University of California
FROM THK LIBRARY
DR. FRANCIS L I E li E R ,
Professor of History and Law in Columbia College, New York.
THK GIFT OF
MICHAEL REESE,
Of San Fr-i
1873.
LIBRARY OF THK
University of California,
CIRC i'L A TIXG B R A X( ' I! .
.! or a week before the end of the term.
THE
MODERN
BRITISH ESSAYISTS.
VOL. II.
ARCHIBALD ALISON.
PHILADELPHIA:
CAREY AND HART
1845.
MISCELLANEOUS
ESSAYS.
BY
ARCHIBALD ALISON, F. R. S.
AUTHOR OF "HISTORY OF EUROPE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION."
Rqjrinlei from
WITH THE AUTHOR'S CORRECTIONS FOR THIS EDITION.
PHILADELPHIA:
CAREY & HART, 126 CHESNUT STREET.
1845.
STEREOTYPED BY L. JOHNSON.
PRINTED BY T. K. & P. G. COLLIMS. PHILADELPHIA.
PREFACE.
A WISH having been expressed by the publishers of this work to have a
collection of my Miscellaneous Essays, published at different times and in different
periodical works in Great Britain, made for reprints in America, and selected
and arranged by myself, I have willingly assented to so flattering a proposal.
I have endeavoured in making the selection to choose such as discuss subjects
possessing, as far as possible, a general and durable interest; and to admi<-
those only, relating to matters of social contest or national policy in Great
Britain, which are likely, from the importance of the questions involved in
them, to excite some interest as contemporary compositions among future
generations of men. And I should be ungrateful if, in making my first appear-
ance before the American public, and in a work hitherto published in a col-
lected form only in this country, I did not make my warmest acknowledgments
for the liberal spirit in which they have received my writings, and the indul-
gence they have manifested towards their imperfections; and express at the
same time the pride which I feel, as an English author, at the vast and
boundless field for British literary exertion which is afforded by the extension
of the Anglo-Saxon race on the other side of the Atlantic. If there is any
wish I entertain more cordially than another, it is that this strong though unseen
mental bond may unite the British family in every part of the world, and
cause them all to feel as brothers, even when the time arrives, as arrive it will,
that they have obtained the dominion of half the globe.
A. ALISON.
Possel House, Glasgow,
Sept. 1, 1844.
CONTENTS.
Page
CHATEAUBRIAND ........... 7
NAPOLEON ............ 27
BOSSUET ........... .42
POLAND ............ 52
MADAME DE STAEL ........... 64
NATIONAL MONUMENTS .......... 73
MARSHAL NEY 84
ROBERT BRUCE ........... 94
PARIS IN 1814 . 100
THE LOUVRE IN 1814 .......... 109
TYROL ...... ...... 117
FRANCE IN 1833 ........ 125
ITALY 154
SCOTT, CAMPBELL, AND BYRON ........ 160
THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION ......... 173
MICHELET'S FRANCE .......... 184
MILITARY TREASON AND CIVIC SOLDIERS . . . . . . .193
ARNOLD'S ROME ........... 203
MIRABEAU ............ 212
BULWER'S ATHENS . . . . . . . . . .223
THE REIGN OF TERROR .......... 241
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830 253
THE FALL OF TURKEY .......... 266
THE SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1820 ....... 279
PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS 239
KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA 299
EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830 . . . . . .309
DESERTION OF PORTUGAL . ........ 321
CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN ......... 325
WELLINGTON ........... 346
THE AFFGHANISTAUN EXPEDITION ........ 348
THE FUTURE 357
GUIZOT ............. 367
HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO 380
A2 5
"TfivE?.s!T7j
^*lFOa|^
ALISON'S ESSAYS,
CHATEAUBRIAND.
[BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE, MARCH, 1832.]
IT is one of the worst effects of the vehe-
mence of faction, which has recently agitated
the nation, that it tends to withdraw the atten-
tion altogether from works of permanent lite-
rary merit, and by presenting nothing to the
mind but a constant succession of party dis-
cussions, both to disqualify it for enjoying the
sober pleasure of rational information, and
render the great works which are calculated
to delight and improve the species known only
to a limited class of readers. The conceit and
prejudice of a large portion of the public, in-
crease just in proportion to the diminution of
their real information. By incessantly studying
journals where the advantage of the spread
of knowledge is sedulously inculcated, they
imagine that they have attained that know-
ledge, because they have read these journals,
and by constantly abusing those whom they
stigmatize as offering the light of truth, they
come to forget that none oppose it so effectually
as those who substitute for its steady ray the
lurid flame of democratic flattery.
It is, therefore, with sincere and heartfelt joy,
that we turn from the turbid and impassioned
stream of political discussion, to the pure foun-
tains of literary genius ; from the vehemence
of party strife to the calmness of philosophic
investigation ; from works of ephemeral cele-
brity to the productions of immortal genius.
When we consider the vast number of these
which have issued from the European press
during the last fifteen years, and the small
extent to which they are as yet known to the
British public, we are struck with astonish-
ment ; and confirmed in the opinion, that those
who are loudest in praise of the spread of in-
formation, are not unfrequently those who
possess least of it for any useful purpose.
It has long been a settled opinion in France,
that the seams of English literature are wrought
out ; that while we imagine we are advancing,
we are in fact only moving round in a circle,
and that it is in vain to expect any thing new
on human affairs from a writer under the
English constitution. This they ascribe to the
want of the boulcversement of ideas, and the ex-
trication of original thought, which a revolu-
tion produces ; and they coolly calculate on the
catastrophe which is to overturn the English
government, as likely to open new veins of
thought among its inhabitants, and pour new
streams of eloquence into its writers.
Without acquiescing in the justice of this
observation in all its parts, and strenuously
asserting for the age of Scott and Byron a
decided superiority over any other in British
history since the days of Shakspeare and Mil-
ton, at least in poetry and romance, we must
admit that the observation, in many depart-
ments of literature, is but too well founded.
No one will accuse us of undue partiality for
the French Revolution, a convulsion whose
principles we have so long and so vigorously
opposed, and whose horrors we have en-
deavoured, sedulously, though inadequately, to
impress upon our readers. It is therefore
with a firm conviction of impartiality, and a
consciousness of yielding only to the tone of
truth, that we are obliged to confess, that
in historical and political compositions the
French of our age are greatly superior to the
writers of this country. We are not insensible
to the merits of our modern English historians.
We fully appreciate the learned research of
Turner, the acute and valuable narrative of
Lingard, the elegant language and antiquarian
industry of Tytler, the vigour and originality
of M'Crie, and the philosophic wisdom of
Mackintosh. But still we feel the justice of the
French observation, that there is something
" English" in all their ideas. Their thoughts
seem formed on the even tenor of political
events prior to 1789: and in reading their
works we can hardly persuade ourselves that
they have been ushered into the world since
the French Revolution advanced a thousand
years the materials of political investigation.
Chateaubriand is universally allowed by
the French, of all parties, to be their first writer.
His merits, however, are but little understood
in this country. He is known as once a minis-
ter of Louis XVIII., and ambassador of that
monarch in London, as the writer of many
celebrated political pamphlets, and the victim,
since the Revolution of 1830, of his noble and
ill-requited devotion to that unfortunate family.
Few are aware that he is, without one single
exception, the most eloquent writer of the pre-
sent age ; that independent of politics, he has
produced many works on morals, religion, and
history, destined for lasting endurance; that
his writings combine the strongest love of
rational freedom, with the warmest inspiration
of Christian devotion ; that he is, as it were,
the link between the feudal and the revolu-
7
8
ALISOJVS MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
Uonary ages; retaining from the former its
generous and elevated feeling, and inhaling
from the latter its acute and fearless investi-
gation. The last pilgrim, with devout feelings,
to the holy sepulchre, he was the first supporter
of constitutional freedom in France ; discard-
ing thus from former times their bigoted fury,
and from modern, their infidel spirit; blending
all that was noble in the ardour of the Crusades,
with all that is generous in the enthusiasm of
freedom.
It is the glory of the Conservative Party
throughout the world, and by this party we
mean all who are desirous in every country to
uphold the religion, the institutions, and the
liberties of their fathers, that the two greatest
writers of the age have devoted their talents
to the support of their principles. Sir Walter
Scott and Chateaubriand are beyond all ques-
tion, and by the consent of both nations,
at the head of the literature, of France and
England since the Revolution; and they will
both leave names at which the latest posterity
will feel proud, when the multitudes who have
sought to rival them on the revolutionary side
are buried in the waves of forgotten time. It
is no small triumph to the cause of order in
these trying days, that these mighty spirits,
destined to instruct and bless mankind through
every succeeding age, should have proved so
true to the principles of virtue ; and the patriot
may well rejoice that generations yet unborn,
while they approach their immortal shrines,
or share in the enjoyments derived from the
legacies they have bequeathed to mankind,
will inhale only a holy spirit, and derive from
the pleasures of imagination nothing but ad-
ditional inducements to the performance of
duty.
Both these great men are now under an
eclipse, too likely, in one at least, to terminate
in earthly extinction. The first lies on the
bed, if not of material, at least, it is to be
feared, of intellectual death ; and the second,
arrested by the military despotism which he
so long strove to avert from his country, has
lately awaited in the solitude of a prison the fate
destined for him by revolutionary violence.*
But
" Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage ;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage."
It is in such moments of gloom and depres-
sion, when the fortune of the world seems most
adverse, when the ties of mortality are about
to be dissolved, or the career of virtue is on
the point of being terminated, that the immortal
superiority of genius and virtue most strongly
appear. In vain was the Scottish bard ex-
tended on the bed of sickness, or the French
patriot confined to the gloom of a dungeon ;
their works remain to perpetuate their lasting
sway over the minds of men; and while their
mortal frames are sinking beneath the suffer-
ings of the world, their immortal souls rise into
the region of spirits, to witness a triumph
more glorious, an ascendency more enduring,
* Sir Walter Scott, at this period, was on his deathbed,
and Chateaubriand imprisoned by order of Louis Philippe.
than ever attended the arms of Caesar or Alex-
ander. *
Though pursuing the same pure and en-
nobling career ; though gifted with the same
ardent imagination, and steeped in the same
fountains of ancient lore, no two writers were
ever more different than Chateaubriand and
Sir Walter Scott. The great characteristic of
the French author, is the impassioned and
enthusiastic turn of his mind. Master of im-
mense information, thoroughly imbued at once
with the learning of classical and catholic
times ; gifted with a retentive memory, a poeti-
cal fancy, and a painter's eye, he brings to bear
upon every subject the force of erudition, the
images of poetry, the charm of varied scenery,
and the eloquence of impassioned feeling.
Hence his writings display a reach and variety
of imagery, a depth of light and shadow, a
vigour of thought, and an extent of illustration,
to which there is nothing comparable in any
other writer, ancient or modern, with whom
we are acquainted. All that he has seen, or
read, or heard, seem present to his mind, what-
ever he does, or wherever he is. He illustrates
the genius of Christianity by the beauties of
classical learning, inhales the spirit of ancient
prophecy on the shores of the Jordan, dreams
on the banks of the Eurotas of the solitude
and gloom of the American forests; visits the
Holy Sepulchre with a mind alternately de-
voted to the devotion of a pilgrim, the curiosity
of an antiquary, and the enthusiasm of a crusa-
der, and combines, in his romances, with the
tender feelings of chivalrous love, the heroism
of Roman virtue, and the sublimity of Chris-
tian martyrdom. His writings are less a
faithful portrait of any particular age or coun-
try, than an assemblage of all that is grand,
and generous, and elevated in human nature.
He drinks deep of inspiration at all the foun-
tains where it has ever been poured forth to
mankind, and delights us less by the accuracy
of any particular picture, than the traits of
genius which he has combined from every
quarter where its footsteps have trod. His
style seems formed on the lofty strains of
Isaiah, or the beautiful images of the B^ook of
Job, more than all the classical or modern
literature with which his mind is so amply
stored. He is admitted by all Frenchmen, of
whatever party, to be the most perfect living
master of their language, and to have gained
for it beauties unknown to the age of Bossuet
and Fenelon. Less polished in his periods,
less sonorous in his diction, less melodious in
his rhythm, than these illustrious writers, he
is incomparably more varied, rapid, and en-
ergetic; his ideas flow in quicker succession,
his words follow in more striking antithesis ;
the past, the present, and the future rise up at
once before us; and we see how strongly the
stream of genius, instead of gliding down the
smooth current of ordinary life, has been broken
and agitated by the cataract of revolution.
With far less classical learning, fewer
images derived from travelling, inferior in-
formation on many historical subjects, and a
mind of a less impassioned and energetic cast,
our own Sir Walter is far more deeply read in
that book which is ever the same the human
CHATEAUBRIAND.
heart. This is his unequalled excellence
there he stands, since the days of Shakspeare,
without a rival. It is to this cause that his
astonishing success has been owing. We feel
in his characters that it is not romance, but
real life which is represented. Every word
that is said, especially in the Scotch novels,
is nature itself. Homer, Cervantes, Shakspeare,
and Scott, alone have penetrated to the deep
substratum of character, which, however dis-
guised by the varieties of climate and govern-
ment, is at bottom everywhere the same; and
thence they have found a responsive echo in
every human heart. Every man who reads
these admirable works, from the North Cape
to Cape Horn, feels that what the characters
they contain are made to say, is just what
would have occurred to themselves, or what
they have heard said by others as long as they
lived. Nor is it only in the delineation of
character, and the knowledge of human nature,
that the Scottish Novelist, like his great pre-
decessors, is but for them without a rival.
Powerful in the pathetic, admirable in dialogue,
unmatched in description, his writings capti-
vate the mind as much by the varied excel-
lencies which they exhibit, as the powerful
interest which they maintain. He has carried
romance out of the region of imagination and
sensibility into the walks of actual life. We
feel interested in his characters, not because
they are ideal beings with whom we have be-
come acquainted for the first time when we
began the book, but because they are the very
persons we have lived with from our infancy.
His descriptions of scenery are not luxuriant
and glowing pictures of imaginary beauty, like
those of Mrs. Radclifle, having no resemblance
to actual nature, but faithful and graphic por-
traits of real scenes, drawn with the eye of a
poet, but the fidelity of a consummate draughts-
man. He has combined historical accuracy
and romantic adventure with the interest of
tragic events ; we live with the heroes, and
princes, and paladins of former times, as with
our own contemporaries; and acquire from
the splendid colouring of his pencil such a
vivid conception of the manners and pomp of
the feudal ages, that we confound them, in our
recollections, with the scenes which we our-
selves have witnessed. The splendour of
their tournaments, the magnificence of their
dress, the glancing of their arms ; their haughty
manners, daring courage, and knightly cour-
tesy; the shock of their battlesteeds, the splin-
tering of their lances, the conflagration of their
castles, are brought before our eyes in such
vivid colours, that we are at once transported
to the age of Richard and Saladin, of Bruce
and Marmion, of Charles the Bold and Philip
Augustus. Disdaining to flatter the passions,
or pander to the ambition of the populace, he
has done more than any man alive to elevate
their character ; to fill their minds with the
noble sentiments which dignify alike the cot-
tage and the palace; to exhibit the triumph
of virtue in the humblest stations over all that
the world calls great; and without ever in-
dulging a sentiment which might turn them
from the scenes of their real usefulness, bring
home to every mind the " might that slumbers
n a peasants arm.
'M\^
Above all, he has uni-
formly, in all his varied and extensive produc-
tions, shown himself true to the cause of virtue.
Amidst all the innumerable combinations of
character, event, and dialogue, which he has
formed, he has ever proved faithful to the polar
star of duty ; and alone, perhaps, of the great
romance-writers of the world, has not left a
line which on his death-bed he would wish
recalled.
Of such men France and England may well
be proud; shining, as they already do, through
the clouds and the passions of a fleeting ex-
istence, they are destined soon to illuminate
the world with a purer lustre, and ascend to
that elevated station in the higher heavens
where the fixed stars shed a splendid and im-
perishable light. The writers whom party has
elevated the genius which vice has seduced,
are destined to decline with the interests to
which they were devoted, or the passions by
which they were misled. The rise of new poli-
tical struggles will consign to oblivion the
vast talent which was engulfed in its conten-
tion ; the accession of a more virtuous age
bury in the dust the fancy which was enlisted
in the cause of corruption; while these illus-
trious men, whose writings have struck root
in the inmost recesses of the human heart,
and been watered by the streams of imperish-
able feeling, will for ever continue to elevate
and bless a grateful world.
To form a just conception of the importance
of Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity, we
must recollect the period when it was pub-
lished, the character of the works it was in-
tended to combat, and the state of society in
which it was destined to appear. For half a
century before it appeared, the whole genius
of France had been incessantly directed to
undermine the principles of religion. The
days of Pascal and Fenelon, of Saurin and
Bourdaloue, of Bossuet and Massillon, had
passed away; the splendid talent of the seven-
teenth century was no longer arrayed in the
support of virtue the supremacy of the church
had ceased to be exerted to thunder in the ear
of princes the awful truths of judgment to
come. Borne away in the torrent of corrup-
tion, the church itself had yielded to the in-
creasing vices of the age ; its hierarchy had
become involved in the passions they were
destined to combat, and the cardinal's purple
covered the shoulders of an associate in the
midnight orgies of the Regent. Orleans. Such
was the audacity of vice, the recklessness of
fashion, and the supineness of religion, that
Madame Roland tells us, what astonished her
in her youthful days was, that the heaven it-
self did not open, to rain down upon the guilty
metropolis, as on the cities of the Jordan, a
tempest of consuming fire.
While such was the profligacy of power and
the audacity of crime, philosophic talent lent
its aid to overwhelm the remaining safeguards
of religious belief. The middle and the lower
orders could not, indeed, participate in the
luxurious vices of their wealthy superiors;
but they could well be persuaded that the faith
which permitted such enormities, the religion
which was stained by such crimes, was a sys-
10
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS.
tern of hypocrisy and deceit. The passion for
innovation, which more than any other feature
Characterized that period in France, invaded
the precincts of religion as well as the bul-
warks of the state the throne and the altar;
the restraints of this world and the next, as
is ever the case, crumbled together. For half
a century, all the genius of France had been
incessantly directed to overturn the sanctity
of Christianity ; its corruptions were repre-
sented as its very essence ; its abuses part of
its necessary effects. Ridicule, ever more
powerful than reason with a frivolous age,
lent its aid to overturn the defenceless fabric ;
and for more than one generation, not one
writer of note had appeared to maintain the
hopeless cause. Voltaire and Diderot, D'Alem-
bert and Raynal, Laplace and Lagrange, had
lent the weight of their illustrious names, or
The powers of their versatile minds, to carry
on the war. The Encyclopedic was a vast
battery of infidelity incessantly directed against
Christianity; while the crowd of licentious
novelists, with which the age abounded
Louvet, Crebillon, Laclos, and a host of others
insinuated the poison, mixed up with the
strongest allurements to the passions, and the
most voluptuous seductions to the senses.
This inundation of infidelity was soon fol-
lowed by sterner days ; to the unrestrained in-
dulgence of passion succeeded the unfettered
march of crime. With the destruction of all
The bonds which held society together ; with
the removal of all the restraints on vice or guilt,
the fabric of civilization and religion speedily
was dissolved. To the licentious orgies of the
Regent Orleans succeeded the infernal furies
of the Revolution : from the same Palais Ro5 r al
from whence had sprung those fountains of
courtly corruption, soon issued forth the fiery
streams of democracy. Enveloped in this
burning torrent, the institutions, the faith, the
nobles, the throne, were destroyed ; the worst
instruments of the supreme justice, the pas-
sions and ambition of men, were suffered to
work their unresisted way : and in a few years
the religion of eighteen hundred years was
abolished, its priests slain or exiled, its Sab-
bath abolished, its rites proscribed, its faith
unknown. Infancy came into the world with-
out a blessing, age left it without a hope ;
marriage no longer received a benediction,
sickness was left without consolation ; the
village bell ceased to call the poor to their
weekly day of sanctity and repose ; the village
churchyard to witness the weeping train of
mourners attending their rude forefathers to
their last home. The grass grew in the
churches of every parish in France ; the
dead without a blessing were thrust into vast
charnel-houses ; marriage was contracted be-
fore a civil magistrate ; and infancy, untaught
to pronounce the name of God, longed only
for the period when the passions and indul-
gencies of life were to commence.
It was in these disastrous days that Chateau-
briand arose, and bent the force of his lofty
mind to restore the fallen but imperishable
faith of his fathers. In early youth, he was at
first carried away by the fashionable infidelity
of his times ; and in his " Essais Historiques,"
which he published in 1792, in London, while
the principles of virtue and natural religion
are unceasingly maintained, he seems to have
doubted whether the Christian religion was
not crumbling with the institutions of society,
and speculated what faith was to be established
on its ruins. But misfortune, that great cor-
rector of the vices of the world, soon chanj
these faulty views. In the days of exile am
adversity, when, by the waters of Babylon, ht
sat down and wept, he reverted to the fait
and the belief of his fathers, and inhaled ii
the school of adversity those noble maxii
of devotion and duty which have ever sin<
regulated his conduct in life. Undauntec
though alone, he placed himself on the ruinj
of the Christian faith; renewed, with Herci
lean strength, a contest which the talents am
vices of half a century had to all appearance
rendered hopeless ; and, speaking to the hear
of men, now purified by suffering, and cleans*
by the agonizing ordeal of revolution, scatter
far and wide the seeds of a rational and
manly piety. Other writers have followed :
the same noble career: Salvandy and Guiz(
have traced the beneficial effects of religk
upon modern society, and drawn from the h
results of revolutionary experience just am
sublime conclusions as to the adaptation of
Christianity to the wants of humanity; but it
is the glory of Chateaubriand alone to have
come forth the foremost in the fight; to have
planted himself on the breach, when it was
strewed only with the dead and the dying, and,
strong in the consciousness of gigantic powers,
stood undismayed against a nati-tn in arms.
To be successful in the contest, it was indis-
pensable that the weapons of warfare should
be totally changed. When the ideas of men
were set adrift by revolutionary changes, when
the authority of ages was set at nought, and
from centuries of experience appeals were
made to weeks of innovation, it was in vain to
refer to the great or the wise of former ages.
Perceiving at once the immense change which
had taken place in the world whom he ad-
dressed, Chateaubriand saw, that he must alter
altogether the means by which they were to
be influenced. Disregarding, therefore, entirely
the weight of authority, laying aside almost
every thing which had been advanced in sup-
port of religion by its professed disciples, he
applied himself to accumulate the conclusions
in its favour which arose from its internal
beauty; from its beneficent effect upon society ;
from the changes it had wrought upon the
civilization, the happiness, and destinies of
mankind; from its analogy with the sublimest
tenets of natural religion; from its unceasing
progress, its indefinite extension, and undecay-
ing youth. He observed, that it drew its sup-
port from such hidden recesses of the human
heart, that it flourished most in periods of dis-
aster and calamity; derived strength from the
fountains of suffering, and, banished in all but
form from the palaces of princes, spread its
roots far and wide in the cottages of the poor.
From the intensity of suffering produced by
the Revolution, therefore, he conceived the
hope, that the feelings of religion would ulti-
1 mately resume their sway : when the waters
CHATEAUBRIAND.
11
of bitterness were let loose, the consolations
of devotion would again be felt to be indispen-
sable; and the spirit of the gospel, banished
during the sunshine of corrupt prosperity, re-
turn to the repentant human heart with the
tears and the storms of adversity.
Proceeding on these just and sublime prin-
ciples, this great author availed himself of
every engine which fancy, experience, or poe-
try could suggest, to sway the hearts of his
readers. He knew well that he was address-
ing an impassioned and volatile generation,
upon whom reason would be thrown away, if
not enforced with eloquence, and argument
lost, if not clothed in the garb of fancy. To
effect his purpose, therefore, of re-opening in
the hearts of his readers the all but extin-
guished fountains of religious feeling, he sum-
moned to his aid the whole aid which learn-
ing, or travelling, or poetry, or fancy, could
supply; and scrupled not to employ his
powers as a writer of romance, an historian,
a descriptive traveller, and a poet, to forward
the great work of Christian renovation. Of
his object in doing this, he has himself given
the following account.*
"There can be no doubt that the Genius of
Christianity would have been a work entirely
out of place in the age of Louis XIV. ; and the
critic who observed that Massillon would never
have published such a book, spoke an un-
doubted truth. Most certainly the author would
never have thought of writing such a work if
there had not existed a host of poems, romances,
and books of all sorts, where Christianity was
exposed to every species of derision. But
since these poems, romances, and books exist,
and are in every one's hands, it becomes in-
dispensable to extricate religion from the sar-
casms of impiety ; when it has been written
on all sides that Christianity is 'barbarous,
ridiculous, the eternal enemy of the arts and of
genius ;' it is necessary to prove that it is neither
barbarous, nor ridiculous, nor the enemy of
arts or of genius ; and that that which is made
by the pen of ridicule to appear diminutive,
ignoble, in bad taste, without either charms or
tenderness, may be made to appear grand,
noble, simple, impressive, and divine, in the
hands of a man of religious feeling.
"If it is not permitted to defend religion on
what may be called its terrestrial side, if no
effort is to be made to prevent ridicule from
attaching to its sublime institutions, there will
always remain a weak and undefended quarter.
There all the strokes at it will be aimed ; there
you will be caught without defence; from
thence you will receive your death-wound. Is
not that what has already arrived 1 Was it
not by ridicule and pleasantry that Voltaire
succeeded in shaking the foundations of faith'?
Will you attempt to answer by theological
arguments, or the forms of the syllogism, licen-
tious novels or irreligious epigrams! Will
formal disquisitions ever prevent an infidel
generation from being carried away by clever
verses, or deterred from the altar by the fear
of ridicule 1 Does not every one know that in
* All the passages cited are translated by ourselves.
There is an English version, we believe, but we have
never seen it.
the French nation a happy bon-mot, impiety
clothed in a felicitous expression, zfelix culpa,
produce a greater effect than volumes of
reasoning or metaphysics 1 Persuade young
men that an honest man can be a Christian,
without being a fool ; convince him that he is
in error when he believes that none but capu-
chins and old women believe in religion, and
your cause is gained ; it will be time enough
to complete the victory to present yourself
armed with theological reasons, but what you
must begin with is an inducement to read
your book. What is most needed is a popular
work on religion; those who have hitherto
written on it have too often fallen into the
error of the traveller who tries to get his com-
panion at one ascent to the summit of a rugged
mountain when he can hardly crawl at its
foot you must show him at every step varied
and agreeable objects; allow him to stop to
gather the flowers which are scattered along
his path, and from one resting-place to another
he will at length gain the summit.
"The author has not intended this work
merely for scholars, priests, or doctors ; what
he wrote for was the men of the world, and
what he aimed at chiefly were the considera-
tions calculated to affect their minds. If you
do not keep steadily in view that principle, if
you forget for a moment the class of readers
for whom the Genius of Christianity was in-
tended, you will understand nothing of this
work. It was intended to be read by the most
incredulous man of letters, the most volatile
youth of pleasure, with the same facility as
the first turns over a work of impiety, or the
second devours a corrupting novel. Do you
intend then, exclaim the well-meaning ad-
vocates for Christianity, to render religion a
matter of fashion ! Would to God, I reply,
that that divine religion was really in fashion,
in the sense that what is fashionable indicates
the prevailing opinion of the world ! Individual
hypocrisy, indeed, might be increased by such
a change, but public morality would unques-
tionably be a gainer. The rich would no longer
make it a point of vanity to corrupt the poor,
the master to pervert the mind of his domestic,
the fathers of families to pour lessons of athe-
ism into their children ; the practice of piety
would lead to a belief in its truths, and with
the devotion we should see revive the manners
and the virtues of the best ages of the world.
"Voltaire, when he attacked Christianity,
knew mankind well enough not to seek to
avail himself of what is called the opinion of
the world, and with that view he employed his
talents to bring impiety into fashion. He suc-
ceeded by rendering religion ridiculous in the
eyes of a frivolous generation. It is this ridi-
cule which the author of the Genius of Chris-
tianity has, beyond every thing, sought to
efface ; that was the object of his work. He
may have failed in the execution, but the ob-
ject surely was highly important. To con-
sider Christianity in its relation with human
society; to trace the changes which it has
effected in thS reason and the passions of
man ; to show how it has modified the genius
of arts and of letters, moulded the spirit of
modern nations ; in a word, to unfold all the
12
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
marvels which religion has wrought in the
regions of poetry, morality, politics, history,
and public charity, must always be esteemed
a noble undertaking. As to its execution, he
abandons himself, with submission, to the
criticisms of those who appreciate the spirit
of the design.
" Take, for example, a picture, professedly
of an impious tendency, and place beside it
another picture on the same subject from the
Genius of Christianity, and I will venture to
affirm that the latter picture, however feebly
executed, will weaken the impression of the
first, so powerful is the effect of simple truth
when compared to the most brilliant sophisms.
Voltaire has frequently turned the religious
orders into ridicule ; well, put beside one of
his burlesque representations the chapter on
the Missions, that where the order of the
Hospitallers is depicted as succouring the
travellers in the desert, or the monks relieving
the sick in the hospitals, attending those dying
of the plague in the lazarettos, or accompany-
ing the criminal to the scaffold, what irony
will not be disarmed what malicious smile
will not be converted into tears 1 Answer the
reproaches made to the worship of the Chris-
tians for their ignorance, by appealing to the
immense labours of the ecclesiastics who
saved from destruction the manuscripts of
antiquity. Reply to the accusations of bad
taste and barbarity, by referring to the works
of Bossuet and Ferielon. Oppose to the carica-
tures of saints and of angels, the sublime effects
of Christianity on the dramatic part of poetry,
on eloquence, and the fine arts, and say
whether the impression of ridicule will long
maintain its ground 1 Should the author have
no other success than that of having displayed
before the eyes of an infidel age a long series
of religious pictures without exciting disgust.
he would deem his labours not useless to the
cause of humanity." III. 263 266.
These observations appear to us as just as
they are profound, and they are the reflections
not merely of a sincere Christian, but a man
practically acquainted with the state of the
world. It is of the utmost importance, no
doubt, that there should exist works on the
Christian faith, in which the arguments of the
skeptic should be combated, and to which the
Christian disciple might refer with confidence
for a refutation of the objections which have
been urged against his religion. But great as
is the merit of such productions, their bene^
ficial effects are limited in their operation conr
pared with those which are produced by such
writings as we are considering. The hardenec
sceptic will never turn to a work on divinitj
for a solution of his paradoxes ; and men ol
the world can never be persuaded to enter on
serious arguments even on the most moment
ous subject of human belief. It is the indiffcr
ence, not the skepticism of such men, which i
chiefly to be dreaded : the danger to be appre
hended is not that they will say there is n
God, but that they will live altogether withou
God in the world. It has happened but to
frequently that divines, in their zeal for th
progress of Christianity among such men
have augmented the very evil they intended t
emove. They have addressed themselves in
enerai to them as if they were combatants
rawn out in a theological dispute ; they have
rged a mass of arguments which they were
nable to refute, but which were too uninterest-
ig to be even examined, and while they flat-
ered themselves that they had effectually
ilenced their opponents' objections, those
fhom they addressed have silently passed by
n the other side. It is, therefore, of incalcu-
able importance that some writings should
xist which should lead men imperceptibly into
le ways of truth, which should insinuate
lemselves into the tastes, and blend them-
elves with the refinements of ordinary life,
,nd perpetually recur to the cultivated mind
vith ail that it admires, or loves, or venerates,
n the world.
Nor let it be imagined that reflections such
.s these are not the appropriate theme of re-
igious instruction that they do not form the
it theme of Christian meditation. Whatever
eads our minds habitually to the Author of
he Universe; whatever mingles the voice
f nature with the revelation of the gospel ;
vhatever teaches us to see, in all the changes
f the world, the varied goodness of him, in
whom "we live, and move, and have our
>eing," brings us nearer to the spirit of the
Saviour of mankind. But it is nnt only as
encouraging a sincere devotion, that these re-
flections are favourable to Christianity; there
s something, moreover, peculiarly allied to its
spirit in such observations of external nature.
When our Saviour prepared himself for his
;emptation, his agony, and death, he retired to
he wilderness of Judaea, to inhale, we may
venture to believe, a holier spirit amidst its
solitary scenes, and to approach to a nearer
communion with his Father, amidst the sub-
imest of his works. It is with similar feelings,
and to worship the same Father, that the
Christian is permitted to enter the temple of
nature ; and by the spirit of his religion, there
s a language infused into the objects which
she presents, unknown to the worshipper of
former times. To all indeed the same objects
appear the same sun shines the same hea-
vens are open: but to the Christian alone it is
permitted to know the Author of these things ;
to see his spirit "move in the breeze and
blossom in the spring," and to read, in the
changes which occur in the material world,
the varied expression of eternal love. It is
from the influence of Christianity accordingly
that the key has been given to the signs of
nature. It was only when the Spirit of God
moved on the face of the deep, that order and
beauty was seen in the world.
It is accordingly peculiarly well worthy of
observation, that the beauly of nature, as felt in
modern times, seems to have been almost un-
known to the writers of antiquity. They de-
scribed occasionally the scenes in which they
dwelt; but, if we except Virgil, whose gentle
mind seems to have anticipated, in this in-
stance, the influence of the gospel, never with
any deep feeling of their beauty. Then, as
now, the citadel of Athens looked upon the
evening sun, and her temples flamed in his
setting beam; but what Athenian writer ever
CHATEAUBRIAND.
13
described the matchless glories of the scene ?
Then, as now, the silvery clouds of the .^gean
sea rolled round her verdant isles, and sported
in the azure vault of heaven ; but what Gre-
cian poet has been inspired by the sight ? The
Italian lakes spread their waves beneath a
cloudless sky, and all that is lovely in nature
was gathered around them; yet even Eustace
tells us, that a few detached lines is all that is
left in regard to them by the Roman poets.
The Alps themselves,
"The palaces of nature, whose vast walls
Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps,
And throned eternity in icy halls
Of cold stihliinity, where forms and falls
The avalanche the thunderbolts of snow."
Even these, the most glorious objects which
the eye of man can behold, were regarded by
the ancients with sentiments only of dismay
or horror; as a barrier from hostile nations, or
as the dwelling of barbarous tribes. The torch
of religion had not then lightened the face of
nature; they knew not the language which
she spoke, nor felt that holy spirit, which to
the Christian gives the sublimity of these
scenes.
Chateaubriand divides his great work into
four parts. The first treats of the doctrinal
parts of religion : the second and the third,
the relations of that religion with poetry, litera-
ture, and the arts. The fourth, the ceremonies
of public worship, and the services rendered
to mankind by the clergy, regular and secular.
On the mysteries of faith he commences with
these fine observations.
" There is nothing beautiful, sweet, or grand
in life, but in its mysteries. The sentiments
which agitate us most strongly are enveloped
in obscurity ; modesty, virtuous love, sincere
frindship, have all their secrets, with which the
world must not be made acquainted. Hearts
which love understand each other by a word ;
half of each is at all times open to the other.
Innocence itself is but a holy ignorance, and
the most ineffable of mysteries. Infancy is
only happy, because it as yet knows nothing ;
age miserable, because it has nothing more to
learn. Happily for it, when the mysteries of
life are ending, those of immortality commence.
"If it is thus with the sentiments, it is as-
suredly not less so with the virtues ; the most
angelic are those which, emanating directly
from the Deity, such as charity, love to with-
draw themselves from all regards, as if fear-
ful to betray their celestial origin.
"If we turn to the understanding, we shall
find that the pleasures of thought also have a
certain connection with the mysterious. To
what sciences do we unceasingly return 1 To
those which always leave something still to
be discovered, and fix our regards on a per-
spective which is never to terminate. If we
wander in the desert, a sort of instinct leads
us to shun the plains where the eye embraces
at once the whole circumference of nature, to
plunge into forests, those forests the cradle of
religion, whose shades and solitudes are filled
with the recollections of prodigies, where the
ravens and the doves nourished the prophets
and fathers of the church. If we visit a modern
monument, whose origin or destination is
known, it excites no attention ; but if we meet
on a desert isle, in the midst of the ocean,
with a mutilated statue pointing to the \\-cst,
with its pedestal covered with hieroglyphics,
and worn by the winds, what a subject of
meditation is presented to the traveller ! Every
thing is concealed, every thing is hidden in
the universe. Man himself is the greatest
mystery of the whole. Whence comes the
spark which we call existence, and in what
obscurity is it to be extinguished 1 ? The Eter-
nal has placed our birth, and our death, under
the form of two veiled phantoms, at the two
extremities of our career; the one produces
the inconceivable gift of life, which the other
is ever ready to devour.
"It is not surprising, then, considering the
passion of the human mind for the mysterious,
that the religions of every country should
have had their impenetrable secrets. God
forbid ! that I should compare their mysteries
to those of the true faith, or the unfathomable
depths of the Sovereign in the heavens, to the
changing obscurities of those gods which are
the work of human hands. All that I observe
is, that there is no religion without mysteries,
and that it is they with the sacrifice which every
where constitute the essence of the worship.
God is the great secret of nature, the Deity was
veiled in Egypt, and the Sphynx was seated at
the entrance of his temples." I. 13, 14.
On the three great sacraments of the Church,
Baptism, Confession, and the Communion, he
makes the following beautiful observations :
"Baptism, the first of the sacraments which
religion confers upon man, clothes him, in the
words of the Apostle, with Jesus Christ. That
sacrament reveals at once the corruption in
which we were born, the agonizing pains
which attended our birth, and the tribulations
which follow us into the world; it tells us that
our faults will descend upon our children, and
that we are all jointly responsible; a terrible
truth, which, if duly considered, would alone
suffice to render the reign of virtue universal
in the world.
" Behold the infant in the midst of the waters
of the Jordan ; the man of the wilderness pours
the purifying stream on his head; the river of
the Patriarchs, the camels on its banks, the
Temple of Jerusalem, the cedars of Lebanon,
seem to regard with interest the mighty spec-
tacle. Behold in mortal life that infant near
the sacred fountain ; a family filled with thank-
fulness surround it; renounce in its name the
sins of the world ; bestow on it with joy the
name of its grandfather, which seems thus to
become immortal, in its perpetual renova-
tion by the fruits of love from generation
to generation. Even now the father is im-
patient to take his infant in his arms, to re-
place it in its mother's bosom, who listens be-
hind the curtains to all the thrilling sounds of
the sacred ceremony. The whole family sur-
round the maternal bed ; tears of joy, mingled
with the transports of religion, fall from every
eye ; the new name of the infant, the old name
of its ancestor, is repeated by every mouth,
and every one mingling the recollections of
the past with the joys of the present, thinks
that he sees the venerable grandfather revive
B
14
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
in the new-born which has taken his name.
Such is the domestic spectacle which through-
out all the Christian world the sacrament of
Baptism presents ; but religion, ever mingling
lessons of duty with scenes of joy, shows us
the son of kings clothed in purple, renouncing
the grandeur of the world, at the same fountain
where the child of the poor in rags abjures
the pomps by which he will in all probability
never be tempted.
" Confession follows baptism ; and the
Church, with that wisdom which it alone
possesses, fixed the era of its commencement
at that period when first the idea of crime can
enter the infant mind, that is at seven years of
age. All men, including the philosophers,
how different soever their opinions maybe on
other subjects, have regarded the sacrament
of penitence as one of the strongest barriers
against crime, and a chef-d'oeuvre of wisdom.
What innumerable restitutions and repara-
tions, says Rousseau, has confession caused to
be made in Catholic countries ! According to
Voltaire, ' Confession is an admirable inven-
tion, a bridle to crime, discovered in the most
remote antiquity, for confession was recognised
in the celebration of all the ancient mysteries.
We have adopted and sanctified that wise
custom, and its effects have always been found
to be admirable in inclining hearts, ulcerated
by hatred, to forgiveness.'
"But for that salutary institution, the guilty
would give way to despair. In what bosom
would he discharge the weight of his heart?
In that of a friend Who can trust the friend-
ships of the world 1 Shall he take the deserts
fora confident 1 Alas! the deserts are ever
filled to the ear of crime with those trumpets
which the parricide Nero heard round the
tomb of his mother. When men and nature
are unpitiable, it is indeed consolatory to find
a Deity inclined to pardon; but it belongs only
to the Christian religion to have made twin
sisters of Innocence and Repentance.
" In fine, the Communion presents instruc-
tive ceremony; it teaches morality, for we
must be pure to approach it ; it is the offering
of the fruits of the earth to the Creator, and it
recalls the sublime and touching history of
the Son of Man. Blended with the recollection
of Easter, and of the first covenant of God with
man, the origin of the communion is lost in
the obscurity of an infant world; it is related
to our first ideas of religion and society, and
recalls the pristine equality of the human
race ; in fine, it perpetuates the recollection of
our primeval fall, of our redemption, and re-
acceptance by God." I. 3046.
These and similar passages, not merely in
this work, which professes to be of a popular
cast, but in others of the highest class of
Catholic divinity, suggest an idea which, the
more we extend our reading, the more we shall
find to be just, viz., that in the greater and
purer writers on religion, of whatever church
or age, the leading doctrines are nearly the
same, and that the differences which divide
their followers, and distract the world, are
seldom, on any material or important points,
to be met with in writers of a superior caste.
Chateaubriand is a faithful, and in some re-
spects, perhaps, a bigoted, Catholic ; yet there
is hardly a word here, or in any other part of
his writings on religion, to which a Christian
in any country may not subscribe, and which
is not calculated in all ages and places to for-
ward the great work of the purification and
improvement of the human heart. Travellers
have often observed, that in a certain rank in
all countries manners are the same; naturalists
know, that at a certain elevation above the
sea in all latitudes, we meet with the same
vegetable productions; and philosophers have
often remarked, that in the highest class of in-
tellects, opinions on almost every subject in
all ages and places are the same. A similar
uniformity may be observed in the principles
of the greatest writers of the world on religion:
and while the inferior followers of their dif-
ferent tenets branch out into endless divisions,
and indulge in sectarian rancour, in the more
lofty regions of intellect the principles are
substantially the same, and the objects of all
identical. So small a proportion do all the
disputed points in theology bear to the great
objects of religion, love to God, charity to man,
and the subjugation of human passion.
On the subject of marriage, and the reasons
for its indissolubility, our author presents us
with the following beautiful observations :
" Habit and a long life together are more
necessary to happiness, and even to love, than
is generally imagined. No one is happy with
the object of his attachment until he has passed,
many days, and above all, many days of mis-
fortune, with her. The married pair must
know each other to the bottom of their souls ;
the mysterious veil which covered the two
spouses in the primitive church, must be
raised in its inmos't folds, how closely soever
it may be kept drawn to the rest of the world.
" What ! on account of a fit of caprice, or
a burst of passion, am I to be exposed to the
fear of losing my wife and my children, and to
renounce the hope of passing my declining
days with theml Let no one imagine that
fear will make me become a better husband.
No ; we do not attach ourselves to a posses-
sion of which we are not secure ; we do not
love a property which we are in danger of
losing.
" We must not give to Hymen the wings of
Love, nor make of a sacred reality a fleeting
phantom. One thing is alone sufficient to de-
stroy your happiness in such transient unions ;
you will constantly compare one to the other,
the wife you have lost to the one you have
gained ; and do not deceive yourself, the balance
will always incline to the past, for so God has
constructed the human heart. This distraction
of a sentiment which should be indivisible
will empoison all your joys. When you
caress your new infant, you will think of the
smiles of the one you have lost; when you
press your wife to your bosom, your heart will
tell you that she is not the first. Every thing
in man tends to unity; he is no longer happy
when he is divided, and, like God, who made
him in his image, his soul seeks incessantly to
concentrate into one point the past, the pre-
sent, and the future.
" The wife of a Christian is not a simple
CHATEAUBRIAND.
15
mortal: she is a mysterious angelic being:
the flesh of the flesh, the blood of the blood of
her husband. Man, in uniting himself to her,
does nothing but regain part of the substance
which he has lost. His soul as well as his
body are incomplete without his wife : he has
strength, she has beauty ; he combats the
enemy and labours the fields, but he under-
stands nothing of domestic life; his companion
is awanting to prepare his repast and sweeten
his existence. He has his crosses, and the
partner of his couch is there to soften them :
his days may be sad and troubled, but in the
chaste arms of his wife he finds comfort and
repose. Without woman man would be rude,
gross, and solitary. Woman spreads around
him the flowers of existence, as the creepers
of the forests which decorate the trunks of
sturdy oaks with their perfumed garlands.
Finally, the Christian pair live and die united:
together they rear the fruits of their union;
in the dust they lie side by side ; and they are
reunited beyond the limits of the tomb." I.
78, 79.
The extreme unction of the Catholic Church
is described in these touching words :
"Come and behold the most moving spec-
tacle which the world can exhibit the death
of the faithful. The dying Christian is no
longer a man of this world; he belongs no
farther to his country; all his relations with
society have ceased. For him the calculations
of time are closed, and the great era of eternity
has commenced. A priest seated beside his
bed pours the consolations of religion into his
dying ear : the holy minister converses with
the expiring penitent on the immortality of the
soul; and that sublime scene which antiquity
presented but once in the death of the greatest
of her philosophers, is renewed every day at
the couch where the humblest of the Christians
expires.
"At length the supreme moment arrives:
one sacrament has opened the gates of the
world, another is about to close them ; religion
rocked the cradle of existence; its sweet
strains and its maternal hand will lull it to
sleep in the arms of death. It prepares the
baptism of a second existence ; but it is no
longer with water, but oil, the emblem of
celestial incorruption. The liberating sacra-
ment dissolves, one by one, the chords which
attach the faithful to this world : the soul, half
escaped from its earthly prison, is almost visi-
ble to the senses, in the smile which plays
around his lips. Already he hears the music
of the seraphims ; already he longs to fly to
those regions, where hope divine, daughter of
virtue and death, beckons him to approach.
At length the angel of peace, descending from
the heavens, touches with his golden sceptre
his wearied eyelids, and closes them in deli-
cious repose to the light. He dies: and so
sweet has been his departure, that no one has
heard his last sigh; and his friends, long after
he is no more, preserve silence round his
couch, still thinking that he slept ; so like the
sleep of infancy is the death of the just." I.
6971.
It is against pride, as every one knows,
that the chief efforts of the Catholic Church
have always been directed, because they con-
sider it as the source of all other crime.
Whether this is a just view may, perhaps, be
doubted, to the extent at least that they carry
it ; but there can be but one opinion as to the
eloquence of the apology which Chateaubriand
makes for this selection.
"In the virtues preferred by Christianity,
we perceive the same knowledge of human
nature. Before the coming of Christ, the soul
of man was a chaos ; but no sooner was the
word heard, than all the elements arranged
themselves in the moral world, as at the same
divine inspiration they had produced the mar-
vels of material creation. The virtues ascended
like pure fires into the heavens; some, like
brilliant suns, attracted the regards by their
resplendent light; others, more modest, sought
the shade, where nevertheless their lustre
could not be concealed. From that moment
an admirable balance was established between
the forces and the weaknesses of existence.
Religion directed its thunders against pride,
the vice which is nourished by the virtues ; it
discovers it in the inmost recesses of the heart,
and follows it out in all its metamorphoses ;
the sacraments in a holy legion march against
it, while humility, clothed in sackcloth and
ashes, its eyes downcast and bathed in tears,
becomes one of the chief virtues of the faith-
ful." I. 74.
On the tendency of all the fables concerning
creation to remount to one general and eternal
truth, our author presents the following reflec-
tions :
" After this exposition of the dreams of
philosophy, it may seem useless to speak of
the fancy of the poets. Who does not know
Deucalion and Pyrrha, the age of gold and of
iron 1 What innumerable traditions are scat-
tered through the earth ! In India, an elephant
sustains the globe ; the sun in Peru has brought
forth all the marvels of existence; in Canada,
the Great Spirit is the father of the world ; in
Greenland, man has emerged from an egg; in
fine, Scandinavia has beheld the birth of Askur
and Emla; Odin has poured in the breath of
life, Hoenerus reason, and Loedur blood and
beauty.
' Askum et Emlam omni conatu destitutes
Animam nee possidebant, rationem nee habebant
Nee sanguinem, nee sermonem, nee t'aciem venustam,
Animam dedit Odinus, rationem dedit Hoenerus,
Loedur sanguinem addidit et faciem venustam.'
" In these various traditions, we find our-
selves placed between the stories of children
and the abstractions of philosophers ; if we
were obliged to choose, it were better to take
the first.
"But to discover the original of the picture
in the midst of so many copies, we must recur
to that which, by its unity and the perfection
of its parts, unfolds the genius of a master.
It is that which we find in Genesis, the original
of all those pictures which we see reproduced
in so many different traditions. What can be
at once more natural and more magnificent,
more easy to conceive, and more in unison
with human reason, than the Creator descend-
ing amidst the night of ages to create light by
a word 1 In an instant, the sun is seen sus-
pended in the heavens, in the midst of an im-
IB
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
mense azure vault; with invisible bonds he
envelopes the planets, and whirls them round
his burning axle; the sea and the forests ap-
pear on the globe, and their earliest voices
arise to announce to the universe that great
marriage, of which God is the priest, the earth
the nuptial couch, and the human race the
posterity." I. 97, 98.
On the appearance of age on the globe, and
its first aspect when fresh from the hands of
the Creator, the author presents an hypothesis
more in unison with the imagination of a poet
than the observations of a philosopher, on the
gradual formation of all objects destined for a
long endurance. He supposes that every thing
was at once created as we now see it.
" It is probable that the Author of nature
planted at once aged forests and their youthful
progeny ; that animals arose at the same time,
some full of years, others buoyant with the
vigour and adorned with the grace of youth.
The oaks, while they pierced with their roots
the fruitful earth, without doubt bore at once
the old nests of rooks, and the young progeny
of doves. At once grew a chrysalis and a
butterfly; the insect bounded on the grass,
suspended its golden egg in the forests, or
trembled in the undulations of the air. The
bee, which had not yet lived a morning, already
counted the generations of flowers by its
ambrosia the sheep was not without its lamb,
the doe without its fawns. The thickets already
contained the nightingale, astonished at the
melody of their first airs, as they poured forth
the new-born effusion of their infant loves.
" Had the world not arisen at once young
and old, the grand, the serious, the impressive,
would have disappeared from nature ; for all
these sentiments depend for their very essence
on ancient things. The marvels of existence
would have been unknown. The ruined rock
would not have hung over the abyss beneath ;
the woods would not have exhibited that
splendid variety of trunks bending under the
weight of years, of trees hanging over the bed
of streams. The inspired thoughts, the vene-
rated sounds, the magic voices, the sacred hor-
ror of the forests, would have vanished with
the vaults which serve for their retreats ; and
the solitudes of earth and heaven would have
remained naked and disenchanted in losing the
columns of oaks which united them. On the
first day when the ocean dashed against the
shore, he bathed, be assured, sands bearing all
the marks of the action of his waves for ages ;
cliffs strewed with the eggs of innumerable sea-
fowl, and rugged capes which sustained against
the waters the crumbling shores of the earth.
" Without that primeval age, there would
have been neither pomp nor majesty in the
work of the Most High; and, contrary to all
our conceptions, nature in the innocence of
man would have been less beautiful than it is
now in the days of his corruption. An insipid
childhood of plants, of animals, of elements,
would have covered the earth, without the
poetical feelings, which now constitute its
principal charm. But God was not so feeble
a designer of the grove of Eden as the incredu-
lous would lead us to believe. Man, the sove-
reign of nature, was born at thirty years of age,
in order that his powers should correspond
with the full-grown magnificence of his new
empire, while his consort, doubtless, had
already passed her sixteenth spring, though
yet in the slumber of nonentity, that she might
be in harmony with the flowers, the birds, the
innocence, the love, the beauty of the youthful
part of the universe." I. 137, 138.
In the rhythm of prose these are the colours
of poetry, but still this was not to all appear-
ance the order of creation ; and here, as in
many other instances, it will be found that the
deductions of experience present conclusions
more sublime than the most fervid imagina-
tion has been able to conceive. Every thing
announces that the great works of nature are
carried on by slow and insensible gradations ;
continents, the abode of millions, are formed
by the confluence of innumerable rills; vege-
tation, commencing with the lichen and the
moss, rises at length into the riches and magni-
ficence of the forest. Patient analysis, philo-
sophical discovery, have now taught us that it
was by the same slow progress that the great
work of creation was accomplished. The fos-
sil remains of antediluvian ages have laid open
the primeval works of nature; the long period
which elapsed before the creation of man, the
vegetables which then covered the earth, the
animals which sported amidst its watery wastes,
the life which first succeeded to chaos, all
stand revealed. To the astonishment of man-
kind, the order of creation, unfolded in Genesis,
is proved by the contents of the earth beneath
every part of its surface to be precisely that
which has actually been followed; the days of
the Creator's workmanship turn out to be the
days of the Most High, not of his uncreated
subjects, and to t correspond to ages of our
ephemeral existence ; and the great sabbath
of the earth took place, not, as we imagined,
when the sixth sun had set after the first morn-
ing had beamed, but when the sixth period had
expired, devoted by Omnipotence to the mighty
undertaking. God then rested from his labours,
because the great changes of matter, and the
successive production and annihilation of dif-
ferent kinds of animated existence, ceased ;
creation assumed a settled form, and laws
came into operation destined for indefinite en-
durance. Chateaubriand said truly, that to
man, when he first opened his eyes on paradise,
nature appeared with all the majesty of age as
well as all the freshness of youth; but it was
not in a week, but during a series of ages, that
the magnificent spectacle had been assembled ;
and for the undying delight of his progeny, in
all future years, the powers of nature for count-
less time had been already exerted.
The fifth book of the Genie de Christianisme
treats of the proofs of the existence of God,
derived from the wonders of material nature
in other words, of the splendid subject of
natural theology. On such a subject, the ob-
servations of a mind so stored with knowledge,
and gifted with such powers of eloquence, may
be expected to be something of extraordinary
excellence. Though the part of his work, ac-
cordingly, which treats of this subject, is neces-
sarily circumscribed, from the multitude of
others with which it is overwhelmed, it is of
CHATEAUBRIAND.
surpassing beauty, and superior in point of
description to any thing which has been pro
duced on the same subject by the genius of
Britain.
" There is a God ! The herbs of the valley
the cedars of the mountain, bless him the in-
sect sports in his beams the elephant salutes
him with the rising orb of the day the bird
sings him in the foliage the thunder pro-
claims him in the heavens the ocean declares
his immensity man alone has said, 'There is
no God !'
" Unite in thought, at the same instant, the
most beautiful objects in nature ; suppose that
you see at once all the hours of the day, and
all the seasons of the year; a morning of
spring and a morning of autumn ; a night be-
spangled with stars, and a night covered
with clouds ; meadows enamelled with flowers,
forests hoary with snow; fields gilded by the
tints of autumn ; then alone you will have a
just conception of the universe. While you
are gazing on that sun which is plunging
under the vault of the west, another observer
admires him emerging from the gilded gates of
the east. By what unconceivable magic does
that aged star, which is sinking fatigued and
burning in the shades of the evening, reappear
at the same instant fresh and humid with the
rosy dew of the morning 1 ? At every instant
of the day the glorious orb is at once rising
resplendent at noonday, and setting in the
west; or rather our senses deceive us, and
there is, properly speaking, no east, or south,
or west in the world. Every thing reduces
itself to one single point, from whence the
King of Day sends forth at once a triple light
in one single substance. The bright splendour
is perhaps that which nature can present that
is most beautiful ; for while it gives us an idea
of the perpetual magnificence and resistless
power of God, it exhibits, at the same time, a
shining image of the glorious Trinity."
The instincts of animals, and their adapta-
tion to the wants of their existence, have long
furnished one of the most interesting subjects
of study to the naturalist, and of meditation to
the devout observer of creation. Chateau-
briand has painted, with his usual descriptive
powers, one of the most familiar of these ex-
amples
" What ingenious springs move the feet of a
bird? It is not by a contraction of muscles
dependent on his will that he maintains him-
self firm upon a branch ; his foot is constructed
in such a way that when it is pressed in the
centre, the toes close of their own accord
upon the body which supports it. It results
from this mechanism, that the talons of the
bird grasp more or less firmly the object on
which it has alighted, in proportion to the
agitation, more or less violent, which it has
received. Thus, when we see at the approach
of night during winter the crows perched on
the scathed summit of an aged oak, we sup-
pose that, watchful and attentive, they main-
tain their place with pain during the rocking
of the winds; and yet, heedless of danger, and
mocking the tempest, the winds only bring
them profouncler slumber; the blasts of the
north attach them more firmly to the branch,
3
from whence weej^ry instant expect to see
them precipitates and like the old seaman,
whose hammock is Misnriided to the roof of
his vessel, the more lie is tossed by the winds,
the more profound is his repose." I. 147, 148.
"Amidst the different instincts which the
Sovereign of the universe has implanted in
nature, one of the most wonderful is that
which every year brings the fish of the pole
to our temperate region. They come, without
once mistaking their way, through the solitude
of the ocean, to reach, on a fixed day, the
stream where their hymen is to be celebrated.
The spring prepares on our shores their nuptial
pomp; it covers the willows with verdure, it
spreads beds of moss in the waves to serve
for curtains to its crystal couches. Hardly
are these preparations completed when the
enamelled legions appear; the animated navi-
gators enliven our coasts ; some spring aloft
from the surface of the waters, others balance
themselves on the waves, or diverge from a
common centre like innumerable flashes of
gold ; these dart obliquely their shining bodies
athwart the azure fluid, while they sleep in
the rays of the sun, which penetrates beneath,
the dancing surface of the waves. All, sport-
ing in the joys of existence, meander, return,
wheel about, dash across, form in squadron,
separate, and reunite; and the inhabitant of
the seas, inspired by a breath of existence,
pursues with bounding movements its mate,
by the line of fire which is reflected from her
in the stream." I. 152, 153.
Chateaubriand's mind is full not only of the
images but the sounds which attest the reign
of animated nature. Equally familiar with
those of the desert and of the cultivated plain,
he has had his susceptibility alike open in
both to the impressions which arise to a pious
observer from their contemplation.
" There is a law in nature relative to the
cries of animals, which has not been sufficient-
ly observed, and deserves to be so. The dif-
ferent sounds of the inhabitants of the desert
are calculated according to the grandeur or
the sweetness of the scene where they arise,
and the hour of the day when they are heard.
The roaring of the lion, loud, rough, and tre-
mendous, is in unison with the desert scenes
n which it is heard ; while the lowing of the
oxen diffuses a pleasing calm through our
valleys. The goat has something trembling
and savage in its cry, like the rocks and ravines
from which it loves to suspend itself. The
war-horse imitates the notes of the trumpet
that animates him to the charge, and, as if he
ielt that he was not made for degrading em-
ployments, he is silent under the spur of the
abourer, and neighs under the rein of the
warrior. The night, by turns charming or
sombre, is enlivened by the nightingale or
saddened by the owl the one sings for the
zephyrs, the groves, the moon, the soul of
lovers the other for the winds, the forests, the
darkness, and the dead. Finally, all the ani-
mals which live on others have a peculiar cry
by which they may be distinguished by the
creatures which are destined to be their prey."
I. 156.
The making of birds' nests is one of the
18
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
most common objects of observation. Listen
to the reflections of genius and poetry on this
beautiful subject.
"The admirable wisdom of Providence is
nowhere more conspicuous than in the nests
of birds. It is impossible to contemplate, with-
out emotion, the Divine goodness which thus
gives industry to the weak, and foresight to
the thoughtless.
" No sooner have the trees put forth their
leaves, than a thousand little workmen com-
mence their labours. Some bring long pieces
of straw into the hole of an old wall ; others
affix their edifice to the windows of a church ;
these steal a hair from the mane of a horse ;
those bear away, with wings trembling beneath
its weight, the fragment of wool which a lamb
has left entangled in the briers. A thousand
palaces at once arise, and every palace is a
nest ; within every nest is soon to be seen a
charming metamorphosis; first, a beautiful
egg, then a little one covered with down. The
little nestling soon feels his wings begin to
grow ; his mother teaches him to raise himself
on his bed of repose. Soon he takes courage
enough to approach the edge of the nest, and
casts a first look on the works of nature.
