and it is now time for 
 men to have got falcon gaze sufficient to pierce through that 
 haze of bloodshed, and to see beyond it those sublime principles 
 which certainly are grotesquely masked, but of which there is 
 sufficient revealed behind all these confusions, and overturnings,
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 413 
 
 and discords. What was the Revolution ? It was a protest by 
 man that man could not be ultimately governed by a falsity and a 
 sham ; it was a standing up to declare that it had been so 
 dealt with, and that it would no longer be so dealt with. It was 
 the protest of man, even the opening of a new apocalypse in 
 France ; and, like the other apocalypse, it opened with fire, and 
 sword, and blood. What had the French people to protest 
 against? A church, which had become a club, a trade, and a 
 profit. It had its priests, but no guidance for the people ; 
 shepherds, whose duty as they imagined was well to shear the flock, 
 but to trouble themselves little about feeding it ; whose problem 
 was to see how much could be got from the flock in a state of 
 starvation ; how much wool could be clipped off the half starved 
 sheep. It has been our fate to hear it said by certain people, that 
 more wool can be gotten from half-starved than from well fed 
 sheep ; this is a doctrine which is in vogue in agricultural times 
 and countries, and it is one which was carried out to the utter- 
 most by the rulers of the French, who were great hands in shear- 
 ing the flock, whose wool they thought was thicker and more plenti- 
 ful by the sheep having been stinted of that food which was down 
 to existence point. 
 
 What is a Church? Or rather, what should it be in the 
 world? The guidance of man towards God. It has been said 
 of our church spires, that they are fingers pointing towards 
 heaven ; so the church and clerity should stand between God 
 and man, not in any priestly fashion, as if we were not all 
 equally near to God, but to guide and reveal, by the teaching 
 of the more to the less wise ; to give that spiritual guidance 
 which the best hearts and the most devout souls are always able, 
 if willing, to give to those who are less blest, less endowed, or 
 who are less at leisure to study and to think. What had this 
 church become in France ? A routine worship ; almost as good 
 as the suggested worship of Carlyle, that it had better be made 
 by machinery. Never mind what the spirit of the man, or of the 
 people : he or they could be religious, by merely performing a 
 certain number of duties, all outward and external. It was a 
 mechanical religion, and is well compared by Carlyle to the 
 rotatory calabash of the East, and to the praying machines in use 
 amongst the Kalmucs, where a small tetotum sort of thing,
 
 4 1 6 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 fallow ; whereas, superstition so overcomes the man that he not 
 only has possessed his mind with certain things, but he hath 
 enervated that mind ; superstition hath not only taken possession 
 of it, but made a slave of it. Another of his reasons for preferring 
 atheism to gross superstition is, that atheism has been usually 
 tolerant. Now Bacon had not seen the French Revolution, and 
 I am not a believer of the excessive toleration of Atheism. We 
 have seen men get up tolerably good hot persecutions in favour 
 of no-belief, of those having no religion ; and the French Revolu- 
 tion could persecute the Catholic priest because he was a priest. 
 Many of these French Revolution men understood little better 
 than most Englishmen the absolute rights of conscience the 
 right of every man to believe what he can, or to believe nothing 
 if he cannot If a man be an atheist, we have nothing to do with 
 that. If he does not violate any of the laws of our society, he 
 hath a right to believe or not, according to his own judgment. 
 And they who would punish any man for no-belief, are 
 as bad in principle and spirit as those who would have 
 punished men for false belief. Still, in the general principle, 
 Lord Bacon, I think, will be proved to be right, that it is better 
 to have an atheistical state of society, than to have one of gross 
 superstition ; because, if Carlyle be interpreter, an atheistic state 
 of society is more like the centre of indifference ; the resting time 
 in the man's mind, where the night turns into twilight, previous to 
 the rising of the day. Some of you may recollect, in one of the 
 works of Frederika Bremer, a description of watching the sun in 
 northern regions, that having gone down, he stops as it were on 
 the balance, and halts awhile, and then proceeds to rise again. 
 That is just the case in the soul. The sun of belief goes down; 
 halts for a time in the thickest cloud-land of no-movement ; 
 balances for a time, neither believing nor disbelieving ; but, having 
 hung thus a short time, that sun of belief proceeds to rise up the 
 eastern steeps, bringing with it wisdom, and gladness, and peace. 
 Scepticism, doubt, or infidelity, may be the balancing of the sun, 
 previous to its rising. This was the case with the French nation. 
 Governed by a lie, they protested against it, got well rid of it, 
 flung it off, hung for half a century in indifference, in no-belief, in 
 nothing, the absence of faith. But see, what is France now? 
 There is coming over France a faith and a deep belief. The
 
 The Geniiis and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 4 1 7 
 
 greatest men in France, at this time, are amongst its most earnest 
 believers ; and those who govern its destinies, political and re- 
 ligious, are becoming earnest and sincere believers, in no technical, 
 but in the deep, spiritual sense of the word. These French infidel 
 philosophes, whose writings preceded the Revolution, did their work 
 in destroying. No new temple could be well built till the old 
 rubbish was got well away. A man must get the ground thoroughly 
 cleared, before he begins a new building. And when things have 
 grown so exceedingly mischievous as to need removing, you must 
 consent to have a set of destructives at work. Such were the 
 French philosophers, Voltaire and Rousseau and others, pulling 
 down a huge fabric of no-truth, of sham ; a fabric that pretended 
 to be a house fit for an immortal soul to live in, but which was, in 
 reality, a huge ungainly thing, built up to house a few at the ex- 
 pense of the many. In endeavouring to understand what these 
 men's mission and work were, I am not pronouncing upon them 
 absolutely ; but I think the day for that rosewater philosophy, as 
 Carlyle would put it, which can never see any good thing in any 
 men that are not all good, which must have all to be the regular 
 pinks and patterns of beauty before they can be anything, which 
 reduces all things either to the angelic or the demoniac, and if 
 men cannot make out a right to the title " angel " they must belong 
 to the demoniac ; that kind of philosophy is passing from us, and 
 we are beginning to see that mankind are very mixed, like the 
 fabled mermaids, and it does not follow that though the tail may 
 be fish-like, the head and upper part of the body may not have the 
 Divine image written thereupon. These men had a measure of 
 truth in them. They were called upon to protest against huge and 
 hideous falsities and lies : and here came in their misfortune. 
 Trained from their childhood to look upon this church as the 
 church, the unique, the only, to believe this church and religion 
 to be identical, when called to remove that, in removing it they 
 removed their all. 
 
 Such is the true philosophic explanation of the infidelity of many 
 a great head and heart that have been amongst us ; such seems to 
 be the solution of the infidelity of such a man as Shelley. He had 
 looked so long upon the blood-stained page of ecclesiastical 
 history, had read trie many legends of the martyrs, and had seen 
 the holy cross of the Lord made the rallying sign for bloodshed 
 
 2 D
 
 416 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 fallow ; whereas, superstition so overcomes the man that he not 
 only has possessed his mind with certain things, but he hath 
 enervated that mind ; superstition hath not only taken possession 
 of it, but made a slave of it. Another of his reasons for preferring 
 atheism to gross superstition is, that atheism has been usually 
 tolerant. Now Bacon had not seen the French Revolution, and 
 I am not a believer of the excessive toleration of Atheism. We 
 have seen men get up tolerably good hot persecutions in favour 
 of no-belief, of those having no religion ; and the French Revolu- 
 tion could persecute the Catholic priest because he was a priest. 
 Many of these French Revolution men understood little better 
 than most Englishmen the absolute rights of conscience the 
 right of every man to believe what he can, or to believe nothing 
 if he cannot If a man be an atheist, we have nothing to do with 
 that. If he does not violate any of the laws of our society, he 
 hath a right to believe or not, according to his own judgment. 
 And they who would punish any man for no-belief, are 
 as bad in principle and spirit as those who would have 
 punished men for false belief. Still, in the general principle, 
 Lord Bacon, I think, will be proved to be right, that it is better 
 to have an atheistical state of society, than to have one of gross 
 superstition ; because, if Carlyle be interpreter, an atheistic state 
 of society is more like the centre of indifference ; the resting time 
 in the man's mind, where the night turns into twilight, previous to 
 the rising of the day. Some of you may recollect, in one of the 
 works of Frederika Bremer, a description of watching the sun in 
 northern regions, that having gone down, he stops as it were on 
 the balance, and halts awhile, and then proceeds to rise again. 
 That is just the case in the soul. The sun of belief goes down ; 
 halts for a time in the thickest cloud-land of no-movement ; 
 balances for a time, neither believing nor disbelieving ; but, having 
 hung thus a short time, that sun of belief proceeds to rise up the 
 eastern steeps, bringing with it wisdom, and gladness, and peace. 
 Scepticism, doubt, or infidelity, may be the balancing of the sun, 
 previous to its rising. This was the case with the French nation. 
 Governed by a lie, they protested against it, got well rid of it, 
 flung it off, hung for half a century in indifference, in no-belief, in 
 nothing, the absence of faith. But see, what is France now? 
 There is coming over France a faith and a deep belief. The
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 417 
 
 greatest men in France, at this time, are amongst its most earnest 
 believers ; and those who govern its destinies, political and re- 
 ligious, are becoming earnest and sincere believers, in no technical, 
 but in the deep, spiritual sense of the word. These French infidel 
 philosophes, whose writings preceded the Revolution, did their work 
 in destroying. No new temple could be well built till the old 
 rubbish was got well away. A man must get the ground thoroughly 
 cleared, before he begins a new building. And when things have 
 grown so exceedingly mischievous as to need removing, you must 
 consent to have a set of destructives at work. Such were the 
 French philosophers, Voltaire and Rousseau and others, pulling 
 down a huge fabric of no-truth, of sham ; a fabric that pretended 
 to be a house fit for an immortal soul to live in, but which was, in 
 reality, a huge ungainly thing, built up to house a few at the ex- 
 pense of the many. In endeavouring to understand what these 
 men's mission and work were, I am not pronouncing upon them 
 absolutely ; but I think the day for that rosewater philosophy, as 
 Carlyle would put it, which can never see any good thing in any 
 men that are not all good, which must have all to be the regular 
 pinks and patterns of beauty before they can be anything, which 
 reduces all things either to the angelic or the demoniac, and if 
 men cannot make out a right to the title " angel " they must belong 
 to the demoniac ; that kind of philosophy is passing from us, and 
 we are beginning to see that mankind are very mixed, like the 
 fabled mermaids, and it does not follow that though the tail may 
 be fish-like, the head and upper part of the body may not have the 
 Divine image written thereupon. These men had a measure of 
 truth in them. They were called upon to protest against huge and 
 hideous falsities and lies : and here came in their misfortune. 
 Trained from their childhood to look upon this church as the 
 church, the unique, the only, to believe this church and religion 
 to be identical, when called to remove that, in removing it they 
 removed their all. 
 
 Such is the true philosophic explanation of the infidelity of many 
 a great head and heart that have been amongst us ; such seems to 
 be the solution of the infidelity of such a man as Shelley. He had 
 looked so long upon the blood-stained page of ecclesiastical 
 history, had read the many legends of the martyrs, and had seen 
 the holy cross of the Lord made the rallying sign for bloodshed 
 
 2 D
 
 418 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 and slaughter; he had watched the oppressor's foot upon the 
 human neck, and the heavy chains laid upon mankind under the 
 pretence of spiritual freedom ; and, having looked at that too 
 exclusively, he fell into the deeper error of mistaking an abuse for 
 the use, of looking upon an abomination as the virtue, instead of 
 regarding it as a foul excrescence which had grown upon the 
 beautiful, holy faith which it pretended to be, but which it was not. 
 I believe a very large part of the infidelity with which society has 
 been troubled, might be put down, if we were candid and fair, to 
 the account of those who are believers. If we make religion false 
 to men, their nature calls upon them to protest against its falsity. 
 If we teach, as it is the fashion to teach, that our version is the 
 absolute, true, sole, and only version, and that if a man cannot 
 accept that, he can accept nothing, he accepts nothing. French 
 priests stood up saying, " We are the veritable, true, and only church; 
 we are religious," and the man said, " I believe you not ; thou art a 
 huge lie and imposture ; I must protest." He protested, and 
 removed it, and, by their own logic, there was no religion left. It 
 might be said, " If my sect, faith, or belief be the only specimen of 
 the Christian verity, and you cannot, and will not believe it, who 
 then taught you, except myself, that in overthrowing my version 
 of the matter, you cut yourselves off entirely?" The French 
 church had taught such men as Voltaire and Rousseau that it was 
 the only thing called Christianity, and that in protesting against 
 that they cut themselves off from the true faith ; overthrow that, 
 and they were, by the logic of the church, necessarily reduced to 
 an abnormal state of no-belief, uncertainty, atheism, and infidelity. 
 But were the men sinless in so doing ? By no means. They 
 were diseased, and followed a common disease, which a little 
 looking to our own lives would teach us that we have the key of. 
 It is strange how men prefer borrowing water out of a neighbour's 
 pitcher, to going to the fountain for it. So many men will not 
 believe Christianity, because some men pretend to be Christians 
 and are not Christian-like. This, of all the fooleries that would- 
 be wise men ever committed, is about the most absurd. Why 
 should we see Christianity through our neighbour's glass ? What 
 excuse is it to us that one man pretends to do right, and does it 
 not? It does not remove our obligation to go where he has pro- 
 fessed to have gone, and get for ourselves the living water. It is
 
 77ie Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 419 
 
 nothing but sloth that makes us prefer to stand at the house door, 
 and, seeing some neighbour go by with a pitcher of what he says 
 is living water, makes us prefer asking him to give us that water 
 instead of going to the living, perennial fountain whence he should 
 have drawn, from which he pretended to have drawn, but whence 
 he did not draw. I pronounce these men, in accepting Chris- 
 tianity and religion from their neighbours rather than from the 
 Book ; in going back to their fathers rather than the founders ; in 
 looking at developments rather than at the thing to have com- 
 mitted an unmanly thing ; for it is being beggar to our neighbours ; 
 it is setting a man between us and God in the things of the spirit ; 
 it is as sensible as to refuse to look at the sunshine, but only to 
 ask that it may be reflected upon us from our neighbours' faces, 
 or from some pocket mirror. There is nothing commoner than 
 for men to neglect religion because of the hypocrisy of the reli- 
 gious ; but just review the matter, and you will find that, instead 
 of its being a manly thing, it is about the most childish thing a 
 man with an intellect of his own can possibly commit. Of all 
 things with which I have little patience, and can hardly speak 
 tamely, this is the one. We are absolutely pestered with unbe- 
 lievers, and men who do not believe because they think it is an 
 unmanly thing so to do. I would commend to your attention the 
 anecdote of Coleridge, who, when a boy at the Blue-coat School, 
 took it into his head that he would become an unbeliever. Some 
 one went and told Mr Bower, the master, who came to Coleridge : 
 "You are an infidel, young man, are you?" said the master. 
 " Yes, sir," said Coleridge ; and the master proceeded to give 
 him a good caning, which Coleridge says was the only " righteous 
 flogging" he ever got. I may not recommend the flogging of 
 heretics, but I would advocate the application of the lash df 
 ridicule to certain phases and forms of infidelity ; to that sort of 
 infidelity which thinks it is the mark of a high mind not to be- 
 lieve. Bulwer says that infidelity, instead of being the mark of a 
 high, noble, and generous spirit, is the mark of a mean, low, and 
 base mind ; and yet many young men think it a manly thing not to 
 believe, not to be " done," not to be " taken in," just that mean, 
 narrow, niggarJly spirit that is to be found hung up for everlast- 
 ing admiration in Rochefoucauld's maxims, or Benjamin Franklin's 
 advices, which teach a man always to be looking out for fear he
 
 420 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 should be taken in. Another great man has said, he would never 
 call that man his friend who could boast that he had never been 
 taken in. So, if any man comes to me, and says he has never 
 been taken in in all his life, he is not the man for me. Such are 
 those cold natures that are always calculating, and will look at a 
 man a hundred times before they shake his hand once, and are 
 always trying to find out some design against themselves. They 
 follow Rochefoucauld's maxim, " Every man to be taken for a 
 knave until he is proved honest," instead of following out Christ's 
 maxim, which, though not written in so many words, he has ex- 
 pressed in so many deeds, "Count every man honest till he 
 is proved knavish ; treat a man as divine until you prove that he is 
 demoniac." So much, then, for that trashy infidelity which comes, 
 not of a stern struggle to believe and finds itself unable, but of a 
 small, blind, infatuated vanity, which perhaps has not the ability 
 to go through the study necessary to lead to a good unbeliever ; 
 for to make a proper unbeliever it requires a great deal more 
 study than these small witlings ever had the manhood or sense to 
 undertake. I blame these men, then, that they should have pre- 
 ferred to learn the version of a thing from its abuse and not from 
 its use. Herein they should be judged, though not by me; 
 man is answerable for his belief to God; every man has the 
 evidence before him. 
 
 These French philosophes undoubtedly did much. They 
 removed the old landmarks, they levelled the old guidance and 
 government, they pointed out to the people the hugeness and 
 hideousness of the lies by which they were governed, and so pre- 
 pared them for revolt ; and the men, in so much of their deed, 
 did not wrongly or unwisely. The sadness was, that in taking 
 away the lie they did not give the truth were unable to give it 
 they had only that partial vision which fixed upon the diseased 
 part, and had no ministration or mission to see the beautiful; and 
 when taking away the hollow staff, upon which a man might have 
 been leaning to his danger, they could not give him that staff by 
 which he could pass through the dark valley of this life, and by 
 which he could be safely guided into the land which is to come. 
 This said French Revolution was remarkable for the men it 
 produced- -stern, Titanic sort of men, like a breed of the old 
 giants come back again men who exhibited to the student some
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 421 
 
 of the most peculiar phases under which humanity ever appeared. 
 It has been remarked in "Zanoni" that most of the great 
 butchers of the Revolution were noticed for their love of some 
 particular animal. Their lives are worth studying, and they 
 cannot be more graphically put than in this great book of 
 Carlyle's. We see these men stalking through their times ; men 
 who divest themselves of all weakness whom terror cannot 
 move, or blood oppose. 
 
 It is perfectly hopeless for me to run through the great cycle of 
 the French Revolution, its great facts and deeds, and the earnest 
 protest it uttered. Mistake it not as a thing of the past. Men 
 talk about it as a thing that has been laid upon the shelf in the 
 great museum of history as a dead effete thing. But the French 
 Revolution has yet to be completed. We are a product of it, in 
 much that we say, think, or do. These strange things, done in 
 Paris, were but the partial opening of an Apocalypse ; the seals 
 are yet opening, and the roll is yet being unrolled, and many 
 peaceful things done in this country are genuine products of that 
 same great movement, which, beginning in blood, shall end in 
 peace and glory ; which, beginning in fire, shall end in purification 
 thrice blessed, thrice holy. It must not be regarded as a thing of 
 the past, or it cannot be understood. It was a turning-point of 
 humanity. Things had been getting blacker and blacker down 
 till then. Then men halted for a time, busied themselves in 
 getting rid of the no-truth by which they had been governed. 
 
 And what are we doing? Building up and constructing what 
 they left clear space for us to do. See the great change that is 
 coming over Europe, see this country returning to faith and 
 spiritualism. We are becoming again childlike in confessing that 
 we have not got the foot-rule yet that can measure Infinity ; that 
 we have not discovered the scale that can weigh the human soul ; 
 that no callipers have been invented that can measure the mind ; 
 that we have not succeeded in bottling a spirit, or in reducing all 
 eternity to some old wives' fable ; that we are about to turn the 
 tables upon these philosophers, and to become, as some of them 
 would sneeringly say, superstitious again. See the faith of France 
 coming back, the struggling between the Jesuits and the University 
 men; not particularly Protestantism flourishing, or Romanism 
 declining, but earnestness coming back. See what Victor Cousin
 
 422 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 and his compeers are doing: overthrowing that sensual philosophy 
 which was the bane of France, which reduced goodness to a formula, 
 and which has little faith in anything that it cannot measure, smell, 
 weigh, touch, and balance. They are returning to a deeper faith 
 and a more earnest spiritualism. This changed spirit of the 
 age is an efflux of the French Revolution a building upon the 
 waste places it made for we suffered well-nigh as much change 
 by the French Revolution, in things political and social, as did 
 the French. It did its work in this country ; it did one noble 
 work for us all : instead of a set of subservient slaves, it has made 
 us a set of rational thinkers ; it has made us to call established 
 verities continually in question; it has produced that inquiring 
 spirit of to-day that will not be imposed upon, that takes hold of 
 all grey beards to see whether they are beards or but a sham o 
 sageness ; and which, by that venerable beard, dashes the empty 
 head against the wall, and proclaims, " Thou, with thy masked 
 face, art no thing to govern me ; I will not have thee, except thou 
 canst make thy patent good by likeness to God, by likeness to 
 truth, and verity indwelling there." This is one of the best 
 signs of our times. No matter how grey a thing be, how 
 long its beard, or how venerable its appearance, it must come 
 into court and get questioned. This is the age of reviewing; 
 of taking down our great men and our old beliefs and trying 
 them, and seeing how much of them belongs to God, how much 
 to man, and how much to the devil ; trying all political faiths, 
 and seeing whether they be true to the rights of men, to the old 
 eternal laws ; and if not, consigning them to the great Tophet, 
 where all lies must, sooner or later, get themselves buried or con- 
 sumed. This is a natural product of the French Revolution, 
 which was a huge protest of this kind, a taking into their own 
 hands the right to try. The French Revolution was the calling 
 of a great jury of humanity, to try kings and priests, rulers and 
 princes, poets, philosophers, and scribes ; come into court they all 
 must, and be tried by the old eternal laws : and if found wanting, 
 be conducted out of court, there to meet the fate they so well 
 deserve. Nor should this French Revolution be a matter of 
 arbitrariness, whether it is studied or not. There are many 
 questions which, if we are true men, we shall ask. One man will 
 ask, "What is work?" that is, what is the end ot life? He will
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 423 
 
 ask, "Who is the task-master?" that is, who, and what is God? 
 He will ask how he is to work ; that is, the method and mode of 
 life ; and if he be wise, he will ask where he is to work, where is 
 the field he is to till, what soil is it, what does it demand of him ? 
 Not only must a man know the work he has to do, but how he 
 must do it, and where he is to do it ; the age in which he lives, 
 the great field in which he is called to work ; he must understand 
 its spirit, necessities, and requirements, except he would do what 
 many of his fellows have done and are doing, resist the march of 
 humanity, forgetting that if they do resist it, they will, like the 
 pilgrims to Juggernaut, lay themselves down to be crushed by its 
 huge wheels. "It is hard for thee, Paul, to kick against the 
 pricks." " Why," saith God, " do the heathen rage, and the people 
 imagine a vain thing?" Such is the lesson given as to these poor 
 human labourers who would oppose the design of God in the 
 progress of man ; which is about as effective as if you should lay 
 down your finger beneath the heavy, broad wheel of a waggon, 
 and thereby expect to stay its course. Sad thing is it to see a 
 man waste his labour ; working to-day with strong arm at some- 
 thing which must go to-morrow. Such seems to me like the 
 child's writing upon the sand ; destined to be obliterated, ob- 
 livioned, in a short time and for ever. All labour, then; that is 
 not in accordance with the onward march of man ; that is not a 
 furtherance of man, a progress ; that is not in accordance with the 
 spirit of our time, is waste labour, lost labour, mere obstructive- 
 ness; made useful, though not intended so. Friction is very 
 necessary; but I would rather be the revolving wheel than 
 the obstructing surface. One does not particularly envy the stone 
 on the road that makes the carriage halt. One would rather be 
 one of the wheels spoken of by Ezekiel, which had the spirit of the 
 living creature in them. If these views are true, we must under- 
 stand the French Revolution, or we shall know not what we are 
 working. It is the key to open the age ; the sound of the trumpet 
 at the opening of the seal, the unrolling of the scroll. The French 
 Revolution is the gaunt, grotesque preface to the age in which we 
 are living. 
 
 With respect to the book, however, it is a strange, wild, 
 graphic, and grotesque performance ; its style is Carlylish in the 
 extreme, the full bloom of peculiarity, the eccentricity of
 
 424 The Genius arid Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 eccentricities ; but the style is such as no very wise man would 
 wish to see changed, in this work at least. He proceeds to make 
 the history live before us ; not by a due, set, and well-connected 
 narrative, but by flashes, revelations, and glimpses : and to under- 
 stand it thoroughly, you must become well read in the pamphlets, 
 tracts, and narratives of the times. Still, let none despair ; much 
 may be made out by diligence and care ; and for those who love 
 knowledge there is hope. Philosophising upon the French 
 Revolution, he deals little in it he is not of that school of 
 historians. There are those who reduce all history to a connected 
 set of bare narratives : and there are your philosophical historians, 
 who not only tell you the history itself, but also kindly tell you 
 what to think about it. Then there is the dramatic form of 
 history, in which the man is given, and not the mere tale ; but 
 he is exhibited before you in his deeds, words, and thoughts, and 
 you are left to do the philosophy yourself. To this latter class 
 Carlyle belongs ; and in reading his history, you must put in the 
 philosophy yourselves, or go without it. It is not one of those 
 works which carry the philosophy along with them ; where there 
 comes a halt, and then a line of capitals, to tell you that the 
 moral is here. In many men's works, you have a fact or event ; 
 then comes a solemn pause, and large capitals to proclaim, " Now 
 the moral is about to commence." What is the consequence? 
 Why, as in our school-days, we diligently read the fable, and very 
 diligently omit to read the moral. Children's books are con- 
 structed on this principle. A bit of morality is put in between 
 the more entertaining parts of the story ; in this, very much 
 resembling certain sandwiches, in which, between two thick pieces 
 of bread and butter, you have a very ghost-like slice of ham. I 
 have watched venerable fathers and ancient maternals reading 
 these children's books ; and I notice that they also quite as 
 diligently omit to read the moral. Children have a very wonder- 
 ful talent for this ; by a sort of divination, they can see at a glance 
 which is tale and which moral. The philosophy ought so to lie 
 in the history or the tale, that the tale, as told, must involve and 
 contain the philosophy. Thus, in the tale of Carlyle, the moral 
 and the philosophy lie bound up in, and inseparable from, the 
 story ; the esoteric is skilfully inwoven with the exoteric ; and if 
 this be above your comprehension, why, content yourselves to go
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlylc. 425 
 
 your way rejoicing, blessing yourselves that you do not feel the 
 high vocation to enter into the meaning and significance of any 
 such mystical and strange language. 
 
 VI. 
 
 We will now pass on to the last of Carlyle's works his " Letters 
 and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell." Concerning this book, some 
 disappointment seems to have been experienced. People say that 
 it does not give so much of Carlyle's opinions as they expected. 
 No, it gives us something better than those ; it gives us the text 
 and opinions of his hero. Seldom, in the literary world, have I 
 known a more modest thing than that book. Here is a man who, 
 if he had blessed us with three volumes of his own, equally large, 
 would have been sure to have had them read ; but he prefers to give 
 us Cromwell as he is. This is modesty ; and it is fair play. Carlyle 
 will not set himself up to dictate as to Cromwell ; but he supplies 
 you with the man's letters and speeches, and his version and explana- 
 tion of them, with this fair intention, that if you do not like his 
 explanations, there are the letters, explain them for yourselves. 
 Quite eclectic and catholic ; " Here I give you my version ; if you 
 do not like it, take the text and form your own version." So that 
 I admire the book for this very thing, for which some people have 
 found fault with it. Besides, it is hardly respectful to such a man 
 as Cromwell to leave him wholly to any man's interpretation, for 
 no man's version of Cromwell can be Cromwell himself; Cromwell 
 cannot be improved ; there can be no improved edition of a man. 
 We may have expurgated, purified, revised, improved editions of 
 a book ; but nothing can be left out of a man ; there can be no 
 expurgation, there can be no flinching from the truth. True, many 
 biographers represent their subjects as the most kind and affec- 
 tionate of men, very pinks of propriety, very patterns and 
 exemplars, the lights of the world, the true salt of the earth. 
 These biographies are written tombstone fashion ; we turn them 
 over, and are perfectly astonished to see how very beautiful a 
 thing human nature is. We had no idea before that there were so 
 many great men in the world ; men or monsters, having no faults. 
 Then, again, lying is always met by compensation. When I read 
 tombstones, I read them with circumspection and allowance ; and 
 biographies of this kind I believe just as little of ; and so with any
 
 426 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 improved version of a man, if you do not give me the man, I car- 
 not believe it at all. True biographies or epitaphs are those which 
 give us both sides of the man. 
 
 It has been said, that in this book Carlyle has not given us both 
 sides of Cromwell. Perchance he thought that his black side had 
 been done very well for some centuries past, and that there was 
 no need to have any more of it. All the history-painters have 
 painted him so black, that it is now time to throw in some strong 
 lights upon the picture. I do not know that such was Carlyle's 
 idea; but if it was, it appears very excusable. " You have all 
 been blackening Cromwell, I must 'pick in the lights,' as the 
 painters say ; because you have reduced it to supernatural dark- 
 ness, and nobody could make anything of it, if I did not cast 
 some exceedingly strong lights upon it." With regard to this man, 
 Cromwell, there is not a more notable case of the world suffering 
 itself to be taken in. He died ; Charles the Second came back ; 
 and there succeeded a licentious, abominable, shallow, fripperied, 
 and knavish age. Of course, they felt themselves dwarfed by 
 being near such a man as Cromwell, for manikins do not like to 
 stand near a giant ; it makes them look smaller than ever. These 
 essenced Rochesters and Buckinghams could not bear the huge 
 shadow he cast, which made these small people look absolutely 
 like children ; for there stood the man, rock -like, and they were 
 so near the base, overwhelmed by his shadow, that they felt a dull, 
 chill, icy coldness ; and it was, therefore, well for them to pro- 
 nounce this thing to be itself a mere shadow, and themselves the 
 true light. If you can prove elsewhere a gigantic wrong or 
 wickedness, your own dwarfed falsehood becomes trueness, the 
 more unlike you are to that gigantic evil. These petty, puny 
 creatures thought if they could only manage to turn the lie upon 
 Cromwell to make out that he was a wretch, a liar, an impostor, 
 and full of wickedness then would they, by being very unlike 
 him, be taken to be true, sincere, righteous, good, earnest men. 
 This will be found the philosophy of a great deal of the blacken- 
 ing done in the world. " I am this, and he is quite other than I. 
 If I can prove that he is wrong, that he does evil, then am I, by 
 being and doing the contrary, just what I should be." And, as 
 the majority of men consent, goose-like, to run over the great 
 common of life, following their leader for the time, so of course
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 427 
 
 do the bulk of men follow after those who first blackened Crom- 
 well. Consequently, as Cromwell's bones were dug up to be 
 gibbeted, his character was raked up, to have the same thing 
 done to it by men who were of a " flunkey " or " lackey " age, as 
 Carlyle calls it, in which they took " Jeames's " * views of the 
 matter ; in which they could see nothing honourable that was 
 without epaulettes ; no manliness without gold lace upon his coat ; 
 nothing very dignified that did not wear powder and pay tax in 
 consequence ; no worth, except it was stamped by court favour , 
 no patent of nobility, except it was enrolled in the Herald's 
 College. Thus the lackey ages followed that of Charles II., and 
 blackened this giant, Cromwell, to make themselves look brighter 
 and larger men ; to turn their semi-shade into the resemblance of 
 light on the same principle that the ladies of old times put smal ; 
 patches upon the face in order to heighten the delicacy and fair- 
 ness of the skin, thinking that if Cromwell could be made the 
 patch, verily they would come forth in beauty not otherwise their 
 own. Hence they laid the dark shades thick upon him, endea- 
 vouring to reduce the man to a liar, a cheat, and a knave. Long 
 ago, one of our great authors said that the day would come for 
 the resurrection of reputation from the tomb of false opinion, 
 when the greatest men of the past should rise to receive their 
 reward for past obloquy ; when of some it must be said, " He 
 hath had worship not enough ; here for the future shall be our 
 Walhalla for him ; to him, for the future, pay homage and rever- 
 ence." Notably now, for Cromwell, are we turning the tables, 
 and getting quite another version of him than the old one so long 
 current. Before, he was pronounced to be the summing up of all 
 hypocrisies, the greatest liar of the world ; but now Carlyle has 
 put to us a very remarkable thing, that there is no proved lie 
 against Cromwell anywhere in history. 
 
 One or two things I may now mention which have not been 
 noted with respect to this man, and I will explain one or two 
 matters which I think have not received the full light that should 
 be thrown upon them. Much is made of Cromwell's peculiar 
 religious dialect ; and it is said that because he talked in this 
 
 * " fiames's Diary," appearing in Punch at the time when Carlyle was 
 writing his "Cromwell," gave a " flunkey's" views of life, and men "in high 
 places."
 
 428 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 singular, puritanic, piebald dialect at one time, and not at another, 
 that therefore he put it on when he thought it needed ; that when 
 he was surrounded by preachers, he talked Puritanese, but when 
 soldiers came, and fighting was to be done, he used good sharp 
 short Saxon words ; consequently (as it is alleged) the man's reli- 
 gion was an imposture a lie. Those who say so understand modern 
 life but little, for I would undertake to find a true, pious, sincere, 
 earnest, humble, religious heart, who believes earnestly in God 
 and walks by the light of the invisible world, but yet to hear him 
 talk about religion it would make anyone smile. Here a scrap 
 of Hebrew, there a bit of Greek ; here a bit of good Saxon 
 English, there a piece of chapel dialect ; here a peculiar phrase, 
 learned out of a creed book, and there a scrap conned out of the 
 Common Prayer. Now, meet the same man in his shop, and he 
 will talk to you in good modern English. Is he then a hypo- 
 crite ? No. He has been bred to talk of religion in a proper 
 dialect, and, to my mind, it is as natural as when a sailor 
 comes before you and talks of nautical matters in nautical 
 phrases. It would be a great shame to judge these men false 
 because they do not talk plain English like other people. The 
 mistake is not in the use of a dialect, but in what lies behind its 
 use ; that is, in technicalising religion, in getting people to think 
 that religion is a parallel line with life, instead of being the soul 
 and spirit of life. Too many of us look at religion in the wrong 
 light, as if it was a something standing separate, here religion, 
 there science, trade, art. That is not the true view of a man's 
 life. A true man's life is like a series of circles round one common 
 centre ; religion the grand centre, and the others like radii going 
 forth from this great centre ; for there are no parallel lines, but 
 effluxes flowing ever forth from this great and true centre, of the 
 belief in God, immortality, and Christ in the heart. If you re- 
 duce religion to this parallel line or technicalism, you make it 
 to be regarded as a thing to be put on and put off again, to be 
 lavendered and laid up in drawers till the next high feast day 
 when it comes out to be worn again. Then will it necessarily get 
 itself a dialect of its own; then will religious people talk their 
 own peculiar chapel dialect, whether Puritans, Churchmen, 
 Wesleyans, Quakers, or others. These people are not neces- 
 sarily less earnest and sincere because they are thus led to speak
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 429 
 
 a particular dialect. I would myself venture to talk to a church- 
 man for a quarter of an hour in a dialect unintelligible to him, 
 which he would not be able at all to understand. Why so? 
 Because such churchman has not been bred in a chapel or con- 
 venticle. I could so explain the Roman Catholic faith to a Pro- 
 testant, that he would not be able to understand it, and would 
 know nothing of it ; whereas to a Catholic the whole would be 
 intelligible, because it would be in his own proper technical 
 dialect. Try Cromwell by this test. His first notions of religion 
 were gotten from the Puritans. He associated with them and their 
 preachers, nay, he exhorted too ; he read their books, and mixed 
 with them till he got in consequence the Puritan's dialect, which 
 came to him naturally when he talked about religion, and he 
 spoke in the tongue in which he had always heard it spoken of; 
 but when he talked about life and business, he talked of it in the 
 tongue in which others talked, and in which all religious denomi- 
 nations would understand it. So we may go at any time now into 
 the society of an honest, upright, and godly man, whose religious 
 dialect we shall not be able to understand, and whose business 
 dialect we can perfectly comprehend, and who, if he speaks a 
 particular religious dialect, it is because he knows no other. This 
 charge against Cromwell goes rather to prove him sincere than 
 insincere. 
 