Terrified and enchanted at the sight, he pre-
cipitates himself amidst his brothers and sisters
who have never as yet seen that spectacle ;
but recalled a second time from his couch, the
young king of the air, who still has the crown
of infancy on his head, ventures to contemplate
the boundless heavens, the waving summit
of the pine-trees, and the vast labyrinth of fo-
liage which lies beneath his feet. And, at the
moment that the forests are rejoicing at the
sight of their new inmate, an aged bird, who
feels himself abandoned by his wings, quietly
rests beside a stream ; there, resigned and
solitary, he tranquilly awaits death, on the
banks of the same river where he sung his
first loves, and whose trees still bear his nest
and his melodious offspring." I. 158.
The subject of the migration of the feathered
tribes furnishes this attentive observer of na-
ture with many beautiful images. We have
room only for the following extract:
"In the first ages of the world, it was by the
flowering of plants, the fall of the leaves, the
departure and the arrival of birds, that the
labourers and the shepherds regulated their
labours. Thence has sprung the art of divina-
tion among certain people ; they imagined that
the birds which were sure to precede certain
changes of the season or atmosphere, could
not but be inspired by the Deity. The ancient
naturalists, and the poets, to whom we are
indebted for the few remains of simplicity
which still linger amongst us, show us how
marvellous was that manner of counting by
the changes ,of nature, and what a charm it
spread over the whole of existence. God is a
profound secret. Man, created in his image,
is equally incomprehensible. It was therefore
an ineffable harmony to see the periods of his
existence regulated by measures of time as
harmonious as himself.
"Beneath the tents of Jacob or of Boaz, the
arrival of a bird put every thing in movement;
the Patriarch made the circuit of the camp at.
the head of his followers, armed with scythes.
If the report was spread, that the young of the
swallows had been seen wheeling about, the
whole people joyfully commenced their harvest.
These beautiful signs, while they directed the
labours of the present, had the advantage of
foretelling the vicissitudes of the approaching
season. If the geese and swans arrived in
abundance, it was known that the winter
would be snow. Did the redbreast begin to
build its nest in January, the shepherds hoped
in April for the roses of May. The marriage
of a virgin on the margin of a fountain, was
i represented by the first opening of the bud of
j the rose ; and the death of the aged, who usual-
i ly drop off in autumn, by the falling of leaves,
j or the maturity of the harvests. While the
philosopher, abridging or elongating the year,
extended the winter over the verdure of spring,
the peasant felt no alarm that the astronomer,
who came to him from heaven, would be
wrong in his calculations. He knew that the
nightingale would not take the season of hoar
j frost for that of flowers, or make the groves
i resound at the winter solstice with the songs
of summer. Thus, the cares, the joys, the
pleasures of the rural life were determined,
not by the uncertain calendar of the learned,
but the infallible signs of Him \vho traced his
path to the sun. That sovereign regulator
wished himself that the rites of his worship
should be determined by the epochs fixed by
his works ; and in those days of innocence,
according to the seasons and the labours they
required, it was the voice of the zephyr or of
the tempest, of the eagle or the dove, which
called the worshipper to the temple of his
Creator." I. 17L
Let no one exclaim, what have these descrip-
tions to do with the spirit of Christianity 7
Gray thought otherwise, when he wrote the
sublime lines on visiting the Grande Char-
treuse. Buchanan thought otherwise, when,
in his exquisite Ode to May, he supposed the
first zephyrs of spring to blow over the islands
of the just. The work of Chateaubriand, it is
to be recollected, is not merely an exposition
of the doctrines, spirit, or precepts of Chris-
tianity; 'it is intended expressly to allure, by
the charms which it exhibits, the man of the
world, an unbelieving and volatile generation,
to the feelings of devotion; it is meant to com-
bine . all that is delightful or lovely in the
works of nature, with all that is sublime or
elevating in the revelations of religion. In his
eloquent pages, therefore, we find united the
Natural Theology of Paley, the Contemplations
of Taylor, and the Analogy of Butler ; and
if the theologians will look in vain for the
weighty arguments by which the English
divines have established the foundation of their
faith, men of ordinary education will find even
more to entrance and subdue their minds.
Among the proofs of the immortality of the
soul, our author, with all others who have
thought upon the subject, classes the obvious
disproportion between the desires and capacity
of the soul, and the limits of its acquisitions
and enjoyments in this world. In the follow-
ing passage this argument is placed in its just
colours.
CHATEAUBRIAND.
19
"If it is impossible to deny, that the hope of
man continues to the edge of the grave if it
be true, that the advantages of this world, so
far from satisfying our wishes, tend only to
augment the want which the soul experiences,
and dig deeper the abyss which it contains
within itself, we must conclude that there is
something beyond the limits of time. 'Vin-
cula hujus mundi, says St. Augustin, 'asperi-
tatem habent veram, jucunditatera falsam,
certum dolorem, incertam voluptatem, durum
laborem, timidam quietem, rern plenam mise
rise, spem beatitudinis inanem.' Far from
lamenting that the desire for felicity has been
planted in this world, and its ultimate gratifica-
tion only in another, let us discern in that
only an additional proof of the goodness of God.
Since sooner or later we must quit this world,
Providence has placed beyond its limits a
charm, which is felt as an attraction to dimin-
ish the terrors of the tomb; as a kind mother,
when wishing to make her infant cross a bar-
rier, places some agreeable object on the other
side." I. 210.
"Finally, there is another proof of the im
mortality of the soul, which has not been suf-
ficiently insisted on, and that is the universal
veneration of mankind for the tomb. There,
by an invincible charm, life is attached to
death, there the human race declares itself
superior to the rest of creation, and proclaims
aloud its lofty destinies. What animal regards
its coffin, or disquiets itself about the ashes of
its fathers 1 Which one has any regard for
the bones of its father, or even knows its
father, after the first necessities of infancy are
passed ? Whence comes then the all-power-
ful idea which we entertain of death 1 Do a
few grains of dust merit so much considera-
tion ? No ; without doubt we respect the
bones of our fathers, because an inward voice
tells us that all is not lost with them; and that
is the voice which has everywhere conse-
crated the funeral service throughout the
world ; all are equally persuaded that the sleep
is not eternal, even in the tomb, and that death
itself is but a glorious transfiguration." I. 217.
To the objection, that if the idea of God is
innate, it must appear in children without
any education, which is not generally the case,
Chateaubriand replies :
" God being a spirit, and it being impossible
that he should be understood but by a spirit,
an infant, in whom -the powers of thought are
not as yet developed, cannot form a proper
conception of the Supreme Being. We must
not expect from the heart its noblest function,
when the marvellous fabric is as yet in the
hands of its Creator.
" Besides, there seems reason to believe
that a child has, at least, a sort of instinct of
its Creator ; witness only its little reveries, its
disquietudes, its fears in the night, its disposi-
tion to raise its eyes to heaven. An infant
joins together its little hands and repeats after
its mother a prayer to the good God. Why does
that little angel lisp with so much love and
purity the name of the Supreme Being, if it
has no inward consciousness of its existence
in its heart?
"Behold that new-born infant, which the
| nurse still carries under her arms. W T hat has
it done to give so much joy to that old man, to
that man in the prime of life, to that woman 1
Two or three syllables half-formed, which no
one rightly understands, and instantly three
reasonable creatures are transported with de-
light, from the grandfather, to whom all that
life contains is known, to the young mother,
to whom the greater part of it is as yet un-
revealed. Who has put that power into the
word of man ? How does it happen that the
sound of a human voice subjugates so instan-
taneously the human heart 1 What subjugates
you is something allied to a mystery, which
depends on causes more elevated than the in-
terest, how strong soever, which you take in
that infant: something tells you that these in-
articulate words are the first openings of an
immortal soul." I. 224.
There is a subject on which human genius
can hardly dare to touch, the future felicity of
the just. Our author thus treats this delicate
subject :
"The purest of sentiments in this world is
admiration ; but every earthly admiration is
mingled with weakness, either in the object it
admires, or in that admiring. Imagine, then,
a perfect being, which perceives at once all
that is, and has, and will be ; suppose that soul
exempt from envy and all the weaknesses of
life, incprruptible, indefatigable, unalterable ;
conceive it contemplating without ceasing the
Most High, discovering incessantly new per-
fections ; feeling existence only from the re-
newed sentiment of that admiration ; conceive
God as the sovereign beauty, the universal
principle of love ; figure all the attachments
of earth blending in that abyss of feeling,
without ceasing to love the objects of affection
on this earth; imagine, finally, that the inmate
of heaven has the conviction that this felicity
is never to end, and you will have an idea,
feeble and imperfect indeed, of the felicity of
the just. They are plunged in this abyss of
delight, as in an ocean from which they can-
not emerge: they wish nothing; they have
every thing, though desiring nothing; an
eternal youth, a felicity without end; a glory
divine is expressed in their countenances ; a
sweet, noble, and majestic joy; it is a sublime
feeling of truth and virtue which transports
them ; at every instant they experience the
same rapture as a mother who regains a be-
loved child whom she believed lost; and that
exquisite joy, loo fleeting on earth, is there
prolonged through the ages of eternity. I. 241.
We intended to have gone through in this
paper the whole Genie de Christianisme, and
we have only concluded the first volume, so
prolific of beauty are its pages. We make no
apology for the length of the quotations, which
have so much extended the limits of this article ;
any observations would be inexcusable which
should abridge passages of such transcendent
beauty.
"The Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem," is
an account of the author's journey in 180G,
from Paris to Greece, Constantinople, Pales-
tine, Egypt and Carthage. This work is not
so much a book of travels as memoirs of the
feelings and impressions of the author during
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
a journey over tne shores of the Mediterranean ;
the cradle, as Dr. Johnson observed, of all that
dignifies and has blest human nature, of our
laws, our religion, and our civilization. It
may readily be anticipated that the observa-
tions of such a man, in such scenes, must con-
tain much that is interesting and delightful:
our readers may prepare themselves for a high
gratification ; it is seldom that they have such
an intellectual feast laid before them. We
have translated the passages, both because
there is no English version with which we are
acquainted of this work, and because the trans-
lations which usually appear of French authors
are executed in so slovenly a style.
On his first night amidst the ruins of Sparta,
our author gives the following interesting ac-
count:
" After supper Joseph brought me my saddle,
which usually served for my pillow. I wrap-
ped myself in my cloak, and slept on the banks
of the Eurotas under a laurel. The night was
so clear and serene, that the milky way formed
a resplendent arch, reflected in the waters of
the river, and by the light of which I could
read. I slept with my eyes turned towards the
heavens, and with the constellation of the
Swan of Leda directly above my head. Even
at this distance of time I recollect the pleasure
I experienced in sleeping thus in the woods
of America, and still more in awakening in
the middle of the night. I there heard the
sound of the wind rustling through those pro-
found solitudes, the cry of the stag and the
deer, the fall of a distant cataract, while the
fire at my feet, half-extinguished, reddened
from below the foliage of the forest. I even
experienced a pleasure from the voice of the
Iroquois, when he uttered his cry in the midst
of the untrodden woods, and by the light of
the stars, amidst the silence of nature, pro-
claimed his unfettered freedom. Emotions such
as these please at twenty years of age, because
life is then so full of vigour that it suffices as
it were for itself, and because there is some-
thing in early youth which incessantly urges
towards the mysterious and the unknown;
ipsi sibi somnia fingunt ; but in a more mature
age the mind reverts to more imperishable
emotions; it inclines, most of all, to the re-
collections and the examples of history. I would
still sleep willingly on the banks of the Eurotas
and the Jordan, if the shades of the three hun-
dred Spartans, or of the twelve sons of Jacob,
were to visit my dreams ; but I would no longer
set out to visit lands which have never been
explored by the plough. I now feel the desire
for those old deserts which shroud the walls
of Babylon or the legions of Pharsalia; fields
of which the furrows are engraven on human
thought, and where I may find man as I am,
the blood, the tears, and the labours of man."
I. 86, 87.
From Laconia our author directed his steps
by the isthmus of Corinth to Athens. Of his
first feelings in the ancient cradle of taste and
genius he gives the following beautiful de-
scription:
" Overwhelmed with fatigue, I slept for some
time without interruption, when I was at length
awakened by the sound of Turkish music,
proceeding from the summits of the Propylenm.
At the same moment a Mussulman priest from
one of the mosques called the faithful to pray
in the city of Minerva. I cannot describe
what I felt at the sound ; that Iman had no
need to remind one of the lapse of time ; his
voice alone in these scenes announced the
revolution of ages.
" This fluctuation in human affairs is the
more remarkable from the contrast which it
affords to the unchangeableness of nature. As
if to insult the instability of human affairs, the
animals and the birds experience no change
in their empires, nor alterations in their habits.
I saw, when sitting on the hill of the Muses,
the storks form themselves into a wedge, and
wing their flight towards the shores of Africa.
For two thousand years they have made the
ame voyage they have remained free and
happy in the city of Solon, as in that of the
chief of the black eunuchs. From the height
of their nests, which the revolutions below
have not been able to reach, they have seen
the races of men disappear ; while impious
generations have arisen on the tombs of their
religious parents, the young stork has never
ceased to nourish its aged parent. I involun-
tarily fell into these reflections, for the stork
is the friend of the traveller: 'it knows the
seasons of heaven.' These birds were fre-
quently my companions in the solitudes of
America : I have often seen them perched on
the wigwams of the savage ; and when I saw
them rise from another species of desert, from
the ruins of the Parthenon, I could not avoid
feeling a companion in the desolation of empires.
" The first thing which strikes a traveller
in the monuments of Athens, is their lovely
colour. In our climate, where the heavens
are charged with smoke and rain, the whitest
stone soon becomes tinged with black and
green. It is not thus with the atmosphere of
the city of Theseus. The clear sky and bril-
liant sun of Greece have shed over the marble
of Paros and Pentilicus a golden hue, com-
parable only to the finest and most fleeting
tints of autumn.
" Before I saw these splendid remains I had
fallen into the ordinary error concerning them.
I conceived they were perfect in their details,
but that they wanted grandeur. But the first
glance at the originals is sufficient to show
that the genius of the architects has supplied
in the magnitude of proportion what was
wanting in size; and Athens is accordingly
filled with stupendous edifices. The Athenians,
a people far from rich, few in number, have
succeeded in moving gigantic masses ; the
blocks of stone in the Pnyx and the Propyleum
are literally quarters of rock. The slabs which
stretch from pillar to pillar are of enormous
dimensions : the columns of the Temple of
Jupiter Olympius are above sixty feet in height,
and the walls of Athens, including those which
stretched to the Piraeus, extended over nine
leagues, and were so broad that two chariots
could drive on them abreast. The Romans
never ereeted more extensive fortifications.
" By what strange fatality has it happened
that the chefs d'ceuvre of antiquity, which the
moderns go so far to admire, have owed their
CHATEAUBRIAND.
21
destruction chiefly to the moderns themselves ?
The Parthenon was entire in 1687; the Chris-
tians at first converted it into a church, and the
Turks into a mosque. The Venetians, in the
middle of the light of the seventeenth century,
bombarded the Acropolis with red-hot shot; a
shell fell on the Parthenon, pierced the roof,
communicated to a few barrels of powder, and
blew into the air great part of the edifice,
which did less honour to the gods of antiquity
than the genius of man. No sooner was the
town captured, than Morosini, in the design
of embellishing Venice with its spoils, took
down the statues from the frortt of the Temple ;
and another modern has completed, from love
for the arts, that which the Venetian had begun.
The invention of fire-arms has been fatal to
the monuments of antiquity. Had the bar-
barians been acquainted with the use of gun-
powder, not a Greek or Roman edifice would
have survived their invasion; they would
have blown up even the Pyramids in the
search for hidden treasures. One year of war
in our times will destroy more than a century
of combats among the ancients. Every thing
among the moderns seems opposed to the per-
fection of art ; their country, their manners, their
dress ; even their discoveries." 1. 136, 145.
These observations are perfectly well found-
ed. No one can have visited the Grecian monu-
ments on the shores of the Mediterranean,
without perceiving that they were thoroughly
masters of an element of grandeur, hitherto
but little understood among the moderns, that
arising from gigantic masses of stone. The
feeling of sublimity which they produce is in-
describable : it equals that of Gothic edifices
of a thousand times the size. Every traveller
must have felt this upon looking at the im-
mense masses which rise in solitary magnifi-
cence on the plains at Stonehenge. The great
block in the tomb of Agamemnon at Argos ;
those in the Cyclopean Walls of Volterra, and
in the ruins of Agrigentum in Sicily, strike
the beholder with a degree of astonishment,
bordering on awe. To have moved such
enormous masses seems the work of a race
of mortals superior in thought and power
to this degenerate age; it is impossible, in
visiting them, to avoid the feeling that you
are beholding the work of giants. It is to this
cause, we are persuaded, that the extraordina-
ry impression produced by the pyramids, and
all the works of the Cyclopean age in archi-
tecture, is to be ascribed ; and as it is an
element of sublimity within the reach of all
who have considerable funds at their com-
mand, it is earnestly to be hoped that it will
not be overlooked by our architects. Strange
that so powerful an ingredient in the sublime
should have been lost sight of in proportion to
the ability of the age to produce it, and that the
monuments raised in the infancy of the
mechanical art, should still be those in which
alone it is to be seen to perfection !
We willingly translate the description of the
unrivalled scene viewed from the Acropolis
by the same poetical hand ; a description so
glowing, and yet so true, that it almost recalls,
after the lapse of years, the fading tints of the
original on the memory.
"To understand the view from the Acropolis,
you must figure to yourself all the plain at its
foot ; bare and clothed in a dusky heath, inter-
sected here and there by woods of olives,
squares of barley, and ridges of vines ; you
must conceive the heads of columns, and the
ends of ancient ruins, emerging from the midst
of that cultivation ; Albanian women washing
their clothes at the fountain or the scanty
streams ; peasants leading their asses, laden
with provisions, into the modern city : those
ruins so celebrated, those isles, those seas,
whose names are engraven on the memory,
illumined by a resplendent light. I have seen
from the rock of the Acropolis the sun rise
between the two summits of Mount Hymettus :
the ravens, which nestle round the citadel, but
never fly over its summit, floating in the air
beneath, their glossy wings reflecting the rosy
tints of the morning: columns of light smoke
ascending from the villages on the sides of the
neighbouring mountains marked the colonies
of bees on the far-famed Hymettus ; and the
ruins of the Parthenon were illuminated by
the finest tints of pink and violet. The sculp-
tures of Phidias, struck by a horizontal ray of
gold, seemed to start from their marbled bed
by the depth and mobility of their shadows :
in the distance, the sea and the Piraeus were
resplendent with light, while on the verge of
the western horizon, the citadel of Corinth,
glittering in the rays of the rising sun, shone
like a rock of purple and fire." I. 149.
These are the colours of poetry; but beside
this brilliant passage of French description,
we willingly place the equally correct and still
more thrilling lines of our own poet.
" Slow sinks more beauteous ere his race be run
Along Morea's hills the setting sun,
Not as in northern clime obscurely bright,
But one unclouded blaze of living light;
O'er the hushed deep the yellow beams he throws,
Gilds the ereen wave that trembles as it glows ;
On old jDgina's rock and Idra's isle,
The God of Gladness sheds his parting smile ;
O'er his own regions lingering loves to shine,
Though there his altars are no more divine ;
Descending fast, the mountain shadows kiss
Thy gloriows gulf, unconquer'd Salamis !
Their azure arches through the long expanse,
More deeply purpled meet his mellowing glance,
And tenderest tints, along their summits driven,
Mark his gay course and own the hues of heaven,
Till, darkly shaded from the land and deep,
Behind his Delphian cliff he sinks to sleep."
The columns of the temple of Jupiter Olym-
pius produced the same effects on the enthu-
siastic mind of Chateaubriand as they do on
every traveller : But he has added some re-
flections highly descriptive of the peculiar turn
of his mind.
" At length we came to the great isolated
columns placed in the quarter which is called
the city of Adrian. On a portion of the archi-
trave which unites two of the columns, is to
be seen a piece of masonry, once the abode of
a hermit. It is impossible to conceive how
that building, which is still entire, could have
been erected on the summit of one of these
prodigious columns, whose height is above
sixty feet. Thus this vast temple, at which
the Athenians toiled for seven centuries, which
all the kings of Asia laboured to finish, which
Adrian, the ruler of the world, had first the
glory to complete, has sunk under the hand of
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
time, and the cell of a hermit has remained
undecayed on its ruins. A miserable cabin is
borne aloft on two columns of marble, as if
fortune had wished to exhibit, on that magni-
ficent pedestal, a monument of its triumph and
its caprice.
"These columns, though twenty feet higher
than those of the Parthenon, are far from pos-
sessing their beauty. The degeneracy of taste
is apparent in their construction ; but isolated
and dispersed as they are, on a naked and
desert plain, their effect is imposing in the
highest degree. I stopped at their feet to hear
the wind whistle through the Corinthian foliage
on their summits: like the solitary palms
which rise here and there amidst the ruins of
Alexandria. When the Turks are threatened
by any calamity, they bring a lamb into this
place, and constrain it to bleat, with its face
turned to heaven. Being unable to find the
voice of innocence among men, the}'- have re-
course to the new-born lamb to mitigate the
anger of heaven." I. 152, 153.
He followed the footsteps of Chandler along
the Long Walls to the Piraeus, and found that
profound solitude in that once busy and ani-
mated scene, which is felt to be so impressive
by every traveller.
"If Chandler was astonished at the solitude
of the Pireeus, I can safely assert that I was
not less astonished than he. We had made
the circuit of that desert shore ; three harbours
had met our eyes, and in all that space we had
not seen a single vessel ! The only spectacle
to be seen was the ruins and the rocks on the
shore the only sounds that could be heard
were the cry of the seafowl, and the murmur
of the wave, which, breaking on the tomb of
Themistocles, drew forth a perpetual sigh from
the abode of eternal silence. Borne away by
the sea, the ashes of the conqueror of Xerxes
repose beneath the waves, side by side with
the bones of the Persians. In vain I sought
the Temple of Venus, the long gallery, and
the symbolical statue which represented the
Athenian people; the image of that implacable
democracy was for ever fallen, beside the
walls, where the exiled citizens came to im-
plore a return to their country. Instead of
those superb arsenals, of those Agora? resound-
ing with the voice of the sailors ; of those
edifices which rivalled the beauty of the city
of Rhodes, I saw nothing but a ruined convent
and a solitary magazine. A single Turkish
sentinel is perpetually seated on the coast ;
months and years revolve without a bark pre-
senting itself to his sight. Such is the deplora-
ble state into which these ports, once so
famous, have now fallen Who have over-
turned so many monuments of gods and men 1 ?
The hidden power which overthrows every
thing, and is itself subject to the Unknown
God whose altar St. Paul beheld at Phalera."
I. 157, 158.
The fruitful theme of the decay of Greece
has called forth many of the finest apostrophes
of our moralists and poets. On this subject
Chateaubriand offers the following striking
observations :
" One would imagine that Greece itself an-
nounced, by its mourning, the misfortunes of
its children. In general, the country is uncul-
tivated, the soil bare, rough, savage, of a brown
and withered aspect. There are no rivers,
properly so called, but little streams and tor-
rents, which become dry in summer. No
farm-houses are to be seen on the farms, no
labourers, no chariots, no oxen, or horses of
agriculture. Nothing can be figured so melan-
choly as to see the track of a modern wheel,
where you can still trace in the worn parts of
the rock the track of ancient wheels. Coast
along that shore, bordered by a sea hardly
more desolate place on the summit of a rock
a ruined tower, an abandoned convent figure
a minaret rising up in the midst of the solitude
as a badge of slavery a solitary flock feeding
on a cape, surmounted by ruined columns-
the turban of a Turk scaring the few goats
which browze on the hills, and you will obtain
a just idea of modern Greece.
" On the eve of leaving Greece, at the Cape
of Sunium, I did not abandon myself alone to
the romantic ideas which the beauty of the
scene was fitted to inspire. I retraced in my
mind the history of that country; I strove to
discover in the ancient prosperity of Athens
and Sparta the cause of their present misfor-
tunes, and in their present situation the germ
of future glory. The breaking of the sea,
which insensibly increased against the rocks
at the foot of the Cape, at length reminded me
that the wind had risen, and that it was time
to resume my voyage. We descended to the
vessel, and found the sailors already prepared
for our departure. W T e pushed out to sea,
and the breeze, which blew fresh from the land,
bore us rapidly towards Zea. As we receded
from the shore, the columns of Sunium rose
more beautiful above the waves : their pure
white appeared well defined in the dark azure
of the distant sky. We were already far from
the Cape ; but we still v heard the murmur of
the waves, which broke on the cliffs at its foot,
the whistle of the winds through its solitary
pillars, and the cry of the sea-birds which wheel
round the stormy promontory : they were the
last sounds whtch I heard on the shores of
Greece." 1. 196.
" The Greeks did not excel less in the choice
of the site of their edifices than in the forms
and proportions. The greater part of the pro-
montories of Peloponnesus, Attica, and Ionia,
and the Islands of the Archipelago, are marked
by temples, trophies, or tombs. These monu-
ments, surrounded as they generally are with
woods and rocks, beheld in all the changes of
light and shadow, sometimes in the midst of
clouds and lightning, sometimes by the light
of the moon, sometimes gilded by the rising
sun, sometimes flaming in his setting beams,
throw an indescribable charm over the shores
of Greece. The earth, thus decorated, re-
sembles the old Cybele, who, crowned and
seated on the shore, commanded her son
Neptune to spread the waves beneath her
feet.
" Christianity, to which we owe the sole
architecture in unison with our manners, has
also taught how to place our true monuments :
our chapels, our abbeys, our monasteries, are
dispersed on the summits of hills not that the
CHATEAUBRIAND.
choice of the site was always the work of the |
architect, but that an art which is in unison I
with the feelings of the people, seldom errs far i
in what is really beautiful. Observe, on the i
other hand, how wretchedly almost all our
edifices copied from the antique are placed. |
Not one of the heights around Paris is orna-
mented with any of the splendid edifices with
which the city is filled. The modern Greek
edifices resemble the corrupted language which
they speak at Sparta and Athens ; it is in vain
to maintain that it is the language of Homer
and Plato; a mixture of uncouth words, and
of foreign constructions, betrays at every in-
stant the invasion of the barbarians.
"To the loveliest sunset in nature, suc-
ceeded a serene night. The firmament, re-
flected in the waves, seemed to sleep in the
midst of the sea. The evening star, my faith-
ful companion in my journey, was ready to
sink beneath the horizon; its place could only
be distinguished by the rays of light which it
occasionally shed upon the water, like a dying
taper in the distance. At intervals, the per-
fumed breeze from the islands which we pass-
ed entranced the senses, and agitated on the
surface of the ocean the glassy image of the
heavens." I. 182, 183.
The appearance of morning in the sea of
Marmora is described in not less glowing
colours.
"At four in the morning we weighed an-
chor, and as the wind was fair, we found our-
selves in less than an hour at the extremity of
the waters of the river. The scene was worthy
of being described. On the right, Aurora rose
above the headlands of Asia ; on the left, w^as
extended the sea of Marmora; the heavens in
the east were of a fiery red, which grew paler
in proportion as the morning advanced; the
morning star still shone in that empurpled
light ; and above it you could barely descry
the pale circle of the moon. "The picture
changed while I still contemplated it; soon a
blended glory of rays of rose and gojd, diverg-
ing from a common centre, mounted to the
zenith; these columns were effaced, revived,
and effaced anew, until: the .sun rose above the
horizon, and confounded all the lesser shades
in one universal blaze of light." I. 236.
His journey into the Holy Land awakened
a new and not less interesting train of ideas,
throughout the whole of which we recognise
the peculiar features of M. de Chateaubriand's
mind : a strong and poetical sense of the
beauties of nature, a memory fraught with
historical recollections; a>deep sense of reli-
gion, illustrated, however, rather as it affects
the imagination and the passions, than the
judgment. It is a mere chimera to suppose
that such aids are to be rejected by the friends
of Christianity, or that truth may with safety
discard the aid of fancy, either in subduing
the passions or affecting the heart. On the
contrary, every day's experience must con-
vince us, that for one who can understand an
argument, hundreds can enjoy a romance;
and that truth, to affect multitudes, must con-
descend to wear the garb of fancy. It is no
doubt of vast importance that works should j
exist in which the truths of religion are un- i
folded with lucid precision, and its principles
defined with the force of reason: but it is at
least of equal moment, that others should be
found in which the graces of eloquence and
the fervour of enthusiasm form an attraction to
those who are insensible to graver considera-
tions ; where the reader is tempted to follow a
path which he finds only strewed with flowers,
and he unconsciously inhales the breath of
eternal life.
Cosi all E<jro fanciul porsiamo aspersi
J)i soave lic:or gli oral del vaso,
Succlii ainari ingannato intanto ei beve,
E dal inganno sua vita riceve.
" On nearing the coast of Judea, the first
visitors we received were > three swallows.
They were perhaps on their way from France,
and pursuing their course to Syria. I was
strongly tempted to ask them what news they
brought from that paternal roof which I had so
long quitted. I recollect that in years of in-
fancy, I spent entire hours in watching with
an indescribable pleasure the course of swal-
lows in autumn, when assembling in crowds
previous to their annual migration : a secret
instinct told me that I too should be a travel-
ler. They assembled in the end of autumn
around a great fishpond; there, amidst a thou-
sand evolutions and flights in air, they seemed
to try their wings, and prepare Tor their long
pilgrimage. Whence is it that of all the re-
collections in existence, we prefer those which
are connected with our cradle 1 The illusions
of self-love, the pleasures of youth, do not
recur with the same charm to the memory ;
we find in them, on the contrary, frequent bit-
terness and pain; but the slightest circum-
stances revive in the heart the recollections
of infancy, and always with a fresh charm.
On the shores of the lakes in America, in an
unknown desert, which was sublime only from
the effect of solitude, a swallow has frequently
recalled to my recollection the first years of
my life ; as here on the coast' of Syria they
recalled them in sight of an ancient land re-
sounding with the traditions of history and the
voice of ages.
"The air was so fresh and so balmy that
all the passengers remained on deck during
the night. At six in the morning I was awa-
kened by a confused hum; I opened my eyes,
and saw all the pilgrims crowding towards
the prow of the vessel. I asked what it was 1
they all replied, ' Signer, il Carmelo.' I in-
stantly rose from the plank on which I was
stretched, and eagerly looked out for the sacred
mountain. Every one strove to show it to me,
but I could see nothing by reason of the daz-
zling of the sun, which now rose above the
horizon. The moment had something in it
that was august and impressive; all the pil-
grims, with their chaplets in their hands,
remained in silence, watching for the appear-
ance of the Holy Land; the captain prayed
aloud, and not a sound was to be heard but
that prayer and the rush of the vessel, as it
ploughed with a fair wind through the azure
sea. From time to time the cry arose, from
those in elevated parts of the vessel, that they
saw Mount Carmel, and at length I myself
perceived it like a round globe under the rays
24
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
of the sun. I then fell on my knees, after the
manner of the Latin pilgrims. My first im-
pression was not the kind of agitation which
I experienced on approaching the coast of
Greece, but the sight of the cradle of the Israel-
ites, and of the country of Christ, filled me
with awe and veneration. I was about to
descend on the land of miracles on the birth-
place of the sublimest poetry that has ever
appeared on earth on the spot where, speak-
ing only as it has affected human history, the
most wonderful event has occurred which
ever changed the destinies of the species. I
was about to visit the scenes which had been
seen before me by Godfrey of Bouillon, Ray-
mond of Toulouse, Tancred the Brave, Richard
Cceur de Lion, and Saint Louis, whose virtues
even the infidels respected. How could an
obscure pilgrim like myself dare to tread a
soil ennobled by such recollections !" I. 263
265.
Nothing is more striking in the whole work
than the description of the Dead Sea, and the
Valley of Jordan. He has contrived to bring
the features of that extraordinary scene more
completely before us than any of the numerous
English travellers who have preceded or fol-
lowed him on the same route.
"We quitted the convent at three in the
afternoon, ascended the torrent of Cedron, and
at length, crossing the ravine, rejoined our
route to the east. An opening in the mountain
gave us a passing view of Jerusalem. I
hardly recognised the city; it seemed a mass
of broken rocks ; the sudden appearance of
that city of desolation in the midst of the wil-
derness had something in it almost terrifying.
She was, in truth, the Queen of the Desert.
"As we advanced, the aspect of the moun-
tains continued constantly the same, that is, a
powdery white without shade, a tree, or even
moss. At half past four, we descended from
the lofty chain we had hitherto traversed, and
wound along another of inferior elevation. At
length we arrived at the last of the chain of
heights, which close in on the west the Valley
of Jordan and the Dead Sea. The sun was
nearly setting ; we dismounted from our
horses, and I lay down to contemplate at lei-
sure the lake, the valley, and the river.
" When you speak in general of a valley,
you conceive it either cultivated or unculti-
vated ; if the former, it is filled with villages,
corn-fields, vineyards, and flocks ; if the latter,
it presents grass or forests ; if it is watered by
a river, that river has windings, and the sinu-
osities or projecting points afford agreeable
and varied landscapes. But here there is no-
thing of the kind. Conceive two long chains
of mountains running parallel from north to
south, without projections, without recesses,
without vegetation. The ridge on the east,
called the Mountains of Arabia, is the most
elevated; viewed at the distance of eight or
ten leagues, it resembles a vast wall, extremely
similar to the Jura, as seen from the Lake of
Geneva, from its form and azure tint. You
can perceive neither summits nor the smallest
peaks ; only here and there slight inequalities,
as if the hand of the painter who traced the long
lines on the sky had occasionally trembled.
"The chain on the eastern side forms part
of the mountains of Judea less elevated and
more uneven than the ridge on the west : it
differs also in its character ; it exhibits great
masses of rock and sand, which occasionally
present all the varieties of ruined fortifications,
armed men, and floating banners. On the
side of Arabia, on the other hand, black rocks,
with perpendicular flanks, spread from afar
their shadows over the waters of the Dead
Sea. The smallest bird could not find in those
crevices of rock a morsel of food ; every thing
announces a country which has fallen under
the divine wrath ; every thing inspires the
horror at the incest from whence sprung Am-
mon and Moab.
" The valley which lies between these moun-
tains resembles the bottom of a sea, from
which the waves have long ago withdrawn :
banks ofgravel, a dried bottom rocks covered
with salt, deserts of moving sand here and
there stunted arbutus shrubs grow with diffi-
culty on that arid soil ; their leaves are co-
vered with the salt which had nourished their
roots, while their bark has the scent and taste
of smoke. Instead of villages, nothing but the
ruins of towers are to be seen. Through the
midst of the valley flows a discoloured stream,
which seems to drag its lazy course unwill-
ingly towards the lake. Its course is not to
be discerned by the water, but by the willows
and shnibs which skirt its banks the Arab
conceals himself in these thickets to waylay
and rob the pilgrim.
" Such are the places rendered famous by
the maledictions of Heaven : that river is the
Jordan : that lake is the Dead Sea. It appears
with a serene surface; but the guilty cities
which are emboso*med in its waves have poi-
soned its waters. Its solitary abysses can
sustain the life of no living thing; no vessel
ever ploughed its bosom ; its shores are with-
out trees, without birds, without verdure ; its
water, frightfully salt, is so heavy that the
highest wind can hardly raise it.
" In travelling in Judea, an extreme feeling
of ennui frequently seizes the mind, from the
sterile and monotonous aspect of the objects
which are presented to the eye: but when
journeying on through these pathless deserts,
the expanse seems to spread out to infinity
before you, the ennui disappears, and a secret
terror is experienced, which, far from lower-
ing the soul, elevates and inflames the
genius. These extraordinary scenes reveal
the land desolated by miracles ; that burning
sun, the impetuous eagle, the barren fig-tree ;
all the poetry, all the pictures of Scripture are
there. Every name recalls a mystery; every
grotto speaks of the life to come ; every peak
re-echoes the voice of a prophet. God him-
self has spoken on these shores: these dried-
up torrents, these cleft rocks, these tombs rent
asunder, attest his resistless hand: the desert
appears mute with terror; and you feel that it
has never ventured to break silence since it
heard the voice of the Eternal." I. 317.
"I employed two complete hours in wan-
dering on the shores of the Dead Sea, notwith-
standing the remonstrances of the Bedouins,
i who pressed me to quit that dangerous region.
CHATEAUBRIAND.
25
I was desirous of seeing the Jordan, at the
place where it discharges itself into the lake ;
but the Arabs refused to lead me thither, be-
cause the river, at a league from its mouth,
makes a detour to the left, and approaches the
mountains of Arabia. It was necessary, there-
fore, to direct our steps towards the curve
which was nearest us. We struck our tents,
and travelled for an hour and a half with ex-
cessive difficulty, through a fine and silvery
sand. We were moving towards a little wood
of willows and tamarinds ; which, to my great
surprise, I perceived growing in the midst of
the desert. All of a sudden the Bethlemites
stopped, and pointed to something at the bottom
of a ravine, which had not yet attracted my at-
tention. Without being able to say what it
was, I perceived a sort of sand rolling on
through the fixed banks which surrounded it.
I approached it, and saw a yellow stream
which could hardly be distinguished from the
sand of its two banks. It was deeply furrowed
through the rocks, and with difficulty rolled
on, a stream surcharged with sand : it was the
Jordan.
"I had seen the great rivers of America,
with the pleasure which is inspired by the
magnificent works of nature. I had hailed
the Tiber -with ardour, and sought with the
same interest the Eurotas and the Cephisus ;
but on none of these occasions did I expe-
rience the intense emotion which I felt on ap-
proaching the Jordan. Not only did that river
recall the earliest antiquity, and a name ren-
dered immortal in the finest poetry, but its
banks were the theatre of the miracles of our
religion. Judea is the only country which
recalls at once the earliest recollections of
man, and our first impressions of heaven;
and thence arises a mixture of feeling in the
mind, which no other part of the world can
produce." I. 327, 328.
The peculiar turn of his mind renders our
author, in an especial manner, partial to the
description of sad and solitary scenes. The
following description of the Valley of Jehosha-
phat is in his best style.
"The Valley qf Jehoshaphat has in all ages
served as the burying-place to Jerusalem: you
meet there, side by s^ide, monuments of the.
most distant times and of the present century.
The Jews still come there to die, from all the
corners of the earth. A stranger sells to them,
for almost its weight in gold, the land which
contains the bones of their fathers. Solomon
planted that valley: the shadow of the Temple
by which it was overhung the torrent, called
after grief, which traversed it the Psalms
which David there composed the Lamenta-
tions of Jeremia.h, which its rocks re-echoed,
render it the fitting abode of the tomb. Jesus
Christ commenced his Passion in the same
place : that innocent David there shed, for the
expiation of our sins, those tears which the
guilty David let fall for his own transgressions.
Few names awaken in our minds recollections
so solemn as the Valley of Jehoshaphat. It is
so full of mysteries, that, according to the
Prophet Joel, all mankind will be assembled
there before the Eternal Judge.
"The aspect of this celebrated valley is
desolate ; the western side is bounded by a
ridge of lofty rocks which support the walls
of Jerusalem, above which the towers of the
city appear. The eastern is formed by the
Mount of Olives, and another eminence called
the Mount of Scandal, from the idolatry of
Solomon. These two mountains, which adjoin
each other, are almost bare, and of a red and
sombre hue; on their desert side you see here
and there some black and withered vineyards,
some wild olives, some ploughed land, covered
with hyssop!, and a few ruined chapels. At
the bottom of the valley, you perceive a tor-
rent, traversed by a single arch, which appears
of great antiquity. The stones of the Jewish
cemetery appear like a mass of ruins at the
foot of the mountain of Scandal, under the
village of Siloam. You can hardly distin-
guish the buildings of the village from the
ruins with which they are surrounded. Three
ancient monuments are particularly conspicu-
ous : those of Zachariah, Josaphat, and Ab-
salom. The sadness of Jerusalem, from which
no smoke ascends, and in which no sound is
to be heard ; the solitude of the surrounding
mountains, where not a living creature is to
be seen ; the disorder of those tombs, ruined,
ransacked, and half-exposed to view, would
almost induce one to believe that the last
trump had been heard, and that the dead were
about to rise in the Valley of Jehoshaphat."
II. 34, 35.
Chateaubriand, after visiting with the devo-
tion of a pilgrim the Holy Sepulchre, and all
the scenes of our Saviour's sufferings, spent a
day in examining the scenes of the Crusaders'
triumphs, and comparing the descriptions in
Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered with the places
where the events which they recorded actually
occurred. He found them in general so ex-
tremely exact, that it was difficult to avoid the
conviction that the poet had been on the spot.
He even fancied he discovered the scene of
the Flight of Erminia, and the inimitable com-
bat and death of Clorinda.
From the Holy Land, he sailed to Egypt;
and we have the following graphic picture of
the approach to that cradle of art and civili-
zation.
" On the 20th October, at five in the morn-
ing, I perceived on the green and ruffled sur-
face of the water a line of foam, and beyond it
a pale and still ocean. The captain clapped
me on the shoulder, and said in French, 'Nilo;'
and soon we entered and glided through those
celebrated waters. A few palm-trees and a
minaret announce the situation of Rosetta, but
the town itself is invisible. These shores re-
semble those of the coast of Florida; they are
totally different from those of Italy or Greece,
every thing recalls the tropical regions.
"At ten o'clock we at length discovered,
beneath the palm-trees, a line of sand which
extended westward to the promontory of
Aboukir, before which we were obliged to
pass before arriving opposite to Alexandria.
At five in the evening, the shore suddenly
changed its aspect. The palm-trees seemed
planted in lines along the shore, like the elms
along the roads in France. Nature appears to
take a pleasure in thus recalling the ideas of
C
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
civilization in a country where that civiliza-
tion first arose, and barbarity has now resumed
its sway. It was eleven o'clock when we cast
anchor before the city, and as it was some
time before we could get ashore, I had full
leisure to follow out the contemplation which
the scene awakened.
"I saw on my right several vessels, and the
castle, which stands on the site of the Tower
of Pharos. On my left, the horizon seemed
shut in by sand-hills, ruins, and obelisks ; im-
mediately in front, extended a long wall, with
a few houses appearing above it ; not a light
was to be seen on shore, and not a sound came
from the city. This, nevertheless, was Alex-
andria, the rival of Memphis and Thebes,
which once contained three millions of inhabit-
ants, which was the sanctuary of the Muses,
and the abode of science amidst a benighted
world. Here were heard the orgies of Antony
and Cleopatra, and here was Caesar received
with more than regal splendour by the Queen
of the East. But in vain I listened. A fatal
talisman had plunged the people into a hope-
less calm : that talisman is the despotism
which extinguishes every joy, which stifles
even the cry of suffering. And what sound
could arise in a city of which at least a third
is abandoned; another third of which is sur-
rounded only by the tombs of its former in-
habitants ; and of which the third, which still
survives between those dead extremities, is a
species of breathing trunk, destitute of the
force even to shake off its chains in the middle
between ruins and the tomb?" II. 163.
It is to be regretted that Chateaubriand did
not visit Upper Egypt. His ardent and learned
mind would have found ample room for elo-
quent declamation, amidst the gigantic ruins
of Luxor, and the Sphynx avenues of Thebes.
The inundation of the Nile, however, pre-
vented him from seeing even the Pyramids
nearer than Grand Cairo; and when on the
verge of that interesting region, he was com-
pelled unwillingly to retrace his steps to the
French shores. After a tempestuous voyage,
along the coast of Lybia, he cast anchor off
the ruins of Carthage; and thus describes
his feelings on surveying those venerable
remains :
" From the summit of Byrsa, the eye em-
braces the ruins of Carthage, which are more
considerable than are generally imagined;
they resemble those of Sparta, having nothing
well preserved, but embracing a considerable
space. I saw them in the middle of February:
the olives, the fig-trees, were already bursting
into leaf: large bushes of angelica and acan-
thus formed tufts of verdure, amidst the re-
mains of marble of every colour. In the dis-
tance, I cast my eyes over the Isthmus, the
double sea, the distant isles, a cerulean sea, a
smiling plain, and azure mountains. I saw
forests, and vessels, and aqueducts ; moorish
villages, and Mahometan hermitages ; glitter-
ing minarets, and the white buildings of Tunis.
Surrounded with the most touching recollec-
tions, I thought alternately of Dido, Sophonis-
ba, and the noble wife of Asdrubal ; I contem-
plated the vast plains where the legions of
Annibal, Scipio, and Caesar were buried : My
eyes sought for the site of Utica. Alas ! The
remains of the palace of Tiberius still remain
in the island of Capri, and you search in vain
at Utica for the house of Cato. Finally, the
terrible Vandals, the rapid Moors, passed be-
fore my recollection, which terminated at last
on Saint Louis, expiring on that inhospitable
shore. May the story of the death of that
prince terminate this itinerary; fortunate to
re-enter, as it were, into my country by the
ancient monument of his virtues, and to close
at the sepulchre of that King of holy memory
my long pilgrimage to the tombs of illustrious
men." II. 257, 258.
"As long as his strength permitted, the
dying monarch gave instructions to his son
Philip ; and when his voice failed him, he
wrote with a faltering hand these precepts,
which no Frenchman, worthy of the name,
will ever be able to read without emotion.
' My son, the first thing which I enjoin you is
to love God with all your heart; for without
that no man can be saved. Beware of vio-
lating his laws; rather endure the worst tor-
ments, than sin against his commandments.
Should he send you adversity, receive it with
humility, and bless the hand which chastens
you ; and believe that you have well deserved
it, and that it will turn to your weal. Should
he try you with prosperity, thank him with
humility of heart, and be not elated by his
goodness. Do justice to every one, as well
the poor as the rich. Be liberal, free, and
courteous to your servants, and cause them to
love as well as fear you. Should any contro-
versy or tumult arise, sift it to the bottom,
whether the result be favourable or unfavour-
able to your interests. Take care, in an espe-
cial manner, that your subjects live in peace
and tranquillity under your reign. Respect
and preserve their privileges, such as they
have received them from their ancestors, and
preserve them with care and love. And now,
I give you every blessing which a father can
bestow on his child; praying the Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit, that they may defend you from
all adversities ; and that we may again, after
this mortal life is ended, be united before God,
and adore his Majesty for ever !' " II. 264.
"The style of Chateaubriand," says Napo-
leon, "is not that of Racine, it is that of a
prophet;' he has received from nature the
sacred flame ; it breathes in all his \vorks."*
It is of no common man being a political oj>po-
nent that Napoleon would have said these
words. Chateaubriand had done nothing to
gain favour with the French Emperor ; on the
contrary, he irritated him by throwing up his
employment and. leaving his country upon the
assassination of the Duke d'Enghien. In truth,
nothing is more remarkable amidst the selfish-
ness of political apostasy in France, than the
uniform consistence and disinterestedness of
this great man's opinions. His principles,
indeed, were not all the same at fifty as at
twenty-five ; we should be glad to know whose
are, excepting those who are so obtuse as to
derive no light from the extension of know-
ledge and the acquisitions of experience?
* Memoirs of Napoleon, iv. 342.
NAPOLEON.
27
Change is so far from being despicable, that
it is highly honourable in itself, ami when it
proceeds from the natural modification of the
mind, from the progress of years, or the lessons
of more extended experience. It becomes
contemptible only when it arises on the sug-
gestions of interest, or the desires of ambition.
Now, Chateaubriand's changes of opinion have
all been in opposition to his interest; and he I
has suffered at different periods of his life from |
his resistance to the mandates of authority, and j
his rejection of the calls of ambition. In early
life, he was exiled from France, and shared in
all the hardships of the emigrants, from his
attachment to Royalist principles. At the
earnest request of Napoleon, he accepted of-
fice under the Imperial Government, but he
relinquished it, and again became an exile
upon the murder of the Duke d'Enghien. The
influence of his writings was so powerful in
favour of the Bourbons, at the period of the
Restoration, that Louis XVIII. truly said, they
were worth more than an army. He followed
the dethroned Monarch to Ghent, and con-
tributed much, by his powerful genius, to con-
solidate the feeble elements of his power, after
the fall of Napoleon. Called to the helm of
affairs in 1824, he laboured to accommodate
the temper of the monarchy to the increasing
spirit of freedom in (he country, and fell into
disgrace with the Court, and was distrusted by
the Royal Family, because he strove to intro-
duce those popular modifications into the 'ad-
ministration of affairs, which might have pre-
vented the revolution of July ; and finally, he
has resisted all the efforts of the Citizen-King
to engage his great talents in defence of the
throne of the Barricades. True to his princi-
ples, he has exiled himself from France, to
preserve his independence; and consecrated
in a foreign land his illustrious name, to the
defence of the child of misfortune.
Chateaubriand is not only an eloquent and
beautiful writer, he is also a profound scholar,
and an enlightened thinker. His knowledge
of history and classical literature is equalled
only by his intimate acquaintance with the
early annals of the church, and the fathers of
the Catholic faith ; while in his speeches deli-
vered in the Chamber of Peers since the
restoration, will be found not only the most
eloquent but the most complete and satisfac-
tory dissertations on the political slate of
France during that period, which is anywhere
to be met with. It is a singular circumstance,
that an author of such great and varied ac-
quirements, who is universally allowed by all
parties in France to be their greatest living
writer, should be hardly known except by
name to the great body of readers in this
country.
His greatest work, that on which his fame
will rest with posterity, is the "Genius of
Christianity," from which such ample quota-
tions have already been given. The next is
the "Martyrs," a romance, in which he has
introduced an exemplification of the principles
of Christianity, in the early sufferings of the
primitive church, and enriched the narrative
by the splendid description of the scenery in
Egypt, Greece, and Palestine, which he had
visited during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and
all the stores of learning which a life spent in
classical and ecclesiastical lore could accumu-
late. The last of his-considerable publications
is the " Etudes Historiques," a work eminently
characteristic of that superiority in historical
composition, whiqh we have allowed to the
French modern writers over their contempo-
raries in this country; and which, we fear,
another generation, instructed when too late
by the blood and the tears of a Revolution,
will be alone able fully to appreciate. Its ob-
ject is to trace the influence of Christianity
from its first spread in the Roman empire to
the rise of civilization in the Western world;
a field in which he goes over the ground trod
by Gibbon, and demonstrates the unbounded
benefits derived from religion in all the institu-
tions of modern times. In this noble under-
taking, he has been aided, with a still more
philosophical mind, though inferior fire and
eloquence, by Guizot; a writer, who, equally
with his illustrous rival, is as yet unknown,
save by report, in this country; but from
whose joint labours is to be dated the spring
of a pure and philosophical system of religious
inquiry in France, and the commencement of
that revival of manly devotion, in which the
antidote, and the only antidote, to the fanati-
cism of infidelity is to be found.
NAPOLEON.*
THE age of Napoleon is one, of the delinea-
tion of which history and biography will never
be weary. Such is the variety of incidents
which it exhibits the splendid and heart-stir-
ring events which it records the immortal
characters which it portrays and the import-
ant consequences which have followed from
it, that the interest felt in its delineation, so
* Memoires do la Diichesse D' Ahrnntea, 2 vols. Colhurn.
London. The translations are executed by ourselves, as
we have not seen the English version.
far from diminishing, seems rather to increase
with the lapse of time, and will continue
through all succeeding ages, like the eras of
Themistocles, Caesar, and the Crusades, to
form the noblest and most favourite subjects
of historical description.
Numerous as have been the Memoirs which
have issued from the French press during the
last fifteen years, in relation to this eventful
era, the public passion for information on it is
still undiminished. Every new set of memoirs
which is ushered into the world with an histo-
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
rical name, or any pretensions to authenticity,
is eagerly read by all classes on the continent.
English translations generally appear in due
time, but they are, in general, so extremely ill
executed, as to give no conception whatever
of the spirit of the original ; and as there is
not one reader out of a hundred who can
read French with such facility as to make it a
matter of pleasure, the consequence is, that
these delightful works are still but imperfectly
known to the British public. Every person
intimately acquainted with their composition,
must have perceived in what an extremely
unfavourable aspect they appear in our ordi-
nary translations ; and in the utter ignorance
of the principles of revolution which pervades
the great bulk of the best informed classes in
this country, compared to what obtains on the
other side of the Channel, is to be found the
best evidence, that the great historical works
which have recently appeared on the events
of the last forty years in France, have had no
share whatever in the formation of public
opinion in this country.
The Duchess of Abrantes undertakes the
work of Memoirs of her own Times with sin-
gular and almost peculiar advantages. Her
mother, Madame Permon, a Corsican lady of
high rank, was extremely intimate with the
family of Napoleon. She rocked the future
emperor on her knee from the day of his birth,
and the intimacy of the families continued till
he was removed to the command of the army
of Italy, in April, 1796. The authoress herself,
though then a child, recounts with admirable
esprit, and all the air of -truth, a number of
early anecdotes of Napoleon ; and after his
return from Egypt she was married to Junot,
then Governor of Paris, and subsequently ad-
mitted as an habitual guest in the court circle
of the First Consul. In her Memoirs, we have
thus a picture of the private and domestic life
of Napoleon from his cradle to his grave ; we
trace him through all the gradations of the
Ecole Militaire, the artillery service, the cam-
paigns of Italy, the return from Egypt, the
Consulate, and the Empire, and live with those
who have filled the world with their renown,
as we would do with our most intimate ac-
quaintances and friends.
It has always struck us as a singular proof
of the practical sagacity and just discrimina-
tion of character in Sir Walter Scott, that
though his Life of Napoleon was published
before the Memoirs of Bourienne, the view
which he gives of Napoleon's character is
substantially the same as that drawn by his
confidential secretary, his school companion,
and the depositary of his inmost thoughts.
This is very remarkable. The French are
never weary of declaiming on the inaccuracies
of the Scottish biographer, and declare that he
wrote history in romance, and romance in
history; but they have never been able to
point out any serious or important error in
his narrative. The true reproach against Sir
Walter's work is of a different kind, and con-
sists in this, not that he has incorrectly stated
facts, but unjustly coloured opinions ; that he
has not done justice to any of the parties
whose conflicts desolated France during the
revolution, and has written rather in the spirit
of an English observer, than one participant
in the feelings of the actors in those mighty
events. There is but one way in which this
defect can be avoided by a native of this
country, and that is, by devoting himself for a
long course of years to the study of the me-
moirs and historians of the Revolution, and by
acquiring, by incessant converse with the
writings, somewhat of the sphit which ani-
mates the people of the continent. The object
to be attained by this, is not to imbibe their
prejudices, or become infatuated by their
errors, but to know and appreciate their ideas,
and do that justice to passions directed against
this country, which we willingly award to those
excited in its favour,
The character of Napoleon has been drawn
by his contemporaries with more graphic
power than any other conqueror in history;
and yet so varied and singular is the combina-
tion of qualities which it exhibits, and so much
at variance with what we usually observe in
human nature around us, that there is no man
can say he has a clear perception of what it
actually was : Brave, without being chival-
rous ; sometimes humane, seldom generous ;
insatiable in ambition ; inexhaustible in re-
sources ; without a thirst for blood, but totally
indifferent to it when his interests were con-
cerned ; without any fixed ideas on religion,
but a strong perception of its necessity as a
part of the mechanism of government ; a great
general with a small army, a mighty conqueror
with a large one ; gifted with extraordinary
powers of perception, and the clearest insight
into every subject connected with mankind ;
without extensive information derived from
study ; but the rarest aptitude for making him-
self master of every subject from actual ob-
servation ; ardently devoted to glory, and yet
incapable of the self-sacrifice which consti-
tutes its highest honours ; he exhibited a mix-
ture of great and selfish qualities, such as
perhaps never were before combined in any
single individual. His greatest defect was the
constant and systematic disregard of truth
which pervaded all Iris thoughts. He was
totally without the droiture, or honesty, which
forms the best and most dignified feature in
the Gothic or German character. The maxim,
Magna est veritas et pravalebit, never seems to
have crqssed his mind. His intellect was the
perfection of that of the Celt or Greek ; with-
out a shadow of the magnanimity and honesty
which has ever characterized the Roman and
Gothic races of mankind. Devoted as he was
to the captivating idol of posthumous fame ;
deeming, as he did, that to live in the recollec-
tion and admiration of future ages " constituted
the true immortality of the soul," he never
seems to have been aware that truth is essen-
tial to the purest and most lasting celebrity ;
and that the veil which artifice or flattery
draws over falsehood during the prevalence
of power, will be borne away with a merciless
hand on its termination.
In the Memoirs of Napoleon and of the
Archduke Charles, the opposite character of
their minds, and of the rtices to which they
belonged, is singularly portrayed. Those of
NAPOLEON.
29
the latter are written with a probity, an integ-
rity, and an impartiality above all praise ; he
censures himself for his faults with a severity
unknown to Caesar or Frederick, and touches
with a light hand on those glorious successes
which justly gained for him the title of Saviour
of Germany. Cautious, judicious, and reason-
able, his arguments convince the understand-
ing, but neither kindle the imagination nor
inspire the fancy. In the Memoirs of Napo-
leon, on the other hand, dictated to Montholon
and Gourgaud, there are to be seen in every
page symptoms of the clearest and most for-
cible intellect ; a coup d'ceil over every subject
of matchless vigour and reach; an ardent and
vehement imagination ; passions which have
ripened under a southern sun, and conceptions
which have shared in the luxuriant growth of
tropical climates. Yet amidst all these varied
excellencies, we often regret the simple bon-
homie of the German narrative. We admire
the clearness of the division, the lucid view of
every subject, the graphic power of the pic-
tures, and the forcible perspicuity of the lan-
guage ; but we have a total want of confidence
in the veracity of the narrative. In every page
we discover something suppressed or coloured,
to magnify the importance of the writer in the
estimation of those who study his work; and
while we incessantly recur to it for striking
political views, or consummate military criti-
cism, we must consult wprks of far inferior
celebrity for the smallest details in which his
fame was personally concerned. We may
trust him in speculations on the future destiny
of nations, the march of revolutions, or the
cause of military success ; but we cannot rely
on the numbers stated to have been engaged,
or the killed and wounded in a single engage-
ment.
The character of Napoleon has mainly rest-
ed, since the publication of his work, on Bou-
rienne's Memoirs. The peculiar opportunities
which he had of becoming acquainted with the
inmost thoughts of the First Consul, and the
ability and graphic powers of his narrative,
have justly secured for it an immense reputa-
tion. It is probable that the private character
and hidden motives of Napoleon will mainly
rest with posterity on that celebrated work.
Every day brings out something to support its
veracity ; and the concurring testimony of the
most intelligent of the contemporary writers
tends to show, that his narrative is, upon the
whole, the most faithful that has yet been pub-
lished. Still it is obvious that there is a secret
rankling at the bottom of Bourienne's heart
against his old schoolfellow. He could hardly
be expected to forgive the extraordinary rise
and matchless celebrity of one who had so long
been his equal. He evinces the highest admi-
ration for the Emperor, and, upon the whole,
has probably done him justice ; yet, upon par-
ticular points, a secret spleen is apparent; and
though there seems no ground for discrediting
most of his facts, yet we must not in every in-
stance adopt implicitly the colouring in which
he has painted them. It is quite plain that
Bourienne was involved in some money trans-
actions, in which Napoleon conceived that he
made an improper use of the state secrets
which came to his knowledge, in his official
situation of private secretary; and that to this
c.;iii^' his exile into honourable and lucrative
banishment at Hamburgh is to be ascribed.
Whether this banishment was justly or un-
justly inflicted, is immaterial in considering
the credit due to the narrative. If he was hard-
ly dealt with, while our opinion of his indivi-
dual integrity must rise, the weight of the
feelings of exasperation with which he was
animated must receive a proportional augmen-
tation.
The Memoirs of the Duchess of Abrantes
are well qualified to correct the bias, and sup-
ply the deficiencies of those of his private se-
cretary. As a woman, she had no personal
rivalry with Napoleon, and could not feel her-
self mortified by his transcendant success. As
the wife of one of his favourite and most pros-
perous generals, she had no secret reasons of
animosity against the author of her husband's
elevation. Her intimate acquaintance also
with Napoleon, from his very infancy, and be-
fore flattery or power had aggravated the faults
of his character, renders her peculiarly well
qualified to portray its original tendency. Many
new lights, accordingly, have been thrown
upon the eventful period of his reign, as well
as his real character, by her Memoirs. His
disposition appears in a more amiable light
his motives are of a higher kind, than from
preceding accounts; and we rise from the pe-
rusal of her fascinating volumes with the im-
pression, which the more extensively we study
human nature we shall find to be the more
correct, that men are generally more amiable
at bottom than we should be inclined to ima-
gine from their public conduct; that their faults
are fully as much the result of the circum-
stances in which they are placed, as of any
inherent depravity of disposition ; and that
deal ing gently with those who are carried along
on the stream of revolution, we should reserve
the weight of our indignation for those who
put the perilous torrent in motion.
But leaving these general speculations, it is
time to lay before our readers a few extracts
from these volumes themselves, and to com-
municate some portion of the pleasure which
we have derived from their perusal. In doing
so we shall adopt our usual plan of translating
the passages ourselves ; for it is impossible
to convey the least idea of the original in the
circumlocutions of the ordinary London ver-
sions.
Of the early youth of Napoleon at the Ecole
Militaire of Paris, with the management of
which he was in the highest degree dissatisfied,
we have the following interesting account :
" When we got into the carriage, Napoleon,
who had contained himself before his sister,
broke out into the most violent invectives
against the administration of such places as the
Maison St.. Cyr, for young ladies, and the Ecole
Militaire for cadets. My uncle, who was ex-
tremely quick in his temper, at last got out of
all patience at the tone of cutting bitterness
which appeared in his language, and told him
so without reserve. Napoleon was then silent,
for enough of good breeding still remained to
make youth respect the voice of those advanced
c 2
30
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
in years. But his heart was so full as to be
almost bursting. Shortly after he led back the
conversation to the subject, and at last his ex-
pressions became so offensive that my father
said to him rudely, ' Be silent; it ill becomes
you, who are educated at the expense of the
King, to speak in that manner.'
" My mother has often since told me, she
was afraid Napoleon would be suffocated at
these words. In an instant he became pale
and inarticulate. When he recovered his voice,
he exclaimed in a voice trembling with emo-
tion, ' I am not an eleve of the King, but of the
State:
" ' A fine distinction, truly,' replied my un-
cle. ' Whether you are an eleve of the King,
or of the State, is of no consequence; besides,
is not the King the State"? I desire that you
will not speak in such terms of your benefactor
in my presence.'
" ' I will do nothing to displease you, M.
Comnene,' replied the young man. ' Permit me
only to add, that if I was the master, and had the
power to alter these regulations, they should
be very different, and for the good of the whole,'
" I have recounted that scene only to remark
these words ' If I was the 'master.' He has
since become so, and all the world knows what
he has done for the administration of the Ecole
Militaire. I am convinced that he long enter-
tained a painful sense of the humiliation he
underwent at that establishment. At our ar-
rival in Paris, he had been a year there, and
that whole period was one of contradiction and
disgust. He was not loved by his companions.
Many persons who were acquainted with my
father, declared to him that Napoleon's charac-
ter was such as could not be rendered sociable.
He was discontented with every thing, and ex-
pressed his censure aloud in such decided
terms, as made him pass with these old wor-
thies for a young firebrand. The result of this
conduct was, that his removal into a regiment
was unanimously demanded by every one at
the school, and thus it advanced the period of
his promotion. He obtained a sub-lieutenancy,
which was stationed at Grenoble. Before his
departure, he came to live some time with us:
my sister was at a convent, but she came fre-
quently home during the period of her vacation.
I recollect that the day when he first put on his
uniform, he was as joyous as young men gene-
rally are on such an occasion : but his boots
gave a singularly ridiculous appearance to his
figure: they were of such enormous dimensions,
that his little thin legs quite disappeared with-
in them. Everybody knows that nothing has
so quick an eye for the ridiculous as childhood,
so the moment that my sister and I saw him
come into the room with these enormous boots,
we burst out into immoderate fits of laughter.
Then, as subsequently, he could not endure
pleasantry, when he was its object: my sister,
who was considerably older than I, answered,
that as he had girded on his sword, he should
consider himself as the Chevalier of Dames,
and be highly flattered by their joking with
him.
" ' It is easy to see,' said Napoleon with a
haughty air, 'that you are a little miss just Jet
loose from school.'
"My sister was then thirteen years old: it
may easily be imagined how such an expres-
sion hurt her. She was of a very gentle dis-
position, but neither she nor any other wo-
man, whatever her age or disposition may be,
can bear a direct insult to her vanity that of
Cecile was keenly offended at the expression
of little miss escaped from school.
"'And you,' said she, ' are nothing but a
Puss IN BOOTS.'
" Everyone burst out a laughing: the stroke
had told most effectually. I cannot describe
the wrath of Napoleon ; he answered nothing,
and it was as well he did not. My mother
thought the epithet so well applied, that she
laughed with all her heart. Napoleon, though
little accustomed at that time to the usage of
the world, had a mind too fine, too strong an
instinctive perception, not to see that it was
necessary to be silent when his adversary was
a woman, and personalities were dealt in:
whatever her age was, she was entitled to re-
spect. At least, such was then the code of po-
liteness in those who dined at table. Now that
utility and personal interest alone are the order
of the day, the consumption of time in such
pieces of politeness is complained of: and
every one grudges the sacrifices necessary to
carry into the world his little contingent of so-
ciability.
" Bonaparte, though grievously piqued at
the unfortunate epithet applied to him by my
sister, affected to disregard it, and began to
laugh like the rest; and to prove that he bore
her no ill will on that account, he bought a
little present, on which was engraved a Puss
in Boots, running before the carriage of the
Marquis of Canabus. This present cost him a
good deal, which assorted ill with the strait-
ened state of his finances. He added a beau-
tiful edition of 'Puss in Boots,' for my sister,
telling her that it was a Souvenir which he beg-
ged her to keep for his sake.
" ' The story-book,' said my mother, ' is too
much : if there had only been the engraving,
it was all well ; but the book for Cecile, shows
you were piqued against her.'
" He gave his word to the contrary. But I
still think with my mother, that he was piqued,
and bitterly so: the whole story was of no small
service to me at a future time, as will appear
in the sequel to these memoirs." I. 52, 53.
Several interesting anecdotes are preserved
of the Reign of Terror, singularly characteris-
tic of the horrors of that eventful period. The
following picture is evidently drawn from the
life :
" On the following day, my brother Albert
was obliged tp remain a considerable time at
home, to put in order the papers which my
father had directed to be burnt. He went out
at three o'clock to see us: he found on the road
groups of men in a state of horrible and bloody
drunkenness. Many were naked down to the
waist; their arms, their breasts bathed in blood.
At the end of their pikes, they bore fragments
of clothes and bloody remnants : their looks
were haggard; their eyes inflamed. As he ad-
vanced, these groups became more frequent
and hideous. My brother, mortally alarmed
as to our fate, and determined at all hazards
NAPOLEON.
31
to rejoin us, pushed on his horse along the
Boulevard where he then was, and arrived in
front of the Palace Beaumarchais. There he
was arrested by an immense crowd, composed
of the same naked and bloody men, but with
an expression of countenance altogether infer-
nal. They set up hideous cries : they sung,
they danced ; the Saturnalia of Hell were be-
fore him. No sooner did they see the cabriolet
of Albert, than they raised still louder yells:
an aristocrat! an aristocrat! and in a moment
the cabriolet was surrounded by a raging mul-
titude, in the midst of which an object was
elevated and presented to his view. Troubled
as the sight of my brother was, he could dis-
tinguish long white hair, clotted with blood,
and a face beautiful even in death. The figure
is brought nearer, and its lips placed on his.
The unhappy wretch set up a frightful cry.
He knew the head: it was that of the Princess
Lamballe.
"The coachman whipped the horse with all
his strength ; and the generous animal, with
that aversion for blood which characterizes its
race, rushed from that spectacle of horror with
redoubled speed. The frightful trophy was
overturned, with the cannibals who bore it, by
the wheels of the carriage, and a thousand
imprecations followed my brother, who lay
stretched out insensible in the bottom of the
cabriolet.
"Serious consequences resulted to my bro-
ther from that scene of horror. He was car-
ried to a physician, where he was soon taken
seriously ill of a burning fever. In his delirium,
the frightful figure was ever present to his ima-
gination. He never ceased, for days together,
to see that livid head and those fair tresses
bathed in blood. For years after, he could not
recall the recollection of that horrible event
without falling into a swoon, nor think of those
days of wo without the most vivid'emotion.
"A singular circumstance concluded this
tale of horror. My brother, in 1802, when
Commissary General of Police at' Marseilles,
received secret instructions to watch, with
peculiar care, over a man named Raymonet,
but whose real name was different. He lived
in a small cottage on the banks of the sea; ap-
peared in comfortable circumstances, but had
no relation nor friend; he lived alone in his
solitary cabin, and received every morning his
provisions from an old woman, who brought
them to his gate. The secret instructions of
the police revealed the fact, that this person
had been one of the principal assassins at the
Abbaye and La Force, in September, 1792, and
was in an especial manner -noted as the most
cruel of the assassins of the Princess Lam-
balle.
" One morning my brother received intelli-
gence that this man was at the point of death;
and, gracious God! what a death! For three
days he had endured all the torments of hell.
The accident which had befallen him was per-
fectly natural in its origin, but it had made him
suffer the most excruciating pains. He was
alone in his habitation ; he was obliged to drag
himself to the nearest surgeon to obtain assist-
ance, but it was too late : an operation was im-
possible, and would not even have assuaged
the pains of the dying wretch. He refused
alike religious succour and words of co
tion. His deathbed was a chair of torture in-
comparably more agonizing than the martyr-
dom of a Christian. He died with blasphemies
in his mouth, like the Reprobate in Dante's
Inferno." I. 95.
The French, who have gone through the
Revolution, frequently complain that there are
no descriptions given in any historical works
which convey the least idea of the Reign of
Terror; so infinitely did the reality of that
dreadful period exceed all that description can
convey of the terrible. There might, however,
we are persuaded, be extracted from the con-
temporary Memoirs (for in no other quarter
can the materials be found) a picture of that
memorable era, which would exceed all that
Shakspeare or Dante had figured of human
atrocity, and take its place beside the plague
in Thucydides, and the Annals of Tacitus, as a
lasting beacon to the human race, of the un-
heard of horrors following in the train of de-
mocratic ascendancy.
One of the most curious parts of the Duch-
ess's work is that which relates to the arrest
of Napoleon after the fall of Robespierre, in
consequence of the suspicions that attached to
him, from his mission to Genoa with the bro-
ther of that tyrant. It appears, that whatever
he may have become afterwards, Napoleon was
at that period an ardent republican: not pro-
bably because the principles of democracy
were suited to his inclinations, but because he
found i in the favour of that faction, then the
.ruling power in France, the only means of gra-
tifying his ambition. Salicetti, one of the de-
puties from Corsica, occasioned his arrest after
the fall of Robespierre, and he was actually a
few days in custody. Subsequently, Salicetti
himself was denounced by the Convention, and
concealed, in the house of Madame Permon,
mother to the Duchess of Abrantes. The whole
details which follow this event are highly inte-
resting; and as they afford one of the few really
generous traits of Napoleon's character, we
willingly give them a place.
" The retreat of Salicetti in our house was
admirably contrived. His little cabinet was
so stuffed with cushions and tapestry, that the
smallest sound could not be heard. No one
could have imagined where he was concealed.
" On the following morning at eleven o'clock,
Napoleon arrived. He was dressed in his usual
costume ; a gray great-coat buttoned up to the
throat, a black neckcloth, round hat, which
came down over the eyes. To say the truth,
at that period no one was elegantly dressed,
and the personal appearance of Napoleon did
not appear so singular as it now does, upon
looking back to the period. He had in his
hand a bouquet of violets, which he presented
to my mother. That piece of gallantry was so
unusual in him, that we immediately began to
laugh. " It appears,' said he, ' I am not
at my new duties of Cavaliere Servonto.'
Then changing the subject, he added, 4 Well,
Madame Permon, Salicetti has, in his turn,
reaped the bitter fruits of arrest. They must
be the more difficult to swallow, that he and
his associates have planted the trees on which
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
they grow.' ' What !' said my^mother, with an
air of surprise, and making a 'sign to me at the
same time to shut the door, ' is Salicetti arrest-
ed]' 'Do you not know,' replied Napoleon,
' that his arrest was yesterday decreed at the
Assembly] I thought you knew it so well
that he was concealed in your house.' ' In my
house !' replied my mother, with a well-feignec
air of surprise ; ' Napoleon, my dear child, you
are mad! In my house ! That implies that ]
have one, which unfortunately is not the case
My dear General, I beg you will not repeal
such nonsense. What have I done to entitle
you thus to sport with me as if I were deranged
for I can call it nothing else ]'
"At these words Napoleon rose up; he
crossed his arms, advanced immediately op-
posite to my mother, where, he stood for some
time without saying a word. My mother bore
without flinching, his piercing look, and did not
so much as drop her eyelid under that eagle's
eye. ' Madame Permon,' said he at length,
* Salicetti is concealed in your house: nay, do
not interrupt me. I do not know it for certain,
but I have no doubt of it, because yesterday at
five o'clock he was seen on the Boulevard,
coming in this direction, after he had received
intelligence of the decree of the Assembly. He
has no friend in this quarter who would risk life
and liberty to save him but yourself; there can
be no doubt, therefore, where he is concealed.'
"This long harangue gave my mother time
to regain her assurance. 'What title could
Salicetti have to demand an asylum from me ?
He knows that our sentiments are not the same.
I was on the point of setting out, and had it
not been for an accidental letter from my hus-
band, I would have been now far advanced on
my road to Gascony.'
"'What title had he to seek an asylum in
your house]' replied Napoleon, 'that is the
justest observation you have yet made, Madame
Permon. To take refuge with a lonely woman,
who might be compromised for a few hours of
concealment to a proscribed culprit, is an act
that no one else would be capable of. You are
indeed his debtor ; are you not, 'Mademoiselle
Loulou]' said he, turning to me, who had
hitherto remained silent in the window.
" I feigned to be engaged with flower-pots in
a window, where there were several bushes of
arbutus, and did not answer him. My mother,
who understood my motive, said to me, ' Ge-
neral Bonaparte speaks to you, my dear.' I
then turned to him ; the remains of my trouble
might show him what had passed in the mind
of a girl of fifteen, who was compelled, in spite
of herself, to do an unpolite thing. He took
my hand, pressed it between his two, and,
turning to my mother, exclaimed, 'I ask your
pardon; I have been in the wrong; your
daughter has given me a lesson.' 'You give
Laurette more merit than she really has,' re-
plied my mother. ' She has not given you a
lesson, because she does not know wherefore
she should do so; but I will do so immediately,
if you persist in believing a thing which has
no foundation, but might do me irreparable
mischief if it were spread abroad.'
"Bonaparte said, with a voice full of emo-
tion, ' Madame Permon, you are an uncom-
lodgings.
i monly generous woman, and that man is a
! wicked man. You could not have closed your
I door upon him, and he knew it ; and yet you
expose yourself and that child for such a man.
Formerly I hated him ; now I despise him. He
has done me a great deal of harm ; yes, he has
done me a great deal of harm, and you know
it. He has had the malice to take advantage
of his momentary ascendency to strive to sink
me below the water. He has accused me of
crimes ; for what crime can be so great as to
be a traitor to your country] Salicetti con-
ducted himself in that affair of Loano, and my
arrest, like a miserable wretch. Junot was
going to have killed him, if I had not prevented
him. That young man, full of fire and friend-
ship for me, was anxious to have fought him
in single combat ; he declared that if he would
not flght, he would have thrown him over the
window. Now he is proscribed ; Salicetti, in
his turn, can now appreciate the full extent
of what it is to have one's destiny shattered,
ruined by an accusation.'
" ' Napoleon,' said my mother, stretching out
her hand to him, ' Salicetti is not here. I swear
he is riot. And must I tell you all ]' ' Tell it;
tell it,' said he, with extreme impatience.
' Well, Salicetti was here yesterday at six
o'clock, but he went out at half-past eight. I
convinced him of the impossibility of his
remaining concealed in furnished lo
He admitted it, and went away.'
" While my mother spoke, the eyes of Na-
poleon continued fixed upon her with an eager-
ness of which it is impossible to convey an
idea. Immediately after, he moved aside, and
walked rapidly through the chamber. 'I was
right, then, after all,' he exclaimed. ' He had
then the cowardice to say to a generous woman,
Give your life for me. But did he who thus
contrived to interest you in his fate, tell you
that he had just assassinated one of his col-
leagues ] Did he wash his hands before he
touched yours to implore mercy]'
" 'Napoleon, Napoleon !' exclaimed my mo-
ther in Italian, and with great emotion, ' this is
too much. Be silent, or I must be gone. If
they have murdered this man after he left me,
at least it is no fault of mine.' Napoleon at
this time was not less moved. He sought
about everywhere like a hound after its prey.
He constantly listened to hear him, but could
make out nothing. My mother was in despair.
Salicetti heard every thing. A single plank
separated him from us ; and I, in my inexpe-
rience, trembled lest he should issue from his
retreat and betray us all. At length, after a
fruitless search of two hours, he rose and went
away. It was full time ; my mother was worn
out with mortal disquietude. 'A thousand
hanks,' said he, as he left the room; 'and
above all, Madame Permon, forgive me. But
f you had ever been injured as I have been
by'that man ! Adieu !' "I. 147, 148.
A few days after, Madame Permon set out
for Gascony, with Salicetti, disguised as a foot-
nan, seated behind the carriage. Hardly had
hey arrived at the first post, when a man ar-
rived on horseback, with a letter for Madame
3 ermon. They were all in despair, conceiv-
ng they were discovered, but upon opening it,
NAPOLEON.
their apprehensions were dispelled ; it was
from Bonaparte, who had received certain in-
telligence from his servant that Salicetti, his
mortal enemy, was in the carriage with her,
and had been concealed in her house. He
had learned it from his servant, who became
acquainted with it from Madame Permon's
maid, who, though faithful to misfortune, could
not conceal the secret from love. It was in
the following terms :
"I never wished to pass for a hypocrite. I
would be so, if I did not declare that for more
than twenty days I have known for certain that
Salicetti was concealed in your house. Recol-
lect my words on the 1st Prairial ; I was then
almost sure of it, now I know it. beyond a doubt.
Salicetti, you see I could repay you the injury
you have done me ; in doing so, I should only
have requited the evil which you did to me,
whilst you gratuitously injured one who had
never offended you. Which is the nobler part
at this moment yours or mine 1 I have it in
my power to revenge myself, but I will not do
it. Perhaps you will say that your benefac-
tress serves as your, shield, and I own that that
consideration is powerful. But though you
were alone, unarmed, and proscribed, your
head would be safe from my hands. Go seek
in peace an asylum where you may become
animated with nobler sentiments towards your
country. My mouth is closed on your,name,
and will never open more on that subject.
Repent, and appreciate my motives. I deserve
it, for they are noble and generous. Madame
Permon My warmest wishes attend you and
your daughter. You are two helpless beings,
without defence. May Providence and the
prayers of a friend be ever with you ! Be
prudent, and do not stop in the great towns.
Adieu! receive my kindest regards. N. BO-
NAPARTE." I. 160.
We regard this letter and the previous
transaction to which it refers, if it shall be
deemed by those intimately acquainted with
the parties as perfectly authentic, as by far the
most important trait in the character of Na-
poleon during his early life which has yet ap-
peared. It demonstrates that at that period at
least his heart was accessible to generous sen-
timents, and that he was capable of perform-
ing a noble action. Admitting that he was, in
a great degree, swayed in this proceeding by his
regard for Madame Permon, who appears to
have been a woman of great attractions, 'and
for whom, as we shall presently see, he con-
ceived warmer feelings than those of mere
friendship, still it is not an ordinary character,
and still less not an ordinary Italian character,
which, from such motives, would forego the
fiendish luxury of revenge. This trait, there-
fore, demonstrates that Napoleon's character
originally was not destitute of generosity; and
the more charitable, and probably the more
just, inference is, that the selfishness and ego-
tism by which he was afterwards so strongly
characterized, arose from that uninterrupted
and extraordinary flow of prosperity which
befell him, and which experience everywhere
proves is more fatal to generosity or interest
in others than any thing else in the course of
man here below.
On the voy^J* along the charming banks
i of the Garoiim- from Bordeaux to Toulouse,
| our authoress gives the following just and in-
teresting account:
"That mind must be really disquieted or in
suffering, which does not derive the highest
pleasure from the voyage by water from Bor-
deaux to Toulouse. I have seen since the
shores of the Arno, those of the Po, the Tagus,
and the Brenta; I have seen the Arno iii its
thundering cascade, and in its placid waters ;
all traverse fertile plains, and exhibit ravish-
ing points of view: but none of them recall
the magical illusion of the voyage from Bor-
deaux to Toulouse. Marmande, Agen, Lan-
gon, La Reole, all those towns whose names
are associated with our most interesting recol-
lections, are there associated with natural
scenery prodigal of beauty, and illuminated
by a resplendent sun and a pure atmosphere.
I can conceive nothing more beautiful than
those enchanted banks from Reole to Agen.
Groups of trees, Gothic towers, old castles,
venerable steeples, which then, alas ! no longer
called the Catholics to prayer. Alas ! at that
time, even the bells were absent, they no
longer called the faithful to the house of God.
Every thing was sad and deserted around that
antique porch. The grass was growing between
the stones of the tombs in the nave; and the
shepherd was afar off, preaching the word of
God in distant land's, while his ilock, deprived
of the Bread of Life, beheld their infants
springing up around them, without any more
religious instruction than the savages of the
desert." I. 166.
The fact here mentioned of the total want of
religious instruction- in the people of the
country in France, is by far the most serious
consequence which has followed the tempests
of the Revolution. The thread of religious in-
struction from parent to child, has, for the
first time since the introduction of Christianity
in the western world, been broken over nearly
a whole nation. A whole generation has not
only been born, but educated and bred up to
manhood, without any other religious impres-
sions than what they received from the tradi-
tions of their parents. Lavalette has recorded,
that during the campaigns of Napoleon in
Italy, the soldiers never once entered a church,
and looked upon the ceremonies of the Catho-
lics in the same way as they would have done
on the superstition of Hindostan or Mexico.
So utterly ignorant were they of the elements
even of religious knowledge, that when they
crossed from Egypt into Syria, they knew not
that they were near the places celebrated in
Holy Writ; they drank without consciousness
at the fountains of Moses, wound without
emotion round the foot of Mount Sinai, and
quartered at Bethlehem and on Mount Carmel,
ignorant alike of the cradle of Christianity, or
of the glorious efforts of their ancestors in
those scenes to regain possession of the Holy
Sepulchre.
What the ultimate consequences of this
universal and unparalleled break in religious
instruction must he, it is not difficult to fore-
tell. The restoration of the Christian worship
by Napoleon, the efforts of the Bourbons during
34
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
fifteen years to restore its sway, have proved
in a great degree nugatory : Christianity, re-
appearing in the garb of political power, has
lost its original and destined hold of the peo-
ple ; it is regarded by all the ardent and impe-
tuous part of the nation, as a mere collection
of antiquated prejudices or nursery tales,
adopted by government for political purposes,
and fitted only to enslave and fetter the human
mind. The consequence has been, an univer-
sal emancipation of the nation, in towns at
least, from the fetters of religion, a dissolu-
tion of manners pervading the middling and
lower orders to a degree unparalleled in mo-
dern Europe, and an universal inclination in
the higher to adopt selfish maxims in life, and
act upon the principles of individual interest
and elevation. This is the great feature of
modern society in France, the distinguishing
characteristic which is alike deplored by their
writers, and observed by the strangers who
visit their country. They are fast descending
into the selfishness and egotism which, in
ancient times, were the invariable forerunners
of political decline. This character has be-
come incapable of sustaining genuine freedom ;
from the fountains of selfishness its noble
streams never yet flowed. The tempests of
democracy will for a time agitate France,
because the people will long strive to shake
off the restraints of government and feligion,
in order that no fetters may be imposed on
their passions ; when they have discovered,
as they will soon do, that this leads only to
universal suffering, they will sink down
quietly and for ever under the shadow of des-
potism. And this will be the consequence and
the punishment of their abandonment of that
which constitutes the sole basis of lasting or
general freedom the Christian religion and
private virtue.
One of the convulsions attended with the
least suffering in the whole course of the Re-
volution, was the 13th Vendemiare, 1795,
when Napoleon, at the head of the troops of
the Convention, 5000 strong, defeated 40,000
of the National Guard of Paris, on the very
ground at the Tuileries, which was rendered
famous, thirty-five years after, by the over-
throw of Charles X. and the dynasty of the
Bourbons. The following description, how-
ever, conveys a lively picture of what civil
war is, even in its least horrible forms.
" During some hours, we flattered ourselves
that matters would be arranged between the
National Guards and the Convention ; but
suddenly at half-past four the cannon began
to discharge. Hardly was the first report
heard, when the reply began on all sides. The
effect was immediate and terrible on my poor
father; he uttered a piercing cry, and calling
for succour, was soon seized with a violent
delirium. In vain we gave him the soothing
draughts which had been prescribed by M.
Duchesnois. All the terrific scenes of the Re-
volution passed before his eyes, and every
new discharge which was heard pierced him
to the heart. What a day ! what a night ! Our
windows were broken to pieces ; towards the
evening the section retired, and they fought
under our eyes ; but when they came to the
church of St. Roch, and the theatre of the Re-
public, it seemed as if the house would fall to
pieces.
"My father was in agony; he cried, he
wept. Never shall I forget the horrors of that
terrible time. Our terrors rose to the highest
pitch, when we heard that barricades were
erected in the Rue de la Loi. Every hour of
that dreadful night was to me like the hour of
the damned, of which Father Bridagne speaks,
Toujours jamais. I loved my father with the
sincerest affection, and I adored my mother. I
saw the one dying with the discharges of can-
non, which resounded in his ears, while the
other, stretched at the foot of that bed of death,
seemed ready to follow him. There are some
recollections which are eternal ; never will the
remembrance of that dreadful night, and of
those two days, be effaced from my memory ;
they are engraven on my mind with a burning
iron." I. p. 190.
Salicetti fell ill in their house, from anxiety
on account of the fate of Rome and his accom-
plices, who were brought to trial for a con-
spiracy to restore the Reign of Terror. The
picture she gives of his state of mind when on
the bed of sickness, is finely descriptive of the
whirl of agony which infidelity and democracy
produce.
"We had soon a new torment to undergo;
Salicetti fell ill. Nothing can equal the hor-
rors of his situation ; he was in a high fever,
and delirious ; but what he said, what he saw,
exceeds any thing that can be conceived. I
have read many romances which portrayed a
similar situation. Alas! how their description
falls short of the t truth ! Never have I read
any thing which approached it Salicetti had
no religion ; that added to the horrors of these
dreadful scenes. He did not utter complaints ;
blasphemies were eternally poured forth. The
death of Rome and his friends produced the
most terrible effect on his mind; their tragic
fate was incessantly present to his thoughts.
One, in particular, seemed never to quit his
bedside ; he spoke to him, he listened, he
answered ; the dialogues between them, for he
answered for his dead friend, were enough to
turn our brains. Sometimes he fancied him-
self in a chamber red with blood. But what
caused me more terror than all the rest, was
the low and modulated tone of his voice during
his delirium; it would appear that terror had
mastered all his other faculties, even the
acutest sufferings. No words can convey an
idea of the horror inspired by that pale and
extenuated man, uttering, on a bed of death,
blasphemies and anathemas in a voice modu-
lated and subdued by terror. I am at a loss to
convey the impression of what I felt, for,
though so vividly engraven on my memory, I
know not how to give it a name." I. p. 156.
It is well sometimes to follow the irreligious
and the Jacobins to their latter end. How
desperately do these men of blood then quail
under the prospect of the calamities they have
inflicted on others; how terribly does the evil
they have commitled return on their own
heads; how infinitely does the scene drawn
from the life, exceed all that the imagination
of Dante could conceive of the terrible !
NAPOLEON.
35
It is well known what a dreadful famine
prevailed in Paris for some time after the sup-
pression of the revolt of the 13th Vendemiare.
Our authoress supplies us with several anec-
dotes, highly characteristic of the period, and
which place Bonaparte's character in a very
favourable light.
" At that period famine prevailed in Paris,
with more severity than anywhere else in
France ; the people were literally suffering
under want of bread ; the other necessaries of
life were not less deficient. What an epoch !
Great God ! the misery was frightful the
depreciation of the assignats went on aug-
menting with the public suffering the poor,
totally without work, died in their hovels, or
issuing forth in desperation, joined the rob-
bers, who infested all the roads in the
country.
" Bonaparte was then of great service to us.
We had white bread 'for our own consump-
tion; but our servants had only the black
bread of the Sections, which was unwholesome
and hardly eatable. Bonaparte sent us every
day some rolls for breakfast, which he came
to eat with us with the greatest satisfaction.
At that period, I can affirm with confidence,
since he associated me in his acts of benefi-
cence, that Napoleon saved the lives of above
a hundred families. He made domiciliary dis-
tributions of bread and wood, which his situa-
tion as military commander enabled him to do.
I was intrusted with the division of these
gifts among ten families, who were- dying of
famine. The greater part of them lodged in
the Rue St. Nicholas, close to our house. That
street was inhabited at that time by the poorest
class. No one who has not ascended one of
its crowded stairs, has an idea of what real
misery is.
"One day Bonaparte, coming to dine at
my mother's, was stopped in alighting from
his carriage by a woman, who bore the dead
body of an infant in her arms. It was the
youngest of six children. Misery and famine
had dried up her milk. Her little child had
just died it was not yet cold. Seeing every
day an officer with a splendid uniform alight
at our house, she came to beg bread from him,
'in order,' as she expressed it, 'that her otter
infants should not share the fate of the youngest
and if I get nothing, I will take the whole
five, and we will throw ourselves together into
the river.'
" This was no vain threat on the part of that
unhappy woman, for at that period suicides
succeeded each other every day. Nothing was
talked of but the tragic end of some family.
Bonaparte entered the room with the expres-
sion of melancholy, which did not leave him
during the whole of dinner. He had at the
moment given a few assignats to that unhappy
woman; but after we rose from table, he
begged my mother to make some inquiries
concerning her. She did so, and found that
her story was all true, and that she was of
good character. Napoleon paid her the wages
due to her deceased husband by the govern-
ment, and got for her a small pension. She
succeeded in bringing up her children, who
ever after retained the most lively sense of
gratitude towards ' the General,' as they called
their benefactor." I. 195.
The Duchess gives a striking picture of the
difference in the fashions and habits of living
which has resulted from the Revolution. Be-
ing on a subject where a woman's observations
are more likely to be accurate than those of a
man, we willingly give a place to her observa-
tions.
" Transported from Corsica to Paris at the
close of the reign- of Louis XV., my mother
had imbibed a second nature in the midst of
the luxuries and excellencies of that period.
We flatter ourselves that we have gained
much by our changes in that particular; but
we are quite wrong. Forty thousand livres a
year, fifty years ago, would have commanded
more luxury than two hundred thousand now.
The elegancies that at that period surrounded
a woman of fashion cannot be numbered ; a
profusion of luxuries were in common use,
of which even the name is now forgotten. The
furniture of her sleeping apartment the bath
in daily use the ample folds of silk and velvet
which covered the windows the perfumes
which filled the room ; the rich laces and dresses
which adorned the wardrobe, were widely dif-
ferent from the ephemeral and insufficient
articles by which they have been replaced.
My opinion is daily receiving confirmation;
for every thing belonging to the last age is
daily coming again into fashion, and I hope
soon to see totally expelled all those fashions
of Greece and Rome, which did admirably well
under the climate of Rome or Messina, but are
ill adapted for our vent du bize and cloudy
atmosphere. A piece of muslin suspended
on a gilt rod, is really of no other use but to
let a spectator see that he is behind the cur-
tain. It is the same with the imitation tapestry
the wallSj six inches thick, which neither
keep out the heat in summer, nor the cold in
winter. All the other parts of modern dress
and furniture are comprised in my anathema,
and will always continue to be so.
"It is said that everything is simplified,
and brought down to the reach of the most
moderate fortunes. That is true in one sense ;
that is to say, our confectioner has muslin
curtains and gilt rods at his windows, and his
wife has a silk cloak as well as ourselves, be-
cause it is become so thin that it is indeed
accessible to every one, but it keeps no one
warm. It is the same with all the other stuffs.
We must not deceive ourselves; we have
gamed nothing by all these changes. Do not
say, 'So much the better, this is equality.'
By no means ; equality is not to be found here,
any more than it is in England, or America,
or anywhere, since it cannot exist. The conse-
quence of attempting it is, that you will have
bad silks, bad satins, bad velvets, and that is
all.
"The throne of fashion has encountered
during the Revolution another throne, and it
has been shattered in consequence. The
French people, amidst their dreams of equali-
ty, have lost their own hands. The large and
soft arm-chairs, the full and ample draperies,
the cushions of eider down, all the other deli-
cacies which we alone understood of all the
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
European family, led only to the imprison-
ment of their possessors ; and if you had the
misfortune to inhabit a spacious hotel, within
a court, to void the odious noise and smells
of the street, you had your throat cut. That
mode of treating elegant manners put them
out of fashion ; they were speedily abandoned,
and the barbarity of their successors still so
lingers amongst us, that every day you see put
into the lumber-room an elegant Grecian chair
which has broken your arm, and canopies
which smell of the stable, because they are
stuffed with hay.
"I growl because I am growing old. If I
saw that the world was going the way it should,
I would say nothing, and would perhaps adopt
the custom of our politicians, which is, to em-
brace the last revolution with alacrity, \vhat-
ever it may be. See how comfortable this is,
say our young men, who espouse the cause
of the last easy chair which their upholsterer
has made for them, as of the last of the thirteen
or fifteen constitutions which have been manu-
factured for them during the last forty years.
I will follow their example ; I will applaud
every thing, even the new government of Louis
Philippe ; though, it must be confessed, that to
do so requires a strong disposition to see
every thing in the most favourable colours."
I. 197, 198.
The authoress apologizes frequently for
these and similar passages, containing details
on the manners, habits, and fashions during
the period in which she lived ; but no excuse
is required for their insertion. Details of ball-
dresses, saloons, operas, and theatres, may
appear extremely trifling to those who have
only to cross the street to witness them ; but
they become very different when they are read
after the lapse of centuries, and the accession
of a totally different set of manners. They, are
the materials from which alone a graphic and
interesting history of the period can be framed.
What would we give for details of this sort
on the era of Caesar and Pompey? with what
eagerness do we turn to the faithful pages of
Froissart and Monstrellet for similar informa-
tion concerning the chivalrous ages ; and with
what delight do we read the glowing pictures
in Ivanhoe and the Crusaders, in Quentin
Durward and Kenilworth, of the manners,
customs, and habits of fhose periods? To all
appearance, the world is changing so rapidly
under the pressure of the revolutionary tem-
pest, that, before the lapse of many genera*
tions, the habits of our times will be as much
the object of research to the antiquary, and of
interest to the historian, as those of Richard
Coaur de Lion or the Black Prince are to- our
age.
We have mentioned above, that Napoleon's
interest in Madame Permon appeared to have
been stronger than that of mere friendship.
The following passage contains the account
of a declaration and refusal, which never pro-
bably before were equalled since the beginning
of the world :
" Napoleon came one day to my mother, a
considerable time after the death of my father,
and proposed a marriage between his sister
Pauline and my brother Permon. 'Permon
has some fortune,' said he; 'my sister has
nothing: but I am in a situation to do much
for my connections, and I could procure an
advantageous place for her husband. That
alliance would render me happy. You know
how beautiful my sister is : My mother is
your friend : Come, say Yes, and all will be
settled.'
" My mother answered, that her son must
answer for himself; and that she would make
no attempt to influence his choice.
" Bonaparte admitted that my brother was
a young man so remarkable, that, though he
was only twenty-five years of age, he had
judgment and talents adequate to any situa-
tion. What Bonaparte proposed was extreme-
ly natural. He contemplated a marriage be-
tween a girl of sixteen and a young man of
twenty-five, who had L.500 a year, with a
handsome exterior; who drew as well as his,
master, Vernet; played on the harp much
better than his master, Kromphultz; spoke
English, Italian, and modern Greek, as well as
a native, and had such talents as had made
his official duties in- the army of the south a
matter of remark. Such was the person whom
Napoleon asked for his sister; a ravishing
beauty and good daughter, it is true ; but that
was all.
" To this proposal Napoleon added another ;
that of a union between myself and Joseph or
Jerome. 'Jerome is younger than Laurette,'
said my mother, laughing. 'In truth, my dear
Napoleon, you have become a high-priest to-
day; you must needs marry all the world, even
children.' Bonaparte laughed also, but with
an embarrassed air. He admitted that that
morning, in rising, a gale of marriage had
blown, ove'r him, 'and to prove it,' said he,
taking the hand of my mother, and kissing it,
'I am resolved to commence the union of our
families by asking you to marry myself as
soon as the forms of society will permit."
" My mother has frequently told me that ex-
traordinary scene, which I know as if I had
been present at it. She looked at Bonaparte
for some seconds with an astonishment bor-
dering on stupefaction ; then she began to
laugh so immoderately that we all heard it,
though we were in the next room.
" Napoleon was highly offended at the mode
in which a proposal, which appeared to him
perfectly natural, was received. My mother,
who perceived what he felt, hastened to ex-
plain herself, and to show that it was at the
thoughts of the ridiculous figure which she
herself would make in such an event, that she
was so much amused. ' My dear Napoleon,'
said she, when she had done laughing, 'let us
speak seriously. You imagine you know my
age, but you really do not: I will not tell you,
for I have a slight weakness in that respect:
I will only say, I am old enough, not only to
be your mother, but the mother of Joseph.
Let us put an end to this pleasantry; it
grieves me when coming from you.'
"Bonaparte told her that he was quite se-
rious; that the age of his wife was to him a
matter of no importance, provided she had not
the look, like her, of being above thirty years
old; that he had deliberately considered what
NAPOLEON.
he had just said ; and he added these remark-
able words: ' I wish 10 marry. My friends
wish me to marry a lady of the Fauxbourg St.
Germain, who is charming and agreeable. My
old friends are averse to this connection, and
the one I now propose suits me better in many
respects. Reflect.' My mother interrupted the
conversation by saying, that her mind was
made up as to herself; and that as to her son,
she would give him an answer in a day or
two. She gave him her hand at parting, and
said, smiling, that, though she had not entirely
given up the idea of conquests, she could not
go just so far as to think of subduing a heart
of six-and-twenty ; and that she hoped their
friendship would not be disturbed by this little
incident. ' But at all events,'' said Napoleon,
* consider it well.' ' Well, I will consider it,'
said she, smiling in her sweetest manner, and
so they parted.
" After I was married to Junot, and he heard
it, he declared that it appeared less surprising
to him than it did to us. Bonaparte, at the
epoch of the 13th Vendemiare, was attached
to the war committee. His projects, his
plans, all had one object, and that was the
East. My mother's name of Comnene, with'
her Grecian descent, had a great interest in
his imagination. The name' of Calomeros,
united with Comnene, might have powerfully
served his ambition in that quarter. 'The
great secret of all these marriages,' said Junot,
'was in that idea.' I believe he was right."
I. pp. 202, 203.
All the proposed marriages came to nothing ;
the duchess's brother refused Pauline, and she
herself Joseph. They little thought, that the
one was refusing the throne of Charlemagne,
the other that of Charles V., and the third, the
most beautiful princess in Europe.
The following picture of three of the most
celebrated women in the Revolution, one of
whom evidently contributed "by her influence
to the fall of Robespierre, shows that the fair
authoress is not less a master of the subject
more peculiarly belonging to her sex.
" Madame D. arrived late in the ball-room.
The great saloon was completely filled. Ma-
dame D., who was well accustomed to such
situations, looked around her to see' if she
could discover a seat, when her eyes were'
arrested by the figure of a young and charm-
ing person, with a profusion of light tresses,
looking around her with her fine blue eyes,
with a timid air, and offering the most perfect
image of a young sylph. She was in the act
of being led to her seat by M. de Trenis, which
showed that she was a beautiful dancer ; for
he honoured no one with his hand, but those
who might receive the title of la belle danseuse.
The young lady, after having bowed blushing
to the Vestris of the room, sat down beside a
lady who had the appearance of being her
elder sister, and whose extremely elegant dress
was attracting the attention of all around her.
' Who are these ladies ]' said Madame D. to
the Count de Haulefort, on whose arm she
was leaning. 'Do you not know the Vis-
countess Beauharnais and her daughter Hor
tense V
" ' My God !' said the Count, ' who is that
beautiful woman?' who at that moment en-
tered the room, and towards whom all eyes
were immediately turned. That lady was
of a stature above the ordinary ; but the per-
fect harmony in her proportions prevented
you from perceiving that she was above the
ordinary size. It was the Venus of the Capi-
tol, but more beautiful than the work of Phi-
dias. You saw the same perfection in the
arms, neck, and feet, and the whole figure
animated by an expression of benevolence,
which told at once, that all that beauty was
but the magic reflection of a mind animated
only by the most benevolent and generous
feelings. Her dress had no share in contri-
buting to her, beauty; for it was a simple
robe of Indian muslin arranged in drapery
like the antique, and held together on the
shoulders by two splendid cameos ; a girdle
of gold, which encircled her figure, was ele-
gantly clasped in the same way; a large gold-
en bracelet ornamented her arm ; her hair,
black and luxuriant, was dressed without
tresses, a la Titus ; over her white and beauti-
ful shoulders was thrown a superb shawl of
redcachemere, a dress at that period extremely
rare, and highly in request. It was thrown
round her in the most elegant and picturesque
manner, forming thus a picture of the most
ravishing beauty. It was Madame Tallien, so
well knovyn for her generous efforts at the
time of the fall of Robespierre." I. 222.
This description suggests one observation,
which must strike every one who is at all fami-
liar with the numerous French female memoirs
which have issued from the Parisian press
within these few years. This is the extraor-
dinary accuracy with which, at any distance
of time, they seem to have the power of re-
calling, not only the whole particulars of a
ball-room or opera, but even the dresses worn
by the ladies on these occasions. Thus the
ball here described took place in 1797. Yet
the duchess has no sort of difficulty in re-
counting the whole particulars both of the
people "and dresses in 1830, three-and-thirty
years after. We doubt extremely whether
any woman in England could give as accu-
rate an account within a month after the
event. Nor does there seem to be any ground
for the obvious remark that these descriptions
are all got up ex post facto, without any foun-
dation in real life ; for the variety and accu-
racy with which they are given evidently
demonstrates, that however much the colours
may have been subsequently added, the out-
lines of the sketch were taken from nature.
As little is there any ground for the suspicion,
that the attention of the French women is ex-
clusively occupied with these matters, to the
exclusion of more serious considerations; for
these pages are full of able and sometimes
profound remarks on politics, events, and
characters, such as would have done credit to
the clearest head in Britain. We can only
suppose that the vanity which, amidst many
excellencies, is the undoubted characteristic
both of the men and women in France, is the
cause of this extraordinary power in their
female writers, and that the same disposition
which induces their statesmen and heroes to
D
38
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
record daily the victories of their diplomacy
and arms, leads their lively and intelligent
Jadies to commit to paper all that is particu-
larly remarkable in private life, or descriptive
of their triumphs in the field of love;
Some interesting details are preserved, as to
the reception of Napoleon in Paris by the
Directory after the Revolution of the 18th
Fructidor. The following quotations exhibit
the talent of the author, both for the lighter
and more serious subjects of narrative in the
best light:
" Junot entered at first into the famous bat-
talion of volunteers of the Cote d'or. After
the surrender of Longwy they were moved to
Toulon ; it was the most terrific period of the
Revolution. Junot was then a sergeant of
grenadiers, an honour which he received from
the voluntary election of his comrades on the
field of battle. Often, in recounting to me the
first years of his adventurous life, he has de-
clared that nothing ever gave him such a de-
lirium of joy, as when his comrades, all, he
said, as brave as himself, named him sergeant
on the field of battle, and he was elevated on
a seat formed of crossed bayonets, still reek-
ing with the blood of their enemies."
It was at that time that, being one day,
during the siege of Toulon, at his post at the
battery of St. Culottes, an officer of artillery,
who had recently come from Paris to direct
the operations of the siege, asked from the
officer who commanded the post for a young
non-commissioned officer who had at once in-
telligence and boldness. The officer immedi-
ately called for Junot; the officer surveyed
him with that eye which alreadybegan to take
the measure of human capacity.
"'You will change your dress,' said the
commander, 'and you will go there to bear
this order.' He showed him with his hand a
spot at a distance on the same side. The
young sergeant blushed up to the eyes ; his
eyes kindled with fire. ' I am not a SPT,' said
he, 'to execute their orders; seek another to
bear them.' 'Do you refuse to obey V said the
superior officer; 'do you know to what punish-
ment you expose yourself in so doing V 'I
am ready to obey,' said Junot, ' but 1 will go
in my uniform, or not at all.' The comman-
der smiled, and looked at him attentively.
'But if you do, they will kill you.' 'What
does that signify]' said Junot; 'you know
me little to imagine I would be pained at such
an occurrence, and, as for me, it is all one
come, I go as I am ; is it not so V And he set
off singing.
" Alter he was gone, the superior officer
asked, ' What is the name of that young man?'
'Junot,' replied the other. The commanding
officer then wrote his name in his pocket-book.
' He will make his way,' he replied. This
judgment was already of decisive importance
to Junot, for the reader must readily have
divined that the officer of artillery was Na-
poleon.
"A few days after, being on his rounds at
the same battery, Bonaparte asked for some
one who could write well. Junot stepped out
of the ranks and presented himself. Bona-
parte recognised him as the sergeant who had
already fixed his attention. He expressed his
satisfaction at seeing him, and desired him to
place himself so as to write under his dicta-
tion. Hardly was the letter done, when a
bomb, projected from the English batteries,
fell at the distance of ten yards, and, exploding,
covered all present with gravel and dust.
' Well,' said Junot, laughing, ' we shall at least
not require sand to dry the ink.'
" Bonaparte fixed his eyes on the young ser-
geant ; he was calm, and had not even quivered
at the explosion. That event decided his for-
tune. He remained attached to the com-
mander of artillery, and returned no more to
his corps. , At' a subsequent time, when the
town surrendered, and Bonaparte was ap-
pointed General, Junot asked no other recom-
pense for his brave conduct during the siege,
but to be named his aid-de-camp. He and
Muiron were the first who served him in that
capacity." I. 268.
A singular incident, which is stated as hav-
ing happened to Junot at the battle of Lonato,
in Italy, is recorded in the following curious
manner:
" The evening before the battle of Lonato,
Junot having been on horseback all the day,
and rode above 20 leagues in carrying the
orders of the General-in-Chief, lay down over-
whelmed with fatigue, without undressing,
and ready to start up at the smallest signal.
Hardly was he asleep, when he dreamed he
was on a field of battle, surrounded by the
dead and the dying. Before him was a horse-
man, clad in armour, with whom he was en-
gaged ; that cavalier, instead of a lance, was
armed with a v scythe, with which he struck
Junot several blows, particularly one on the
left temple. The combat was long, and at
length they seized each other by the middle.
In the struggle the vizor, the casque of the
horseman, fell off, and Junot perceived that he
was fighting with a skeleton ; soon the armour
fell off", and death stood before him armed with
his scythe. ' I have not been able to take you,'
said he, 'but I will seize one of your best
friends. Beware of me !'
" " Junot awoke, bathed with sweat. The
morning was beginning to dawn, and he could
not sleep from the impression he had received.
He felt convinced that one of his brother aid-
de-camps, Muiron or Marmont, would be slain
in the approaching fight. In effect it was so :
Junot received two wounds one on the left
temple, which he bore to his grave, and the
other on the breast ; but Muiron was shot
through the heart." I. 270.
The two last volumes of this interesting
work, published a few weeks ago, are hardly
equal in point of importance to those which
contained the earlier history of Napoleon, but
still they abound with interesting and curious
details. The following picture of the religion
which grew up ir- France on the ruins of
Christianity, is singularly instructive :
" It is well known, that during the revolu-
tionary troubles of France, not only all the
churches were closed, but the Catholic and
Protestant worship entirely forbidden ; and,
after the Constitution of 1795, it was at the
hazard of one's life that either the mass was
NAPOLEON.
heard, or any religious duty performed. It is
evident that Robespierre, who unquestionably
had a design which is now generally under- j
stood, was desirous, on the day of the fete of
the Supreme Being, to bring back public
opinion to the worship of the Deity. Eight
months before, we had seen the Bishop of
Paris, accompanied by his clergy, appear vo-
luntarily at the bar of the Convention, to abjure
the Christian faith and the Catholic religion.
But it is not as generally known, that at that
period Robespierre was not omnipotent, and
could not carry his desires into effect. Nu-
merous factions then disputed with him the
supreme authority. It was not till the end of
1793, and the beginning of 1794, that his power
was so completely established that he could
venture to act up to his intentions.
"Robespierre was then desirous to establish
the worship of the Supreme Being, and the
belief of the immortality of the soul. He felt
that irreligion is the soul of anarchy, and it
was not anarchy but despotism which he. de-
sired ; and yet the very day after that magnifi-
cent fete in honour of the Supreme Being, a
man of the highest celebrity in science, and
as distinguished for virtue and probity as
philosophic genius, Lavoisier, was led out to
the scaffold. On the day following that,
Madame Elizabeth, that princess whom the
executioners could not guillotine, till they had
turned aside their eyes from the sight of her
angelic visage, stained the same axe with her
blood! And a month after, Robespierre, who
wished to restore order for his own purposes
who wished to still the bloody waves which for
years had inundated the state, felt that all his
efforts would be in vain if the masses who
supported his power were not restrained and
directed, because without order nothing but
ravages and destruction can prevail. To en-
sure the government of the masses, it was in-
dispensable that morality, religion, and belief
should be established and, to affect the mul-
titude, that religion should be clothed in ex-
ternal forms. 'My friend,' said Voltaire, to
the atheist Damilaville, 'after you have supped
on well-dressed partridges, drank your spark-
ling champagne, and slept on cushions of
down in the arms of your mistress, I have no
fear of you, though you do not believe in God.
But if you are perishing of hunger, and I meet
you in the corner of a wood, I would rather
dispense with your company.' But when
Robespierre wished to bring back to some-
thing like discipline the crew of the vessel
which was fast driving on the breakers, he
found the thing was not so easy as he ima-
gined- To destroy is easy to rebuild is the
difficulty. He was omnipotent to do evil; but
the day that he gave the first sign of a disposi-
tion to return to order, the hands which he
himself had stained with blood, marked his
forehead with the fatal sign of destruction."
VI. 34, 35.
After the fall of Robespierre, a feeble attempt
was made, under the Directory, to establish a
religious system founded on pure Deism. To
the faithful believer in Revelation, it is inte-
resting to trace the rise and fall of the first
attempt in the history of the world to es-
tablish such a faith as the basis of national
religion.
' I 1 1 der the Directory, that brief and deplora-
ble government, a new sect established itself
in France. Its system was rather morality
than religion ; it affected the utmost tolerance,
recognised all religions, and had no other faith
than a belief in God. Its votaries were termed
the Theophilanthropists. It was during the
year 1797 that this sect arose. I was once
tempted to go to one of their meetings. Lare-
veilliere Lepaux, chief grand priest and pro-
tector of the sect, was to deliver a discourse.
The first thing that struck me in the place of
assembly, was a basket filled with the most
magnificent flowers of July, which was then
the season, and another loaded with the most
splendid fruits. Every one knows the grand
altar of the church of St. Nicholas in the
Fields, with its rich Corinthian freize. I sus-
pect the* Theophilanthropists had chosen that
church on that account for the theatre of their
exploits, in a spirit of religious coquetry. In
truth, their basket of flowers produced an ad-
mirable effect on that altar of the finest Grecian
form, and mingled in perfect harmony with the
figures of angels which adorned the walls. The
chief pronounced a discourse, in which he
spoke so well, that, in truth, if the Gospel had
not said the same things infinitely better, some
seventeen hundred and ninety-seven years be-
fore, it would have been decidedly preferable
either to the Paganism of antiquity, or the
mythology of Egypt or India.
"Napoleon had the strongest prejudice
against that sect. ' They are comedians,' said
he ; and when some one replied that nothing
could be more admirable than the conduct of
some of their chiefs, that Lareveilliere Lepaux
was one of the most virtuous men in Paris ;
in fine, that' their morality consisted in nothing
but virtue, good faith, and charity, he replied
** 'To what purpose is all that? Every sys-
tem of morality is admirable. Apart from
certain dogmas, more or less absurd, which
were necessary to bring them down to the
level of the age in which they were produced,
what do you see in the morality of the Wid-
ham, the Koran, tie Old Testament, or Confu-
cius 1 Everywhere a pure system of morality,
that is to say, you see protection to the weak,
respect to- the laws, gratitude to God, recom-
mended" and enforced. But the evangelists
alone exhibit the union of all the principles of
morality, detached from every kind of ab-
surdity. There is something admirable, and
not your common-place sentiments put into
bad verse. Do you wish to see what is sub-
lime, you and your friends the Theophilan-
thropists? Repeat the Lord's Prayer. Your zea-
lots,' added he, addressing a young enthusiast
in that system, 'are desirous of the palm of
martyrdom, but I will hot give it them ; nothing
shall fall on them but strokes of ridicule, and
I little know the French, if they do not prove
mortal.' In truth, the result proved how well
he had appreciated the French character. It
perished after an ephemeral existence of five
years, and left not a trace behind, but a few
verses, preserved as a relic of that age of
mental aberration." VI. 40 43.
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
This passage is very remarkable. Here we
have the greatest intellect of the age, Napoleon
himself, recurring to the Gospel, and to the
Lord's Prayer, as the only pure system of re-
ligion, and the sublimest effort of human com-
position; and Robespierre endeavouring, in the
close of his bloody career, to cement anew the
fabric of society, which he had had so large a
share in destroying, by a recurrence to reli-
gious impressions ! So indispensable is devo-
tion to the human heart; so necessary is it to
the construction of the first elements of society,
and so well may you distinguish the spirit of
anarchy and revolution, by the irreligious ten-
dency which invariably attends it, and prepares
the overthrow of every national institution, by
sapping the foundation of every private virtue.
The arrest of the British residents over all
France, on the rupture of the peace of Amiens,
was one of the most cruel and unjustifiable
acts of Napoleon's government. The following
scene between Junot and the First Consul on
this subject, is singularly characteristic of the
impetuous fits of passion to which that great
man was subject, and which occasionally be-
trayed him into actions so unworthy of his
general character.
" One morning, at five o'clock, when day was
just beginning to break, an order arrived from
the First Consul to repair instantly to Malmai-
son. He had been labouring till four in the
morning, and had but just fallen asleep. He
set off instantly, and did not return till five in
the evening. When he entered he was in great
agitation; his meeting with him had been
stormy, and the conversation long.
" When Junot arrived at the First Consul's,
he found his figure in disorder; his features
were contracted; and every thing announced
one of those terrible agitations which made
every one who approached him tremble.
" ' Junot,' said he to his old aid-de-camp, ' are
you still the friend on whom I can rely 1 Yes
or no. No circumlocution.'
" ' Yes, my General.'
" ' Well then, before an hour is over, you
must take measures instantly, so that all the
English, without one single exception, shall be
instantly arrested. Room enough for them will
be found in the Temple, the Force, the Abbaye,
and the other prisons of Paris ; it is indispen-
sable that they should all be arrested. We
must teach their government, that entrenched
though they are in thgir isle, they can be reach-
ed by an enemy who is under no obligation
to treat their subjects with any delic'acy. The
wretches,' said he, striking his fist violently on
the table, 'they refuse Malta, and assign as a
reason' : Here his anger choked his voice,
and he was some time in recovering himself.
'They assign as a reason, that Lucien has in-
fluenced, by my desire, the determinations of
the Court of Spain, in regard to a reform of the
Clergy; and they refuse to execute the Treaty
of Amiens, on pretence that, since it was signed,
the situation of the contracting parties had
changed.'
" Junot was overwhelmed ; but the cause of
his consternation was not the rupture with
England. It had been foreseen, and known for
several days. But in the letters which were
now handed to him he perceived a motive to
authorize the terrible measure which Napoleon
had commanded. He would willingly have
given him his life, but now he was required to
do a thing to the last degree repugnant to the
liberal principles in which he had been trained.
" The First Consul waited for some time for
an answer; but seeing the attitude.of Junot, he
proceeded, after a pause of some minutes, as
if the answer had already been given.
'" That measure must be executed at seven
o'clock this evening. I am resolved that, this
evening, not the most obscure theatre at Paris,
not the most miserable restaurateur, should
contain an Englishman within its walls.'
" ' My General,' replied Junot, who had no\tf
recovered his composure, ' you know not only
my attachment to your person, but my devotion
in every thing which regards yourself. Believe
me, then, it is nothing but that devotion which
makes me hesitate in obeying you, before en-
treating you to take a few hours to reflect on
the measure which you have commanded me
to adopt.' ,
"Napoleon contracted his eye-brows.
" ' Again !' said he. ' What ! is the scene of
the other day so soon to be renewed 1 Lannes
and you truly give yourselves extraordinary
license. Duroc alone, with his tranquil air,
does not think himself entitled to preach ser-
mons to me. You shall find, gentlemen, by
God, that I can square my hat as well as any
man; Lannes has already experienced it; and
I do not think he will enjoy much his eating
of oranges at Lisbon. As for you, Junot, do
not rely too much on my friendship. The day
on which I ddubt of yours, mine is destroyed.'
"'My General,' replied Junot, profoundly
afflicted at being so much misunderstood, " it
is not at the moment that I am giving you the
strongest proof of my devotion, that you should
thus address me. Ask my blood ; ask my life ;
they belong to you, and shall be freely render-
ed; but to order me to do a thing which will
cover us all with '
'"Go on,' he interrupted, 'go on, by all
means. What will happen to me because I
retaliate on a perfidious government the inju-
ries which it has heaped upon me?'
'" It does not belong to me,' replied Junot,
' to decide upon what line of conduct is suit-
able to you. Of this, however, I am well as-
sured, that if any thing unworthy of your glory
is attempted, it will be from your eyes being
fascinated by the men, who only disquiet you
by their advice, and incessantly urge you to
measures of severity. Believe me, my Gene-
ral, these men do you infinite mischief.'
" ' W T ho do you mean ?' said Napoleon.
" Junot mentioned the names of several,
and stated what he knew of them.
" ' Nevertheless, the.se men are devoted to
me,' replied he. ' One of them said the other
day, "If the First Consul were to desire me to
kill my father, I would kill him." '
"'I know not, my General,' replied Junot,
' what degree of attachment to you it is, to sup-
pose you capable of giving an order to a son
to put to death his own father. But it matters
not; when one is so unfortunate as to think in
that manner, they seldom make it public.'
NAPOLEON.
41
" Two years afterwards, the First Consul,
who was then Emperor, spoke to me of that
scene, after my return from Portugal, and told
me that he was on the point of embracing Ju-
not at these words: so much was he .struck
with these noble expressions addressed to him,
his general, his chief, the man on whom alone
his destiny depended. 'For in fine,' said the
Emperor, smiling, 'I must own I am rather
unreasonable when I am angry, and that you
know, Madame Junot.'