 Then it has been said that he sometimes jested with respect to 
 sacred matters, and two tales of this are told, which are apocryphal, 
 and of which there is no proof. But suppose them proved, and 
 what does it amount to ? It is open to my own experience to 
 have sat down at a good clerical association, and now and then 
 those men have absolutely laughed, and in a quiet, joking sort of 
 spirit they have spoken of a thing which should not be held 
 lightly. Were the men very blameable ? No. It is one of the 
 eccentricities of the soul; jesting sometimes comes to relieve an 
 over-burdened heart, and there have been such things as a man 
 laughing when wailing might have been expected. Some of you 
 may have experienced a strong desire to laugh when you ought 
 to have looked solemn ; in fact, it is a fatality with some that 
 when they ought to be the very pinks of propriety, sobriety, and 
 seriousness, they are looking as waggish and droll as can be. 
 And how much of this may not have been the case with Cromwell
 
 430 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 in the foundation (if there were any) for these two tales ! It is 
 said that he was improperly jesting and joking when about to 
 sign a death-warrant, and smearing the pen across Harry Martin's 
 face; also that he got rid of some people on one occasion by 
 flinging a bolster at the head of one, and helping the other 
 downstairs by a kick or a push. I am willing to admit both 
 these things to be true, and the man who speaks harshly against 
 Cromwell for them is a shallow man who understands little of 
 our nature. Have you not watched life long enough, and often 
 enough, to know that there is such a thing as nervousness and 
 over-wrought excitement striving to find vent? Why, Louis 
 Philippe sits in his chair when transacting business with his 
 ministers, and draws cartoons. Bonaparte whittled away at the 
 arm of his chair. Was the man a child, a fool, or a dreamer, 
 because his knife was working away at the chair ? I have seen 
 books of Melancthon, in which there are fac-simile sketches of 
 curious heads, grotesque masks on the margin of sundry pages 
 in the books, out of which Melancthon lectured to his students ; 
 and to get rid of his nervousness, the man used to draw comical 
 faces on the margin of the page. Was the man a fool because he 
 did that ? Did he lecture the less wisely, or less earnestly, for 
 doing these things? Even the bumpkin stands twiddling and 
 twirling a key or a bit of string, because he comes into your 
 presence and is weighed down by awe at the sight of your 
 honourable or venerable self. No ; the man was over-wrought, 
 over-excited ; it was because he felt so deeply that he did it, and 
 not because he felt so little; it was the strong attempt of an 
 over-burdened mind to relieve itself. As for that unceremonious 
 breaking up of the Council, who that hath been condemned to 
 sit upon a committee and to hear endless men betwaddle one 
 almost to death; giving you their "forsooth," "peradventure," 
 " notwithstanding," and " in consequence of," and " he would if he 
 could," who that hath borne this, that would not almost wish. 
 for Cromwell to be sending some good sofa bolster at their heads, 
 and so clearing the atmosphere by one strong electric stroke. It 
 strikes me that Cromwell chose no bad way of getting rid of the 
 business, especially when we happen to know that he did not 
 want to give his opinion ; when he had heard other people, and 
 held his peace ; which, as we know, is sometimes necessary in our
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 431 
 
 day. After hearing all he could, he discharged them in that 
 curious fashion, making one of them go down-stairs faster then 
 he ascended. Does not that look more like the thing, than the 
 sham and dupery which has been built upon this shallow founda- 
 tion ? No ; these are evidences of truth, just as I know sundry 
 epistles in the New Testament to be genuine, not so much from 
 the prolegomena of these learned men ; but I know them to be 
 the genuine letters of living men, because there slips in at the end 
 of one, for instance, such directions as this, " The cloak which 
 I left at Troas, with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, 
 and the books, but especially the parchments." Paul, a busy 
 man, had perhaps forgotten these things, and wrote for them. 
 No man getting up a thing for imposture would have thought of 
 that. They would have been too clever, like one of the men 
 pursuing a thief who suddenly disappears, and most of them are 
 for going to search the house. " Oh, no," says the clever man of 
 the party, " he is sure not to go into that house, because he will 
 think that we shall naturally seek for him there." So they go 
 forward, and the over -sage or over-cunning man leaves the thief 
 safely ensconced in the house. If men were getting up these 
 things for impostures, they would not have thought of these little 
 matters ; they would have seemed too minute for them, to write 
 about some parchments which a man had forgotten. But it is 
 precisely these little Dutch touches in the picture, that show us 
 the genuineness of the letter, and the character of the man. 
 These things, in Cromwell's case, show us the earnest heart, the 
 struggle of nature within him ; he was too man-like to pretend to 
 be the pink of perfection ; he did not belong to that school which 
 thinks it necessary to reduce everything to an angelic formula. 
 There is something so far off about these perfect sort of people ; 
 we look at them from a distance, admire them, and so have done 
 with them. And so with Cromwell : if he had never done any but 
 great deeds we might have admired him, but it would have been 
 at a very great distance; we could not have come near him. 
 Beware of isolating any great man from you. Keep him nigh to 
 you. Meditate on those parts of his nature which show that he 
 is bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh. Take the old Greek 
 and Latin men ; look at them in their loftiness and in their 
 weakness ; for it is only through the little weaknesses oi his
 
 432 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 nature, that I know a great man to be a brother, because he 
 hungers when I hunger, weeps when I weep, rejoices when I 
 rejoice, hath his clothing upon him as I have, and hath, like rue, 
 his failures and his successes, his struggles and hopes, his doubts 
 and fears. 
 
 With respect to what Carlyle has said of Cromwell, it reduces 
 itself to the formula before given, that no sham man ever did 
 such good work as he has done in the world. He says : " By his 
 fruits ye shall know him " ; and those fruits being in the main 
 good and true, the man cannot be bad. 
 
 And now, having great love for this Cromwell, I will, before 
 quitting him, mention one or two other points connected with him. 
 Some people pronounce him to be a barbarian, and say he had no 
 taste for art or literature. This is an eminent lie. We are tojd 
 he took great pains to prevent a certain learned library from going 
 out of the country. We find him pensioning literary men, and 
 setting apart a sum of money to have good maps of Ireland laid 
 down ; appointing professors to one university, and purchasing 
 certain rolls of curious MSS. for the other. Very barbarian 
 deeds are these ; so barbarian that many a modern Government 
 might do well to imitate them. Cromwell was one of the master 
 spirits that taught catholicity and the rights of conscience. He 
 has been sadly wronged and maligned here. He was a man far 
 in advance of almost any of us. Amongst his chaplains there 
 were Independents and Presbyterians ; he had not got to the 
 modern system, which is to hear no preachers but the men who 
 are continually chanting our own belief, and picturing our own 
 minds a species of mental vanity just as men surround their 
 chambers with mirrors, that they may see themselves every time 
 they move. It is so pleasant to turn round and see every man 
 holding one's own opinions ; to see every man a reflex of one's 
 self. I dissent from that ; I think it is a tame, stale, unprofitable 
 sort of thing. I look round this room and see no two faces cut 
 alike, and it appears to me that if all the faces were made of one 
 pattern, the room would look a trifle less interesting than it does. 
 This Cromwell had a chaplain, who bestowed a very inflicting 
 lecture on him for some opinion he held. Cromwell suffered him 
 to preach his belief, and still held his own. We find him showing 
 kindness to many Roman Catholics ; and, though called by the
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 433 
 
 law to put down and punish them, we often find him in private 
 assuaging the rigour of the law. An eminent Roman Catholic, 
 Kenelm Digby, received money and other kindnesses from Crom- 
 well, to enable him to prosecute his studies. He bestowed great 
 kindness upon the Episcopalians, giving them many advantages ; 
 he was the friend of the Quaker, upholding his right to worship 
 God in his own fashion ; and he protested against the persecution 
 bestowed upon the first English Unitarians. When it was said 
 that men ought to be persecuted and hunted, Cromwell said he 
 could not support that. He was the friend of the Jew, maintain- 
 ing for him a right to worship the God of the Hebrews ; that he 
 should do it as long as he believed in the old Scriptures and the 
 uncome Messiah. This is the barbarian Cromwell, whom we have 
 abused so long in histories. He taught liberty of conscience 
 further than most men have learned it yet ; he taught it to the pro- 
 per extreme which shall yet come, when no man shall dare to call 
 his brother to account for his religious opinions. Every man 
 stands next and nigh to God ; and God never asks us to assist 
 him in judging the world. All men persecuting for belief, con- 
 stitute themselves, for the time, God's assessors; undertake to 
 assist him. As if he wanted aid ! Who asks you to do that part 
 of the world's business ? I would say, " Every time you feel in- 
 clined to annoy, or hurt, or persecute a man because he believes 
 not with you, think you are committing the hugest impudence 
 against God, taking His work upon you. You are not called upon 
 to do it ; it is no part of your duty ; see that you leave it thoroughly 
 undone." There was something Titanic and gigantic about the 
 old modes of persecution ; roasting a man right out of the world 
 looks as if we did believe he deserved it. By the modern way of 
 doing it there is nothing gigantic. But the spirit of persecution 
 may not be altered, though its form is so ; lions and fleas can 
 both trouble us. It is not needful that a thing should be gigantic 
 to become annoying. This is modem persecution ; taking away 
 a man's character, by insinuation, innuendo, and hint. Be clear 
 of all of it, the unmanliest thing that can ever be done. 
 
 I must now pass away from this man Cromwell, commending 
 this large book to your study, and hoping that after studying it 
 thoroughly, you will come to a truer version of his character. I 
 have explained the possible chnritable theory to those who feel
 
 434 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 inclined to think Carlyle has overrated Cromwell. He has not 
 catalogued his faults ; you will all be able to put in the black 
 shade yourselves. Many take pleasure in putting in the faults in 
 a man's character ; they think it shows their discriminating know- 
 ledge of character and of the world. Take Carlyle's Cromwell, 
 then, and work away with it. Put in as many faults as you like, 
 to show your knowledge of the world, strength of intellect, and 
 non-dupeability. Certainly, the book will to some appear one- 
 sided : that is because Carlyle does not belong to that school of 
 critics who think because they put a good thing on one side they 
 are obliged to put a bad thing on the other, and for every 
 adjective on the one side of the page they must have one on the 
 other ; as, if a man be pronounced kind, you must have a " but " 
 in the middle " He was kind, but somewhat severe ; " " He was 
 wise, but then he was hasty tempered : " "He was a great man, 
 but he had his failings." This is thought to be the perfection of 
 impartiality and fairness. Carlyle does not follow that system. 
 He does not object to the good of a man's character filling up 
 the page of the folio, and that there are but two or three entries 
 on the bad side. Some people like an even number of entries on 
 the debtor and creditor side of the book. Carlyle does not object 
 to the unseemly want of harmony in having this page filled and 
 that empty. He has filled up one page, and perhaps not quite 
 filled up the other ; he has left us something to do. There is a 
 pleasure in picking holes in a man's coat, and he having given 
 Cromwell a new superfine coat, we can exercise ourselves in find- 
 ing out the faults, and putting in the shadows for ourselves. 
 
 I am sometimes asked if Carlyle's books are religious, but I 
 find difficulty in answering that question. If I knew what people 
 call religious, I could then tell whether the books are so or not. 
 There is a lack of a recognition of some of the high doctrines of 
 Christianity in them ; there is a hazy and somewhat mystical air 
 of religionism over them, perhaps not quite what we would have. 
 He is unwilling to supply us too much, to give a cut and dried 
 formula to save us from thinking. If it be supposed that for a 
 man to be religious, he must have a continual working up of 
 forms and doctrines, feeling, barometric and thermometric obser 
 rations of the weather of the soul, a constant diary-keeping you 
 will find little of that sort of religion in Carlyle's books. He
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle, 435 
 
 understands that a man's interior life is made hidden by God ; he 
 understands that the soul's life only retains its beauty when it is 
 the life in the soul. He has taught, that when the inner life of 
 man is dragged forth for everyone to look at, for everybody to 
 finger and handle it, its beauty is spoiled, its purity is soiled, and 
 hypocrisy is engendered. If a man has to exhibit, at a given 
 time, his inner life, the root of the thing, he runs the risk of 
 getting it up to order. If such books only are religious, then are 
 Carlyle's very irreligious books. If a man is religious by a con- 
 stant talking about the matter, then also are they irreligious. But 
 ofttimes the most talked-of things are the least valuable things. 
 It is true, " Out of the fulness of the heart the tongue speaketh," 
 but there are thoughts and feelings which lie too deep for tears, 
 and if they cannot be expressed in that language, they cannot be 
 expressed in tongue language. I will read on this subject a pas- 
 sage from one of the great Germans, a piece of good manly 
 satire : 
 
 " We all know that the more a man prates about his feelings 
 the less he has of them, and that a sensation, the expression of 
 which he sees printed before him, is on that very account so much 
 the seldomer felt within the breast ; we have therefore always main- 
 tained, and shall always maintain, that the twaddle about feelings 
 which we find in books is nothing but an ass's badge for the 
 slothful feelings, a conductor which carries off real sensations, a 
 mere Protestant repetition of the rosary ; for as certainly as a 
 young Catholic girl generally runs heedlessly over her paternoster, 
 so surely will the young Protestant skim feelinglessly over the 
 sentimental phrases in the sweet Protestant devotional books. 
 Indeed, this fore-feeling which is printed in the books, restrains 
 the real feelings of the breast far more than is done by the merely 
 objective incitements to feeling which exist in a rosary; for, if a 
 man see before him, printed letter for letter, the subjective feel- 
 ings which he might probably have taken the trouble of exciting, 
 he certainly will not take the trouble ; and a young Catholic girl 
 who reads something about the Mater Dolorosa, may still be 
 moved by it, but it is impossible that the young Protestant can 
 be so, who is obliged to read in a book ' O, how moving this is ! 
 O, what do I feel at that ! O, how my heart is moved at this ! 
 O, what woe does this excite in me ! ' &c., &c. Who would not
 
 436 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 be moved by reading in the Bible the plain, simple, objective 
 narrative of the death of Christ ? but who, I ask, was ever moved 
 by reading Tradge? who, pouring out his wishy-washy sorrow, 
 like drops out of a wet sponge, boasts of it, and then solemnly 
 begins : ' Let this song, this woeful song, be dedicated to thee, O 
 woe ! ' Yet what further need we to know, than that in spite of 
 all the innumerable sentimental whinings which we find in those 
 writings, intended to aid us in our devotions, and for the use of 
 children, our generation has evidently become careless about 
 sentimentality ; it is dry, ironical, and even to a certain extent, 
 cold and hard-hearted, whilst former ages, which did not talk so 
 much about the feelings, were really milder. This applies especi- 
 ally to the young. The more the milk of human kindness is ex- 
 tracted from their hearts, the drier their hearts become. Feeling, 
 and again feeling, is daily inculcated ; and what is the result ? 
 Dry old-fashion edness, and nothing but old-fashionedness." 
 
 I have said that the reproach brought against Wordsworth by 
 Professor Wilson, that there is an absence of some of the higher 
 doctrines of Christianity in him, applies to Carlyle. Wilson has 
 brought a grievous charge against Wordsworth, that there is a 
 misty religionism rather than a clearly defined religion, about him. 
 This misty religionism is apt to evaporate. Men must have some- 
 thing definite to cling to ; there must be something visible and 
 positive, something that can be seen, touched, and known, and be 
 present with us. Here, then, if blame be due, it is due to Carlyle ; 
 and here, in the spirit of fairness, blame I bestow. 
 
 I have now done. None are so conscious of the deficiencies 
 of this lecture as I am myself. If, however, I have succeeded in 
 making anyone think who never thought before, in causing any to 
 search for the good and true : nay, if I have been happy enough 
 to unsettle some, to make any doubt, or feel uncomfortable, I 
 have my reward. Some of the things about which I have had to 
 talk are sadly uncomfortable matters. I have had to show the 
 starving brother in the midst of a luxurious age ; men bowed 
 down in the midst of much prate of freedom; a Christianity 
 weeping and waiting to be applied : these matters are unpleasant, 
 but physicians' tasks are not always pleasant duties. There are 
 disagreeable potions contained in the pharmacopoeia, and it is 
 sometimes necessary they should be administered. I can but
 
 The Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. 437 
 
 thank you for the kindness and attention with which you have 
 listened to a young man's words ; and hope that what in them 
 has been true may live, while the weak or false things may be 
 speedily forgotten. None of you can charge me with insulting 
 your religious sect or political party. I have tried to teach those 
 sublime politics which transcend mere party questions, and that 
 religion which is higher than theologic differences or sectarian 
 divisions.
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 
 (BORN 1811. DIED 1863.) FROM SIST GEO. III. TO 26TH VICTORIA. 
 
 T T might be a curious question for speculation whether a man 
 * would prefer to have the portrait of his character drawn 
 immediately after his death, or whether he would prefer to wait 
 some years until time had mellowed and softened and rendered 
 more clear many of the fine points connected with it. With regard 
 to a man's character, death seems to have lost its power except 
 to take all that is likest itself to speedy oblivion. Be the answer 
 to the question what it may, one thing is clear, that they who 
 have lived with him can now weave for Thackeray a chaplet 
 culled from the garden in which he has himself worked, a thing 
 which could not be done fifty years hence. 
 
 Another question is, what is the meaning of the rule nil nisi 
 bonum ? and ought we not to substitute nil nisi verum ? To-night, 
 the two rules are almost one, and he who is so generous as to say 
 nil nisi bonum, may be so just as to add nil nisi verum ; standing 
 by the one, we may keep the other, and obeying both, break 
 neither. 
 
 I shall proceed to notice the life of that great, good man 
 Thackeray. It is a life without "hair-breadth 'scapes," and 
 wonderfully wanting in interest to those who like to be startled ; 
 but full of beauty and thrilling interest to those who know that a 
 good writer is one of God's best and greatest and loveliest 
 creatures, and who like to see a great artist at his work ; who 
 would like to have gone home with Michael Angelo, and seen the 
 chisel with which the great Moses was struck, as it were, out of 
 the rock ; or to have seen Raffael grind the colours with which 
 he painted the " Transfiguration " ; or to have seen Shakespeare 
 sin and suffer, in order that he might be able to write the history 
 of sin and suffering : for these are things worth a lifetime to 
 behold.
 
 William Makepeace Thackeray. 439 
 
 To begin, then, with the history of Thackeray, I will commence 
 with what is a good rule, and one which I recommend to all to 
 mention a man's pedigree, when there is something worth 
 stating. Thackeray's great-grandfather was Dr Thomas Thackeray, 
 headmaster of Harrow, an excellent schoolmaster, and most 
 worthy man. If you notice this fact, you will, in all probability, 
 understand whence came that great love of, and perpetual 
 leaning towards the life of public schools which marks all 
 Thackeray's works, and which was in all probability strengthened 
 by his subsequent connection with that finest of all schools, the 
 Charter House. In addition to serving his country by his labours 
 as a schoolmaster, Dr Thomas Thackeray also served it by pre- 
 senting it with six sons and ten daughters, of whom we will centre 
 our attention upon two daughters who married gentlemen in the 
 Indian service a fact which will account to a great extent for 
 the great flavour of curry which runs through Thackeray's writings. 
 His grandfather, who was in the Indian service, retired upon a 
 competency, and his son Richard Thackeray, the father of the 
 great novelist, was in the same service, and lived at Calcutta, 
 where William Makepeace Thackeray was born in 1811, just one 
 year before his contemporary Dickens. 
 
 In 1815, his father died, and he came to England in 1817, his 
 widowed mother marrying Major Smythe. The ship stopped at 
 St Helena, and here he was shown Napoleon by a black servant 
 who had him in charge. This sight, and the sight of the palace 
 of the Prince Regent, which was shewn to him by the same black 
 guardian after his arrival in England, are both described with 
 great force by Thackeray in his works. Then he went to the 
 Charter House, upon the glorious memories connected with which, 
 and the many names, since great in story, which have figured 
 amongst the students in its old cloisters, we might dwell long and 
 lovingly. From this school Thackeray went to Trinity College, 
 Cambridge, where he had for fellow-students John Mitchell 
 Kemble, and that greatest poet of modern times, Alfred Tennyson. 
 He left Cambridge without taking a degree, but he did not leave 
 it without doing something, for it is true that he published a 
 paper called the Snob a work small in many respects, but showing 
 that he knew how to make powder, and also how to fire it when 
 necessary. In 1831, he went to Germany, where he lived in
 
 44 William Makepeace Thackeray. 
 
 the same town with, and saw Goethe the greatest man since 
 Shakespeare whose sun was setting in golden glory. 
 
 Soon after this, he was taken with the desire to become an artist, 
 and to this end he went to Rome, and thence to his favourite city, 
 Paris, to his favourite haunt the Louvre, shortly after which he came 
 to London and commenced to write at first from love of literature, 
 for his patrimony was what to this day would be called ample. 
 (To follow him through the whole catalogue of his earlier works 
 would be mere idleness, but amongst the most notable may be 
 mentioned numerous contributions to Fraser.} But Paris was his 
 delight. He did not love Frenchmen, because he was always too 
 good an Englishman for that. He detested Louis Philippe, as 
 every honest man must, because he knew him to be the greatest 
 Pecksniff in the world. He hated French novels with a hatred 
 which the genius of George Sand could not remove from his 
 mind. But he loved Paris, because there he enjoyed the most 
 perfect liberty. There is a time in every man's life when to live 
 amongst civilisation is a great nuisance, and this was that point in 
 Thackeray's life, and he appreciated the liberty he enjoyed. In 
 Paris, nobody knows you or cares about you, and you return it 
 back with interest. 
 
 After remaining in Paris some time, he returned to London, 
 and found a group of notable men who were contributors to 
 Fraser s Magazine, which was then edited by that great, gracious, 
 and graceless man, Dr Maginn. to whom Thackeray behaved with 
 the utmost kindness. Amongst the reckless race of men with 
 whom he was then associated, Thackeray found the types of 
 Captain Shan don and Tom Sargeant, and many others. It was 
 then, also, that he learned that contempt for the so called 
 Bohemianism of pots of porter and pipes of tobacco, and tavern 
 revels and debt, which marks many of his works : and it was this 
 contempt which earned for him. amongst second rate Bohemians, 
 the title of a "prig." Now it was that he published the " Yellow- 
 Plush Papers," which seem like the chips of a workman learning 
 to do good work, and show how hard he worked and how long he 
 laboured before being able to produce his great masterpiece, 
 "Vanity Fair." In 1836, he aspired to illustrate the immortal 
 " Pickwick Papers " of Dickens, and his sketches being refused as 
 unsuitable by the great novelist, he turned his attention sedulously
 
 William Makepeace Thackeray. 441 
 
 again to literature, and showed himself to be without doubt the 
 greatest English novelist since the days of Fielding. " Esmond," 
 to my mind, stands out as the greatest novel of this century, and, 
 whatever may be said of Sir Walter Scott or Dickens, since Tom 
 Jones, the finest novel in the language. I say this, knowing that 
 the majority of you are Dickens mad ; but I say it in the firm 
 conviction that I shall be able to prove accurately the truth of my 
 assertion for I differ from you, I am happy to say, with all my 
 heart and soul and strength. At the same time I think that 
 Dickens' novel, the " Pickwick Papers," which Thackeray aspired 
 to illustrate, is one which future historians will find most precious, 
 and will be least willing to lose. 
 
 After this, Thackeray joined a newspaper, and in so doing made 
 the greatest mistake of his life. Still, it is not to be wondered at, 
 for most men, at some period of their lives, distinguish them- 
 selves by meddling with that with which they are least acquainted. 
 I think it is sometimes necessary that a man should be taught the 
 value of money by losing it, and thereby gain a wholesome 
 appreciation of the hod-bearers of life. The newspaper was got 
 up by a company calling itself the Unpopular Newspaper Com- 
 pany, and was called The Constitutional and Public Ledger. Its 
 literary staff was one of great talent, but it had not the advantage 
 of a good business-men element. The natural consequence of 
 this was that it died, and Major Smythe, with Thackeray, lost 
 their money. From this time, he who had previously written from 
 love of literature, had to write for money. 
 
 Soon after this, he married Miss Shaw, in Paris, and of this 
 marriage we will say but little, for over it came subsequently a 
 shadow, worse than the shadow of death, but of which Thackeray 
 said nothing. One might speak of another celebrity, who, under 
 similar circumstances, called in the whole of England to witness 
 the scene. 
 
 A gradual appreciation of Thackeray's works has grown up 
 but a short time back, comparatively speaking. Thackeray was 
 a popular lecturer; his lectures on "The English Humourists" 
 and " The Four Georges " deserve the highest praise. It is 
 perfectly ridiculous that such men as Thackeray and Dr Johnson 
 should have been rejected as candidates for seats in parliament 
 because they were not what the world calls " men of business/''
 
 442 William Makepeace Thackeray. 
 
 for whom the great Liberal party manifests such an unaccount- 
 able and perverse affection. Thackeray became famous, and 
 prosperous, and died, not full of years, but certainly full of 
 honours. 
 
 Having now given some consideration to the life of Thackeray, 
 the next question is to see the connection between the man and 
 his works, and 1 hope to show that in his case, as in that of all 
 great authors, the man is much greater than his works his works 
 being but the overflowings of a fountain never dry, and from which 
 can be sent forth waters still sweeter and more copious in volume. 
 There is no question much more curious than the similarity and 
 discrepancies between men and their books. The majority of 
 readers of books are disappointed when they see their authors. 
 Most men are disappointed with the Elgin marbles, and why ? 
 Because they are so much like life, because they are so natural. 
 And their disappointment at being brought into contact with a 
 man of genius is of the same sort. He was so natural, and they 
 who saw him wanted to see his style in his clothes. 
 
 Great men are divided into two classes. There are some who 
 find the Elgin marbles natural, and some who have a spice of 
 quackery by which I mean anything that a man does to draw 
 the attention and gaping admiration of the world, or a too great 
 longing for eccentricity and oddity. There is no doubt that, with 
 all respect to Pythagoras, he knew perfectly well that the public 
 liked something to gape at. They like a robe thrown over the 
 shoulder, and for a man to turn away with a great scowl, just as 
 in the theatre the man who plays the saint must snivel to the end, 
 and the villain must remain a villain until the fall of the curtain. 
 It is open to a man to take one of two courses either just to be 
 himself, and let fools have their say, and care nothing about them, 
 or, understanding the public, to throw a robe round the shoulder, 
 and mutter and start, and be Byronic, and shave the temple in 
 order to look Shakespearean. All these are little tricks which 
 sometimes great geniuses have not disdained. Pythagoras under- 
 stood mystery-mongering perfectly, and he muttered and had a 
 cloak to throw round him a halo or a darkness, just as the hours 
 seemed to require. In our old friend Diogenes, there was a 
 touch of the play-actor in that tub business, and that famous reply 
 of his to Alexander was not, I am afraid, impromptu it existed
 
 William Makepeace Thackeray. 443 
 
 in manuscript in the tub. 1 am sorry to surmise it, too, but I 
 think there was a little touch of it in the noblest of the Pagans 
 Socrates who understood the public, and was a little more odd 
 than he ought to have been. I am afraid that Socrates some- 
 times mounted the waggon, had a trumpet blown, and announced 
 his moral pills. Certainly the great Napoleon understood the 
 art. He knew when to start, and how to wear his cocked 
 hat; for he was a great genius, and could have commanded 
 the world's wonder and enforced its applause. Napoleon liked 
 a little bit of quackery dearly. What could have been finer 
 than when, sitting in the ruins of Moscow, after that disastrous 
 expedition, he wrote a letter to Paris about the opera? He 
 showed that he could fight Russians, and think about Paris fight 
 Russians, and think about the length of ballet girls' dresses. Louis 
 XIV. knew the value of quackery, and so did Lord Burleigh, who 
 did not always shake his head because he needed to do so, but 
 because he had learned that a shake of his head went a long way 
 with those who saw it. So with Bolingbroke, and Chatham, who 
 never spoke except in his best wig. You have perhaps heard 
 of the musician who never sat down to compose until he had 
 arranged himself in evening dress, and you have heard that 
 whenever Chatham was about to make one of his world-shaking 
 speeches he assumed his best wig. Let us be charitable, and 
 suppose that it was necessary for the cranium underneath ; but 
 still I am afraid that, after all, there was in it a touch of the 
 mountebank, the trumpet, and the quack. As for Lord Byron, 
 he understood the art perfectly ; he knew the value of a little 
 quackery, and he administered it most admirably. It is not for 
 us to say whether this was right or wrong, inasmuch as it depends 
 upon to what degree a man has to "tumble" for a company, and 
 with what skill he estimates their taste in tumbling. But it re- 
 quires a mind strong in its simplicity to take the nobler course 
 to say your say or write your book, and then do as you would if 
 you had not said your say or written your book. To be perfectly 
 natural is the most difficult of all arts, and requires in audience 
 and reader a very simple and strong mind to get through the work 
 of finding a great man perfectly simple. Those not thoroughly 
 simple-minded play tricks, and the question is whether Thackeray 
 played tricks, tumbled, and rouged, or whether he went on his
 
 444 William Makepeace 'Fkackeray. 
 
 straightforward way caring nothing for the public, and caring 
 nothing for the crowd of humble loving prigs that surrounded 
 him,. There is a splendid passage in " The Corsair," which ex- 
 plains what I mean by this : 
 
 " He bounds he flies until his footsteps reach 
 The verge where ends the cliff, begins the breach, 
 There checks his speed ; but pauses less to breathe 
 The breezy freshness of the deep beneath, 
 Than there his wonted, statelier step renew ; 
 Nor such, disturbed by haste, to vulgar view: 
 For well had Conrad learned to curb the crowd, 
 By arts to veil, and yet preserve the proud ; 
 His was the lofty part, the distant mien, 
 That seems to shun the sight and awes if seen : 
 The solemn aspect, and the high-born eye, 
 That checks low mirth, but lacks not courtesy." 
 
 This passage explains nearly all the quacks of the high, solemn 
 chieftain sort. We shall see by-and-bye whether Thackeray did 
 this kind of thing. He was very fond of looking into the tricks of 
 genius. He liked to be by when the preacher arranged his last 
 curl before mounting the pulpit, and when the beadle was arrang- 
 ing his surplice so that it might fall in the best folds the preacher 
 being a man who ought to commend the gospel by his admirable- 
 ness. Many people like to hear the gospel read by a darling ; 
 and curls disarm criticism. It is pleasant to see people get ready 
 for their work, and the dressing-room was the room for him. His 
 audience would be before the scenes, and behind the scenes was 
 rather flat ; but the dressing-room was the place for him, and there 
 he would be found whenever he had time and opportunity. He 
 spent much time in seeing the great people of the world dress. 
 He saw Beau Brummell dress, with his three hairdressers, one of 
 whom took the back hair, another the front hair, and the third the 
 high intellectual hair. He watched the wonderful quack, Dr 
 Dodd, and saw him get ready to astonish the public. Both great 
 theatres gave their best actors to teach Dodd to read the services. 
 Garrick taught him so to read the Litany that people came from 
 the ends of the earth to hear him ; Mrs Clive taught him to read 
 the marriage service with much emotion, and the baptismal service 
 with a kind, fatherly attention to the infant. Did not Woodward,
 
 William Makepeace Thackeray. 445 
 
 the actor, teach him how to say, " Dearly beloved brethren " ? and 
 also coach him up in the reading of an Epistle ? Barry taught 
 him to read the Communion Service until he nearly harrowed up 
 the sinners ; and the Athanasian Creed until damnation rolled 
 round the church as thunder-storms sometimes do. He was the 
 cheapest of quacks. When Lady Blessington declared in her 
 book that she saw Lord Byron in a nankeen jacket and spectacles, 
 do you like him so well ? I try to read " The Corsair," but when 
 1 do so, I see the nankeen jacket and spectacles it is like a 
 picture painted over another, and the confounded nankeen jacket 
 and spectacles will peep through. Why not paint him in curls, 
 instead of in the disgusting nankeen in which there is so much 
 bathos ? It calls up remembrances of the mediaeval spinsters of 
 our early days, and of men who wore trousers which were too 
 short and every way too small for them. I never yet saw a man 
 wearing nankeen who did not look shrunk. It is the most un- 
 romantic tackle I know of. 
 
 If, then, men are to be blamed, the blame lies with the public 
 rather than with the men themselves, and the blame will last until 
 people can be satisfied with perfect naturalness and simplicity. Is 
 an author like his book, or is his book like an author? The 
 sentiments that authors draw are very often a great deal beauti- 
 fuller than the actions which an author does. When it is known 
 that a man who has for a long time taught the path of duty, has 
 committed a meanness, people turn round and say that his long 
 life has been a shallow hypocrisy, and the short time spent in 
 iniquity has been a display of his real hidden nature. People say 
 that a man cannot be a good poet unless he is a good man. This 
 doctrine I do not believe. It is true that, to be a good poet, a 
 man must be of good disposition, must have a good sight, often 
 have good aspirations and good inclinations ; and what are these 
 without a sympathy with what is lofty, generous, and noble? I 
 can imagine that Sterne was harsh to his wife ; but he wrote 
 tenderly of Maria. His wife may not have been a Maria, 
 and there is a tendency to take out of the familiar, the ex- 
 haustion which has been brought about by the worship of 
 the ideal. The cases, if you will hunt all through literature, 
 in which an author has not been in himself as glorious as his 
 works, are few. As instances of this, I may mention Milton,
 
 446 William Makepeace Thackeray. 
 
 Schiller, Bishop Warburton, Sir Philip Sidney, Dr Johnson, 
 Addison, Gobbet, Jeremy Bentham, and others. An author 
 cannot avoid painting himself in his works, a circumstance well 
 known in the old times by him who said, " O, that mine enemy 
 would write a book ! " A book is the revelation of revelations, 
 and is the one thing that betrays a man more than any other. It 
 is often said that there are two views of life the ideal and the 
 real. Thackeray gave much thought to this, and though he had 
 a model man and a model woman, he had a whole gallery of 
 realities. On one side of his study he had the ideal, and on the 
 other side the real. On one side were his Chrysostom, his Paul, 
 and his Apostles, and on the other his vicar, curate, deacon, and 
 beadle. And so it is all through literature, an author fills his 
 book with two classes of characters, real and ideal. In Shake- 
 speare, we have the ideal Miranda and the actual Stephano. The 
 poet had seen all his great characters pass by ; he had known 
 FalstafF, talked to Dame Quickly, and had seen Mrs Page. Sir 
 Walter Scott drew Rebecca from his imagination, but he had 
 known Andrew Fairservice, and drew him from actual observation. 
 The same remark applies universally, almost. Oliver Goldsmith 
 was " a hero with chambermaids, and a coward to ladies," and 
 this spirit he carried into all his writings. Books are absolutely 
 necessary for an author to act out all that he is ; for can we 
 suppose that a man ever talks his best? No, indeed, it never 
 can be done. Can you imagine Rousseau talking his reveries, or 
 giving utterance verbally to all the world of tenderness which is 
 wrapped up in his Confessions ? Or do you suppose that Pepys 
 would have spoken out all that he wrote in his immortal Diary ? 
 Shakespeare could not have told all the wealth of passion which 
 he has put into his plays. It can only be done on paper that 
 wonderful confessor of the soul and only through the pen. Who 
 can wonder that the Commandments should be graven on a rock ? 
 or that the sublimest language of love must be written ? 
 
 I find the connection between Thackeray and his books very 
 close; he is thoroughly and intensely in his books. Nobody 
 knows him so thoroughly through his books as by his books. 
 Reading his books, we find a cultivated man a man of natural 
 genius, but that genius hindered a little at the beginning by too 
 much cultivation, which, with a man of great natural genius, acts
 
 William Makepeace Thackeray. 447 
 
 like the clouds of a glorious day, that seem to hamper and hide 
 the sun, until he not only conquers them, but gathers them into a 
 long train of wonderful glory. 
 