" As for my husband, the conversation which
he had with the First Consul was of the warm-
est description. He went the length of remind-
ing him, that at the departure of the ambassa-
dor, Lord Whitworth, the most solemn assu-
rances had been given him of the safety of all
the English at Paris. 'There are,' said lie,
* amongst them, women, children, and old men ;
there are numbers, my General, who night and
morning pray to God to prolong your days.
They are for the most part persons engaged in
trade, for almost all the higher classes of that na-
tion have left Paris. The damage they would
sustain from being all imprisoned, is immense.
Oh, my General ! it is not for you whose noble
and generous mind so well comprehends what-
ever is grand in the creation, to confound a
generous nation with a perfidious cabinet.' "
VI. 406410.
With the utmost difficulty, Junot prevailed
on Napoleon to commute the original order,
which had been for immediate imprisonment,
into one for the confinement of the unfortu-
nate British subjects in particular towns, where
it is well known most of them lingered till de-
livered by the Allies in 1814. But Napoleon
never forgave this interference -with his wrath;
and shortly after, Junot was removed from the
government of Paris, and sent into honourable
exile to superintend the formation of a corps
of grenadiers at Arras.
The great change which has taken place in
the national character of France, since the Re-
storation, has been noticed by all writers on'
the subject. The Duchess of Abrantes' obser-
vations on the subject are highly curious.
"Down to the year 1800, the national cha-
racter had undergone no material alteration.
That character overcame all perils, disregard-
ed all dangers, and even laughed at death it-
self. It was this calm in the victims of 'the
Revolution which gave the executioners their
principal advantage. A friend of my acquaint-
ance, who accidentally found himself sur-
rounded by the crowd who were returning from
witnessing the execution of Madame duBarri,
heard two of the women in the street speaking
to each other on the subject, and one said to
the other, 'How that one cried out! If they
all cry out in that manner, I will not return
again to the executions.' What a volume of
reflections arise from these few words spoken,
with all the. unconcern of those barbarous
days !
"The three years of the Revolution follow-
ing 1793, taught us to weep, but did not teach
us to cease to laugh. They laughed under the
axe yet stained with blood ; they laughed as
the victim slept at Venice under the burning
irons which were to waken his dreams. Alas !
how deep must have been the wounds which
have changed this lightsome character! For
the joyous Frenchman laughs no more; and
if he still has some happy days, the sun of
gaiety has set for ever. This change has taken
place during the fifteen years which have fol-
lowed the Restoration; while the horrors of
the wars of religion, the tyrannical reigns of
Louis XI. and XIV., and even the bloody days
of the Convention, produced no such effect."
V. 142.
Like all the other writers on the modern
tate of France, of whatever school or party
in politics, Madame Junot is horrified \vith the
deterioration of manners, and increased vul-
garity, which has arisen from the democratic
invasions of later times. Listen to this ardent
supporter 'of the revolutionary order of things,
I on this subject :
"At, that time, (1801,) the habits of good
company were not yet extinct in Paris; of the
old company of France, and not of what is now
termed good company, and which prevailed
thirty years ago only among postilions and
stable-boys. At that period, men of good birth
did not smoke in the apartments of their wives, be-
cause they felt it to be a dirty and disgusting
practice ; they generally washed their hands ;
when- they went out to dine, or to pass the
evening in a house of their acquaintance, they
bowed to /he lady at its head in entering and retiring,
and did not appear so abstracted in their
thoughts as to behave as they would have
done in an hotel. They were then careful not
to turn, their back on those with whom they conversed,
so as to show only ah ear or the point of a
nose to those Vhom they addressed. They
spoke of something else, besides those eternal
politics on which no two can ever agree, and
which give occasion only to the interchange
of bitter expressions. There has sprung from
these endless disputes, .disunion in families,
the dissolution of the oldest friendships, and
the growth of hatred which will continue till
the grave. Experience proves that in these
contests no one is ever convinced, and that
each goes away more than ever persuaded of
the truth of his own opinions.
" The customs of the world now give me
nothing but pain. From the bosom of the re-
tirement where I have been secluded for these
fifteen years, I can judge, without preposses-
sion, of the extraordinary revolution in man-
ners which has lately taken place. Old im-
pressions are replaced, it is said, by new ones ;
that is all. Are, then, the new ones superior?
I cannot believe it. Morality itself is rapidly
undergoing dissolution; every character is con-
taminated, and no one knows from whence
the poison is inhaled. Young men now lounge
away their evenings in the box of a theatre, or
the Boulevards, or carry on elegant conversa-
tion with a fair seller of gloves and perfumery,
make compliments on her lily and vermilion
cheeks, and present her with a cheap ring, ac-
companied with a gross and indelicate compli-
1 ment. Society is so disunited, that it is daily
| becoming more vulgar, in the literal sense of
j the word. Whence any improvement is to
i arise, God only knows." V. 156, 157.
While we are concluding these observations,
1)2
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
another bloody revolt has occurred at Paris ;
the three glorious days of June have come to
crown the work, and develope the consequences
of the three glorious days of July.* After a
desperate struggle, maintained with much
greater resolution and vigour on the part of
the insurgents than the insurrection which
proved fatal to Charles X.; after Paris having
been the theatre, for three days, of bloodshed
and devastation ; after 75,000 men had been
engaged against the Revolutionists; after the
thunder of artillery had broken down the Re-
publican barricades, and showers of grape-
shot had thinned the ranks of the citizen-sol-
diers, the military force triumphed, and peace
was restored to the trembling city. What has
been the consequence 1 All the forms of law
have been suspended ; military commissions
established ; domiciliary visits become univer-
sal ; several thousand persons thrown into
prison ; and, before this, the fusillades of the
new heroes of the Barricades have announced
to a suffering country that the punishment of
their sins has commenced. The liberty of the
press is destroyed, the editors delivered over
to military commissions, the printing presses power, not freedom, but democracy, not ex-
of the opposition journals thrown into the emption from tyranny, but the power of tyran-
Seine, and all attempts at insurrection, or
words tending to excite it, and all offences of the
press tending to excite dissatisfaction or revolt,
sequent sufferings of their country, and the
total extinction of their liberties on the last
occasion, were owing to their vacillation in
the first revolt. They have now fought with
the utmost fury against the people, as they did
at Lyons, and French blood has amply stained
their bayonets ; but it has come too late to
wash out the stain of their former treason, or
revive the liberties which it lost for their
country.
Polignae is now completely justified for all
but the incapacity of commencing a change
of the constitution with 5000 men, four pieces
of cannon, and eight rounds of grape-shot to
support it. The ordinances of Charles X., now
adopted with increased severity by Louis Phi-
lippe, were destined to accomplish, without
bloodshed, that change which the fury of de-
mocracy rendered necessary, and without
which it has been found the Throne of the
Barricades cannot exist. It is evident that
the French do not know what freedom is. They
had it under the Bourbons, as our people had
it under the old constitution; but it would not
content them, because it was not liberty, but
handed over to military commissions, com-
posed exclusively of officers! This is the
freedom which the three glorious days have
procured for France !
The soldiers were desperately chagrined and
mortified at the result of the three days of July ;
and well they might be so, as all the sub-
nizing over others, that they desired. They
gained their point, they accomplished their
wishes, and the consequence has been, two
years of suffering, followed by military des-
potism. We always predicted the three glori-
ous days would lead to this result; but the
termination of the drama has come more
rapidly than the history of the first Revolution
led us to anticipate.
BOSSUET.
To those who study only the writers of a
particular period, or have been deeply im-
mersed in the literature of a certain age, it is
almost incredible how great a change is to be
found in the human mind as it there appears,
as compared with distant times, and how much
even the greatest intellects are governed by
the circumstances in which they arise, and
the prevailing tone of the public mind with
which they are surrounded. How much so-
ever we may ascribe, and sometimes with
justice ascribe, to the force and ascendant of
individual genius, nothing is more certain
than that, in the general case, it is external
events and circumstances which give a certain
bent to human speculation, and that the most
original thought is rarely able to do much
more than anticipate by a few years, the simul-
taneous efforts of inferior intellects. Gene-
rally, it will be found that particular seasons
or periods in the great year of nations or of
the world, bring forth their own appropriate
* Written on the day when the accounts of the defeat
of the ereat Revolt at the Cloister of Silleri by Louis
Philippe and Marshal Soult were received.
fruits : it is rarely that in June can be matured
those of September. The changes which have
made the greatest and most lasting alteration
on the progress of science or the march of
human affairs printing, gunpowder, steam
navigation were brought to light, it is hardly
known how, and. by several different persons,
so nearly at the same time, that it is difficult
to say to whom th palm of original invention
is to be awarded. The discovery of fluxions,
awarded by common consent to the unap-
proachable intellect of Newton, was made
about the same time by his contemporaries,
Leibnitz and Gregory; the honours of original
thought in political economy are divided be-
tween Adam Smith and the French economists ;
the improvements on the steam-engine were
made in the same age by Watt and Arkwright;
and the science of strategy was developed
with equal clearness in the German treatise
of the Archduke Charles, as the contemporary
treatises of Jomini and Napoledn. The great-
est intellect perceives only the coming light ;
the rays of the rising sun strike first upon the
summits of the mountains, but his ascending
BOSSUET.
43
beams will soon illuminate the slopes on their
sides, and the valleys at their feet.
There is, however, a considerable variety
in the rapidity with which the novel and ori-
ginal ideas of different great men are com-
municated to their contemporaries ; and hence
the extraordinary difference between the early
celebrity which some works, destined for future
immortality, have obtained in comparison of
others. This has long been matter of familiar
observation to all persons at all acquainted
with literary history. The works of some great
men have at once stepped into that celebrity
which was their destined meed through every
subsequent age of the world, while the pro-
ductions of others have languished on through
a long period of obscurity, unnoticed by all
save a few elevated minds, till the period
arrived, when the world became capable of
understanding their truth, or feeling their
beauty. The tomb of Euripides, at Athens,
bore that all Greece mourned at his obsequies.
We learn from Pliny's Epistles, that even in
his own lifetime, immortality was anticipated
not only for Tacitus, but all who were noticed
in his annals. Shakspeare, though not yet
arrived' at the full maturity of his fame, was
yet well known to, and enthusiastically ad-
mired by his contemporaries. Lope de Vega
amassed a hundred thousand crowns in the
sixteenth century, by the sale of his eighteen
hundred plays. Gibbon's early volumes ob-
tained a celebrity in the outset nearly as great
as his elaborate and fascinating work has
since attained. In the next generation after
Adam Smith, his principles were generally
embraced, and largely acted upon by the legis-
lature. The first edition of Robertson's Scot-
laud sold off in a month ; and Sir Walter Scott,
by the sale of his novels and poems, was able,
in twenty years, besides entertaining all the
literary society of Europe, to purchase the
large estate, and rear the princely fabric,
library, and armory of Abbotsford.,
Instances, on the other hand, exist in equal
number, and perhaps of a still more striking
character, in which the greatest and most pro-
found works which the human mind has ever-
produced have remained, often for a long time,
unnoticed, till the progress of social affairs
brought the views of others generally to a level
with that of their authors. Bacon bequeathed
his reputation in his last testament to the ge-
neration after the next; so clearly did he per-
ceive that more than one race of men must
expire before the opinions of others attained
the level of his own far-seeing sagacity. Burke
advanced principles in his French Revolution
of which we are now, only now," beginning,
after the lapse of half a century, to feel the full
truth and importance. Hume ,met with so
little encouragement in the earlier volumes of
his history, that but for the animating assu-
rances of a few enlightened friends, he has him-
self told us, he would have resigned his task
in despair. Milton sold the Paradise Lost for
five pounds, and that immortal work languished
on with a very limited sale till, fifty years after-
wards, it was brought into light by the criti-
cisms of Addison. Campbell for years could
not find a bookseller who would buy the Plea-
sures of Hope. Coleridge and Wordsworth
passed for little better than imaginative illu-
minati with the great bulk of their contempo-
raries.
The principle which seems to regulate this
remarkable difference is this : Where a work
of genius either describes manners, characters,
or scenes with which the great bulk of man-
kind are familiar, or concerning which they
are generally desirous of obtaining informa-
tion ; or if it advance principles which, based
on the doctrines popular with the multitude,
lead them to new and agreeable results, or
deduces from them conclusions slightly in
advance of the opinions of the age, but lying
in the same direction, it is almost sure of
meeting with immediate popularity. Where,
oh the other hand, it is founded on principles
which are adverse to the prevailing current of
public opinion where it sternly asserts the
great principles of religion and morality, in
opposition to the prejudices or passions of a
corrupted age when it advocates the neces-
sity of a rational and conservative govern-
ment, in the midst of the fervor of innovation
or the passion of revolution when it stigma-
tizes present vices, or reprobates present
follies, or portrays the consequences of present
iniquity when it appeals to feelings and vir-
tues which have passed from the breasts of the
present generation the chances are that it
will meet with present admiration only from a
few enlightened or virtuous men, and that a
different generation must arise, possibly a new
race of mankind become dominant, before it
attains that general popularity which is its
destined and certain reward. On this account
the chances are much against the survivance,
for any considerable period, of any work,
either on religion, politics, or morals, which
has early attained to a very great celebrity,
because the fact of its having done so is, in
general, evidence of its having fallen in, to an
extent inconsistent with truth, with the pre-
vailing opinions and prejudices of the age. In
such opinions there is almost always a consi-
derable foundation of truth, but as conxmonly
a large intermixture of error. Principles are,
by the irreflecting mass, in general pushed too
far; due weight is not given to the considera-
tions on the other side ; the concurring influ-
ence of other causes is either overlooked or
disregarded. This is more particularly the
case with periods of general excitement, whe-
ther on religious or political subjects, inso-
much that there is hardly an instance of works
which attained an early and extraordinary
celebrity at such eras having survived the
fervour which gave them birth, and the gene-
ral concurrence of opinion in which they were
cradled. Where are now the innumerable
polemical writings which issued both from the
Catholic and Protestant divines during the
fervour of the Reformation ? Where the forty
thousand tracts which convulsed the nation in
the course of the great Rebellion ? Where
the deluge of enthusiasm and infidelity which
overspread the world at the commencement
of the French Revolution"? On the other
hand, the works which have survived such
periods of general fervour are those whose
44
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
authors boldly and firmly, resting on the in-
ternal conviction of truth, set themselves to
oppose the prevailing vices or follies of their
age, and whose works, in consequence little
esteemed by their contemporaries, have now
risen into the purer regions of the moral at-
mosphere, and now shine, far above the
changes of mortality, as fixed stars in the
highest heavens. Of this character is Bacon,
whose sublime intellect, bursting the fetters
of a narrow-minded age, outstripped by two
centuries the progress of the human mind
Jeremy Taylor, whose ardent soul, loathing
the vices of his corrupted contemporaries,
clothed the lessons of religion in the burning
words of genius and Burke, whose earlier
career, chained in the fetters of party, has now
been forgotten in the lustre of the original and
independent thoughts, adverse to the spirit of
the age, which burst forth in his works on the
French Revolution.
In comparing, on subjects of political thought
or social amelioration, the writings of the school
of Louis XIV. with that of the Revolution, the
progress of the human mind appears prodi-
gious and so it will speedily appear from the
quotations which we shall lay before our
readers. But, in the general comparison of
the two, there is one thing very remarkable,
and which is exactly the reverse of what might
d priori have been expected, and what the ig-
norant vulgar or party writers still suppose to
be the case this is the superior independence
of thought, and bold declamation against the
vices of the ruling power in the state, which
the divines and moralists of the Grande Mo-
narque exhibit, when compared with the cring-
ing servility and oriental flattery which the
writers of the Revolutionary school, whether
in France or England, have never ceased to
address to their democratic patrons and rulers
invested with supreme authority. We need
not remind our readers what is the language,
even of able writers and profound thinkers of
the modern democratic school, in regard to the
sources of all abuse in government, and the
quarter from whence alone any social im-
provement can be expected. It is kings and
aristocrats who are the origin of all oppres-
sion and unhappiness ; it is their abuses and
misgovernment which have ever been the real
causes of public suffering; it is their insatia-
ble avarice, rapacity, and selfishness which
have in every age brought misery and desola-
tion upon the humbler and more virtuous
members of society. Where, then, is ameliora-
tion to be looked for 1 ? and in what class of
society is an antidote to be found to the in-
herent vices and abuses of power 1 ? In the
middle and lower ranks ; it is their virtue,
intelligence, and patriotism which is the real
spring of all public prosperity it is their un-
ceasing labour and industry which is the
source of all public wealth their unshaken
constancy and courage which is at once the
only durable foundation of national safety, and
the prolific fountain of national glory. Princes
may err, ministers may commit injustice ; but
the people, when once enlightened by educa-
tion, and intrusted with power, are never
wrong the masses never mistake their real
interests : their interests are on the side of
good government of them it may truly be
said, Vox populi, vox Dei. Such is the language
which the democratic flatterers of these times
incessantly address to the popular rulers of the
state to the masses by whom popularity and
eminence is to be won to the Government by
whom patronage and power is distributed.
From such degrading specimens of general
servility and business, let us refresh our eyes,
and redeem the honour of human nature, by
turning to the thundering strains in which
Bossuet and Fenelon impressed upon their
courtly auditory and despotic ruler, the eternal
doctrines of judgment to come, and the stern
manner in which they traced to the vices or
follies of princes the greater part of the evils
which disturb the world.
It is thus that Fenelon, in the name of Men-
tor, addresses his royal pupil, the heir of the
French monarchy:
" A king is much less acquainted than pri-
vate individuals with those by whom he is
surrounded; every one around him has a
mask on his visage ; every species of artifice
is exhausted to deceive him alas ! Tele-
maque ! you will soon experience this too bit-
terly. The more extensive the kingdom is
which you have to govern, the more do you
stand in need of ministers to assist you in
your labours, and the more are you exposed
to the chances of misrepresentation. The ob-
scurity of private life throws a veil over our
faults, and magnifies the idea of the powers of
men ; but supreme authority puts the virtues
to the test^ and unveils even the most incon-
siderable failing; grandeur is like the glasses
which magnify all the objects seen through
them. The whole world is occupied by ob-
serving a single man, flattering his virtues,
applauding his vices in his presence, execrat-
ing them in his absence. Meanwhile, the
king is but a man beset by all the humours, pas-
sions, and iveaknesses of mortality ; surrounded by
artful flatterers, who have all their objects to
gain in leading him into vices. Hardly has
he redeemed one fault, when he falls into
another; such is the situation even of the
most enlightened and virtuous kings ; what
then must be the destiny of those who are de-
praved ]
" The longest and best reigns are frequently
too short to repair the mischfef done, and often
without intending it at their commencement.
Royalty is born the heir to all these miseries ;
human weakness often sinks under the load
by which it is oppressed. Men are to be pitied
for being placed under the government of one
as weak and fallible as themselves ; the gods
alone would be adequate to the due regulation
of human affairs. Nor are kings less to be
pitied, being but men ; that is to say, imperfect
and fallible beings, and charged with the go-
vernment of an innumerable multitude of cor-
rupted and deceitful men.
" The countries in which the authority of the
sovereign is most absolute, are precisely those
in which they enjoy least real power. They
take, they raise every thing ; they alone pos-
sess the state ; but meanwhile every class of
society languishes, the fields are deserted, cities
BOSSUET.
45
decline, commerce disappears. The king, who
cannot engross in his own person the whole
state, and who cannot increase in grandeur,
but with the prosperity of his people, annihi-
lates himself by degrees by the decay of riches
and power in his subjects. His dominions
become bereaved both of wealth and men ; the
last decline is irreparable. His absolute power
indeed gives him as many slaves as he has
subjects ; he is flattered, adored, and his
slightest wish is a law; every one around him
trembles; but wait till the slightest revolution
arrives, and that monstrous power, pushed to
an extravagant excess, cannot endure; it has
no foundation in the affections of the people ;
it has irritated all the members of the state,
and constrained them all to sigh after a change.
At the first stroke which it receives, the idol
is overturned, broken, and trampled under foot.
Contempt, hatred, fear, resentment, distrust, in
a word, all the passions conspire against so
odious an authority. The king who, in his
vain prosperity, never found a single man suf-
ficiently bold to tell him the truth, will not find
in his misfortune a single person either to ex-
tenuate his faults or defend him against his
enemies." Tclanaque, liv. xii. adfin.
Passages similar to this abound in all the
great ecclesiastical writers of the age of Louis
XIV. and Louis XV. They are to be found
profusely scattered through the works of Bos-
suet, Massilon, Fenelon, and Bourdaloue. We
have many similar passages marked, but the
pressure of other matters more immediately
connected with the object of this paper pre-
cludes their insertion. Now this independence
and boldness of thought and expression, in
courtly churchmen, and addressed to a courtly
auditory, is extremely remarkable. It was to
the Grande Monarque and his numerous train
of princes, dukes, peeresses, ladies, and. cour-
tiers, that these eternal, but unpalatable truths
were addressed ; it was the holders of all the
church patronage of France, that were thus
reminded of the inevitable result of misgo-
vernment on the part of the ruling power. We
speak much about the increasing kitelligence,
spirit, and independence of the age ; neverthe-
less we should like to see the same masculine
cast of thought, the same caustic severity of
expression applied to the vices and follies of
the present holders of power by the expectants
of their bounty, as was thus fearlessly rung
into the ears of the despotic rulers of France
by the titled hierarchy who had been raised to
greatness by their support. We should like
to see a candidate for popular suffrage on the
hustings condemn, in equally unmeasured
terms, the vices, follies, and passions of the
people ; or a leading orator on the liberal side,
portray in as vivid colours, from the Ministe-
rial benches in the House of Commons, the
inevitable consequences of democratic selfish-
ness and injustice; or a favourite preacher on
the Voluntary system, thunder, in no less for-
cible language, in the ears of his astonished
audience, the natural results of fervour and
intrigue among popular constituencies. Alas !
we see none of these things; truth, which did
venture to make itself heard, when sanctified
by the Church, in the halls of princes, is ut-
terly banished from the precincts of the many-
headed despots ; and religion, which loudly
proclaimed the universal corruption and weak-
ness of humanity in the ears of monarehs, can-
not summon up sufficient courage to meet, in
iheir strongholds of power, the equally de-
praved and selfish masses of the people.
Aristotle has said that the courtier and the
demagogue are not only nearly allied to each
other, but are in fact the name 'men, varying not
in their object, but in the quarter to which,
according to the frame of government, they
address their flattery; but this remarkable fact
would seem to demonstrate that the latter is a
more thorough and servile courtier than the
former ; and that truth will more rarely be
found in the assemblies of the multitude than
in the halls of princes.
In truth, the boldness and indignation of
language conspicuous in the great ornaments
of the French Church would be altogether in-
explicable on merely worldly considerations ;
and accordingly it will never be found among
the irreligious and selfish flatterers of demo-
cracy. It is religion alone, which, inspiring
men with objects and a sense of duty above
this world, can lead to that contempt of pre-
sent danger, and that fearless assertion of
eternal truth, in the presence of power, which
has formed in every age the noblest attribute
of the Christian Church. In the temporal
courtiers of no age or country has there ever
been found an example of the same courage-
ous maintenance of principle and castigation
of crime in defiance of the frowns of authority ;
these worldly aspirants have ever been as
servile and submissive to kings as the syco-
phantish flatterers of a democratic multitude
have been lavish in the praise of their in-
tellectual wisdom. And the principle which
rendered Bossuet and Fenelon the courageous
assertor-s of eternal truth in the chapels and
court of the Grand Monarque, was the same
as that which inspired Latimer, the martyr of
the English Church, with such heroic firm-
ness in resisting the tyrannic injustice of
Henry VIII. In the midst of the passions and
cruelty of that blood-stained tyrant, the up-
right prelate preached a sermon in his pre-
sence at the Chapel-Royal, condemning, in the
strongest terms, the very crimes to which
every one knew the monarch was peculiarly
addicted. Enraged beyond measure at the re-
buke thus openly administered to his "plea-
sant vices," Henry sent for Latimer, and
threatened him with instant death if he did
not on the next occasion retract all his cen-
sures as openly as he had made them. The
reproof got wind, and on the next Sunday the
Royal Chapel was crowded with the courtiers,
eager to hear the terms in which the inflexi-
ble prelate was to recant his censures on the
voluptuous tyrant. But Latimer ascended the
pulpit, and after a long pause, fixing his eyes
steadily on Henry, exclaimed, in the quaint
language of the time, to which its inherent
dignity has communicated eloquence "Be-
think thee, Hugh Latimer! that thou art in
the presence of thy worldly sovereign, who
hath power to terminate thy earthly life, and
cast all thy worldly goods into the flames : But
46
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
bethink thee also, Hugh Latimer! that thou
art in the presence of thy Heavenly Father,
whose right hand is mighty to destroy as to
save, and who can cast thy soul into hell fire ;"
and immediately began, in terms even severer
and more cutting than before, to castigate the
favourite vices and crimes of his indignant
sovereign. The issue of the tale was different
from what the cruel character of the tyrant
might have led us to expect. Henry, who,
with all his atrocity, was not on some occa-
sions destitute of generous sentiments, was
penetrated by the heroic constancy of the
venerable prelate, and instead of loading him
with chains, and sending him, as every one
expected, to the scaffold, openly expressed his
admiration of his courage, and took him more
into favour than ever.
The philosophical work of Bossuet, which
has attained to most general celebrity, is his
" Histoire Universelle ;" and Chateaubriand
has repeatedly, in his later writings, held it up
as an unequalled model of religious general-
ization. We cannot concur in these eulogiums ;
and in nothing perhaps does the vast progress
of the human mind, during the last hundred
and fifty years, appear more conspicuous than
in comparing this celebrated treatise with the
works on similar subjects of many men of in-
ferior intellects in later times. The design of
the work was grand and imposing; nothing
less than a sketch of the divine government
of the world in past ages, and an elucidation
of the hidden designs of Providence in all the
past revolutions of mankind. In this magnifi-
cent attempt he has exhibited a surprising
extent of erudition, and cast over the com-
plicated thread of human affairs the eagle
glance of genius and piety ; but he has not, in
our humble apprehension, caught the spirit,
or traced the real thread of divine administra-
tion. He was too deeply read in the Old Testa-
ment, too strongly imbued with the Fathers of
the Church, to apprehend the manner in which
Supreme Wisdom, without any special or mi-
raculous interposition, works out the moral
government of the world, and develops the
objects of eternal foresight by the agency of
human passions, virtues, and vices. His His-
toric Theology is all tinged with the character
of the Old Testament; it is the God of Battles
whom he ever sees giving the victory to His
chosen ; it is His Almighty Arm which he dis-
cerns operating directly in the rise and the fall
of nations. Voltaire said with truth that his
" Universal History" is little more, than the
History of the Jews. It was reserved for a
future age to discern, in the complicated thread
of human affairs, the operation not less certain,
but more impartial, of general laws ; to see in
human passions the moving springs of social
improvement, and the hidden instruments of
human punishment; to discern, in the rise
and fall of nations, the operation, not so much
of the active interposition, as of the general
tendency of Divine power ; and in the efforts
which the wicked make for their own aggran-
dizement, or the scope which they afford to
their own passions, the certain causes of ap-
proaching retribution. That Providence ex-
ercises an unceasing superintendence of
human affairs, and that the consequences of
public actions are subjected to permanent
laws, the tendency of which in national, as in
private life, is to make the virtues or vices of
men as instruments of their own reward or
punishment, is obvious upon the most cursory
survey of history, as well as private life; and
though it cannot be affirmed that the sequence
is invariable, yet it is sufficiently frequent to
warrant certain inferences as to the general
character of the laws. We cannot affirm that
every day in summer is to be warm, and every
day in winter cold; but nevertheless, the gen-
eral character of those periods is such as to
warrant the conclusion that the rotation of the
season was intended, and in general does pro-
duce that variation on temperature, and the
consequent checking and development of the
fruits of the earth. But, as far as we can dis-
cern, the intentions of the Supreme Being are
here, as elsewhere, manifested by general laws ;
the agents empl'oyed are the virtues, vices, and
passions of men ; and the general plan of
divine administration is to be gathered rather
from an attentive consideration of the experi-
enced consequences of human actions, than
any occasional interposition to check or sus-
pend the natural course of events.
As a specimen of the mode in which Bossuet
regards the course of events, we subjoin the
concluding passage of his Universal History :
"This long chain of causes and effects, on
which the fate of empires depends, springs at
once from the secrets of Divine Providence.
God holds on high the balance of all kingdoms
all hearts are in his hands ; sometimes he
lets loose the passions sometimes he re-
strains them ; by these means he moves the
whole human race. Does he wish to raise up
a conqueror he spreads terror before his
arms, and inspires his soldiers with invincible
courage. Does he wish to raise up legislators
he pours into their minds the spirit of fore-
sight and wisdom. He causes them to fore-
see the evils which menace the state, and lay
deep in wisdom the foundations of public tran-
quillity. He knows that human intellect is
ever contracted in some particulars. He then
draws the film from its eyes, extends its views,
and afterwards abandons it to itself blinds it,
precipitates it to destruction. Its precautions
become the snare which entraps ; its foresight
the subtlety which destroys it. It is in this
way that God exercises his redoubtable judg-
ments according to the immutable laws of
eternal justice. It is his invisible hand which
prepares effects in their most remote causes,
and strikes the fatal blows, the very rebound
of which involves nations in destruction.
When he wishes to pour out the vials of his
wrath, and overturn empires, all becomes
weak and vacillating in their conduct. Egypt,
once so wise, became intoxicated, and faltered
at every step, because the Most High had
poured the spirit of madness into its counsels.
It no longer knew what step to take ; it
faltered, it perished. But let us not deceive
ourselves ; God can restore when he pleases the
blinded vision ; and he who insulted the blind-
ness of others, himself falls into the most pro-
found darkness, without any other cause being
BOSSUET.
47
carried into operation to overthrow the longest j
course of prosperity.
" It is thus that God reigns over all people.
Let us no longer speak of hazard or fortune,
or speak of it only as a veil to our weakness
an excuse to our ignorance. That which ap-
pears chance to our uncertain vision is the
effect of intelligence and design on the part of
the Most High of the deliberations of that
Supreme Council which disposes of all human
affairs.
" It is for this reason that the rulers of man-
kind are ever subjected to a superior force
which they cannot control. Their actions pro-
duce greater or lesser effects than they in-
tended ; their counsels have never failed to be
attended by unforeseen consequences. Neither
could they control the effect which the conse-
quences of former revolutions produced upon j
their actions, nor foresee the course of events
destined to follow the measures in which they
themselves were actors. He alone who held
the thread of human affairs who knows what
was, and is, and is to come foresaw and pre-
destined the whole in his immutable council.
"Alexander, in his mighty conquests, in-
tended neither to labour for his generals, nor
to ruin his royal house by his conquests.
When the elder Brutus inspired the Roman
people with an unbounded passion for free-
dom, he little thought that he was implanting
in their minds the seeds of that unbridled li-
cense, destined one day to induce a tyranny
more grievous than that of the Tarquins.
When the Coesars nattered the soldiers with a
view to their immediate elevation, they had no
intention of rearing up a militia of tyrants for
their successors and the empire. In a word,
there is no human power which has not con-
tributed, in spite of itself, to other designs than
its own. God alone is able to reduce all things
to his own will. Hence it is that every thing
appears surprising when we regard only secon*
dary causes ; and, nevertheless, all things ad-
vance with a regulated pace. Innumerable
unforeseen results of human councils eon-
ducted the fortunes of Rome from Romulus
to Charlemagne." Discours sur I' Hist. Univ.
ad fin.
It is impossible to dispute the grandeur of
the glance which the Eagle of Meaux has cast
over human- affairs in the ancient world. But
without contesting many of his propositions,
and, in particular, fully conceding the truth of
the important observation, that almost all the
greater public actions of men have been at-
tended in the end by consequences different
from, often the reverse of, those which they
intended, we apprehend that the mode of Di-
vine superintendence and agency will be found
to be more correctly portrayed in the following
passage from Blair an author, the elegance
and simplicity of whose diction frequently dis-
guises the profoundness of his thoughts, and
the correctness of his observations of human
affairs : " The system upon which the Divine
Government at present proceeds plainly is,
that men's own weakness should be appointed
to correct them ; that sinners should be snared
in the work of their own hand, and sunk in
the pit which themselves have digged ; that the
backslider in heart should be filled with his
own ways. Of all the plans which couid be
devised for the government of the world, this
approves itself to reason as the wisest and
most worthy of God; so to frame the constitu-
tion of things, that the Divine laws should in
a manner execute themselves, and carry their
sanctions in their own bosom. When the
vices of men require punishment to be in-
flicted, the Almighty is at no loss for ministers
of justice. A thousand instruments of ven-
geance are at his command; innumerable
arrows- are always in his quiver. But such is
the profound wisdom of his plan, that no pe-
culiar interposals of power are requisite. He
has no occasion to step from his throne, and
to interrupt the order of nature. With the
majesty and solemnity which befits Omnipo-
tence, he pronounces, 'Ephraim has gone to
his idols : let him alone.' He leaves trans-
gressors to their own guilt, and punishment
follows of course. Their sins do the work of
justice. They lift the scourge ; and with every
stroke which they inflict on the criminal, they
mix this severe admonition, that as he is only
reaping the fruit of his own actions, he de-
serves all that he suffers." BLAIR, iv. 268,
Serm. 14.
The most eloquent and original of Bossuet's
writings is his funeral oration on Henrietta,
Queen of England, wife of the unfortunate
Charles I. It was natural that such an occa-
sion should call forth all his powers, pro-
nounced as it was on a princess of the blood-
royal of France, who had undergone unpa-
ralleled calamities with heroic resignation, the
fruit of the great religious revolution of the
age, against which the French prelate had
exerted all the force of his talents. It exhibits
accordingly a splendid specimen of genius
and capacity; and imbued as we are in this
Protestant land with the most favourable im-
pressions of the consequences of this convul-
sion, it is perhaps not altogether uninstructive
to observe in what light it was regarded by the
greatest intellects of the Catholic world, that
between the two we may form some estimate
of the light in which it will be viewed by an
impartial posterity.
" Christians !" says he, in the exordium of
his discourse ; " it is not surprising that the
memory of a great Queen, the daughter, the
wife, the mother of monarchs, should attract
you from all quarters to this melancholy cere-
mony ; it will bring forcibly before your eyes
one of those awful examples which demon*-
strate to the world the vanity of which it is
composed. You will see in her single life the
extremes of human things; felicity without
bounds, miseries without parallel; a long and
peaceable enjoyment of one of the most noble
crowns in the universe, all that birth and gran-
deur could confer that was glorious, all that
adversity and suffering could accumulate that
was disastrous ; the good cause, attended at
first with some success, then involved in the
most dreadful disasters. Revolutions unheard
of, rebellion long restrained at length reign-
ing triumphant; no curb there to license, no
laws in force. Majesty itself violated by bloody
hands, usurpation, and tyranny, under the name
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
of liberty a fugitive Queen, who can find no j
retreat in her three kingdoms, and was forced '
to seek in her native country a melancholy |
exile. Nine sea voyages undertaken against j
her will by a Queen, in spite of wintry tern- j
pests a throne unworthily overturned, and
miraculously re-established. Behold the les-
son which God has given to kings ! thus does
He manifest to the world the nothingness of
its pomps and its grandeur! If our words
fail, if language sinks beneath the grandeur
of such a subject, the simple narrative is more
touching than aught that words can convey.
The heart of a great Queen, formerly elevated
by so long a course of prosperity, then steeped
in all the bitterness of affliction, will speak in
sufficiently touching language ; and if it is not
given to a private individual to teach the
proper lesson? from so mournful a catastrophe,
the King of Israel has supplied the words-r-
* Hear ! Oh ye Great of the Earth ! Take les-
sons, ye Rulers of the World !'
" But the wise and devout Princess, whose
obsequies we celebrate, has not merely been a
spectacle exhibited to the world in order that
men might learn the counsels of Divine Pro-
vidence, and the fatal revolutions of monar-
chies. She took counsel herself from the ca-
lamities in which she was involved, while
God was instructing kings by her example.
It is by giving and withdrawing power that
God communicates his lessons to kings. The
Queen we mourn has equally listened to the
voice of these two opposite monitors. She
has made use, like a Christian, alike of pros-
perous and adverse fortune. In the first she
was beneficent, in the last invincible ; as long
as she was fortunate, she let her power be felt
only by her unbounded deeds of goodness ;
when wrapt in misery, she enriched herself
more than ever by the heroic virtues befitting
misfortune. For her own good, she has lost
that sovereign power which she formerly ex-
ercised only for the blessings of her subjects ;
and if her friends if the universal church
have profited by her prosperities, she herself
has profited more from her calamities than
from all her previous grandeur. That is the
great lesson to be drawn from the ever-memo-
rable life of Henrietta Maria of France, Queen
of Great Britain.
" I need not dwell on the illustrious birth of
that Princess; no rank on earth equals it in
lustre. Her virtues have been not less re-
markable than her descent. She was endowed
with a generosity truly royal; of a truth, it
might be said, that she deemed every thing
lost which was not given away. Nor were
her other virtues less admirable. The faithful
depositary of many important complaints and
secrets it was her favourite maxim that
princes should observe the same silence as
confessors, and exercise the same discretion.
In the utmost fury of the Civil Wars never
was her word doubted, or her clemency called
in question. Who has so nobly exercised that
winning art which humbles without lowering
itself, and confers so graciously liberty, while
it commands respect 1 ? At once mild yet firm
condescending, yet dignified she knew at the
game time how to convince and persuade, and
to support by reason, rather than enforce by
authority. With what prudence did she con-
duct herself in circumstances the most ar-
duous ; if a skilful hand could have saved the
state, hers was the one to have done it. Her
magnanimity can never be sufficiently extolled.
Fortune had no power over her; neither the
evils which she foresaw, nor those by which
she was surprised, could lower her courage.
What shall I say to her immovable fidelity to
the religion of her ancestors 1 She knew well
that that attachment constituted the glory of
her house, as well as of the whole of France,
sole nation in the world which, during the
twelve centuries of its existence, has never
seen on the throne but the faithful children of
the church. Uniformly she declared that no-
thing should detach her from the faith of St.
Louis. The King, her husband, has pro-
nounced upon her the noblest of all eulogiums,
that their hearts were in union in all but the
matter of religion; and confirming by his tes-
timony the piety of the Queen, that enlightened
Prince has made known to all the world at
once his tenderness, his conjugal attachment,
and the sacred, inviolable fidelity of his in-
comparable spouse."
All the world must admire the sustained
dignity of this noble eulogium ; but touching
as were the misfortunes, heroic the character,
of the unfortunate Henrietta, it more nearly
concerns us to attend to the opinion of Bossuet
on the great theological convulsion, in the
throes of which she was swallowed up.
; ' When God permits the smoke to arise from
the pits o/ the abyss which darkens the face
of Heaven that is, when he suffers heresy to
arise when, to punish the scandals of the
church, or awaken the piety of the people and
their pastors, He permits the darkness of error
to deceive the most elevated minds, and to
spread abroad throughout the world a haughty
chagrin, a disquieted curiosity, a spirit of re-
volt, He determines, in his infinite wisdom,
the limits which are to be imposed to the pro-
gress of error, the stay which is to be put to
the sufferings of the church. I do not pretend
to announce to you, Christians, the destiny of
the heresies of our times, nor to be able to
assign the fatal boundary by which God has
restrained their course. But if my judgment
does not deceive me ; if, recurring to the his-
tory of past ages, I rightly apply their experi-
ence to the present, I am led to the opinion,
and the wisest of men concur in the sentiment,
that the days of blindness are past, and that the
time is approaching when the true light will return.
" When Henry VIII., a prince in other re-
sj>ects so accomplished, was seduced by the
passions which blinded Solomon and so many
other kings, and began to shake the authority
of the Church, the wise warned him, that if he
stirred that one point, he would throw the
whole fabric of government into peril, and in-
fuse, in opposition to his wishes, a frightful
license into future ages. The wise forewarned
him ; but when is passion controlled by wis-
dom ; when does not folly smile at its predic-
tions 1 That, however, which a prudent fore-
sight could not persuade to men, a ruder in-
I structor, experience, has compelled them to
BOSSUET.
49
believe. All that religion has that is most sa-
cred has been sacrificed ; England has changed
so far that it no longer can recognise itself;
and, more agitated in its bosom and on its own
soil than even the ocean which surrounds it,
it has been overwhelmed by a frightful inun-
dation of innumerable absurd sects. Who can
predict but what, repenting of its enormous
errors concerning Government, it may not ex-
tend its reflections still farther, and look back
with fond regret to the tranquil condition of re-
ligious thought which preceded the convul-
sions'?"
Amidst all this pomp of language, and this
sagacious intermixture of political foresight
with religious prepossession, there is one re-
flection which necessarily forces itself upon
the mind. Bossuet conceived, and conceived
justly, that the frightful atrocities into which
religious dissension. had precipitated the Eng-
lish people would produce a general reaction
against the theological fervour from which
they had originated; and that the days of ex-
travagant fervour were numbered, from the
very extent of the general suffering which its
aberrations had occasioned. In arriving at
this conclusion, he correctly reasoned from
the past to the present; and foretold a decline
in false opinion, from the woful consequences
which Providence had attached to its continu-
ance. Yet how widely did he err when he
imagined that the days of the Reformation
were numbered, or that England, relapsing
into the quiet despotism of former days, was
to fall back again into the arms of the Eternal
Church ! At that very moment the broad and
deep foundations of British freedom were in
the act of being laid, and that power was aris-
ing, destined in future ages to be the bulwark
of the Protestant faith, the vehicle of pure un-
defiled religion to the remotest corners of the
earth. The great theological convulsions of
the sixteenth century were working out their
appropriate fruits; a new world was peopling
by its energy, and rising into existence from
its spirit; and from the oppressed and dis-
tracted shores of England those hosts of emi-
grants were embarking for distant regions,
who were destined, at no remote period, to
spread the Church of England and the Pro-
testant faith through the countless millions of
the American race. The errors, indeed the
passions, the absurdities of that unhappy pe-
riod, as Bossuet rightly conjectured, have
passed away; the Fifth Monarchy men no
longer disturb the plains of England; the
chants of the Covenanters are no longer heard
on the mountains of Scotland ; transferred to
the faithful record of history or the classic
pages of romance, these relics of the olden,
time only furnish a heart-stirring subject for
the talents of the historian or the genius of the
novelist. But the human mind never falls
back, though it often halts in its course. Ves-
tigia tn'lla rc'n.rsum is the law of social affairs
not less than of the fabled descent to the
shades below; the descendants of the Puritans
and the Covenanters have abjured the absur-
dities of their fathers, but they have not re-
lapsed into the chains of Popery. Purified of
its corruptions by the indignant voice of in-
7
surgent reason, freed from its absurdities by
the experience of the calamities with which
they were attended, the fair form of Catholic
Christianity has arisen in the British Isles;
imbued with the spirit of the universal Church,
but destitute of the rancour of its deluded sec-
taries; borrowing from the religion of Rome
its charity, adopting from the Lutheran Church
its morality; sharing with reason its intellec-
tual triumphs, inheriting from faith its spiri-
tual constancy, not disdaining the support of
ages, and yet not excluding the light of time ;
glorying in the antiquity of its descent, and,
at the same time, admitting the necessity of
recent reformation ; it has approached as near
as the weakness of humanity, and the limited
extent of our present vision will permit, to
that model of ideal perfection which, veiled in
the silver robes of innocence, the faithful trust
is one day to pervade the earth. And if pre-
sent appearances justify any presentiments as
to future events, the destinies of this church
are worthy of the mighty collision of antiqui-
ty with revolution, of the independence of
thought with the reverence for authority, from
which it arose, and the vast part assigned to
it in human affairs. The glories of the Eng-
lish nation, the triumphs of the English navy,
have been the pioneers of its progress ; the in-
fidel triumphs of the French Revolution, the
victorious career of Napoleon, have minister-
ed to its, success; it is indissolubly wound up
with the progress of the Anglo-American race;
it is spreading over the wilds of Australia;
slowly but steadily it is invading the primeval
deserts of Africa. It shares the destiny of the
language of Milton, Shakspeare, and Scott; it
must grow with the growth of a colonial em-
pire which encircles the earth; the invention
of printing, the discovery of steam navigation,
are the vehicles of its mercies to mankind !
"I have spoken," says Bossuet, "of the
license into which the human mind is thrown,
when once the foundations of religion are
shaken, and the ancient landmarks are re-
moved.
" But as the subject of the present discourse
affords so uni.que and memorable an example
for the instruction of all ages of the lengths to
which such furious passions will lead the peo-
ple, I must, in justice to my subject, recur to
the original sources of error, and conduct you,
step by step, from the first contempt and dis-
regard of the church to the final atrocities in
which it has plunged mankind.
" The fountain of the whole evil is to be
found in those in the last centur}', who at-
tempted reformation by means of schism ;
finding the church an invincible barrier against
all their innovations, they felt themselves under
the necessity of overturning it. Thus the
decrees of the Councils, the doctrines of the
fathers, the traditions of the Holy See, and of
the Catholic Church, have been no longer con-
sidered as sacred and inviolable. Every one
has made for himself a tribunal, where he
rendered himself the arbiter of his own belief;
and yet the innovators did impose some limits
to the changes of thought by restraining them
within the bounds of holy writ, as if the mo-
ment that the principle is once admitted that
50
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
every believer may put what interpretations
upon its passages he pleases, and buoy him-
self up with the belief that the Holy Spirit has
dictated to him his own peculiar explanation,
there is no individual who may not at once
conceive himself authorized to worship his
own inventions, to consecrate his thoughts,
and call the wanderings of his imagination
divine inspiration. From the moment this
fatal doctrine was introduced, it was distinctly
foreseen by the wise that license of thought
being now emancipated from all control, sects
would multiply ad i-nfinitvm; obstinacy become
invincible; disputes interminable; and that,
while some would give to their reveries the
name of inspiration, others, disgusted with
such extravagant visions, and not being able
to reconcile the majesty of religion with a
faith torn by so many divisions, would seek a
fatal repose in the indifference of irreligion, or
the hardihood of atheism.
"Such, and more fatal still, have been the
natural effects of the new doctrine. But, in
like manner, as a stream which has burst its
banks does not everywhere produce the same
ravages, because its rapidity does not find
everywhere the same inclinations and open-
ings, thus, although that spirit of indocility
and independence was generally diffused
through all the heresies of latter times, it has
not produced universally the same effects ; it
has in many quarters been restrained by fear,
worldly interests, and the particular humour
of nations, or by the Supreme Power, which
can impose, where it seems good, effectual
limits even to the utmost extravagance of hu-
man passion. If it has appeared in undis-
guised malignity in England if its malignity
has declared itself without reserve if its kings
have perished under its fury, it is because its
kings have been the primary causes of the
catastrophe. They have yielded too much to
the popular delusion that the ancient religion
was susceptible of improvement. Their sub-
jects have in consequence ceased to revere its
maxims ; they could have no respect for it
when they saw them daily giving place to the
passions and caprices of princes. The earth,
too frequently moved, has become incapable
of consistence; the mountains, once so stable,
have fallen on all sides, and ghastly preci-
pices have started forth from their -bared
sides. I apply these remarks to all the fright-
ful aberrations which we daily see rising up
around us. Be not deluded with the idea lhat
they are only a quarrel of the Episcopacy, or
some disputes of the English Church, which
have so profoundly moved the Commons.
These disputes were nothing but the feeble
commencement, slight essays by which the
turbulent spirits made trial of their liberty.
Something much more violent was stirring
their hearts ; a secret disgust at all authority
an insatiable craving after innovation, after
they had once tasted its delicious sweets.
44 Thus the Calvinists, more bold than the
Lutherans, have paved the way for the Soci-
nians, whose numbers increase every day.
From the same source have sprung the infinite
sects of the Anabaptists, and from their opi-
nions, mingled with the tenets of Calvinism,
have sprung the Independents, to whose ex-
travagances it was thought no parallel could
be found till there emerged out of their bosom
a still more fanatic race, the Tremblers, who
believe that all their reveries are Divine in-
spiration ; and the Seekers, who, seventeen
hundred years after Christ, still look for the
Saviour, whom they have never yet been able
to find. It is thus, that when the earth was
once stirred, ruins fell on ruins ; when opinion
was once shaken, sect multiplied upon sect.
In vain the kings of England flattered them-
selves that they would be able to arrest the
human mind on this perilous declivity by pre-
serving the Episcopacy; for what could the
bishops do, when they had themselves under-
mined their own authority, and all the reve-
rence due to the power which they derived by
succession from the apostolic ages, by openly
condemning their predecessors, even as far
back as the origin of their spiritual authority,
in the person of St. Gregory and his disciple
St. Augustin, the firsi apostle of the English
nation ? What is Episcopacy, when it is
severed from the Church, which is its main
stay, to attach itself, contrary to its divine na-
ture, to royalty as its supreme head? Thus
two powers, of a character so essentially dif-
ferent, can never properly unite ; their func-
tions are so different that they mutually impede
each ; and the majesty of the kings of Eng-
land would have remained inviolable, if. con-
tent with its sacred rights, it had not endea-
voured to draw to itself the privileges and
prerogatives of the Church. Thus nothing
has arrested^ the violence of the spirit, so fruit-
ful is error; and God, to punish the irreligious
irritability of his people, has delivered them
over to the intemperance of their own vain
curiosity, so that the ardour of their insensate
disputes has become the most dangerous of
their maladies.
" Can we be surprised if they lost all respect
for majesty and the laws, if they became fac-
tious, rebellious, and obstinate, when such
principles were instilled into their minds 1 Re-
ligion is fatally enervated when it is changed;
the weight is taken away which can alone
restrain mankind. There is in the bottom of
every heart a rebellious spirit, which never
fails to escape if the necessary restraint is
taken away ; no curb is left when men are
once taught that they may dispose at pleasure
of religion. Thence has sprung that pretended
reign of Christ, heretofore unknown to Christ-
endom, which was destined to annihilate roy-
alty, and render all men equal, under the
name of Independents; a seditious dream, an
impious and sacrilegious chimera; but valu-
able as a proof of the eternal truth, that every
thing turns to sedition and treason, when once
the authority of religion is destroyed. But
why seek for proofs of a truth, while the Divine
Spirit has pronounced upon the subject an
unalterable sentence? God has himself de-
clared that he will withdraw from the people
who alter the religion which he has establish-
ed, and deliver them over to the scourge of
civil war. Hear the prophet Zacharias !
'Their souls, saith the Lord, have swerved
from me, and I have said I will no longer be
BOSSUET.
51
your shepherd ; let him who is to die prepare
for death ; let he who is to be cut off perish,
and the remainder shall prey on each other's
flesh.' "* BOSSUET'S Orais. Funcb. de la Reine
d* Jlngleterrc.
The character and the career of the triumph
of Cromwell are thus sketched out by the
same master-hand :
" Contempt of the unity of the Church was
doubtless the cause of the divisions of Eng-
land. If it is asked how it happened that so
many opposite and irreconcilable sects should
have united themselves to overthrow the royal
authority? the answer is plain a man arose
of an incredible depth of thought ; as profound
a hypocrite as he was a skilful politician ;
capable alike of undertaking and concealing
everything; active and indefatigable equally
in peace as war; so vigilant and active, that
he has never proved awanting to any oppor-
tunity which presented itself to his elevation ;
in fine, one of those stirring and audacious
spirits which seem born to overturn the world.
How hazardous the fate of such persons is,
sufficiently appears from the history of all
ages. But also what can they not accomplish
when it pleases God to make use of them for
his purposes 1 ' It was given to him to deceive
the people, and to prevail against kings.'j-
Perceiving that in that infinite assembly of
sects, who were destitute of all certain rules,
the pleasure of indulging in their own dogmas
was the secret charm which fascinated all
minds, he contrived to play upon that mon-
strous propensity so as to render that monstrous
assembly a most formidable body. When once
the secret is discovered of leading the multitude
by the attractions of liberty, it follows blindly, be-
cause it hears only that name. The people, oc-
cupied with the first object which had trans-
ported them, go blindfold on, without perceiving
that they are on the high road to servitude ;
and their subtle conductor, at once a soldier, a
preacher, a combatant, and a dogmatizer, so
enchanted the world, that he came to be re-
garded as a chief sent by God to work out the
triumph of the cause of independence. He
was so ; but it was for its punishment. The
design of the Almighty was to instruct kings,
by this great example, in the danger of leaving
his church: He wished to unfold to men to
what lengths, both in temporal and spiritual
matters, the rebellious spirit of schism can
lead; and when, in order to accomplish this
end, he has made choice of an instrument,
nothing can arrest his course. 'I am the
Lord,' said he, by the mouth of his prophet
Jeremiah ; ' I made the earth, and all that
therein is : I place it in the hands of whom I
will.'" Ibid.
It is curious to those who reflect on the pro-
* Zecb. xi. 9.
f Rev. xiii. 5.
gress of the human mind from one age to
another, to observe the large intermixture of
error with truth that pervades this remarkable
passage. It is clear that the powerful and
sagacious mind of the Bishop of Meaux had
penetrated the real nature of the revolutionary
spirit, whether in religion or politics ; and, ac-
cordingly, there is a great deal of truth in his
observations on the English Revolution. But
he narrows too much the view which he took
of it. He ascribes more than its due to the
secession from the Church of Rome. No one
can doubt, indeed, that religious fervour was
the great lever which then moved mankind;
and that Bossuet was correct in holding that
it was the fervour of the Reformation running
into fanaticism, which, spreading from spiritual
to temporal concerns, produced the horrors of
the Great Rebellion. But, on the other hand,
the event has proved that it was no part of the
design of Providence to compel the English,
by the experience of suffering, to fall again
into the arms of the Church of Rome. An
hundred and seventy years have elapsed since
Bossuet composed these splendid passages,
and the Church of England is not only still
undecayed, but it is nourishing now in reno-
vated youth, and has spread its colonial de-
scendants through every part of the earth.
The Church of Rome still holds its ground in
more than half of old Europe ; but Protestant-
ism has spread with the efforts of colonial en-
terprise, and the Bible and the hatchet have
gone hand in hand in exploring the wilds of
the New World. And the hand of Providence
is equally clear in both. Catholicism is suited
to the stately monarchies, antiquated civiliza-
tion, and slavish habits of Southern Europe;
but it is totally unfit to animate the exertions
and inspire the spirit of the dauntless emi-
grants who are to spread the seeds of civiliza-
tion through the wilderness of nature. And
one thing is very remarkable, and affords a
striking illustration of that subjection of human
affairs to an overruling Providence which Bos-
suet has so eloquently asserted in all parts of
his writings. Mr. Hume has observed that the
marriage of Queen Henrietta to Charles I., by
the partiality for the Catholic faith which it
infused into his descendants, is the principal
reason of their being at this moment exiles
from the British throne! It was deemed at
the time a masterpiece of the Court of Rome
to place a Catholic Queen on the throne of
England; and the conversion of that bright
jewel to the tiara of St. Peter was confidently
anticipated from its effects; and its ultimate
results have been not only to confirm the Pro-
testant faith in the British isles, but diffuse its
seed, by the distraction and suffering of the
Civil Wars, through the boundless colonial
empire of Great Britain.
52
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
POLAND.*
THE recent events in Poland have awakened
the old and but half-extinguished interest of the
British people in the fate of that unhappy
country. The French may regard the Polish
legions as the vanguard only of revolutionary
movement: the Radicals may hail their strug-
gle as the first fruits of political regeneration:
the great majority of observers in this country
think of them only as a gallant people, bravely
combating for their independence, and forget
the shades of political difference in the great
cause of national freedom. The sympathy
with the Poles, accordingly, is universal. It
is as strong with the Tories as the Whigs, with
the supporters of antiquated abuse as the aspi-
rants after modern improvement. Political
considerations combine with generous feeling
in this general interest. And numbers who
regard with aversion any approach towards
revolutionary warfare, yet view it with com-
placency when it seems destined to interpose
Sarmatian valour between European indepen-
dence and Muscovite ambition.
The history of Poland, however, contains
more subjects of interest than this. It is fraught
with political instruction as well as romantic
adventure, and exhibits on a great scale the
consequences of that democratic equality
which, with uninformed politicians, is so much
the object of eulogium. The French revolu-
tionists, who sympathize so vehemently with
the Poles in their contest with Russian despot-
ism, little imagine that the misfortunes of that
country are the result of that very equality
which they have made such sacrifices to at-
tain; and that in the weakness of Poland may
be discerned the consequences of the political
system which they consider as the perfection
of society.
Poland, in ancient, possessed very much the
extent and dominion of Russia in Europe in
modern times. It stretched from the Baltic to
the Euxine ; from Smolensko to Bohemia ; and
embraced within its bosom the whole Scythia
of antiquity the storehouse of nations, from
whence the hordes issued who so long pressed
upon and at last overthrew the Roman empire.
Its inhabitants have" in every age been cele-
brated for their heroic valour : they twice, in
conjunction with the Tartars, caplured the
ancient capital of Russia, and the conflagration
of Moscow, and retreat of Napoleon, were but
the repetition of what had resulted five centu-
ries before from the appearance of the Polish
eagles on the banks of the Moskwa. Placed
on the frontiers of European civilization, they
long formed its barrier against barbarian inva-
sion : and the most desperate wars they ever
maintained were those which they had to
carry on with their own subjects, the Cossacks
of the Ukraine, whose roving habits and pre-
* Salvandy's Histoire de la Polofriie, 3 vols. Parts, 1830.
Reviewed in RHckwood's Magazine, Aug. 1831. Writ-
ten during the Polish war.
datory life disdained the restraints of regular
government. When we read the accounts of
the terrible struggles they maintained with the
great insurrection of these formidable hordes
under Bogdan, in the 17lh century, we are
transported to the days of Scythian warfare,
and recognise the features of that dreadful
invasion of the Sarmatian tribes, which the
genius of Marius averted from the Roman
republic.
Nor has the military spirit of the people de-
clined in modern times. The victories of
Sobieski, the deliverance of Vienna, seem
rather the fiction of romance than the records
of real achievement. No victory so glorious
as that of Kotzim had been gained by Chris-
tendom over the Saracens since the triumphs
of Richard on the field of Ascalon : And the
tide of Mahommedan conquest would have
rolled resistlessly over the plains of Germany,
even in the reign of Louis XIV., if it had not
been arrested by the Polish hero under the
walls of Vienna. Napoleon said it was the
peculiar quality of the Polanders to form sol-
diers more rapidly than any other people.
And their exploits in the Italian and Spanish
campaigns justified the high eulogium and
avowed partiality of that great commander.
No swords -cut deeper than theirs in the Rus-
sian ranks during the campaign of 1812, and
alone, amidst universal defection, they main-
tained their faith inviolate in the rout at Leip-
sic. But for, the hesitation of the French em-
peror in restoring their independence, the
whole strength of the kingdom would have
been roused on the invasion of Russia; and
had this been done, had the Polish monarchy
formed the support of French ambition, the
history of the world might have been changed;
"From Fate's dark hook one leaf been torn.
And FJodden had been Bannockburn."
How, then, has it happened that a country
of such immense extent, inhabited by so martial
a people, whose strength on great occasions
was equal to such achievements, should in
every age have been so unfortunate, that their
victories should have led to no result, and
their valour so often proved inadequate to
save their country from dismemberment 1 The
plaintive motto, Qiwniodo Lapsus ; Quid fcci,
may with still more justice be applied to the
fortunes of Poland than the fall of the Court-
enays. *' Always combating," says Salvandy,
" frequently victorious, they never gained an.
accession of territory, and were generally
alad to terminate a glorious contest by a
cession of the ancient provinces of the re-
public."
Superficial observers will answer, that it
was the elective form of government; their
unfortunate situation in the midst of military
powers, and the absence of any chain of moun-
tains to form the refuge of unfortunate patriot-
POLAND.
53
ism. But a closer examination will demon-
strate that these causes were not sufficient to
explain the phenomenon ; and that the series
of disasters which have so long overwhelmed
the monarchy, have arisen from a more per-
manent and lasting cause than either their
physical situation or elective government.
The Polish crown has not always been
elective. For two hundred and twenty years
they were governed by the race of the Jagellons
with as much regularity as the Plantagenets
of England; and yet, during that dynasty, the
losses of the republic were fully as great as in
the subsequent periods. Prussia is as flat,
and incomparably more sterile than Poland,
and, with not a third of the territory, it is
equally exposed to the ambition of its neigh-
bours : Yet Prussia, so far from being the
subject of partition, has .steadily increased in
territory and population, and now numbers
fifteen millions of souls in her dominion. The
fields of Poland, as rich and fertile as those of
Flanders, seem the prey of every invader,
while the patriotism of the Flemings has
studded their plains with defensive fortresses
which have secured their independence, not-
withstanding the vicinity of the most ambitious
and powerful monarchy in Europe.
The real cause of the never-ending disasters
of Poland, is to be found in the democratic
equality, which, from the remotest ages, has
prevailed in the country. The elective form
of government was the consequence of this
principle in their constitution, which has de-
scended to them from Scythian freedom, and
has entailed upon the state disasters worse
than the whirlwind of Scythian invasion.
" It is a mistake," says Salvandy, " to sup-
pose that the representative form of govern-
ment was found in the woods of Germany.
What was found in the woods was Polish
equality, which has descended unimpaired in
all the parts of that vast monarchy to the present
times.* It was not to our Scythian ancestors,
but the early councils of the Christian church,
that we are indebted for the first example of
representative assemblies." In these words
of great and philosophic importance is to be
found the real origin of the disasters of Poland.
The principle of government, from the earli-
est times in Poland, was, that every free man
had an equal right to the administration of
public affairs, and that he was entitled to ex-
ercise this right, not by representation, but in
person. The result of this was, that the whole
freemen; of the country constituted the real
government; and the diets were attended by
an hundred thousand horsemen ; the great ma-
jority of whom were, of course, ignorant, and
in necessitous circumstances, while all were
penetrated with an equal sense of their im-
portance as members of the Polish state. The
convocation of these tumultuous assemblies
was almost invariably the signal for murder
and disorder. Thirty or forty thousand lackeys,
in the service of the nobles, but still possess-
ing the rights of freemen, followed their mas-
ters to the place of meeting, and were ever
ready to support their ambition by military
* Salvandy, vol. i. Tableau Historique.
violence, while the unfortunate natives, eat
up by such an enormous assemblage of armed
men, regarded the convocation of the citizens
in the same light as the inhabitants of the
Grecian city did the invasion of Xerxes, whose
hordes had consumed every thing eatable in
their territory at breakfast, when they re-
turned thanks to the gods that he had not
dined in their neighbourhood, or every living
creature would have perished.
So far did the Poles carry this equality
among all the free citizens, that by an original
and fundamental law, called the Llberum Veto,
any one member of the diet, by simply inter-
posing his negative, could stop the election of
the sovereign, or any other measure the most
essential to the public welfare. Of course, in
so immense a multitude, some were always to
be found fractious or venal enough to exercise
this dangerous power, either from individual
perversity, the influence of external corrup-
tion, or internal ambition; and hence the
numerous occasions on which diets, assembled
for the most important purposes, were broken
up without having come to any determination,
and the Republic left a prey to anarchy, at the
time when it stood most in need of the unani-
mous support of its members. It is a striking
proof how easily men are deluded by this
phantom of general equality, when it is re-
collected that this ruinous privilege has, not
only in every age, been clung to as the Magna
Charta of Poland, but that the native historians,
recounting distant events, speak of any in-
fringement upon it as the most fatal measure
that could possibly be figured, to the liberties
and welfare of the country.
All human institutions, however, must be
subject to some check, which renders it
practicable to get through business on urgent
occasions, in spite of individual opposition.
The Poles held it utterly at variance with
every principle of freedom to bind any free
man by a law to which he had not consented.
The principle, that the majority could bind the
minority, seenxed to them inconsistent with
the most elementary ideas of liberty. To get
quit of the difficulty, they commonly massacred
the. rerusant ; and this appeared, in their eyes,
a much less serious violation of freedom than
out-voting him; because, said they, instances
of violence are few, and do not go beyond the
individual sufferers ; but when once the rulers
establish that the majority can compel the
minority to yield, no man has any security
against the violation of his freedom.
Extremes meet. It is curious to observe
how exactly the violation of freedom by po-
pular folly coincides in its effect with its ex-
tinction by despotic power. The bow-string
in the Seraglio, and assassination at St. Peters-
burg, are the limitations on arbitrary power in
these despotic states. Popular murders were
the means of restraining the exorbitant liberty
of the Poles within the limits necessary for the
maintenance of the forms even of regular
government. Strange, as Salvandy has well
observed, that the nation the most jealous of
its liberty, should, at the same time, adhere to
a custom of all others the most destructive to
freedom ; and that, to avoid the government
B.1
54
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
of one, they should submit to the despotism
of all !
It was this original and fatal passion for
equality, which has in every age proved fatal
to Polish independence which has paralyzed
all the valour of her people, and all the en-
thusiasm of her character and rendered the
most warlike nation in Europe the most un-
fortunate. The measures of its government
partook of the unstable and vacillating cha-
racter of all popular assemblages. Bursts of
patriotism were succeeded by periods of dejec-
tion ; and the endless changes in the objects
of popular inclination, rendered it impracti-
cable to pursue any steady object, or adhere,
through all the varieties of fortune, to one uni-
form system for the good of the state. Their
wars exactly resembled the contests in La
Vendee, where, a week after the most glorious
successes, the victorious army was dissolved,
and the leaders wandering with a few fol-
lowers in the woods. At the battle of Kotzim,
Sobieski commanded 40,000 men, the most
regular army which for centuries Poland had
sent into the field; at their head, he stormed
the Turkish entrenchments, though defended
by 80,000 veterans, and 300 pieces of cannon ;
he routed that mighty host, slew 50,000 men,
and carried the Polish ensigns in triumph to
the banks of the Danube. But while Europe
resounded with his praises, and expected the
deliverance of the Greek empire from his
exertions, his army dissolved the troops re-
turned to their homes and the invincible
conqueror was barely able, with a few thou-
sand men, to keep the field.
Placed on the frontiers of Europe and Asia,
the Polish character and history have partaken
largely of the effects of the institutions of both
these quarters of the globe. Their passion
for equality, their spirit of freedom, their na-
tional assemblages, unite them to European
independence ; their unstable fortune, per-
petual vacillation, and chequered annals, par-
take of the character of Asiatic adventure.
While the states by whom they are surrounded,
have shared in the steady progress of Euro-
pean civilization, the Polish monarchy has
been distinguished by the extraordinary vicis-
situdes of Eastern story. Elevated to the
clouds during periods of heroic adventure, it
has sunk to nothing upon the death of a single
chief; the republic which had recently carried
its arms in triumph to the neighbouring capi-
tals, was soon struggling for its existence with
a contemptible enemy; and the bulwark of
Christendom in one age, was in the next razed
from the book of nations.
Would we discover the cause of this vacil-
lation, of which the deplorable consequences
are now so strongly exemplified, we shall find
it in the passion for equality which appears in
every stage of their history, and of which M.
Salvandy, a liberal historian, has given a pow-
erful picture :
"The proscription of their greatest princes,"
says he, " and, after their death, the calumnies
of posterity, faithfully echoing the follies of
contemporaries, have destroyed all those who
; n different ages have endeavoured, in Poland,
to create a solid or protecting power. Nothing
is more extraordinary than to hear the modern
annalists of that unfortunate people, whatever
their country or doctrine may be, mechanically
repeat all the national outcry against what they
call their despotic tyrants. Facts speak in
vain against such prejudices. In the eyes of
the Poles, nothing was worthy of preservation
in their country but liberty and equality a high-
sounding expression, which the French Revo-
lution had not the glory of inventing, nor its
authors the wisdom to apply more judiciously.
" Contrary to what has occurred everywhere
else in the world, the Poles have never been
at rest but under the rule of feeble monarchs.
Great and vigorous kings were uniformly the
first to perish ; they have always sunk under
vain attempts to accustom an independent no-
bility to the restraints of authority, or soften to
their slaves the yoke of bondage. Thus thB
royal authority, which elsewhere expanded on
the ruins of the feudal system, has in Poland
only become weaker with the progress of time.
All the efforts of its monarchs to enlarge their
prerogative have been shattered against a
compact, independent, courageous body of
freemen, who, in resisting such attempts, have
never either been weakened by division nor
intimidated by menace. In their passion for
equality, in their jealous independence, they
were unwilling even to admit any distinction
between each other; they long and haughtily
rejected the titles of honour of foreign states,
and even till the last age, refused to recognise
those hereditary distinctions and oppressive
privileges, which are now so fast disappear-
ing from tha face of society. They even went
so far as to insist that one, in matters of de-
liberation, should be equal to all. The crown
was thus constantly at war with a democracy
of nobles. The dynasty of the Piasts strove
with much ability to create, in the midst of
that democracy, a few leading families; by
the side of those nobles, a body of burghers.
These things, difficult in all states, were there
impossible. An hereditary dynasty, always
stormy and often interrupted, was unfit for the
persevering efforts requisite for such a revolu-
tion. In other states the monarchs pursued
an uniform policy, and their subjects were va-
cillating; there the people were steady, and
the crown changeable." I. 71.
" In other states, time had everywhere in-
troduced the hereditary descent of honours and
power. Hereditary succession was established
from the throne to the smallest fief, from the
reciprocal necessity of subduing the van-
quished people, and securing to each his share
in the conquests. In Poland, on the other
hand, the waywoods, or warlike chieftains, the
magistrates and civil authorities, the governors
of castles and provinces, so far from founding
an aristocracy by establishing the descent of
their honours or offices in their families, were
seldom even nominated by the king. Their
authority, especially that of the Palatins, ex-
cited equal umbrage in the sovereign who
should have ruled, as the nobles who should
have obeyed them. There was thus authority
and order nowhere in the state.
"It is not surprising that such men should
unite to the pride which could bear nothing
POLAND.
55
above, the tyranny which could spare nothing
below them. In the dread of being compelled
to share their power with their inferiors ele- ;
vated by riches or intelligence, they affixed a
stigma on every useful profession as a mark
of servitude. Their maxim was, that nobility j
of blood was not lost by indigence or domestic
service, but totally extinguished by commerce
or industry. This policy perpetually withheld
from the great body of serfs the use of arms,
both because they had learned to fear, but still
continued to despise them. In fine, jealous of
every species of superiority as a personal out-
rage, of every authority as an usurpation, of
every labour as a degradation, this society
was at variance with every principle of human
prosperity.
" Weakened in this manner in their external
contests, by their equality not less than their
tyranny, inferior to their neighbours in number
and discipline, the Poles were the only warlike
people in the world to whom victory never
gave either peace or conquest. Incessant con-
tests with the Gewnans, the Hungarians, the
pirates of the north, the Cossacks of the
Ukraine, the Osmanlis, occupy their whole
annals ; but never did the Polish eagles ad-
vance the frontiers of the republic. Poland
saw Moravia, Brandenburg, Pomerania, es-
cape from its rule, as Bohemia and Mecklen-
burg had formerly done, without ever being
awakened to the necessity of establishing a cen-
tral government sufficiently strong to coerce
and protect so many discordant materials.
She was destined to drink to the last dregs the
bitter consequences of a pitiless aristocracy
and a senseless equality.
" Vainly did Time, whose ceaseless course,
by breaking through that fierce and oppressive
equality, had succeeded where its monarchs
had failed, strive to introduce a better order
of things. Poland was destined, in all the
ages of its history, to differ from all the other
European states. With the progress of wealth,
a race of burghers at length sprung up an
aristocracy of wealth and possessions arose ;
but both, contrary to the genius of the people,
perished before they arrived at maturity. The
first was speedily overthrown ; in the convul-
sion consequent upon the establishment of
the last, the national independence was de-
stroyed." I. 74.
Of the practical consequences of this fatal
passion for equality in. the legislature and the
form of government, our author gives the fol-
lowing curious account:
"The extreme difficulty of providing food
for their comitia of an hundred thousand citi-
zens on horseback, obliged the members of
the diet to terminate their deliberations in a
few days, or rather to separate, after having
devoured all the food in the country, com
rnenced a civil war, and determined nothing.
The constant recurrence of such disasters at
length led to an attempt to introduce territorial
deputies, invested with full power to carry on
the ordinary and routine business of the state.
But so adverse was any delegation of authority
to the original nature of Polish independence,
that this beneficial institution never was es-
tablished in Poland but in the most incom-
plete manner. Its introduction corrected none
of the ancient abuses. The king was still
the president of tumultuous assemblies ; sur-
rounded by obstacles on every side ; controlled
by generals and ministers not of his own se-
lection ; obliged to defend the acts of a cabinet
which he could not control, against the cries
of a furious diet. And these diets, which
united, sabre in hand, under the eye of the
sovereign, and still treated of all the important
affairs of the state of war and peace, the
election of a sovereign, the formation of laws
which gave audience to ambassadors, and
administered justice in important cases
were still the Champs de Mars of the northern
tribes, and partook to the very last of all the
vices of the savage character. There was
the same confusion of powers, the same ele-
ments of disorder, the same license to them-
selves, the same tyranny over others.
; 'This attempt 'at a representative govern-
ment was destructive to the last shadow of the
royal authority; the meetings of the deputies
became fixed and frequent; the power of the
sovereign was lost without any permanent
body arising to receive it in his room. The
system of deputations made slow progress ;
and in several provinces was never admitted.
General diets, where the whole nation as-
sembled, became more rare, and therefore
more perilous; and as they were convoked
only on great occasions, and to discuss
weighty interests, the fervour of passion was
superadded to the inexperience of business.
"Speedily the representative assemblies be-
came the object of jealousy on the part of this
democratic race ; and the citizens of the re-
public sought only to limit the powers which
they had conferred on their representatives.
Often the jealous multitude, terrified at the
powers with which they had invested the de-
puties, were seized with a sudden panic, and
hastened together from all quarters with their
arms in their hands to watch over their pro-
ceedings. Such assemblies were styled ' Diets
under the Buckler.' But generally they re-
stricted and qualified their powers at the mo-
ment of election. The electors confined their
parliaments to a circle of limited questions:
gave them obligatory directions; and held, after
every session, what they called post-comitial diets;
the object of which was to exact from every deputy
a rigid account of the execution of his mandate.
Thus every question of importance was, in effect,
decided in the provinces before it was debated in the
national assembly. And" as unanimity was still
considered essential to a decision, the passing
of any legislative act became impossible when
there was any variance between the instruc-
tions to the deputies. Thus the majority were
compelled to disregard the protestations of the
minority ; and, to guard against that tyranny,
the only remedy seemed to establish, in favour
of the outvoted minority, the right of civil
war. Confederations were established ; armed
leagues, formed of discontented nobles, who
elected a marshal or president, and opposed
decrees to decrees, force to force, diet to diet,
tribune to tribune; and had alternately the
kin-.,' tor its leader and its captive. What de-
plorable institutions, which opened to all the
56
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
discontented a legal channel for spreading]
anarchy through their country ! The only as-
tonishing thing is, that the valour of the Polish
nobility so long succeeded in concealing these
mortal defects in their institutions. One
would have imagined that a nation, under
such customs, could not exist a year; and yet
it seemed never weary either of victories or
folly." I. 116.
No apology is necessary for the length of
these quotations ; for they are not only illus-
trative of the causes of the uniform disasters
of Poland, but eminently instructive as to the
tendency of democratic institutions all over
the world.
There is no danger that the inhabitants of
England or France will flock in person to the
opening of Parliament, and establish diets of
two or three hundred thousand freemen, with
sabres by their sides ; but there is a very great
danger, that they will adopt the democratic
jealousy of their representatives, and fix them
down by fixed instructions to a course of con-
duct which will both render nugatory all the
advantages of a deliberative assembly, and
sow the seeds of dissension, jealousy, and civil
war between the different members of the
state. This is the more to be apprehended,
because this evil was felt in the strongest
manner in France during the progress of the
Revolution, and has appeared in America most
remarkably even during the brief period of its
political existence.
The legislators of America are not in any
sense statesmen; they are merely delegates,
bound to obey the directions of their constitu-
ents, and sent there to forward the individual
interest of the province, district, or borough
which they represent. Their debates are lan-
guid and uninteresting; conducted with no
idea whatever of convincing, but merely of
showing the constituents of each member
what he had done for his daily hire of seven
dollars. The Constituents Assembly met, with
cahiers or instructions to the deputies from all
the electors ; and so much did this jealousy of
the legislature increase with the progress of
the movements in France, that the surest road
to popularity with the electors was soon found,
to be, the most abject professions of submis-
sion to their will. Every one knows how long
and vehemently annual parliaments have been
demanded by the English radicals, in order to
give them an opportunity of constantly exer-
cising this surveillance over their representa-
tives ; and how many members of the present
House of Commons are under a positive
pledge to their constituents on more than one
momentous question. It is interesting to ob-
serve how much mankind, under all varieties
of climate, situation, and circumstances, are
governed by the same principles; and to trace
the working of the same causes in Polish an-
archy, French revolutions, American selfish-
ness, and British democracy.
Whoever considers the matter dispassion-
ately, and attends to the lessons of history,
must arrive at the conclusion, that this demo-
cratic spirit cannot co-exist with regular go-
vernment or national independence in ancient
states ; and that Polish anarchy is the neces-
sary prelude in all such communities to Mos-
covite oppression. The reason is eternal, and
being founded in the nature of things, must be
the same in all ages. When the true demo-
cratic spirit is once generally diffused, men
invariably acquire such an inordinate jealousy
of their rulers, that they thwart all measures,
even of the most obvious and undeniable utili-
ty ; and by a perpetual change of governors,
gratify their own equalizing spirit, at the ex-
pense of the best interests of the state. This
disposition appears at present in France, and
England, in the rapid changes of administra-
tion which have taken place within the last
few years, to the total destruction of any uni-
formity qf government, or the prosecution of
any systematic plan for the public good: it
appears in America in the execrable system
of rotation of office, in other words, of the ex-
pulsion of every man from official situations,
the moment he becomes qualified to hold them,
which a recent able observer has so well ex-
posed ;* it appeared in Poland in the uniform
weakness of the executive, and periodical re-
turns of anarchy, which rendered them, in
despite of their native valour, unfortunate in
every contest, and at last led to the partition
of the republic.
Never was there a truer observation, than
that wherever the tendency of prevailing in-
stitutions is hurtful, there is an under-current
perpetually flowing, destined to correct them.
As this equalising and democratic spirit is
utterly destructive to the best interests of so-
ciety, and the happiness of the very people
who indulge in it, so by the wisdom of nature,
it leads rapidly and certainly to its own de-
struction. The moment that it became para-
mount in the Roman Republic, it led to the
civil convulsions which brought on the despo-
tism of the Caesars ; its career was rapidly cut
short in France by the sword of Napoleon ; it
exterminated Poland from the book of nations ;
it threatens to close the long line of British
greatness; it will convulse or subjugate Ame-
rica, the moment that growing republic is
brought in contact with warlike neighbours,
or finds the safety-valve of the back settle-
ments closed against the escape of turbulent
multitudes.
The father of John Sobieski, whose estates
lay in the Ukraine, has left a curious account
of the manners and habits of the Cossacks in
his time, which was about 200 years ago.
" The great majority," said he, " of these wan-
dering tribes, think of nothing but the affairs
of their little families, and encamp, as it were,
in the midst of the towns which belong to the
crown or the noblesse. They interrupt the
ennui of repose by frequent assemblies, and
their comitia are generally civil wars, often at-
tended by profuse bloodshed. It is there that
they choose their hetman, or chief, by accla-
mation, followed by throwing their bearskin
caps in the air. Such is the inconstancy in the
multitude, that they frequently destroy their
own work; but as long as the hetman remains
in power, he has the right of life and death.
The town of Tretchmiron, in Kiovia, is the
* Captain Hall.
POLAND.
arsenal of their warlike implements and their
treasure. There is deposited the booty taken
by their pirates in Koraelia and Asia Minor;
and there are also preserved, with religious
care, the immunities granted to their nation
by the republic. There are displayed the
standards which the king sends them, when-
ever they take up arms for the service of the
republic. It is round this royal standard that
the nation assemble in their cornitia. The het-
man there does not presume to address the
multitude but with his head uncovered, with a
respectful air, ready to exculpate himself from
all the charges brought against him, and to
solicit humbly his share of the spoils taken
from the enemies. These fierce peasants are
passionately fond of war; few are acquainted
with the use of the musket ; the pistol and
sabre are their ordinary weapons. Thanks to
their light and courageous squadrons, Poland
can face the infantry of the most powerful na-
tions on earth. They are as serviceable in re-
treat as in success ; when discomfited, they
form, with their chariots ranged in several
lines in a circular form, an entrenched camp,
to which no other fortifications can be com-
pared. Behind that tabor, they defy the at-
tacks of the most formidable enemy."
Of the species of troops who composed the
Polish army, our author gives the following
curious account, a striking proof of the na-
tional weakness which follows the fatal pas-
sion for equality, which formed their grand
national characteristic :
" Five different kinds of soldiers composed
the Polish army. There was, in the first place,
the mercenaries, composed of Hungarians,
Wallachians, Cossacks, Tartars, and Germans,
who would have formed the strength and
nucleus of the army, had it not been that on
the least delay in their payments, they invari-
ably turned their arms against the govern-
ment: the national troops, to whose mainte-
nance a fourth of the national revenue was
devoted: the volunteers, under which name
were included the levies of the great nobles,
and the ordinary guards which they maintained
in time of peace: the Pospolite, that is, the,
array of the whole free citizens, who, after
three summonses from the king, were obliged
to come forth under the banners of their re-
spective palatines, but only to remain a few
months in the field, and could not be ordered
beyond the frontiers. This last unwieldy
body, however brave, was totally deficient in
discipline, and in general served only to mani-
fest the weakness of the republic. It was
seldom called forth but in civil wars. The
legions of valets, grooms, and drivers, who
encumbered the other force, may be termed a
fifth branch of the military force of Poland ;
but these fierce retainers, naturally warlike
and irascible, injured the army more by their
pillage and dissensions than they assisted it
by their numbers.
"All these different troops were deficient in
equipment ; obliged to provide themselves
with every thing, and to collect their subsist-
ence by their own authority, they were encum-
bered with an incredible quantity of baggage-
wagons, destined, for the most part, less to
8
convey provisions than carry off plunder.
They had no corps of engineers; the artillery,
composed of a few pieces of small calibre, had
no other officers than a handful of French
adventurers, upon whose adherence to the
republic implicit reliance could not be placed.
The infantry were few in number, composed
entirely of the mercenary and royal troops;
but this arm was regarded with contempt by
the haughty nobility. The foot soldiers were
employed in digging ditches, throwing bridges,
and cutting down forests, rather than actual
warfare. Sobieski was exceedingly desirous
of having in his camp a considerable force of
infantry ; but two invincible obstacles pre-
vented it, the prejudices of the country, and
the penury of the royal treasury.
" The whole body of the Pospolite, the vo-
lunteers, the valets cTarmee, and a large part of
the. mercenaries and national troops, served
on horseback. The heavy cavalry, in particu-
lar, constituted the strength of the armies ;
there were to be found united, riches, splen-
dour, and number. They were divided into
cuirassiers and hussars ; the former clothed
in steel, man and horse bearing casque and
cuirass, lance and sabre, bows and carabines;
the latter defended only by a twisted hauberk,
which descended from the head, over the
shoulders and breast, and armed with a sabre
and pistol. Both were distinguished by the
splendour of their dress and equipage, and the
number and costly array of their mounted ser-
vants, accoutred in the most bizarre manner,
with huge black plumes, and skins of bears
and other wild beasts. It was the boast of
this body, that they were composed of men,
all measured, as they expressed it, by the same
standard ; that is, equal in nobility, equally
enjoying the rights to obey only their God and
their swords, and equally destined, perhaps, to
step one day into the throne of the Piasts arid
the Jagellons. The hussars and cuirassiers
were called Towarzirz, that is, companions;
they called each other by that name, and they
were designated in the same way by the sove-
reign, whose chief boast would be Primus inter
pares, the first among equals." I. 129.
With so motley and discordant a force, it is
not surprising that Poland was unable to make
head against the steady ambition and regular
forces of the military monarchies with which
it was surrounded. Its history accordingly
exhibits the usual feature of all democratic
societies occasional bursts of patriotism, and
splendid efforts followed by dejection, anarchy,
and misrule. It is a stormy night illuminated
by occasional flashes of lightning, never by
the steady radiance of the morning sun.
One of the most glorious of these flashes is
the victory of Kotzim, the first great achieve-
ment of John Sobieski.
"Kotzim is a strong castle, situated four
leagues from Kamaniek, on a rocky projection
which runs into the Dneiper, impregnable
from the river, and surrounded on the other
side by deep and rocky ravines. A bridge
thrown over one of them, united it to the en-
trenched camp, where Hussein Pacha had
posted his army. That camp, defended by
ancient fieldworks, extended along the banks
58
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
of the Dneiper, and was guarded on the side
of Moldavia, the sole accessible quarter, by
precipices cut in the solio 1 rock, and impass-
able morasses. The art of the Ottomans had
added to the natural strength of the position ;
the plain over which, after the example of the
Romans, that military colony was intended to
rule, was intersected to a great distance by
canals and ditches, whose banks were strength-
ened by palisades. A powerful artillery de-
fended all the avenues to the camp, and there
reposed, under magnificent tents, the Turkish
generalissimo and eighty thousand veterans,
when they were suddenly startled by the sight
of the Polish banners, which moved in splendid
array round their entrenchments, and took up
a position almost under the fire of their artil-
lery.
" The spot was animating to the recollec-
tions of the Christian host. Fifty years be-
fore, James Sobieski had conquered a glorious
peace under the walls of that very castle : and
against its ramparts, after the disaster of the
Kobilta, the power of the young Sultan Osman
had dashed itself in vain. Now the sides
were changed ; the Turks held the entrenched
camp, and the army of the son of James So-
bieski filled the plain.
" The smaller force had nqw to make the
assault ; the larger army was entrenched be-
hind ramparts better fortified, better armed
with cannon, than those which Sultan Osman
and his three hundred thousand Mussulmen
sought in vain to wrest from the feeble army
of Wladislaus. The Turks were now grown
gray in victories, and the assailants were
young troops, for the most part ill armed, as-
sembled in haste, destitute of resources, maga-
zines, or provisions worn out with the fatigues
and the privations of a winter campaign. Deep
ditches, the rocky bed of torrents, precipitous
walls of rock, composed the field of battle on
which they were called on to combat an enemy
reposing tranquilly under the laurels of vic-
tory, beneath sumptuous tents, and behind
ramparts defended by an array of three hun-
dred pieces of cannon. The night passed on
the Polish side in mortal disquietude ; the
mind of the general, equally with the soldiers,
was overwhelmed with anxiety. The enter-
prise which he had undertaken seemed above
human strength; the army had no chance of
safety but in victory, and there was too much
reason to fear that treachery, or division in
his own troops, would snatch it from his grasp,
and deliver down his name with disgrace to
posterity.
"Sobieski alone was inaccessible to fear.
When the troops were drawn forth on the fol-
lowing morning, the Grand Hetman of Lithu-
ania declared the attack desperate, and his
resolution to retreat. 'Retreat,' cried the
Polish hero, ' is impossible. We should only
find a disgraceful death in the morasses with
which we are surrounded, a few leagues from
hence; better far to brave it at the foot of the
enemy's entrenchments. But what ground is
there 'for apprehension? Nothing disquiets
me b%t what I hear from you. Your menaces
are our only danger. I am confident you will
not execute them. If Poland is to be effaced
from the book of nations, you will not allow
our children to exclaim, that if a Paz had not
fled, they would not have wanted a country.'
Vanquished by the magnanimity of Sobieski,
and the cries of Sapieha and Radziwik, the
Lithuanian chief promised not to desert his
countrymen.
"Sobieski then ranged his faltering batta-
lions in order of battle, and the Turks made
preparations to receive behind their entrench-
ments the seemingly hopeless attack of the
Christians. Their forces were ranged in a
semicircle, and their forty field-pieces advanced
in front, battered in breach the palisades which
were placed across the approaches to the
Turkish palisades. Kouski, the commander
of the artillery, performed under the superior
fire of the enemy, prodigies of valour. The
breaches were declared practicable in the
evening; and when night came, the Christian
forces of the two principalities of Walachia
and Moldavia deserted the camp of the Infi-
dels, to range themselves under the standard
of the cross ; a cheering omen, for troops
never desert but to the side which they ima-
gine will prove successful.
" The weather was dreadful ; the snow fell
in great quantities ; the ranks were obstructed
by its drifts. In the midst of that severe tem-
pest, Sobieski kept his troops under arms the
whole night. In the morning they were buried
in the snow, exhausted by cold and suffering.
Then he gave the signal of attack. ' Com-
panions, said he, in passing through the lines,
his clothes, his hair, his mustaches covered
with icicles, 'I deliver to you an enemy already
half vanquished. You have suffered, the Turks
are exhausted. The troops of Asia can never
endure the hardships of the last twenty-four
hours. The cold has conquered them to our
hand. Whole troops of them are already sink-
ing under their sufferings, while we, inured to
the climate, are only animated by it to fresh
exertions. It is for us to save the republic
from shame and slavery. Soldiers of Poland,
recollect that you fight for your country, and
that Jesus Christ combats for you.'
" Sobieski had thrice heard mass since the
rising of the sun. The day was the fete of St.
Martin of Tours. The chiefs founded great
hopes on his intercession : the priests, who
had followed their masters to the field of battle,
traversed the ranks, recounting the actions of
that great apostle of the French, and all that
they might expect from his known zeal for the
faith. He was a Slavonian by birth. Could
there be any doubt, then, that the Christians
would triumph when his glory was on that day
in so peculiar a manner interested in perform-
ing miracles in their favour?
" An accidental circumstance gave the
highest appearance of truth to these ideas.
The Grand Marshal, who had just completed
his last reconnoissance of the enemy's lines,
returned with his countenance illuminated by
the presage of victory 'My companions,' he
exclaimed, ' in half an hour we shall be lodged
under these gilded tents.' In fact, he had dis-
covered that the point against which he in-
tended to direct his principal attack was not
defended but by a few troops benumbed by the
POLAND.
cold. He immediately made several feigned
assaults to distract the attention of the enemy,
and directed against the palisades, by which
he intended to enter, the fire of a battery
already erected. The soldiers immediately
recollected that the preceding evening they
had made the utmost efforts to draw the
cannon beyond that point, but that a power
apparently more than human had chained
them to the spot, from whence now they easily
beat down the obstacles to the army's ad-
vance, and cleared the road to victory. Who
was so blind as not to see in that circum-
stance the miraculous intervention of Gregory
of Tours !
" At that moment the army knelt down to re-
ceive the benediction of Father Pizeborowski,
confessor of the Grand Hetman ; and his
prayer being concluded, Sobieski, dismount-
ing from his horse, ordered his infantry to
move forward to the assault of the newly-
opened breach in the palisades, he himself,
sword in hand, directing the way. The armed
valets followed rapidly in their footsteps. That
courageous band were never afraid to tread
the path of danger in the hopes of plunder.
In a moment the ditches were filled up and
passed ; with one bound the troops arrived at
the foot of the rocks. The Grand Hetman,
after that first success, had hardly time to re-
mount on horseback, when, on the heights of
the entrenched camp, were seen the standard
of the cross and the eagle of Poland. Petri-
kowski and Denhoff, of the royal race of the
Piasts, had first mounted the ramparts, and
raised their ensigns. At this joyful sight, a
hurrah of triumph rose from the Polish ranks,
and rent the heavens ; the Turks were seized
with consternation; they had been confounded
at that sudden attack, made at a time when
they imagined the severity of the weather had
made the Christians renounce their perilous
enterprise. Such was the confusion, that but
for the extraordinary strength of the position,
they could not have stood a moment. At this
critical juncture, Hussein, deceived by a false
attack of Czarnicki, hastened with his cavalry
to the other side of the camp, and the spahis,
conceiving that he was flying, speedily took to
flight.
" But the Janizzaries were not yet van-
quished. Inured to arms, they rapidly formed
their ranks, and falling upon > the valets, who
had dispersed in search of plunder, easily put
them to the sword. Fortunately, Sobieski had
had time to employ his foot soldiers in level-
ling the ground, and rendering accessible the
approaches to the summits of the hills. The
Polish cavalry came rushing in with a noise
like thunder. The hussars, the cuirassiers,
with burning torches affixed to their lances,
scaled precipices which seemed hardly acces-
sible to foot soldiers. Inactive till that mo-
ment, Paz now roused his giant strength.
Ever the rival of Sobieski, he rushed forward
with his Lithuanian nobles in the midst of
every danger, to endeavour to arrive first in
the Ottoman camp. It was too late ; already
mander, Sobieski was employed in re-forming
the ranks of the assailants, disordered by
the assault and their success, and preparing
for a new battle in the midst of that city of
tents, which, though surprised, seemed not
subdued.
" But the astonishment and confusion of the
besieged, the cries of the women, shut up in
the Harems, the thundering charges of the
heavy squadrons clothed in impenetrable steel,
and composed of impetuous young men, gave
the Turks no time to recover from their con-
sternation. It was no longer a battle, but a
massacre. Demetrius and the Lithuanian met
at the same time in the invaded camp. A cry
of horror now rose from the Turkish ranks,
and they rushed in crowds to the bridge of
boats which crossed the Dniester, and formed
the sole communication between Kotzim, and
the fortified city of Kamaniek. In the struggle
to reach this sole outlet from destruction, mul-
titudes killed each other. But Sobieski's fore-
sight had deprived the vanquished even of this
last resource. His brother-in-laAv, Radziwil,
had during the tumult glided unperceived
through the bottom of the ravines, and at the
critical moment made himself master of the
bridge, and the heights which commanded it.
The only resource of the fugitives was now to
throw themselves into the waves. 20,000 men
perished at that fatal point, either on the shores
or in the half-congealed stream. Insatiable in
carnage, the hussars led by Maziniki pursued
them on horseback into the bed of the Dneiper,
and sabred thousands when struggling in the
stream. 40,000 dead bodies were found in the
precincts of the camp. The water of the river
for several leagues ran red with blood, and
corpses were thrown up with every wave on
its deserted shores.
"At the news of this extraordinary triumph,
the Captain Pacha, who was advancing with
a fresh army to invade Poland, set fire to his
camp, and hastened across the Danube. The
Moldavians and Walachians made their sub-
mission to the conqueror, and the Turks, re-
cently so arrogant, began to tremble for their
capital. Europe, electrified with these suc-
cesses, returned thanks for the greatest victory
gained for three centuries over the infidels.
Christendom quivered with joy, as if it had
just escaped from ignominy and bondage."
II. 130153.
But while Europe was awaiting the intel-
ligence of the completion of the overthrow of
the Osmanlis, desertion and flight had ruined
the Polish army. Whole Palatinates had
abandoned their colours. They were desirous
to carry off in safety the spoils of the East, and
to prepare for that new field of battle which
the election of the King of Poland, who died
at this juncture, presented. Sobieski remained
almost alone on the banks of the Dniester. At
the moment when Walachia and Moldavia
were throwing themselves under the protec-
tion of the Polish crown, when the Captain
Pacha was flying to the foot of Balkan, and
Sobieski was dreaming of changing the face
the flaming lances of the Grand Hetman | of the world, his army dissolved. The Turks,
gleamed on the summits of the entrenchments, I at this unexpected piece of fortune, recovered
and ever attentive to the duties of a com- 1 from their terror ; and the rule of the Mussul-
60
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
men was perpetuated for two centuries in Eu-
rope." II. 165.
This victory and the subsequent dissolution
of the army, so characteristic both of the glo-
ries and the incon.stancy of Poland, great as it
was, was eclipsed by the splendours of the de-
liverance of Vienna. The account of the pre-
vious election of this great man to the throne
of Poland is singularly characteristic of Polish
manners.
" The plain of Volo to the west of Warsaw
had been the theatre, from the earliest times,
of the popular elections. Already the impa-
crown. Sobieski had previously occupied the
bridge over the river by a regiment of hussars,
upon which the Lithuanians seized every
house in the city which wealth could com-
mand. These hostile dispositions were too
significant of frightful disorders. War soon
ensued in the midst of the rejoicings between
Lithuania and Poland. Every time the oppo-
site factions met, their strife terminated in
bloodshed. The hostilities extended even to
the bloody game of the Klopiches, which was
played by a confederation of the boys in the
city, or of pages and valets, who amused them-
tient Pospolite covered that vast extent with selves by forming troops, electing a marshal,
its waves, like an army prepared to commence | choosing a field of battle, and fighting there to
last extremitv- On this occasion they
an assault on a fortified town. The innumera-
ble piles of arms; the immense tables round
which faction united their supporters ; a
thousand jousts with the javelin or the lance;
a thousand squadrons engaged in mimic war;
a thousand parties of palatines, governors of
castles, and other dignified authorities who
traversed the ranks distributing exhortations,
party songs, and largesses ; a thousand caval-
cades of gentlemen, who rode, according to
custom, with their battle-axes by their sides,
and discussed at the gallop, the dearest in-
terests of the republic ; innumerable quarrels,
originating in drunkenness, and terminating
in blood: Such were the scenes of tumult,
amusement, and war, a faithful mirror of
Poland, which, as far as the eye could reach,
filled the plain.
" The arena was closed in by a vast circle
of tents, which embraced, as in an immense
girdle, the plain of Volo, the shores of the Vis-
tula, and the spires of Warsaw. The horizon
seemed bounded by a range of snowy moun-
tains, of which the summits were portrayed in
the hazy distance by their dazzling whiteness.
Their camp formed another city, with its
markets, its gardens, its hotels, and its monu-
ments. There the great displayed their Orien-
tal magnificence ; the nobles, the palatines,
vied with each other in the splendour of their
horses and equipage ; and the stranger who
beheld for the first time that luxury, worthy of
the last and greatest of the Nomade people,
was never weary of admiring the immense
hotels, the porticoes, the colonnades, the gal-
leries of painted or gilded stuffs, the castles
of cotton and silk, with their draw-bridges,
towers, and ditches. Thanks to the recent
victory, a great part of these riches had been
taken . from the Turks. Judging from the
multitude of stalls, kitchens, baths, audience
chambers, the elegance of the Oriental archi-
tecture, the taste of the designs, the profusion
of gilded crosses, domes, and pagodas, you
would imagine that the seraglio of some
Eastern sultan had been transported by en-
chantment to the banks of the Vistula. Vic-
tory had accomplished this prodigy ; these,
were the tents of Mahomet IV., taken at the
battle of Kotzim, and though Sobieski was
absent, his triumphant arms surmounted the
crescent of Mahomet.
"The Lithuanians were encamped on the
opposite shores of the Vistula; and their Grand
Hetman, Michel Paz, had brought up his whole
force to dictate laws, as it were, to the Polish
the last extremity. On this
were divided into corps of Lithuanians and
Poles, who hoisted the colours of their respec-
tive states, got fire-arms to imitate more com-
pletely the habits of the equestrian order, and
disturbed the plain everywhere by their
marches, or terrified it by their assaults.
Their shock desolated the plain; the villages
were in flames ; the savage huts of which the
suburbs of Warsaw were then composed, were
incessantly invaded and sacked in that terri-
ble sport, invented apparently to inure the
youth to civil war, and extend even to the
slaves the enjoyments of anarchy.
" On the day of the elections the three orders
mounted on horseback. The princes, the
palatines, the bishops, the prelates, proceeded
towards the plain of Volo, surrounded 'by eighty
thousand mounted citizens, any one of whom
might, at the expiry of a few hours, find him-
self King^of Poland. They all bore in their
countenances, even under the livery or ban-
ners of a master, the pride arising from that
ruinous privilege. The European dress no-
where appeared on that solemn occasion.
The children of the desert strove to hide the
furs and skins in which they were clothed
under chains of gold and the glitter of jewels.
Their bonnets were composed of panther-skin,
plumes of eagles or herons surmounted them:
on their front were the most splendid precious
stones. Their robes of sable or ermine were
bound with velvet or silver : their girdle
studded with jewels ; over all their furs were
suspended chains of diamonds. One hand of
each nobleman was without a glove ; on it was
the splendid ring on which the arms of his
family were engraved ; the mark, as in ancient
Rome, of the equestrian order. A new proof
of this intimate connection between the race,
the customs, and the traditions of the northern
tribes, and the founders of the Eternal City.
" But nothing in this rivalry of magnificence
could equal the splendour of their arms.
Double poniards, double scymitars, set with
brilliants; bucklers of costly workmanship,
battle-axes enriched in silver, and glittering
with emeralds and sapphires; bows and arrows
richly gilt, which were borne at festivals, in
remembrance of the ancient customs of the
country, were to be seen on every side. The
horses shared in this melange of barbarism
and refinement; sometimes cased in iron, at
others decorated with the richest colours, they
bent under the weight of the sabres, the lances,
and javelins by which the senatorial order
POLAND.
61
marked their rank. The bishops were distin-
guished by their gray or green hats, and yellow
or red pantaloons, magnificently embroidered
with divers colours. Often they laid aside
their pastoral habits, and signalized their ad-
dress as young cavaliers, by the beauty of their
arms, and the management of their horses.
In that crowd of the equestrian order, there
was no gentleman so humble as not to try to
rival this magnificence. Many carried, in furs
and arms, their whole fortunes on their backs.
Numbers had sold their votes to some of the
candidates, for the vanity of appearing with
some additional ornament before their fellow-
citizens. And the people, whose dazzled eyes
beheld all this magnificence, were almost with-
out clothing; their long beards, naked legs,
and filth, indicated, even more strongly than
their pale visages and dejected air, all the
miseries of servitude." II. 190 197.
The achievement which has immortalized
the name of John Sobieski is the deliverance
of Vienna in 1683 of this glorious achieve-
ment M. Salvandy gives the following interest-
ing account:
"After a siege of eight months, and open
trenches for sixty days, Vienna was reduced
to the last extremity. Famine, disease, and
the sword, had cut off two-thirds of its garri-
son ; and the inhabitants, depressed by inces-
sant toil for the last six months, and sickened
by long deferred hope, were given up to des-
pair. Many breaches were made in the walls ;
the massy bastions were crumbling in ruins,
and entrenchments thrown up in haste in the
streets, formed the last resource of the German
capital. Stahremborg, the governor, had an-
nounced the necessity of surrendering if not
relieved in three days ; and every night signals
of distress from the summits of the steeples,
announced the extremities to which they were
reduced.
" One evening, the sentinel who was on the
watch at the top of the steeple of St. Stephen's,
perceived a blazing flame on the summits of
the Calemberg; soon after an army was seen
preparing to descend the ridge. Every tele-
scope was instantly turned in that direction,
and from the brilliancy of their lances, and the
splendour of their banners it was easy to see
that it was the Hussars of Poland, so redoubt-
able to the Osmanlis, who were approaching.
The Turks were immediately to be seen divid-
ing their vast host into divisions, one destined
to oppose this new enemy, and one to continue
the assaults on the besieged. At the sight of
the terrible conflict which was approaching,
the women and children flocked to the
churches, while Stahremborg led forth all that
remained of the men to the breaches.
"The Duke of Lorraine had previously set
forth with a few horsemen to join the King of
Poland, and learn the art of war, as he ex-
pressed it, under so great a master. The two
illustrious commanders soon concerted a plan
of operations, and Sobieski encamped on the
Danube, with all his forces, united to the
troops of the empire. It was with tears of joy.
that the sovereigns, generals, and the soldiers
of the Imperialists received the illustrious
chief whom heaven had sent to their relief.
Before his arrival discord reigned in their
camp, but all now yielded obedience to the
Polish hero.
" The Duke of Lorraine had previously con-
structed at Tulin, six leagues below Vienna,
a triple bridge, which Kara Mustapha, the
Turkish commander, allowed to be formed
without opposition. The German Electors
nevertheless hesitated to cross the river; the
severity of the weather, long rains, and roads
now almost impassable, augmented their
alarms. But the King of Poland was a stranger
alike to hesitation as fear; the state of Vienna
would admit of no delay. The last despatch
of Stahremborg was simply in these words :
' There is no time to lose.' ' There is no re-
verse to fear,' exclaimed Sobieski ; ' the gene-
ral who at the head of three hundred thousand
men could allow that bridge to be constructed
in his teeth, cannot fail to be defeated.'
"On the following day the liberators of
Christendom passed in review before their
allies. The Poles marched first; the specta-
tors were astonished at the magnificence of
their arms, the splendour of the dresses, and
the beauty of the horses. The infantry was
less brilliant; one regiment in particular, by
its battered appearance, hurt the pride of the
monarch ' Look well at those brave men/
said he to the Imperialists ; ' it is an invincible
battalion, who have sworn never to renew
their clothing, till they are arrayed in the spoils
of the Turks.' These words were repeated to
the regiments; if they did not, says the annal-
ist, clothe them, they encircled every man
with a cuirass.
" The Christian army, when all assembled,
amounted to 70,000 men, of whom only 30,000
were infantry. Of these the Poles were 18,000.
The principal disquietude of the king was
on account of the absence of the Cossacks,
whom Mynzwicki had promised to bring up to
his assistance. He well knew what admirable
scouts they formed: the Tartars had always
found in them their most formidable enemies.
Long experience in the Turkish wars had
rendered them exceedingly skilful in this
species of warfare : no other force was equal
to them in seizing prisoners and gaining in-
telligence. They were promised ten crowns
for every man they brought in after this man-
ner: they led their captives to the tent of their
king, where they got their promised reward,
and went away saying, 'John, I have touched
my money, God will repay you.' Bereaved of
these faithful assistants, the king was com-
pelled to expose his hussars in exploring the
dangerous defiles in which the army was about
to engage. The Imperialists, who could not
comprehend his attachment to that undisci-
plined-militia, were astonished to hear him
incessantly exclaiming, Oh ! Mynzwicki, Oh '
Mynzwicki.' "
A reeky chain, full of narrow and precipitous
ravines, of woods and rocks, called the Calem-
herg in modern times, the Mons ./Etins of the
Romans, separated the two armies: the cause
of Christendom from that of Mahomet. It was
necessary to scale that formidable barrier; for
the mountains advanced with a rocky front
into the middle of the Danube. Fortunately,
62
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
the negligence of the Turks had omitted to
fortify these posts, where a few battalions
might have arrested the Polish army.
" Nothing could equal the confidence of the
Turks but the disquietude of the' Imperialists.
Such was the terror impressed by the vast
host of the Mussulmen, that at the first cry of
Allah ! whole battalions took to flight. Many
thousand peasants were incessantly engaged
in levelling the roads over the mountains, or
cutting through the forest. The foot soldiers
dragged the artillery with their arms, and were
compelled to abandon the heavier pieces.
Chiefs and soldiers carried each his own pro-
visions : the leaves of the oak formed the sole
subsistence of the horses. Some scouts reach-
ed the summit of the ridge long before the
remainder of the army, and from thence be-
held the countless myriads of the Turkish
tents extending to the walls of Vienna. Ter-
rified at the sight, they returned in dismay,
and a contagious panic began to spread
through the army. The king had need, to re-
assure his troops, of all the security of his
countenance, the gaiety of his discourse, and
the remembrance of the multitudes of the
infidels whom he had dispersed in his life.
The Janizzaries of his guard, who surrounded
him on the march, were so many living monu-
ments of his victories, and every one was
astonished that he ventured to attack the Mus-
sulmen with such an escort. He offered to
send them to the rear, or even to give them a
safe conduct to the Turkish camp, but they all
answered with tears in their eyes, that they
would live and die with him. His heroism
subjugated alike Infidels and Christians, chiefs
and soldiers.
"At length, on Saturday, September llth,
the army encamped, at eleven o'clock in the
forenoon, on the sterile and inhospitable sum-
mit of the Calemberg, and occupied the con-
vent of Camaldoli and the old castle of Leo-
poldsburg. Far beneath extended the vast and
uneven plain of Austria: its smoking capital,
the gilded tents, and countless host of the
besiegers ; while at the foot of the ridge, where
the mountain sunk into the plain, the forests
and ravines were occupied by the advanced
guards, prepared to dispute the passage of the
army."
There it was that they lighted the fires which
spread joy and hope through every heart at
Vienna.
"Trusting in their vast multitudes, the
Turks pressed the assault of Vienna on the
one side, while on the other they faced the
liberating army. The Turkish vizier counted
in his ranks four Christian princes and as
many Tartar chiefs. All the nobles of Ger-
many and Poland were on the other side :
Sobieski was at once the Agamemnon and
Achilles of that splendid host.
"The young Eugene of Savoy made his first
essay in arms, by bringing to Sobieski the in-
telligence that the engagement was commenced
between the advanced guards at the foot of
the ridge. The Christians immediately de-
scended the mountains in five columns like
torrents, but marching in the finest order : the
leading divisions halted at every hundred
paces to give time to those behind, who were
retarded by the difficulties of the descent, to
join them. A rude parapet, hastily erected by
the Turks to bar the five debouches of the
roads into the plain, was forced after a short
combat. At every ravine, the Christians ex-
perienced fresh obstacles to surmount: the
spahis dismounted to contest the rocky ascents,
and speedily regaining their horses when they
were forced, fell back in haste to the next
positions which were to be defended. But the
Mussulmen, deficient in infantry, could not
withstand the steady advance and solid masses
of the Germans, and the Christians everywhere
gained ground. Animated by the continued
advance of their deliverers, the garrison of
Vienna performed miracles on the breach ;
and Kara Mustapha, who long hesitated which
battle he should join, resolved to meet the
avenging squadrons of the Polish king.
"By two o'clock the ravines were cleared,
and the allies drawn up in the plain. Sobieski
ordered the Duke of Lorraine to halt, to give
time for the Poles, who had been retarded by
a circuitous march, to join the army. At
eleven they appeared, and took their post on
the right. The Imperial eagles saluted the
squadrons of gilded cuirasses with cries of
'Long live King John Sobieski!' and the cry,
repeated along the Christian line, startled the
Mussulmen force.
" Sobieski charged in the centre, and di-
rected his attack against the scarlet tent of the
sultan, surrounded by his faithful squadrons
distinguished by his splendid plume, his bow,
and quiver of gold, which hung on his shoul-
der most of ail by the enthusiasm which his
presence everywhere excited. He advanced,
exclaiming, 'Non nobis, Domine, sed tibi sit
gloria !' The Tartars and the spahis fled when
they heard the name of the Polish hero re-
peated from one end to the other of the Otto-
man lines. ' By Allah,' exclaimed Sultan
Gieray, ' the king is with them !' At this
moment the moon was eclipsed, and the Ma-
hometans beheld with dread the crescent
waning in the heavens.
" At the same time, the hussars of Prince
Alexander, who formed the leading column,
broke into a charge amidst the national cry,
'God defend Poland!' The remaining squad-
rons, led by all that was noblest and bravest in
the country, resplendent in arms, buoyant in
courage, followed at the gallop. They cleared,
without drawing bridle, a ravine, at which in-
fantry might have paused, and charged furi-
ously up the opposite bank. With such
vehemence did they enter the enemy's ranks,
that they fairly cut the army in two, justify-
ing thus the celebrated saying of that haughty
nobility to one of their kings, that with their
aid no reverse was irreparable ; and that if the
heaven itself were to fall, they would support
it on the points of their lances.
"The shock was so violent that almost all
the lances were splintered. The Pachas of
Aleppo and of Silistria were slain on the spot ;
four other pachas fell under the sabres of
Jablonowski. At the same time Charles of
Lorraine had routed the force of the principa-
lities, and threatened the Ottoman camp. Kara
POLAND.
Mustapha fell at once from the heights of
confidence to the depths of despair. ' Can
you not aid me ?' said he to the Kara of the
Crimea. ' I know the King of Poland,' said
he, ' and I tell you, that with such an enemy
we have no chance of safety but in flight.'
Mustapha in vain strove to rally his troops ;
all, seized with a sudden panic, fled, not daring
to lift their eyes to heaven. The cause of
Europe, of Christianity, of civilization, had
prevailed. The wave of the Mussulman power
had retired, and retired never to return.
"At six in the evening, Sobieski entered the
Turkish camp. He arrived first at the quar-
ters of the vizier. At the entrance of that vast
enclosure a slave met him, and presented him
with the charger and golden bridle of Musta-
pha. He took the bridle, and ordered one of
his followers to set out in haste for the Queen
of Poland, and say that he who owned that
bridle was vanquished ; then planted his
standard in the midst of that armed caravan-
sera of all the nations of the East, and ordered
Charles of Lorraine to drive the besiegers
from the trenches before Vienna. It was
already done ; the Janizzaries had left their
posts on the approach of night, and, after sixty
days of open trenches, the imperial city was
delivered.
" On the following morning the magnitude
of the victory appeared. One hundred and
twenty thousand tents were still standing, not-
withstanding the attempts at their destruction
by the Turks ; the innumerable multitude of
the Orientals had disappeared ; but their spoils,
their horses, their camels, their splendour,
loaded the ground. The king at ten approached
Vienna. He passed through the breach, where-
by but for him on that day the Turks would
have found an entrance. At his approach the
streets were cleared of their ruins; and the
people, issuing from their cellars and their
tottering houses, gazed with enthusiasm on
their deliverer. They followed him to the
church of the Augustins, where, as the clergy
had not arrived, the king himself chanted Te
Deum. This service was soon after performed
with still greater solemnity in the cathedral of
St. Stephen ; the king joined with his face to
the ground. It was there that the priest used
the inspired words- ' There was a man sent
from heaven, and his name was John.' " HI.
50, 101.
During this memorable campaign, Sobieski,
who through life was a tender and affectionate
husband, wrote daily to his wife. At the age
of fifty-four he had lost nothing of the tender-
ness and enthusiasm of his earlier years. In
one of them he says, " I read all your letters,
my dear and incomparable Maria, thrice over;
once when I receive them, once when I retire
to my tent and am alone with my love, once
when I sit down to answer them. I beseech
you, my beloved, do not rise so early; no
health can stand such exertions; if you do,
you will destroy my health, and what is worse,
injure your own, which is my sole consola-
tion in this world." When offered the throne
of Poland, it was at first proposed that he
should divorce his wife, and marry the widow
of the late king, to reconcile the contending
faction. " I am not yet a king," said he, " and
have contracted no obligations towards the
nation: Let them resume their gift; I disdain
the throne if it is to be purchased at such a
price."
It is superfluous, after these quotations, to
say any thing of the merits of M. Salvaridy's
work. It unites, in a rare degree, the qualities
of philosophical thought with brilliant and
vivid description ; and is one of the numerous
instances of the vast superiority of the Modern
French Historians to most of those of whom
Great Britain, in the present age, can boast.
If any thing could reconcile us to the march
of revolution, it is the vast development of
talent which has taken place in France since
her political convulsions commenced, and the
new field which their genius has opened up
in historical disquisitions. On comparing the
historians of the two countries since the resto-
ration, it seems as if they were teeming with
the luxuriance of a virgin soil; while we are
sinking under the sterility of exhausted cul-
tivation. Steadily resisting, as we trust we
shall ever do, the fatal march of French in-
novation, we shall yet never be found wanting
in yielding due praise to the splendour of
French talent; and in the turn which political
speculation has recently taken among the
most elevated minds in their active metropolis,
we are not without hopes that the first rays
of the dawn are to be discerned, which is
destined to compensate to mankind for the
darkness and blood of the revolution.
64
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
MADAME DE STAEL.*
AMIDST the deluge of new and ephemeral
publications under which the press both in
France and England is groaning, and the
woful depravity of public taste, in all branches
of literature, which in the former country has
followed the Revolution of the Three Glorious
Days, it is not the least important part of the
duty of all those who have any share, however
inconsiderable, in the direction of the objects
to which public thought is to be applied, to
recur from time to time to the great and
standard works of a former age; and from
amidst the dazzling light of passing meteors
in the lower regions of the atmosphere, to
endeavour to direct the public gaze to those
fixed luminaries whose radiance in the higher
heavens shines, and ever will shine, in im-
perishable lustre. From our sense of the im-
portance and utility of this attempt, we are
not to be deterred by the common remark,
that these authors are in everybody's hands ;
that their works are read at school, and their
names become as household sounds. We
know that many things are read at school
which are forgotten at college ; and many
things learned at college which are unhappily
and permanently discarded in later years; and
that there are many authors whose names are
as household sounds, whose works for that
very reason are as a strange and unknown
tongue. Every one has heard of Racine and
Moliere, of Bossuet and Fenelon, of Voltaire
and Rousseau, of Chateaubriand and Madame
de Stael, of Pascal and Rabelais. We would
beg to ask even our best informed and most
learned readers, with how many of their works
they are really familiar; how many of their
felicitous expressions have sunk into their
recollections ; how many of their ideas are
engraven on their memory? Others may
possess more retentive memories, or more ex-
tensive reading than we do ; but we confess,
when we apply such a question, even to the
constant study of thirty years, we feel not a
little mortified at the time which has been
misapplied, and the brilliant ideas once ob-
tained from others which have now faded
from the recollection, and should rejoice much
to obtain from others that retrospect of past
greatness which we propose ourselves to lay
before our readers.
Every one now is so constantly in the habit of
reading the new publications, of devouring
the fresh productions of the press, that we for-
get the extraordinary superiority of standard
works ; and are obliged to go back to the
studies of our youth for that superlative en-
joyment which arises from the perusal of
authors, where every sentence is thought, and
often every word conception ; where new trains
of contemplation or emotion are awakened in
every page, and the volume is closed almost
* Blackwood's Magazine, June 1837.
every minute to meditate on the novelty or
justice of the reflections which arise from its
study. And it is not on the first perusal of
these authors that this exquisite pleasure is
obtained. In the heyday of youth and strength,
when imagination is ardent, and the world
unknown, it is the romance of the story, or the
general strain of the argument which carries
the reader on, and many of the finest and most
spiritual reflections are overlooked or un-
appreciated; but in later years, when life has
been experienced, and joy and sorrow felt,
when the memory is stored with recollections,
and the imagination with images, it is reflec-
tion and observation which constitute the chief
attraction in composition. And judging of the
changes wrought by Time in others from what
we have experienced ourselves, we anticipate
a high gratification, even in the best informed
readers, by a direction of their attention to
many passages in the great French writers of
the age of Louis XIV. and the Revolution, a
comparison of their excellences, a criticism
on their defects, and an exposition of the
mighty influence which the progress of poli-
tical events has had upon the ideas reflected,
even to the greatest authors, from the age in
which they lived, and the external events
passing around them.
The two great eras of French prose litera-
ture are those of Louis XIV. and the Revo-
lution. If the former can boast of Bossuet,
the latter can appeal to Chateaubriand: if the
former still shine in the purest lustre in
Fenelon, the latter may boast the more fervent
pages, and varied genius of De Stael ; if the
former is supreme in the tragic and comic
muse, and can array Racine, Corneille' and
Moliere, against the transient Lilliputians of
the romantic school, the latter can show in
the poetry and even the prose of Lamartine a
condensation of feeling, a depth of pathos and
energy of thought which can never be reached
but in an age which has undergone the animat-
ing episodes, the heart-stirring feelings conse-
quent on social convulsion. In the branches of
literature which depend on the relations of men
to each other, history politics historical phi-
losophy and historical romance, the superiority
of the modern school is so prodigious, that it
i;> impossible to find a parallel to it in former
days : and even the dignified language and
eagle glance of the Bishop of Meaux sinks
into insignificance, compared to the vast ability
which, in inferior minds, experience and actual
suffering have brought to bear on the in-
vestigation of public affairs. Modern writers
were for long at a loss to understand the cause
which had given such superior pathos, ener-
gy, and practical wisdom to the historians of
antiquity; but the French Revolution at once
explained the mystery. When modern times
were brought into collision with the passions
and the suffering consequent on democratic
MADAME DE STAEL.