 Thackeray, being an educated man, was modest, and withal a 
 man of the world in the best and highest sense of the word. 
 Amongst literary men there are two classes hermits like Thomas 
 Carlyle a man who did not belong to clubs, who did not make 
 morning calls, who did not put himself at the service of idlers 
 and fools, who did not have his carte de visite portraits taken, and 
 send them out in a wheel-barrow, who did not keep a footman ; 
 and we also have men of the world, like Thackeray, who 
 was a member of several clubs, who sauntered down Pall 
 Mall, and, standing at the bow windows, criticised the 
 girls as they passed, calling this one a dowdy and that 
 one a belle, who was critical upon horses, talked politics, 
 smoked pipes, and went the whole round of life. We cannot 
 spare these men of the world, who are growing as useful as 
 hermits. It is very possible to be a good hermit, but very 
 difficult to be a good man of the world. Perhaps your ideal of 
 the religious man is a hermit a man who never sits in the seat 
 of the scornful (the scornful being those who read Punch] or walks 
 with the profane (they being those who go to plays), but turns 
 his back upon Babylon (that is, never goes to a ball). These 
 hermits are uncommonly useful ; but what is to become of the 
 world if a man does not carry the lamp of true piety into the 
 streets of Babylon ? and what is to become of us if the godly 
 people do not sometimes come down our way? We find that 
 Thomas Carlyle kept under the mere ordinary robes of mortality 
 an upright spirit, a truthful heart, and a pious soul. From his 
 hermitage at Chelsea he sent forth his wonderful prophecies, which 
 will in future years be set down next to those of the Hebrew 
 Scriptures. Then, on -the other hand, we have our Thackeray 
 a man of the world, great, and full of gracefulness, full of fun ; 
 criticising bishops, millionaires, and tailors ; able to shake the 
 brass out of a Prince Regent, able to whip this nation for its 
 disgusting loyalty, able to scourge the aristocracy, able to criticise 
 the democracy ; a man who walked through life carrying the lamp 
 of an upright character, a pure spirit, and a truth-telling tongue. 
 
 I find Thackeray a very generous man generous to relieve
 
 448 William Makepeace Thackeray. 
 
 distress in all its forms, and what is more, generous to literary 
 men, and to his contemporaries in the same walk of letters as 
 himself. It is hard to admire a man in the same line of business 
 as one's self, to do it heartily, to look at them impartially, as if 
 they belonged to a different line. It is easy for a manufacturer 
 to go to a cattle show, and admire a sheep of which he knows 
 nothing ; or for an ironmaster to admire a mountain of lard 
 called a pig, well knowing that it will not influence the price of 
 his own "pigs"; and people may admire wood-turning, knowing 
 that it does not come out of their own heads ; but for people in 
 the same line of business to do this is difficult. Michael Angelo 
 has done this, and Thackeray has done the same. His praise of 
 the writings of his contemporary and, in a degree, rival 
 Charles Dickens, illustrates this. And Thackeray's praise was not 
 all praise ; for who is all compliments, robs his compliments 
 of half their value. It is only he who knows how to blame whose 
 praise is truly choice. I hate the whole set of literature in which 
 such men as Bill Sykes those dirty, unwashed, nasty ruffians 
 are brought into decent company. I think a great novelist ought 
 to have something better to do than to wash the dirty unwashed 
 of his own day. He may paint an old ruffian, but it is a difficult ' 
 matter to say at what age a ruffian becomes lawful. It is one of 
 Thackeray's greatest glories that, throughout all his works, he has 
 not been indebted to the Newgate Calendar for a hero he could 
 get rogues to paint without descending to such depths as that. 
 In all probability, many of you will not like this, because 
 you are Dickens mad. In addition to this, Dickens 
 has, by contorting the English language causing chimneys 
 to " grin," window frames to " wink," and similar other 
 monstrosities spoiled it, and created a school of imitators who fill 
 their " All Round the Clocks," " All Round the Weeks," and such 
 like publications with such stuff from week to week. There was 
 nothing of this in Thackeray, who loved his work and glorified it. 
 His calling was that of a novelist, a tale-teller to spin stories a 
 profession which some people have not yet settled the right or 
 wrong of. 
 
 There are people in Birmingham who are dead against novel- 
 reading, and who assert that it makes young women think them- 
 selves the heroine of the fiction, and gives young men very high
 
 William Makepeace Thackeray. 449 
 
 notions of chivalry, and a very low one of chicanery and robbery. 
 But with Thackeray it was the readiest and the truest way of re- 
 presenting the spirit of the time, and he adopted it His apprecia- 
 tion of his calling is finally given in those parts of his lectures on 
 the Humourists which deal with Fielding and Steele. If any man 
 knows "Vanity Fair "well, and "Esmond" if he knows "Esmond" 
 well, he knows the old days of Queen Anne; and if he reads 
 " Vanity Fair," or " Pendennis," or " The Newcomes," he will see 
 the man at the clubs ; Rotten Row, and the riders thereon ; how 
 bishops are made, and what they do when they are made ; how 
 men wriggled into Parliament in the nineteenth century ; how the 
 theatre of St Stephen's and all its scene-shifters and candle- 
 snuffers do their work ; indeed, he will see a very picture of life 
 in the nineteenth century. 
 
 Thackeray was fond of eccentricities. He took a sham up 
 between his thumb and finger, straightened it out, then smelt it, 
 and then threw the foul imposture away. He was the greatest 
 master of comparative anatomy in our time. It is a great study 
 to be able to take a man mentally to pieces and dissect him. He 
 had a fine eye for a snob, from the top to the bottom of society. 
 He read it all, and knew where to find the particular bone the 
 snob bone. He said, " you notice in the anatomical structure of 
 this creature, now called George the Fourth, that this bone is 
 largely, fully, and freely developed ; " and then, taking some 
 wretched little snob from the middle classes, who lives in the back 
 parlour in order that he may have a drawing-room ; or some 
 Major Ponto, who has a large silver dish, and in the centre a 
 small landrail which he calls "game;" or a chamberlain "copper 
 stick in waiting," or "Jeames:" after examination, he says 
 " The same bone, with a slight alteration of development" He 
 had the finest eye for the importance of town society. He was 
 unsectarian in satire. He never scarified the great in order to 
 glorify the poor, or glorified the great to make out that the poor 
 were all vile. There was one thing done by old Rymer that 
 Thackeray did not follow him in. Rymer said tnat every king was 
 a hero. If this is so, we shall have to declare that Prussia has 
 headed a new page in the annals of chivalry. I have heard of a 
 man who went to fight, and, retiring early, lived to fight another 
 day ; but it is reserved to our own time to read the history of a 
 
 2 F
 
 45 William Makepeace Thackeray. 
 
 man who went when the fight was over to see where the fight had 
 been. When I went to a fight, I took my ticket and got there in 
 time; but when I go again, it will be a day after the fair. 
 Perhaps nothing much more just or severe has ever been written 
 than the immortal epitaph on George the Fourth. You may 
 call it savage, but it is true. He never acted well by man or 
 woman. He was as false to his mistress as to his wife. He 
 deserted his friends and his principles. He was so ignorant 
 that he could scarcely spell, but he had skill in cutting out coats 
 and an undeniable taste in cookery. He built the palaces of 
 Brighton and Buckingham, and for these qualities and proofs of 
 genius an admiring aristocracy christened him the First Gentle- 
 man in Europe. Friends, respect the king whose statue is here, 
 and the generous aristocracy who admired him. 
 
 I might go on at some length to speak of " Vanity Fair " and 
 its principal character, the " she-devil " Becky Sharp, but time 
 will not permit. I cannot even glance at all the works of 
 Thackeray, but I have endeavoured to show that his works are 
 worthy of the man, and that the man was worthy of his works ; 
 that he was a man who understood the nineteenth century and 
 the duties of a writer in it, and that he was a man who, without 
 exaggeration or fuss, painted us such a picture of life and gave us 
 such lessons in morals, that it is almost impossible to read them 
 without getting wiser. He was a man who set himself to do what 
 he could with novels, and put into them all the gospel and the law, 
 and all the testimony that his upright life and true conscience 
 had ever caused him to learn,
 
 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 BORN 1798. DIED 1845. (FROM 38x11 GEO. III. TO STH VICTORIA.) 
 
 I HAVE not chosen the present subject with a view to show what a 
 high-priest of fun Thomas Hood was, but rather what an admir- 
 able man he was, and what a true spirit and religious soul he pos- 
 sessed, and to correct the mistake I fear some people labour 
 under that the man who is full of fun, mirth, wit, and jokes, is a 
 shallow man. The most shallow of men is one who has no 
 laughter in him, and the most playful of souls is the most holy, 
 and the fullest of charity, tenderness, and loving-kindness. True 
 merriment is one of God's greatest gifts to man. 
 
 Reading Thomas Hood's puns is out of my line, but in the 
 course of my daily experience of men and women I have found 
 the world so full of prigs, who by virtue of their stupidity believe 
 themselves to be wise, and by virtue of their inability to see a 
 joke, make it out that joking is bad, that I take a peculiar pleasure 
 in showing Thomas Hood to be one of the gentlest, most charit- 
 able, and truest gentlemen of modern days. I cannot say to what 
 Church he belonged, or what darling minister he sat under, but in 
 all things that make a man King of Jesters, Prince of Punsters, 
 Lord of Misrule, and Master of Mirth he was supreme. 
 
 The facts of his life may soon be told. His father was a 
 Scotchman, but I thank God his mother was not of the same 
 nationality ; not that I mean any disrespect to my Scotch friends, 
 but because one of the most difficult things in the world is to 
 make a Scotchman see a joke indeed, the greatest triumph in 
 my life was having once excited a burst of merriment in a Scotch 
 audience. Well, his father lived in London, and had something 
 to do with publishing and printing, and Thomas, his son, was an 
 engraver, and married a wife a kind, loveable woman, who was 
 gloriously dull at times to the merits of a joke, whose husband 
 often " sold " her, and who did not dislike being " sold." It is a
 
 452 Thomas Hood. 
 
 beautiful thing in Hood's life to watch the terrible accumulation 
 of those petty sorrows which do far more to try the worth of a 
 man than all the heroic griefs of this world. He was a poor man, 
 and soon got into a partnership that placed him in debt. The 
 debt was not so great as that of Sir Walter Scott, but it was a 
 heavy burden upon a man who was poor in health, always 
 dyspeptic, almost always miserable, who possessed a tender con- 
 science and was always making jokes. He had to become an 
 exile from his native land to seek cheap living, good air, lowly 
 cookery, and small payments all to clear off a debt that was none 
 of his ; for in this world honest men must pay the debts of the 
 knaves. For this purpose he went to Coblentz, thence to Berlin, 
 thence returned to England, and again went to Ostend. His 
 family was, happily in his circumstances, not very large, though 
 he would himself have said, honestly, " the more the merrier." 
 
 I do not place him among the Dei ma/ores, the great gods of 
 Literature, but he is an admirable specimen of the Dei minores, 
 and his works show that he possessed almost every qualification 
 that makes a man loveable. It is said that God's mercies are 
 tender mercies, and I am angry to see that the adjectives to be 
 found in the Bible and other books are so often thrown away. 
 Mercies are common, but tender mercies mean much more. It 
 is a mercy to write a letter to a little child ; but it is a tender 
 mercy to take a little longer time about it, and write in Roman 
 letters, so that the little one can have the proud satisfaction of 
 spelling it over for himself. It is a mercy to give a servant a 
 holiday ; but it is a tender mercy when she asks for one day to 
 give her two, so that she may not have to come away at nine 
 o'clock, just when the dancing begins. And Thomas Hood, when 
 suffering from painful attacks of disease, after he had got through 
 his work would still spare the time to draw a number of head- 
 pieces, tail-pieces, grotesques, and caricatures of all kinds on a 
 scrap of paper, and then, taking off his shoes, would creep up- 
 stairs and lay it on the pillow of his children, so that when they 
 woke up in the morning they might find this evidence of his love 
 before their eyes. It was a mercy to make the drawings, but it 
 was a tender mercy to take off his shoes and creep upstairs with- 
 out waking the children. 
 
 I find in Hood another sure sign of a gentle heart : he had
 
 Thomas Hood. 453 
 
 some terrible hatreds. It is a common mistake to suppose that a 
 gentle heart dislikes nothing ; but you must remember the necessity 
 that exists for him who loves God truly to hate the devil much 
 that a passion for light implies a hatred of darkness, and that 
 " the sons of God shall have no communion with the sons of 
 Belial." He had a great hatred of bigots, those who are not con- 
 tent with having a creed of their own, and with proclaiming it 
 pretty loudly, but who say you cannot be acceptable to God unless 
 you believe as they do, that honesty is not honesty unless it is in 
 accordance with some peculiar version of some incomprehensibility. 
 Then he hated pedants, those who, not content with giving the 
 results of their reflections, must parade the machinery by which 
 those results had been obtained before the eyes of everyone. The 
 time in which he lived was an age of pedantries, of progress, 
 liberty, penny magazines, Lord Broughams, and an enlightened 
 people. He joined with Cobbett in thinking it were better to 
 have the Inquisition, and poor people have well-filled bellies and 
 good round cheeks, than to have civil and religious liberty with 
 starvation. And so it is ; for has not divine method given the 
 child an appetite long before it either has civil and religious liberty, 
 or requires it ? Then he hated quacks, men who pretended to 
 cure diseases they knew nothing about, who gave results without 
 having ever mastered the processes. Hood hated all these, and, 
 hating, must fight with them. His eyes always spied out the 
 crack in the armour, and his shaft was sent direct to the spot ; 
 but he never struck a man when he was down, nor followed even 
 the vicious into the recesses of private life, to sting them in the 
 domestic circle. 
 
 He dearly loved his wife, and had a warm affection for his 
 children, to whom he wrote the most charming letters, and with 
 whom he sympathised most closely. I find that Thomas Hood 
 was a religious man, though I am not able to detect the church 
 he attended or the minister he sat under. He was a man who 
 feared God, spoke the truth, loved justice, walked humbly, loved 
 sweetly, paid off his debts, was charitable towards all men, leaned 
 upon the arm of God, confessed himself a broken reed in the 
 hands of the Almighty. Beyond that I do not know that he 
 was " religious." So far as all these things make a man religious, 
 he was so ; but he kept his religion as quiet and unobtrusive as he
 
 454 Thomas Hood. 
 
 could, and that is not the fashion now-a-days. Now, men are not 
 content with believing, but must state the process by which 
 they arrived at their belief, give their texts, articles, and creeds, 
 and state what special services and revival sermons they attend. 
 Instead of prayers being the most private of man's affairs, they 
 are the most public. D.V. is printed on bills ; there are saintly 
 linen-drapers and glorified dealers in cotton, who " beg (D.V.) 
 to open their shops on Tuesday next/' The fashion is too 
 prevalent in the present day, with some people, of affecting to 
 regard Thomas Hood, and, in fact, all who minister to their 
 amusement, with pharisaical contempt, and despising all those 
 who gratify them by an exhibition of talent of a humorous, 
 mirthful, or imitative character. It is the too common practice 
 with some, after they have laughed at the humour of an actor, 
 delighted in the performances of a gifted singer, wondered at 
 the agility of a tight-rope dancer, revelled in the crack article 
 of a magazine, or exploded at the too-it-it-too of a Punch, to go 
 home and sneer at the hard-working beings who have, perad- 
 venture, spent a life in attending to the talent which has charmed 
 them. But the only thing we can do is to thank God we are unlike 
 these dreary children of convention, and endeavour to avoid falling 
 into the same errors as they do. We must remember that a tight- 
 rope dancer, perhaps, makes it the study of his life to amuse us, 
 just as a minister makes it the study of his life to teach us. It is 
 now as it has ever been ; one man must carry the load of mortar 
 and another lay the brick ; one man make the design and another 
 build the house ; one man be William Shakespeare and another be 
 Thomas Hood. 
 
 In order the better to bear out the assertions I have made 
 respecting Hood's religion and childlike simplicity, I must refer 
 you to his biography, written by his son, and to his inimitable 
 letters to children. His biography, however, contains few in- 
 cidents, and is simply the life of a man who was almost always 
 poor, and almost always sick ; an exile searching for cheapness 
 and health, who met with an heroic and cheerful bearing the 
 petty calamities of life ; who showed his heroism by making a 
 true jest of his calamities ; who was the greatest punster the world 
 has ever had, and the supremest master of nonsense the world has 
 ever seen. There are some persons who cannot appreciate non-
 
 Tkomas Hood. 455 
 
 sense, and for those benighted beings I must express my pity, for 
 a man's afflictions ought always to be pitied. Hood's nonsense is 
 the play of men ; children have their play, and it is very graceful ; 
 monkeys have their play, and it is very comical ; and the wisest 
 man must have nonsense, for nonsense is as essential to man as 
 sense. It is essential to the health of the spirit, for, like the 
 overflowing of a cup, it shows the fulness of measure. Some can- 
 tankerous persons are so miserable as never to have any nonsense, 
 for their cup is never full ; their measure is like the measure of a 
 scrimping shopkeeper who is anxious to get rich quickly, and to 
 give no more than the law compels. Whenever a man has great 
 genius and a large heart, it is sure to overflow in the shape of 
 nonsense, and the best nonsense in the world is that of Thomas 
 Hood. The immense benefit of punning in a social and philo- 
 sophical point of view can scarcely be calculated, and more ot 
 comparative philology may be learned from the study of first- 
 rate puns than from any other source. 
 
 It must be remembered that Hood was never in easy circum- 
 stances, never enjoyed strong health, and was never free from 
 anxiety ; that his life was a continual running away from calamity 
 to meet with it afresh ; that he was the victim of publishers, of 
 booksellers, and of scamps ; and that through all this, cheerful- 
 ness, mirth, fun, good temper, gentleness of heart, and pity, 
 never failed him once. Hood never had a superior in comicality ; 
 he was the idealist of comicality, while the modern comic men 
 are only the poor realists of the same. His nonsense has a 
 bottomless absurdity in it, but it is always interesting, and (a sure 
 mark of genius) the same book that pleases children pleases men. 
 Children laugh at those of his works which every man who does 
 not enjoy is a fool. Many men make jokes, but Hood's jokes 
 arose in him spontaneously ; he appears to blunder into nonsense, 
 and yet it always seems perfectly natural. The story that Charles 
 Lamb, when reproached by his chief at the India House for 
 always arriving late, answered, " Yes, but remember I always go 
 away so early " an answer that at the first moment sounds as if 
 it was a reason, and is yet so delightfully absurd is the best 
 illustration out of Hood of what Hood's nonsense is. A basis of 
 bottomless absurdity, having an air of logical method, distinguishes 
 his gigantic fun and overpowering humour. Some of his charming
 
 456 Thomas Hood. 
 
 letters to children, and a letter to his friend Mr Phillips, illustrate 
 this; also a letter in answer to an invitation to be present at an 
 exhibition of the Manchester Athenaeum, where some years ago 
 they exhibited celebrated people upon a platform at two-and- 
 sixpence a head, to be followed by early dancing, and where 
 archbishops, bishops, statesmen, poets, and authors were shown 
 for the amusement of the Manchester cotton-lords and their 
 clerks. 
 
 A letter written by Dr Elliot at the time when a pension was 
 asked for Hood, describes the complication of organic diseases 
 by which the great punster and humourist was confined to a sick 
 bed, and in this letter it is stated that the illness was aggravated 
 by the anxiety and depression of mind, caused by his being 
 compelled to continue his literary labours at times when he was 
 suffering from disease. 
 
 Before I pass to the serious poems I will give you one or two 
 specimens of Hood as a punster : I am sorry, and yet glad, that 
 I shall be obliged to take some very old favourites, because every- 
 one knows them, but they are Hood's best, and will well bear 
 repeating. They are " Faithless Sally Brown," " Faithless Nelly 
 Gray," and "A Parthian Glance." The novel of "Tylney 
 Hall " is the most laboured and worst of Hood's productions, and 
 " Up the Rhine " is the best. 
 
 I now come to Hood's serious poems, which are not among 
 the greatest, though they are full of elegance and beauty ; indeed, 
 it is a matter of surprise that, being so good, Hood could not 
 do better. His " Ode on a distant view of Clapham Academy," 
 and his "Ode to Rae Wilson," may be taken as examples of 
 these. I can well understand that people guiltless of fun them- 
 selves will consider it a very wrong thing to read anything like 
 the latter. I am told that Rae Wilson was a good man, and he 
 was certainly one who thought he had a little private commission 
 to judge the feelings of others ; was one of a class that used to 
 exist who could gauge any man's piety, and who put forth a 
 little rule of their own phraseology, and, unless a man could quote 
 that freely, said he was not pious. I dare say you know some 
 Rae Wilson, Esq., and in a day or two you will hear some of them 
 talk. Of course I read this ode under protest, and with a feeling 
 o! burning indignation, as I admire Rae Wilson. But, seriously,
 
 Thomas Hood. 457 
 
 I ask if it is too bad, after the example of pious bankers, British 
 and others, after the last few years of British commerce, the most 
 sneaking, lying, rascally, canting period ever known, when they 
 open a bank with prayer, and say grace before meat, and then 
 swallow a widow and three orphans ; and next morning they are 
 at it again. I say that these words, sharp as they are, are not too 
 sharp ; severe as they seem, the only fault I know in them is that 
 they are not severe enough. In the same poem Hood speaks warmly 
 against the principle of making people religious by law, making 
 them good by compulsion Anti this, and main force the other. 
 
 Then there are those letters that passed between Hood and Sir 
 Robert Peel regarding the poet's pension. Sir Robert Peel, in 
 announcing the grant, said that he had read all Hood's acknow- 
 ledged works, and acknowledged " the good sense and good feel- 
 ing which have taught you to infuse so much fun and merriment 
 into writings, curing folly and exposing absurdities, and yet never 
 trespassing beyond those limits within which wit and facetiousness 
 are not very often confined." Now you would hardly have 
 thought that Sir Robert Peel could have read all Hood's writings 
 in that busy life of his, which at the first sight looks all red tape 
 and officialism. Some of you have got the idea that Sir Robert 
 Peel was rigid and frigid, cold and icy ; but in reality no man had 
 a more kindly heart, a more genial soul than that great statesman, 
 who did not carry his best qualities on his sleeve, and who might 
 be said to be like a fountain, sometimes ice-bound, but still having 
 the waters of sweetness within. In his last letter, written by Hood 
 when on his death-bed to Sir Robert Peel, he protested against 
 that literary movement in which he felt he had had some share, 
 that one-sided humanity so different from the universal Catholicism 
 of Shakespeare, and said, " The poles of society are already too 
 far asunder. It should be the duty of our writers to draw them 
 nearer by kindly attraction, not to aggravate the existing repulsion 
 and place a wider gulf between rich and poor, with hate on one 
 side, and fear on the other." Hood sinned a little in that way, 
 but not much, and his repentance was greater than his sin. He 
 died on the ist of May, the month in which he was married, and 
 in which all the noticeable events of his life happened, his last 
 words being, " Oh Lord, say, ' Arise, take up thy cross, and 
 follow Me.' "
 
 MARTIN LUTHER* 
 
 BORN 1483. DIED 1546. 
 {From a Birmingham newspaper, dated February 18, 1846.) 
 
 EDNESDAY evening last, being the 3ooth anniversary of 
 
 * * the death of Martin Luther, Mr Dawson lectured on 
 some points connected with the life and character of that remark- 
 able man. Having protested against the spirit of monopoly 
 exercised by every religious party with regard to the great men 
 who had belonged to it, and the partial eulogy bestowed by that 
 party, Mr Dawson proceeded to notice the humble birth of 
 Luther, as another of the many cases in which the world's heralds 
 have arisen from the poorer classes of society. Tracing briefly 
 the well-known facts of his early course, the lecturer paused at 
 Luther's visit to Rome, and the bitter disappointment he experi- 
 enced when the reality so little corresponded to the exalted 
 expectations this zealous son of the Church had formed of this 
 holy of holies. Bitter as was this lesson, Luther and the world 
 could ill have spared it : what he then saw, justified what he 
 afterwards spoke. 
 
 Mr Dawson drew a distinction between the use of strong and 
 stern language against a public abuse or wrong, and the employ- 
 ment of such words in a private case ; though bidden to forgive 
 private injuries, the Christian is not forbidden to protest against 
 spiritual wickedness in high places. Christ, ever gentle to the 
 penitent, spoke sternly to the Pharisees and Scribes. 
 
 Luther, in common with many other reformers, failed to carry 
 out to their legitimate length his own principles. Hence had 
 arisen the great defect of Protestantism, which promised private 
 
 * These brief notices of Luther and Calvin are only inserted to complete 
 the group of Religious Leaders, and to indicate Mr Dawson's attitude towards 
 the Protestant Reformation.
 
 Martin Luther. 459 
 
 judgment, but in many indirect ways broke the promise. The 
 Reformers (and they are imitated by their admirers of to-day) 
 asserted the principle of private judgment, but then limited its 
 free exercise by authoritatively defining what it must arrive at, 
 " You may think for yourselves, but you must think as we do ! " 
 The Evangelical Alliance is a body which asserts private judg- 
 ment, and then settles what verdict private judgment must pass ; 
 and refuses a place to all who do not arrive at the credence of 
 that verdict. True that the thing is a voluntary union, but that 
 does not alter the spirit which dictates so strange a contradiction. 
 The practical denial of its own principles will lead to the gradual 
 dissolution of Protestantism under its present form. The final 
 battle must be fought between Authority, as embodied in 
 Romanism, and full freedom as to be hereafter found in that 
 true Catholic Church, towards which the most thoughtful of all 
 the sects are feeling their way. Men cannot continue to dwell in 
 this middle state ; either, like Newman, they must go back to 
 Rome, or else, as Arnold was doing, go forward to freedom. 
 
 Too harsh a judgment must not be passed on Luther and his 
 fellows for this seeming denial of their own principles. A re- 
 former is exposed to many painful trials and temptations. He 
 finds that his words have stirred up strifes and divisions, intro- 
 duced discords into families, chilled hearts and hands that once 
 were warm, estranged friends, unsettled old convictions, and 
 substituted doubts and uncertainty where before was belief, or at 
 least, the calm of careless lack of thought. The blame is thrown 
 on him : accusing fingers point at him, and with cruel unfairness 
 and childish pettishness his surgeon hand is cursed, and not the 
 disease which demanded his painful aid. Finding too, as Luther 
 did, his name taken in vain, and the riotous doings of Miinster 
 fanatics laid at his door, he is tempted to halt, to become con- 
 servative, and to become authoritative and dictatorial in the hope 
 of checking these unpleasant things. He forgets the Lord's words, 
 " Think not that I am come to send peace on earth, I am come 
 not to send peace but a sword ; for I am come to set a man at 
 variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, 
 and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and a man's 
 foes shall be they of his own household." 
 
 Mr Dawson proceeded to show ho\v Luther had succeeded so
 
 460 Martin Luther. 
 
 greatly by appealing to the people. A controversy was to be settled 
 between the Pope and Luther. Luther appealed to the people, 
 by translating the Bible into their tongue, and by preaching to 
 them. All revivals of religion were accomplished by this means. 
 Religion in this land, in the eighteenth century, had become 
 weak and decayed. Wesley and Whitfield recovered it by preach- 
 ing to the people. Religion was like that giant of old table let 
 it but touch its mother earth and it rose up again strong to do 
 and to dare. 
 
 Mr Dawson concluded by exhorting all who desired to see 
 religion truly revived, to turn to the people ; to go, pioneer-like, 
 into the regions where there is darkness thick darkness and the 
 shadow of death.
 
 JOHN CALVIN. 
 BORN 1509. DIED 1564. 
 
 T^NGLISHMEN would admit and accept with relish and 
 *-' delight many of their (German) principles of criticism and 
 thought in their initial stages, in their uncompleted and moderate 
 condition ; but when these writers proceed to unfold the fruit to 
 which the germ that we have been cherishing must lead, we 
 close our eyes in fury and horror. We had rather hold in our 
 hands the fair blossom, and keep it a blossom for ever, than find 
 out its true nature, by having its ash apple put into our hands. 
 For this reason it is that Calvin's theology has never had any 
 more than an exceptional hold on our national mind. His stern 
 logic compelled him to certain stern conclusions, from which, 
 because they were legitimate deductions from his premises, he 
 did not shrink. Thus he placed Christ Himself among the 
 damned. He knew what he was about ; he knew that his system 
 necessarily involved these conclusions, and that it must fall to 
 the ground if they were denied. But we, with our characteristic 
 good sense and illogical and inconsistent prudence, are only 
 " moderately Calvinistic." That is exactly characteristic of us. 
 We will not go on far enough to discover that our ground is false. 
 We pause at the moment when the light of detection is going to 
 dawn upon us. We will not let our theory carry us beyond what 
 is stronger to us than any theory. And so we cherish our false- 
 hood unconscious of its nature, hold the snake in our bosoms, 
 but never suffer it to grow so warm as to become vital and bite. 
 A pity but that we sometimes did we should then fling it away, 
 and know a snake again when we saw it.* 
 
 * " Nihil actum erat, si corporea tantum morte defunctus fuisset Christus : 
 sed operse simul pretium erat, ut divinse ultionis severitatem sentiret, quo et 
 irse ipsius intercederet, et satisfaceret justo judicio. Unde etiam eum 
 oportuit, cum inferorum copiis seternae mortis horrore, quasi consertis manibus 
 luctari." "rgv, si ad inferos descendisse dicitur,nil mirttm." " Utsciamusnon 
 modo corpus Christ! in pretium redemptionis fuisse traditum, sed aliud majus 
 et excellentius, pretium fuisse, quod diros in atrimd cruciatus damnati ac 
 perditi hominis pertitlerit." PROSP. REV.
 
 CALVIN AND SERVETUS. 
 
 CALVIN: BORN 1509. DIED 1564. 
 SERVETUS : BORN 1509. DIED 1553. 
 
 OOME months ago I sketched the life and character of that 
 ^ great man of the Church, John Calvin, showing his learning, 
 his clear intellect, his devout zeal, his marvellous industry, his 
 grand poverty, his great self-denial, his sickly body, his sad soul, 
 his brave heart, and his unwearied perseverance ; and showing 
 also his errors and his failings (for he was but a man), his 
 imperious temper, his despotic spirit, his egotistic magnification 
 of himself and his office, his impatience of contradiction, and his 
 petty, peevish anger against any man who assailed his views, his 
 teachings, or himself. As time then failed, I had to leave to a 
 future occasion the ugliest chapter of his history, the darkest blot 
 on his great fame his dealings with the famous Spaniard, Michael 
 Servetus. 
 
 Such stories are not pleasant, and could most men follow their 
 likings, they would blot such pages out of history, and read it 
 without its shadows and crimes. But in reading history we must 
 read all ; and though I have now said all the good I can of 
 Calvin, and a more thorough admirer he never had yet, still I 
 have no sect or party to defend, and with the best desires to see 
 Calvin clearly through this business, yet I think him highly and 
 greatly to blame. 
 
 Servetus was born in the same year as Calvin, in 1509, at Villa 
 Nueva, in Arragon ; his father was a notary ; and he himself was 
 sickly and diseased in body, but with an inquisitive and restless 
 mind, given somewhat to metaphysical fancies, and all his life 
 vain, very arrogant, boastful, fanatic, mystical, noisy, acute, 
 clever, learned, and brave. Leaving the study of the law, betak- 
 ing himself to metaphysics, and astrology, star-gazing the night 
 long, he at last came to Basle, where, in 1531, he published his 
 first work, " De Trinitatis Erroribus," a treatise on the errors con-
 
 Calvin and Ser veins. 46 3 
 
 earning the doctrine of the Trinity ; maintaining that the Scrip- 
 tures were the only sources of religious knowledge, and that they 
 had a mystical as well as a literal sense, and that it was impossible 
 for God to have a Son co-eternal with Himself. After this he 
 went to Strasburg, having adopted the name Villeneuf (from his 
 native place). He got his living by medicine, which he had 
 studied with pertinacity, industry, and success. He went after- 
 wards to Lyons, among the great printers whose names are so 
 dear to the lovers of old books, and got employment by cor- 
 recting proofs, which very few men then could do, as the work 
 needed to be done by a great scholar. He afterwards went to 
 Paris, and took his .two degrees as Magister and Doctor in 
 Medicine. In a book published at this time he laid down clearly 
 the circulation of the blood ; and some years after Harvey had 
 made his discovery the theory was found in Servetus's book, 
 the " Restitutio Christianismi." 
 
 In 1540 he removed to Vienne, and carried on a correspond- 
 ence with Calvin ; and when Servetus was tried as the supposed 
 author of the " Restitutio Christianismi " at Vienne, Calvin (the 
 great Protestant) sent the letters and manuscript he had received 
 from Servetus to a Roman Catholic Court, by which Servetus was 
 to be condemned. By such evidence he was condemned ; but he 
 contrived to escape, and fled to Geneva. Calvin had been 
 offended by some remarks written by Servetus on the pages of 
 his great " Institutes," and in a private letter said, " If ever he 
 comes within my authority, I will never surfer him to depart 
 alive ; " but he gave not a hint of the sort to Servetus, who un- 
 suspectingly fled to Geneva, into Calvin's own State, and where 
 he ruled almost supreme. He intended to go to Italy, by way of 
 Zurich, but was discovered and arrested, and by trickery and 
 stratagem was induced to confess himself to be Servetus. Accord- 
 ing to a curious custom prevailing in Geneva, someone had 
 to stake his life against that of the prisoner, and a servant of 
 Calvin did so against Servetus. He was tried for heresy and 
 blasphemy, in some thirty articles, one of which charged him with 
 attacking and defaming the doctrine of Monsieur Calvin, minister 
 of God's word, in the church at Geneva. He was condemned to 
 be burned alive, and was treated with the greatest harshness and 
 cruelty while in prison. Calvin got the opinion of the churches
 
 464 Calvin and Servetus. 
 
 on the matter ; and all condemned Servetus, but none recom- 
 mended that he should be put to death. But Calvin, whose per- 
 sonal feelings were deeply wounded, determined that Servetus 
 should die, and that he should be burned alive. Servetus 
 was thunder-struck and horror-struck. He begged and prayed 
 that he might be beheaded, lest, as he plaintively said, the 
 torture of the fire might make him say some lie and lose his own 
 soul. Near Geneva, on the 27th of October 1553, Servetus was 
 led forth, placed on a block surrounded by oak boughs (the wood 
 unfortunately green), with a crown or chaplet of straw round his 
 head, saturated with sulphur that he might be suffocated the 
 sooner ; and for half-an-hour, with green wood, and an executioner 
 who was a booby and a blunderer, did that man slowly burn. The 
 last words he was heard to utter were taken to confirm his heresy, 
 as he to the last addressed Christ as the Son of God. 
 
 The moment he was dead a great reaction set in, and Calvin 
 saw that he had done wrong. He wrote in defence of his unwise 
 and barbarous act, as the first Reformer who put a heretic to 
 death. None can deny that through the whole business there 
 was too much personal antagonism, too much wounded vanity, 
 too much vindictive animosity from Calvin to Servetus. Calvin 
 was essentially an autocrat, could not brook contradiction or 
 censure ; and as our own Henry removed the Papacy in his own 
 person to London, so did John Calvin at Geneva ; whether wear- 
 ing three or forty crowns, making himself the Pope of the Protes- 
 tant Church in its views and faith. The special merits or demerits 
 of Servetus need not be discussed ; whatever were his works and 
 life, his death did good in bringing Protestantism to its senses, 
 and from the discussions and debates which followed his death 
 Servetus probably did the world as much good by dying as he did 
 by living.
 
 ULRICH ZWINGLL 
 
 BORN 1484. DIED 1531. 
 
 T3 Y the order established by God, in Europe, Switzerland is 
 *-' physically and intellectually an important part. All the 
 great rivers of continental Europe have their birth in that land. 
 The Rhone running through France and seeking the Mediter- 
 ranean, washing the walls of many an old city and many a noble 
 vineyard, arises in Switzerland. There also rises the Rhine, so 
 dear to the German heart, the noblest of the world's rivers ; for, 
 after all, the North American rivers have nothing but their big- 
 ness no antiquity, no pedigree, and nothing in their scenery to 
 be admired. In Switzerland, too, the Danube rises, and many 
 other streams, showing the land to be the highest place in central 
 Europe. It is a land which, for wise purposes, has been the 
 greatest stronghold of human liberty that Europe has. Switzer- 
 land is the one great old republic amidst the endless emperors 
 and kings who have wearied Europe and afflicted humanity. 
 
 In the days of the Reformation its John Calvin and its Ulrich 
 Zwingli played most important parts. The great rigidities and 
 severities of Calvin's doctrine formed probably the reasons why 
 he, a Frenchman, had so little influence on France ; and his 
 preaching of Protestantism, severe in its nature and doctrine, did 
 not fit it for the French mind ; but when he came to Geneva he 
 soon became lawgiver, preacher, and ruler, ruling with an iron 
 hand. 
 