65
ascendency and social convulsion, they were
not long of feeling the truths which experience
had taught to ancient writers, and acquiring
the power of vivid description and condensed
yet fervent narrative by which the great his-
torians of antiquity are characterized.
At the head of the modern prose writers of
France, we place Madame de Stael, Chateau-
briand, and Guizot : The general style of the
two first and the most imaginative of these
writers De Stael and Chateaubriand is es-
sentially different from that of Bossuet, Fenelon
and Massillon. We have no longer either the
thoughts, the language, or the images of these
great and dignified writers ! With the pompous
grandeur of the Grande Monarque; with the
awful splendour of the palace, and the irresisti-
ble power of the throne ; with the superb mag-
nificence of Versailles, its marbles, halls, and
forests of statues, have passed away the train
of thought by which the vices and corruption
then chiefly prevalent in society were combated
by these worthy soldiers of the militia of
Christ. Strange to say, the ideas of that des-
potic age are more condemnatory of princes;
more eulogistic of the people, more con-
firmatory of the principles which, if pushe'd to
their legitimate consequences, lead to demo-
cracy, than those of the age when the sove-
reignty of the people was actually established.
In their eloquent declamations, the wisdom,
justice, and purity of the masses are the con-
stant subject of eulogy ; almost all social and
political evils are traced to the corruptions of
courts and the vices of kings. The applause
of the people, the condemnation of rulers, in
Telemachns, often resembles rather the frothy
declamations of the Tribune in favour of the
sovereign multitude, than the severe lessons
addressed by a courtly prelate to the heir of a
despotic throne. With a fearless courage
worthy of the highest commendation, and very
different from the base adulation of modern
times to the Baal of popular power, Bossuet,
Massillon, and Bourdaloue, incessantly rung
in the ears of their courtly auditory the equality
of mankind in the sight of heaven and the
awful words of judgment to come. These im-
aginary and Utopian effusions now excite a
smile, even in the most youthful student; and
a suffering age, taught by the experienced
evils of democratic ascendency, has now
learned to appreciate, as they deserve, the pro-
found and caustic sayings in which Aristotle,
Sallust, and Tacitus have delivered to future
ages the condensed wisdom on the instability
and tyranny of the popular rule, which ages
of calamity had brought home to the sages of
antiquity.
In Madame de Stael and Chateaubriand we
have incomparably more originality and va-
riety of thought; far more just and expe-
rienced views of human affairs ; far more
condensed wisdom, which the statesman and
the philosopher may treasure in their memo-
ries, than in the great writers of the age of
Louis XIV. We see at once in their produc-
tions that we are dealing with those who speak
from experience of human affairs ; to whom
years of suffering have brought centuries of
wisdom ; and whom the stern school of adver-
sity have learned to abjure both much of the
fanciful El Dorado speculations of preceding
philosophy, and the perilous effusions of suc-
ceeding republicanism. Though the one was
by birth and habit an aristocrat of the ancient
and now decaying school, and the other, a
liberal nursed at the feet of the great Gamaliel
of the Revolution, yet there is no material dif-
ference in their political conclusions; so com-
pletely does a close observation of the progress
of a revolution induce the same conclusions
in minds of the highest stamp, with whatever
early prepossessions the survey may have
been originally commenced. The Dix Annees
d'Exil, and the observations on the French
revolution, might have been written by Cha-
teaubriand, and Madame de Stael would have
little wherefrom to dissent in the Monarchic
selon la Charte, or later political writings of
her illustrious rival.
It is by their works of imagination, taste,
and criticism, however, that these immortal
writers are principally celebrated, and it is
with them that we propose to commence this
critical survey. Their names are universally
known : Corinne, Delphine, De 1'Allemagne,
the Dix Annees d'Exil, and De la Litterature,
are as familiar in sound, at least,, to our ears,
as the Genie de Christianisme, the Itineraire,
the Martyrs, Atala et Rene of the far-travelled
pilgrim of expiring feudalism, are to our
memories. Each has beauties of the very
highest cast in this department, and yet their
excellences are so various, that we know not
to which to award the palm. If driven to dis-
criminate between them, we should say that
De Stael has more sentiment, Chateaubriand
more imagination ; that the former has deeper
knowledge of human feelings, and the latter
more varied and animated pictures of human
manners ; that the charm of the former con-
sists chiefly in the just and profound views of
life, its changes and emotions with which her
works abound, and the fascination of the latter
in the brilliant phantasmagoria of actual
scenes, impressions, and events which his
writings exhibit. No one can exceed Madame
de Stael in the expression of the sentiment or
poetry of nature, or the development of the
varied and storied associations which histori-
cal scenes or monuments never fail to awaken
in the cultivated mind ; but in the delineation
of the actual features she exhibits, or the
painting of the various and gorgeous scenery
or objects she presents, she is greatly inferior
to the author of the Genius of Christianity.
She speaks emotion to the heart, not pictures
to the eye. Chateaubriand, on the other hand,
has dipped his pencil in the finest and most
radiant hues of nature: with a skill surpassing
even that of the Great Magician of the North,
he depicts all the most splendid scenes of both
hemispheres ; and seizing with the inspiration
of genius on the really characteristic features
of the boundless variety of objects he has
visited, brings them before us with a force and
fidelity which it is impossible to surpass.
After all, however, on rising from a perusal
of the great works of these two authors, it is
hard to say which has left the most indelible
impression on the mind; for if the one has
66
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
accumulated a store of brilliant pictures which
have never yet been rivalled, the other has
drawn from the objects on which she has
touched all the most profound emotions which
they could awaken; and if the first leaves a
gorgeous scene painted on the mind, the latter
has engraved a durable impression on the
heart.
CORINJTE is not to be regarded as a novel.
Boarding-school girls, and youths just fledged
from college, may admire it as such, and dwell
with admiration on the sorrows of the heroine
and the faithlessness of Lord Nevil ; but con-
sidered in that view it has glaring faults, both
in respect of fancy, probability, and story, and
will bear no comparison either with the great
novels of Sir Walter Scott, or the secondary
productions of his numerous imitators. The
real view in which to regard it is as a picture
of Italy; its inhabitants, feelings, and recollec-
tions; its cloudless skies and glassy seas; its
forest-clad hills and sunny vales ; its umbra-
geous groves and mouldering forms ; its heart-
inspiring ruins and deathless scenes. As such
it is superior to any work on that subject which
has appeared in any European language. No-
where else shall we find so rich and glowing
an intermixture of sentiment with description ;
of deep feeling for the beauty of art, with a
correct perception of its leading principles;
of historical lore with poetical fancy; of ar-
dour in the cause of social amelioration, with
charity to the individuals who, under unfortu-
nate institutions, are chained to a life of indo-
lence and pleasure. Beneath the glowing sun
and azure skies of Italy she has imbibed the
real modern Italian spirit: she exhibits in the
mouth of her heroine all that devotion to art,
that rapturous regard to antiquity, that insou-
ciance in ordinary life, and constant besoin of
fresh excitement by which that remarkable
people are distinguished from any other at
present in Europe. She paints them as they
really are ; living on the recollection of the
past, feeding on the glories of their double set
of illustrious ancestors ; at times exulting in
the recollection of the legions which subdued
the world, at others recurring with pride to
the glorious though brief days of modern art ;
mingling the names of Caesar, Pompey, Cicero,
and Virgil with those of Michael Angelo, Ra-
phael, Buonarotti, and Correggio; repeating
with admiration the stanzas of Tasso as they
glide through the deserted palaces of Venice,
and storing their minds with the rich creations
of Ariosto's fancy as they gaze on the stately
monuments of Rome.
Not less vividly has she portrayed, in the
language, feelings, and character of her he-
roine, the singular intermixture with these
animating recollections of all the frivolity
which 'has rendered impossible, without a
fresh impregnation of northern vigour, the
regeneration of Italian society. We see in
her pages, as we witness in real life, talents
the most commanding, beauty the most fasci-
nating, graces the most captivating, devoted
to no other object but the excitement of a
transient passion; infidelity itself subjected to
certain restraints, and boasting of its fidelity
to one attachment; whole classes of society
incessantly occupied with no other object but
the gratification of vanity, the thraldom of at-
tachment, or the imperious demands of beauty,
and the strongest propensity of cultivated life,
the besoin d'aimer, influencing, for the best part of
their lives, the higher classes of both sexes.
In such representation there would probably
be nothing in the hands of an ordinary writer
but frivolous or possibly pernicious details ;
but by Madame de Stael it is touched on so
gently, so strongly intermingled with senti-
ment, and traced so naturally to its ultimate
and disastrous effects, that the picture be-
comes not merely characteristic of manners,
but purifying in its tendency.
The Dix AXNEES D'EXIL, though abounding
with fewer splendid and enchanting passages,
is written in a higher strain, and devoted to
more elevated objects than the Italian novel.
It exhibits the Imperial Government of Napo-
| Icon in the palmy days of his greatness ; when
all the Continent had bowed the neck to his
power, and from the rock of Gibraltar to the
Frozen Ocean, not a voice dared to be lifted
against his commands. It shows the internal
tyranny and vexations of this formidable
power; its despicable jealousies and con-
temptible vanity; its odious restrictions and
tyrannizing tendency. W r e see the censorship
chaining the human mind to the night of the
tenth in the opening of the nineteenth century;
the commands of the police fettering every
effort of independent thought and free discus-
sion ; forty millions of men slavishly following
the car of a victor, who, in exchange for all
the advantages of freedom, hoped but never
obtained from the Revolution, dazzled them
with the glitter only of gilded chains. In her
subsequent migrations through Tyrol, Poland,
Russia, and Sweden, to avoid his persecution
during the years which preceded the Russian
war, we have the noblest picture of the ele-
vated feelings which, during this period of
general oppression, were rising up in the na-
tions which yet preserved a shadow of inde-
pendence, as well as of the heroic stand made
by Alexander and his brave subjects against
the memorable invasion which ultimately
proved their oppressor's ruin. These are
animating themes ; and though not in general
inclined to dwell on description, or enrich her
work with picturesque narrative, the scenery
of the north had wakened profound emotions
in her heart which appear in many touches
and reflections of no ordinary sublimity.
Chateaubriand addresses himself much more
habitually and systematically to the eye. He
paints what he has seen, whether in nature,
societ3 r , manners, or art, with the graphic skill
of a consummate draughtsman; and produces
the emotion he is desirous of awakening, not
by direct words calculated to arouse it, but by
enabling the imagination to depict to itself the
objects which in nature, by their felicitous com-
bination, produced the impression. Madame
de Stael does not paint the features of the
scene, but in a few words she portrays the
emotion which she experienced on beholding
it, and contrives by these few words to awaken
it in her readers ; Chateaubriand enumerates
with a painter's power all the features of the
MADAME DE STAEL.
67
scene, and by the vividness of description
succeeds not merely in painting it on the
retina of the mind, but m awakening there the
precise emotion which he himself felt on
beholding it. The one speaks to the heart
through the eye, the other to the eye through
the heart. As we travel with the illustrious
pilgrim of the Revolution, we see rising before
us in successive clearness the lonely temples,
and glittering valleys, and storied capes of
Greece ; the desert plains and rocky ridges
and sepulchral hollows of Judea; the solitary
palms and stately monuments of Egypt; the
isolated remains of Carthage, the deep solitudes
of America, the sounding cataracts, and still
lakes, and boundless forests of the New World.
Not less vivid is his description of human
scenes and actions, of which, during his event-
ful career, he has seen such an extraordinary
variety; the Janissary, the Tartar, the Turk;
the Bedouins of the desert places, the Numi-
dians of the torrid zone; the cruel revolution-
ists of France ; the independent savages of
America; the ardent mind of Napoleon, the
dauntless intrepidity of Pitt. Nothing can
exceed the variety and brilliancy of the pictures
which he leaves engraven on the imagination
of his reader; but he has neither touched the
heart nor convinced the judgment like the
profound hand of his female rival.
To illustrate these observations we have
selected two of the most brilliant descriptions
from Chateaubriand's Genie de Christianisme,
and placed beside these two of the most in-
spired of Madame de StaeTs passages on
Roman scenery. We shall subjoin two of the
most admirable descriptions by Sir Walter
Scott, that the reader may at once have pre-
sented to his view the masterpieces, in the
descriptive line, of the three greatest authors
of the age. All the passages are translated by
ourselves; we have neither translations at
hand, nor inclination to mar so much elo-
quence by the slovenly dress in which it usual-
ly appears in an English version.
" There is a God ! The herbs of the valley,
the cedars of the mountain, bless him the
insect sports in his beams the elephant
salutes him with the rising orb of day the
bird sings him in the foliage the thunder
proclaims him in the heavens the ocean de-
clares his immensity man alone has said,
< There is no God !'
" Unite in thought, at the same instant, the
most beautiful objects in nature ; suppose that
you see at once all the hours of the day, and
all the seasons of the year; a morning of
spring and a morning of autumn ; a night be-
spangled with stars, and a night covered with
clouds; meadows enamelled with flowers,
forests hoary with snow ; fields gilded by the
tints of autumn; then alone you will have a
just conception of the universe. While you
are gazing on that sun which is plunging under
the vault of the west, another observer admires
him emerging from the gilded gates of the east.
By what unconceivable magic does that aged
star, which is sinking fatigued and burning in
the shades of the evening, reappear at the same
instant fresh and humid with the rosy dew of
the morning ? At every instant of the day the
glorious orb is at once rising resplendent at
noonday, and setting in the west ; or rather
our senses deceive us, and there is, properly
speaking, no east, or south, or west, in the
world. Every thing reduces itself to one .single
point, from whence the King of Day scuds
forth at once a triple light in one single sub-
stance. The bright splendour is perhaps that
which nature can present that is most beauti-
ful ; for while it gives us an idea of the per-
petual magnificence and resistless power of
God, it exhibits, at the same time, a shining
image of the glorious Trinity."
Human eloquence probably cannot, in de-
scription, go beyond this inimitable passage ;
but it is equalled in the pictures left us by the
same author of two scenes in the New World.
" One evening, when it was a profound calm,
we were sailing through those lovely seas
which bathe the coast of Virginia, all the
sails were furled I was occupied below when
I heard the bell which called the mariners
upon deck to prayers I hastened to join my
orisons to those of the rest of the crew. The
officers were on the forecastle, with the passen-
gers ; the priest, with his prayer-book in his
hand, stood a little in advance ; the sailors were
scattered here and there on the deck ; we were
all above, with our faces turned towards the
prow of the vessel, which looked to the west.
"The globe of the sun, ready to plunge into
the waves, appeared between the ropes of the
vessel in the midst of boundless space. You
would have imagined, from the balancing of
the poop, that the glorious luminary changed
at every instant its horizon. A few light clouds
were scattered without order in the east, where
the moon was slowly ascending; all the rest of
the sky was unclouded. Towards the north,
forming a glorious triangle with the star of day
and that of night, a glittering cloud arose from
the sea, resplendent with the colours of the
prism, like a crystal pile supporting the vault
of heaven.
" He is much to be pitied who could have
witnessed this scene, without feeling the beau-
ty of God. Tears involuntarily flowed from
my eyes, when my companions, taking off*
their hats, began to sing, in their hoarse strains,
the simple hymn of Our Lady of Succour.
How touching was that prayer of men, who,
on a fragile plank, in the midst of the ocean,
contemplated the sun setting in the midst of
the waves! How that simple invocation of the
mariners to the mother of woes, went to the
heart ! The consciousness of our littleness
in the sight of Infinity our chants prolonged
afar over the waves night approaching with
its sable wings a whole crew of a vessel
filled with admiration and a holy fear God
bending over the abyss, with one hand retain-
ing the sun at the gates of the west, with the
other raising the moon in the east, and yet
lending an attentive ear to the voice of prayer
ascending from a speck in the immensity all
combined to form an assemblage which can-
not be described, and of which the human
heart could hardly bear the weight.
"The scene at land was not less ravishing.
One evening I had lost my way in a forest, al
a short distance from the Falls of Niagara.
68
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
Soon the day expired around me, and I tasted,
in all its solitude, the lovely spectacle of a
night in the deserts of the New World.
" An hour after sunset the raoon showed it-
self above the branches, on the opposite side
of the horizon. An embalmed breeze, which
the Queen of Night seemed to bring with her
from the East, preceded her with its freshen-
ing gales. The solitary star ascended by de-
grees in the heavens ; sometimes she followed
peaceably her azure course, sometimes she
reposed on the groups of clouds, which re-
sembled the summits of lofty mountains covered
with snow. These clouds, opening and clos-
ing their sails, now spread themselves out in
transparent zones of white satin, now dis-
persed into light bubbles of foam, or formed
in the heavens bars of white so dazzling and
sweet, that you could almost believe you felt
their snowy surface.
"The scene on the earth was of equal beau-
ty ; the declining day, and the light of the moon,
descended into the intervals of the trees, and
spread a faint gleam even in the profoundest
part of the darkness. The river which flowed
at my feet, alternately lost itself in the woods,
and reappeared brilliant with the constella-
tions of night which reposed on its bosom. In
a savanna on the other side of the river, the
moonbeams slept without movement on the
verdant turf. A few birches, agitated by the
breeze, and dispersed here and there, formed
isles of floating shadow on that motionless sea
of light. All would have been in profound
repose, but for the fall of a few leaves, the
breath of a transient breeze, and the moaning
of the owl ; while, in the distance, at intervals
the deep roar of Niagara was heard, which,
prolonged from desert to desert in the calm of
the night, expired at length in the endless
solitude of the forest.
"The grandeur, the surpassing melancholy
of that scene, can be expressed by no human
tongue the finest nights of Europe can give
no conception of it. In vain, amidst our cul-
tivated fields, does the imagination seek to ex-
pand it meets on all sides the habitations of
men; but in those savage regions the soul
loves to shroud itself in the ocean of forests,
to hang over the gulf of cataracts, to meditate
on the shores of lakes and rivers, and feel
itself alone as it were with God.
'Prsesentiorem conspicirmis Deum,
Fera per jusa, clivosque prjrruptos,
Sonantes inter aquas nemoruiuque noctem.' "
We doubt if any passages ever were written
of more thrilling descriptive eloquence than
these ; hereafter we shall contrast them with
some of the finest of Lamartine, which have
equalled but not exceeded them. But now
mark the different style with which Madame
de Stael treats the heart-stirring monuments
of Roman greatness.
" At this moment St. Peter arose to their
view; the greatest edifice which man has ever
raised, for the Pyramids themselves are of less
considerable elevation. I would perhaps have
done better, said Corinne, to have taken you
to the most beautiful of our edifices last; but
that is not my system. I am convinced that,
to render one alive to the charm of the fine
arts, w$ should commence with those objects
which awaken a lively and profound admira-
ion. When once that sentiment has been
experienced, a new sphere of ideas is awaken-
ed, which renders us susceptible of the im-
pression produced by beauties of an inferior
order; they revive, though in a lesser degree,
the first impression which has been received.
All these gradations in producing emotion are
contrary to my opinion ; you do not arrive at
the sublime by successive steps; infinite de-
grees separate it from the beautiful.
" Oswald experienced an extraordinary emo-
tion on arriving in front of the fa9ade of St.
Peter's. It wns the first occasion on which a
work of human hands produced on him the
effects of one of the marvels of nature. It is
the only effort of human industry which has
the grandeur which characterizes the imme-
diate works of the Creator. Corinne rejoiced
in the astonishment of Oswald. 'I have
chosen,' said she, ' a day when the sun was
shining in all its eclat to show you this monu-
ment for the first time. I reserve for you a
more sacred religious enjoyment, to contem-
plate it by the light of the moon ; but at this
moment it was necessary to obtain your pre-
sence at the most brilliant of our fetes, the
genius of man decorated by the magnificence
of nature.'
" The Place of St. Peter is surrounded by
columns, which appear light at a distance, but
massy when seen near. The earth, which
rises gently to the gate of the church, adds to
the effect it produces. An obelisk of eighty
feet in height, which appears as nothing in
presence of the cupola of St. Peter's, is in the
middle of the place. The form of obelisks
has something in it which is singularly pleas-
ing to the imagination; their summit loses
itself in the clouds, and seems even to elevate
to the Heavens a great thought of man. That
monument, which was brought from Egypt to
adorn the baths of Caracalla, and which Sex-
tus V. subsequently transported to the foot of
the Temple of St. Peter ; that contemporary
of so many ages which have sought in vain to
decay its solid frame, inspires respect; man
feels himself so fleeting, that he always expe-
riences emotion in presence of that which has
passed unchanged through many ages. At a
little distance, on each side of the obelisk, are
two fountains, the waters of which perpetually
are projected up and fall down in cascades
through the air. That murmur of waters,
which is usually heard only in the field, pro-
duces in such a situation a new sensation ;
but one in harmony with that which arises
from the aspect of so majestic a temple.
" Painting or sculpture, imitating in general
the human figure, or some object in external
nature, awaken in our minds distinct and posi-
tive ideas ; but a beautiful monument of archi-
tecture has not any determinate expression,
and the spectator is seized, on contemplating
it, with that reverie, without any definite ob-
ject, which leads the thoughts so far off. The
sound of the waters adds to these vague and
profound impressions ; it is uniform, as the
edifice is regular.
'Eternal movement and eternal repose*
MADAME DE STAEL.
69
are thus brought to combine with each other.
It is here, in an especial manner, that Time is
without power; it never dries up those spark-
ling streams ; it never shakes those immovable
pillars. The waters, which spring: up in fan-
like luxuriance from these fountains, are so
light and vapoury, that, in a fine day, the raj r s
of the sun produce little rainbows of the most
beautiful colour.
"Stop a moment here, said Corinne to Lord
Nelvil, as he stood under the portico of the
church ; pause before drawing aside the cur-
tain which covers the entrance of the Temple.
Does not your heart beat at the threshold of
that sanctuary 1 ? Do you not feel, on entering
it, the emotion consequent on a solemn event 1 ?
At these words Corinne herself drew aside the
curtain, and held it so as to let Lord Nelvil
enter. Her attitude was *o beautiful in lining so,
that for a Moment it withdrew the eyes of her lover
even from the. majestic interior of the Temple. But
as he advanced, its greatness burst upon his
mind, and the impression which he received
under its lofty arches was so profound, that the
sentiment of love was for a time effaced. He
walked slowly beside Corinne ; both were
silent. Every thing enjoined contemplation ;
the slightest sound resounded so far, that no
word appeared worthy of being repeated in
those eternal mansions. Prayer alone, the
voice of misfortune was heard at intervals in
their vast vaults. And, when under those
stupendous domes, you hear from afar the
voice of an old man, whose trembling steps
totter along those beautiful marbles, watered
with so many tears, you feel that man is ren-
dered more dignified by that very infirmity of
his nature which exposes his divine spirit to
so many kinds of suffering, and that Chris-
tianity, the worship of grief, contains the true
secret of man's sojourn upon earth.
" Corinne interrupted the reverie of Oswald,
and said to him, 'You have seen the Gothic
churches of England and Germany, and must
have observed that they are distinguished by a
much more sombre character than this cathe-
dral. There is something mystical in the Ca-
tholicism of these Northern people ; ours
speaks to the imagination by exterior objects.
Michael Angelo said, on beholding the cupola
of the Pantheon, 'I will place it in the air;'
and, in truth, St. Peter's is a temple raised on
the basement of a church. There is a certain
alliance of the ancient worship with Christi-
anity in the effect which the interior of that
church produces: I often go to walk here
alone, in order to restore to my mind the tran-
quillity it may have lost. The sight of such a
monument is like a continual and fixed music,
awaiting you to pour its balm into your mind,
whenever you approach it ; and certainly,
among the many titles of this nation to glory,
we must number the patience, courage, and
disinterestedness of the chiefs of the church,
who consecrated, during a hundred and fifty
years, such vast treasures and boundless
labour to the prosecution of a work, of which
none of them could hope to enjoy the fruits.'"
Corinne, vol. i. c. 3.
In this magnificent passage, the words un-
derlined are an obvious blemish. The idea
of Oswald turning aside at the entrance of St.
Peter's from the gaze of the matchless interior
of the temple, a spectacle unique in the world,
to feast his eye by admiration of his inamorata,
is more than we, in the frigid latitudes of the
north, can altogether understand. But Ma-
dame de Stae'l was a woman, and a French-
woman ; and apparently she could not resist
the opportunity of signalizing the triumph of
her sex, by portraying the superiority of female
beauty to the grandest and most imposing ob-
ject that the hands of man have ever reared.
Abstracting from this feminine weakness, the
passage is one of almost uniform beauty, and
well illustrates the peculiar descriptive style
of the author; not painting objects, but touch-
ing the cords which cause emotions to vibrate.
She has unconsciously characterized her own
style, as compared with that of Chateaubriand,
in describing the different characters of the
cathedrals of the North and South. " There is
something mystical in the Catholicism of the
Northern people ; ours speaks to the imagina-
tion by exterior objects."
As another specimen of Madame de Stael's
descriptive powers, take her picture of the
Appian Way, with its long lines of tombs on
either side, on the southern quarter of Rome.
"She conducted Lord Nelvil beyond the
gates of the city, on the ancient traces of the
Appian Way. These traces are marked in
the middle of the Campagna of Rome by
tombs, on the right and left of which the ruins
extend as far as the eye can reach for several
miles beyond the walls. Cicero says that, on
leaving the gate, the first tombs you meet are
those of Metellus, the Scipios, and Servillius.
The tomb of the Scipios has been discovered
in the very place which he describes, and
transported to the Vatican. Yet it was, in
some sort, a sacrilege to displace these illus-
trious ashes ; imagination is more nearly allied
than is generally imagined to morality; we
must beware of shocking it. Some of these
tombs are so large, that the houses of peasants
have been worked out in them, for the Romans
consecrated a large space to the last remains
of their friends and their relatives. They
were strangers to that arid principle of utility
which fertilizes a few corners of earth, the
more by devastating the vast domain of senti-
ment and thought.
"You see' at a little distance from the Ap-
pian Way a temple raised by the Republic to
Honour and Virtue ; another to the God which
compelled Hannibal to remeasnre his steps ;
the Temple of Egeria, where Numa went to
consult his tutelar deity, is at a little distance
on the left hand. Around these tombs the
traces of virtue alone are to be found. No
monument of the long ages of crime which
disgraced the empire are to be met with be-
side the places where these illustrious dead
repose ; they rest amongst the relics of the
republic.
"The aspect of the Campagna around Rome
has something in it singularly remarkable.
Doubtless it is a desert; there are neither
trees nor habitations ; but the earth is covered
with a profusion of natural flowers, which
the energy of vegetation renews incessantly.
70
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
These creeping plants insinuate themselves : Even then that obelisk was covered with
among the tombs, decorate the ruins, and
seem to grow solely to do honour to the dead.
You would suppose that nature was too proud
hieroglyphics whose secrets have been kept
for so many ages, and which still withstand
the researches of our most learned scholars.
there to suffer the labours of man, since Cin- Possibly the Indians, the Egyptians, the anti-
cmnatus no longer holds the plough which j quity of antiquity, might be revealed to us in
furrows its bosom ; it produces flowers in
wild profusion, which are of no sort of use to
the existing generation. These vast unculti-
vated planes will doubtless have few attrac-
tions for the agriculturist, administrators, and
all those who speculate on the earth, with a
view to extract from it the riches it is capable
of affording; but the thoughtful minds, whom
death occupies as much as life, are singularly
attracted by the aspect of that Campagna,
where the present times have left no trace ;
that earth which cherishes only the dead, and
covers them in its love with useless flowers
plants which creep along the surface, and
never acquire sufficient strength to separate
themselves from the ashes, which they have the
appearance of caressing." Corinne, 1. v. c. 1.
How many travellers have traversed the
Appian Way, but how few have felt the deep
impressions which these words are fitted to
produce !
" The churches of modern Rome," continues
the same author, " are decorated with the mag-
nificence of antiquity, but there is something
sombre and striking in the intermingling of
these beautiful marbles with the ornaments
stripped from the Pagan temples. The columns
of porphyry and granite were so numerous at
Rome that they ceased to have any value. At
Su John Lateran, that church, so famous from
the councils of which it was the theatre, there
were such a quantity of marble columns that
many of them were covered with plaster to be
converted into pilasters so completely had
the multitude of riches rendered men indiffer-
ent to them. Some of these columns came
from the tomb of Adrian, and bear yet upon
their capitals the mark of the geese which
saved the Roman people. These columns
support the ornaments of Gothic churches,
and some rich sculptures in the arabesque
order. The urn of Agrippa has received the
ashes of a pope, for the dead themselves have
yielded their place to other dead, and the tombs
have changed tenants nearly as often as the
mansions of the living.
" Near to St. John Lateran is the holy stair,
transported from Jerusalem. No one is per-
mitted to go up it but on his knees. In like
manner Caesar and Claudius ascended on their
knees the stair which led to the temple of Ju-
piter Capitolinus. Beside St. John Lateran is
the Baptistery, where Constantine was bap-
tized in the middle of the place before the
church is an obelisk, perhaps the most ancient
monument which exists in the world an obe-
lisk contemporary of the War of Troy an
obelisk which the barbarian Cambyses re-
spected so much as to stop for its beauty the
conflagration of a city an obelisk for which
a king put in pledge the life of his only son.
The Romans in a surprising manner got it
conveyed from the extremity of Egypt to Italy
they turned aside the course of the Nile to
these mysterious signs. The wonderful charm
of Rome consists, not merely in the beauty of
its monuments, but in the interest which they
all awaken, and that species of charm in creases
daily with every fresh study." Ibid. c. 3.
We add only a feeble prosaic translation of
the splendid improvisatore effusion of Corinne
on the Cape of Mesinum, surrounded by the
marvels of the shore of Baiae and the Phleg-
rian fields.
"Poetry, nature, history, here rival each
other in grandeur here you can embrace in
a single glance all the revolutions of time and
all its prodigies.
"I see the Lake of Avernus, the extin-
guished crater of a volcano, whose waters
formerly inspired so much terror Acheron,
Phlegeton, which a subterraneous flame caused
to boil, are the rivers of the infernals visited
by JEneas.
" Fire, that devouring element which created
the world, and is destined to consume it, was
formerly an object of the greater terror that
its laws were unknown. Nature, in the olden
times, revealed its secrets to poetry alone.
" The city of Cumae, the Cave of the Sibylle,
the Temple of Apollo, were placed on that
height. There grew the wood whence was
gathered the golden branch. The country of
^Eneas is around you, and the fictions conse-
crated by genius have become recollections of
which we still seek the traces.
"A Triton plunged into these waves the
presumptive Trojan who dared to defy the di-
vinities of the deep by his songs these water-
worn and sonorous rocks have still the cha-
racter which Virgil gave them. Imagination
was faithful even in the midst of its omnipo-
tence. The genius of man is creative when
he feels Nature imitative when, he fancies he
is creating.
" In the midst of these terrible masses, gray
witnesses of the creation, we see a new moun-
tain which the volcano has produced. Here
the earth is stormy as the ocean, and does
not, like it, re-enter peaceably into its limits.
The heavy element, elevated by subterraneous
fire, fills up valleys, ' rains mountains,' and its
petrified waves attest the tempests which once
tore its entrails.
"If you strike on this hill the subterraneous
vault resounds you would say that the in-
habited earth is nothing but a crust ready to
open and swallow us up. The Campagna of
Naples is the image of human passion sul-
phurous, but fruitful, its dangers and its plea-
sures appear to grow out of those glowing
volcanoes which give to the air so many
charms, and cause the thunder to roll beneath
our feet.
"Pliny boasted that his country was the
most beautiful in existence he studied nature
to be able to appreciate its charms. Seeking
the inspiration of science as a warrior does
bring its waters so as to convey it to the sea. j conquest, he set forth from this promontory to
MADAME DE STAEL.
71
observe Vesuvius athwart the flames, and
those flames consumed him.
" Cicero lost his life near the promontory
of Gaeta, which is seen in the distance. The
Triumvirs, regardless of posterity, bereaved
it of the thoughts which that great man had
conceived it was on us that his murder was
committed.
" Cicero sunk beneath the poniards of ty-
rants Scipio, more unfortunate, was banished
by his fellow-citizens while still in the enjoy-
ment of freedom. He terminated his days
near that shore, and the ruins of his tomb are
still called the ' Tower of our Country.' What
a touching allusion to the last thought of that
great spirit!
" Marius fled into those marshes not far from
the last home of Scipio. Thus in all ages the
people have persecuted the really great; but
they are avenged by their apotheosis, and the
Roman who conceived their power extended
even unto Heaven, placed Romulus, Numa,
and Caesar in the firmament new stars which
confound in our eyes the rays of glory and the
celestial radiance.
" Oh, memory! noble power! thy empire is
in these scenes! From age to age, strange
destiny ! man is incessantly bewailing what
he has lost ! These remote ages are the de-
positaries in their turn of a greatness which is
no more, and while the pride of thought, glory-
ing in its progress, darts into futurity, our sou]
seems still to regret an ancient* country to
which the past in some degree brings it
back." Lib. xii. c. 4.
Enough has now been given to give the un-
lettered reader a conception of the descriptive
character of these two great continental
writers to recall to the learned one some of
the most delightful moments of his life. To
complete the parallel, we shall now present
three of the finest passages of a similar cha-
racter from Sir Walter Scott, that our readers
may be able to appreciate at a single sitting
the varied excellences of the greatest masters
of poetic prose who have appeared in modern
times.
The first is the well-known opening scene
of Ivanhoe.
"The sun was setting upon one of the rich
grassy glades of that forest, which we have
mentioned in the beginning of the chapter.
Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed,
wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed per-
haps the stately march of the Roman soldiery,
flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet
of the most delicious green sward; in some
places they were intermingled with beeches,
hollies, and copsewood of various descrip-
tions, so closely as totally to intercept the level
beams of the sinking sun ; in others they re-
ceded from each other, forming those long
sweeping vistas, in the intricacy of which the
eye delights to lose itself, while imagination
considers them as the paths to yet wilder
scenes of silvan solitude. Here the red rays
of the sun shot a broken and discoloured light,
that partially hung upon the shattered boughs
and mossy trunks of the trees, and there they
illuminated in brilliant patches the portions
of turf to which they made their way. A con-
siderable open space, in the midst of this glade,
seemed formerly to have been dedicated to the
rites of Druidical superstition ; for, on the sum-
mit of a hillock, so regular as to seem artificial,
there still remained part of a circle of rough
unhewn stones, of large dimensions. Seven
stood upright; the rest had been dislodged
from their places, probably by the zeal of
some convert to Christianity, and lay, some
prostrate near their former site, and others on
the side of the hill. One large stone only had
found its way to the bottom, and in stopping
the course of a small brook, which glided
smoothly round the foot of the eminence, gave,
by its opposition, a feeble voice of murmur to
the placid and elsewhere silent streamlet."
The next is the equally celebrated descrip-
tion of the churchyard in the introductory
chapter of Old Mortality.
" Farther up the narrow valley, and in a re-
cess which seems scooped out of the side of
the steep heathy bank, there is a deserted
burial-ground which the little cowards are
fearful of approaching in the twilight. To
me, however, the place has an inexpressible
charm. It has been long the favourite termi-
nation of my walks, and, if my kind patron
forgets not his promise, will (and probably at
no very distant day) be my final resting-place
after my mortal pilgrimage.
"It is a spot which possesses all the solem-
nity of feeling attached, to a burial-ground,
without exciting those of a more unpleasing
description. Having been very little used for
many years, the few hillocks which rise above
the level plain are covered with the same
short velvet turf. The monuments, of which
there are not above seven or eight, are half
sunk in the ground and overgrown with moss.
No newly-erected tomb disturbs the sober se-
renity of our reflections, by reminding us of
recent calamity, and no rank springing grass
forces upon our imagination the recollection,
that it owes its dark luxuriance to the foul and
festering remnants of mortality which ferment
beneath. The daisy which sprinkles the sod,
and the hair-bell which hangs over it, derive
their pure nourishment from the dew of Heaven,
and their growth impresses us with no degrad-
ing or disgusting recollections. Death has in-
deed been here, and its traces are before us;
but they are softened and deprived of their
horror by our distance from the period when
they have been first impressed. Those who
sleep beneath are only connected with us by
the reflection, that they have once been what
we now are, and that, as their relics are now
identified with their mother earth, ours shall,
at some future period, undergo the same trans-
formation."
The third is a passage equally well known,
but hardly less beautiful, from the Antiquary.
"The sun was now resting his huge disk
upon the edge of the level ocean, and gilded
the accumulation of towering clouds through
which he had travelled the livelong day, and
which now assembled on all sides, like mis-
fortunes and disasters around a sinking em-
pire, and falling monarch. Still, however, his
dying splendour gave a sombre magnificence
to the massive congregation of vapours, form-
72
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
ing out of their unsubstantial gloom, the show
of pyramids and towers, some touched with
gold, some with purple, some with a hue of
deep and dark red. The distant sea, stretched
beneath this varied and gorgeous canopy, lay
almost portentously still, reflecting back the
dazzling and level beams of the descending
luminary, and the splendid colouring of the
clouds amidst which he was sitting. Nearer
to the beach, the tide rippled onward in waves
of sparkling silver, that imperceptibly, yet ra-
pidly, gained upon the sand.
" With a mind employed in admiration of
the romantic scene, or perhaps on some more
agitating topic, Miss Wardour advanced in
silence by her father's side, whose recently
offended dignity did not stoop to open any
conversation. Following the windings of the
beach, they passed one projecting point or
headland of rock after another, and now found
themselves under a huge and continued extent
of the precipices by which that iron-bound
coast is in most places defended. Long pro-
jecting reefs of rock, extending under water,
and only evincing their existence by here and
there a peak entirely bare, or by the breakers
which foamed over those that were partially
covered, rendered Knockwinnock bay dreaded
by pilots and ship-masters. The crags which
rose between the beach and the mainland, to
the height of two or three hundred feet, af-
forded in their crevices shelter for unnum-
bered sea-fowl, in situations seemingly secured
by their dizzy height from the rapacity of man.
Many of these wild tribes, with the instinct
which sends them to seek the land before a
storm arises, were now winging towards their
nests with the shrill and dissonant clang which
announces disquietude and fear. The disk of
the sun became almost totally obscured ere he
had altogether sunk below the horizon, and an
early and lurid shade of darkness blotted the
serene twilight of a summer evening. The
wind began next to arise ; but its wild and
moaning sound was heard for some time, and
its effects became visible on the bosom of the
sea, before the gale was felt on shore. The
mass of waters, now dark and threatening,
began to lift itself in larger ridges, and sink in
deeper furrows, forming waves that rose high
in foam upon the breakers, or bursting upon
the beach with a sound resembling distant
thunder."
Few objects are less beautiful than a bare
sheet of water in heathy hills, but see what it
becomes under the inspiration of genius.
"It was a mild summer day; the beams of
the sun, as is not uncommon in Zetland, were I
moderated and shaded by a silvery haze, which j
filled the atmosphere, arid, destroying the strong I
contrast of light and shade, gave even to noon
the sober livery of the evening twilight. The j
little lake, not three-quarters of a mile in cir-
cuit, lay in profound quiet; its surface un-
dimpled, save when one of the numerous
water-fowl, which glided on its surface, dived
for an instant under it. The depth of the water
gave the whole that cerulean tint of bluish
green, which occasioned its being called the
Green Loch ; and at present, it formed so per-
fect a mirror to the bleak hills by which it was
surrounded, and which lay reflected on its
bosom, that it was difficult to distinguish the
water from the land; nay, in the shadowy
uncertainty occasioned by the thin haze, a
stranger could scarce have been sensible that
a sheet of water lay before him. A scene of
more complete solitude, having all its pecu-
liarities heightened by the extreme serenity of
the weather, the quiet gray composed tone of
the atmosphere, and the perfect silence of the
elements, could hardly be imagined. The
very aquatic birds, who frequented the spot in
great numbers, forbore their usual flight and
screams, and floated in profound tranquillity
upon the silent water."
It is hard to say to which of these mighty
masters of description the palm should be
awarded. Scott is more simple in his lan-
guage, more graphic in his details, more
thoroughly imbued with the character of the
place he is desirous of portraying: Chateau-
briand is more resplendent in the images
which he selects, more fastidious in the fea-
tures he draws, more gorgeous from the mag-
nificence with which he is surrounded : Ma-
dame de Stael, inferior to both in the power
of delineating nature, is superior to either in
rousing the"'varied emotions dependent on his-
torical recollections or melancholy impres-
sions. It is remarkable that, though she is a
southern writer, and has thrown into Corinne
all her own rapture at the sun and the recol-
lections of Italy, yet it is with a northern eye
that she views the scenes it presents it is not
with the living, but the mighty dead, that she
holds communion the chords she loves to
strike are those melancholy ones which vi-
brate more strongly in a northern than a
southern heart. Chateaubriand is imbued
more largely with the genuine spirit of the
south : albeit a Frank by origin, he is filled
with the spirit of Oriental poetry. His soul
is steeped in the cloudless skies, and desultory
life, and boundless recollections of the East.
Scott has no decided locality. He has struck
his roots into the .human heart he has de-
scribed Nature with a master's hand, under
whatever aspects she is to be seen; but his
associations are of Gothic origin ; his spirit is
of chivalrous descent; the nature which he
has in general drawn is the sweet gleam of
sunshine in a northern climate.
NATIONAL MONUMENTS.
NATIONAL MONUMENTS."
THE history of mankind, from its earliest
period to the present moment, is fraught with
proofs of one general truth, that it is in small
states, and in consequence of the emulation
and ardent spirit which they develop, that the
human mind arrives at its greatest perfection,
and that the freest scope is afforded both to the
grandeur of moral, and the brilliancy of intel-
lectual character. It is to the citizens of small
republics that we are indebted both for the
greatest discoveries which have improved the
condition or elevated the character of man-
kind, and for the noblest examples of private
and public virtue with which the page of his-
tory is adorned. It was in the republics of
ancient Greece, and in consequence of the
emulation which was excited among her
rival cities, that the beautiful arts of poetry,
sculpture, and architecture were first brought
to perfection; and while the genius of the hu-
man race was slumbering among the innume-
rable multitudes of the Persian and Indian
monarchies, the single city of Athens produced
a succession of great men, whose works have
improved and delighted the world in every
succeeding age. While the vast feudal mo-
narchies of Europe were buried in ignorance
and barbarism, the little states of Florence,
Bologna, Rome, and Venice were far advanced
iu the career of arts and in the acquisition of
knowledge; and at this moment, the traveller
neglects the boundless but unknown tracts of
Germany and France, to visit the tombs of
Raphael, and Michael Angelo, and Tasso, to
dwell in a country where every city and every
landscape reminds him of the greatness of
human genius, or the perfection of human
taste. It is from the same cause that the
earlier history of the Swiss confederacy exhi-
bits a firmness and grandeur of political cha-
racter which we search for in vain in the
annals of the great monarchies by which they
are surrounded, that the classical pilgrim
pauses awhile in his journey to the Eternal
City to do homage to the spirit of its early re-
publics, and sees not in the ruins which, at the
termination of his pilgrimage, surround him,
the remains of imperial Rome, the mistress
and the capital of the world; but of Rome,
when struggling with Corioli and Veii ; of
Rome, when governed by Regulus and Cincin-
natus and traces the scene of her infant wars
with the Latian tribes, with a pious interest,
which all the pomp and magnificence of her
subsequent history has not been able to excite.
Examples of this kind have often led histo-
rians to consider the situation of small re-
publics as that of all others most adapted to
the exaltation and improvement of mankind.
* Blackwood's Magazine, July 1819. and Edinburgh
Review, August 1823. Written when the National Mo-
numents in London and Edinburgh to the late war were
in contemplation, and in review of the Earl of Aberdeen's
Essay on Grecian architecture.
10
To minds of an ardent and enthusiastic cast,
Avho delight in the contemplation of human
genius, or in the progress of public improve-
ment, the brilliancy and splendour of such
little states form the most delightful of all ob-
jects ; and accordingly, the greatest of living
historians, in his history of the Italian republics,
has expressed a decided opinion that in no
other situation is such scope afforded to the
expansion of the human mind, or such facility
afforded to the progressive improvement of our
species.
On the other hand, it is not to be concealed,
that such little dynasties are accompanied by
many circumstances of continued and aggra-
vated distress. Their small dimensions, and
the jealousies which subsist betwixt them, not
only furnish the subject of continual disputes,
but aggravate to an incredible degree the
miseries and devastations of war. Between
such states, it is not conducted with the dig-
nity and in the spirit which characterizes the
efforts of great monarchies, but rather with the
asperity and rancour which belong ,to a civil
contest. While the frontiers only of a great
monarchy suffer from the calamities of war,
its devastations extend to the very heart of
smaller states. Insecurity and instability fre-
quently mark the internal condition of these
republics ; and the activity which the histo-
rian admires in their citizens, is too often em-
ployed in mutually destroying and pillaging
each other, or in disturbing the tranquillity of
the state. It is hence that the sunny slopes
of the Apennines are everywhere crowned by
castellated villages, indicating the universality
of the ravages of war among the Italian States
in former times ; and that the architecture of
Florence and Genoa still bears the character
of that massy strength which befitted the period
when every noble palace was an independent
fortress, and when war, tumult, and violence,
reigned for centuries within their walls ;
while the open villages and straggling cottages
of England bespeak the security with which
her peasants have reposed under the shadow
of her redoubted power.
The universality of this fact has led many
wise and good men to regard small states as
the prolific source of human suffering; and to
conclude that all the splendour, whether in arts
or in science, with which they are surrounded,
s dearly bought at the expense of the peace
and tranquillity of the great body of the peo-
ple. To such men it appears, that the periods
of history on which the historian dwells, or
which have been marked by extraordinary
genius, are not those in which the greatest
public happiness has been enjoyed; but that
it is to be found rather under the quiet and
inglorious government of a great and pacific
empire.
Without pretending to determine which of
these opinions is the best founded, it i^ mure
G
74
J,Iffo
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
important for our present purpose to observe,
that the union of the three kingdoms in the
British Empire, promises to combine for this
country the advantages of both these forms of
government without the evils to which either
is exposed. While her insular situation, and
the union and energy of her people, secure for
Great Britain peace and tranquillity within
her own bounds, the rivalry of the different
nations of whom the empire is composed, pro-
mises, if properly directed, to animate her
people with the ardour and enterprise which
have hitherto been supposed to spring only
from the collision of smaller states.
Towards the accomplishment of this most
desirable object, however, it is indispensable
that each nation should preserve the remem-
brance of its own distinct origin, and look to
the glory of its own people, with an anxious and
peculiar care. It is quite right that the Scotch
should glory with their aged sovereign in the
name of Britain : and that, when considered
with reference to foreign states, Britain should
exhibit a united whole, intent only upon up-
holding and extending the glory of that empire
which her united forces have formed. But it
is equally important that her ancient metro-
polis should not degenerate into a provincial
town; and that an independent nation, once
the rival of England, should remember, with
pride, the peculiar glories by which her people
have been distinguished. Without this, the
whole good effects of the rivalry of the two
nations will be entirely lost ; and the genius
of her different people, in place of emulating
and improving each other, will be drawn into
one centre, where all that is original and cha-
racteristic will be lost in the overwhelming
influence of prejudice and fashion.
Such an event would be an incalculable
calamity to the metropolis, and to the genius
of this country. It is this catastrophe which
Fletcher of Salton so eloquently foretold, when
he opposed the union with England in the
Scottish Parliament. Edinburgh would then
become like Lyons, or Toulouse, or Venice, a
provincial town, supported only by the occa-
sional influx of the gentlemen in its neighbour-
hood, and the business of the courts of law
which have their seat within its walls. The
city and the nation which have produced or
been adorned by David Hume, Adam Smith,
Robert Burns, Dugald Stewart, Principal Ro-
bertson, and Walter Scott, would cease to exist ;
and the traveller would repair to her classical
scenes, as he now does to Venice or Ferrara,
to lament the decay of human genius which
follows the union of independent states.
Nor would such an event be Jess injurious
to the general progress of science and arts
throughout the empire. It is impossible to
doubt, that the circumstance of Scotland being
a separate kingdom, and maintaining a rival-
ship with England, has done incalculable good
to both countries that it has given rise to a
succession of great men, whose labours have
enlightened and improved mankind, who
would not otherwise have acted upon the
career of knowledge. Who can say what
would have been the present condition of
England in philosophy or science, if she had
not been stimulated by the splendid progress
which Scotland was making 1 and who can
calculate the encouragement which Scottish
geniu.s has derived from the generous applause
which England has always lavished upon her
works 1 As Scotchmen, we rejoice in the ex-
altation and eminence of our own country;
but we rejoice not less sincerely in the literary
celebrity of our sister kingdom ; not only from
the interest which, as citizens of the united
empire, we feel in the celebrity of any of its
members, but as affording the secret pledges
of the continued and progressive splendour of
our own country.
It is impossible, however, to contemplate
the effects of the union of the two kingdoms,
from which this country has derived such
incalculable benefits in its national wealth and
domestic industry, without perceiving that in
time, at least, a corresponding decay may take
place in its literary and philosophic acquire-
ments. There are few examples in the history
of mankind, of an independent kingdom being
incorporated with another of greater magni-
tude, without losing, in process of time, the
national eminence, whether in arts or in arms,
to which it had formerly arrived. A rare suc-
cession of great men in our universities, in-
deed, and an extraordinary combination of
talents in the works of imagination, has
hitherto prevented this effect from taking
place. But who can insure a continuance of
men of such extraordinary genius, to keep
alive the torch of science in our northern
regions 1 Is it not to be apprehended that the
attractions of wealth, of power, and of fashion,
which have so long drawn our nobles and
higher classes to the seat of government, may,
ere long, exercise a similar influence upon our
national genius, and that the melancholy ca-
tastrophe which Fletcher of Salton described,
with all its fatal consequences, may be, even
now, approaching to its accomplishment ?
Whatever can arrest this lamentable pro-
gress, and fix down, in a permanent manner,
the genius of Scotland to its own shores, con-
fers not only an incalculable benefit upon this
country, but upon the united empire of which
it forms a part. The erection of National Mo-
numents in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh,
seems calculated, in a most remarkable man-
ner, to accomplish this most desirable object.
To those, indeed, who have not been in the
habit of attending to the influence of animating
recollections upon the development of every
thing that is great or generous in human cha-
racter, it may appear that the effects we anti-
cipate from such structures are visionary and
chimerical. But when a train is ready laid, a
spark will set it in flames. The Scotch have
always been a proud and an ardent people;
and the spirit which animated their forefathers,
in this respect, is not yet extinct. The Irish
have genius, which, if properly directed, is
equal to any thing. England is the centre of
the intellectual progress of the earth. Upon
people so disposed, it is difficult to estimate
the effects which splendid edifices filled with
monuments to the greatest men whom their
respective countries can boast, may ultimately
produce. It will give stability and consistence
NATIONAL MONUMENTS.
75
to the national pride, a feeling which, when
properly directed, is the surest foundation of
national eminence. It will perpetuate the re-
membrance of the brave and independent
Scottish nation a feeling, of all others, the
best suited to animate the exertions of her
remotest descendants. It will teach her inha-
bitants to look to their own country for the
scene of their real glory ; and while Ireland
laments the absence of a nobility insensible to
her fame, and unworthy of the land of Burke
and Goldsmith, it will be the boast of this
country, to have erected on her own shores a
monument worthy of her people's glory, and
to have disdained to follow merely the triumphs
of that nation, whose ancestors they have ere
now vanquished in the field.
Who has not felt the sublime impression
which the interior of Westminster Abbey pro-
duces, w^here the poets, the philosophers, and
the statesmen of England, " sleep with her
kings, and dignify the scene?" Who has
viewed the church of St. Croce at Florence, and
seen the tombs of Galileo, and Machiavelli,
Michael Angelo, and Alfieri, under one sacred
roof, without feeling their hearts swell with
the remembrance of her ancient glory; and,
among the multitudes who will visit the sacred
pile that is to perpetuate the memory of Scot-
tish or Irish greatness, how many may there
be whom so sublime a spectacle may rouse to
a sense of their native powers, and animate
with the pride of their country's renown ; and
in whom the remembrance of the "illustrious
of ancient days" may awaken the noble feeling
of Correggio, when he contemplated the works
of the Roman masters ; " I too am a Painter."
Nor do we think that such monuments
could produce effects of less importance upon
the military character and martial spirit of the
Scottish people in future ages. The memory
of the glorious achievements of our age, in-
deed, will never die, and the page of history
will perpetuate, to the higher orders, the recol-
lection of the events \vhich have cast so unri-
valled a splendour over the British nation, in
the commencement of the nineteenth century.
But the study of history has been, hitherto at
least, confined to few, comparatively speaking,
of the population of a country ; and the know-
ledge which it imparts can never extend uni-
versally to the poorer class, from whom the
materials of an army are to be drawn. In the
ruder and earlier periods of society, indeed,
the traditions of warlike events are preserved
for a series of years, by the romantic ballads,
which are cherished by a simple and primitive
people. The nature of the occupations in
which they are principally engaged, is favour-
able to the preservation of such heroic recol-
lections. But in the state of society in which
we live, it is impossible that the record of past
events can be thus engraven on the hearts of a
nation. The uniformity of employments in
which the lower orders are engaged the se-
vere and unremitting toil to which they are
exposed the division of labour which fixes
them down to one limited and unchanging oc-
cupation, the prodigious numbers in which
they are drawn to certain centres of attrac-
tion far from the recollections of their early
years, all contribute to destroy those ancient
traditions, on the preservation of which so
inueh of the martial .spirit of a people depends.
The peasantry in the remoter parts of Scotland
can still recount some of the exploits, and
dwell with enthusiasm on the adventures of
Bruce or Wallace; but you will search in
vain among the English poor for any record
of the victories of Cressy or Azincour, of
Blenheim or Ramillies. And even among the
higher orders, the experience of every day is
sufficient to convince us that the remembrance
of ancient glory, though not forgotten, may
cease to possess any material influence on the
character of our people. The historian, in-
deed, may recount the glorious victories of
Vittoria, Trafalgar, and Waterloo ; and their
names may be familiar to every ear; but the
name may be remembered when the heart-
stirring spirit which they should awaken is no
longer felt. For a time, and during the life-
time of the persons who were distinguished in
these events, they form a leading subject of
the public attention ; but when a new genera-
tion succeeds, and different cares and fashions
and events occupy the attention of the nation,
the practical effects of these triumphs is lost,
how indelibly soever they may be recorded in
the pages of history. The victories of Poic-
tiers, and Blenheim, and Minden had long ago
demonstrated the superiority of the English
over the French troops ; but though this fact
appeared unquestionable to those who studied
the history of past events, everybody knows
with what serious apprehension a French in-
vasion was contemplated in this country,
within our own recollection.
It is of incalculable importance, therefore,
that some means should be taken to preserve
alive the martial spirit which the recent
triumphs have awakened; and to do this, in
so prominent a way as may attract the atten-
tion of the most thoughtless, and force them
on the observation of the most inconsiderate.
It is from men of this description from the
young, the gay, and the active, that our armies
are filled ; and it is on the spirit with which
they are animated that the national safety de-
pends. Unless they are impressed with the
recollection of past achievements, and a sense
of the glories of that country which they are
to defend, it will little avail us in the moment
of danger, that the victories on which every
one now dwells with exultation, are faithfully
recorded in history, and well known to the
sedentary and pacific part of our population.
It is upon the preservation of this spirit that
the safety of every nation must depend. It is
in vain that it may be encircled with fortresses,
or defended by mountains, or begirt by the
ocean ; its real security is to be found in the
spirit and the valour of its people. The army
which enters the field in the conviction that it
is to conquer, has already gained the day. The
people, who recollect with pride the achieve-
ments of their forefathers, will not prove un-
worthy of them in the field of battle. The
remembrance of their heroic actions preserved
the independence of the Swiss republics, amidst
the powerful empires by which they were sur-
rounded ; and the glory of her armies, joined
76
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
to the terror of her name, upheld the Roman |
empire for centuries after the warlike spirit j
of the people was extinct. It is this which
constitutes the strength and multiplies the
triumphs of veteran soldiers; and it is this
which renders the qualities of military valour
and prowess hereditary in a nation.
Every people, accordingly, whose achieve-
ments are memorable in past history, have
felt the influence of these national recollec- j
tions, and received them as the most valuable '
inheritance from their forefathers. The states-
men of Athens, when they wished to rouse that
fickle people to any great or heroic action, re-
minded them of the national glory of their
ancestors, and pointed to the Acropolis crown- 1
ed with the monuments of their valour; De-
mosthenes in the most heart-stirring apostro- I
phe of antiquity invoked the shades of those i
who died at Marathon and Plata&a, to sanctify j
the cause in which they were to be engaged.
The Swiss peasants, for five hundred years |
after the establishment of their independence, !
assembled on the fields of Morgarten and Lau-
pen, and spread garlands over the graves of
the fallen warriors, and prayed for the souls \
of those who had died for their country's free-
dom. The Romans attached a superstitious |
reverence to the rock of the capitol, and loaded
its temples with the spoils of the world, and
looked back with a mixture of veneration and
pride, to the struggles which it had witnessed, ,
and the triumphs which it had won.
"Capitoli immobile saxum."
So long as Manlius remained in sight of the
capitol, his enemies found it impossible to ob-
tain a conviction of the charges against him.
When Scipio Africanus was accused by a fac-
tion in the forum, in place of answering the
charge, he turned to the capitol, and invited
the people to accompany him to the temple of
Jupiter, and return thanks for the defeat of the
Carthagenians. Such was the influence of
local associations on that severe people ; and
so natural is it for the human mind to imbody
its recollections in some external object ; and
so important an effect are these recollections
fitted to have, when they are perpetually
brought back to the public mind by the sight of
the objects to which they have been attached.
The erection of a national monument, on a
scale suited to the greatness of the events it is
intended to commemorate, seems better calcu-
lated than any other measure to perpetuate the
spirit which the events of our times have
awakened in this country. It will force itself
on the observation of the most thoughtless,
and recall the recollection of danger and glory,
during the slumber of peaceful life. Thousands
who never would otherwise have cast a thought
upon the glory of their country, will by it be
awakened to a sense of what befits the de-
scendants of those great men who have died
in the cause of national freedom. While it
will testify the gratitude of the nation to de-
parted worth, it will serve at the same time to
mark the distinction which similar victories
may win. Like the Roman capitol, it will
stand at once the monument of former great-
ness, and the pledge of future glory.
Nor is it to be imagined that the national
monument in London is sufficient for this pur-
pose, and that the commencement of a similar
undertaking in Edinburgh or Dublin is an un-
necessary or superfluous proceeding. It is
quite proper, that in the metropolis of the
United Empire, the trophies of its common
triumphs should be found, and that the na-
tional funds should there be devoted to the
formation of a monument, worthy of the
splendid achievements which her united forces
have performed. But the whole benefits of
the emulation between the two nations, from
which our armies have already derived such
signal advantage, would be lost, if Scotland
were to participate only in the triumphs of
her sister kingdom, without distinctly mark-
ing its own peculiar and national pride, in the
glory of her own people. The valour of the
Scottish regiments is known and celebrated
from one end of Europe to the other; and this
circumstance, joined to the celebrity of the
poems of Ossian, has given a distinction to
our soldiers, to which, for so small a body of
men, there is no parallel in the history of the
present age. Would it not be a subject of re-
proach to this country, if the only land in
which no record of their gallantry is to be
found, was the land which gave them birth ;
and that the traveller who has seen ihe tartan
hailed with enthusiasm on every theatre of
Europe, should find it forgotten only in the
metropolis of that kingdom which owes its
salvation to the bravery by which it has been
distinguished'?
The animating effects, moreover, which the
sight of a national trophy is fitted to have on
a martial people, would be entirely lost in this
country, if no other monument to Scottish or
Irish valour existed than the monument in
London. There is not a hundredth part of
our population who have ever an opportunity
of going to that city; or to whom the existence
even of such a record of their triumph could
be known. Even upon those who may see it,
the peculiar and salutary effect of a national
monument would be entirely lost. It would
be regarded as a trophy of English glory ; and
however much it might animate our descend-
ants to maintain the character of Britain on
the field of European warfare, it would leave
wholly untouched those feelings of generous
emulation by which the rival nations of Eng-
land and Scotland have hitherto been animated
towards each other, and to the existence of
which, so much of their common triumphs
have been owing.