 Ulrich Zwingli was a Swiss proper, born and bred there, with 
 every peculiarity which has ever distinguished his country. He 
 was born in 1484, at Wildhaus, St Gall, in the Toggenburg, one 
 of the mountain districts of Switzerland, and his father was a 
 farmer tolerably well to do in the world. Young Ulrich had a 
 quick intellect, a clear brain, a brave heart, a pleasant sunny 
 temper, and, as a little lad, had heard and learned the Bible 
 
 2 G
 
 466 Ulrich Zwingli. 
 
 stories, as children always will (for there are none others to which 
 they take so kindly). After living at Basle and Berne, he went 
 to Vienna to study, and become a deep good scholar. Then he 
 returned to Berne to pursue his studies, giving, like many a poor 
 Scotch student, lessons to others, that he might get the means to 
 teach himself. He was a dear lover of music, and found his 
 flute a kindly friend ; and as he sat down to play, the little 
 children often gathered round, and the poor folks of the place, 
 whose bread was scanty and their pleasures few. He found, like 
 Luther, and many a much-tried much-tempted man. that love of 
 music was a great delight, and intended by God to be a refresh- 
 ment and a pleasure amid the many perils and dangers of a much- 
 tried life. His reputation for scholarship extended, and he 
 became pastor of a church at Glarus, and entered on his duties 
 with a good heart and great energy. He was a Bible-reading 
 man, and soon came to doubt a great deal of what the world 
 counted religion, finding the most " religious " people the least 
 godly, and that though Europe was then excessively "religious," 
 the church was full of abuses, the manners of the clergy offensive 
 in the extreme, and the morals of the laity filthy and corrupt. 
 He soon began to get into trouble ; preaching more to the people, 
 telling them more of godliness than prayers, and that it was more 
 important to live well than to pray any quantity of Ave Marias. 
 Paternosters, or any such spiritual tread-mill work, which was 
 then counted the sure method of reaching heaven. 
 
 At this time of his life, Zwingli, as a young man, committed 
 some faults, of which he was afterwards thoroughly ashamed. 
 Then, as now, it was the custom of the Swiss to band themselves 
 to fight the battles of other countries, and Zwingli went with 
 some of his countrymen to Italy, acting as their chaplain, and 
 showing that then he deemed the office of soldier not incon- 
 sistent with that of priest and minister, and considered that a 
 Christian might fight for other countries than his own. Returning 
 from Italy, he was appointed preacher at Einsiedlen famous for 
 a black virgin, to which perpetual pilgrimages were made. Here 
 too, he preached faith in Christ alone, and no trust in black 
 virgins, miracles, and so forth, inflicting a sad blow on the trade 
 of the place, and telling the streams of pilgrims how to gain 
 salvation " without money and without price."
 
 Ulrick Zwingli. 467 
 
 About this time Zwingli first heard of Luther and his doings, of 
 Tetzel and his red cross, and his little cargo of indulgences, and 
 of how Dr Martin Luther had put out his famous theses denying 
 that indulgences had any virtue at all. The same thing had 
 occurred in Switzerland. Samson had come round on his journey 
 from the great Vatican house with his little ecclesiastical furniture 
 and stock of indulgences, his brazen face, his lying tongue, his im- 
 pudent lungs. In the course of his journey he came to Einsiedlen, 
 where Zwingli preached, and as Tetzel provoked Luther, so Samson 
 provoked Zwingli to the attack. Zwingli preached and denounced 
 Samson and his indulgences, and Samson, finding his market spoiled, 
 packed up his spiritual wares, and went elsewhere. The abuse of 
 this doctrine of indulgences must not, however, blind the eyes to 
 its real origin. In the early ages of the Church it exercised great 
 discipline, and while it counselled repentance to God, it imposed a 
 penalty ( pcena) for the church itself. This pana was sometimes 
 remitted in special cases, and the abuse gradually grew. In the 
 better ages of the church, it never claimed to pardon the culpa 
 (fault) but only to remit the pana (punishment), but the doctrine 
 of plenary indulgence came in, abuses followed, and indulgences 
 were extensively granted and openly sold. 
 
 Zwingli afterwards removed to Zurich, and there he met Samson 
 again, and again exposed him, preaching again his broad Protestant 
 doctrines of faith in Christ alone, and the necessity of reading and 
 studying the Scriptures. Samson was recalled to Rome, taking 
 with him from poor Switzerland eight hundred thousand crowns ; 
 and Zwingli, who loved his country with a passion, did all he could 
 to denounce the unholy gains. At Zurich he remained enthroned 
 in the great church, preaching to the people of their sins as a people, 
 denouncing their custom of hiring themselves as soldiers to foreign 
 States, labouring to teach them their duties in the world, and per- 
 suading Deans and dignitaries to give up to the service of the poor 
 what they had long unrighteously enjoyed. In this lies the great 
 distinction between the Swiss and the English Reformation ; the 
 English church lands have been seized and turned from their ori- 
 ginal purpose to add to the wealth of noble families and courtly 
 folk ; but in Switzerland, when changes came and the creed was 
 changed, the lands left by pious forefathers were still devoted to 
 the humble and the poor.
 
 468 Ulrich Zwingli. 
 
 Before the fame of what Martin Luther had done and taught 
 had reached Switzerland, and before the vindictive Frenchman, 
 John Calvin, had taken up his place there, Ulrich Zwingli, the 
 farmer's son, had gone to school and college, had left them 
 learned and devout, had returned to his native country to become 
 the king of his parish, the chief preacher at Einsiedlen, and with 
 courage and boldness in that land of shrines and monks and 
 bones, had lifted up his protest and his cry against the system 
 which asserted that a soul was to be saved by any quantity of 
 performances and contemplations of relics and bones, had for- 
 bidden the impudent impostor Samson, with his red cross and his 
 bag of indulgences, to set up his place there, had driven him 
 thence with dread and fear, and was promoted to the great town of 
 Zurich, and, as I said, became the preacher in the cathedral there. 
 
 A council, or rather conference, was held to settle some of the 
 doctrines in dispute between the Catholics and Protestants ; but 
 as they could not agree on the points to start from as Faber, an 
 honest man, owned that he knew little Hebrew, and very little 
 Greek, though tolerably well up in Latin, and as Zwingli and his 
 supporters appealed to the Bible only, and ignored Papal tradi- 
 tions, and other such matters no really satisfactory result ensued. 
 The Government protested against all violence, but disturbances 
 soon broke out, relics were scattered, and crucifixes broken or 
 destroyed. Zwingli had persuaded the canons to give up many 
 of their revenues and livings, and to devote them to the service of 
 the poor. No new novices were allowed, but the existing orders 
 were suffered to remain ; and great changes were gradually made. 
 The rights of property were respected, and what had been left to 
 the church was retained by the church for church purposes, 
 although the form of faith and doctrine had been changed. 
 
 As the Reformation doctrines spread, it became necessary for 
 the continental governments to determine which form of faith 
 was to prevail. A conference was held to determine this point ; 
 certain cantons declared for the old faith, and certain others for 
 the new ; and it is a curious and interesting fact that the arrange- 
 ments then made and the decisions then come to have remained 
 to this day. This is a fact on which all should meditate ; a fact 
 unpleasant to the Vatican as showing certain necessary and irre- 
 concilable differences in the human mind ; and unpleasant to
 
 Ulrich Zwingli. 469 
 
 Exeter Hall, believing that if Protestantism be preached to people 
 they must at once accept it ; and interesting to members of that 
 Church standing. between the Vatican and Exeter Hall, with no 
 great love for either, and no dislike to some of their doctrines in 
 ecclesiastical matters, as showing that many of these distinctions 
 were vain, and all their efforts had failed to bring the people of 
 one canton from the side which their peculiarities as a people 
 caused them to take in Martin Luther's time. 
 
 The famous Protestant war in Germany arose from the previous 
 oppressions of the people, and their natural anxiety in a time of 
 change to get greater temporal as well as spiritual rights. The 
 dogmatic and arbitrary Luther, whom I so much admire in many 
 things, said a strong word for the peasants, but a still stronger for 
 the princes, and was angry and vexed that they would not be 
 content with a religious revolution, without seeking social and 
 political change. Great disturbances arose, councils were held, 
 and made the breaches wider than before, persecutions were 
 carried on, even to burning an obnoxious person, and great 
 violence prevailed. 
 
 Zwingli met Martin Luther with Melancthon and Lampadius at 
 Marburg, to discuss the great question of the Sacrament. Luther 
 interpreted Christ's command literally, and held not transubstan- 
 tiation but consubstantiation. Zwingli took Christ's words in 
 their simple sense, held the sacrament to be a symbolic institution, 
 a commemorative rite, held neither transubstantiation nor con- 
 substantiation, and maintained that Christ's words, " This is my 
 body," were no more to be taken literally than when he said, 
 " I am the vine." Luther was very fierce and pettish, he disliked 
 anybody to differ from his views, and when they parted hesitated 
 to give his hand to Zwingli, and when he did so did it grudgingly 
 as an act of Christian charity, and not as a sign of brotherhood. 
 The doctrine of Zwingli, however, seems to be the one of common 
 sense, and is held by the Church of Scotland, the Polish Pro- 
 testants, and the larger part of the English people. In another 
 point, too, Zwingli held larger and more liberal views than many 
 Protestants even of the present day. He was the least dogmatic 
 of all the Reformers, and had a great dislike to setting up opinions 
 of his own, and making them articles of faith. In one sentence, 
 written but shortly before his death, he showed the largest charity
 
 470 Ulrich Zwingli. 
 
 in expressing his belief that they who had never heard the gospel 
 preached, but who had fulfilled the law engraven on their con- 
 science, whatever their age or country might be, would have their 
 portion in eternal life. Zwingli clung mostly to the inward veri- 
 ties, and cared but little for those things which interested Luther 
 so much, and plagued Calvin so often. 
 
 The disputes between the Catholic cantons (Lucerne, Zug, 
 Schwuts, Uri, and Unterwalden) and the Protestant cantons 
 (Zurich and Berne) resulted at last in war. On the nth of 
 October 1531, a battle was fought at Cappel, in which Zwingli 
 was wounded, and was afterwards slain by a Catholic by whom he 
 was discovered. Sentence was passed upon his dead body ; it 
 was quartered, burned to ashes, mixed with rubbish, and dispersed 
 to the winds of heaven, which, like the Avon's stream with Wycliffe's 
 ashes, seems to have symbolised the spreading of his doctrines 
 far and wide throughout the world. He went to battle as a brave 
 man should, believing that it was right to fight when the cause 
 was just, and could be defended in no other way. After this 
 battle, the Protestants were discouraged for a while, arbitration 
 was sought, and a compromise was come to. 
 
 From the sketch I have given, it will be seen that Zwingli was 
 a single-minded, pious, devout soul; simple, and free from all 
 dogmatism ; not without some enthusiasm and fanaticism, mixing 
 perhaps too much with State craft, the danger which waited on 
 the immortal Cromwell, which lay about the path of Milton, and 
 which besets every man who is wishful to make politics more pure 
 and holy, forgetting that he who goes among unholy men to make 
 them holy, should be ever watchful lest they draw him down in- 
 stead of his lifting them up. If, however, he had some few faults, 
 he was surely what a Protestant preacher ought to be a large- 
 hearted, large-voiced, brave man. What he had to say, and people 
 did not like to hear, he said with a shout, 'preaching perpetually 
 against the crying sin of the Swiss their hiring themselves to 
 fight in anybody's quarrels, and to wrestle in anybody's cause. 
 He was a preacher of an unusual pattern now, preaching an 
 inward and an outward religion a religion of the heart, the 
 house, the State, the Church with the voice of Boanerges 
 against great public sins, but with the sweet tones of Barnabas 
 to comfort inward and private griefs. Fierce in heart, he
 
 Ulrich Zwingli. 471 
 
 was a pious, simple, truth-telling soul ; and overshadowed by 
 Calvin and Luther, has not received all the justice he 
 deserves. Between the impetuous and fiery Luther, and the 
 clear, acute, cold-blooded, and clear-visioned Calvin, Zwingli has 
 almost been forgotten. He had more learning than Luther, and 
 less acuteness, but a good deal more candour than Calvin. 
 Upon the whole, Zwingli, of all the Reformers, was in character 
 and spirit most like the English people, and would have suited 
 us well. He was not intolerably dogmatic ; he was gentle, yet 
 strong ; and deserves far more honour than he has ever yet had. 
 His confession of faith would be that of any intelligent orthodox 
 Dissenter ; and concerning the doctrines of the Trinity, the 
 Atonement, Election, Grace, and the operation of the Holy 
 Spirit, most intelligent orthodox Dissenters might adopt Zwingli's 
 creed. 
 
 Zwingli, however, did not believe that Christianity would 
 always remain just as he had left it. He knew life was short, and 
 work long ; he had seen many changes brought about, and he 
 expected change in the future. His bravery and boldness, his 
 earnestness and simplicity, are a perpetual warning to all to go 
 in the same spirit, to reject in the same spirit, and to hold in the 
 same spirit, whatever views they hold, believing with many pious 
 and holy souls, that what is held with full faith by them, may form 
 no more part of eternal truth than the articles held by good and 
 great men before their time.
 
 EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 
 
 BORN 1688. DIED 1772. 
 
 MANUEL SWEDENBORG long despised and often for- 
 gotten has had the privilege that belongs to all men who 
 devote their lives to thought namely, that, as the world grows 
 older, they get more reverenced, better known, and better loved. 
 The men that are run after during their lives the men of 
 action, and the men of noise, receive their recompense in this 
 world. Charles the Twelfth was a man of great abilities, a won- 
 derful soldier, and, in some respects, a great king ; but he is 
 fading very fast from men's memory, whilst Swedenborg, the 
 philosopher, who was his contemporary, finds a larger audience 
 in every successive generation. It is one thing to have a name 
 written in a book, and another to have a name always living, 
 always connected with thought, and bringing forth, in every suc- 
 cessive generation, new thoughts and new feelings. Swedenborg 
 has the privilege of finding a larger audience every decade that 
 passes, and in proof of this, I need only refer to the audience 
 before me. 
 
 It would have astonished Swedenborg's friends, a quarter of a 
 century ago, could they have known that in a few years a 
 popular lecture would be given upon the philosopher and his 
 doctrines, under the auspices of a Literary Institution. 
 
 Swedenborg has generally been looked upon as a mere sect- 
 maker, and as one to whom the language of Festus to Paul is 
 really applicable " Much learning hath made thee mad." The 
 restriction that hath so long existed as to the subjects which 
 should be introduced in public institutions and assemblies, has 
 also prevented Swedenborg, and others similarly circumstanced, 
 from being understood. It is a rule with most institutions 
 that there shall be no politics and no religion introduced, for- 
 getting that when these two things are taken out of life and con-
 
 Emanuel Swedenborg. 473 
 
 versation, what is left is but like a chip in porridge a dead, dry, 
 dull, material, hortus si cats thing of this world and its affairs. 
 
 I am not here to declaim against Swedenborg. Those who 
 know most of the man, know that, if one were so inclined, an 
 evening would not be long enough to abuse him. How little, 
 then, can I hope to do him justice in so short a time ! I do not 
 pretend to have read all that Swedenborg wrote, and for all my 
 deficiencies in describing the man and his writings, I will ask 
 pardon from those who know him well. My object is to roll 
 away the clouds that fools have rolled around the memory of one 
 of the most pious, most pure, most noble of men ; who chose the 
 pen as his profession, adhered to it all his life long, and laid 
 down that great rule that knowledge is worse than ignorance if 
 it does not lead men to live wiser and better, and that all science 
 is worse than idleness if it does not end in God. 
 
 Swedenborg fell on very extraordinary times. He appeared 
 just when it was best he should come, as God always appoints. 
 He came when men's faith had long ceased to have anything 
 prophetic or inspiring in it. Religion had come to be a mere 
 historical business. It was the dependent of past history. It 
 prated in church about a living God, but in reality it was 
 worshipping a God that had withdrawn from any active concern 
 in human affairs. Or, religion was morality merely, without a 
 spiritual basis; a sort of magisterial religion very good if one 
 never got into trouble. Afterwards came that grand and gigantic 
 French Revolutionary talk upon all the internal, mystical side of 
 life. This world and all it contains were reduced to what you 
 could see and feel. Men talked about God as a " force," and 
 put the next world into a coffin. They believed in nothing in 
 this world but what could be seen, felt, and tasted with the bodily 
 organs. They "believed in nightingales, provided they were 
 roasted." In short, they looked upon this world as one great 
 workshop and cookshop ; and upon all the tales about spiritual 
 communion, and influences, and utterances, as the tales of 
 inspired madmen, and fools of old times. 
 
 Then there was another sore evil. The men who were really 
 religious could not stand their ground against the encroachments 
 made by the waves of the sea of science. The scientific flood 
 was ever taking away scraps and morsels of the Christian endow-
 
 474 Emanuel Swedenborg. 
 
 ment, as the sea, in some places, encroaches upon the land of 
 some beneficed clergyman. There were good people who thought 
 that Bible truth and scientific truth could not be harmonized, and 
 therefore they took their stand upon Bible truth ; and when they 
 were very honest, they said plainly that knowledge must be 
 twisted to meet the literal statements of the Scriptures. On 
 Sunday people felt bound to admire the spirit of the New 
 Testament, and they would rejoice in turning one cheek if 
 smitten on the other ; and the next day would curse the smiter, 
 and rejoice in a man who had what they called " plenty of spirit " 
 in him, who would resent rather than receive an insult, and, upon 
 the whole, on Monday they thought the Duke of Wellington was 
 much more of a man than some of the saints. By and bye they 
 put religion into a little world by itself, and tried to systematize 
 trade and politics, and all other matters, and place each under 
 its own set of rules and morals. Thus we have the " political 
 world," the " religious world," the " scientific world," and circles 
 and worlds without number, governed by different moral codes, 
 and with very little sympathy between them. Now, all these 
 things are evil. It is an evil whenever a man's religion enters 
 into a battle with anything that is not immoral and sinful, and so 
 a wrong to conscience. That cannot be a great Religion that 
 cannot take into itself everything that is not hostile to the life 
 and light of the Lord God. 
 
 What this age wanted, then, was some reconciling faith a faith 
 in which Religion and Science would be brought together and 
 married. The history of the world is a contest between the 
 material and spiritual elements in man ; in one age the spiritual 
 having the ascendency, and in another the material. Now, if any 
 man could show that this world is not a " waste howling wilder- 
 ness ; " that body, soul, and spirit are not separate things, but one 
 within the other; that man is in heaven while in time, in soul 
 while in the body ; that every duty is not to be considered beautiful 
 or important according to the effects that follow from it, but in its 
 essence we should welcome him, and gladly receive his teach- 
 ings. This contest between heaven and earth, religion and 
 science, body and soul, duty and delight, Swedenborg has done 
 much to set at rest. If men had studied the Gospels, they would 
 have read that when the wine flagged at the marriage festival, in
 
 Emanuel Swedenborg. 475 
 
 Cana of Galilee, it was supplied by miracle. But as for ascetic 
 people, wearing hair shirts, they have thought they should reach 
 heaven by some rope-ladder, or a flight of wings, and that the less 
 flesh they carried the sooner they would get there. 
 
 Such, then, were some of the signs and portents of the times 
 when Swedenborg appeared on this world's stage. It would be 
 useless to dwell long on his life. It was a quiet life, and there 
 are not many startling facts in it. Let us see, however, if there 
 are inducements enough for us to become students of his writings. 
 He was born in that fine old Scandinavian land of Sweden, that 
 has blessed the world with so many men of thought and action. 
 His father was Jasper Svedberg, Bishop of Skara, and his son 
 Emanuel was born in the year 1688. He was not a very jovial 
 sort of a boy, and of his early life we have not many memorials, 
 beyond the fact that he was given to thought and speculations on 
 religious matters. Some men must begin very early in life the 
 great work they have to do. 
 
 Swedenborg went to the University of Upsala : in his studies 
 he was diligent, patient, and laborious, and at the age of twenty- 
 two took his degree as Doctor of Philosophy. In 1710 he came 
 to London, and had a narrow escape with his life. At that time 
 an epidemic raged in Sweden, and vessels that came to this 
 country had to undergo quarantine. Swedenborg was induced 
 by some of his countrymen, who came off in a boat, to go with 
 them into the city. For this he was very near being hanged, 
 and was only freed under the condition that if anyone attempted 
 the same thing again he should not escape the gallows. It was 
 his custom to resort to all places of learning, and we therefore 
 find him at Oxford, at Utrecht, at Paris. Everywhere he was 
 perpetually working, and very soon he was perpetually writing. 
 Of his poems that is, those in metrical form, published in early 
 life I cannot say much. His great poems are to be found in 
 his after religious books. In 1716 he commenced his " Daedalus 
 Hyperboreas," a periodical dedicated to the record of mechanical 
 and mathematical inquiries and discoveries. He then became 
 acquainted with Polheim, Charles XII.'s Councillor of Commerce, 
 and, while living under Polheim's roof, he wished very much to 
 marry Polheim's daughter. He got a sort of agreement on the 
 matter from the father, with the daughter's signature, which was
 
 476 Emaniiel Swedenborg. 
 
 attached from feelings of filial obedience. This agreement, which 
 gave the young lady uneasiness, her brother stole from Sweden- 
 borg's desk, and put it in the fire, which to Swedenborg was a 
 great grief at the time ; but he was a man who had other work to 
 do than to sit and watch the ashes. In his after life he was on 
 one occasion jocosely asked if he was ever desirous of marrying, 
 and he said he was once on the road to matrimony, " but," said 
 he, "the lady would not have me." However painful it might 
 have been to Swedenborg to miss Lady Polheim, it was a great 
 good to us all, and perhaps a blessing to the lady herself. 
 
 In 1718, we find him at the siege of Friedrikshall, with 
 Charles XII. He there ingeniously planned rolling machines, 
 by which two galleys, five boats, and a sloop were conveyed 
 overland a distance of fifteen miles, and under cover of which 
 Charles was enabled to carry on his operations. In 1719, 
 Swedenborg was ennobled, not made baron, as is generally sup- 
 posed. He was at this time appointed Assessor of the Board of 
 Mines in Sweden, and perfected his studies in metallurgy. In 
 1724 he published some of his works on Natural Philosophy, 
 and one on the Philosophy of the Infinite. In 1744 appeared 
 his great work, "The Animal Kingdom," and in 1745, "The 
 Worship and Love of God." 
 
 In all his scientific doings and works he was a patient, exact, 
 and practical man. Of all the men ever called dreamers, 
 Swedenborg was the least like one. He meddled with all know- 
 ledge, and was a quiet, methodical, orderly, patient, duty-doing 
 man ; and it was with this basis he was to uprear that which 
 afterwards made his name still more famous his attempt to dis- 
 cover the nature and properties of spirit, and to penetrate into 
 the unseen world. 
 
 This great change occurred between his fiftieth and sixtieth 
 year. Up to that time he had been a man of science. In the 
 fifty-eighth year of his age, he appears in a new character. He 
 says on this subject : " I have been called to a holy office by 
 the Lord Himself, who was graciously pleased to manifest Himself 
 to me His servant, in the year 1743, when He opened my sight 
 to a view of the spiritual world, and granted me the privilege of 
 conversing with spirits and angels, which I enjoy to this day. 
 From that time I began to print and publish various arcana, that
 
 Emanuel Swedenborg. 477 
 
 have been seen by me, or revealed to me, respecting heaven and 
 hell, the state of man after death, the true worship of God, the 
 spiritual sense of the Word, with many other most important matters 
 conducive to salvation and true wisdom." 
 
 Now, here is a very large claim put in by Swedenborg. I 
 suppose my audience are Christians. Where is the extravagance? 
 Swedenborg asserts that there is a spiritual world. Is that a 
 novelty ? Do you not believe in a heaven and a hell ? Can you 
 tell when intercourse with that world ceased to be possible ? 
 Can you draw some sharp chronological line to define when 
 spiritual gifts ceased ? There is nothing in all Christian theology 
 so loosely drawn as the line when gifts and graces of a supernatural 
 kind ceased out of this world. Here they were, and when did 
 they go ? There has been an unbroken series of churches that 
 have asserted that these supernatural gifts never have died out. 
 Yet Christian people treat Swedenborg's claim as a seer of visions 
 as a priori ridiculous. How angry people are at the supernatural 
 claims of those they do not like ! If Colonel Gardiner gets con- 
 verted by a vision, and professes to have seen Christ crucified on 
 the cross, forthwith Dr Doddridge writes his life, and the Reli- 
 gious Tract Society publishes many editions of it, without note 
 or comment, to say, " We are very sorry that Colonel Gardiner 
 should have been so fanatical as to attribute his conversion to a 
 vision." I might show several cases. A member of the Society 
 of Friends is not at all put out by George Fox's illuminations and 
 voices. Bunyan had visions ; but then Bunyan was a Baptist, 
 and belonged to our regiment, and so he had a license. But, on 
 the other side, the feeling is that if you are not of us, if you have 
 visions, then you are a fool and a madman. " But," they say, 
 " Gardiner's vision was only once, and Swedenborg's visions lasted 
 through many years." The marvel is that the thing is done at 
 all. It is not the number of cases, but the thing itself that is 
 disputed. It is quite as marvellous to have one vision as a 
 thousand. I don't say that I believe Swedenborg's claim at pre- 
 sent. I leave that, but I would ask, Why do people laugh so 
 much at him ? The great men of the world have all voted on 
 that side of the great question Socrates and Plato of the old 
 world ; St John and others in the New Testament ; Origen, 
 Plotinus, Jacob Behmen, Pascal, Fenelon all the great men
 
 478 Emanuel Swedenborg. 
 
 beli2ve that underlying the sensuous, visible world, there is a 
 spiritual and unseen world, in which may be discovered the 
 essences of things. 
 
 Swedenborg is therefore in good company; his inward or 
 spiritual eyes were opened. Some people complain of the 
 abtruseness of his books ; but I believe there is not a sentence in 
 them that could not be made plain to an ordinary audience. 
 Swedenborg did not say he was inspired, but only that his 
 spiritual or inward vision was open. He said that men's inward 
 eyes were overclouded by sin, or they would see and hear what 
 was now hidden from them. I would ask you if you have never 
 heard in the songs of birds more at one time than at another ? 
 And what is this but the quickening or opening of some inward 
 sense? Swedenborg said there was an inward sight and an 
 inward hearing. It is a phenomenon running all through history, 
 that as a man greatens and brightens, all life is altered to him. 
 Did you never marvel where Wordsworth and Byron and Shakes- 
 peare found all their bright thoughts ? You never had such ideas 
 visit you. No; how could they strike you if your eyes were 
 scaled ? What was the difference between Shakespeare and 
 other people ? The difference was that there were eyes within 
 the poet's outer eyes ; there were spiritual eyes as well as eyes of 
 the body, and under the visible forms of nature there lay a 
 significance, a beauty, and a meaning that was hidden from the 
 common observer, but which was seen by the poet's soul. So 
 says Swedenborg " For this spiritual world around us there is 
 an eye prepared." It is not shown to the body's eye, and God 
 was pleased to open his inward eye, and these things were made 
 plain to him. 
 
 From this time Swedenborg dropped his secular duties, and 
 gave up his assessorship. The king, in consideration of his long 
 and faithful service of thirty-one years, would have continued his 
 salary, but Swedenborg desired only half of it. He then devoted 
 the rest of his long life to the one great purpose of reforming 
 the theology of his time, and to found what he called the New 
 Church. His spiritual gifts soon got noised abroad, and some 
 thought they meant fortune-telling. A widow Martville sought 
 his advice for the recovery of a lost receipt for a sum of money 
 that had been paid and was demanded a second time. Sweden-
 
 Emanucl Swedenborg. 479 
 
 borg was kind, and did not scowl her away. By means of his 
 spiritual privilege he conversed with the deceased husband who 
 had paid the money, and the receipt was found ; but those who 
 think that a prophet is no good except for the lost spoon, or that 
 this great man was only good for fortune-telling, will find that he 
 kept clear of that. 
 
 When Swedenborg began to write these great heresies, a worthy 
 bishop and a doctor got up a complaint against him. The doctor, 
 whose name was Ekebom, had the honesty to say of himself, that 
 he took great care not to examine Swedenborg's works. Don't 
 read what those opposed to you say, as Sydney Smith remarks, 
 lest you should be prejudiced, you know. Swedenborg, however, 
 was a man of good connections, of high repute, and of such a 
 calm, quiet, blameless life, that it was found impossible to get up 
 any very great stir about him. 
 
 In 1771 we find him in London again, and in 1772 he died, in 
 Cold Bath Fields, at the age of eighty-five. A little before his 
 death he was seized with apoplexy. He was at this time visited 
 by a Lutheran clergyman, who asked him if he adhered to his 
 spiritual revelations ? on which the dying man lifted himself up, 
 and said that as he had made no pretensions in heat or extrava- 
 gance, there was nothing to revoke in the hour of his death. 
 
 His life being closed, I will turn to some matters in which, to 
 me at least, Swedenborg is most interesting. Let us fancy that 
 Swedenborg and his works stand like some great temple, and 
 over one of its doors there is this inscription "The invisible 
 things of God from the creation are clearly seen, being under- 
 stood by the things that are made ; " for that should be the 
 writing over every Swedenborgian porch in the world. And over 
 the other door of the temple there is written " The fear of the 
 Lord is the beginning of wisdom." These are the two great 
 mottoes the man's life suggests to us. Entering into this temple, I 
 find that this house which Swedenborg built to God is very much 
 like Solomon's temple of old, or some of the great shrines in Catholic 
 lands. It is not a little mean building a meeting-house, square 
 drabbed and whitewashed but a great majestic temple ; not 
 where logic is despised and learning unknown, but into which 
 this great man brought everything he could lay his hands on all 
 that philosophy and learning could bring ; and yet everything has
 
 480 Emanuel Swedenborg. 
 
 written upon it, " Holiness to the Lord." Swedenborg is, there- 
 fore, to my mind, attractive ; for if there is anything I dislike 
 it is Manichaeism that which this country is so full of miser- 
 able Puritanism ; Religion warring against Science and Art. 
 In this man's religion, what I admire first, but not most, is 
 the idea that religion does not require of us to become foolish 
 and dull, grave and grim ; that it is not required of a man 
 that, in order to become a lover of God, he must also be a 
 lover of ugliness, meanness, and deformity. Swedenborg 
 gathered more knowledge than all other men, and he carried 
 it all as an offering to the shrine of God. 
 
 I wish now to enter upon the consideration of one or two 
 of Swedenborg's principal doctrines. The one that interests 
 me most is the doctrine of "Correspondences;" but an out- 
 sider like myself can hardly be expected to treat it in orthodox 
 fashion. There is no such thing as an accidental correspondence 
 of natural and spiritual things. Swedenborg showed this clearly. 
 He taught that everything was first in spirit and in thought 
 before it was in body and in form ; that therefore, whenever 
 you lay your hand upon a thought or an idea, it has its 
 counterpart, its sign and type, in this visible world. Hence, 
 there is a connection between the tones of the voice and a 
 virtuous life : the voice sweetens as the temper sweetens. In 
 like manner, every feature and every motion is indicative of the 
 spirit's quality. One might even make the ugliest man on earth 
 beautiful, without rouge, carmine, or brush, by calling up to his 
 memory his mother's words and image, or telling him some tale 
 of old that would stir his affections to their depths. Such is the 
 connection between body and spirit, that the change of the 
 inward always changes the outward. The debased part of our 
 population daily grow uglier. As a nation becomes educated, it 
 grows, not handsomer, but more beautiful. As men sink down 
 in morals and intellect, beauty decays, and they take their place 
 in the sty of sensualism. Plato well said that only a good man 
 could be a beautiful man. Mere handsomeness is only animal. 
 What Plato meant was this, that beauty consisted in the develop- 
 ment of those inward senses that shine in the eye, touch in the 
 fingers, and are heard in the tones of the voice. This he pro- 
 nounced to be real beauty, and all this can be produced out-
 
 Rvianml Swedenborg. 48 1 
 
 wardly only by being first wrought inwardly, by inward worth, by 
 the divine within us. Bodily beauty is but the weed in which 
 the Lord dresses goodness. Outward beauty, which is of God, is 
 the finger with which He beckons us to come up higher and 
 behold the " beauty of holiness." 
 
 Swedenborg said that man is a microcosm, a little world, in 
 which can be found every mechanism of the great world. The 
 mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms are all in man. He 
 taught the great doctrine that the least things are, in form and 
 function, the same as the greatest, and he proved it. Swedenborg 
 placed before us the great strings of principles, on which we may 
 string facts like so many beads. He says of the lungs, that the 
 initial of the lungs, the beginning or the least lung, is of the same 
 form and function as the total lungs. In crystals, every fragment 
 has the same number of facets. Thus Swedenborg taught us to 
 learn little things from big ones, and big things from little ones. 
 As to the harmonies between colours and tones, they are per- 
 iectly familiar to all. There are also relations between forms and 
 colours ; between morals and mathematics. Morals are only 
 mathematics in a different sphere ; and morality and Euclid are 
 the same book read in two different ways. The right line of 
 geometry becomes the line of rectitude in morals. A knave does 
 things in a roundabout fashion, instead of going in a direct way 
 like an honest man. As Coleridge said, "A knave is only a 
 roundabout fool." Another illustration : Things that are equal 
 to the same thing are equal to one another. Now, set a culti- 
 vated man opposite to a low, vulgar creature, one who knows 
 only beer and skittles, and tell them that they are men and 
 brethren, and the educated man would turn aside from the other 
 as a being with whom he could feel no sympathy. Here are 
 beings seemingly unequal ; but teach them that being both 
 created by one God, from one heaven, they must look to some 
 common point above them, and out of themselves, and then the 
 first dim sense of their being equals in comparison with the 
 Infinite, will dawn upon them. Compared with Him they are 
 each nothing, and are therefore equal to one another. Let men 
 iorget themselves, and meet in something greater than themselves, 
 and they will acknowledge their common brotherhood. 
 
 Swedenborg's greot principles of series and degrees, of influx 
 
 2 H
 
 482 Emctnnel Sivcdenborg. 
 
 and efflux, are proved to be true by their universal applicability. 
 He explained the doctrine of the Incarnation of Deity more 
 clearly than any other man that ever wrote. He proved that God 
 was made flesh, and that his name was called Emanuel. It was 
 with him no cloudy doctrine of theology, but a necessary doctrine 
 of human existence. He was, too, a great anatomist, and the 
 first that made anatomy a pleasant study. He went out into 
 nature with a guiding principle, and he had this great merit, 
 that he sought the soul where God had placed it. Hence, he 
 says, " I took the analytic mode to find the soul." What a 
 check to materialism this ! In Swedenborg's writings there is 
 room for phrenologists and others, provided they do not stop at 
 their own little circles. There is no greater blunder made by the 
 practical people of the world, than the neglect of anatomy. Till 
 Swedenborg's time, the dissecting room and the scalpel were 
 words of horror. Swedenborg turned anatomy into a glory, a 
 liberal art. There is nothing so little studied as anatomy, and 
 nothing that more deserves to be studied. Out of Swedenborg's 
 anatomy we may learn politics, and social knowledge ; the best 
 principles of drainage and ventilation, and all the laws of 
 mechanics, are found in the human body. When God made the 
 world, he hung his own picture up in it. Read Swedenborg 
 often if you want to have an intimate knowledge of the walls of 
 the temple, the place where God puts spirit. Swedenborg justi- 
 fied poetry, and as a natural philosopher he reduced similes to a 
 science. He completed the circle of knowledge ; he began with 
 God, and he leads all things back to God again. I may utter 
 Swedenborgianism in this sentence " Of one thought, by one 
 thought, God made all things which exist in this world." 
 
 Then there is that doctrine of Heaven and Hell. Swedenborg 
 maintained that heaven is not a space or place, but is internal 
 and spiritual that it is a state of the mind. It becomes one to 
 speak charily of the popular heaven and the popular hell. It is 
 supposed that if one can but get inside heaven, just squeeze in, 
 he is all right for ever. Now, Swedenborg could not enter into 
 this doctrine. He had meditated upon these words of the Lord, 
 " The kingdom of heaven is within you.'' It is possible to make 
 a heaven below, or a very hell upon earth. How ? This little 
 heaven may be in a barn. How is it made ? By the pouring
 
 Emanuel Sivedenborg, 483 
 
 out from loving souls and hearts all blessed influences. It is a state 
 of the feelings and emotions, rather than a geographical external 
 form, or outward place. Thus, Swedenborg insisted upon the awful 
 doctrine, that every hour of our lives we are building up our own 
 heaven or our own hell ; that every hour, like the insect, we are 
 weaving round us a spiritual body in which we shall dwell for ever, 
 and that every feeling, every word, produces a spiritual state 
 to match. Every indulgence in sensualism adds something 
 deformed to this state ; and, instead of one great limbo, in which 
 the fool, with his eleventh hour conversion, is set upon the same 
 footing as the man who has gone through a life-long struggle for 
 the same object, Swedenborg said that each built up his own 
 house accordingly. Swedenborg asserted that the outward face 
 of the spiritual world is not different from this ; that as in this 
 world a tree is one thing to one man, and another thing to 
 another man, so it is there. I like Swedenborg for having 
 nothing to do with disembodied spirits, but he gave a body to 
 every one as St Paul has it, " a spiritual body," fitted to the 
 spirit, formed by the spirit, woven round it, created by its own 
 acts and feelings ; and this is a more noble doctrine than that 
 vague, dreary kind of existence, which is commonly supposed to 
 await us hereafter. Swedenborg knew that there are no beings 
 who are made angels off-hand. He taught that heaven is the 
 great end for which exist all worlds and all life, and that its inha- 
 bitants are the eliminations from all worlds of the noble, the holy, 
 and the just. What is the meaning of all this world of ours, with 
 all its noise and trouble ? It is a place for the fitting up of souls 
 to furnish heaven. 
 