It is in the preservation of this feeling of
rivalry that we anticipate the most important
effects of a national monument in this me-
tropolis. There is no danger that the ancient
animosity of the two nations will ever revive,
or that the emulation of our armies will lead
them to prove unfaithful to the common cause
in which they must hereafter be engaged. The
stern feelings of feudal hatred with which the
armies of England and Scotland formerly met
at Flodden or Bannockburn, have now yielded
to the emulation and friendship which form
the surest basis of their common prosperity.
But it is of the last importance that these feel-
NATIONAL MONUMENTS.
77
ings of national rivalry should not be extin-
guished. In every part of the world the good
effects of this emulation have been expe-
rienced. It is recorded, that at the siege of
Namur, when the German troops were re-
pulsed from the breach, King William ordered
his English guards to advance ; and the veteran
warrior was so much affected with the devoted
gallantry with which they pressed on to the
assault, that, bursting into tears, he exclaimed,
"See how my brave English fight." At the
storm of Bhurtpoor, when one of the British
regiments was forced back by the dreadful
tire that played on the breach, one of the na-
tive regiments was ordered to advance, and
these brave men cheered as they passed the
British troops, who lay trembling in the
trenches. Everybody knows the distinguished
gallantry with which the Scottish and Irish re-
giments, in all the actions of the present war,
have sought to maintain their ancient repute
tion ; and it is not to be forgotten, that the first
occasion on which the steady columns of
France were broken by a charge of cavalry,
when the leading regiments of England, Scot-
land, and Ireland, bore down with rival valour
on their columns; and in the enthusiastic cry
of the Grays, "Scotland for ever," we may
perceive the value of those national recollec-
tions which it is the object of the present edi-
fice to reward and perpetuate.
If this spirit shall live in her armies ; if the
rival valour which was formerly excited in
their fatal wars against each other, shall thus
continue to animate them when fighting against
their common enemies, and if the remem-
brance of former division is preserved only to
cement the bond of present union, Britain and
Ireland may well, like the Douglas and Percy,
both together " be confident against the world
in arms."
Foreign foe or false bepuilinjr,
Shall our union ne'er divide,
Hand in hand, while peace is smiling,
And in battle side by side.
There is no fact more certain than that a
due appreciation of the grand or the beautiful
in architectural design is not inherent in any
individual or in any people ; and that towards
the formation of a correct public taste, the ex-
istence of fine models is absolutely essential. It
is this which gives men who have travelled in
Italy or Greece so evident a superiority in
considering the merits of the works of art in
this country over those who have not had
similar advantages; and it is this which renders
taste hereditary among a people who have the
models of ancient excellence continually be-
fore their eyes. The taste of Athens continued
to distinguish its people long after they had
ceased to be remarkable for any other and
more honourable quality; and Rome itself, in
the days of its imperial splendour, was com-
pelled to borrow, from a people whom she had
vanquished, the trophies by which her victories
were to be commemorated. To this day the
lovers of art flock from the most distant parts
of the world to the Acropolis, and dwell with
rapture on its unrivalled beauties, and seek to
inhale, amid the ruins that surround them, a
portion of the spirit by which they were con-
ceived. The remains of ancient Rome still
serve as the model of every thing that is great
in the designs of modern architects; and in
the Parthenon and the Coliseum we find the
originals on which the dome of St. Peter's and
the piazza St. Marco have been formed. It is
a matter of general observation, accordingly,
that the inhabitants of Italy possess a degree
of taste both in sculpture, architecture, and
painting, which few persons of the most culti-
vated understanding in transalpine countries
can acquire. So true it is, that the existence
of fine models lays the only foundation of a
correct public taste; and that the transference
of the model of ancient excellence to this
country is the only means of giving to our
people the taste by which similar excellence
is to be produced.
Now it has unfortunately happened that the
Doric architecture, to which so much of the
beauty of Greece and Italy is owing, has been
hitherto little understood, and still less put in
practice in this country. We meet with few
persons who have not visited the remains of
classical antiquity, who can conceive the
matchless beauties of the temples of Minerva
at Athens, or of Neptune at Poestum. And,
indeed, if our conceptions of the Doric betaken
from the few attempts at imitation of it which
are here to be met with, they would fall very
far short, indeed, of what the originals are
fitted to excite.
We are far from underrating the genius of
modern architects, and it would be ungrateful
to insinuate, that sufficient ability for the
formation of an original design is not to be
found. But in the choice of designs for a
building which is to stand for centuries, and
from which the taste of the metropolis in
future ages is in a greater measure to be
formed, it is absolutely essential to fix upon
some model of known and approved excellence.
The erection of a monument in bad taste, or
even of doubtful beauty, might destroy the
just conceptions on this subject, which are
beginning to prevail, and throw the national
taste a century back at the time when it is
making the most rapid advances towards per-
fection. It is in vain to expect that human
genius can ever make any thing more beauti-
ful than the Parthenon. It is folly, therefore,
to tempt fortune, when certainty is in our
hands.
There are many reasons besides, which
seem in a peculiar manner to recommend the
Doric temple for the proposed monuments. By
the habits of modern times, a different species
of architecture has been devoted to the differ-
ent purposes to which buildings may be ap-
plied ; and it is difficult to avoid believing,
that there is something in the separate styles
which is peculiarly adapted to the different
emotions they are intended to excite. The
light tracery, and lofty roof, and airy pillars
of the Gothic, seem to accord well with the
sublime feelings and spiritual fervour of re-
ligion. The massy wall, and gloomy character
of the castle, bespeak the abode of fendal
power and the pageantry of barbaric magni-
ficence. The beautiful porticoes, and columns.
and rich cornices of the Ionic or Corinthian,
78
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
seem well adapted for the public edifices in a
great city ; for those which are destined for
amusement, or to serve for the purpose of
public ornament. The Palladian style is that
of all others best adapted for the magnificence
of private dwellings, and overwhelms the
spectator by a flood of beauty, against which
the rules of criticism are unable to withstand.
If any of these styles of architecture were to
be transferred from buildings destined for one
purpose to those destined for another, the im-
propriety of the change would appear very
conspicuous. The gorgeous splendour of the
Palladian front would be entirely misplaced,
in an edifice destined for the purpose of re-
ligion ; and the rich pinnacles and gloomy
aisles of the Gothic, would accord ill with the
scene of modern amusement or festivity.
Now a National Monument is an edifice of
a very singular kind, and such as to require a
style of architecture peculiar to itself. The
Grecian Doric, as it is exhibited in the Par-
thenon, appears singularly well adapted for
this purpose. Its form and character is asso-
ciated in every cultivated mind with the re-
collections of classical history ; and it recalls
the brilliant conceptions of national glory as
they were received during the ardent and
enthusiastic period of youth; while its stern
and massy form befits an edifice destined to
commemorate the severe virtues and manly
character of war. The effect of such a build-
ing, and the influence it would have on the
public taste, would be increased to an in-
definite degree, by the interest of the purpose
to which it is destined. An edifice which re-
called at once the interest of classical associa-
tion, and commemorated the splendour of our
own achievements, would impress itself in the
most indelible manner on the public mind,
and force the beauty of its design on the most
careless observer. And there can be no doubt
that this impression would be far greater, just
because it arose from a style of building
hitherto unknown in this country, and pro-
duced an effect as dissimilar from that of any
other architectural design, as the national
emotions which it is intended to awaken are
from those to which ordinary edifices are des-
tined.
We cannot help considering this as a matter
of great importance to this city, and to the
taste of the age in which we live. It is no
inconsiderable matter to have one building of
faultless design erected, and to have the youth
of our people accustomed from their infancy
to behold the work of Phidias. But the ulti-
mate effect which such a circumstance might
produce on the taste of the nation, and the
celebrity of this metropolis, is far more im-
portant. It is in vain to conceal, that the
wealth and the fashion of England is every
day attracting the higher part of our society
to another capital; and that Edinburgh can
never possess attractions of the same descrip-
tion with London, sufficient to enable her to
stand an instant in the struggle. But while
London must always eclipse this city in all
that depends on wealth, power, or fashionable
elegance, nature has given to it the means of
establishing a superiority of a higher and a
more permanent kind. The matchless beauty
of its situation, the superb cliffs by which it
is surrounded, the magnificent prospects of
the bay, which it commands, have given to
Edinburgh the means of becoming the most
beautiful town that exists in the world. And
the inexhaustible quarries of free-stone, which
lie in the immediate vicinity, have rendered
architectural embellishment an easier object
in this city than in any other in the empire.
It cannot be denied, however, that much still
remains to be done in this respect, and that
every stranger observes the striking contrast
between the beauty of its private houses, and
the deplorable scantiness of its public build-
ings. The establishment of a taste for edifices
of an ornamental description, and the gradual
purification of the popular taste, which may
fairly be expected from the influence of so
perfect a model as the Parthenon of Athens,
would ultimately, in all probability, render
this city the favourite residence of the fine
arts ; the spot to which strangers would re-
sort, both as the place where the rules of taste
are to be studied, and the models of art are to
be found. And thus, while London is the
Rome of the empire, to which the young, and
the ambitions, and the gay, resort for the pur-
suit of pleasure, of fortune, or of ambition,
Edinburgh might become another Athens, in
which the arts and the sciences flourished,
under the shade of her ancient fame, and
established a dominion over the minds of men
more permanent than even that which the
Roman arms were able to effect.
The Greeks always fixed on an eminence
for the situation of their temples, and what-
ever was the practice of a people of such ex-
quisite taste is well worthy of imitation. The
Acropolis of Athens, the Acrocorinthus of
Corinth, the temple of Jupiter Panhellenius,
in -^Egina, are instances of the beauty of these
edifices when placed on such conspicuous
situations. At Athens, in particular, the tem-
ples of Jupiter Olympius and of Theseus are
situated in the plain; but although the former
is built in a style of magnificence to which
there is no parallel, and is double the size of
the Parthenon, its effect is infinitely less strik-
ing than that of the temple of Minerva, which
crowns the Acropolis, and meets the eye from
every, part of the adjacent country. The tem-
ple of Jupiter Panhellenius, in the island of
JEgina., is neither so large nor so beautiful as
the temple of Theseus ; but there is no one
who ever thought of comparing the effect
which the former produces, crowning a rich
and wooded hill, to that which is felt on view-
ing the latter standing in the plain of Attica.
The temple of Neptune, at Peestum, has a
sublime effect from the desolation that sur-
rounds it, and from the circumstance of there
being no eminence for many miles to interfere
with its stern and venerable form ; but there
is no one who must not have felt that the
grandeur of this edifice would be entirely lost
if it was placed in a modern city, and over-
topped by buildings destined for the most or-
dinary purposes. The temple of Vesta, at
Tivoli, perched on the crag which overhangs
the cataract, is admired by all the world; but
NATIONAL MONUMENTS.
the temple to the same goddess, on the banks
of the Tiber, at Rome, is passed over without
notice, though the intrinsic beauty of the one
is nearly as great as that of the other. In the
landscapes too of Claude and Poussin, who
knew so well the situation in which every
building appears to most advantage, the rains
of temples are almost always placed on pro-
minent fronts, or on the summit of small
hills ; in such a situation, in short, as the Gal-
lon Hill of Edinburgh presents. The practice
of the ancient Greeks, in the choice of situa-
tions for their temples, joined to that of the
modern Italian painters in their ideal repre-
sentations of the same objects, leaving no
room to doubt that the course which they fol-
lowed was that which the peculiar nature of
the building required.
But all objects of local interest sink into
insignificance compared with the vast effect
which a restoration of so perfect a relic of
antiquity as the Parthenon of Athens would
have on the national taste, and ultimately on
the spread of refined and elevating feelings
among the inhabitants of the country. As
this is a subject of the very highest import-
ance, and which is not generally so well
understood as it should be, we crave the in-
dulgence of our readers to a few observations,
conceived in the warmest feeling of interest
in modern art, but a strong sense of the only
means by which it can be brought to the ex-
cellence of which it is susceptible.
It is observed by Madame de Stael, " that
architecture is the only art which approaches,
in its effects, to the works of nature," and
there are few, we believe, who have not, at
some period of their lives, felt the truth of the
observation. The Cathedral of York, the
Dome of St. Paul's, or the interior of St.
Peter's, are scarcely eclipsed in our recollec-
tion wilh the glories of human creation; and
the impression which they produce is less
akin to admiration of the talent of an artist,
than to the awe and veneration which the tra-
veller feels when he first enters the defiles of
the Alps.
It has often been a matter of regret to per-
sons of taste in this country, that an art so
magnificent in its monuments, and so power-
ful in its effect, has been so little the object
of popular cultivation; nor is it perhaps
easy to understand, how a people so much
alive to the grand and beautiful in the other
departments of taste, should so long have re-
mained insensible to the attractions of one of
its most interesting branches. Many causes
have, doubtless, conspired to produce this
effect; but among these, the principal, we are
persuaded, is to be found in the absence of
any monuments of approved excellence to form the
taste, and excite the admiration of the public.
And, in this respect, there is an important dis--
tinction, which is often overlooked, between
architecture and the other departments of art
or literature.
In poetry, painting, or sculpture, the great
works of former times are in everybody's
hands ; and the public taste has long ago been
formed on the study of those remains of an-
cient genius, which still continue, notwith-
standing the destruction of the people who
gave them birth, to govern the imagination .f
succeeding ages. The poetry of Virgil, and
the eloquence of Cicero, form the first objects
to which the education of the young is di-
rected ; the designs of Raphael and Correggio
have been multiplied by the art of engraving,
to almost as great an extent as the classical
authors ; and casts, at least, of the Apollo and
the Venus, are familiar to every person who
has paid the smallest attention to the beauty
of the human form. It is on the hulntmd
study of these works that the public taste has
been formed; and the facility of engraving
and painting has extended our acquaintance
with their excellencies, almost as far as
knowledge or education hate extended in the
world.
But with architecture the case is widely
different. Public edifices cannot be published
and circulated with the same facility as an
edition of Virgil, or a print of Claude Lorraine.
To copy or restore such monuments, requires
an expenditure of capital, and an exertion of
skill, almost as great as their original con-
struction. Nations must be far advanced in
wealth and attainment before such costly un-
dertakings can be attempted. And if the su-
perstition of an earlier age has produced
structures of astonishing magnitude and ge-
nius, . they are of a kind which, however
venerable or imposing, are not calculated to
have the same effect in chastening the public
taste, with those that arose in that auspicious
period when all the finer powers of the mind
had attained their highest exaltation. It thus
unfortunately happens, that architecture can-
not share in the progress which the other fine
arts are continually making from the circula-
tion and study of the works of antiquity; and
successive nations are often obliged to begin
anew the career which their predecessors
have run, and fall inevitably into the errors
which they had learned to avoid.
The possibility of multiplying drawings or
engravings of the edifices of antiquity, or of
informing distant nations of their proportions
and dimensions, has but little tendency to
obviate this disadvantage. Experience has
shown that the best drawings convey a most
inadequate conception of architectural gran-
deur, or of the means by which it is produced.
To those, indeed, who have seen the originals,
such engravings are highly valuable, because
they awaken and renew the impression which
the edifices themselves have made ; but to
those who have not had this advantage, they
speak an unknown language. This is matter
of common observation; and there is no tra-
veller who has returned from Greece or Italy,
who will not confirm its truth. It is as im-
possible to convey a conception of the exterior
of the Parthenon, or the interior of St. Peter's,
by the finest drawings accompanied by the
most accurate statement of their dimensions,
as to give the inhabitants of a level country
a true sense of the sublimity of the Alps, by
exhibiting a drawing of the snowy peaks of
M.)nt Blanc, and informing him of its altitude
according to the latest trigonometrical obser
rations.
80
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
Even if drawings could convey a concep-
tion of the original structures, the taste for
this art is so extremely limited that it could
have but little effect in obviating the disadvan-
tage of their remote situation. There is not
one person in a hundred who ever looks at a
drawing, or, if he does, is capable of deriving
the smallest pleasure from the finest produc-
tions of that branch of art. To be reduced to
turn over a portfolio of engravings, is prover-
bially spoken of as the most wretched of all
occupations in a drawing-room ; and it is no
uncommon thing to see the productions of
Claude, or Poussin, or Williams, abounding
in all the riches of architectural ornament,
passed over without the slightest indication of
emotion, by persons of acknowledged taste in
other respects. And yet the same individuals,
who are utterly insensible to architectural ex-
cellence in this form, could not avoid acquiring
a certain taste for its beauties, if they were
the subject of habitual observation, in edifices
at home, or obtruded upon their attention in
the course of foreign travelling.
Besides this, the architect is exposed to in-
surmountable difficulties, if the cultivation of
those around him has not kept pace with his
own, and if they are incapable of feeling the
beauty of the edifices on which his taste has
been formed. It is to no purpose that his own
taste may have been improved by studying the
ruins of Athens or Rome, unless the taste of
his employers has undergone a similar ameliora-
tion, his genius will remain dormant, and his
architectural drawings be suffered to lie in
unnoticed obscurity in the recesses of his
portfolio. The architect, it should always be
remembered, cannot erect edifices, as the poet
writes verses, or the painter covers his can-
vas, without any external assistance. A great
expenditure of capital is absolutely essential
to the production of any considerable specimen
of his art : and, therefore, unless he can com-
municate his own enthusiasm to the wealthy,
and unless a growing desire for architectural
embellishments is sufficient to overcome the
inherent principle of parsimony, or the inte-
rested views of individuals, or the jealousy of
public bodies, he will never have an opportu-
nity of displaying his genius, or all his at-
tempts will be thwarted by persons incapable
of appreciating it. And unfortunately the
talents of no artist, how great soever, can
effect such a revolution; it can be brought
about only by the continued observation of beauti-
ful edifices, and the diffusion of a taste for the
art among all the well-educated classes of the
people.
The states of antiquity lay so immediately
in the vicinity of each other, that the progress
of architecture was uninterrupted; and thus
people of each nation formed their taste by the
study of the structures of those to whom they
lay adjacent. The Athenians, in particular, in
raising the beautiful edifices which, have so
long been the admiration of the world, pro-
ceeded entirely upon the model of the build-
ings by which they were surrounded, and the
temple of Jupiter Panhellenius, in the island
of JGgina, which is said to have been built by
JEaciis before the Trojan War, remains to this
day to testify the species of edifices on which
their national taste was formed. The Ionic
order, as its name denotes, arose in the wealthy
regions of Asia Minor; and when the Athe-
nians turned their attention to the embellish-
ment of their city, they had, in their immediate
vicinity, edifices capable of pointing out the
excellencies of that beautiful style. The Ro-
mans formed their taste upon the architecture
of the people whom they had subdued, and
adopted all their orders from the Grecian
structures. Their early temples were exactly
similar to those of their masters in the art of
design; and when the national taste was
formed upon that model, they combined them,
as real genius will, into different forms, and
left the Coliseum and the baths of Dioclesian
as monuments of the grandeur and originality
of their conceptions.
In modern times, the restoration of taste first
began around the edifices of antiquity. "On
the revival of the art in Italy," says Lord Aber-
deen, ' during the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies, the great architects who adorned that
country naturally looked for instruction to the
monuments with which they were surrounded:
the wrecks and fragments of Imperial Rome.
These were not only successfully imitated, but
sometimes even surpassed by the Italian art-
ists; for Bramante and Michael Angelo, Pal-
ladio and Bernini, designed and executed
works which, although of unequal merit, may
fairly challenge a comparison with the boasted
productions of the Augustan age." Italy and
France, accordingly, have reaped the full ad-
vantage of their local proximity to the monu-
ments of former genius ; and the character of
their buildings evinces a decided superiority
to the works of architects in other states.
In the south of Europe, therefore, the pro-
gress of architecture has been uninterrupted,
and each successije age has reaped the full
benefit which the works of those which pre-
ceded it was fitted to confer. But the remote-
ness of their situation has deprived the in-
habitants of the north of Europe of this advan-
tage ; and, while the revival of letters and the
arts has developed the taste of the people of
this country in other respects, to a very great
degree, their knowledge of architecture is yet
in its infancy. In this city the most remarka-
ble proofs of this deficiency were annually
exhibited till a very recent period. The same
age which was illustrated by the genius of
Sir Walter Scott, and Campbell, and Dugald
Stewart, witnessed the erection of Nelson's
monument and St. George's church.
The extraordinary improvement in the public
taste, which has taken place since the peace
of 1814, opened the Continent to so large a pro-
portion of our population, evinces, in the most
unequivocal manner, the influence of the actual
sight of fine models in training the mind to the
perception of architectural beauty. That archi-
tecture is greatly more an object both of study
and interest than it was ten years ago, is
matter of common observation ; and the most
convincing proof of the extension of a taste
for its excellencies is to be found in the rapid
increase and extensive circulation of en-
gravings of the most interesting ruins on the
NATIONAL MONUMENTS.
81
Continent, which has taken place of late years.
These engravings, however incapable of con-
veying an adequate idea of the originals, to
those who have never left this country, yet
serve as an admirable auxiliary to the memo-
ry, in retaining the impression which they
had produced on those who have had that
advantage; and, accordingly, their sale is
almost entirely confined to persons of that de-
scription.
Nor is the improvement less gratifying in
the style of the edifices, and the genius of the
architects who have arisen during that period.
The churches of Marybone and St. Pancras, in
London, notwithstanding some striking defects,
are by far the finest buildings which have been
raised in the metropolis since the days of Sir
Christopher Wren. The new street in front
of Carlton House, including the Quadrant,
contains some most beautiful specimens of
architecture; although the absurd rage for
novelty has disfigured it by other structures
of extraordinary deformity. The buildings
which adjoin, and look into the Regent Park,
are the most chaste and elegant examples of
the application of the Grecian architecture to
private edifices which the metropolis can boast.
Nor is the improvement less conspicuous in
our own capital, where the vicinity of free-
stone quarries of uncommon beauty, and the
advantages of unrivalled situation, have ex-
cited a very strong desire for architectural
embellishment. It is hardly possible to believe
that Waterloo Place, the Royal Terrace, Leo-
pold Place, and the Melville Monument, have
been erected in the same age which witnessed
the building of Lord Nelson's monument on
the Calton Hill, or the recent edifices in the
Parliament Square. The remarkable start
which the genius as well as the taste of our
architects has taken since the public attention
was drawn to this art, affords a striking proof
of the influence of popular encouragement in
fostering the conceptions of native genius, and
illustrates the hopelessness of expecting that
our artists will ever attain to excellence, when
the taste of the people does not keep pace with
their exertions.
But the causes which have recently given
so remarkable a stimulus to architectural ex-
ertion are temporary in their nature. It is
impossible to expect that the Continent will
always be open to our youth, or that the public
attention can be permanently directed to the
arts of peace, with the interest which is so
remarkable at this time. Other wars may
arise which will shut us out from the south
of Europe ; the interest of politics may again
withdraw the national attention from the fine
arts ; or the war of extermination, of which
Greece is now the theatre, may utterly destroy
those monuments which have so long survived
to direct and improve the world. From the
present aspect of affairs on the Continent,
there seems every reason to apprehend that
one or both of these effects may very soon
take place. These circumstances render it
the more desirable, that some steps should be
taken iofa in this island the fleeting percep-
tion of architectural beauty which is now
prevalent; and, if possible, render our people
independent of foreign travelling, or of the
borrowed aid of foreign edifices.
Lord Aberdeen, like all other travellers of
taste, speaks in the highest terms of the im-
pression produced by the unrivalled edifices
of ancient Greece ; and contrasts the pure and
faultless taste by which they are distinguished,
with the ephemeral productions which in
modern times have arisen, in the vain attempt
to improve upon their proportions. If we seek
for the manifestation of pure taste in the
monuments which surround us, our search
will but too often prove fruitless. We must
turn our eyes towards those regions,
Where on the Egean shore a city stands,
Built nobly !
Here, it has been little understood, for it has
been rarely felt; its country is Greece, its
throne the Acropolis of Athens.
"By a person writing on the subject of
architecture, the name of Athens can scarcely
be pronounced without emotion, and, in the
mind of one who has had the good fortune to
examine at leisure its glorious remains, im-
pressions are revived which time and distance
can never obliterate. It is difficult to resist the
desire of fondly dwelling on the descriptions
of monuments, to the beauty of which, although
they have been long well known, and accu-
rately described, we feel that no language can
do full justice. But, as it is not the purpose
of this inquiry to give those practical or de-
tailed instructions in the art, which may be so
much better attained from other sources, I will
only observe in this place, what it is of con-
sequence to keep in view, because no descrip-
tions or representations, however accurate,
can give adequate notions of the effect of the
originals, that, notwithstanding the lapse of
ages, the injuries of barbarism, and fanatical
violence, Athens still presents to the student
the most faultless models of ornamental archi-
tecture; and is still, therefore, the best school
for the acquisition of the highest attributes of
his art." pp. 35, 36.
Speaking of the numerous attempts at no-
velty, which have been made in modern times,
he observes :
"It may be observed in general, that few of
those numerous changes of taste which an in-
satiable desire of novelty, or the caprice of
fashion, may have sanctioned for a time, have
been ultimately successful ; for these ephe-
meral productions, however warmly sup-
ported, have been found successively to vanish
before the steady and permanent attractions of
Grecian beauty, and we shall probably feel dis-
posed to admit, that the ornamental details of
the standard models of antiquity, combined
and modified by discretion and judgment, ap-
pear to offer a sufficient variety for the exer-
cise of invention and genius in this province
of the art" p. 30.
And comparing these with the remains of
Grecian architecture, he observes :
" The precious remains of Grecian art were
long neglected, and the most beautiful were, in
truth, nearly inaccessible to the Christian
world. It is almost in our own time, that ob-
stacles, formerly insurmountable, have been
since vanquished ; and that the treasures of
82
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
art, still unfortunately in the custody of igno-
rance and barbarism, have not only been
visited, but have been accurately measured
and delineated. Henceforth, therefore, these
exquisite remains should form the chief study
of the architect who aspires to permanent
reputation; other modes are transitory and
uncertain, but the essential qualities of Gre-
cian excellence, as they are founded on reason,
and are consistent with fitness and propriety,
will ever continue to deserve his first care."
pp. 215, 216.
The argument which is most commonly
nrged against the restoration of an ancient
structure, is, that it is degrading to copy the
architecture of another people. It is both hu-
miliating to our artists, it is said, and inju-
rious to the progress of art, to imitate what
has been already done. The Romans never
copied; but, borrowing merely the general
forms of the Grecian architecture, moulded
them into different combinations, which gave
a different character to their style of building.
Such also should be the course which we
should adopt.
This very plausible argument proceeds
upon an inattention to the successive sleps
by which excellence in the fine arts is attained,
and a mistaken conception of the height to
which we have already ascended in our taste
or knowledge of architecture. It is quite true
that the Romans did not copy the Grecian tem-
ples; and that the modern Italians have not
thought of attempting a restoration of the Coli-
seum or the Pantheon. But it is to be recol-
lected that the originals were within their reach,
and had already exercised their salutary influence
upon the public taste. The ancient Romans
had only to go to Paestum, Agrigentum, or
Syracuse, to behold the finest Grecian temples;
and their warlike youth, in the course of the
military expeditions to which all the citizens
were liable, had perpetually, in their eastern
dominions, the Grecian edifices placed before
their eyes. Michael Angelo, Poussin, and
Claude Lorraine, lived amidst the ruins of an-
cient Rome, and formed their taste from their
earliest youth, upon the Jiabi'uaf contemplation
of those monuments. For them to have co-
pied these buildings, with a view to the re-
storation of the public taste, would have been as
absurd as for us to copy York or Lincoln Ca-
thedrals, in order to revive an admiration for
the Gothic architecture.
But is there no difference between the situ-
ation of a people, who, like the ancient Romans
and modern Italians, had the great models of
antiquity continually before their eyes, and
that of a people, who, like the inhabitants of
this island, have no models in the Doric style,
either to form their taste, or guide their exer-
tions, and who have no means of reaching the
remains of that order which exist, but by a
journey of many thousand miles? Of the in-
fluence of the study of ancient excellence in
improving the taste, both of architects and peo-
ple, no one acquainted wi h the subject can
have the smallest doubt; and it is stated in
the strongest terms, by the author whose obser-
vations have just been mentioned. "Amidst
the ruins of Rome, the great Italian architects
formed their taste. They studied the relics of
ancient grandeur, with all the diligence of en-
thusiasm. They measured the proportions, and
drew the details, and modelled the members
But when their artists were employed by the
piety or magnificence of the age, they never re-
stored the examples by which they were sur-
rounded, and which were the objects of theii
habitual study. The architects did not linger in
contemplation of their predecessors ; former
generations had advanced and they proceeded."
Now such being the influence of the remains
of antiquity in guiding the inventions, and
chastening the taste of modern artists, is there
no advantage in putting our architects in this
particular on a level with those of Italy, and com-
pensating, in some degree, by the restoration
of the finest monuments of ancient genius,
the local disadvantages with which a residence
in this remote part of the world is necessarily at-
tended! By doing this, we are not precluding
the development of modern invention ; we are,
on the contrary, laying the surest foundation
jor it, by bringing our artists to the point from
which the Italian artists took their departure.
When this is done, the inventive genius of the
two nations will be able to commence their
career with equal advantages. Till it is attempt-
ed, we can hardly hope that we shall overtake
them in the race. Suppose, that instead of
possessing the Coliseum and the Pantheon
within their walls, and having made their pro-
portions the continual subject of their study,
the Roman artists had been obliged to travel
into the interior of Asia to visit their ruins,
and that"' this journey, from the expense with
which it was attended, had been within the
reach only of a few of the most opulent and
adventurous of their nobility ; can there be the
slightest doubt that the fine arts in that city
would have been greatly indebted to any Ro-
man pontiff who restored those beautiful mo-
numents in his own dominions? and yet this
benefit is seriously made a matter of doubt,
when the restoration of the Parthenon is pro-
posed, in a part of the world where the remains
of ancient genius are placed at the distance of
two thousand miles.
The greatest exertions of original genius,
both in literature and arts, by which modern
Europe has been distinguished, have been made
in an age when the wealth of ancient times
was thoroughly understood. The age of Tasso
andMachiavel followed the restoration of letters
in Italy. If we compare their writings with those
which preceded that great event, the difference
appears almost incalculable. It was on the stu-
dy of Grecian and Roman eloquence, that Mil-
ton trained himself to those sublime concep-
tions which have immortalized his name.
Raphael and Michael Angelo gave but slight
indications of original genius till their pow-
ers were awakened and their taste refined by
the study of the Grecian sculpture. Statuary, in
modern times, has nowhere been cultivated with
such success as at Rome, amidst the wrrks
of former ages; and Chantry hasdeclared that
the arrival of the Elgin marbles in the British
Museum is to be regarded as an era in the pro-
gress of art in this country. Architecture has
attained its greatest perfection in France and
NATIONAL MONUMENTS.
Italy, where the study of the remains of anti-
quity which those countries contain, has had
so powerful an influence upon the public taste.
Those who doubt the influence of the restoration
of the Parthenon, in improving the efforts of
original genius in this country, reason in op-
position not only to the experience of past
times, in all the other departments of literature
and art, but to all that we know of the causes
to which the improvement of architecture itself
has been owing.
It is no answer to this to say that drawings
and prints of these edifices are open to all the
world; and that an architect may study the
proportions of the Parthenon as well in
Stuart's Athens, as on the Calton Hill of Edin-
burgh. An acquaintance with drawings is
limited to a small number, even in the most
polished classes of society, and to the middling
and lower orders is almost unknown ; where-
as, public edifices are seen by all the world,
and obtruda themselves on the attention of the
most inconsiderate. There are few persons
who return from Greece or Italy, without a
considerable taste for architectural beauty ;
but during the war, when travelling was im-
possible, the existence of Stuart's Athens and
Piranesi's Rome produced no such effect.
Our architects, during the war, had these ad-
mirable engravings constantly at their com-
mand: but how wretched were their concep-
tions before the peace had afforded them the
means of studying the originals ! The extra-
ordinary improvement which both the style of
our buildings, and the taste of our people have
received, since the edifices of France and Italy
were laid open to so large a proportion of the
country, demonstrates the superior efficacy of
actual observation, to the study of prints, in
improving the public taste for architectural
beauty. The engravings never become an object
of interest till the originals have been seen.
The recent attempts to introduce a new
order of architecture in this island, demon-
strate, that we have not as yet arrived at the
point where the study of ancient models can
be dispensed with. In the new street in front
of Carlton House, every thing, which, if form-
ed on the model of the antique, is beautiful ;
every thing in which novelty has been at-
tended is a deformity. It is evident, that more
i than one generation must pass away, before
architecture is so thoroughly understood as to
admit of the former landmarks being disre-
garded.
The belief that a Grecian temple cannot
look beautiful, but in the climate and under
the sun of Athens, is a total mistake. The
clear atmosphere which prevails during the
frosts of winter, or in the autumnal months,
in Scotland, is as favourable to the display of
architectural splendour, as the warm atmo-
sphere of Greece. The Melville monument in
St. Andrew's Square appears nowise inferior
to the original in the Roman capitol. The
gray and time-worn temples of Paestum are
perhaps more sublime that the Grecian struc-
tures which still retain the brightness and
lustre by which they were originally charac-
terized. Of all the edifices which the genius
of man ever conceived, the Doric temple is
most independent of the adventitious advantages
of light and shade, and rests most securely on
the intrinsic grandeur and solidity of its con-
struction.
To say, that every people have an archi-
tecture of their own, and that the Gothic is
irretrievably fixed down upon this island, is a
position unwarranted either by reason or
authority. A nation is not bound to adhere to
barbarous manners, because their ancestors
were barbarous ; nor is the character of their
literature to be fixed by the productions of its
earliest writers. It is by its works in the
period of its meridian splendour, that the opi-
nion of posterity is formed. The bow was
once the national weapon of England, and to
the skill with which it was used, our greatest
victories have been owing; but that is no
reason why it should be adhered to as the
means of national defence after fire-arms have
been introduced. If we must make something
peculiar in the National Monument, let it be
the peculiarity which distinguishes the period
when architecture and the other fine arts
have attained to their highest perfection, and
not the period of their infancy. But the feudal
and castellated forms arose during an age of
ignorance and civil dissension. To compel
us to continue that style as the national archi-
tecture, would be as absurd as to consider
Chaucer as the standard of English literature,
or Duns Scotus as the perfection of Scotch
eloquence. We do not consider the writers in
the time of the Jameses as the model of our
national literature. Why then should we con-
fer that distinction on the architecture which
arose out of the circumstances of the barba-
rous period!
For these reasons, we are compelled to dif-
fer from the noble author, whose very inte-
resting essay on Grecian architecture has
done so much to awaken the world to a sense
of its excellencies, in regard to the expediency
of restoring the Parthenon in the National
Monument of Scotland. From the taste which
his work exhibits, and from the obvious supe-
riority which he possesses over ourselves in
estimating the beauties of Grecian architec-
ture, we drew the strongest argument in favour
of such a measure. It was from a study of
the ruins of ancient Greece, that Lord Aber-
deen acquired the information and taste which
he possesses on this subject, and gained the
superiority which he enjoys over his untra-
velled countrymen. If they had the same
means of visiting and studying the originals
which he has possessed, we should agree
with him in thinking, that the genius of the
age should be directed to new combinations.
But when this is not the case, we must be con-
tent to proceed by slower degrees; and while
nineteen-twentieths of our people do not know
what the Parthenon is, and can perceive no-
thing remarkable in the finest models of archi-
tectural excellence, we must not think of
forming new orders. It is enough if we can
make them, acquainted with those which
already exist. The first step towards national
excellence in the fine arts, is to feel the beauty
of that which has already been done; the se-
cond, is to excel it. We must lake the first
84
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
step, before we attempt the second. Having
laid the foundation of national taste in archi-
tecture, by restoring the finest- model of anti-
quity on the situation of all others the best
adapted for making its excellencies known, we
shall be prepared to form new edifices, and
possibly to surpass those which antiquity has
left. But till this is done, there is every rea-
son to apprehend, that the efforts of our artists
will be as ineffectual in obtaining true beauty,
as the genius of our writers was in obtaining
real excellence, until the restoration of the
classic authors gave talent its true direction,
and public taste an unexceptionable standard.
MARSHAL NET.*
THE memoirs connected with the French |
Revolution furnish an inexhaustible source
of interesting discussion. We shall look in
vain in any other period of history for the
same splendid succession of events ; for a
phantasmagoria in which characters so illus-
trious are passed before the view ; or for in-
dividuals whose passions or ambition have
exercised an equally important influence on
human affairs. When we enter upon the era
of Napoleon, biography assumes the dignity
of history ; the virtues and vices of individuals
become inseparably blended with public mea-
sures ; and in the memoirs of contemporary
writers, we turn for the secret springs of those
great events which have determined the fate
of nations.
From the extraordinary interest, however,
connected with this species of composition,
has arisen an evil of no ordinary kind. Not
France only, but Europe at large, being in-
satiable for works of this kind, an immense
number have sprung up of spurious origin, or
doubtful authority. Writing of memoirs has
become a separate profession. A crowd of
able young men devote themselves to this fas-
cinating species of composition, which pos-
sesses the interest of history without its dry-
ness, and culls from the book of Time only
the most brilliant of its flowers. Booksellers
engage in the wholesale manufacture, as a
mercantile speculation ; an attractive name,
an interesting theme, is selected ; the relations
of the individuals whose memoirs are pro-
fessed to be given to the world, are besought
to furnish a few original documents or au-
thentic anecdotes, to give an air of veracity to
the composition; and at length the memoirs
are ushered forth to the world as the work of
one who never wrote one syllable of them
himself. Of this description are the soi-disant
Memoirs of Fouche, Robespierre, Une Femme
de Qualite, Louis the Eighteenth, and many
others, which are now admitted to be the work
of the manufacturers for the Parisian book-
sellers, but are nevertheless interspersed with
many authentic and interesting anecdotes,
derived from genuine sources, and contain in
consequence much valuable matter for future
history.
In considering the credit due to any set of
memoirs, one main point, of course, is, whe-
ther they are published by a living author of
* Memoires du Marechal Ney, publics par sa Famille.
Paris, Fournier ; Londres, E. Bull, 1833. Blackwood's
Magazine, Oct. 1833.
character and station in society. If they are,
there is at least the safeguard against impos-
ture, which arises from the facility with which
they may be disavowed, and the certainty that
no man of character would permit a spurious
composition to be palmed upon the world as
his writing. The Memoirs, therefore, of Bour-
rienne, Madame Junot, Savary, and many
others, may be relied on as at least the ad-
mitted work of the persons whose names they
bear, and as ushered into the world under the
sanction and on the responsibility of living
persons of rank or station in society.
There are other memoirs, again, of such ex-
traordinary ability as at once to bear the stamp
of originality and veracity on their very face.
Of this description are Napoleon's memoirs,
dictated to Montholon and Gourgaud ; a work
which bears in every page decisive marks of
the clear conceptions, lucid ideas, and tranch-
ant sagacfty of the Conqueror of Austerlitz
and Rivoli. Judging from internal evidence,
we are disposed to rank these invaluable Me-
moirs much higher than the rambling and dis-
cursive, though interesting work of Las Casas.
They are not nearly so impassioned or ran-
corous ; facts are not so obviously distorted;
party spirit is not so painfully conspicuous.
With regret, we must add, that even these
genuine memoirs, dictated by Napoleon him-
self, as the groundwork for the history of his
achievements, contain the marks of the weak-
nesses as well as the greatness of his mind;
an incessant jealousy of every rival who ap-
proached even to his glory ; an insatiable
passion for magnifying his own exploits ; a
disregard of truth so remarkable in a person
gifted with such extraordinary natural sagaci-
ty, that it can be ascribed only to the poison-
ous moral atmosphere which a revolution pro-
duces. The Memoirs of Thibaudeau perhaps
exhibit the most valuable and correct, as well
as favourable picture of the emperor's mind.
In the discussions on the great public mea-
sures which were submitted to the Council of
State at Paris, and, above all, in the clear and
luminous speeches of Napoleon on every sub-
ject, whether of civil or military administra-
tion, that occurred during his consulship, is
to be found the clearest proof of the vast grasp
and great capacity of his mind; and in their
superiority to those of the other speakers, and,
above all, of Thibaudeau himself, the best
evidence of the fidelity of his reports.
Next in value to those of Napoleon and
Thibaudeau, we are inclined to place those of
MARSHAL NEY.
85
Bourrienne and the Duchess of Abrantes. The
first of these writers, in addition to consider-
able natural talents, enjoyed the inestimable ad-
vantage of having been the school-fellow of
Napoleon, and his private secretary during
the most interesting period of his life ; that
which elapsed from the opening of his Italian
Campaign, in 1796, to his accession to the
throne in 1804. If Bourrienne could be entire-
ly relied on, his Memoirs, with such sources
of information, would be invaluable ; but un-
fortunately, it is evident that he labours under
a feeling of irritation at his former school-
fellow, which renders it necessary to take his
statements with some grains of allowance.
Few men can forgive the extraordinary and
unlooked-for elevation of their former equals ;
and, in addition to this common source of pre-
judice, it is evident that Bourrienne labours
under another and a less excusable feeling.
It is plain, even from his own admission, that
he had been engaged in some money transac-
tions of a doubtful character with M. Ouvrard,
which rendered his continuing in the highly
confidential situation of private secretary to
the emperor improper ; and his dismissal from
it has evidently tinged his whole narrative
with a certain feeling of acrimony, which, if
it has not made him actually distort facts, has
at least caused them to appear in his hands
through a medium coloured to a certain de-
gree.
The Duchess of Abrantes, like most of the
other annalists of Napoleon, labours under
prepossessions of a different kind. She was
intimate with Napoleon from his childhood ;
her mother had the future emperor on her
knee from the day of his birth ; and the in-
timacy between the two families continued so
great, that when Napoleon arrived at the age
of twenty-six, and felt, as he expresses it, the
" besoin de se fixer," he actually proposed for
the duchess's mother himself, who was a per-
son of great natural attractions, while he
wished at the same time to arrange a mar-
riage between Joseph and the duchess, and
Pauline and her brother. It may readily be
imagined that, though these proposals were
all declined, they left no unfavourable impres-
sion on the duchess's mind; and this, coupled
with her subsequent marriage to Junot, and
his rapid advancement by the emperor, has
filled her mind with an admiration of his cha-
racter almost approaching to idolatry. She
sees every thing, in consequence, in the con-
sular and imperial government, in the most
favourable colours. Napoleon is worshipped
with all a woman's fervour, and the days of
triumph for the Grand Army looked back to
as a dream of glory, which has rendered all
the remainder of life worthless and insipid.
The Memoirs of Marshal Ney appear under
different auspices from any others which have
yet appeared regarding this eventful era. They
do not profess to have been written by him-
self; and, indeed, the warlike habits, and
sudden and tragic death of the marshal, pre-
clude the possibility of their being ushered
forth to the world under that character. But,
on the other hand, they are unquestionably
published by his family, from the documents
and papers in their possession; and the anec-
dotes with which they are interspersed have
plainly been collected with great pains from
all the early friends of that illustrious warrior.
If they are not published, therefore, under
the sanction of personal, they are under that
of family responsibility, and may be regarded,
as we would say in England, as " the Ney Pa-
pers," connected together by an interesting
biography of the character to whom they
refer.
In such a production, historical impartiality
cannot be reasonably expected. To those of
his family who still mourn the tragic end of
the bravest of French heroes, his character
must still be the object of veneration. Fail-
ings which would have been acknowledged,
defects which would have been pointed out, if
he had descended to an honoured tomb, are
forgotten in his melancholy fate ; and his
family, with hearts ulcerated at the supposed
injustice and perhaps real illegality of his
condemnation, are rather disposed to magnify
his character into that of a martyr, than ac-
knowledge its alliance with any of the weak-
nesses or faults of mortality. In such feel-
ings, there is not only every thing that is
natural, but much that is commendable ; and
the impartial foreigner, in reviewing the his-
tory of his achievements, will not forget the
painful sense of duty under which the British
government acted at the close of his career,
or the mournful feelings with which the axe
of justice was permitted to descend on one of
the bravest of -the human race, under the feel-
ing whether right or not it is the province
of history to inquire of imperious state
necessity.
Marshal Ney was born at Sarrelouis,on the
10th January, 1769; consequently, he was
twenty years old when the Revolution first
broke out. His father was an old soldier, who
had served with distinction at the battle of
Rosbach ; but after his discharge, he conti-
nued the profession of a cooper, to which he
had been early educated. At school, his son,
the young Ney, evinced the turbulent vigour
of his disposition, and the future general was
incessantly occupied in drilling and directing
his comrades. Napoleon gave tokens of the
same disposition at an equally early period :
there is no turn of mind which so early
evinces itself as a taste for military achieve-
ments. He was at first destined for a notary's
office ; but in spite of the earnest entreaties of
his parents, he resolved to change his profes-
sion. At the age of fifteen, our author gives
the following interesting account of the cir-
cumstances which led to his embracing the
profession of arms.
" So early as when he was fifteen, Ney had
a presentiment of his future destiny. His
father, incapable alike of estimating his pow-
ers, or sharing his hopes, in vain endeavoured
to restrain him. The mines of Assenwider at
that period were in full activity ; he sent his
son there, to endeavour to give a new direc-
tion to his thoughts. It had quite an opposite
effect. His imagination soon resumed its
wonted courses. He dreamed only of fields
of battle, combats and glory. The counsels
H
86
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
of his father, the tears of his mother, were
alike ineffectual : they lacerated without mov-
ing his heart. Two years passed away in this
manner ; but his taste for arms became every
day more decided. The places where he
dwelt, contributed to strengthen the natural
bent of his genius. Almost all the towns on
the Rhine are fortified ; wherever he went, he
saw garrisons, uniforms, and artillery. Ney
could withstand it no longer; he. resigned his
humble functions, and set out for Metz, where
a regiment of hussars was stationed, with the
intention of enlisting. The grief which he
well knew that sudden determination would
cause to his mother, the chagrin which it
would occasion to his father, agitated his
mind ; he hesitated long what to do, but at
length filial piety prevailed over fear, and he
returned to Sarrelouis to embrace his parents,
and bid them adieu.
"The interview was painful, his reception
stormy ; reproaches, tears, prayers, menaces,
alternately tore his heart. At length he tore
himself from their arms, and flying in haste,
without either baggage, linen, or money, he
regained the route of Metz, from which he
had turned. He walked on foot; his feet
were soon blistered, his shoes were stained
with blood. Sad, harassed, and worn out
with fatigue, he nevertheless continued his
march without flinching; and in his very first
debut, gave proof of that invincible determi-
nation which no subsequent obstacles were
able to overcome.
"At an after period,- when fortune had
smiled on his path, he returned to Sarrelouis.
The artillery sounded; the troops were under
arms; all the citizens crowded to see their
compatriot of whom they were so proud. Re-
cognising then the road which thirteen years
before he had traversed on foot, the marshal
recounted with emotion his first fatigues to
the officers who surrounded him." I. 5, 6.
It has frequently been observed, that those
who rise from humble beginnings are ashamed
in subsequent life of their commencement,
and degrade themselves by a puerile endea-
vour to trace their origin to a family of dis-
tinction. Ney, equally with Napoleon, was
above that meanness.
"Never in subsequent life did the marshal
forget the point from which he had started.
After he had arrived at the highest point of his
fortune, he took a pleasure in recurring to his
humble origin. When some persons were
declaiming in his presence on their connection
with the noblesse, and what they had obtained
from their rich families: 'You were more
fortunate than I,' said he, interrupting them ;
* I received nothing from my family, and
deemed myself rich when, at Metz, I had two
pieces of bread on the board.'
" After he was named a marshal of the em-
pire, he held a splendid levee: every one
offered his congratulations, and hastened to
present his compliments. He interrupted the
adulatory strain by addressing himself to an
old officer who kept at a distance. ' Do you
recollect, captain, the time when you said to
me, on occasion of my presenting my report,
Well done, Ney ; I am well pleased with you ;
go on as you have begun, you will make your
fortune.' ' Perfectly, marshal,' replied his old
commander; 'I had the honour to command
a man infinitely my superior. Such good for-
tune is not easily forgotten.'
" The satisfaction which he experienced at
recurring to his origin, arose not merely from
the noble pride of having been the sole archi-
tect of his fortune, but also "from the warm
affection which he ever felt for his family.
He loved nothing so much as to recount the
tenderness which he had experienced from his
mother, and the good counsels which he had
received from his father. Thus, when he was
abandoning himself to all the dangers arising
from an impetuous courage, he carefully con-
cealed his perils from his parents and rela-
tions, to save them from useless anxiety. On
one occasion, he commanded the advanced
guard of General Colaud, and was engaged in
a serious action. Overwhelmed with fatigue,
he returned and recounted to his comrades the
events of the day. One of his friends blamed
him for his imprudence. 'It is very true,'
replied Ney, 'I have had singular good for-
tune to-day; four different times I found my-
self alone in the midst of the Austrians.
Nothing but the most extraordinary good for-
tune extricated me out of their hands.' 'You
have been more fortunate than your brother.'
'What,' replied Ney, impetuously, and fixing
his eyes anxiously on his friend, ' is my bro-
ther dead 1 Ah ! my poor mother !' At length
he learned the mournful news, that in a
serious affair in Italy, Pierre Ney, his elder
brother, "had been killed. He burst into tears,
and exclaimed, ' What would have become of
my mother and sister, if I too had fallen !
Write to them, I pray you ; but conceal the
dangers to which I am exposed, that they may
not fear also for my life.' The father of the
marshal died a few years ago, at the age of
nearly a hundred years. He loved his son
with tenderness mingled with respect, and al-
though of a singularly robust habit of body,
his family feared the effect of the shock which
the sad events of 1815 might produce upon
him. He was never informed of them: the
mourning of his daughter, with whom he
lived, and of his grandchildren, only made
him aware that some dreadful calamity had
befallen the family. He ventured to ask no
questions, and ever since, sad and melancholy,
pronouncing but rarely the name of his son,
he lingered on till 1826, when he died without
having learned his tragic fate." I. 9, 10.
The great characteristic of Marshal Ney
was his impetuous courage, which gained for
him, even among the giants of the era of Na-
poleon, the surname of the Bravest of the
Brave. This remarkable characteristic is
thus described in these Memoirs :
'It is well known with what power and
energy he could rouse the masses of the sol-
diers, and precipitate them upon the enemy.
Vehement and impetuous when heading a
charge, he was gifted with the most imper-
turbable sang froid when it became necessary
to sustain its movements. Dazzled by the
lustre of that brilliant valour, many persons
have imagined that it was the only illustrious
MARSHAL NEY.
87
quality which the marshal possessed ; but |
those who were nearer his person, and better j
acquainted with his character, will concede to
him greater qualities than the enthusiasm
which captivates and subjugates the soldier.
Calm in the midst of a storm of grape-shot
imperturbable amid a shower of balls and
shells, Ney seemed to be ignorant of danger ;
to have nothing to fear from death. This
rashness, which twenty years of perils have
not diminished, gave to his mind the liberty,
the promptitude of judgment and execution,
so necessary in the midst of the complicated
movements of war. This quality astonished
those who surrounded him, more even than
the courage in action which is more or less
felt by all who are habituated to the dangers
of war. One of his officers, whose courage
had repeatedly been put to the proof, asked
him one day if he had never felt -fear. Re-
gaining instantly that profound indifference
for danger, that forgetfulness of death, that
elasticity of mind, which distinguished him on
the field of battle, 'I have never had time,'
replied the marshal xvith simplicity.
"Nevertheless, this extraordinary coolness
in danger did not prevent his perceiving those
slight shades of weakness, from which it is so
rarely that a soldier is to be found entirely
exempted. On one occasion, an officer was
giving an account of a mission on which he
had been sent: while he spoke, a bullet passed
so near him that he involuntarily lowered his
head, but nevertheless continued his narrative
without exhibiting emotion ' You have done
extremely well,' said the marshal, 'but next
time do not bow quite so low.'
"The marshal loved courage, and took the
greatest pleasure in producing it in others. If
he had witnessed it in a great degree in any
one on the field of battle ; if he had discovered
vigour, capacity, or military genius, he never
rested till he had obtained their promotion ;
and the army resounded for long with the
efforts which he made for this purpose." I. 21.
But it was not mere valour or capacity on
the field of battle, which distinguished Ney ;
he was attentive also to the minutest wants of
his soldiers, and indefatigable in his endea-
vours to procure for them those accommoda-
tions, of which, from having risen from the
humblest rank himself, he so well knew how
to appreciate the value. Of his efforts in this
respect we have the following interesting ac-
count:
"Quick in repressing excesses, the marshal
omitted nothing to prevent them. A private
soldier in early life, he had himself felt the
sufferings endured by the private soldier, and
when elevated to a higher station he did his |
utmost to assuage them in others. He knew
that the soldier, naturally just and grateful to
those who watched over his interests, was
difficult to manage when his complaints were
neglected, and it was evident that his superiors
had no sympathy for his fatigues or his priva-
tions. Ney was sincerely attached to those |
great masses, which, though composed of men j
of such different characters, were equally
ready every day to meet dangers and death in
the discharge of duty. At that period our
troops, worn out with the fatigues of war, ac-
customed to make light of dangers, were much
ruder in their manners, and haughty in their
ideas, than those of these times, who lead a
pacific life in great cities and garrisons. The
marshal was incessant in his endeavours to
discover and correct the abuses which affected
them. He ever endeavoured to prevent their
wishes, and to convince the officers who com-
manded them, that by elevating the soldier in
his own eyes, and treating him with the respect
which he deserves, but without any diminution
of the necessary firmness, it was alone possible
ta obtain that forgetfulness of himself, that
abandonment of military discipline, which
constitutes so large a portion of military force.
"Avoiding, therefore, in the most careful
way, the imposition of unnecessary burdens
upon the soldiers, he was equally careful to
abstain from that vain ostentation of author-
ity, that useless prodigality of escort, which
generals of inferior calibre are so fond of dis-
playing. His constant object was to spare the
troops engaged in that fatiguing service, and
not to diminish, but from absolute necessity,
by such detachments, the numerical strength
of the regiments under his orders. That soli-
citude did not escape the soldiers ; and among
their many subjects of gratitude, they ranked
in the foremost place the continual care and
perseverance with which their general secured
for them the means of subsistence. The pro-
digies he effected in that particular will be
found fully detailed in the campaign of Portu-
gal, where he succeeded, in a country repeat-
edly devastated, in providing, by incredible
exertions, not only provisions for his own
corps, but the whole army, during the six
months that it remained in Portugal. Con-
stantly in motion on the Mondego, inces-
santly pushing columns in every direction,
he contrived to procure bread, clothes, provi-
sions, in fine, every thing which was required.
The recollection of these things remained
engraven on the minds of his soldiers, and
when his division with Massena caused him
to resign the command of his corps, the grief
of the soldiers, the murmurs, the first symp-
toms of an insurrection ready to break forth,
and which a single word from their chief
would have blown into a flame, were sufficient
to prove that his cares had not been thrown
away on ungrateful hearts, and that his multi-
plied attentions had won all their affections.
" But his careful attention to his soldiers did
not prevent him from maintaining the most
rigorous discipline, and punishing severely
any considerable excess on the part of the
troops under his command. An instance of
this occurred in the country of Darmstadt.
The Austrians had been defeated, and retired
near to Swigemberg, where they were broken
anew. The action was warmly contested, and
our soldiers, irritated by so much resistance,
broke open several houses and plundered them.
The circumstances in which it occurred might
excuse the transgression, but Ney resolved to
make a signal example of reparation. While
he proceeded with the utmost severity against
the .offenders, he published a proclamation, in
which he directed that the damage should be
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
estimated ; and in order that it should not be
fixed at an elusory sum, he charged the Land-
grave himself with the valuation.
" When Governor of Gallicia and Salamanca,
these provinces, notwithstanding their hatred
at the yoke of the stranger, cheerfully acknow-
ledged the justice of his administration. One
only object of spoil has been left by the mar-
shal to his family, a relic of St. James of Com-
postella, which the monks of the convent of
St. Jago presented to him, in gratitude for the
humanity with which he treated them. He did
not limit his care to the protection of property
from pillage ; he knew that there are yet
dearer interests to which honour is more
nearly allied, and he never ceased to cause
them to be respected. The English army will
bear testimony to his solicitude in that parti-
cular. Obliged, after the battle of Corunna, to
embark in haste, they were unable to place on
board the women by whom they were followed,
and in consequence, fifty were left on the shore,
where they were wandering about without pro-
tection, exposed to the insults of the soldiers.
No sooner was Ney informed of their situa-
tion, than he hastened to come to their suc-
cour; he assembled them, assured them of his
protection, and directed that they should be
placed in a female convent. But the Superior
refused to admit them ; she positively refused
to have any thing to do with heretics ; no en-
treaties could persuade her to extend to these
unfortunates the rites of hospitality.
" ' Be it so,' replied the marshal ; ' I under-
stand your scruples ; and, therefore, instead of
these Protestants, you shall furnish lodgings
to two companies of Catholic grenadiers.' Ne-
cessity, at length, bent the hard-hearted Abbess ;
and these unhappy women, for the most part
the wives or daughters of officers or non-com-
missioned officers, whose bravery we had ex-
perienced in the field, were received into the
convent, where they were protected from every
species of injury." I. 39 41.
We have no doubt of the truth of this last
anecdote, and we may add that Ney not only
respected the remains of Sir John Moore,
interred in the ramparts of Corunna, but
erected a monument to his memory. It is
soothing to see the Freemasonry of generous
feeling, which subsists between the really
brave and elevated, under all the varieties of
national rivalry or animosity, in every part of
the world.
It is a pleasing task to record traits of gene-
rosity in an enemy; but war is not composed
entirely of such actions; and, as a specimen
of the mode in which the Republican troops,
in the first years of their triumphs, oppressed
the people whom they professed to deliver, we
subjoin the following account of the mode in
which they levied their requisitions, taken
from the report of one of the Envoys of Go-
vernment to the Convention.
" Cologne, 8th October, 1794.
"The agents sent to make requisitions, my
dear colleagues, act in such a manner as to
revolt all the world. The moment they arrive
in a town, they lay a requisition on every
thing ; literally every thing. No one thereafter
can either buy or sell. Thus we see com-
merce paralyzed, and for how long 1 For an
indefinite time ; for there are many requisi-
tions which have been laid on a month ago,
and on which nothing has yet been demanded;
and during that whole period the inhabitants
were unable to purchase any articles even of the
first necessity. If such measures are not cal-
culated to produce a counter-revolutionary
reaction ; if they are not likely to rouse against
us the indignation of all mankind, I ask you
what are 1
" Safety and fraternity. GELLIT." I. 53.
Contrast this conduct on the part of the
Friends of the People, as detailed by one of
their own representatives to his democratic
rulers, with the conduct of the Duke of Wel-
lington, paying high prices for every article
required by the English army in the south of
France, and we have the best proof of the dif-
ference between the actions of a Conservative
and Revolutionary Government.
The life of a soldier who spent twenty years
in camps, of course furnishes abundant ma-
terials for the description of military adventure.
We select, almost at random, the following de-
scription of the passage of the Rhine, opposite
Ehrenbreitzin, by the corps of Kleber, in 1795.