 Swedenborg's Spiritual Diary is a strange book. It is a metho- 
 dical diary kept by him of his experiences in the unseen world. 
 It is a terrible book, and was not prepared by Swedenborg for 
 publication, but kept for his own reference. Much of it I do not 
 believe, and I cannot. This Spiritual Diary is looked upon as 
 the most bedlam book of all that Swedenborg wrote. It may be 
 regarded either as a correct map of things as they exist, or as a 
 map showing how a great man supposes them to exist. I take it 
 in the latter sense. Swedenborg says that lazy luxurious people 
 are punished in the other life that he saw them punished in a 
 manner so horrible that I cannot relate it or believe it. Swedenborg
 
 484 Ewanucl Swedenborg* 
 
 makes exceptions for queens and such like that cannot help it. 
 The punishment was so terrible that even the spirits in the next 
 world could not look at it. It yvas a tremendous punishment. 
 But there seems to me a want of correspondence in the nature 
 of the punishment, in its quality and amount, and I have not 
 been able to look upon it as a picture of an objective reality. I 
 have found the Spiritual Diary so quaint, so undesignedly witty, 
 so awfully wise, such a sublime poem of all the ways, and habits, 
 and customs of men, that its like is not to be found. It is 
 theological, but thoroughly practical. If Swedenborg ever showed 
 a want of mercy, it was for men who did not believe in good 
 works; who preached justification by faith alone, as some people 
 do, as if good works were dead weights to a man in his ascent to 
 heaven. That provoked Swedenborg's scorn and indignation. 
 He represents Melancthon as being engaged in writing a treatise 
 on Justification by Faith, and as the writer elevated his mind to 
 the consideration of charity, or sunk it to the contemplation of 
 faith alone, he was alternately elevated to a higher sphere in the 
 spiritual world, or sunk down into regions of obscurity and cold. 
 I don't ask you to receive that Diary in any other way than as 
 the marvellous utterances of a man who was morally and mentally 
 incapable of a lie, and not likely to be deceived. The book is 
 a thorough carrying out of the moral purposes of ethical justice 
 into another world ; it is the carrying out of that great principle 
 of the sequence of doctrine and morals, which is as certain as 
 that of gravity or weight, that " whatsoever a man soweth, that 
 shall he also reap." The doctrine of compensation is perhaps the 
 one which the world is least disposed to believe. There is no 
 very great faith in men that they cannot do a bad action and not 
 suffer for it. People will reason, perversely, that because sentence 
 against an evil work is not executed speedily, the hearts of men 
 may be set upon doing evil. To Swedenborg, death was only an 
 unclothing and a clothing upon, and therefore if a man begins 
 something to-night, and he dies to-night, that thing will not be 
 lost. If begun here, it must proceed towards its end, for its 
 recompenses and rewards. I know not a book so terrible to a 
 man who does wrong, as this strange bedlam-be-called Diary of 
 Swedenborg. It is a book that burns like fire all the foolishness 
 and rottenness of life. It makes a man who is indulging in
 
 Emanuel Swedenborg. 485 
 
 wrong-doing tremble at the thought of passing from this world 
 into eternity. It is the severest and terriblest vindication of 
 moral justice, of moral sequence, of necessary recompence, and of 
 consequent reward, that was ever written. 
 
 Swedenborg's doctrine about the Bible his division of the 
 books of the Bible into two classes seems to me wanting in 
 evidence. 
 
 I have tried this evening to get you to see that this man will 
 enable you to walk through Nature understanding its end and 
 purposes, to see its essences and modes of being. Swedenborg 
 honours second causes. Second causes are all necessities of the 
 First Cause God being the Cause of causes. Second causes are, 
 to Swedenborg, theological ; he admitted them into his church. 
 To his disciples, there are no difficulties about particular provi- 
 dences, and a general providence. To them, body and soul are 
 admirable friends, and when this body is done with, they know 
 they shall have another, and a better. Swedenborg is a calm and 
 a quiet but a pleasant writer. Under his rule, you may be as 
 scientific as you like, provided you love God and your neighbour. 
 You may be a learned pundit, and yet a humble Christian 
 Hence, I consider him one of the greatest harmonizers in science 
 and theology. 
 
 Believing many things different from Swedenborg, he has yet 
 taught me one thing, which is to travel the road of life from 
 Dan to Beersheba. He pours out of himself so rich a stream of 
 truth that one cannot but listen to him. He says you may be 
 learned and pious, a doctor in divinity and a doctor in philosophy 
 at the same time; that you may go to college and to chapel, 
 and serve God equally in both. You may eat, drink, and be 
 given in marriage, and for all these things you will have no shame, 
 and conscience can bring no charge. If I were going to be shut 
 up in prison three years, Swedenborg's books would be my choice, 
 and at the end of three years it would be six more before I should 
 find them uninteresting, strange, or dry. 
 
 I am avoiding his theology, because, as you will see, if we should 
 get into the doctrine of the Trinity, you might complain that it was 
 not fit for the place and the occasion. Suffice it to say that 
 Swedenborg was the justifier of the poets, the expounder of 
 symbols ; he taught that instead of Nature being dead, material-
 
 486 Emanuel Swedenborg. 
 
 istic, and barren, it is a house informed by spirit a house of 
 clay, but filled with divine fire, and that every step in Nature is a 
 step to that great altar which conducts the worshipper to the 
 throne of God ; and up through the ranks of angels you rise 
 higher and higher, until you end in Him who is the Cause of all 
 causes, Beginning and End. In conclusion, he asserts that the 
 more truly learned you become, the more you know of necessity 
 the more near you must be to God. I say, then, that however you 
 may judge of this man, you cannot do otherwise than admire him, 
 as teaching that a man may be at once simple and profound ; a 
 Bible-believer and a humble Christian soul.
 
 JOHN WESLEY. 
 BORN 1703. DIED 1791. (FROM 2ND QUEEN ANNE TO 3isr GEORGE III.) 
 
 T CANNOT but congratulate this assembly as much as myself 
 -* that so many should be willing to listen to a lecture on a 
 man who, in the days in which he lived, was very apt to be set 
 down as a fanatic, and whose great claim to consideration is not 
 that which the world most values or most praises, but whose whole 
 life was heartily and thoroughly given up to the promotion of the 
 greatest safeguard a nation can boast of the fear of God, and the 
 practice of His holy will. 
 
 There are two or three things which it will be necessary for me 
 to premise before entering upon my subject. There are some 
 present, I perceive, who belong to the sect which holds the 
 honoured name of " Wesley." Let me efficiently warn such that 
 John Wesley does not belong to you now-a-days any more than to 
 others ; because it is the privilege of a great man by-and-bye to 
 get beyond the bounds of his family. Wesley was a man too 
 large for a sect ; he belonged to his country, and, better still, to 
 the world ; he belonged to those of the true Apostolic succession 
 the true Christian Church however much some of the members 
 of that Church may differ from him in point of doctrine, or smile 
 at some of his peculiarities or weaknesses. Hence, others claim 
 to take as much interest in Wesley as Wesleyans themselves do. 
 Perhaps we shall not find him as Wesleyans find him, but I shall 
 read him with as much faithfulness as possible. As to agreeing 
 with Wesley's theology, I do not ; I do not pretend to, and do 
 not wish to do. But if I differ from it if I were therefore 
 incapable of telling the truth about him, or were capable of 
 admiring what was admirable and noble in the man, without 
 confessing it, I should be falling into one of those faults against 
 which I continually warn others the fault of sacrificing truth to 
 the interests of piety, and giving up to the narrowness of a sect 
 that which was meant for the good of mankind.
 
 488 John Wesley. 
 
 To those present who are Wesleyans, it is of small importance 
 what I think of Wesley (to Wesley himself it is of no importance ; 
 he is gone where man's opinion counts for nothing, and where 
 man's praise is not valued) ; to Wesleyans, I repeat, it does not 
 matter what others think of Wesley, but to other portions of the 
 Christian Church it is important whether they are honest enough 
 to do a man justice who is not of their sect. Nothing does one's 
 soul so much good as a faithful attempt to do a man credit, and 
 though differing from him, to praise him for what in him is 
 honest, true, and good. Hence in all faithfulness I shall endea- 
 vour to point out the excellences of the man. Wesleyans have 
 got Wesley by heart, his sermons and his hymn-book, and they 
 may pardon others if they do not know quite so much of him ; 
 and they must not be surprised if I set before others what is quite 
 familiar to Wesleyans. I do not intend to go minutely into 
 Wesley's biography ; I shall direct attention more particularly to 
 what sort of a man he was ; I shall examine his motives, investigate 
 his principles, and watch his work. Further on, I shall have 
 something to say of Wesleyans, their present position, and future 
 prospects, and I shall have to see how far they are worthy of their 
 founder ; whether the children of Wesley are before or behind 
 him whether they have passed him or come up to him. There- 
 fore, don't let us confuse Wesleyans with Wesley himself, for I 
 never met a Wesleyan yet who said he was up to the mark of the 
 founder of his sect, and if I say anything unpleasant of Wesleyans, 
 it must not be received as necessarily applicable to the great man 
 whose name they bear. 
 
 I never can think of Wesley without associating him with the 
 four glorious Johns of whom England ought to be proud 
 Wycliffe, the Reformer before the Reformation ; Milton, the 
 greatest soul England ever knew ; Bunyan, the writer of the most 
 blessed book next to the Bible that the world ever delighted in ; 
 Locke, who turned a clear understanding, an admirable educa- 
 tion, and a pure conscience, to putting that which was before a 
 matter of feeling, on the grounds of philosophy. Then comes 
 Wesley, and I believe, taking him altogether, Wesley was worthy 
 to walk in the company of these four. He had not the genius of 
 Milton, nor the philosophy of Locke, but if to consecrate the 
 energies of a man, as to the carrying out of an object which he
 
 John Wesley. 489 
 
 knew to be a true and good one, and that object of the highest 
 character, constitutes genuine greatness, Wesley was as great as any 
 of these four glorious Johns. 
 
 I shall consider this evening the nature of the work which 
 Wesley had to do in the world, and the manner in which he was 
 prepared for it. As far as religion was concerned, nothing could 
 be worse than the state of English mind and English life at the 
 period of Wesley's birth. Religion was treated in the higher 
 classes with scepticism, and polished, polite sneering ; and some 
 of you would scarcely believe the words with which Butler started 
 his " Analogy " when he wrote, " It is come, I know not how, to 
 be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so 
 much as a subject of inquiry, but that it is now at length dis- 
 covered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as if, in the 
 present age, this were an agreed point among all people of discern- 
 ment." People, in fact, talked of Christianity as a system that 
 had done its work and was exploded. The state of morality in 
 the upper classes was reflected in the works of Shaftesbury, and in 
 the lower in the novel of Tom Jones ; and there was indeed a 
 need of a new apostle, and a new reform. A combination of 
 circumstances had brought about barbarous ignorance amongst 
 the people, and a sleek, fat, worldly, do-nothingness amongst 
 the clergy. In 1736, every sixth house in London was devoted 
 to the sale of spirits, and in that year five bushels per head of 
 malt were consumed ; to swear was to be polite, to curse to 
 be accomplished ; to fear God was to be a fool, to believe 
 religion was to be superstitious ; to live by it was idiotic, and to 
 die by it was worse still. Manners were vile, base, and 
 debauched ; the people never heard sermons, and did not want 
 to. England was a nominally Christian country, and yet I could 
 not point to any age in European history where a nominally Chris- 
 tian country ever has presented a worse picture to the student 
 than did England in 1736. If you want to acquaint yourselves 
 with the immoral condition of the clergy, read Macaulay, and if 
 you want to learn the state of the people, refer to the annals of 
 Wednesbury and Walsall, and see how the enlightened mobs 
 treated Wesley. No words of mine, in fact, could paint the 
 immoral and irreligious condition of the country when Wesley 
 began his great and noble work, but it is easy to perceive that it
 
 49O John Wesley. 
 
 required some strong man to drop church patronage, to forswear 
 the easy chair, to throw up books of divinity, and to go bare- 
 footed, like a friar of old, through the country to preach the 
 gospel in such a manner as to bring it home to the hearts of man- 
 kind, and restore to the people a knowledge of the require- 
 ments of a Christian life. What was wanted in those days was a 
 man who should wander through the land, not preaching a new 
 doctrine for the people had no doctrine at all ; and if 
 Wesley had gone hair-splitting, or pronounced some new theolo- 
 gical views, he never would have touched the consciences of the 
 men he had to deal with, so he very wisely preached the simple 
 gospel of Christ Jesus. 
 
 The birth, education, intellect, and training of Wesley were 
 precisely of the character the age most wanted. . He was 
 descended from the sturdy nonconformist stock, his grandfather 
 being a clergyman of nonconforming zeal, and one of the 8000 
 who went to jail in the age of Charles II., because they would 
 not consent to bow down to the very golden calf set up in those 
 days ; his father being also a clergyman of nonconforming spirit, 
 and his maternal grandfather a thorough old dissenter. Wesley 
 came of a good stock on both sides. No reform in the Church 
 was ever brought about by one outside the pale of it when he 
 began. Not only was Wesley a churchman at first, but he was 
 an out and out Puseyite ; he was a stickler for vestments and 
 white and black gowns in fact, a regular austere, inflexible High 
 Churchman. But it is curious to note how this remarkable 
 church fossil became enlivened ; it is gloriously instructive to look 
 at Wesley in early life, and see him a kind of church petrifaction, 
 and notice how life crept gradually into limb after limb and into 
 his great heart ; how he was compelled by the love of Christ ; 
 how, one after the other, he dropt the grave-clothes of ecclesiasti- 
 cism, and when his Master called him, a loving, hearty, energetic 
 supporter of one system, he left it to found another. 
 
 We must now travel on to the little parsonage at Epworth, in 
 Lincolnshire, a place which shone out in those dreary days of 
 irreligion like the light of the Israelitish cottage in the cursed 
 darkness of the land of Egypt. Here dwelt Samuel Wesley, 
 John's father. His mother has been described as " an admirable 
 woman, of highly improved mind, of strong and masculine under-
 
 John Wesley. 491 
 
 standing, an obedient wife, an exemplary mother, and a fervent 
 Christian." The family of the old clergyman were brought up in 
 a careful manner, and the first rudiments of instruction instilled 
 into them by their mother. 
 
 On the occasion of an incendiary fire which took place at the 
 parsonage, John Wesley was providentially rescued from the 
 flames through the fervent intercession of his father with God, 
 when the father's heart-felt thanksgiving found vent in these 
 words : " God has given me all my children ; let the house go, I 
 am rich enough now." This escape made a deep impression on 
 the youthful mind of Wesley, who, in a portrait painted of him 
 long afterwards, caused to be written under it, "Is not this a 
 brand plucked from the burning ? " It naturally made a strong 
 impression upon the heart and soul of the mother of the boy: she 
 gave him to God ; she looked upon him entirely as God's. This 
 was one of the circumstances of his life that helped to form his 
 character. 
 
 Then he became a scholar in the Charter House. There John 
 suffered, as all boys suffer now in all our large schools, from the 
 tyranny of the older boys. What was given John to eat, the 
 other boys took away. But his father had advised him to walk 
 briskly three times round the garden every morning; and, empty 
 bellied and miserable, he might be seen scudding around three 
 times in accordance with this advice. It was good advice, it pre- 
 pared him for those walks of his in after life. He had a deal 
 of walking had John. He paved the way in youth, and it gave 
 him his bravery and endurance in after life. He went away to 
 Christ Church. God required a reformer, and John Wesley 
 became a good scholar ; for although God might require a lot of 
 cobblers and tailors for His work, an educated man was wanted 
 to begin the movement. It has been ever so. I set aside from 
 this those glorious days when the fishermen were chosen and 
 enlightened with the Holy Ghost ; but when the Epistles were to 
 be written, God chose one of the deepest Rabbinical writers, the 
 most finished man of his time. The great Apostle Paul was 
 chosen to be Apostle to the Gentiles. There are people who 
 think ignorance a good thing for a Christian, but they are always 
 persons who are themselves ignorant. John Wesley was a 
 thorough scholar, a profound logician, and deeply versed in the
 
 49 2 John Wesley. 
 
 classics. And although, with an excusable weakness, he had some 
 scruples about his classical knowledge, yet he was one of the most 
 earnest workers for the secular education of this nation that this 
 nation ever had. Some think he was only a preacher, but he 
 made endless books on useful knowledge. Nobody reads them 
 now, because they have done their work ; still, there is a barrow- 
 ful of them, on all secular subjects. John Wesley hated ignorance; 
 he knew that Christianity had nothing to gain from anything that 
 was dark, and so he advocated learning. 
 
 At Christ Church he worked very hard, and, as far as man 
 could see, he was to be shut up in Oxford. At this time he was 
 a cheerful man, cheerful, not jolly. He was a narrow man, a 
 small man beside Martin Luther ; a shaving beside the large deep 
 heart of the German. John Wesley was of a serene temper ; but 
 he never knew the depths of mirth nor the depths of grief : he had 
 scruples about smiling, and compunctions about laughter. He 
 had some scruples about taking orders, not as to the rites of the 
 orders, but as to his fitness for taking them ; he approached them 
 slowly and reverentially, and did what he usually did in other 
 tilings sought counsel at the parsonage at Epworth. 
 
 At this time of his life he got hold of two books that, with the 
 exception of the Bible, did most to make or mar him. He got 
 hold of "De Imitatione Christi," an excellently written and 
 glorious book, but a book with marvellous powers of mischief. It 
 was a book that preached all through it such an abstinence from 
 the duties of life, that if it were true the Gospel must be false, 
 and John the Baptist was a greater man than His master. It was 
 a book for the guidance of the monk, the anchorite, and the 
 hermit, and was never intended for men like ourselves ; it set an 
 example impossible to follow. There are many books like it. 
 Doddridge's " Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul " is like 
 it a glorious book, but a mischievous one. When you get to 
 the end of the chapter, you feel you are unworthy to say the 
 prayer there ; and you cannot do it. John Wesley got hold of 
 the " De Imitatione," but he had a deal of sense ; he did not 
 think he ought to believe it all, what was the use of telling a 
 man that he must mix with none but religious people, indeed ? 
 but he felt he was bound to imitate the pattern. He became an 
 ascetic ; he had been ascetic at the Charter House from necessity;
 
 John Wesley. 493 
 
 he now became ascetic from choice. There is a time in every 
 man's life when he is sure to become ascetic if he is religious; 
 the problem is how to be in the world and not of the world, not 
 how to keep apart from the world altogether. Some people seem 
 to think that you should know a religious man by some distinctive 
 mark, as you would know a sheep by the mark on its wool. The 
 Quaker sets up his broad brim ; another thinks to be saved by 
 starving; but the Gospel does not teach us to break the vessel 
 in order that it may hold the divine liquor. John Wesley, how- 
 ever, thought so ; he was in earnest about the good he got from 
 the "De Imitatione," and it led him for a while into what I can 
 call nothing else but the Gospel of Starvation. Indeed, he left it 
 behind him ; for the early Conferences solemnly discussed whether 
 egg-and-wine was not spiritually dangerous. Then there was 
 another terrible question discussed by those Conferences, about 
 ruffles : if a woman indulged in the worldliness of lace, she was 
 not to be simply "admonished, 1 ' but "dealt with" by the eclesi- 
 astical law. Breadth of brims, squareness of toes, absence of 
 curls, egg-flip discarded ; this was religion. John Calvin legislated 
 on curls ; fancy him sending a bride to prison for being married 
 in curls, and sending the bride's maids there, too, for being 
 accessories before the fact ! Wesleyanism has dropt off these 
 things now, they will not stick to it ; they stick to Romanism still, 
 and they will not drop off it. They never dropt off Wesley, 
 because he had a love of them. He got to starvation point, and 
 then he found it damaged his health, although no doubt it blest 
 his soul. 
 
 And then he got hold of the second book the noble record of 
 "Holy Living and Dying" of Jeremy Taylor, the poet of the pulpit, 
 which did a more kindly office for Wesley than " De Imitatione." 
 He then began to keep one of the most wonderful diaries now in 
 existence. The brother Charles I shall have to say something 
 about by-and-bye. I admire John, but love Charles best ; John 
 was the king, but Charles was " the sweet singer of Israel." We 
 know no hymns like some of those of Charles Wesley ; but you 
 are not to suppose that I agree with all the theology. There was 
 a club at Oxford where these men strictly spent their leisure, and 
 became prayerful and ascetic to a fault. They fell into an error ; 
 for they tried to awe their souls into method, and got a great
 
 494 John Wesley. 
 
 many ugly nicknames for their pains. This made them the more 
 earnest ; for they were like all Englishmen they loved to go out 
 on a stormy day and battle with the elements, when those who 
 had " the pips " were stopping at home. 
 
 One word on Wesley's mission to Georgia, and his luckless love 
 affair there. On John's rejection by his fair Sophia, he simply 
 made a note in his diary, and by-and-bye heartily thanked God 
 for his deliverance. Miss Sophia married someone else, and then 
 some parts of her behaviour not pleasing him, he excommunicated 
 her. He became embroiled in a law-suit in consequence, and 
 ended it by returning to England. 
 
 It is a singular fact in history, that the sam.-s day that John 
 Wesley returned home, George Whitfield was to leave it for 
 America. He had just time to stop Whitfield's departure, and he 
 adopted the most extraordinary method of determining whether 
 or not he should go he actually drew a lot for it. There was 
 never a man more credulous than John Wesley. With an intellect 
 clear and piercing, a power of reasoning not of a low order, logical 
 to the greatest extent, and with a scholastic knowledge the most 
 wonderful, yet he was so credulous. The house at home was 
 haunted by " old Jeffrey," who rung bells, shook the floors, and 
 rattled the doors ; this was the secret of Wesley's credulity. You 
 could never tell a story too long for him : a camel of a story was 
 one he loved, he could not endure a gnat. He used to settle all 
 difficult points by letting the Bible fall open, and choosing the 
 top text, and, like little children when they cast lots, if that did 
 not suit he would let it fall open again. He drew his lot ; but 
 Whitfield went to America notwithstanding that John Wesley's 
 lot had decided he should not. 
 
 Wesley had come home, and then he declared that in a certain 
 place, in a certain house, in a certain room, at a quarter-past nine 
 he was exact to the minute he was converted. That doctrine 
 of instantaneous conversion is a difficult one to understand. 
 Many persons say it was not so ; that John Wesley was converted 
 long before. But John Wesley says it was so, and he ought to 
 know best. It all depends on the definition of the word " con- 
 version." John Wesley tells us that in that little room in 
 Aldersgate Street, on the 2pth of May, in the year 1739, he was 
 converted, and, more than that, he declared that he never was
 
 John Wesley. 495 
 
 converted before. " But," say some biographers, " that is a 
 mistake/' Well, well ; who ought to be the best judge of the 
 matter John Wesley, or Robert Southey? It is like all other 
 controversies; the terms are not defined before the argument 
 proceeds. Ask John Wesley what he means by conversion ; then 
 ask Robert Southey what he means, and the difference of opinion 
 will be at once set right. What John Wesley meant is pretty 
 clear from what he has said about it: his idea of conversion 
 seems to be that it is an inward, clear consciousness of grace 
 before God, accompanied by an inward heavenly peace arising 
 in the soul. Tn a letter to a friend, Wesley said that before his 
 conversion he had only the faith of a devil, the faith of a Judas 
 Iscariot that speculative notional shadow which lives in the head 
 and not in the heart. John W'esley's notions of religion, previously 
 to this 29th of May, were purely of an ethical kind. He had 
 struggled with it, had subjected himself to it, he only knew it as 
 a law, and perhaps he did not love it sometimes ; but in that 
 chamber in Aldersgate Street it came to him differently ; it there 
 sprang up in his heart as a deep inward love between himself and 
 God. Therefore it is easy to understand what John meant when 
 he said he was converted there ; he meant that before then he had 
 been a mere Christian legalist, but that at that time he first felt 
 religion as a law of love. Is there no difference between serving 
 God as a servant, and serving him as a lover or a friend ? and is 
 there no meaning in the words, " I call you no more servants, but 
 friends"? Is there no difference between doing a thing, not 
 because we love it, but because it is the law, and doing it because 
 it comes natural to us? Oh, yes, John Wesley, who had known 
 Christianity as a law and then as a life, contrasted the dreary 
 bondage of the one, with the deep, joyous, enthusiastic love of 
 the other, and well did he say, " I was converted in Aldersgate." 
 
 The next thing to be remembered, after John Wesley's conver- 
 sion, is his visit to the Moravians in Germany. I am sorry I 
 have not time to sketch the Moravians. They are a very noble 
 people, with very queer laws ; I would not like to join them, 
 because they would undertake to regulate my little life a little too 
 much to please me. Moravianism has no more chance of being 
 universal in England than Wesleyanism has; I, for one, shall 
 never go to a band-meeting or a love-feast ; nor shall I tell my
 
 496 John Wesley. 
 
 " experiences " to anybody, because I like to keep them to myself. 
 Well, John Wesley went and spent a fortnight in Germany, and 
 there he met with that old theological curiosity, Zinzendorff.* 
 They had some discussions together, and by-and-bye they took to 
 quarrelling. This is to be remembered. 
 
 Then I am also sorry that I have not time to sketch the life of 
 that memorable man Whitfield, the first of those rigid old church- 
 men of that day to preach out of doors. Now, it is not uncommon 
 to preach out of doors ; but then, aye, it was a different thing 
 altogether. Why, John Wesley himself said he at one time of his 
 life almost thought it a sin to save a man out of church. It was 
 nothing but the grand compulsion "Necessity is laid upon me 
 that I preach the Gospel " that could have carried Whitfield out 
 of doors to preach. Well, he went down to Bristol and preached 
 to the Kingswood colliers, who, not the most polished specimens 
 of humanity now, were very rough then. But Whitfield did not 
 care for that ; he went down to polish them, and they listened to 
 him, because he came to do them good. It was something new 
 to them. Their employers then, as they do now, used them only 
 for their own gain ; they let the colliers make them rich, they paid 
 their wages grudgingly, and then would even steal after them with 
 that mean trick of truck. There are few days more noble to 
 Englishmen, who have sense, than that memorable i;th of Feb- 
 ruary 1739, that day of days when the giant Whitfield broke the 
 cruel bondage that ecclesiastical Delilahs had enmeshed him in, 
 and strode forth a Samson to preach the Gospel to those poor 
 blackfaced and neglected colliers down at Kingswood. And yet 
 he apologised for it. He said, with that simplicity of his, " I was 
 long in making up my mind, but I thought it might be doing the 
 service of my Saviour, who had a mountain for His pulpit and the 
 heavens for His sounding board, and who, when His Gospel was 
 refused by the Jews, sent His servants unto the Gentiles." " Let 
 a little water out, and there will soon be room for more." 
 
 We have seen Wesley a right order-loving Christian, with Dis- 
 senting blood in him, a High Churchman, a rigid stickler for 
 
 * Nicholas Louis, Count von Zin/endorff, a Saxon nobleman, who rendered 
 himself remarkable as the founder, or rather reviver, of the religious society 
 commonly called in England Moravians, upon the European continent 
 Herrnhuters, and by themselves the United Brethren.
 
 John Wesley. 497 
 
 ecclesiastical discipline ; we have to see all his rigidity give way, 
 like the Judaism of St Paul, to a greater and a better light; and 
 to do that we must see what was the training of the man. Was 
 it .ambition that caused him to change? That will never do. 
 There was but one thing he feared, and that was the wrath of God. 
 There was but one thing he yielded to, and that was his over- 
 whelming sense of the necessity that was laid upon him to preach 
 Christ everywhere he could. That is the burden of his teaching, 
 the great lesson of his life. 
 
 In the course of time Wesley must go down to Bristol too. The 
 foundations of Methodism were laid there. Well, to his infinite 
 honour, he went out to preach, and then came those paroxysms 
 of madness, roaring, howling, writhing, falling on the ground, 
 fainting, shouting, and bawling, all for the glory of God. It need 
 not be explained, for they are at it again in Belfast* and other 
 places, and the same words are used to express it now as were 
 used in Wesley's days. I have looked with astonishment at what 
 some of my brother clergymen if they will allow me to use the 
 phrase have said and done on this matter. " Fools rush in 
 where angels fear to tread," and as I have the reputation of a fool, 
 I shall take the liberty of saying a few words on the subject. I 
 will therefore assert broadly that all that happened when Wesley 
 preached, and all that is happening in Belfast and other places 
 now, has no necessary connection with the preaching of Methodism. 
 You doubt it? You shall fill me any room you like with any 
 average men and women, and I will undertake to have half of 
 them fainting and the other half weeping at any given time. You 
 fill me your Town Hall, and at a certain time I will have every 
 man there on his legs shouting and howling and roaring. What ! 
 do you think we are dunces enough to believe that such things 
 are necessary to the preaching of rehgion ? I say that nothing 
 that happened in John Wesley's days, and is now happening at 
 Belfast, but happened to the Christians in the old Roman Catho- 
 lic days, and then the bigots howled it down as gross fanaticism 
 and superstition. But where is the sense of hounding down the 
 strugglings and the strivings of some good old Catholic saint, 
 and crying up the same thing when it occurs in the Protestant, or 
 what is called the Evangelical Church? I believe that these 
 
 * A.D. 1859, 
 
 2 I
 
 49 8 John Wesley. 
 
 paroxysms are facts, that they do occur, and I believe that some 
 of them are genuine and some are nothing but fraud. John 
 Wesley believed the same. You need not fear ; I intend saying 
 nothing about John Wesley that cannot be found in his "Journal." 
 You must remember that, late in life, John Wesley neither ex- 
 pected nor encouraged these paroxysms ; that Charles Wesley 
 was always shy of them ; and that they never occurred during the 
 preaching of George Whitfield, who was the more fiery preacher. 
 Charles and John said they would put it down ; let those who 
 dare, read the "Journal" after that had taken place. John said 
 to a woman, who was " distressing herself and crying " by his 
 side, " I shan't think any better of you for that," and then " she 
 mended." Then read this noble passage. "To-day one came, 
 who was pleased to fall into a fit for my entertainment. He beat 
 himself heartily. I thought it a pity to hinder him. So, instead 
 of singing over him, as I often had before, I had him placed out- 
 side to recover at his leisure." Again. "A girl, as she began to 
 cry, I ordered to be carried out. Her convulsions were so 
 violent as to deprive her of the use of her limbs till they laid her 
 outside the door, and then she unexpectedly found her legs and 
 walked off." Well, then : " Some very unstill sisters, who always 
 took care to stand near me, and tried who could cry loudest, 
 since I have had them removed out of my sight, have been as 
 quiet as lambs." One more specimen. "The first night I 
 preached here, half my words were lost through the noise and 
 outcries. Therefore I gave out public notice that whosoever cried 
 out so as to drown my voice should, without hurting them, be 
 gently carried to the furthest corner of the room ; but my porter 
 had no employment that night." Then, if Charles and John 
 Wesley found out that these paroxysms were under the control 
 of the will, am I to be blamed because I think that there is no 
 ground for supposing that these physiological and psychological 
 phenomena under the control of the will have nothing more to 
 do with Christianity than with preaching Mohamedanism ? 
 
 The next point, then, is the separation of John Wesley from 
 the Moravians. It is easy to account for the separation of 
 Zinzendorff and John Wesley; they could not both be kings. 
 There are fundamental differences between the Moravians and 
 the Wesleyans. The Moravians hold that " all prayer, all Bible
 
 John Wesley. 499 
 
 reading, all benevolent acts prior to regeneration (i.e., the sudden 
 turning point), are deadly poison." That Wesley could not hold. 
 He held that " Evangelical perfection is possessed by the re- 
 generate as a moral condition wherein even all the irregular 
 motions of concupiscence, every involuntary impulse of sensuality 
 are unknown." The Moravians could not hold that. Well, both 
 sides appealed to their own experience instead of to reason, and 
 as a natural result the breach widened, they took strong views 
 of one another's doctrine, and spoke sharp words about each 
 other. 
 
 The next thing in Wesley's life was his separation from 
 Whitfield. George Whitfield held the doctrine of election and 
 irreversible decrees, and was also opposed to the " perfection " 
 doctrine. John put this Calvinistic doctrine about as shortly and 
 as cleverly, to answer his own purpose, as ever it has been put 
 yet. He says, "Supposing one in twenty of mankind are elected, 
 then nineteen out of twenty are reprobated ; the elect shall be 
 saved do what they will ; the reprobate shall be damned do what 
 they can." It is very strong, and very, very plain indeed. The 
 quarrel grew bitter, and Whitfield let out that curious fact that 
 Wesley had cast a lot to see if he (Whitfield) was to go to 
 America, and that God had given him the wrong lot. This stung 
 Wesley to the quick; he said it was, what it really was, a 
 violation of true friendship ; and the bitterness of the quarrel 
 increased. 
 
 In these times men are getting moderate ; but in old times, 
 when theologians spoke about matters of doctrine, there were 
 some noises. I will just give you a specimen or two of 
 "Theological Billingsgate" a description of Calvinism by an 
 Arminian, and a description of Arminianism by a Calvinist 
 choice specimens in their way. Here is one extracted from the 
 very curious poem, Dr Beaumont's " Psyche." 
 
 '' Oh, no ! may those black mouths for ever be 
 Damm'd up with silence and with shame, which dare 
 Father the foulest, deepest tyranny 
 On Love's great God : and needs will make it clear 
 
 From his own Word ! thus rendering Him at once 
 " Both Cruelty's and Contradiction's prince.
 
 500 John Wesley. 
 
 "A prince whose mocking Law forbids, what yet 
 Is his eternally resolved will : 
 Who woos and tantalizes souls to get 
 Up into heaven, yet destines them to hell ; 
 Who calls them forth whom he keeps locked in ; 
 Who damns the sinner, yet ordains the sin.'" (Canto x. 71). 
 
 This was the Arminian view of Calvinism. For the other side 
 there were richer flowers in store : " Scarce had our first parents 
 made their appearance when Satan, the first Arminian, began to 
 preach the pernicious doctrine of free will to them, which so 
 pleased the old gentleman and his lady that they (like thousand? 
 of their foolish offspring in our day) adhered to the deceitful 
 news, embraced it cordially, disobeyed the command of their 
 Maker, and by so doing launched their whole posterity into a 
 cloud of miseries and ills. But some, perhaps, will be ready to 
 say that Arminianism, though an error, cannot be the root of all 
 other errors, to which I answer, that, if it first originated with 
 Satan, then, I ask, from whence springs every error or evil in the 
 world ? Surely, Satan must be the first moving cause of all evils 
 that ever did, do now, or ever will make their appearance in this 
 world ; consequently he was the first propagator of the cursed 
 doctrine above mentioned. Hence [the logic is lovely] Armin- 
 ianism begat Popery, Popery begat Methodism, Methodism begat 
 Moderate Calvinism, Moderate Calvinism begat Baxterianism, Bax- 
 terianism begat Unitarianism, Unitarianism begat Arianism, Ar- 
 ianism begat Universalism, Universalism begat Deism, and Deism 
 begat Atheism." The tirade concludes by averring that of all these 
 " isms " Arminianism is the worst, and that the whole will end in 
 " destructionism." Where do you think I got that from ? Not 
 from an infidel paper. No, I always go to a religious paper for 
 abuse. Well, then, it is an extract from the Gospel Magazine. 
 
 Then, out of the two sides, as it always does occur in a quarrel 
 between two sects, there arose another Antinomianism. 
 
 The next thing that comes under our notice is the gradual 
 systematising of Methodism. The first step was out-of-door 
 preaching by John Wesley ; by-and-bye the clergy would not let 
 him preach indoors, because he preached so enthusiastically and 
 awoke the pew-sleepers, this led to field preaching ; but then there 
 were wet days, and they must have a meeting-house ; but then a
 
 John Wesley. 501 
 
 bricklayer would not build them one for the love of God, and so 
 there must be funds ; and then, who would take care of the 
 funds ? they must have stewards. Then they got their meeting- 
 houses, and wanted preachers lay preachers. John Wesley 
 kicked against that a long time, but was at last convinced. Well, 
 then, having got the preachers, they must have something to pay 
 them with ; and so came the " penny-a-week " fund, that marvel 
 of organisation, that secret of the strength of Wesleyanism. The 
 sooner the advocates of the voluntary principle come to that 
 penny-a-week, the better it will be for them. Lay preaching was 
 a novelty then. Fox certainly had gone up and down and 
 preached Quakerism in spite of all the horse-ponds in the coun- 
 try, but that was before Quakerism settled down into broadcloth 
 and easy-going. But lay-preaching was again cultivated under 
 U'esley, and the Methodists gradually became formed into a 
 society. It had a noble title and a noble preamble, and a set of 
 common-sense rules, but it was not called a church, it was a society. 
 
 And now the mob began their insane roar against Methodism, 
 the same as they did in Jerusalem when Christ came. The early 
 Wesleyans knew almost all the horse-ponds in the country ; when- 
 ever eggs were more ancient than usual they were reserved for 
 Wesleyans in short, they were ill-treated everywhere; and if 
 anyone wants to read of the heroism of all heroism, it must be 
 found in the annals of the early Quakers and the early Wesleyans. 
 Time would fail me to tell of John Wesley's travels, his rough 
 usage and hard fare, his rencontre with Beau Nash, and his ex- 
 ploits at Wednesbury and Walsall. He always turned his atten- 
 tion to the poor in preference to the wealthy, and was ever ready 
 to do all in his power for their service. His courage was indomit- 
 able ; his perseverance and earnestness were marvellous. 
 
 I must just allude to the establishment of Kingswood School. 
 It was just such an extraordinary institution for the instruction of 
 the young, as anyone would naturally expect from a man who 
 knew nothing about either women or children. One of the rules 
 of the school provided that the children should never have a day's 
 holiday from the time they entered till the time they left ; another, 
 that they were to rise at four and spend an hour in self-examina- 
 tion ; another, that they were only to have meat twice a week ; 
 and so on.
 
 502 John Wesley. 
 
 In the year 1744 a conference was formed for drawing up the 
 doctrines of Wesleyanism, and the society went fully afloat. 
 
 And now I come to the point where I hope to fairly lay hands 
 on John Wesley, and that is in reference to the large-hearted 
 charity of the man. He never shut a Catholic out of heaven. 
 He acknowledged, after reading of the death of some Trappist 
 monks, that, " notwithstanding they had a great deal of supersti- 
 tion, a strong vein of piety ran through their works." He held 
 Montaigne to be right in many things, said a good word for 
 Servetus, and even went so far as to publish the life of Thomas 
 Firmin, the Unitarian. No doubt Wesleyans now would call 
 these his " weaknesses," but they were the opinions of his mature 
 life, glorious opinions too. Why, he made no doubt, he said, but 
 Marcus Antoninus was one of those who should come from the 
 East and from the West to sit down with Isaac and Jacob in the 
 kingdom. Wesley was no bitter Protestant bigot; he believed 
 that if a man loved God with all his heart he would be saved, 
 differences of opinion notwithstanding. 
 
 Wesley had remarkable power over both his preachers and his 
 people, a power not sought, but laid at his feet. He was a king, 
 who held his kingship to the last, and then bequeathed a republi- 
 can constitution to his people. He had a deal of shrewd policy 
 had John. He knew his preachers well ; he knew that they had 
 not much to say, that their little pump would soon be dry, so he 
 moved them up and down, and thus made their little story always 
 fresh. 
 
 I like John's lectures about singing, and would advise 
 Wesleyans to read Wesley on singing. He was very strong about 
 singing lines over and over again, and could not endure fugues. 
 
 Wesleyanism did not go into Scotland ; but there is no time to 
 give the reason. It went into Ireland, and some curious advice 
 John had to write to his people there about cleanliness ; he even 
 advised the use of brimstone in families as a destructive agent. 
 He told them, too, to mend their clothes, or he would never 
 expect them to mend their lives. 
 
 Wesley's marriage was most unhappy, and at last came separa- 
 tion, and Wesley made in his journal this laconic entry : " Non 
 earn relinque; non dimisi ; non revocabo." " I did not leave her ; 
 I did not dismiss her ; and I shan't fetch her back,"
 
 John Wesley. 503 
 
 Thus ends the eventful history of John Wesley. He never 
 missed a night's sleep ; he was regular in his habits ; and with his 
 hair silver white, his face rosy with health, his great charitable 
 soul peeping out of his eyes, he went down to the grave at a good 
 old age, long past the three score and ten years allotted to man, 
 and far into the four score years which were to bring trouble and 
 sorrow ; and, with a fine emotion, the minister who buried him, 
 by a slight change in the service, spoke of " their dear father now 
 departed" instead of "their dear brother," for he was their father 
 ever. 
 
 One thing has been forgotten. While Voltaire and Rousseau 
 were inflaming the revolutionary spirits of France with their writ- 
 ings, John Wesley and Whitfield were doing their mighty work in 
 England, and there are few men to whom England owes more for 
 her steadfastness than these two. Wesley was therefore a patriot 
 as well as a priest. 
 
 What I have to say of Wesley's hymns must go till another 
 opportunity, for time is short. 
 
 I intend now to see what was the work the followers of Wesley 
 undertook to do, whether that work is done, and to enter into a 
 little speculation as to whether they are to increase, or whether 
 they are to have to say, " Let now thy servant depart in peace, 
 for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." You must remember that 
 the falling oft" of a society is as likely to happen because its work 
 is well done as because Its work is not well done. If each sect that 
 comes into the world to urge forward some forgotten side of the 
 truth does its work, it soon becomes absorbed by the large bodies, 
 and we may have to receive at [some future time some new 
 Wesley to preach Wesleyanism to Wesleyans. 
 
 I do not think modern Wesleyanism is better than its founder, and 
 my honest opinion is that it is not up to the mark. I do not think 
 it is adapted to be a permanent institution ; its discipline is too 
 sharp for some of us, too strict, too severe. All religious forms 
 have a danger somewhere, and Wesleyanism has its danger ; it is 
 to be apprehended in the exaggerated importance it attaches to 
 what are technically called " experiences," thus drawing off atten- 
 tion from that great matter which absolutely must be insisted upon 
 good works. The Romish Church has a tendency to ceremon- 
 ialism, and the Wesleyans have a tendency not a whit better.
 
 504 John Wesley. 
 
 As to its increase, I suppose it is always increasing. It has had 
 some splits, and will go on splitting. I feel certain I shall live long 
 enough to see another split. A sect cannot be got that will not 
 split ; it would be sure to contain some men who were born to be 
 governed by the Church, and some who were born to be indepen- 
 dent. If I were one of the former, I should not be able to think 
 that a bishop multiplied by a hundred (for that is what the Con- 
 ference is, after all) was better than a single bishop, and, as I 
 should like to look up to the man who governed me, and feel that 
 I was governed by a great man, I should go over to be governed 
 by one bishop. And then the independent men would go over 
 to the Independents. There must be splits. I do not know much 
 about Wesleyans myself, but my soul goes out towards those Primi- 
 tives. I find them with some fine old stuff in them yet, and I often 
 see them standing on the top of a waggon preaching away. I 
 don't know what John would say to a Primitive, though ; but at 
 the same time I am quite sure what John would say to the 
 Wesleyan chapels now-a-days, with their Gothic windows and 
 their spires and their turrets. The Primitive is certainly a 
 sort of pioneer, although his grammar is a little curious some- 
 times, and no doubt he is doing a good work. Modern 
 Wesleyanism is, however, doomed to the fate of all other 
 isms. There will be a man rise out of its bosom to reform it 
 to re-Wesleyanise Wesleyanism. But beyond that I will say that, 
 as in the beginning, so now, they are famous for preaching the 
 first principles of Christian faith, and that the more they continue 
 to do that, the more will they uphold their glory and honour. As 
 I have said before, a large number must go to the Church, and 
 a large number the other way ; but the follower of Wesley must 
 go straight on in his way. As soon as ever they fall into the evil of 
 preferring the means to the end, on that day will be written across 
 Wesleyanism, " Ichabod," the glory hath departed. My object 
 this evening has been to bring Wesley out of the little chapels 
 where he has been shut up, and to expose him in the market-place 
 of Old England, so that all who pass by may give him honour 
 and .if I have not succeeded in making you love Wesley, and 
 admire Wesley more than you have ever done before, I have done 
 my work clumsily.
 
 LIFE OF DR PRIESTLEY. 
 
 BORN 1733. DIED 1804. (FROM 6rn GEORGE II. TO 44TH GEORGE III.) 
 
 TT has never been permitted to this town of Birmingham to have 
 great men born in it, but great men have been resident in it, 
 and by their discoveries have added lustre to it. Not that the 
 town knows very much about them, or cares very much. In the 
 case of Watt, probably the town does ; but in the case of Priestley, 
 it requires a great deal for a man to admire him. It requires a 
 man set free from antiquated theological prejudices; able to 
 understand that science is not limited by anything which has gone 
 before it, except its own data ; a man free from a passion for 
 throwing stones, for calling men heretics, for meddling with other 
 people's damnation, and even yet this town, in common with 
 other towns, is far from being free from this evil spirit. It is not 
 so long since Birmingham was disgraced by some pettifogging 
 riots and theological and religious disorders (the hero of them is 
 recently dead) ; * and if you look carefully you will see that the 
 number of men thoroughly free from the bigotry of theologians 
 is small. Even yet many scientific men treat Priestley in the 
 same manner as he was treated in his lifetime by the Fellows of 
 the Royal Society in London. He says that after the riots they 
 treated him coldly, and proclaimed him Athiest, Theist, Unitarian; 
 all of which, in the conception of a fool and a bigot, a man can 
 be at one time. 
 
 * " On the i6th and ijth of July 1867, occurred the last of that long series of 
 riots which have rendered the town of Birmingham somewhat infamous in that 
 respect. It originated in the weakness of the chief magistrate of the town in 
 refusing to grant the use of the Town Hall for the purpose of a series of Anti- 
 Papal Lectures by the late Mr William Murphy, and thus tacitly giving the 
 rough element in the town to understand that Mr Murphy was not to be pro- 
 tected from any attacks which might be made upon him, by such of the said 
 roughs as might feel themselves aggrieved by the certainly intemperate 
 language of the lecturer." Old and New Birmingham : A history of the to~Mii 
 and its people. By Robert K. Dent.
 
 506 Life of Dr Priestley. 
 
 Priestley's life, I am sorry to say, is not familiar, except 
 to members of the sect of which he was one of the chief fathers 
 and chief glories. It is so many years since he died, that it is 
 not to be wondered at that most people's portrait of him is dim. 
 He never was a man calculated to excite enthusiasm or passion. 
 He knew very little of the human heart, or the inner things of 
 human nature. He did not meddle with the deep things of life, 
 and, therefore, he was not a man who very easily fascinated, or a 
 man very easily remembered. 
 
 He was the son of Jonas Priestley, and was born on the i3th of 
 March 1733, at Birstal, near Leeds. His mother seems to have 
 been an excellent woman ; rather prim, if one of the stories told 
 about her is to be believed. She saw her son, then a child, play- 
 ing with a pin, and asked him where he had got it. The lad 
 replied that he had been playing with his cousins, and acknow- 
 ledged that he had brought the pin away with him. She made 
 him take it back. This shows a nice sense of property and pro- 
 priety, and, to a man like me, a prime sense of forgetfulness that 
 in such extreme righteousness the fine lines of conscience are apt 
 to be effaced. When Priestley's mother died, he came under the 
 care of a very excellent woman an aunt. She was Calvinistical, 
 but was far from confining salvation to those who thought as she 
 did. Being in good circumstances, her home was the resort of all 
 the dissenting ministers in the neighbourhood, and those obnoxious 
 from heresy she welcomed as much as the others, if she thought 
 them honest, good, and sincere. There's a Calvinist ! actually 
 admitting the right of other people to be saved although they 
 were heretical, and actually believing that men could be honest 
 and good though they were unsigned. 
 
 Priestley went to the Free Grammar School, and there learnt 
 Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and in the vacations he learnt Chaldee, 
 Syriac, and Arabic. His dear aunt thought he should be a 
 minister, but his health being feeble, he turned to mercantile 
 pursuits. He got better in health, however, and at the age of 
 nineteen he went to one of the somewhat humble academies in 
 which Dissenters at that time placed their students he went to 
 Daventry. The master was a Mr Ashworth, and he was the suc- 
 cessor of Dr Doddridge. The soundness of Dr Doddridge has 
 been questioned, and he certainly did take a method with young
 
 Life of Dr Priestley. 507 
 
 men, perhaps inadvisable, if you are afraid where your investiga- 
 tions may lead you to ; he always required a student to read the 
 best books on both sides of a controverted question, and to make 
 an abridgement of both. This is monstrous ; for if a man reads 
 both sides of a controverted question, the chances are that there 
 will be no controverted questions ; so that Dr Doddridge's 
 system was, of course, founded on fundamental mistake. But it 
 led to enlarged views on both sides. Priestley had an original 
 faculty for heresy ; he soon admitted that he came to take a 
 heterodox view of almost every question. He dropped his ortho- 
 dox views slowly, as men usually do ; for the rejection of a system 
 of theology is never systematic. You loosen one stone, and cling 
 very lovingly to the next ; you give up one thing, and take your 
 stand upon another. Thus, a man who has ceased to be a 
 Calvinist, and has gone over to the Arminians, takes his stand 
 upon the Trinity, is sound upon the Atonement. 
 
 Priestley wished, by-and-bye, to become a communicant of a 
 Calvinistic congregation ; he wished to eat of the supper of 
 Christ's blood, but he wa$ refused, because he doubted, or rather, 
 as they said in those days, because he " entertained doubts." I 
 have been told to entertain strangers, that thereby I may perhaps 
 entertain angels unawares ; but entertaining a doubt ! who ever 
 found one entertaining, and what wise man would ever entertain 
 one? Well, he "entertained doubts" as to the liability of the 
 whole human race to the wrath of God and the pains of hell, on 
 account of " the sin of our first parents," and because a young 
 man entertains doubts upon this deep question, upon which 
 nobody knows anything particular, it is determined that he is not 
 a fit person to be a communicant. So you see what comes of 
 entertaining a doubt. At the Academy divisions were frequent, 
 because discussions were numerous, and I need hardly tell you 
 that wherever men can divide, divide they will; wherever they 
 can differ, differ they must. It has been so from the beginning, 
 and it will be so to the end of the chapter. These men, then, 
 eager, full of texts, rushed to battle over the question of liberty 
 and necessity ; they debated questions upon which they had not 
 over-much evidence, and, as they knew nothing about the next 
 world, they were argumentative, contentious, and lucid upon what 
 happens to us after death.
 
 508 Life of Dr Priestley. 
 
 By-and-bye Joseph Priestley quitted that humble academy, and 
 went as minister to Needham Market (how suggestive the name 
 is of the place !), and there he got into a sort of nebulous 
 Arianism ; he got the reputation of not being exactly sound. 
 They gave him .^30 a year. But his people had a great idea of 
 getting a minister up to the mark ! They did not want a teacher 
 (what congregation does ?) ; they wanted an ardent advocate of 
 their own opinions, who would illuminate, illustrate, enforce, and 
 ornament them, and at the same time show what an enlightened 
 congregation it was which held such views, and could secure such 
 an expounder. For ^30 this congregation expected too much, 
 and Priestley left them with a great deal of thankfulness, for they 
 were over hard upon him. 
 
 Then at Nantwich he opened a school, and got on ; rigid 
 economy, no debts, for Priestley never was in debt throughout his 
 life, and he hated debt with the holy horror with which every 
 honest man should hate it. Rigid economy got him an air- 
 pump ; rigid economy bought him an electrical machine. How 
 characteristic ! This man half starved himself to buy an air-pump, 
 and was sternly self-denying to purchase an electrical machine. 
 
 Then he was married to a Miss Wilkinson. I have looked 
 among his works, and have been unable to discover a treatise on 
 marriage ; but, no doubt, he wrote a preliminary treatise on 
 the married state. He went about his marriage in a highly philo- 
 sophic and systematic manner, and, no doubt, reduced the matter 
 to philosophic principles before he put it into marital practice. 
 
 He visited London, and to him it was always a delight to go 
 to London. He took a month there whenever he could, because 
 it meant to him new books, new subjects, new faces, new 
 discussions. There, in 1766, he met Dr Franklin and Dr Price 
 (and there were three clear, clever, intelligent-minded men, whose 
 duty it was to brush away cob-webs, and to let in light). Of 
 course he took at once to Franklin and at once to Price (" birds 
 of a feather flock together "), and he told Franklin that, if he 
 could get the necessary books together, he should write a history 
 of electrical discovery. Give Priestley the books, and he could 
 write on anything. He had a clear, ready, apprehensive mind, a 
 pen too facile, and these betrayed him into writing more than 
 anybody would ever read.
 
 Life of Dr Priestley. 509 
 
 Meantime in theological matters, doctrine after doctrine had 
 slid away, and then the Atonement. "Men talk," he said, "of 
 the sacred doctrine of Remission ; but it shows that the death of 
 Christ is no proper sacrifice or satisfaction for sin. The pardon is 
 dispensed solely on account of the personal repentance of the 
 sinners." This was looked upon as very shocking. He left 
 Nantwich and went to Warrington, where he succeeded Dr 
 Aikin, and was Professor of Languages and Belles Lettres in the 
 Dissenting Academy; but, by-and-bye. the trustees and the pro- 
 fessors fell out, and in 1767 he left Warrington, and went to the 
 Mill Hill Chapel, Leeds. His house was near to a brewery, and, 
 whether it was the smell of the wort, or the smell of the brewery 
 chimney, it set him thinking about chemistry, and he was soon 
 found impregnating water with " fixed air." 
 
 Then in 1771 he was made an offer to go with Captain Cook 
 on his second voyage to the Southern Seas, and the matter was 
 nearly settled, when a difficulty came in the way. It was inti- 
 mated to him by Mr, afterwards Sir Joseph, Banks, that 
 " objections to his religious principles had been successfully urged 
 by some of the ecclesiastical members of the Board of Longitude." 
 Did anyone ever read anything more utterly ridiculous than this 
 statement? What had ecclesiastical principles to do with the 
 Board of Longitude? If it had been a matter of latitude, the 
 case might have been different ! Poor Priestley unsound on the 
 Atonement, and, therefore, not sufficiently sound to accompany 
 Captain Cook, and to take an observation of a planet, or to make 
 an experiment at sea ! And simply because he was an Arian ! 
 Such superstitions as these take longer to weed out of people's 
 minds than any other.* 
 
 In 1772, Priestley was appointed librarian and literary com- 
 panion to the Earl Shelburne; salary, ^250 a year, with separate 
 residence, and a provision for life if the persons did not disagree, 
 and if the Earl did not die first. In the second year of the 
 engagement, Priestley travelled Germany, France, and Holland. 
 
 * "They objected to Priestley 'on account of his religious principles,' and 
 appointed the two Forsters, whose 'religious principles,' if they had been 
 known to these well-meaning but not far-sighted persons, would probably 
 have surprised them." Professor Huxley's Address at the unveiling of the 
 Priestley statue in Birmingham.
 
 510- Life of Dr Priestley. 
 
 At Paris he was received with respect and honour by the great 
 chemists. There he said they were all Atheists, and they pitied 
 him. In England he was not thought fit to go with Captain 
 Cook ; in France he was so little heretical that he was pitied ; he 
 never could get right. 
 
 Moved by the French pity he wrote what, after all, was one of 
 his best books, "Letters to a Philosophic Unbeliever." These 
 letters are the letters of a Theist, of a Christian Theist, and of a 
 philosophic man, arguing the question of Revealed against Natu- 
 ral Religion. This is a book which leaves Priestley high and dry 
 among his followers. He was the father of the Unitarian Church. 
 There are people now in the sect who care not for the traditions 
 of their fathers ; they have got so far that they believe Priestley 
 has become old-fashioned, sound, orthodox, antiquated, fogeyish, 
 as compared with their advanced ideas. The questions Priestley 
 discussed are done with, and new questions have arisen. The 
 question now is, which shall get out of the road, Scripture or 
 Science ; and, if the Scriptures differ with Science, which pitcher, 
 in going down the stream, shall break. But these questions were 
 not Priestley's questions, and we have no right to ask them of 
 him in his books. He went on with his chemical researches, 
 aided by Lord Shelburne. He declared man, on scientific grounds, 
 to be simply material. Therefore, he was a " Materialist." 
 Fearful name? He also held that immortality depended upon 
 the Christian resurrection of man as material solely, wholly, 
 simply material but that he still might become immortal by the 
 fiat of God. Many men have since gone beyond this, but this 
 was his position. Some people nowadays would rather not rise, 
 than feel that they haven't got a soul in the meantime. 
 
 He parted with Earl Shelburne, and, after spending a little time 
 in London, he came to Birmingham. Many here have, no doubt, 
 sat in the shrine once sacred to his memory ; but some have sold 
 the shrine, and have given to the priests the things which once 
 were Priestley's.* No doubt they are right; because what are 
 
 * " In 1862 the Roman Catholics purchased from the Unitarians the building 
 long known as the New Meeting House, the successor of that in which Dr 
 Priestley preached from 1780 to 1791, and which was burnt by the rioters in 
 the latter year. It is now known as St Michael's, and during the year 1878 a 
 red brick manse was erected in front, thus obscuring the view of this historic 
 edifice." Old and New Birmingham, by Robert K. Den!.
 
 Life of Dr Priestley. 5 1 1 
 
 traditions, and what are antiquities to a people so enlightened as 
 you and I ? They are merely clinging superstitions. And so 
 the old place is sold, and Priestley's haunts are now trodden by 
 the feet of those against whom he was one of the most earnest 
 fighters, and one of the deadliest foes. 
 
 A subscription was entered into to help him in his experiments ; 
 an offer was made to try to obtain him a pension, but he de- 
 clined. Then he wrote a " History of the Corruptions of Chris- 
 tianity," a book which was worthy any wise man's reading ; but 
 it had the honour of being burnt at Dort by the common hang- 
 man. Burning books is the finest system of propagandism 
 known. 
 
 Then he was engaged in a literary warfare with Dr Horsley. 
 Priestley was an affectionate, quiet, methodical, and apparently 
 cold man ; but he could get warm, and when, in that controversy, 
 he stood hammer in hand and dealt blow for blow with his 
 opponent, he hit hard; and he had the best of it in argument, 
 although Horsley was more courteous. He addressed some 
 familiar letters to the people of Birmingham, the irony of which 
 was delicate and fine. The people of Birmingham did not like 
 them ; people seldom like irony, except at the expense of their 
 neighbours, and so the people of Birmingham were exasperated. 
 Then Priestley replied to that splendid man, Burke, and though 
 Burke beat Priestley in eloquence, Priestley had the best of it in 
 argument ; for when Burke had made a charge against him, 
 which he would neither substantiate nor retract, Priestley said 
 that he had not the ability to prove it, nor the honesty to 
 withdraw it. 
 
 On the i4th of July 1791, that outbreak of humanity- 
 splendid, fearful, necessary, terrible, salutary the French Revo- 
 lution, was to be celebrated in Birmingham. The Bastile had 
 fallen (two years before) ; there was a chance for humanity ; the 
 down-trodden peoples had an opportunity of regaining their 
 liberty, and there was to be a dinner in Birmingham in honour of 
 the event. Now come the famous riots with which you are all 
 familiar. There was a mob, with the usual characteristics of a 
 mob hysterics, strong passions, small thought, abundance of 
 noise. Every intellectual man must despise a mob. It is a 
 curious thing that the mob now does not take the same side. Do
 
 512 Life of Dr Priestley. 
 
 you think the mob knows more about it now ? No, they have 
 merely an idea that the upper classes are not on their side, and 
 so they bellow against them. But in those days, the lower and 
 the upper classes joined, and the educated rowdy led on the 
 uneducated blackguard, and used their vilest passions and their 
 filthiest senses to inflict political chastisement upon a few 
 enlightened men who loved their country as dearly as they did, 
 and who would love its institutions and constitution as long as 
 they did. Whenever I hear of aristocratic people seeking to 
 league with the democracy I am suspicious, and think that the 
 former only leagues with the latter in order that they may make 
 them do some dirty work which they are not too wise or too 
 scrupulous, but too finical, to do themselves. The singular thing 
 was, that when the gentlemen, the magistrates, the Church-and- 
 King men, had hounded on the people, they tried to call them 
 back when it was too late, by saying, " Consider what a great 
 deal of money it will cost." But why should Priestley be attacked ? 
 Because of his writings, and because he was talked of as a chief 
 preacher of heresy. This is what was said of him in an address 
 to the Unitarians, published at that time : " Dr Priestley at 
 present, seems a chaos in miniature ; not worth God's notice ; 
 has neither belief nor understanding given him. For a careful 
 analysis proves his spirit of the order of rebelling angels, his 
 principles frothy and fiery, like fixed and inflammable air mixed 
 with gunpowder, his body terra damnata, and the whole com- 
 pound a devil incarnate. I hope Dissenters will beware of his 
 seduction, and take heed lest they are deceived through philo- 
 sophy." That must have been written by a drunken chemist ; 
 it was, moreover, just the sort of stuff the mob liked it was 
 thoroughly unintelligible. Take another specimen from a song 
 entitled " Old Mother Church," describing the Dissenters : 
 
 " Sedition is their creed ; 
 Feign'd sheep, but wolves indeed 
 
 How can we trust? 
 Gunpowder Priestley would 
 Deluge the Throne with blood, 
 And lay the great and good 
 
 Low in the dust.
 
 Life of Dr Priestley. 5 1 3 
 
 Hist'ry thy page unfold, 
 Did not their sires of old 
 
 Murder their king? 
 And they would overthrow 
 King, lords, and bishops too ; 
 And, while they gave the blow, 
 
 Loyally sing 
 
 O Lord, our God, arise, 
 Scatter our enemies, 
 And make them fall." 
 
 Priestley was not at the dinner, though some still say he was ; 
 toasts and sentiments were given, and the newspapers afterwards 
 said the toasts drunk were " something awful." Afterwards the 
 house of the heretic Priestley was attacked; his books were 
 destroyed ; torn MSS. covered the ground. And then the mob 
 went on. House after house was destroyed the houses of those 
 whose names had never been famous in the town save for good 
 deeds and good sense. The justest, clearest-headed, simplest, 
 and truest men were the victims. The mob had a fine sense of 
 oppositeness ; it knew its antipodes, like the dirty man who 
 selected the cleanest he could find to kick. Of course poor 
 Priestley had to take to flight. He received only ^2000 as com- 
 pensation for his losses, but private generosity did a good deal for 
 him besides. 
 
 He went to Hackney to succeed Dr Price, but the Hackney 
 philosophers held up their hands with horror and said, " What, 
 Dr Priestley, the smoked-out of Birmingham, the atheist, the 
 revolutionist ! " 
 
 And so Priestley left Hackney and went to America, as he had 
 friends there. William Cobbett saw him there, and did not like 
 him because he spoke against England. This Cobbett was a man 
 to whose acuteness there was no limit, and to the dense depths of 
 whose stupidity there was no bottom. He looked upon Priestley 
 as a lean sedition-monger, as a man heretical and unsound, and 
 so he denounced him. The Americans did not receive Priestley 
 with any great cordiality ; they were bent on exhibiting a little 
 temporary gentility ; they had been a little too democratic, and 
 now they wished to try a little gentlemanly democracy and mode- 
 rate, kid-gloved republicanism, by way of contrast. In 1796 
 
 2 K
 
 514 Life of Dr Priestley. 
 
 Priestley's wife died, and in 1804 he died in America. His eloge 
 was pronounced at Paris by Cuvier. 
 
 Priestley and James Watt were two of the most eminent men 
 ever connected with Birmingham; one discovered the steam- 
 engine, the other oxygen. Priestley was a man of prodigious 
 mental activity ; he was always writing. Natural philosophy, 
 grammar, geography, metaphysics, theology, philology, and 
 history were among the subjects on which he wrote ; and he 
 wrote a great deal too much. As an historian there was 
 nothing great about him ; one of his greatest admirers said, " His 
 Church History is laborious, and not uninteresting." Could ever 
 book be damned with fainter praise than this ? A great historian 
 must be a great metaphysician, a great poet he must have 
 imagination and a mastery of language. Priestley's History was 
 erudite, enlightened, " not uninteresting," and " laborious." If 
 you answered the logic of it, you would do well. As a theologian 
 he was not great he was not equal either to Bull, Butler, 
 Lardner, or Paley ; he was a great captain, but not one of the 
 chief captains. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that he 
 was not a great power in theology. The nebulous Arianism 
 of his day he brought together in the simple, clear, and 
 homogeneous thing, called now Humanitarianism. From one 
 end of his works to the other there is not a ray of imagination. 
 He was such an excellent man, he was never in a pickle ; he was 
 so good, he was never in a scrape; he never sinned so as to 
 understand the deeper tragedies of life. Cool, calm, pious, 
 devout, he led a uniform, dispassionate life, content to follow 
 where science led him. If a man wants a guide, philosopher, and 
 friend if he wants a confessor let him not go to Priestley. But 
 there is nothing foolisher than finding fault because a man is not 
 everything. 
 
 Priestley was not a great orator, and he never could be, 
 because he lacked imagination. He did not write all his own 
 sermons ; he never pretended that he did, and so there was no 
 harm done. Pious, puritan, devout, intelligent, fearless, and 
 brave, these are the qualities for which I admire Priestley. In 
 politics he was large-hearted, generous, and liberal; there was 
 nothing moonshiny or mountebank about him; there was no 
 spasm, no noise about him ; he was no fire-eater ; in his politics
 
 Life of Dr Priestley. 5 r 5 
 
 he soared above the region of like and dislike; he would not 
 have been much good in a contested election. His political 
 opinions were deduced from and founded upon the law of God. 
 He drew conclusions from things of which he was the student, and 
 not the creator. I cannot understand men, Liberals in their youth, 
 turning Tories in their old age. I could no more turn Tory than I 
 could deny the order of the stars. 
 
 As a man of science, Priestley was great. I do not say he was 
 equal to Newton, but he must be grouped immediately around 
 him. The discoverer of oxygen is a man who should be thought 
 much of in a town like this. Such a man should not be left to 
 teach children to eke out a living to discover oxygen, and birch 
 boys. There is no science on which the future of this country 
 so much depends as on chemistry. The town of Birmingham has 
 to wipe out a disgrace. Our fathers had a prophet amongst them, 
 and they stoned him. They drove Priestley away with ignominy, 
 and thereby placed a blot on the reputation of Birmingham, 
 which it is the duty of their descendants to remove. Perhaps 
 the people do not care to remove the blot. If King Solomon 
 were to come to earth, and offer to write a second Book of 
 Proverbs for nothing, he would not be heeded if a man came 
 forward and offered to stand on his head, and drink a quart of 
 ale meanwhile. But, whether the Priestley Memorial Fund will 
 be taken up by the people or not, I can tell you that it will be 
 carried through, even if ten or twelve men have to find the money 
 between them.* 
 
 * " The admirers of Priestley, principally as a scientific discoverer, and in 
 some degree also as a politician and philosopher, some time ago raised a fund 
 which was spent in a beautiful marble statue, and this has been presented by 
 Professor Huxley to the Mayor as representing the town. The sculptor is Mr 
 F. J. Williamson of Esher, a pupil of Foley's, and the statue formed of Sicilian 
 marble, and in execution perfect, representing the character of the great 
 scientific man with wonderful fidelity, is a high work of art and most credit- 
 able to the sculptor. With the peculiar wig of the period, and every part of 
 the costume faithfully executed in detail, with expression as life-like as is pos- 
 sible in marble, Priestley is shown holding in his hand a burning glass, in the 
 act of discovering oxygen. As Professor Huxley in his address afterwards 
 pointed out, the burning glass is reduced to aesthetic proportions; but the 
 incident chosen by the sculptor otherwise represents accurately the most note- 
 worthy incident of the scientific career of Priestley." The Priestley Memorial. 
 London : Longmans, Paternoster Row.
 
 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 BORN 1762. DIED 1835. (FROM 2ND GEORGE III TO STH WILLIAM IV.) 
 
 T AM to lecture to you to-night on William Cobbett, ploughboy, 
 -* soldier, author, and Member of Parliament. I shall not 
 attempt to furnish a detailed autobiography of my hero, but 
 merely sketch in outline the leading events of his life. Five-and- 
 twenty years are about long enough to lay the dust that a man 
 who talked so plainly, loved so heartily, hated so strongly, and 
 feared so little as William Cobbett necessarily raised about him ; 
 for he was one of those disagreeable men who always say what 
 they mean, call spades spades, fools fools, and knaves knaves. 
 The height of a man's position could not save him from the scorn 
 and ridicule of Cobbett, who had a love for all honest men and 
 independent men, and a hatred for all time-servers, gentilities, 
 and worshippers of the great. No wonder, then, that wherever 
 he went, in latter days, calumny, abuse, and hostility accompanied 
 him. These five-and-tvventy years have laid the dust, and enable 
 us to do justice to a man who, whatever his faults were, was a 
 thorough bit of good old English stuff: one who raised himself 
 from the lowest position to the highest, and who spoke the Eng- 
 lish language as only three other men could speak it. 
 
 The time has now come when I can give an illustrative coat of 
 varnish to that picture of a thorough-going, old-fashioned Eng- 
 lishman. I like him a great deal better than I like Dr Franklin. 
 I like Franklin a good deal, but he had the bad fortune to be 
 born an American ; and that double-chinned, smooth, money- 
 chinking, prosperous man, let me do what I will, I can never love 
 him. I respect, admire, esteem him, and all that, but I never 
 loved Franklin, and I believe I never shall. But there are 
 certain things about Cobbett that oblige us to love him. He was 
 one of the most mighty egotists the world ever had he believed 
 in himself thoroughly and whenever he wanted to illustrate a
 
 William Cobbett. 517 
 
 principle of righteousness he pointed to himself. This egotism is 
 shown in every one of Cobbett's books ; and in reading Cobbett 
 we have to pay the price that always has to be paid for the 
 writings of strong self-educated men. Education crushes egotism, 
 and makes a man so full of authorities that he never dares to 
 quote himself ; while the self-educated man always says, "/did, 
 / thought, / said " and therefore you must pardon Cobbett, 
 who, whenever he wants to show you a beautiful example of 
 righteousness, says, " Look at me." And I do pardon him ; for 
 real big words are offensive only when they are the source of 
 small deeds. 
 
 Cobbett's early life was spent in Hampshire, as a ploughboy. 
 A huntsman, on one occasion, without any provocation, wantonly 
 gave the boy a cut with his whip, and Cobbett took a whimsical 
 revenge upon him. Few of the actions of a boy eight years of 
 age supply such a key to the after life of a man as this does. It 
 shows a rough sense of tyranny, a rough sense of justice in the 
 boy that exactly explains the conduct of William Cobbett at 
 twenty, at forty, at sixty years old. 
 
 In 1782, he forsook his rustic occupation, and endeavoured to 
 get service on board a man-of-war; but, failing that, he took a 
 situation in London as copying clerk. He did not stop long at 
 that, however, but one day, being down at Chatham, he enlisted 
 as a private soldier. In a short time he was made corporal, and 
 by cleanliness, intelligence, and an extraordinary habit of 
 punctuality, he made his way upwards, and got promoted to the 
 rank of sergeant-major over the heads of thirty sergeants, who, 
 strange to say, did not hate him on that account. He shows the 
 cause for his rapid promotion in a book which, when I say that it 
 is about one of the wisest books ever written, you will understand 
 how few people have ever heard of it. If you have not read 
 William Cobbett's " Advice to Young Men " you are benighted 
 beings you each need a missionary to your own share, and I will 
 be that missionary. You must each read the book, and not only 
 that, but you must buy copies, and distribute them. Cobbett 
 never pretended that his rise in life was due to luck, chance, fate, 
 destiny, fortune, stars, his ship coming home, his uncle remembering 
 him in his will, or anything else by which idle people seek to 
 justify their idleness and want ot success. If you have the
 
 518 William Cobbett. 
 
 necessary virtues, you must have the equally necessary success. 
 William Cobbett was not an architect, or anything so fine ; he 
 was only a bricklayer, and built a bridge from poverty, obscurity, 
 and lowliness, to wisdom, high place, fame, and station, brick by 
 brick, using as his materials industry and punctuality, and only 
 spending three farthings while he earned four. 
 
 Cobbett had a great horror of tea and coffee, which he called 
 "kettle-slops." I heartily endorse Cobbett's denunciation of 
 these " slops." The custom of frequent tea-drinking is a sign of 
 a generation of feebleness, want of fibre, emasculation, weak 
 philanthropy, and cant. Cobbett got up in the summer at day- 
 light, and in the winter at four o'clock in the morning. His 
 mode of living was characterised by entire absence of effeminacy. 
 By his indomitable energy and attention to self-training, he was 
 able to earn a livelihood by teaching others, and learned to write 
 the English that is only equalled by the English of Dean Swift, 
 an educated man ; John Bunyan, a tinker and Benjamin 
 Franklin, printer's devil. 
 
 At New Brunswick, where his regiment was stationed, Cobbett 
 became acquainted with his future wife, the daughter of a sergeant 
 of artillery ; and the account he has given of his courtship, 
 marriage, and early married life, is the loveliest love story 1 have 
 ever read and for some sin of my youth I have been condemned 
 to read about all the love poetry ever written. At four o'clock on 
 a cold winter's morning, Cobbett saw the sergeant's daughter 
 engaged in the unromantic occupation of cleaning out a tub, 
 and he then saw in her so much beauty, grace, and true woman- 
 hood, that he at once exclaimed, " That's the woman for me," 
 adding, in his autobiographical book, " so that this matter was at 
 once settled, and as firmly fixed as if it had been written in the 
 Book of Fate." Now, that is one of the noblest sentences ever 
 written. It was written in the book of fate, for the will of a real 
 man is a page in the book of fate. Let parsons and theologians 
 talk to us about the powerlessness of free-will, and so on, but the 
 strong will of a man is one of God's methods of doing God's 
 work. The sentence was written in the book of fate, and there- 
 fore in his will it was written in his will, and therefore in 
 the book of fate. He got married, and made a tender-hearted 
 husband.
 
 William Cobbett. 519 
 
 In 1791, Cobbett got his discharge, in consideration of good 
 conduct and useful services. He at once laid a charge of 
 peculation against four officers of the regiment. But on the day 
 for the trial Cobbett did not appear for some unexplained 
 reason he went over to France. When he arrived there, the 
 French Revolution having done its little work of upsetting, was 
 trying its hand at building up. The history of all revolutions is 
 the history of destruction, followed either by God in His goodness 
 sending to a nation a master-builder who can construct something 
 new and better than the old, or He in His goodness sends a 
 despotic warrior who can drive the revolution into order, and put 
 a stop to its excesses. Once or twice in England, God has sent 
 us a master-builder ; once or twice in France He has sent them a 
 despotic warrior. Therefore I would advise you not to put your 
 trust in revolutions. Cobbett, who hated revolutions, was soon 
 glad to get out of the terrible scenes there. 
 
 Cobbett then went to America, where he came in contact with 
 Dr Priestley, who had been driven from this town of Birmingham 
 by the fanaticism of a brutal mob, hounded on by a miscreant 
 magistracy, and an ignorant and brutish gentry. Dr Priestley 
 was, of course, not over-well disposed towards England, and when 
 Cobbett heard some of the Doctor's statements concerning the 
 vile usage he met with in Birmingham (usage which constitutes 
 the most shameful page in local history) his back was up, and he 
 wrote a pamphlet the reverse of sugar ; for he was then a staunch 
 Tory, with an instinctive belief that England was the best country 
 in the world. He thought her grass the greenest, her daughters 
 the fairest, her sons the most beautiful. He thought her Constitu- 
 tion came next to the Bible and Prayer-book ; he thought the King, 
 Lords, and Commons came next to the Holy Trinity, and were 
 almost as sacred, and, without knowing the least about it, he 
 swallowed the whole thing. 
 
 And here I must discharge my conscience of one little matter 
 before I go further. My soul doth loathe that species of modern 
 Liberal with whom it is a matter of instinct when this country and 
 any other country go to quarrel, to take it for granted that all 
 other nations are right and that England is wrong. Before I 
 know a question, I go for Old England ; after I know it, I try to 
 go for the truth. But there are men, whom some of you support,
 
 520 William Cobbett. 
 
 who, if there is a war between England and nasty, dirty Yehs and 
 Chinamen, before they know anything of the matter, say the 
 enemy is right. Before I know, I am sure England, my own 
 country, my Jerusalem, my people, are right until I prove them 
 wrong. It must be proved to me before I go with these new- 
 fangled Liberals in supposing that England is always wrong, while 
 Chinese, Hindoos, Zulus, Russians, Feejees, Kaffirs, Niggers, and 
 all others are always right. I admire Cobbett for his love of 
 country. Feeling some satisfaction at finding myself several 
 pounds avoirdupois lighter in consequence of this declaration, I 
 will proceed. 
 
 Cobbett achieved great fame in America as a pamphleteer, thus 
 becoming the most successful politician with the pen that the 
 world has ever yet seen. There were then two parties in America 
 one for a union of interests with England ; the other for France. 
 Cobbett, as might be expected, joined the former, heart and hand, 
 in consequence of which there was much opposition against him. 
 This, however, did not terrify him, and all his opponents were 
 treated as a good terrier treats rats. I know that, according to 
 your miserable notions of humanity, it is a dreadful thing to put 
 a terrier into a barn. He goes at the rats with vigour, gives them 
 one or two shakes, tosses them over his head, and there is an end 
 of them. So it was with Cobbett, who had the strongest aversion 
 for rats of all kinds, whether Whig or Tory, whether belonging to 
 the Church or the State, and never saw one without attacking it. 
 The mob threatened him in America ; but he possessed that first, 
 second, third, and last of virtues courage. The one virtue that 
 never fails a man in this world is courage. Never is a man 
 knocked down until he deserves it. The Scriptures tell us to 
 resist the devil ; and if we can resist the devil, we know we can 
 resist everybody else. 
 
 At length Cobbett returned to England, where the Government, 
 knowing of his great ability as a Tory pamphleteer, thought they 
 had a great catch in him, and well they might. They made over- 
 tures to him ; but he had now come nearer the British Constitu- 
 tion, and found he did not like it so well as at a distance. He 
 changed his opinions. He refused their offer of the plant and 
 copyright of the True Briton, and commenced a paper of his own. 
 For thirty years, with the exception of eleven weeks, he never
 
 William Cobbett. 521 
 
 failed to send copy for the Political, afterwards the Annual 
 Register, and he exercised an influence over the minds of the 
 people of England far greater than any other man. He had a 
 rare fight with the newspapers, some of which would have gone 
 out of existence altogether had they not had him to attack. 
 Some men are privileged to feed writers, and a happy privilege it 
 is ; for if a man who has a wife and six or seven children can 
 get a guinea a week for abusing you, why, let him abuse you. 
 Cobbett was now a Liberal, for a closer inspection of the Con- 
 stitution and the glorious institutions he admired so much at a 
 distance, convinced him that all was not gold that glittered, 
 especially when he saw how hardly some of the laws pressed on 
 the poor farm labourers. He dearly loved the poor peasantry of 
 the country loved them like a parent ; but he did not think that 
 the ballot-box, or any other political tinkering or carpentering 
 would regenerate the country; or that if they gave a working 
 man a vote, he would know political economy at once, get up in 
 Adam Smith by instinct, and swallow M'Culloch without knowing 
 it. He had a passionate love for the peasant and ploughman, 
 and he liked the mechanics very well, but he thought there was 
 too much fuss made about them. He did not think much of 
 those people who made such a noise about the " dear working- 
 classes," and invited them to meetings, and asked them to 
 " please to come in their dirt." No, he affectionately requested 
 them to come in their working clothes. My affectionate request 
 to the working classes is to go home after their work, and wash 
 themselves, and then come here in their best. Plenty has been 
 said about the working-classes ; but I like a man that can strike a 
 furrow right across a five-acre field, without being two inches out 
 of the line. A good furrow is as hard to do, and lovelier when 
 done, than anything I know ; and yet you laugh at the man who 
 does it, and say he is a clodhopper, a chaw-bacon, and that he 
 eats turnips. I praise the agricultural labourer for his skill, and I 
 admire the unmurmuring patience with which he adapts himself 
 to the painful exigencies of his hard lot. Cobbett called Lord 
 Brougham a " nasty palaverer," for wanting to give working men 
 the Penny Magazine and Edinburgh Review, which, in his opinion, 
 would not light a fire, nor boil a pot, nor put anything into it. 
 Through all his troubles and labours, he stuck up for the
 
 522 William Cobbett. 
 
 labourer, like a bit of tough oak as he was. Cobbett did not care 
 so much that the peasant should have the suffrage, as that he should 
 be well fed, well clothed, and lightly taxed. He did not think so 
 much about religion either, as he said, " I would rather that the 
 peasants should have the Inquisition, with full bellies and rosy 
 cheeks, than have both civil and religious liberty and starve." 
 That is very dreadful, no doubt ; but it is very sensible, and very 
 characteristic of the man. 
 
 He was several times tried for libel, and was on one occasion 
 imprisoned for two years in Newgate. In 1826, he offered him- 
 self as a candidate to represent Preston in Parliament, and 
 failed; and in 1829 and 1830 he went through the country 
 addressing the farmers at agricultural dinners, thus having a little 
 Parliament of his own. On one occasion he came to Birming- 
 ham, where he had a discussion with Thomas Attwood, who, I 
 am told, had the best of it ; but as I did not hear it, I do not 
 believe that. When, after many rebuffs, he got into Parliament 
 in 1832, as a member for Oldham, the atmosphere of the 
 place (which he called a " den of thieves ") helped to kill 
 him, and, after making a few good speeches, he sickened, 
 and died. I leave him now to your further study and further 
 judgment.
 
 RICHARD COBDEN. 
 
 BORN 1804. DIED 1865. (FROM 441-11 GEORGE III. TO 28111 VICTORIA.) 
 
 'HPHERE are comparative advantages, and disadvantages, in 
 seeing a man's face very close. A certain fine play of 
 emotion, certain peculiar signs of feeling are caught, and the 
 man's character is better estimated than if seen at a distance. At 
 a distance certain defects are not seen, and the face may gain 
 thereby. So it is with a man's character. If we look very near, 
 very close, we are apt to see slight traces of emotion, true feeling, 
 kindness and nobleness that time and distance will afterwards 
 remove ; or we may see foibles and pettinesses that may not 
 afterwards be discovered. 
 
 For us to-night there is no choice. I have to draw the char- 
 acter of a man who was amongst us so often, and who lived so 
 thoroughly in the class to which the majority of us belong, who 
 held so heartily the opinions many of us are consecrated to, that 
 if we run the risk of seeing little foibles that posterity will never 
 hear of, we are nevertheless in a better position to do justice to 
 him, because time and oblivion have as yet cheated us of nothing, 
 and the grave is too new to rob us of one single sign of emotion, 
 tenderness, nobleness, or truth. 
 
 I shall draw very briefly the outline of Mr Cobden's life, 
 because it is too recent, too well known, by some even too much 
 mingled in, to require any very long and elaborate outline. On 
 the 3d of June 1804, at Dunford, near Midhurst, in Sussex, 
 Cobden was born, his father belonging to the class now getting so 
 rare 3. yeoman, a small farmer who lived upon the land, as his 
 fathers had done before him. I have been told that Cobden's 
 father was not very prosperous, and even if he had been, a small 
 Sussex farm is not the place for a man of large views or real 
 genius ; therefore, Richard turned out early in life. He went to 
 the great city the city of cities, indeed and entered a London
 
 524 Richard Cobden. 
 
 warehouse. From his master he got an early lecture, because of 
 the strong propensity he showed for reading. This dear old 
 bungle-headed commercial man but represents the old-fashioned 
 class, pettifogging in his dealings, small in his comprehension, 
 and unfortunate in his predictions. He held up to Richard 
 Cobden frightful examples of commercial men who had gone to 
 ruin through cherishing a fatal desire for the reading of books. 
 Happily the lectures were in vain ; the apprentice would read the 
 books, though the master would keep him from them ; and, by a 
 strange chance, the apprentice succeeded, the master failed, and 
 the apprentice had the grace and generousness to allow him ^50 
 a year for life. So that Cobden was able to repay exceedingly bad 
 advice by the exceedingly substantial token of success which had 
 attended his not following it. 
 
 Cobden removed to a firm in Watling Street, and, through the 
 accident of a fellow-clerk falling ill, he became a commercial 
 traveller, and a bag-man. Sharp, shrewd, belonging to this 
 generation and no other, not very inclined to value any samples 
 except those he carried in his own pack, he was able to push 
 with a great deal of sharpness, but without at any time passing 
 the line of strict honesty and truth. 
 
 His employers giving up the business, it divided itself into 
 three firms ; the head being the men who had been in the 
 employment of the firm itself. Cobden belonged to the one 
 which set itself up at Manchester, as " Cobden and Company." 
 Here it was that his shrewdness, good taste, and exceedingly 
 clear eye for what he was and what he had to do came into play. 
 The fashion in Manchester in his day was old and slow. When 
 the firm put out a few pieces of print, they quietly watched to see 
 which took people's fancy, and, having made safe and sure, they 
 then proceeded to print some more. But such a feeble way of 
 commerce would hardly suit a man like Cobden. So he at once 
 issued excellent patterns and famous stuff, knowing they would 
 succeed ; and those the English people would not take to were 
 sent abroad, and, thank God ! the tastes abroad were very 
 different to what they were at home. What could not be inflicted 
 upon the English people, the natives of Africa and the people of 
 China were ready to take in any quantity ; and they could not be 
 frightened by any hideousness. Cobden's prints became famous,
 
 Richard Cobden. 525 
 
 and obtained a very great name ; and his share in the profits was 
 ^2000 a year. 
 
 About this time politics began to whisper their seductive talk 
 to him, and Mr Cobden began his political life. In 1830, his 
 career was not very distinguished, while in 1834 we find him 
 making a tour in Turkey, Egypt, Greece, and the United States, 
 of which tour he frequently talked, because from it he had very 
 much learned. When he came home he wrote certain letters in 
 the Manchester Times; and then came his first pamphlet, entitled 
 " England, Ireland, and America, by a Manchester manufacturer." 
 This pamphlet contains a statement of nearly all the principles he 
 lived so nobly to defend. It has his peculiar views all the old- 
 fashioned notions of the old Liberal party of England Peace, 
 Retrenchment, Free-trade, and Non-intervention. It led to a 
 great deal of controversy, especially on the matter of Turkey ; for 
 he was not a great believer in the necessity of Turkey to this 
 country, nor in keeping that old rottenness much longer going. 
 These were heretical views for it was a part of the high politics of 
 this country to believe in Turkey, and in the doing of anything 
 for Turkey. 
 
 Then he published a pamphlet upon Russia; and in this he put 
 forth another of his peculiar opinions. He thought, all his life 
 long, a great deal of the education of this country was utter non- 
 sense ; and he raised his voice against that delightful absurdity of 
 the upper classes making their children learn antique geography, 
 and not geography at home. How few could pass an examina- 
 tion upon Bradshaw, or tell the names of railways in England ! 
 If they look at the letters L. N. W. and G. W. R., they may tell 
 what they mean ; but if they look simply at the letters C. R. and 
 L. and Y., they know nothing about them. Hence Cobden spoke 
 disrespectfully of the Ilissus because he once saw it damned up by 
 washerwomen, yet which every boy was taught to revere while 
 they knew nothing of the Mississippi which runs through two 
 thousand miles of country. / don't see why the little river is to 
 be spoken of disrespectfully because modern washerwomen have 
 put it to use. The smaller the river the more noble the men 
 who live upon it and make it famous. You may put a million of 
 boors upon a mighty stream, and the river will still be mighty ; but 
 it takes a noble people to make it great.
 
 526 Richard Cob den. 
 
 Cobden also put forth the deplorable ignorance which pre- 
 vailed in this country in the fundamental principles of social and 
 political economy. He found almost the whole nation in dark- 
 ness, and he proposed that as they had a Linnsean Society for 
 looking after plants, they should also have a Smithian Institution 
 to be called after Adam Smith, and devoted to the hard labour 
 of endeavouring to drive a little common sense into the heads of 
 English politicians, teaching those first principles of political 
 economy which it was his honour to propagate the wide world 
 over. 
 
 Now he showed a zeal for the place in which his lot was cast. 
 He took a great interest in the Manchester Athenaeum. He wrote 
 a pamphlet entitled " Incorporate your borough," and did more 
 to promote, perhaps, than any other man, the incorporation of 
 the borough; and one of the first titles he had was Mr Alderman 
 Cobden. There are glories about the alderman about the title, 
 I mean, not the individual which ought not to be forgotten. 
 The title comes straight from old English life, and is derived from 
 the self-governed life of England, which it is every wise man's 
 duty to preserve, and to protest against its being frittered away. 
 This was about the only title Cobden ever took. He put up for 
 Stockport, and at first did not succeed; but in 1841 he was 
 returned for that borough. 
 
 It was about this time that he became acquainted with his fast 
 friend (there have been five-and- twenty years of genial and 
 uniform friendship between those two men) Mr Bright. 
 
 Mr Bright sought him out, and found him in his warehouse in 
 Mossley Street, wanting him to come over to Rochdale to make a 
 speech on Education. From that day those two men were seldom 
 or never parted. 
 
 It was said that they never went into opposite lobbies of 
 the House of Commons but twice ; and I forget the subject of the 
 twice told difference. 
 
 In 1838, when the Anti-corn Law League was formed, Cobden 
 warmly espoused the principles they professed. He did not take 
 credit for originating them he knew that that must be given 
 chiefly to Adam Smith, and, next to him, to the old, wise, witty, 
 venerable General Thompson. In the contest that ensued, 
 Birmingham took next to no part ; in the biggest battle in
 
 Richard Cobden. 527 
 
 modern times, the people of this town merely looked on. When 
 I came to Birmingham, I found a handful of wise men who met 
 in the Public Office to support the League. The question is 
 probably a sore one, and I will turn from it. The leaders in 
 Birmingham have always been men who have had quaint notions, 
 queer ways ; and this is amongst one of the strangest : that a 
 town which has profited so much by the repeal of the Corn 
 Laws, should have taken so little part in the struggle. At length 
 the fight was over, the battle was won ; and it is not worth while 
 for us to settle to whom the greatest praise is due ; but they who 
 fought before the battle was wrought out, deserve the largest credit, 
 if any is to be apportioned. 
 
 After this Cobden went abroad, and the wise men of almost 
 every nation received him as one who had done a work for all 
 time. Few Englishmen make a reputation so wide and so 
 universal as Cobden did. During his absence, he was elected 
 for the West Riding, and returned to differ irom his countrymen, 
 and to express that difference in the same calm courage as before. 
 This was on the ugly Crimean war, which he always opposed, 
 and which he only ceased to oppose when opposition would have 
 been factious ; for when people are in the midst of a fight, it is 
 better to wait until they come out, and have their wounds dressed, 
 before you lecture them as to their future good behaviour. Then 
 followed the Chinese war, in the debate on which Cobden took a 
 part well-known to all ; the Dissolution ; the re-election, and the 
 rejection of many eminent men ; the defeat of the Government, 
 and the short reign of Lord Derby. 
 
 On Mr Cobden's return from America, he found a seat in the 
 Cabinet ready for him, which he declined. He didn't like Lord 
 Palmerston's conduct, and he told him so in Parliamentary terms. 
 Then he turned his attention to the commercial relations between 
 this country and France. He loved the great French nation, and 
 some of his friends had been talking over a little opening that 
 they thought they saw in the thick armour of French Protection- 
 ism and commercial stupidity. Mr Bright and Mr Cobden went 
 down and saw Mr Gladstone, and then they went and saw Lord 
 Palmerston, and the happy result was that Mr Cobden went to 
 France. There he saw the Emperor, and then he fell to work ; 
 and with a minute, painstaking, and constant industry and per-
 
 528 Richard Cobden. 
 
 petual good temper, and an adherence to principle that now and 
 then gave way for the sake of the main good, the great man un- 
 titled, almost uncommissioned, succeeded in doing perhaps the 
 most fruitful act of recent politics. There may be some few that 
 cry out against him. If we had been in the rag trade, for 
 instance, or the great bone business, we should have thought him 
 a little treacherous to his principles. Well, I believe he was ; for 
 it was here that Mr Cobden showed he could be pliable, here 
 that he could be expedient. On some questions on which he and 
 his countrymen differed he would not be pliable ; but here, for 
 the sake of the whole, he sometimes. waived a part. Like a wise 
 man, he gave in where he saw it was wisdom to do so. The 
 principle was not much affected ; details could be subsequently 
 modified. England cannot bestow too much praise upon the 
 treaty. It kept three or four great towns alive during those sad 
 winters when the cotton famine came. It opened the ports of 
 this country to one of the most growing trades we have ever had. 
 It joined the hands of two old foes in a firmer, and wiser, and 
 cooler grasp than was possible on any other ground whatsoever. 
 It joined two nations hostile in history, enemies by tradition, 
 members of faiths that were always looking at one another with 
 dissembled hate, and showed that it was possible for these two 
 great nations to remain at peace. It gave the world this just 
 guarantee that so long as England and France remain at peace, 
 there will be little possibility for any other nation to disturb 
 the peace of the world itself. There are men in this town who 
 know the exceeding patience and minute industry that was neces- 
 sary to carry out the tiresome treaty. It was not the affirming 
 of great principles, but the regulation of details. Fancy a list 
 of Birmingham goods alone ! All these had to be wrangled 
 over. Every step almost had to be fought ; for the French Pro- 
 tectionists were as obstinate as the old English Protectionists had 
 been. The consequence was that after many a week of protracted 
 labour, that did fatal injury to Cobden I fear, the greatest treaty 
 of modern times was carried. What was the Treaty of Utrecht, 
 or the Treaty of Vienna, compared to a treaty which taught two 
 nations good sense, mutual admiration, and mutual respect a 
 treaty that bound over two great nations to keep the peace towards 
 one another? On the conclusion of the treaty Mr Gladstone 
 paid a high tribute to Mr Cobden.
 
 Richard Cobden. 529 
 
 There is no more need to follow Cobden's history. You 
 know it. A body constantly weakening made his presence in 
 political counsels unfrequent and rare. True to his principles to 
 the last, when he heard that strange scheme for the defence of 
 Canada a scheme for defending a country which, if it could not 
 be defended by those fine old Generals Frost and Snow, would 
 be defended by no General at all he must go up to town and 
 try to speak, and try to vote a rash act, showing the ruling pas- 
 sion strong in death. It was fatal. He never left the great city 
 again. It was only when the breath of life was gone from that 
 hard labouring man, that he was carried down to sleep, where that 
 only son of his sleeps, and where so much of his heart had so 
 long been sleeping ; and there now rest father and son a busy 
 life ended where it began. He was born in the country, and was 
 buried in the country. He was born amongst the farmers, and 
 lived amongst the farmers, and loved them. Still, at one time 
 they accounted him their deadliest enemy. Some of them thought 
 he was a modern incarnation of Satan ; but they learned to know 
 better, and welcome him back to the old glorious county of 
 Sussex as their best friend. And now, Richard Cobden the 
 commercial traveller, the farmer's enemy, the incarnation of evil 
 quietly sleeps in one of the counties most dedicated to the 
 pursuits of the English farmers, amid those who learnt to know 
 that he loved them wisely when they were not wise, that he loved 
 them well when they were too prejudiced and too passionate to 
 know it. 
 
 Before delineating some of the glories of Richard Cobden's 
 character, it may be well, not exactly to contrast, but to place 
 him side by side with five or six of the most noticeable men of 
 his own time. I cannot help, when I think of Cobden, thinking 
 of William Cobbett. Perhaps it is because they were born so 
 near the same place. The father of both of them had little 
 farms ; they both loved farming and became politicians. William 
 Cobbett advocated a popular cause. But there the parallel soon 
 ceases. Cobbett, passionate, prejudiced, violent, coarse, vitupera- 
 tive, and vulgar ; he did immense good service, but it was often 
 at the expense of stirring up ugly passions, and he himself was not 
 altogether free from some of those stains which, while they do not 
 alter one's admiration for the man's genius, considerably limit 
 
 2 L
 
 530 Richard Cobden. 
 
 our estimate of the man's worth. There was a touch of the 
 demagogue about Cobbett ; there was none about Cobden. Then 
 one thinks of O'Connell that wonderful man ! and the awful 
 power he once had over the Irish ; who might have taught that 
 nation wisdom, but who wasted his splendid powers in the most 
 hideous and cruel pretences, and stirred up a cry that he never 
 intended to have gratified. He passed across our wondering 
 gaze like a great meteor or firework, with a deal of splendour and 
 a deal of noise ; and when he was dead left little but a great deal 
 of stench and smoke. We next think of the Duke of Wellington. 
 What parallel is there between Cobden and Wellington ? Well, 
 they were a good deal alike. They both told the truth always, 
 under all circumstances, and nothing but the truth. The old 
 Duke was simple with his tongue, plain with his pen, sharp and 
 decisive. As one well said of him, his account of himself was 
 always the exact fact. The old Duke's style had no nap in it, so 
 that there was no room for the lies to hide. So Cobden's style 
 was simple, plain, short, unaffected. They both knew nothing 
 but their duty ; they both strove to do nothing else. Both were 
 unselfish, both unaffected, both disinterested ; but there the parallel 
 must end. The greater soldier did his duty ; and very queer 
 duties this country sometimes sent him to do. He could not help 
 it ; it was not for him to settle whether it was right or wrong ; it 
 was for him to do it. He was a great old Tory, and the conse- 
 quence was that his great works were written on sand, for it is the 
 penalty of Conservatism to have its memory written on sand. 
 The next great wave comes, and where is it? It is gone. I have 
 not higher respect for any class of men than the English Conser- 
 vatives ; they are such a bold and gallant people ; they lose every 
 battle they go into, and are ready to fight again. Where is the 
 Duke of Wellington's work now ? Much of it is written in his- 
 tory, and nowhere else. Then comes Sir Robert Peel, a greater 
 man than either of the others mentioned ; but with all our respect 
 for him we cannot but admit that he slowly and very reluctantly 
 carried out what other men had long ago taught. His position 
 enabled him to give official sanction to what he had resisted ; 
 and while we admit the merit of a man who forsook his party to 
 do service to his nation, still we cannot consent to class him with 
 one who, in evil days, saw a principle and clung to it when it was
 
 Richard Cobden. 531 
 
 unpopular, advocated it when it was dangerous, and at last lived 
 to see it enthroned by virtue. Then we have the last great man. 
 whose loss we must mourn we think of the Prince Consort. 
 There was a great man ! But what a profound pity one has for 
 a prince, born, unfortunately, amongst the great ; cradled amongst 
 the tomfoolery of medievalism ; his poor limbs, in youth, like 
 the limbs of aristocracy, swathed in custom, rank, folly, precedent, 
 and feebleness. How hard it is now-a-days for a prince to become 
 a great man ! How hard for such a man to be great, simple, and 
 wise ! And yet this the Prince Consort was. He walked out of 
 a palace to become a man of sense. He was enabled to under- 
 stand the nineteenth century ; to be a student of the sciences, a 
 lover of philosophy ; to comprehend that the future greatness 
 of nations depends rather upon commercial relations and the cul- 
 tivation of science and true art, than it does upon the old wars 
 and the old rivalries. But when I put Richard Cobden side by 
 side with this man, I think I must call him the greatest if not 
 the greatest in faculty, yet the greatest in result While Cobbett's 
 work is much of it happily going on ; O'Connell's dismissed and 
 forgotten ; the Duke of Wellington's out of sight, a great deal of 
 it ; Sir Robert Peel's lasting, but lacking completeness and mas- 
 siveness ; the Prince Consort's is still fruitful, but lacks the genius 
 and the greatness of the work of Cobden. 
 
 Cobden did two things : he taught two great nations common 
 sense ; and if there is an achievement more difficult than that, I 
 do not know it. Fighting battles is easy, but to conquer preju- 
 dices is hard. He first taught the English people sense, and then, 
 as if that were not task enough for a Hercules, he undertook a 
 still greater he undertook to teach the French people sense. 
 Having slowly converted English squires and English farmers, he 
 undertook the still more difficult task of converting French states- 
 men and French manufacturers. What did he leave behind him ? 
 These two great works : two nations brought over to the initial 
 principles of free trade. How this was done, lets some light into 
 his character. What we all praise him for, is the principle of 
 unselfishness, the perfect disinterestedness of the man. It is 
 pleasant to see a man do so much work and get nothing for it, as 
 it were. 
 
 One likes to see the man in the title which he sometimes
 
 532 Richard Cobden. 
 
 received in jest The Unadorned One. Sir Robert Peel fixed it 
 upon him. He said it was the unadorned eloquence of Mr 
 Cobden that did so much for Free Trade. Is it possible to be 
 eloquent without adornment ? What most people call eloquence 
 is beneath a wise man's contempt big words, sound and fury, 
 many of the words unintelligible, and a large part of the rest 
 useless, if intelligible. Most people call eloquence " bursts "- 
 " bursts of eloquence," they say. Well, Cobden could indulge in 
 bursts of eloquence if people stirred his heart and roused his 
 opposition ; but what can we say when a gentleman gets ready 
 his bursts a fortnight before ? and when his burst comes off every 
 night exactly at the same minute ? I know the orators, and I 
 can tell you about it. At 8.15, burst the first ; at 8.30, burst the 
 second. Some of you admire it ; some of you mistake perspira- 
 tion for inspiration, and call it eloquence. The Duke of Welling- 
 ton was an eloquent man when young. In what did his elo- 
 quence consist ? He said fit things in few words. What was Mr 
 Cobden's eloquence ? The eloquence of fact, reason, sense, and 
 conviction. When he had got all this, then he could appeal to 
 sentiment to give it warmth, and to passion sometimes to give it 
 the needful swing. " Unadorned," it was " adorned the most." 
 But the man's character was undecorated by the rags and frippery 
 of this world. If it were lawful, the words of Peter against female 
 vanity in dress might be parodied thus, as descriptive of Cob- 
 den's principles : " Whose adorning, let it not be of titles and 
 rank, of wearing of Court suits and gold lace, and the putting on 
 of apparels, and the putting on of the sword, and having heraldry, 
 plush breeches, copper stick, gold stick, and being equerry-in- 
 waiting and flunkey-in-honour ; but rather let it be with the sim- 
 plicity of a man, and the glorious incorruptible ornament of a 
 straight-forward tongue, an honest heart, a sincere spirit, and 
 great principles." I confess my admiration is for the man in his 
 untitled glory. It is so sad to see so many men who have served 
 their country and come to a certain point, and . then there is that 
 lacquered sham of the Middle Ages waiting to take them, and 
 they drop into the great gulf one after another, and one peeps 
 over and says, " What has become of that famous old Radical ? " 
 and one gets the answer, " Got a Court suit on helping to keep 
 up that worn-out folly, instead of remaining true to the rank from
 
 Richard Cob den. 533 
 
 which he sprang." I would scout the idea of making such a man 
 as Cobden a peer. 
 
 As a self-made man, Cobden had a little of the dogmatism and 
 egotism pertaining to all men of that class. Though usually calm 
 and quiet, he was apt to put a man down if he differed from him, 
 and found it rather difficult to be tolerant if a pet crochet was 
 under discussion ; but under these little impatiences there usually 
 ruled a calm, quiet, deep spirit, for he was a man never angry. 
 He never brought into politics angry passions or spiteful feelings. 
 He was not a demagogue. He flattered neither the great nor the 
 small. He seldom appealed to class prejudice. He was never 
 an anachronism. He did not do as some who shall be nameless 
 talk politics in 1865 as though he lived in the last generation. 
 Mr Cobden never ranted, roared, cursed, or swore ; never vitu- 
 perated ; never, to use a vulgar phrase, " pitched into " anything 
 or anybody, but always relied on reason for convincing his 
 hearers. I find Richard Cobden incapable of trickery, incapable 
 of buffoonery ; I find him incapable of insincerity or of hatred. 
 I find in him no bitterness, and only wonder how he managed to 
 stop in the House of Commons so long, where no one who is 
 familiar can say there are no trickery and dodges. 
 
 Mr Cobden differed with his countrymen on the subjects of 
 education and peace. It is my conviction that fighting is a 
 necessary condition of the present order of things, but that there 
 is a "more excellent way" which will one day prevail on the 
 earth. Richard Cobden looked forward to that sweet day in the 
 far future, and brought back a branch, and endeavoured to plant 
 it in the soil of the present. He watered it, sometimes with tears: 
 laboured at it, gardened around it, and talked about it ; but it 
 would not grow, and then he grew impatient and blamed every- 
 body about him. His dream was a holy and noble one. He 
 simply endeavoured to plant his plant too early. 
 
 Richard Cobden's great services have promoted the wealth of 
 nations. He also taught the nations the true protection against 
 the corruption incident, in the long run, to civilisation, in his 
 simplicity of living and simplicity of manners.
 
 WELLINGTON AND NAPOLEON. 
 
 WELLINGTON BORN, 1769. DIED, 1852. 
 NAPOLEON BORN, 1769. DIED, 1821. 
 
 "VT'ESTERDAY, in London, after the great man (whom I pur- 
 -* posely call great) was consigned to his grave, the Garter 
 King-at-Arms gave forth all his styles, honours, and titles. It 
 may not be unbecoming in me to do what the herald-king did, 
 and trace what led to the giving of those titles, the abilities of 
 which they were the symbols, and show why it was they honoured 
 the man. If I compare him with the other great man, with whom 
 he fought, you will excuse me if I indulge in a little national 
 vanity, and praise the Englishman at the expense of his opponent. 
 And if, at the conclusion, you believe that the name of Napoleon 
 Bonaparte appears more attractive, I hope when you look at 
 our own good Englishman, you will find him more honourable 
 and worthy of admiration, and if not so much like the lion, still 
 like that faithful animal which guards his master, noble to the last, 
 humble and self-denying. He who looks longest will learn to 
 give Wellington a higher place in history than Napoleon ever can 
 have. 
 
 I am no admirer of the cosmopolitan spirit, but while wishing 
 to love all mankind, I feel that patriotism should ever be cherished; 
 and it is pardonable in a man to prefer the men of his own land 
 to those of any other. Our great countryman now dead we well 
 knew, and I shall bring forward the other man with a view to 
 contrast and comparison. 
 
 When Napoleon began his career, he was engaged in that 
 struggle for liberty for all men, against the monopoly of a small 
 party, shut up in feudalism, and who maintained the right of 
 ruling the world as they thought good, and for their own pleasure. 
 The evil of the Revolution was at the door of those whose 
 tyranny and despotism had pressed the spring down so low that 
 when it did rebound it was almost as fatal to the people as to the 
 rulers. At that time, in Napoleon sprung up a mighty talent.
 
 Wellington and Napoleon. 535 
 
 He loved soldiership ; but was looked upon by many men in 
 England as the representative of a new life. Many took his side, 
 wept at his disasters, gloried in his victories, and opposed Pitt 
 and his Ministry not out of love to Napoleon, but because they 
 regarded him as a new symbol of freedom and liberty in 
 Europe. 
 
 Napoleon had no aim beyond himself. He had one great idol 
 himself. He was the most intense' worshipper of self the world 
 ever knew. He had opportunities which no other man had. He 
 made his way through the frippery and nonsense of the day ; for 
 which I admire him. But when I see him with his feet in satin 
 sandals, and employing artists to caricature the old Roman robes, 
 fetching the poor Pope to crown him, with the oil-bottle to anoint 
 him, using religion merely to cheat men ; for he cared no more 
 for religion than some of the philosophers whom he helped to put 
 down Catholic when it suited him, and Protestant when it 
 pleased him when I see all these things, my sympathy for the 
 man drops, and I no longer look on him as the advocate of a 
 new regime, but as a man with no other aim but to worship 
 himself, with no great cause to uphold him, no retreat when his 
 work was done, no duty to perform when his fighting was over. 
 And when he marries an emperor's daughter, discarding Josephine 
 for the purpose of becoming Emperor Napoleon ; when he wears 
 laurels, and becomes one of the race of valets, my interest in him 
 is over the man has lost the meaning of life, his first love is 
 over, he is no longer the protester for men against forms, nor the 
 asserter of the new life of Europe against the old regime of royal 
 and priestly tyranny ; and, that being the case, my admiration of 
 Napoleon ceases. He never really had any great cause to rely 
 on. He was, in every respect, a selfish man not in the vulgar 
 sense, for what it might bring him ; but he was selfish in a noble 
 sense, he had a firm faith in himself, took little counsel of any- 
 body, held other people cheap, and could do his own work. So 
 far, he had self-dependence. But he measured other men's rights 
 by his own will, which to him was the measure of all things. He 
 was unscrupulous in his means, and petty in his ends. He once 
 said that there were only two motives which governed mankind 
 fear and interest. At love he laughed ; at friendship he mocked. 
 He loved France, but it was for himself. He was France. He
 
 536 Wellington and Napoleon. 
 
 did not so much serve France as he made France serve him. 
 Doubts, fears, and difficulties which haunted others, he knew 
 nothing of. There was no meanness he would not stoop to, in 
 the shape of knavery, assassination, and theft. He cared not 
 how many fell in battle nor what happened, so that his dream of 
 being universal ruler might be realised, to accomplish which piety 
 and truth were sacrificed by him. 
 
 If, then, you ask me if I admire Napoleon, I answer that in 
 one sense I do ; for I like to see a man do his work well. The 
 man who with a will carries an army over the Alps, is a refresh- 
 ment and a joy ; and we learn from him to prop our vacillating 
 will. By him, the word " impossible " went out of the French 
 dictionary, and out of his own soul. I like his will and utter 
 fearlessness. He widened the regions of human possibility, and 
 showed that nature was not exhausted, that history was not used 
 up. He did mighty works, in which men, weak or strong, find 
 consolation and strength. He wrote ' can " upon everything. I, 
 however, almost love him for exposing hereditary incapacity. 
 He was, in some respects, the democrat in the noblest sense 
 not of the people, but of the rights of the people the right of 
 any horse-boy to become a king. He opened a career for talent, 
 and made a way for capability. He showed many an inclina- 
 tion for internal reform, and, if circumstances had allowed, he 
 would have done more for the people; he was the giver of the 
 French code, and he was a man of large aims. 
 
 But the fault of his life was the turning France into a camp, 
 and Europe into a battle-field, by which he cut off his opportuni- 
 ties for introducing a new regime, and initiating a new era of 
 social progress. He surrounded war with a false glory, and filled 
 the minds of men with that detestable phrase " glory." There 
 is no member of the Peace Society or issuer of peace placards who 
 hates war more than I do ; and it is because I hate war so much 
 that I admire Wellington, who did more than any other man to 
 reduce war to its proper proportion, and put it in its true light. 
 Napoleon intoxicated men with the love of war, while Wellington 
 made war an awful duty and a terrible necessity. I will not 
 say there are no causes in which it is worthy to fight ; but I 
 will say that he had no right to give up the defenceless child 
 committed to his care. If you attack my child it is my duty to
 
 Wellington arid Napoleon. 537 
 
 go into you, to do the best I can for the defence of the helpless. 
 If this dear old land, made and continued a nation by God 
 the land where our forefathers sleep, the land we love if any 
 foreign power say to us, " We bid you cease to be a nation," and 
 tell us to commit suicide, or they will murder us, I would say, 
 "Nay, we must stand up for fatherland ; we must defend the 
 women and children of the land, the creed and soil." I love 
 peace, but I love justice better. Righteousness first, and peace 
 second. Let us have the thing that is just and right, and leave 
 our happiness, peace, welfare, and comfort in the hands of the 
 All-wise. So far I am a fighting man. 
 
 Look at the motives and ends of each of the two warriors. 
 Napoleon held out the plunder of towns as an inducement to his 
 men, and he was a great thief himself. Wellington was terribly 
 severe, believing that severity was true mercy. In Spain he hung 
 a man for stealing a looking-glass. The man watched the army, 
 and went out to see what he could pillage. He went into a house, 
 and took the only thing it contained, a looking-glass ; but who 
 should come up, just as he was returning with it, but the terrible 
 Commander-in-chief and some officers. In five minutes the tree 
 bore strange fruit ; and the first sight which the French saw was 
 an Englishman hung up by his own countrymen for stealing other 
 people's property. That was teaching the men that they had to 
 do a terrible duty not to fill an empty purse. He was a terrible 
 disciplinarian, but it was real mercy. But what fearful things the 
 French did ! and although the English sometimes did wrong, it 
 was against their orders. I have spoken of the refreshing nature 
 of Napoleon's will. While I admire the passage of the Alps, I 
 admire the passage through Spain a great deal more. Wellington 
 led a very ill-clothed, ill-fed, and ill-paid army to a country 
 where he received but little assistance. His officers were 
 always grumbling and despairing, and he had a niggardly 
 Ministry at home. What with incapable Dukes of York, put 
 in to do duty merely because they were Dukes of York, the 
 English came to believe that they never could conquer on land 
 but were always to be conquered. Notwithstanding this, Welling- 
 ton never turned back till at last he reached Paris victorious, 
 having defeated every French marshal sent against him. He did 
 his best, and that was sufficient for him ; he had simply his duty
 
 538 Wellington and Napoleon. 
 
 to do, and that sustained him. There is nothing more strange in 
 modern times than his career ; becoming greater than kings, but 
 content to be a servant. Had he been unscrupulous, like 
 Napoleon, he might have continued to lead armies ; but he 
 returned here to take his place and become a household word 
 with Englishmen ; and his wise counsels were ever looked up to 
 by the Queen and her people in the hour of peril. He was the 
 greatest se)~vant of history, and that is his great glory. Napoleon's 
 ambition was to be a master, and he became one ; the ambition 
 of Wellington was to do the duty of a servant, and he did it. 
 Wellington was a noble example of self-denial and unselfishness. 
 What a lover of truth our man was, and what a boundless liar the 
 other was ! He only spoke the truth when it suited his purpose. 
 He played tricks with dates, and sent false reports of victories 
 before the battles were concluded. Our man never altered a 
 date, but put things down as they were. Napoleon never would 
 admit of anybody's glorious services but his own. Whatever 
 glory his marshals got, he took it from them and disparaged their 
 services ; but Wellington could afford to be generous to others 
 he had only to serve his country, and had no motive for running 
 others down, and even to his foes he gave due praise. 
 
 What a man he was for sharp, emphatic words ! He never 
 compassed an object by crooked plans, but went to his mark in 
 a straight line, and hit the right nail on the head. He remains a 
 model of Spartan laconism, of Roman heroism, like unto them 
 who returned to their homes, content with serving their cause, 
 even though that cause had not served them. Napoleon knew 
 how to flatter the vanity of his soldiery, and could appeal to the 
 power of enthusiasm. He talked to them of forty centuries 
 looking down from the pyramids, yet he could laugh at it as 
 moonshine. The Emperor Napoleon could say, when it suited 
 him, "There is but one God, and Mahomet is his prophet." He 
 appealed to noble sentiments, yet did not believe in them. He 
 used sentiment and romance, and did wonders with them, but 
 despised them all the time. But our cold-blooded Englishman 
 had the peculiarity of our fathers, feeling much but saying little. 
 He makes no vain addresses to his soldiers there are no pyramids 
 for forty centuries to look down from. He has but one word a 
 cold-looking one, with no romance in it a solemn, awful word
 
 Wellington and Napoleon. 539 
 
 the word "duty." The French, on reading his despatches, never 
 found the word " glory ; " but the duke said, " If men do their 
 duty, glory will follow." He knew how to work an army on the 
 principle of duty. He did not tell them of sacked towns, or bid 
 them keep up the memory of their sires. He only spoke of duty. 
 Can you peace-men say a word against such a man, who led his 
 army through every trouble with only one word " duty " ? Even 
 as a religious man, the duke seemed to be a man under orders. 
 He was once asked about missions, if it was not better to keep 
 people at home, rather than send them to China and other 
 places ? He answered, " I don't think so what are your marching 
 orders?" "Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to 
 every creature." "Had anyone any right to give you orders?" 
 " Yes, the Great Captain of Salvation." " That is all I care for," 
 said the duke ; and that principle went into the minutest details 
 of his life. For this, I respect Wellington more than I respect 
 Napoleon for blotting out the word " impossibility." Though the 
 name of Napoleon will always make the most noise in the world, 
 yet, as peace becomes more loved, and war more hated, and men 
 more just, will Wellington's name abide in far more honour thau 
 Napoleon's. 
 
 These two great men were brought together at the crisis of 
 their fate, having been trained apart, and unknown to each other, 
 until their destiny, and the destinies of their respective countries, 
 and the future of Europe hung in battle, when the genius of our 
 countryman and the good fortune of our land gained the triumph. 
 Perhaps I have, in the eyes of some, contrasted too much in 
 favour of our countryman, and to the disadvantage of the foreigner; 
 but I adhere to it, giving to the Frenchman more genius and 
 poetic nature, but retaining for our countryman all moral supe- 
 riority, a greater character, a better balanced judgment, a want of 
 egotism, and a forgetfulness of self. The ultimate place which 
 the two characters must take, depends on the standard of great- 
 ness set up. If that standard consists in being true to the genius 
 of country, in the love of duty more than glory, being a lover of 
 truth, a flatterer of no man, but simple, plain, and ascetic, then I 
 claim the palm for our countryman, and put him immeasurably 
 above his great opponent. I do not wish to underrate the mighty 
 genius of Napoleon, but to indicate in what he was superior to
 
 540 Wellington and Napoleon. 
 
 Wellington ; for he had that which, distinguished with the subtlety 
 of genius, had the power of improvising things, possessed much 
 of the ideal, romantic, and poetic, and understood better than 
 Wellington the force of ideas, sentiments, and sympathies ; for in 
 history there is no nobler triumph of thought over material force 
 than the return of Napoleon from Elba to France, unbefriended, 
 and yet confident in the love of the French for him. The land- 
 ing from Elba is the most marvellous fact in history ; it showed 
 Napoleon's genius, and proved him to be a greater man than one 
 had suspected him to be ; for that is the best genius which knows 
 how to avail itself of the powers lying dormant in the human soul. 
 Napoleon trusted to great thoughts in France, and they did not 
 desert him. But catch Wellington landing without an army, or 
 the probability of having one ! No trusting in romance with him. 
 How he would have sneered at Napoleon under such circum- 
 stances ; and though I regard the scene as theatrical bombast, yet 
 I admire the principle which led Napoleon to leave Elba, march 
 to Paris, gather an army, dare Waterloo, and lose all. In this 
 respect Wellington was greatly inferior. Napoleon lost his labour 
 in devoting altogether to himself that which he might have given 
 to mankind. Napoleon's life was an awful experiment to discover 
 whether a man could succeed by trampling on conscience, truth, 
 and faith, and so do without such things ; and I, as a moralist, 
 rejoice that he was defeated. Napoleon fell as a man whose soul 
 is taken out of him. Members of Peace Societies and preachers 
 may yet preach an endless sermon from Napoleon's history to 
 show that the back-bone of the world is righteousness and 
 truth, that God's word ever remains sure, and that no man 
 shall prosper without the salt of righteousness to keep true life 
 within him. 
 
 Napoleon's lies at St Helena are damning evidence against him. 
 In the early part of life, Napoleon was industrious, usually wise, 
 and generally exact. Later on, the curse of egotism came upon 
 him, he lost the power of being patient and quiet, and in his latter 
 days he could not keep his temper. Our great countryman was 
 always level with his fortune, never repining when it came to the 
 worst, and at his best he was even and calm. He shaved himself 
 on the morning of Waterloo with a calm hand, when " the battle 
 of the giants " was coming on. Although dancing at a ball the
 
 Wellington and Napoleon. 541 
 
 night before, yet he knew of the battle coming on, and had pre- 
 pared for it, not being taken by surprise as many have supposed. 
 It is a most wonderful thing in his history, that of a calm, cool 
 shave on the morning of Waterloo. Yet, when listening to the 
 long list of the slain, he dropped his head, and tear after tear fell 
 from his eyes ; but, when he suspected the Serjeant saw him 
 in that state, he said, " Go on," showing that he had an eye to 
 weep, a heart to be wounded, nerves that could be shaken, and a 
 soul that could be sad. Napoleon went on like a frantic child 
 after the destruction of Moscow, because it was ruin to him ; but 
 Wellington ever consoled himself with knowing that he had done 
 his duty, that he had done everything his country could ask, and 
 opportunity could give, and therefore he was perfectly calm, and 
 could breakfast before the battle, and sup after. Fortune never 
 made him a madman. He had his defects an absence of under- 
 standing of public opinion, a somewhat narrowness of vision 
 and he lacked the genial power of making himself loved. Whether 
 his soldiers loved him or not, it is certain they greatly feared and 
 respected him, because he was, what every man should be who 
 leads, "a terror to evil doers, and a praise to them that do 
 well." 
 
 I consider Napoleon's life to have been an awful failure in every 
 respect, and see not where he has succeeded, except in retaining 
 a name amongst a list of terrible warriors and of terrible tyrants 
 also. Napoleon's course was heralded in by the great French 
 Revolution, which he afterwards smothered in imperial velvet, 
 raising himself into a rotten power, fetching one of the oldest 
 things in Europe to Paris to be crowned by it, and adopting all 
 the worn-out toggery of ceremonialism of which he had been the 
 great opponent. He left France poorer and smaller than he 
 found it ; he seated in the heart of the French that curse of 
 nations, the love of glory, cursed ^it with a military spirit the 
 abominable worship of war as a fair and comely thing. He 
 stained the people with their greatest faults, and did them in- 
 calculable harm. Hence he failed in everything he left a 
 mighty name and an awful smoke. He smothered Europe in 
 cannon-smoke, and from the sad effects it will be many a long 
 year before it recovers. He left France with the hatred of the 
 French, who rejoiced at Waterloo ; for they found that, conquer
 
 54 2 Wellington and Napoleon. 
 
 what he would, there was more to conquer, and France was tired 
 of him. On the whole, his life appears a wonderful episode, 
 without any vital connection with the sublime life of the world. 
 
 Wellington succeeded, but a great part of his work failed 
 because he was a mere resister. He had no affirmative. Resist, 
 resist, was his cry all his life long. He was engaged in a war 
 against a nation with which we had no business. What business 
 had we to engage in a war for the purpose of propping up the 
 throne of an incapable Bourbon? We have dishonoured our 
 fathers' great names, and, verily, we have our reward a national 
 debt, heavy taxes, posterity mortgaged, and ourselves over- 
 burdened. I do not advocate repudiation, for we must suffer for 
 the sins of our fathers, who did wrong to suffer themselves to be 
 led into the war ; but when in it, why, like Englishmen, they 
 could only fight it out. Wellington was the champion of a cause 
 that was contrary to the genius of his country. His life was an 
 eminent success, but the greater part of his work was an eminent 
 failure. He fought the cause of Legitimacy versus the people. 
 And how bright the cause of Legitimacy looks just now in 
 Europe ! Just as we are burying the champion of Legitimacy, 
 the child of it, the Count Chambord, is waiting to be called by 
 the people to the throne of France. Even at this moment, the 
 position of him who is now almost crowned in Paris, is a great 
 protest against Legitimacy ; for every vote given for the Empire 
 is one of the nails in the coffin of Legitimacy, which will place it 
 in the history of the past ; for it shows that the people will be 
 sovereign, and that the attempt to put them down was a failure. 
 But if Wellington has done nothing more than to save this little 
 Island from Napoleon, it is a great success. To save this land, 
 was to preserve the eye of the world ; to have saved this little 
 land, the ark of liberty to have saved the chosen people of the 
 land of our fathers, is no mean work ; and that Wellington did 
 do. But so far as it was an attempt to restore Legitimacy, it 
 was a great failure ; for the Bourbons have run away, and, I believe, 
 for ever. 
 
 Napoleon died a prisoner, and he deserved his fate ; and I do 
 not see why the sentence should not be done on the great man 
 as on the small. I may be sorry for his sufferings ; but when I 
 see his wicked works, counting the world as no more than a battle-
 
 Wellington and Napoleon. 543 
 
 field ; when I think of the blood-thirsty massacre of Jaffa ; when 
 I look at his deeds, public and private, you must not expect 
 me to drivel in sentimentalism over St Helena. He who stakes 
 civilisation, with freedom freedom of thought, freedom of 
 speech, freedom of the press against his own glory, must expect 
 that, if he loses, mankind will chain him to a rock. I never did, 
 and never intend to shed a tear over Napoleon at St Helena. 
 When I think of his lies at St Helena, I cannot pity his fate it 
 is one of God's awful lessons. Sometimes God keeps between 
 unjust deeds and their punishment a long interval ; but in this 
 case the man worshipped a lie, and for his reward went to the 
 grave with a lie in his right hand. 
 
 When Wellington retired from war he began a new life. Na- 
 poleon had only one. He forgot the country to serve himself; 
 he shall therefore die far from his country, and be hated by his 
 countrymen. The other was a man of truth and duty, and he 
 shall have a serene old age, shall be the counsellor of kings, and 
 be looked up to by the people. He who does his duty shall die 
 in peace and quiet in old age at home. 
 
 As a statesman Wellington cannot be called great and glorious. 
 Great men are those who in early life see a great truth, love it, 
 and, whether it find favour or not, die with it on their lips. 
 Great statesmen are those who originate measures, and see them 
 carried not those who come in at the close of the struggle. 
 Wellington never originated any great work, and therefore cannot 
 be called a great or glorious statesman. Just what the nation 
 now wants, Wellington has been to it. His disposition as a 
 soldier unfitted him to be a great statesman. If he could have 
 put ideas into regiments, and principles into squadrons, he would 
 have been a great statesman. He wanted the peculiar genius to 
 understand the nation. He must fall as a statesman. He could 
 not see his foe, or he never would have been beaten. What was 
 to be done with things that he could not shoot ? What was to be 
 done with such a people as us? Here was his lack of under- 
 standing the presiding thought of a people to be mightier than 
 physical force. This is a power before which kings and con- 
 querors, like the hosts of Sennacherib's army, go down into death. 
 Men who could not hold a sword have been more powerful than 
 any king the world ever saw. This kind of enemy Wellington
 
 544 Wellington and Napoleon. 
 
 did not understand. He did not understand " Captain Pen," nor 
 was he half alive to the power of ink, nor what armies go to 
 battle when only a single goose-quill goes to fight. He had not 
 that mighty gift of genius which takes cognisance of the force by 
 which men are shaped, moulded, and governed. He did not half 
 understand civil liberty, having been trained too much in the 
 army. He could have drilled the people, and pipe-clayed us all. 
 He did not understand how to hold the iron hand in the velvet 
 glove. He did not know how to rule the people with an iron 
 hand of power, and yet make them believe they were governing 
 themselves. 
 
 Wellington knew this, and admitted that he was not qualified 
 for the station of government. He undertook, at the request of 
 his friends, to fight a battle which he did not understand to fight 
 with men whom he had never fought before, and he was con- 
 stantly beaten. There is nothing more complimentary that can 
 be said of him, than that he acknowledged he was not fit for a 
 statesman ; but he said his friends told him he was sure to con- 
 quer, ,and he had never before taken any word but his own. 
 Here, for once, he and his friends had their reward. So it will 
 happen to us when friends try to persuade us against the interior 
 voice. 
 
 As to Catholic Emancipation, he had opposed it, his predilec- 
 tions were against it ; and when he came into power and wished to 
 carry it, he had a large part of the public mind against him the 
 aristocracy and clergydom were against him which was a hard 
 thing for a poor soldier like Wellington. He had the spirit of 
 Exeter Hall against him, his own consistency was against him, 
 and he had Protestantism in general against him. But he knew 
 there was a terrible alternative to carry that Bill, or have a civil 
 war. There were those who declared that the Bill must not pass, 
 and that the people were ready to go to civil war in defence of 
 Protestant principles, and so forth. But listen to what the soldier, 
 grim with war, said : " It has been my lot to see much of war, 
 more than most men. I have been engaged in the military pro- 
 fession from my boyhood ; my life has been familiar with scenes 
 of death and spectacles of suffering in other countries which were 
 the seat of war ; and, rather than the country dear to me should 
 be visited with such calamities, I would make any sacrifice I
 
 Wellington and Napoleon. 545 
 
 would lay down my life." The man who said that never boasted 
 nor ever lied. He spoke the thing that was, and the words 
 remain an abiding honour to his memory. The man believed 
 there was not a law in the statute-books worth the loss of one life 
 by civil war. 
 
 He did not run away, but retreated, as he did in Spain, to 
 begin again. He enabled the Conservative cause to renew the 
 combat at another time. He went thoroughly through his work, 
 and a useful statesman it cannot be denied that he was. It was 
 a great, brave, and bold thing, and, according to my creed, a 
 necessary thing. 
 
 Wellington's next great trial was the Reform Bill, when he 
 seemed to forget himself, and to have turned prophet, prophesying 
 that if the Reform Bill were carried, the sun of England would 
 set. He stood it out firmly and boldly, but the people passed 
 him by ; and I defy you to show a nobler sight than Englishmen 
 on that occasion passing by the hero and leaving him behind. 
 The people said, " Shall we bow down and let him ride over us. 
 because he is a great man ? shall we lay our will at the altar of 
 our hero?" That is the stuff of Englishmen. They would 
 honour the man, but would not abdicate to him. There is no 
 Colossus that has ever been thought of that can bestride this 
 land. If Wellington thwarted the people, he must be put aside. 
 If the French had known this in the day of their strength, and 
 said to Napoleon, "Though you are great, France is greater," 
 and not have sold themselves to him, it would have been well for 
 them. England knew better. We said, " We worship our nation 
 first, our great men second." Wellington stormed, resisted, pro- 
 phesied, fell; and we went forward. While I mourn the petty 
 insults of the people on that occasion, I venerate the sublime 
 calmness with which a great nation passed him by. He had a 
 sixty or seventy peerage power with him in his pocket, and on 
 the Corn Law question he said to his followers, " I am going, you 
 must come." He went ; they followed. That was his great utility. 
 He commanded the peers as he did a squadron, when to sit down, 
 get up, go forward, or retreat. He could make them do as he 
 pleased, which was a great thing, and so prevented great discord 
 and civil war. He would support the Queen's Government 
 whether it belonged to his own or the other side. He stood the 
 
 2 M
 
 546 Wellington and Napoleon. 
 
 figure of the Queen's counsellor, the friend of all parties, and 
 though without a crown, he was greater than any crowned head, 
 and he became a household sight and a household word to us 
 he was the old man whom we knew so well, whose figure every 
 Englishman knew by heart. He died, loved by all, in a good 
 old age, and a whole nation went to his funeral, to which nothing 
 is equal in history. 
 
 In conclusion, I again express my hatred of war. If I have 
 said anything in praise of war I have not meant it, unless it were 
 in defence of country, creed, household and home. I have not 
 defended or glorified war. I do not forget the virtues and faults 
 of the two men, Wellington and Napoleon, and I will render to 
 Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that 
 are God's,
 
 THE PRINCE CONSORT: FUNERAL ELOGE. 
 
 BORN 1819. MARRIED 1840. DIED 1861. 
 
 T F it had been possible to doubt for a moment the depth of the 
 sorrow that stirs this great nation at the present time, this 
 meeting is a sufficient answer to it ; and if the propriety of our 
 assembling together * were doubted, the occasion is justification 
 sufficient. At the same time, I ask you to pardon the weakness 
 of any words I may have to speak touching the merits of one who 
 was not only great in position but great in soul ; not only lofty in 
 exaltation, but righteous in spirit; who was just in all things, 
 walking humbly towards God and charitably towards men. We 
 have not met here to discourse on death, but to praise the dead 
 for the goodness he has shown ; for praise is always a strengthener 
 to virtue, and the opportunity to bestow it is a gain to the soul. 
 It is not always, however, that preachers of righteousness have 
 been called upon to utter the praises of princes or of kings ; for 
 the history of the great is but too often the history of the bad, 
 and the history of the mighty the history of the corruptness of the 
 earth. But when we can praise a prince, it becomes us to do it. 
 Though virtue is always lovely, yet when God raises it into high 
 places it gains an additional lustre. Like the little lamp which 
 lights the humble cottage, but, when mounted on high, throws its 
 feeble glimmer across the broad sea, and is the beacon to many a 
 storm-tossed mariner, so, whenever justice and righteousness are 
 exalted to a throne, they shine so much the clearer and so much 
 the farther abroad. So with the Prince we have met to comme- 
 morate. As exalted was he in station as he was just in spirit ; as 
 holy, kindly, gentle-hearted, and true in private life, as he was 
 distinguished, noble, and great in birth noble in all things, 
 whether public or private. 
 
 It therefore becomes us to pour out as full a cup of praise as 
 * In the Town Hall, Birmingham.
 
 548 The Prince Consort : Funeral Eloge. 
 
 we can upon that great good man who now seeks burial at the 
 hands of this nation of his adoption. And in doing so, we cannot 
 do better than call to mind two texts in the New Testament one 
 relating to the centurion, of whom it is said, "he loved our nation, 
 and builded us a synagogue," and the other relating to the widow, 
 who did everything that in her lay for the good of the community. 
 On the first text, I shall show how he has loved our nation, and 
 on the other show, out of his own words, how heartily he penetrated 
 into the glories of the English character for the purpose of doing 
 us good. 
 
 Concerning his love for our nation. A foreigner by birth, 
 taking one of the noblest positions in the world and one of the 
 loveliest of charges upon him, he had grace enough to acknow- 
 ledge it, and to fulfil one of the most delicate of duties to find 
 out exactly what he had to do, and do it, and to find out exactly 
 what he had not to do, and to abstain from doing it ; whatsoever 
 there was of personal ambition or personal feeling about him he 
 repressed, and came amongst us only to do his duty uprightly, 
 and to serve God and work righteousness in our midst. By the 
 jealousies of this nation, not altogether unwarranted by history, 
 he was denied that active part in political power which we forbid 
 all our princes, and he submitted to it humbly, and, keeping 
 himself from all party politics, secured a position in a sphere far 
 above them. This was a duty he had set himself, and one he 
 faithfully fulfilled. How truly, may be gathered from a sentence 
 he uttered on receiving the freedom of the city of London, at the 
 hands of the Merchant Tailors' Company. " I remember," he 
 said, " with what regret when, shortly after I came of age, the 
 Companies of the Goldsmiths and of the Fishmongers offered me 
 their freedom, I found myself compelled to decline this honour, 
 being informed that, identified as they were by historical tradition, 
 and still representing two opposite political parties, I could make 
 a choice of only one of them ; and fully sensible that, like the 
 Sovereign to whom I had just been united, and to devote my 
 whole existence to whom it had become my privilege, I could 
 belong only to the nation at large, free from the trammels, and 
 above the dissensions of political parties." So he understood his 
 duty, accepted it, obeyed it, and served God. 
 
 And he understood Englishmen. He understood that nothing
 
 The Prince Consort : Funeral Eloge. 549 
 
 was dearer to them than that sweet old word "home"; knew 
 that our glorious forefathers, before the Gospel was given to men, 
 had loved it, maintained its chastity, its purity, and its honour ; 
 knew that when Odin was worshipped, those fierce old Pagans 
 were gentle towards women, tender towards children, lovers of 
 the house, and cheerful by their own fireside, and thought, 
 doubtless, that the all-loving God, looking down upon them from 
 the mercy-seat, and seeing them so gentle and so strong, so 
 loving and so fierce, gave them the glorious Gospel of peace and 
 salvation as a reward for their simplicity and true-heartedness, 
 and made them the greatest people upon the earth. We have, 
 as a people, our sins, but we have, as a nation, our excellences ; 
 and the glory of this country is that there are in it so many homes, 
 pure in morals, sweet in spirit, holy in living, kindly and gentle, 
 and genial and true, and this great man lifted this glory of our 
 country up on high, carried it into the precincts of the palace, 
 and became faithful as a husband, gentle as a father, as an 
 educator far-seeing, and as an example perfect. Knowing that 
 the iniquity of the great was the subversion of government, he 
 sweetened Royalty by making it virtuous and honourable. One 
 need not pass through the ugly records of the past through the 
 long history of Courts made obscene by lust, disgraceful by luxury, 
 and abominable by oppression ; nor read how the harlot trod the 
 royal presence chamber, and lustful revellers passed through the 
 palace as it pleased them to find out how odious had become 
 the name of Court, and of Royalty as well. But he, whose good- 
 ness we have met to commemorate, coming amongst us a stranger, 
 took, as it were, a bunch of hyssop, out of the virtues of lowly 
 life, and, dipping it in the sweet waters of holy living, sprinkled 
 it upon the lust-stained walls of palaces, and as the husband, 
 father, friend, and prince, purified high places, and made them 
 once more comely. And we thank him for it from our hearts, 
 for he has made government pleasant, monarchy mighty, royalty 
 lovely ; he has made high places sweet places, purified the steps 
 of the throne, and knit this nation together into such a love for 
 its monarchy as ages past have never seen, and ages to come will 
 perish in death before they see equalled. 
 
 And then, with respect to English society, he belonged to no 
 circle, but he looked around and was at home in every part of it.
 
 550 The Prince Consort : Funeral Eloge. 
 
 Touch English life wherever you may, there you find the Prince. 
 Amongst even domestic servants his presence was to be found ; 
 and at a meeting of the Domestic Servants' Provident and 
 Benevolent Society this is how he spoke of them : " Who would 
 not feel the deepest interest in the welfare of their domestic 
 servants ? Whose heart would fail to sympathise with those who 
 minister to us in all the wants of daily life, attend us in sickness, 
 receive us upon our first appearance in this world, and even 
 extend their cares to our mortal remains ; who live under our 
 roof, form our household, and are a part of our family ? " Such 
 words as these are a little poem in themselves. 
 
 Then we find him always taking a lively interest in the glorious 
 old occupation of agriculture ; the old peasants of England were 
 his delight, and those who do not do them the justice they 
 deserve may learn a lesson from their Prince. Prince Albert 
 was a farmer himself, and knew that there was a piety in provid- 
 ing food for a people, and tilling the soil of a nation. At Windsor 
 Park, in 1851, at a meeting of agriculturists, he said, and it was 
 in a tent he said it : " Your encampment singularly contrasts 
 with that which the barons of England, the feudal lords of the 
 land, with their retainers, erected round Old Windsor Castle in 
 a similar mead, though not exactly in the same locality. They 
 came, then, clad in steel, with lance and war-horse ; you appear 
 in more peaceful attire, and the animals you bring with you are 
 the tokens of your successful cultivation of the arts of peace. 
 King John came trembling among his subjects, unwillingly com- 
 pelled to sign that great Charter which has ever since been your 
 birthright. Your Sovereign came confiding among her loyal and 
 loving people ; she came to admire the results of their industry, 
 and to encourage them to persevere in their exertions." 
 
 But though he was a son of the soil, and put his hand truly to 
 the plough, he was not so wedded to the land that he could not 
 be wedded to the sea. At Liverpool we find him making a 
 speech in favour of the Sailors' Home, and at Grimsby opening 
 the docks, pouring out his intelligent understanding in praise of 
 the sailor, than whom amongst all Englishmen there are none so 
 lovable and none so lovely ; none who deserve so much and get 
 so little, or who in stirring times so nobly vindicate the honour 
 of this great country and maintain the glory of that old flag which
 
 The Prince Consort : Funeral Eloge. 55 1 
 
 the phrase may be threadbare ; but God knows, the flag will 
 never be has " braved a thousand years the battle and the 
 breeze." 
 
 Then he identified himself with us as a commercial nation. It 
 was not for him to curl his lip in scorn at a " nation of shop- 
 keepers ; " that was for blood-stained oppressors and cruel tyrants. 
 He was always with the manufacturer and his workmen, and he 
 had a lesson to teach us and laboured hard to teach it, and the 
 lesson was this, that whosoever fails to do his work as intelligently 
 as he can, fails in his duty to his country, by compromising its 
 honour among the nations of the earth. Perhaps the greatest 
 speech the Prince ever delivered on this subject was that which 
 he delivered in this town, and so great is it that it should be read 
 again and again. 
 
 And yet this man, so great and so lofty, and so intellectual and 
 so useful, was to be found amongst the humblest. We might 
 follow him down to the lowly school, giving his wise counsel and 
 his kindly assistance, knowing that education was worthless unless 
 it went down to the lowest places in the land ; and then follow 
 him up again to the greatest colleges in the world, still giving his 
 counsel and assistance, and glorying in the glories of antiquity. 
 
 Then, as to his being a religious man, he belonged to that 
 great old English Church, which, however much some of us may 
 differ with it in views, has roofed over as much piety and temporal 
 godliness as has made our country great and glorious in its 
 Christianity. To it he belonged ; of it he was a member ; in it 
 he worshipped ; and for it he spoke. But, though a Protestant, 
 he was something wider and something better too ; for he was a 
 man who worshipped God in the spirit and the principles of old 
 times, but according to the ritual, the mode, and fashions of 
 modern men. Too many of our neighbours are so very fond of 
 going to ancient times, of getting palms and pomegranates from 
 Palestine to lay upon the altar ; but he was one who loved to 
 serve the God of England with such appliances as God has given 
 Englishmen to do it with, and he thought the offering of a golden 
 sheaf of English wheat was far more acceptable than all the fruits 
 of foreign lands together. Prince Albert was not a man to turn 
 to ancient times ; he served his God with art and science, with 
 modern industry and mechanism, in order that whatsoever England
 
 552 The Prince Consort : Funeral Eloge. 
 
 had to do, she might do it conscientiously, honestly, and truly, 
 and thus make the most acceptable offering she could to a loving 
 and bountiful God who had blessed her so highly. 
 
 He was, too, an English gentleman ; he loved his horse and 
 his dog, and the good old wholesome sports of England ; and he 
 loved the open fields, and the good fresh air, and everything else 
 that is good in our good old country. As a gentleman, he was 
 courteous and affable, and as a Prince noble and generous ; as a 
 husband and a father he was loving and gentle, and as a Christian 
 humble and dutiful. It is not for us to open the door of that 
 secret closet that has been closed from all prying by the Master 
 Himself, but still we may loyally and reverentially stand outside 
 and await his coming forth, to judge by his fruits his love to 
 God and Englishmen of the sincerity of his devotion and 
 religion. 
 
 His greatest praise, perhaps, is that much was never said 
 against his character : and the nation must be hard up for finding 
 a fault when it complains that he has listened to the Queen when 
 she talked to her ministers. We can pardon the suspicion and 
 the prejudices that prompt the complaint, but we must always 
 remember that when God called him to be the husband of the 
 topmost woman in the topmost nation in the world, He called 
 him to be her adviser and her guide. 
 
 Perhaps, too, he was not so open and so genial as Englishmen 
 would have loved to see him ; but that was probably owing to the 
 difficulty of maintaining his position, and when criticism has to 
 pick up such small rods to chastise a great man's memory, it is 
 very pitiful indeed, and especially in the case of a man of whom 
 it may be said that he was an Englishman indeed, in whom there 
 was no guile. 
 
 So great and so good was he, that we may all hope that a few 
 thoughts upon his merits will lead us so to act that we may take 
 up his unfinished plans and finish them for him ; for in that way 
 most shall we show our love for him and our reverence for his 
 memory. And though it has pleased Almighty God to bring over 
 this nation a cloud so heavy and so dark that this Christmas-day 
 that is coming can be but a short outburst of sunshine, heralded 
 in by a black and gloomy day, and perhaps followed by another. 
 e may find in this great sorrow of ours a blessing 01" heaven ;
 
 The Prince Consort : Funeral Eloge. 553 
 
 for it may be that from this open grave of a Prince there may 
 pass some spirit that shall breathe over the troublous nations such 
 a rebuke to human pride, and human wrong, and human folly, 
 that peace and goodwill may prevail, and righteousness abound 
 in all the places of the earth. 
 
 In looking, too, upon this widowed woman and these fatherless 
 children, who have lost their best guide and protector, we may 
 virtuously sorrow over the grave, and give way to such a flow of 
 sympathy and brotherly love as shall, if war comes upon us, knit 
 our hearts strongly together, and cause us to sink all our petty 
 differences, and stand side by side to vindicate the honour of the 
 country our Prince has loved so well and served so truly.
 
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