"The fort of Ehrenbreitzin commanded the
mouth of Moselle; the batteries of the right
bank swept all the shores of the Rhine. The
enemy were quite aware of our design ; the
moon shone bright; and his soldiers, with
anxious eyes and listening ears, waited the
moment when our boats might come within
reach of his cannon. The danger was great ;
but that of hesitation was still greater ; we
abandoned ourselves to our fate, and pushed
across towards Neuwied. Instantly the forts
and the batteries thundered with unexampled
violence ; a shower of grape-shot fell in our
boats. But there is something in great danger
which elevates the mind. Our pontonniers
made a sport of death, as of the batteries
which were successively unmasked, and join-
ing their efforts to the current which swept
them along, at length reached the dikes on
the opposite shore. Neuwied also opened its
fire. That delicious town, embellished by
all the arts of peace, now transformed into a
warlike stronghold, overwhelmed us by the
fire of its batteries. We replied with vigour,
but for long felt a repugnance to direct our
fire against that charming city. At length,
however, necessity compelled us to make the
attack, and in a few hours Neuwied was re-
duced to ashes.
" The difficulties of the enterprise neverthe-
less remained. It was necessary to overcome
a series of redoubts, covered by chevaux-de-
frize, palisades, and covered ways. We had
at once to carry Dusseldorf and beat the Count
d'Hirbauch, who awaited our approach at the
head of 20.000 men. Kleber alone did not des-
pair ; the batteries on the left shore were ready,
and the troops impatiently awaited the signal
to land. The dispositions were soon made.
Lefebvre attacked the left, Championnet the
centre, Grenier the right. Such leaders could
not but inspire confidence in the men. Soldiers
and officers leapt ashore. We braved the storm
of grape-shot; and on the 5th September, at
MARSHAL NEY.
break of day, we were established on the Ger-
man bank of the river." I. 99101.
These Memoirs abound with passages of
this description; and if implicit faith is to be
given to them, it appears certain that Ney from
the very first was distinguished by a degree
of personal gallantry, as well as military con-
duct, which has been rarely paralleled, and
never exceeded. The description of his ele-
vation to the rank of General Brigade, and the
action which preceded it, is singularly de-
scriptive of the character of the French armies
at that period,
" Meanwhile Mortier made himself master of
Ebermanstadt, Collaud advanced upon For-
chiers. His orders were to drive back every
opponent whom he found in the plain, and
disperse every force which attempted to cover
the place. The task was difficult ; the avenues
leading to it, the heights around it, were equally
guarded; and Wartensleben, in the midst oif
his soldiers, was exhorting them not to per-
mit their impregnable position to be carried.
It presented, in truth, every obstacle that could
well be imagined; they were abrupt, covered
with woods, surrounded by deep ravines. To
these obstacles of nature were joined all the
resources of art; on this height were placed
masses of soldiers, that was crowned with ar-
tillery; infantry was stationed at the summit
of the defiles, cavalry at their mouths ; on
every side the resistance promised to be of the
most formidable description. Ney, however,
was not to be deterred by such obstacles ; he
advanced at the head of a handful of heroes,
and opened his fire. He had only two pieces
of artillery; the enemy speedily unmasked
fourteen. His troop was for a moment shaken
by the violence of the fire ; but it was ac-
customed to all the chances of war. It speedily
re-formed, continued the attack, and succeeded,
after an obstinate struggle, in throwing the ene-
my's ranks into disorder. Some reinforcements
soon afterwards arrived ; the melee grew
warmer; and at length the Austrians, over-
whelmed and broken, evacuated the position,
which they found themselves unable to defend.
" Kleber, charmed with that brilliant achieve-
ment, testified the warmest satisfaction with it
to the young officer. He addressed to him,
at the head of his troop, the most flattering ex-
pressions upon his activity, skill, and courage,
and concluded with these words, 'I. will no
longer hurt your modesty by continuing my
praises! My line is taken; you are a Gene-
ral of Brigade.' The chasseurs clapped their
hands, and the officers loudly testified their
satisfaction. Ney alone remained pensive ; he
even seemed to hesitate whether he should ac-
cept the rank, and did not utter a single word.
'Well,' continued Kleber, in the kindest man-
ner, 'you seem very confused; but the Aus-
trians are those who will speedily make you
forget your ennui ; as for me, I will forthwith
report your promotion to the Directory.' He
did so in effect, and it was confirmed by return
of post." I. 186.
It is still a question undecided, whether Na-
poleon intended seriously to invade England,
or whether his great preparations in the Chan-
nel were a feint merely to give employment
12
to his troops, and cover other designs. Bour-
rienne maintains that he. never in reality in-
tended to attempt the descent; and that, un-
known to every one, he was organizing his
expedition into the heart of Germany at the
time when all around him imagined that he
was studying only the banks of the Thames.
Napoleon himself affirms the contrary. He
asserts that he was quite serious in his inten-
tion of invading England; that he was fully
aware of the risks with which the attempt
would have been attended, but was willing to
have braved them for so great an object ; and
that the defeat of the combined squadron by
Sir Robert Calder, frustrated the best combined
plan he had ever laid during his whole career.
His plan, as detailed in the instructions given
to Villeneuve, printed in the appendix to his
Memoirs, was to have sent the combined fleet
to the West Indies, in order to draw after it
Lord Nelson's squadron ; and to have immedi-
ately brought it back, raised the blockade of
Ferrol and Corunna, and proceeded with the
combined fleet to join the squadrons of Rochelle
and Brest, where twenty sail of the line were
ready for sea, and brought the combined squad-
ron into the Channel to cover the embarkation
of the army. In this way, by a sudden con-
centration of all his naval force, he calculated
upon having seventy sail of the line in the
Channel ; a much greater force than, in the ab-
sence of Lord Nelson, the British could have
at once assembled to meet him. When we
recollect that Lord Nelson fell into the snare,
and actually pursued the combined fleets to
the West Indies ; that in pursuance of Na-
poleon's design, Villeneuve -reached Ferrol,
and that it was in consequence only of his un-
successful action with Sir Robert Calder, that
he was induced to fall back to Cadiz, and there-
by cause the whole plan to miscarry; it is
evident that the fate of Britain then hung upon
a thread, arid that if the English admiral had
been defeated, and the combined fleet had pro-
ceeded up the Channel, the invasion might have
been effected, and the fate of the civilized world
been changed. It is a singular proof of the
sagacity of Lord Collingwood, that at the very
time when this well-combined plan was in
progress on Napoleon's, side, he divined the
enemy's intentions, and in a memorial address-
ed to the Admiralty, and published in his Me-
moirs, pointed out the danger arising from the
precise plan which his great antagonist was
adopting; and it is a still more singular in-
stance of the injustice and precipitance of
public opinion, that the British government
were compelled to bring the admiral to a
court-martial, and dismiss him from the ser-
vice, because, with fifteen ships of the line, he
had maintained a glorious combat with twenty-
seven, captured two of their line, and defeated
the greatest and best combined project ever
formed by the Emperor Napoleon.
As every thing relating to this critical pe-
riod of the war is of the very highest interest
in Great Britain, we shall translate the pas-
sages of Ney's Memoirs, which throw light
upon the vast preparations then made on the
other side of the Channel.
"Meanwhile time passed on, and England,
B*
90
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
a little recovered from its consternation, but
nevertheless the real place of attack, always
escaped its government. Four thousand gun-
boats covered the coast; the construction of
praams and rafts went on without intermission ;
every thing announced that the invasion was
to be effected by main force, and by means of
the flotilla which made so much noi.se. If the
strife was doubtful, it at least had its chance
of success ; but while England was daily be-
coming more confident of success in repelling
that aggression, the preparations for the real
attack were approaching to maturity. Napoleon
never seriously intended to traverse the Chan-
nel under cover of a fog, by the aid of a favour-
able wind, or by the force of such frail vessels
of war as gun-boats. His arrangements were
better made; and all that splendid display of
gun-boats was only intended to deceive the
enemy. He wished to disperse the force which
he could not combat when assembled together.
In pursuance of this plan, his fleets were to
have assembled from Toulon, Rochfort, Cadiz,
Brest, and Ferrol, draw after them to the West
Indies the British blockading squadrons, and
return rapidly on their steps, and present them-
selves in the Channel before the English were
well aware that they had crossed the Line.
Master in this way of a preponderating force,
riding irresistibly in the Channel, he would have
embarked on board his flotilla the troops with
which he would have made himself master of
London, and revolutionized England, before
that immense marine, which he could never
have faced when assembled together, could
have collected for its defence. These different
expeditions, long retained in their different har-
bours, had at length set sail ; the troops had
received orders to be ready to put themselves
instantly on board; the instructions to the
general had foreseen every thing, provided for
every emergency ; the vessels assigned to each
troop, the order in which they were to fall out
of the harbour, were all fixed. Arms, horses,
artillery, combatants, camp-followers, all had
received their place, all were arranged accord-
ing to their orders.
" Marshal Ney had nothing to do but follow
out literally his instructions ; they were so
luminous and precise as to provide for every
contingency. He distributed the powder, the
tools, the projectiles, which were to accompany
his corps on board the transports provided for
that purpose. He divided that portion of the
flotilla assigned to him into subdivisions;
every regiment, every battalion, every com-
pany, received the praams destined for their
use; every one, down to the very last man,
was ready to embark at the first signal. He
did more ; rapidity of movement requires com-
bined exertions, and he resolved to habituate
the troops to embarkation. The divisions were
successively brought down to the quay, and
embarked in the finest order ; but it was possi-
ble that when assembled hurriedly together,
they might be less calm and orderly. The
Marshal resolved to put it to the proof.
" Infantry, cavalry, artillery, were at once
put under arms, and ranged opposite to the
vessels on which they were to embark. The
whole were formed in platoons for embarka-
tion, at small distances from each other. A
cannon was discharged; the field-officers and
staff-officers immediately dismounted, and
placed themselves each at the head of the
troop he was destined to command. The drums
had ceased to beat; the soldiers had unfixed
their bayonets; a second discharge louder than
'.he first was heard ; the generals of divisions
pass the order to the colonels. 'Make ready
to embark.' Instantly a calm succeeds to the
tumult; everyone listens attentively, eagerly
watching for the next order, on which so much
depended. A third cannon is heard, and the
command ' Colonels, forward,' is heard with
indescribable anxiety along the line. In fine
a last discharge resounds, and is instantly fol-
lowed by the order, ' March !' Universal ac-
clamations instantly broke forth; the soldiers
hurried on board ; in ten minutes and a half
twenty-five thousand men were embarked.
The soldiers never entertained a doubt that
they were about to set sail. They arranged
themselves, and each took quarters for him-
self; when the cannon again sounded, the
drums beat to arms, they formed ready for
action on the decks. A last gun is discharged ;
every one believed it was the signal to weigh
anchor, and shouts of Vive V Empereur rent the
air, but it was the signal for debarkation,
which was effected silently and with deep re-
gret. It was completed, however, as rapidly
as the embarkation, and in thirteen minutes
from the time when the soldiers were on
board, they were arranged in battle array on
the shore.
"Meanwhile the English had completely
fallen into the snare. The fleet which cruised
before Rochfort had no sooner seen Admiral
Missiessy running down before the wind, than
it set sail in pursuit. Villeneuve, who started
from Toulon in the middle of a violent tem-
pest, was obliged to return to the harbour; but
such was Nelson's anxiety to meet him, that
he set sail first for Egypt, then for the West In-
dies. The Mediterranean was speedily cleared
of English vessels ; their fleets wandered
through the Atlantic, without knowing where
to find the enemy; the moment to strike a
decisive stroke had arrived.
"The unlocked for return of Missiessy frus-
trated all these calculations. He had sailed
like an arrow to Martinique, and returned still
more rapidly: but the English now retained
at home the squadrons which they had original-
ly intended to have sent for the defence of
Jamaica. Our situation in consequence was
less favourable than we had expected ; but,
nevertheless, there was nothing to excite un-
easiness. We had fifteen ships of the line at
Ferrol, six at Cadiz, five at Rochfort, twenty-
one at Brest. Villeneuve was destined to rally
them, join them to the twenty which he had
under his orders, and advancing at the head
of an overwhelming force, make himself mas-
ter of the Channel. He left Toulon on the
30th March, and on the 23d June he was at the
Azores, on his return to Europe, leaving Nelson
still in the West Indies. But at the very mo-
ment when every one flattered himself that
our vessels would speedily arrive to protect
the embarkation of the army, we learnt that,
MARSHAL NEY.
9t
deterred by a cannonade of a few hours, and
the loss of two ships, (Sir R. Calder's battle,)
he had taken refuge in Ferrol. A mournful
feeling took possession of our minds ; every
one complained that a man should be so im-
measurably beneath his destiny.
"All hope, however, was not lost; the em-
peror still retained it. He continued his dis-
positions, and incessantly urged the advance
of the marine. Every one flattered himself
that Villeneuve, penetrated with the greatness
of his mission, would at length put to sea, join
Gautheame, disperse the fleet of Cornwallis,
and at length make his appearance in the
Channel. But an unhappy fatality drew him
on. He only left Ferrol to throw himself into
Cadiz. It was no longer possible to count on
the support of his squadron. The emperor in
vain attempted other expedients, and made
repeated attempts to embark. Nothing could
succeed for want of the covering squadron ;
and soon the Battle of Trafalgar arid the
Austrian war postponed the conquest of Eng-
land to another age." II. 259 262.
This passage, as- well as all the others in
Napoleon's Memoirs, which are of a similar
import, are calulated, in our opinion, to excite
the most singular feelings. They demonstrate,
beyond a doubt, of what incalculable import-
ance Sir Robert Calder's action was ; and that,
more than even the triumph of Trafalgar, it
fixed the destinies of Britain. The great victory
of Nelson did not occur till the 21st October,
and months before that the armies of Napo-
leon had been transported from the shores of
Boulogne to the heart of Germany, and were
irrevocably engaged in a contest with Austria
and Russia. It was Sir Robert Calder's action
which broke the course of Napoleon's designs,
and chained his armies to the shore, at the
very time when they were ready to have
passed over, with a second Caesar, to the shores
of Britain. It is melancholy to think of the
fate of the gallant officer, under the dictation
of that impartial judge, the popular voice,
whose skill and bravery achieved these great
results.
It is a curious speculation, now that the
event is over, what would have been the fate
of England, if Napoleon, with one hundred
and fifty thousand men, had, in consequence
of the success of these combinations, landed
on the shores of Sussex. We are now com-
pelled, with shame and sorrow, to doubt the
doctrine which, till the last three years, we
held on this subject. We fear, there is a great
probability that he would have achieved the
overthrow of the British empire. Not that
the mere force of Napoleon's army, great as it
was, could have in the end subjugated the de-
scendants of the conquerors of Cressy and
Azicour. The examples of Vimiera, Maida,
Alexandria, Corunna, and Waterloo, where
English troops, who had never seen a shot
fired in anger, at once defeated the veterans
of France, even when commanded by the
ablest officers, is sufficient to prove the reverse.
England was invincible, if she remained faith*-
ful to herself. But would she have remained
faithful to herself 1 That is the question. The
events of the last three years have awakened
us to the mournful fear, that she would not. It
is now proved, by sad experience, that we
possess within ourselves a numerous, power-
ful, and energetic, faction, insatiable in am-
bition, unextinguishable in resources, deaf to
every call of patriotism, dead to every feeling
of hereditary glory. To them national triumph
is an object of regret, because it was achieved
under the banners of their opponents ; national
humiliation an object of indifference, provided
they are elevated by it to the reins of power.
With burning hearts and longing eyes they
watched the career of the French Revolution,
ever eulogizing its principles, palliating its
excesses, vituperating its adversaries. Mr.
Fox pronounced in Parliament the Constitu-
j tion framed by the Constituent Assembly, to
be "the most astonishing fabric of wisdom
| and virtue which patriotism had reared in any
i age or country, on the ruins of ignorance and
' superstition." And when this astonishing
fabric produced Danton and Robespierre, and
hatched the Reign of Terror, he showed no
disposition to retract the opinion. Two hun-
dred and fifty thousand Irishmen, we are told
by Wolfe Tone, were united, drilled, regimented
and organized, to effect the separation of Ire-
land from Great Britain ; and if we may be-
lieve Mr. Moore, in his Life of Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, Mr. Fox was no stranger to their
treasonable intentions at the very time when
he earnestly supported their demand for Parlia-
mentary Reform. During the last three years
we have seen this party systematically undo
every think which their predecessors had
effected during half a century of unexampled
glory; abandon, one by one, all the objects of
our continental policy, the Dutch barrier, the
protection of Portugal, the independence of
Holland, the integrity of Turkey; unite the
leopard and the tricolor in an inglorious
crusade against the independence of the sur-
rounding' states ; beat down Holland by open
force, and subvert Portugal by feigned neutrali-
ty and real hostility; force the despots of
Northern Europe into a dangerous defensive
combination, and unite the arms of constitu-
tional freedom with those of democratic am-
bition in the South; and, to gain a deceitful
popularity for a few years, sacrifice the Con-
stitution, which had for two hundred years
conferred unexampled prosperity on their
country. The men who have done these
things, could not have been relied on when
assailed by the insidious arts and deceitful
promises of Napoleon.
Napoleon has told us, in his Memoirs, how
he proposed to have subjugated England. He
would have overcome it, as he overcame Swit-
zerland, Venice, and all the states which did
not meet him with uncompromising hostility.
He would instantly, on landing, have pub-
lished a proclamation, in which he declared
that he came to deliver the English from the
oligarchy under which they had groaned for
three centuries ; and for this end he would
have promised annual parliaments, universal
suffrage, vote by ballot, the confiscation of the
Church property, the abolition of the Corn
Laws, and all the objects of Whig or Radical
ambition. By these offers he would have
92
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
thrown the apple of eternal discord and divi-
sion into Great Britain. The republican trans-
ports which broke out with such vehemence
on the announcement of the Reform Bill in
1831, would have been instantly heard on the
landing of the tricolor-flag on the throne of
England: and the divisions now so irrecover-
ably established amongst us, would have at
once arisen in presence of a gigantic and en-
terprising enemy. There can be little doubt,
we fear, what a considerable portion of the
Movement party in England, and the whole of
it in Ireland, would have done. They would,
heart and hand, have joined the enemy of their
country. Conceiving that they were doing
what was best for its inhabitants they would
have established a republic in close alliance
with France, and directed the whole resources
of England to support the cause of democracy
all over the world. Meanwhile, Napoleon,
little solicitous about their political dogmas,
would have steadily fixed his iron grasp on
the great warlike establishments of the coun-
try ; Portsmouth, Plymouth, Woolwich, Chat-
ham, Sheerness, Deptford, and Carron, would
have fallen into his hands ; the army would
have been exiled or disbanded; and if his
new democratical allies proved at all trouble-
some in the House of Commons, he would
have dispersed them with as little ceremony,
by a file of grenadiers, as he did the Council
of Five Hundred in the Orangery of St. Cloud.
It is with pain and humiliation that we
make this confession. Five years ago we
should have held any man a foul libeller on
the English character who should have de-
clared such conduct as probable in any part
of the English opposition ; and we should
have relied with as much confidence on the
whole liberal party to resist the aggressions
of France, as we should on the warmest ad-
herents of government. It is their own conduct,
since they came into power, which has unde-
ceived us, and opened our eyes to the immen-
sity of the danger to which the country was
exposed, when her firm patriots at the helm
nailed her colors to the mast. But regarding,
as we do, with perfect sincerity, the Reform
Bill as the parent of a much greater change
in our national institutions than a conquest by
France would have been, and the passing of
that measure as a far more perilous, because
more irremediable leap in the dark, than if
we had thrown ourselves into the arms of
Napoleon, we cannot but consider the subse-
quent events as singularly illustrative of the
prior dangers, and regard the expulsion of the
Whigs from the ministry by the firmness of
George III., in 1807, as a delivery from greater
danger than the country had known since the
Saxon arms were overthrown by William on
the field of Hastings.
One of the most brilliant acts of Napoleon
was his astonishing march from Boulogne to
Swabia, in 1805, and the admirable skill with
which he accumulated his forces, converging
from so many different points round the un-
fortunate Mack, who lay bewildered at Ulm.
In this able undertaking, as well as in the
combat at Elchingen, which contributed in so
essential a manner to its success, and from
which his title of duke was taken, Ney bore
a conspicuous part. The previous situation
of the contending powers is thus described by
our author:
"The troops which the emperor had under
his command did not exceed 180,000 men.
This was little enough for the strife which
was about to commence, for the coalition did
not now merely oppose to us the troops which
they had in the first line. The allied sove-
reigns already addressed themselves to the
multitude, and loudly called on them to take
up arms in defence of liberty, they turned
against us the principles which they professed
their desire to destroy. They roused in Ger-
many national antipathies : flattered in Italy
the spirit of independence, scattered every
where the seeds of insurrection. The masses
of the people were slow to swallow the bait.
They appreciated our institutions, and did not
behold without distrust this sudden burst of
enthusiasm in sovereigns in favour of the po-
pular cause : but they readily took fire at the
recital of the sacrifices which we had imposed
on them, the promised advantages which we
had not permitted them to enjoy. The Coali-
tion prepared to attack us on all the vast line
which we occupied. Russians, Swedes, Eng-
lish, Hanoverians, hastened to take a part in
the strife. The approach of such a mass of
enemies might have occasioned dangerous
results ; a single reverse might have involved
us in a strife with warlike and impatient na-
tions; but the Austrians had imprudently
spread themselves through Bavaria, at a time
when the Russians had hardly as yet passed
Poland. The emperor did not despair of an-
ticipating the one and overwhelming the other,
and thus dissipating that formidable league of
sovereigns before they were in a situation to
deploy their forces on the field of battle. The
blow, according to these calculations, was to
be struck in Swabia. But from that country
to Boulogne, where our troops were stationed,
the distance was nearly the same as to Podo-
lia, where the Russians had arrived. He
sought to steal a march upon them to conceal
for some days the great manoeuvre which he
meditated. For this purpose, Marmont, whose
troops were on the coast, when he set out for
Germany, received orders to give out that he
was about to take merely other quarters ; and
Bernadotte, who was stationed in Hanover, to
encourage the opinion that he was about to
spend the winter in that country. Meanwhile
all had orders to hasten their march ; all ad-
vanced with the same celerity ; and when our
enemies still believed us on the shores of the
Channel, we were far advanced towards the
Rhine. The first and second corps had
reached Mayence; the third was grouped
around Manheim ; the fourth had halted in
the environs of Spire; the fifth was estab-
lished at Strasbourg, and the sixth, which had
started from Montreuilon the 28th August, had
reached Lauterbourg on the 24th September.
In that short interval, it had traversed three hun-
dred leagues, being at the rate of above ten
leagues a-day. History has nothing to show
comparable to such celerity." II. 268 270.
From a soldier of such ability and experi-
MARSHAL NEY.
ence much may be expected of value on the
science of war. In the " Reflections" of the
marshal, at the end of the second volume, the
reader will find much interesting matter of that
description. We select one example :
" The defensive system accords ill with the
disposition of the French soldier, at least if it
is not to be maintained by successive diver-
sions and excursions ; in a word, if you are
not constantly occupied in that little warfare,
inactivity destroys the force of troops who
rest constantly on the defensive. They are
obliged to be constantly on the alert, night
and day; while, on the other hand, offensive
expeditions, wisely combined, raise the spirit
of the soldier, and prevent him from having
time to ponder on the real cause of his dan-
gerous situation.
"It is in the offensive that yoji find in the
French soldier inexhaustible" resources. His
active disposition, and valour in assaults,
double his power. A general should never
hesitate to march with the bayonet against the
enemy, if the ground is favourable for the use
of that weapon. It is in the attack, in fine,
that you accustom the French soldier to every
species of warfare, alike to brave the ene-
my's fire, which is generally little hurtful,
and to leave the field open to the develop-
ment of his intelligence and courage.
. " One of the greatest difficulties in war is
to accustom the soldier to the fatigues of
marching. The other powers of Europe will
attain with difficulty in this respect the degree
of perfection which the French soldier pos-
sesses. His sobriety and physical constitu-
tion are the real causes of the marked superi-
ority he has acquired over the Austrians in
that particular.
" Rapidity of march, or rather an able com-
bination of marches, almost invariably deter-
mine the fate of war. Colonels of infantry,
therefore, should be indefatigable in their en-
deavours to train their soldiers progressively to
ordinary and forced marches. To attain that
object, so essential in war, it is indispensable
to oblige the soldier to carry his knapsack on
his back from the outset of the campaign, in
order to accustom him to the fatigues which
in the course of it he must undergo. The
health of the soldier depends on this being
habitual ; the men are economized by it ; the
continual loss by partial and frequently
useless combats is avoided, as well as the
considerable expenses of hospitals to govern-
ment." II. 410, 411.
We have room for no more extracts :
those which have been already given will
convey a clear idea of the character of this
work. It possesses the merits, and exhibits
the defects, of all the memoirs by the leaders
of the ambitious or war party in France, re-
garding that period. Abounding in anecdote,
full of patriotic spirit and military adventure,
it at the same time presents all the prejudices
and errors of that party, a profound and
unreasonable hatred of this country an im-
passioned enthusiasm for the glory of France
a deliberate and apparently sincere belief,
that whatever opposes its elevation is to be
looked upon with instinctive and unconquer-
able aversion. In this respect, the opinions
of this party in France are utterly extravagant,
and not a little amusing. They make no
allowances for the differences of national
feeling yield nothing to national rivalry
never transport themselves into the breasts of
their antagonists in the strife, or of the people
they are oppressing, but take for granted, as a
matter concerning which there can be no dis-
pute, that whatever resists the glory of France
is an enemy of the human race. There are
many writers of intelligence and ability in
whom we cannot pardon this weakness ; but,
recollecting the tragic fate of Marshal Ney,
and pitying the ulcerated hearts of his rela-
tions, we find more excuse for it in his bio-
grapher, and look forward with interest to the
concluding volumes of this work, which will
contain still more interesting matter the
Peninsular campaigns, the Russian retreat,
the rout of Waterloo.
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
ROBERT BRUCE.*
A Freedome is a noble thing;
Freedome makes man to have liking ;
Freedome all solace to men eives ;
He lives at ease that freely fives.
HARBOUR'S BRUCE.
THE discovery of the bones of ROBERT
BRUCE, among the ruins of Dunfermline ab-
bey, calls for some observations in a journal
intended to record the most remarkable events,
whether of a public or a domestic nature,
which occur during the period to which it
refers ; and it will never, perhaps, be our
good fortune to direct the attention of our
readers to an event more interesting to the
antiquary or the patriot of Scotland, than the
discovery and reinterment of the remains of
her greatest hero.
It is satisfactory, in the first place, to know
that no doubt can exist about the remains
which were discovered being really the bones
of Robert Bruce. Historians had recorded
that he was interred " debito cum honore in
medio Ecclesiae de Dunfermline ;" but the
ruin of the abbey at the time of the Reforma-
tion, and the subsequent neglect of the monu-
ments which it contained, had rendered it
difficult to ascertain where this central spot
really was. Attempts had been made to ex-
plore among the ruins for the tomb; but so
entirely was the form of cathedral churches
forgotten in this northern part of the island,
that the researches were made in a totally
different place from the centre of the edifice.
At length, in digging the foundations of the
new church, the workmen came to a tomb,
arched over with masonry, and bearing the
marks of more than usual care in its construc-
tion. Curiosity being attracted by this cir-
cumstance, it was suspected that it might
contain the remains of the illustrious hero ;
and persons of more skill having examined
the spot discovered that it stood prenscly in the
centre of the church, as its form was indicated
by the 'existing ruins. The tomb having been
opened in the presence of the Barons of
Exchequer, the discovery of the name of King
Robert on an iron plate among the rubbish,
and the cloth of gold in which the bones were
shrouded, left no room to doubt that the long
wished-for grave had at last been discovered ;
while the appearance of the skeleton, in
which the breast-bone was sawed asunder,
afforded a still more interesting proof of its
really being the remains of that illustrious
hero, whose heart was committed to his faith-
ful associate in arms, and thrown by him, on a
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, amidst the ranks
of the enemy, with the sublime expression,
" Onwards, as thou wast wont, thou fearless
heart."
Such an event demands a temporary pause
in the avocations and amusements of life.
We feel called on to go back, in imagination,
* Blackwood's Mapazine, Dec 1819. Written at
the time of the di-covery of the remains of Robert
Bruce in the church of Dunferniline.
to the distant and barbarous period when the
independence of our country was secured by
a valour and ability that has never since
been equalled; and in returning from his
recent grave to take a nearer view of the
difficulties which he had to encounter, and the
beneficial effects which his unshaken patriot-
ism has confirmed upon its people. Had we
lived in the period when his heroic achieve-
ments were fresh in the public recollection,
and when the arms of England yet trembled
at the-name of Bannockburn, we would have
dwelt with enthusiasm on his glorious ex-
ploits. A nation's gratitude should not relax,
when the lapse of five subsequent centuries
has not produced a rival to his patriotism and
valour ; and when this long period has served
only to develope the blessings which they
have conferred upon his country.
Towards a due understanding, however, of
the extraordinary merits of Robert Bruce, it
is necessary to take a cursory view of the
power with which he had to contend, and of
the resources of that kingdom, which, at that
critical juncture, providence committed to his
arms.
The power of England, against which it
was his lot incessantly to struggle, was, per-
haps, the most formidable which then existed
in Europe. The native valour of her people,
distinguished even under the weakest reign,
was then led on and animated by a numerous
and valiant feudal nobility. That bold and
romantic spirit of enterprise which led the
Norman arms to the throne of England, and
enabled Roger de Hauteville, with thirty fol-
lowers, to win the crown of the two Sicilies,
still animated the English nobles; and to this
hereditary spirit was added the remembrance
of the. matchless glories which their arms had
acquired in the wars of Palestine. The
barons, who were arrayed against Robert
Bruce, were the descendants of those iron
warriors who combated for Christendom under
the wall of Acre, and defeated the whole
Saracen strength in the battle of Ascalon ; the
banners that were unfurled for the conquest
of Scotland, were those which had waved
victorious over the arms of Saladin; and the
sovereign who led them, bore the crown
that had been worn by Richard in the Holy
Wars, and wielded in his sword the terror of
that mighty name, at which even the accumu-
lated hosts of Asia were appalled.
Nor were the resources of England less
formidable for maintaining and nourishing
the war. The prosperity which had grown
up with the equal laws of our Saxon ances-
tors, and which the tyranny of the early Nor-
man kings had never completely extinguished,
had revived and spread under the wise and
ROBERT BRUCE.
95
beneficent reigns of Henry II. and Edward I.
The legislative wisdom of the last monarch
had given to the English law greater improve-
ments than it had ever received in any subse-
quent reigns, while his heroic valour had
subdued the rebellious spirit of his barons,
and trained their united strength to submis-
sion to the throne. The acquisition of Wales
had removed the only weak point of his wide
dominion, and added a cruel and savage race
to the already formidable mass of his armies.
The navy of England already ruled the seas,
and was prepared to carry ravage and desola-
tion over the wide and defenceless Scottish
coast ; while a hundred thousand men, armed
in the magnificent array of feudal war, and
led on by the ambition of a feudal nobility,
poured into a country which seemed destined
only to be their prey.
But most of all, in the ranks of this army,
were found the intrepid YEOMAXRY of Eng-
land ; that peculiar and valuable body of men
which has in every age contributed as much
to the stability of the English character, as
the celebrity of the English arms, and which
then composed those terrible archers, whose
prowess rendered them so formidable to all
the armies of Europe. These men, whose
valour was warmed by the consciousness of
personal freedom, and whose strength was
nursed among the enclosed fields and green
pastures of English liberty, conferred, till the
discovery of fire-arms rendered personal ac-
quirements of no avail, a matchless advan-
tage on the English armies. The troops of
no other nation could produce a body of men
in the least comparable to them either in
strength, discipline, or individual valour; and
such was the dreadful efficacy with which
they used their weapons, that not only did
they mainly contribute to the subsequent tri-
umphs of Cressy and Azincour, but at Poitiers
and Hamildon Hill they alone gained the vic-
tory, with hardly any assistance from the
feudal tenantry.
These troops were well known to the
Scottish soldiers, and had established their
superiority over them in many bloody battles,
in which the utmost efforts of undisciplined
valour had been found unavailing against
their practised discipline and superior equip-
ment. The very names of the barons who
headed them were associated with, an un-
broken career of conquest and renown, and
can hardly be read yet without a feeling of
national exultation.
Names that to fear were never known,
Bold Norfolk's Earl lie Brotherton,
And Oxford's famed do Vere ;
Ross, Montapne, and Manly came,
And Courtney's pride, and Percy's fame,
Names known too well in Scotland's war
At Falkirk, Methven. and Dunbar,
Dla/.ed broader yet in after years,
At Cressy red, and fell Poitiers.
Against this terrible force, before which, in
the succeeding reign, the military power of
France was compelled to bow, Bruce had to
array the scanty troops of a barren land, and
the divided forces of a turbulent nobility.
Scotland was, in his time, fallen low indeed
from that state of peace and prosperity in
which she was found at the first invas ; on of
Edward I., and on which so much light has
been thrown by the industrious research of
our times.* The disputed succession had
sown the seeds of unextinguishable jealousies
among the nobles ; the gold of England had
corrupted many to betray their country's
cause; and the xatal ravages of English inva-
sion naa desolated the whole plains from
which resources for carrying on the war
could be dra\\(n. All the heroic valour, the
devoted patriotism, and the personal prowess
of Wallace, had been unable to stem the
torrent of English invasion ; and, when he
died, the whole nation seemed to sink under
the load against which his unexampled forti-
tude had long enabled it to struggle. These
unhappy jealousies among the nobles, to
which his downfall was owing, still continued,
and almost rendered hopeless any attempt to
combine their forces ; while the thinned popu-
lation and ruined husbandry of the country
seemed to prognosticate nothing but utter
extirpation from a continuance of the war.
Nor was the prospect less melancholy from a
consideration of the combats which had taken
place. The short spear and light shield of
the Scotch had been found utterly unavailing
against the iron panoply and powerful horses
of the English barons; while the hardy and
courageous mountaineers perished in vain
under the dreadful tempest of the English
archery.
What then must have been the courage of
that youthful prince, who after having been
driven for shelter to an island on the north of
Ireland, could venture, with only forty fol-
lowers, to raise the standard of independence
in the west of Scotland, against the accumu-
lated force of this mighty power? what the
resources of that understanding, which, though
intimately acquainted, from personal service,
with the tried superiority of the English arms,
could foresee, in his barren and exhausted
country, the means of combating them 1 what
the ability of that political conduct which
could re-unite the jaring interests, and smother
the deadly feuds, of the Scottish nobles ? and
what the capacity of that noble warrior, who,
in the words of the contemporary historian,f
could "unite the prowess of the first knight to
the conduct of the greatest general of his age,"
and was able, in the space of six years, to raise
the Scottish arms from the lowest point of
depression to such a pitch of glory, that even
the redoubted archers and haughty chivalry
of England fled at the sight of the Scottish
banner ?t
Nor was it only in the field that the great
and patriotic conduct of Robert Bruce was dis-
played. In the endeavour to restore the almost
ruined fortunes of his country, and to heal the
wounds which a war of unparalleled severity
had brought noon its people, he exhibited the
same wise ana beneficent policy. Under his
auspicious rule, husbandry revived, arts were
encouraged, and the turbulent barons were
awed into subjection. Scotland recovered,
during his administration, in a great measure,
* rtnlmers's Ciledonb, vol. i fFroiesart.
$ Walsing. p. 10o. Mon. Malms, p. 102, 153.
96
ALISON';! MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
from the devastation that had preceeded it
and the peasants, forgetting the stern warrio
in the beneficent monarch, long rememberec
his sway, under the name of the " good King
Robert's reign."
But the greatness of his character appeared
most of all from the events that occurred aftei
his death. When the capacity with which
he and his worthy associates, Randolph anc
Douglas, had counterbalanced the superiority
of the English arms, was withdrawn, the fabric
which they had supported fell to the ground
In the very first battle which was fought after
his death, at Hamildon Hill, a larger army
than that which conquered at Bannockburn
was overthrown by the archers of England
without a single knight couching his spear
Never, at any subsequent period, was Scotland
able to withstand the more powerful arms of
the English yeomanry. Thenceforward, her
military history is little more than a melancholy
catalogue of continued defeats, occasioned
rather by treachery on the part of her nobles,
or incapacity in her generals, than any defect
of valour in her soldiers ; and the independence
of the monarchy was maintained rather by the
terror which the name of Bruce and the re-
membrance of Bannockbuni had inspired,
than by the achievements of any of the suc-
cessors to his throne.*
The merits of Robert Bruce, as a warrior,
are very generally acknowledged; and the eyes
of Scottish patriotism turn with the greater
txultation to his triumphs, from the contrast
which their splendour affords to the barren
and humiliating annals of the subsequent
reigns. But the important CONSEQ.UEIVCES of
nis victories are not sufficiently appreciated.
"While all admit the purity of the motives by
which he was actuated, there are many who
lament the consequences of his success, and
perceive in it the source of those continued
hostilities between England and Scotland
which have brought such incalculable calami-
ties upon both countries, and from which the
latter has only within half a century begun to
recover. Better would it have been, it is said
for the prosperity of this country, if, like Wales,
she had passed at once under the dominion of
the English government, and received, five
centuries ago, the present of that liberty which
she so entirely lost during her struggles for
national independence, and which nothing but
her subsequent union with a free people has
enabled her to obtain.
There is something, we think, a priori, im-
probable in this supposition, that, from the
assertion of her independence under Robert
Bruce, Scotland has received any injury. The
instinct to maintain the national independence,
and resist aggression from foreign powers, is
so universally implanted among mankind, that
it may well be doubted whether an obedience
to its impulse is likely in any case to pro-
duce injurious effects. In fact, subjugation
by a foreign power is itself, in general, a greater
calamity than any benefits with which it is
accompanied can ever compensate; because,
in the very act of receiving them by force, there
* Henry's Britain, vol. vii.
is implied an entire dereliction of all that is
valuable in political blessings, a security that
they will remain permanent. There is no ex-
ample, perhaps, to be found in the history of
mankind, of political freedom being either
effectually conferred by a sovereign in gift, or
communicated by the force of foreign arms ;
but as liberty is the greatest blessing which
man can enjoy, so it seems to be the law of
nature that it should be the reward of intre-
pidity and energy alone ; and that it is by the
labour of his hands, and the sweat of his brow,
that he is to earn his freedom as well as his
subsistence.
Least of all are such advantages to be an-
ticipated from the conquest of a. free people.
That the dominion of free states over con-
quered countries is always more tyrannical
than that of any other form of government,
has been observed ever since the birth of
liberty in the Grecian states, by all who have
been so unfortunate as to be subjected to their
rule. If we except the Roman republic, whose
wise and beneficent policy is so entirely at
variance with every thing else which we ob-
serve in human affairs, that we are almost dis-
posed to impute it to a special interposition of
divine providence, there is no free state in
ancient or modern times, whose government
towards the countries whom it subdued has
not been of the most oppressive description.
We are accustomed to speak of the maternal
government of free governments, but towards
their subject provinces, it is generally the
cruel tyranny of the step-mother, who oppresses
her acquired children to favour her own off-
spring.
Nor is it difficult to perceive the reason
why a popular government is naturally in-
clined, in the general case, to severity towards
its dependencies. A single monarch looks to
the revenue alone of the countries whom he
las subdued, and as it necessarily rises with
the prosperity which they enjoy, his obvious
nterest is to pursne the measures best calcu-
ated to secure it. But in republics, or in those
"ree governments where the popular voice ex-
ercises a decided control, the leading men of
he state themselves look to the property of
he subject country as the means of their in-
dividual exaltation. Confiscations according-
y are multiplied, with a view to gratify the
>eople or nobles of the victorious country
with grants of the confiscated lands. Hatred
and animosity are thus engendered between
he ruling government and their subject
provinces ; and this, in its time, gives rise to
new confiscations, by which the breach be-
ween the higher and lower orders is rendered
rreparable. Whoever is acquainted with the
listory of the dominion which the Athenian
and Sy racusan populace held over their subject
ities ; with the government of Genoa, Venice,
nd Florence, in modern times ; or with the
anguinary rule which England exercised
ver Ireland during the three centuries which
bllowed her subjugation, will know that this
tatement is not overcharged.
On principle, therefore, and judging by the
xperience of past times, there is no room to
doubt, that Bruce, in opposing the conquest of
ROBERT BRUCE,
97
Scotland by the English arms, doing what the
real interest of his country required ; and that
how incalculable soever may be the blessings
which she has since received by a union, on
equal terms, with her southern neighbour, the
result would have been very different had she
entered into that government on the footing of
involuntary subjugation. In fact, it is not diffi-
cult to perceive what would have been the
policy which England would have pursued to-
wards this country, had she prevailed in the
contest for the Scottish throne ; and it is by
following out the consequences of such an
event, and tracing its probable influence on
the condition of our population at this day,
that we can alone appreciate the immense obli-
gations we owe to our forefathers, who fought
and died on the field of Bannockburn.
Had the English then prevailed in the war
with Robert Bruce, and finally succeeded in
establishing their long wished-for dominion in
this country, it cannot be doubted, that their
first measure would have been to dispossess a
large portion of the nobles who had so obsti-
nately maintained the war against them, and
substitute their own barons in their room. The
pretended rebellion of Scotland against the
legitimate authority of Edward, would have
furnished a plausible pretext for such a pro-
ceeding, while policy would of course have
suggested it as the most efficacious means, both
of restraining the turbulent and hostile spirit
of the natives, and of gratifying the great barons
by whose force they had been subdued. In
fact, many such confiscations and grants of
the lands to English nobles actually took place,
during the time that Edward I. maintained his
authority within the Scottish territory.
The consequences of such a measure are
very obvious. The dispossessed proprietors
would have nourished the most violent and
inveterate animosity against their oppressors ;
and the tenantry on their estates, attached by
feudal and clanish affection to their ancient
masters, would have joined in any scheme for
their restoration. The seeds of continual dis-
cord and hatred would thus have been sown
between the lower orders and the existing
proprietors of the soil. On the other hand,
the great English barons, to whom the con-
fiscated lands were assigned, would naturally
prefer the society of their own country, and the
security of their native castles, to the unpro-
ductive soil and barbarous tribes on their
northern estates. They would in consequence
have relinquished these estates to factors or
agents, and, without ever thinking of residing
among a people by whom they were detested,
have sought only to increase, by rigorous ex-
actions, the revenue which they could derive
from their labour.
In progress of time, however, the natural
fervour of the Scottish people, their hereditary
animosities against England, the exertions of
the dispossessed proprietors, and the oppression
of the English authorities, would have occa-
sioned a revolt in Scotland. They would na-
turally have chosen for such an undertaking
the moment when the English forces were en-
gaged in the wars of France, and when the
entire desertion of the nothern frontier pro-
13
raised successful rapine to their arms. In such
circumstances, it is not to be doubted that they
would have been unable to withstand the seeds
of resistance to the English arms, which the
French emissaries would have sedulously
spread through the country. And if the au-
thority of England was again re-established,
new and more extensive confiscations would
of course have followed ; the English nobles
would have been gratified by grants of the most
considerable estates on the north of the Tweed,
and the bonds of military subjection would-
have been tightened on the unfortunate people
who were subdued.
The continuance of the wars between France
and England, by presenting favourable op-
portunities to the Scotch to revolt, combined
with the temptation which the remoteness of
their situation and the strength of their coun-
try afforded, would have induced continual
civil wars between the peasantry and their
foreign masters, until the resources of the coun-
try were entirely exhausted, and the people
sunk in hopeless submission under the power
that oppressed them.
But in the progress of these wars, an evil
of a far greater and more permanent descrip-
tion would naturally arise, than either the loss
of lives or the devastation of property which
they occasioned. In the course of the pro-
tracted contest, the LANDED PROPERTY OF THB
COUNTRY WOULD ENTIRELY HAVE CHANGED MAS-
TERS ; and in place of being possessed by na-
tives of the country permanently settled on
their estates, and attached by habit and com-
mon interest to the labourers of the ground,
it would have come into the hands of foreign
noblemen, forced upon the country by military
power, hated by the natives, residing always
on their English estates, and regarding the
people of Scotland as barbarians, whom it was
alike impolitic to approach, and necessary to
curb by despotic power.
But while such would be the feelings anej
policy of the English proprietors, the stewards
whom they appointed to manage their Scotch
estates, at a distance from home, and surround-
ed by a fierce and hostile population, would
have felt the necessity of some assistance, to
enable them to maintain their authority, or
turn to any account the estates that were com-
mitted to their care. Unable to procure mili-
tary assistance, to enforce the submission of
every district, or collect the rents of every pro-
perty, they would, of necessity, have looked to
some method of conciliating the people of the
country ; and such a method would naturally
suggest itself in the attachment which the peo-
ple bore to the families of original landlords, and
the consequent means which they possessed
of swaying their refractory dispositions. These
unhappy men, on the other hand, despairing
of the recovery of their whole estates, would
be glad of an opportunity of regaining any part
of them, and eagerly embrace any proposal by
which such a compromise might be effected.
The sense qf mutal dependence, in short, would
have led to an arrangement, by which the es-
tates of the English nobles ti-cre to be subset to
the Scottish prmiric'ora for a f:.n<l ynrly rent, and
they would take upoii themselves the task to
98
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
which they alone were competent, of recovering
the rents from the actual cultivators of the soil.
As the numbers of the people increased,
however, and the value of the immense farms
which had been thus granted to the descendants
of their original proprietors was enhanced, the
task of collecting rents over so extensive a
district would have become too great for any
individual, and the increased wealth which he
had acquired from the growth of his tenantry,
would have led him to dislike the personal la-
bour with which it would be attended. These
great tenants, in consequence, would have sub-
set their vast possessions to an inferior set of
occupiers, who might each superintend the
collection of the rents within his own farm,
and have an opportunity of acquiring a per-
sonal acquaintance with the labourers by whom
it was to be cultivated. As the number of the
people increased, the same process would be
repeated by the different tenants on their re-
spective farms ; and thus there would have
sprung up universally in Scotland a class of
MIDDLE MEN between the proprietor and the ac-
tual cultivator of the soil.
While these changes went on, the condition
of the people, oppressed by a series of suc-
cessive masters, each of whom required to live
by their labour, and wholly debarred from ob-
taining any legal redress for their grievances,
would have gradually sunk. Struggling with
a barren soil, and a host of insatiable oppres-
sors, they could never have acquired any ideas
of comfort, or indulged in any hopes of rising
in the world. They would, in consequence,
have adopted that species of food which pro-
mised to afford the greatest nourishment for a
family from the smallest space of ground ; and
from the universality of this cause, the POTATO
would have become the staple food of the
country.
The landed proprietors, on the other hand,
who are the natural protectors, and ought al-
ways to be the best encouragers of the people
on their estates, would have shrunk from the
idea of leaving their English possessions,
where they were surrounded by an affectionate
and comfortable tenantry, where riches and
plenty sprung from the natural fertility of the
soil, and where power and security were de-
rived from their equal law, to settle in a north-
ern climate, amongst a people by whom they
were abhorred, and where law was unable to
restrain the licentiousness, or reform the bar-
barity of the inhabitants. They would in con-
sequence have universally become ABSENTEE
PROPRIETORS; and not only denied to the Scot-
tish people the incalculable advantages of a
resident body of landed gentlemen ; but, by
their influence in Parliament, and their animo-
sity towards their northern tenantry, prevented
any legislative measure being pursued for
their relief.
In such circumstances, it seems hardly con-
ceivable that arts or manufactures should have
made any progress in this country. But, if in
spite of the obstacles which the unfavourable
climate, and unhappy political circumstances
of the country presented, manufactures should
have begun to spring up amongst us, they
would speedily have been checked by the com-
mercial jealousy of their more powerful south-
ern rivals. Bills would have been brought
nto parliament, as was actually done in re-
gard to a neighbouring island, proceeding
on the preamble, " that it is expedient that
the Scottish manufactures should be discou-
raged ;" and the prohibition of sending their
goods into the richer market of England,
whither the whole wealth of the country were
already drawn, would have annihilated the in-
fant efforts of manufacturing industry.
Nor would the Reformation, which, as mat-
ters stand, has been of such essential service
to this country, have been, on the hypothesis
which we are pursuing, a lesser source of suf-
fering, or a greater bar to the improvement
of the people. From being embraced by their
English landlords, the Reformed Religion
would have been hateful to the peasants of
Scotland ; the Catholic priests would have
sought refuge among them, from the persecu-
tion to which they were exposed in their native
seats ; and both would have been strengthened
in their hatred to those persons to whom their
common misfortune was owing. Religious
hatred would thus have combined with all the
previous circumstances of irritation, to in-
crease the rancour between the proprietors
of the soil, and the labouring classes in this
country; and from the circumstance of the
latter adhering to the proscribed religion, they
would have been rendered yet more incapable
of procuring a redress for their grievances in
a legislative form.
Had the English, therefore, succeeded in
subduing Scotland in the time of Robert
Bruce, and in maintaining their authority
from that period, we think it not going too far
to assert, that the people of this country would
have been now in an unhappy and distracted
condition: that religious discussion and civil
rancour would have mutually exasperated the
higher and lower orders against each other ;
that the landed proprietors would have been
permanently settled in the victorious country;
that everywhere a class of middlemen would
have been established to grind and ruin the
labours of the poor; that manufactures would
have been scanty, and the country covered
with a numerous and indigent population,
idle in their habits, ignorant in their ideas,
ferocious in their manners, professing a reli-
gion which held them in bondage, and cling-
ing to prejudices from which their ruin must
ensue.
Is it said, that this is mere conjecture, and
that nothing in the history of English govern-
ment warrants us in concluding, that such
would have been the consequence of the esta-
blishment of their dominion in this country 1
Alas ! it is not conjecture. The history of IRK-
LAHD affords too melancholy a confirmation
of the truth of the positions which we have
advanced, and of the reality of the deduction
which we have pursued. In that deduction
we have not reasoned on hypothesis or con-
jecture. Every step which we have hinted at,
ha* there been taken ; every consequence which
we have suggested, has there ensued. Those
acquainted with the history of that unhappy
country, or who have studied its present con-
ROBERT BRUCE.
99
dition, will recognise in the conjectural history
which we have sketched, of what tvould have
followed the annexation of this country to
England in the time of Edward II., the real
history of what HAS FOLLOWED its subjugation
in the time of Henry II., and perceive in the
causes which we have pointed out, as what
would have operated upon our people, the
real caitses of the misery and wretchedness in
which its population is involved.
Nor is the example of the peaceful submis-
sion of Wales to the dominion of England,
any authority against this view of the subject.
Wales is so inconsiderable in comparison to
England, it comes so completely in contact
with its richest provinces, and is so enveloped
by its power, that when once subdued, all
thought of resistance or revolt became hope-
less. That mountainous region, therefore, fell
as quietly and as completely into the arms of
England, as if it had been one of the Hept-
archy, which in process of time was incor-
porated with the English monarchy. Very
different is the situation of Scotland, where
the comparative size of the country, the fervid
spirit of the inhabitants, the remoteness of its
situation, and the strength of its mountains,
continually must have suggested the hope of
successful revolt, and as necessarily occa-
sioned the calamitous consequences which we
have detailed. The rebellion of Owen Glen-
dower is sufficient to convince us, that nothing
but the utter insignificance of Wales, compared
to England, prevented the continual revolt of
the Welsh people, and the consequent intro-
duction of all those horrors which have fol-
lowed the establishment of English dominion
among the inhabitants of Ireland.
Do we then rejoice in the prosperity of our
country 7 Do we exult at the celebrity which
it has acquired in arts and in arms'? Do we
duly estimate the blessings which it has long
enjoyed from equal law and personal freedom ?
Do we feel grateful for the intelligence, the
virtue, and the frugality of our peasantry, and
acknowledge, with thankfulness, the practical
beneficence and energetic spirit of our landed
proprietors ! Let us turn to the grave of Ro-
bert Bruce, and feel as we ought the inex-
pressible gratitude due to him as the remote
author of all these blessings. But for his bold
and unconquerable spirit, Scotland might have
shared with Ireland the severity of English
conquest; and, instead of exulting now in the
prosperity of our country, the energy of our
peasantry, and the patriotic spirit of our resi-
dent landed proprietors, we might have been
deploring with her an absent nobility, an
oppressive tenantry, a bigotted and ruined
people.
It was therefore, in truth, a memorable day
for this country when the remains of this
great prince were rediscovered amidst the
ruins in which they had so long been hid;
when the arms which slew Henry de Bohun
were reinterred in the land which they had
saved from slavery ; and the head which had
beheld the triumph of Bannockburn was con-
signed to the dust, after five centuries of grate-
ful remembrance and experienced obligation.
It is by thus appreciating the merits of depart-
ed worth, that similar virtues in future are to
be called forth ; and by duly feeling the conse-
quences of heroic resistance in time past, that
the spirit is to be excited by which the future
fortunes of the state are to be maintained.
In these observations we have no intention,
as truly we have no desire, to depreciate the
incalculable blessings which this country has
derived from her union with England. We
feel, as strongly as any can do, the immense
advantage which this measure brought to the
wealth, the industry, and the spirit of Scotland.
We are proud to acknowledge, that it is to the
efforts of English patriotism that we owe the
establishment of liberty in our civil code ; and
to the influence of English example, the diffu-
sion of a free spirit among our people. But it
is just because we are duly impressed with
these feelings that we recur, with such grate-
ful pride, to the patriotic resistance of Robert
Bruce ; it is because we feel that we should
be unworthy of sharing in English liberty, un-
less we had struggled for our own indepen-
dence, and incapable of participating in its
benefits, unless we had shown that we were
capable of acquiring it. Nor are we ashamed
to own, that it is the spirit which English free-
dom has awakened that first enabled us fully
to appreciate the importance of the efforts
which our ancestors made in resisting their
dominion ; and that but for the Union on equal
terms with that power, we would have been
ignorant of the debt which we owed to those
who saved us from its subjugation. In our
national fondness, therefore, for the memory
of Robert Bruce, the English should perceive
the growth of those principles from which
their own unequalled greatness has arisen;
nor should they envy the glory of the field of
Bannockburn, when we appeal to it as our
best title to be quartered in their arms.
Yet mourn not, land of Fame,
Though ne'er the leopards on thy shield
Retreated from BO fad a field
Since Norman William came.
Oft may thine annals justly boast.
Of battles there by Scotland lost,
Grudge not her victory ;
When for her freeborn rights she strove.
Rights dear to all who freedom love,
To none BO dear as tuee.
100
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
PARIS IN 1814.*
WITH whatever sentiments a stranger may
enter Paris, his feelings must be the same
with regard to the monuments of ancient mag-
nificence, or of modern taste, which it contains.
All that the vanity or patriotism of a long
series of sovereigns could effect for the em-
bellishment of the capital in which they
resided ; all that the conquests of an ambitious
and unprincipled army could accumulate from
the spoils of the nations whom they had sub-
dued, are there presented to the eye of the
stranger with a profusion which obliterates
every former prejudice, and stifles the feelings
of national emulation in exultation at the
greatness of human genius.
The ordinary buildings of Paris, as every
traveller has observed, and as all the world
knows, are in general mean and uncomfort-
able. The height and gloomy aspect of the
houses ; the narrowness of the streets, and the
want of pavement for foot passengers, convey
an idea of antiquity, which ill accords with
what the imagination had anticipated of the
modern capital of the French empire. This
circumstance renders the admiration of the
spectator greater when he first comes in sight
of its public edifices ; when he is conducted to
the Place Louis Quinze or the Pont Neuf,
from whence he has a general view of the
principal buildings of this celebrated capital.
With the single exception of the view of Lon-
don from the terrace of the Adelphi, there is
no point in Britain where the effect of archi-
tectural design is so great as in the situations
which have now been mentioned. The view
from the former of these, combines many of
the most striking objects which Paris has to
present. To the east, the long front of the
Tuileries rises over the dark mass of foliage
which cover its gardens ; to the south, the
picturesque aspect of the town is broken by
the varied objects which the river presents,
and the fine perspective of the Bridge of Peace,
terminating in the noble front of the palace of
the Legislative Body; to the west, the long
avenues of the Elysian Fields are closed by
the pillars of a triumphal arch which Napo-
leon had commenced ; while, to the north, the
beautiful fagade of the Place itself, leaves the
spectator only room to discover at a greater
distance the foundation of the Temple of
Glory, which he had commenced, and in the
execution of which he was interrupted by
those ambitious enterprises to which his sub-
sequent downfall was owing.f To a painter's
* Written in May and June, 1814, during a residence
at Paris, when the allied armies occupied the city, and
the great museum of the Louvre was untouched; and
published in "Travels in France in 181415," which
issued from the press in Edinhurgh in 1815, to the
first volume of which the author contributed a few
chapters.
f Since completed, and forming the beautiful peristyle
of the Madeleine.
eye, the effect of the whole scene is increased
by the rich and varied fore-ground, which
everywhere presents itself, composed of the
shrubs with which the skirts of the square are
adorned, and the lofty poplars which rise
amidst the splendour of architectural beauty:
while recent events give a greater interest to
the spot from which this beauty is surveyed,
by the remembrance, that it was here that
Louis XVI. fell a martyr to the revolutionary
principles, and that it was here that the Em-
peror Alexander and the other princes of
Europe took their station when their armies
passed in triumph through the walls of Paris.
The view from the Pont Neuf, though not
striking upon the whole, embraces objects of
greater individual beauty. The gay and ani-
mated quays of the city covered with foot pas-
sengers, and, with all the varied exhibitions of
industrious occupation, which, from the warm-
ness of the climate, are carried on in the open
air ; the long and splendid front of the Louvre,
and the Tuileries ; the bold projections of
the Palais des Arts, of the Hotel de la Monnaie,
and other public buildings on the opposite side
of the river ; the beautiful perspective of the
bridges, adorned by the magnificent colonnade
which fronts the Palace of the Legislative
Body; and the lofty picturesque buildings of
the centre of Paris, surrounding the more ele-
vated towers of Notre Dame, form a scene,
which, though less perfect, is more striking,
and more characteristic than the scene from
the centre of the Place Louis Quinze. It con-
veys at once a general idea of the French
capital ; of that mixture of poverty and splen-
dour by which it is so remarkably distinguish-
ed; of that grandeur of national power, and
that degradation of individual importance
which marked the ancient dynasty of the
French nation. It marks too, in an historical
view, the changes of public feeling which the
people of this country have undergone, from
the distant period when the towers of Notre
Dame rose amidst the austerity of Gothic taste,
and were loaded with the riches of Catholic
superstition, to that boasted sera, when the
loyalty of the French people exhausted the
wealth and the genius of the country, to deco-
rate with classic taste the residence of their
sovereigns; and lastly, to those later days,
when the names of religion and of loyalty have
alike been forgotten ; when the national exulta-
tion. reposed only on the trophies of military
greatness, and the iron yoke of imperial power
was forgotten in the monuments which record
the deeds of imperial glory.
To the general observation on the inferiority
of the common buildings in Paris, there are
some remarkable exceptions. The Boulevards,
which are the remains of the ancient ramparts
which surrounded the city at a former period,
are, in general, beautiful, both from the circu-
PARIS IN 1814.
101
lar form in which they are built, which pre-
vents the view from being ever too extensive
for the objects which it contains, and presents
them in the most picturesque aspect ; from the
breadth which they everywhere preserve, and
which affords room for the spectator to observe
the magnificence of the detached palaces with
which they abound ; and from the rows of trees
with which they are shaded, and which com-
bine singularly well with the irregular cha-
racter of the building which they generally
present. In the skirts of the town, and more
especially in the Fauxbourg St. Germain, the
beauty of the streets is greatly increased by
the detached hotels or villas, surrounded by
gardens, which are everywhere to be met with,
in which the lilac, the laburnum, the Bois de
Judee, and the acacia, grow in the most luxu-
riant manner, and on the green foliage of
which, the eye reposes with singular delight,
amidst the bright and dazzling whiteness of
the stone with which they are surrounded.
The Hotel des Invalides, the Chelsea Hospital
of France, is one of the objects on which the
Parisians principally pride themselves, and to
which a stranger is conducted immediately
after his arrival in that capital. The institu-
tion itself appears to be well conducted, and
to give general satisfaction to the wounded
men, who have there found an asylum from
the miseries of war. These men live in habits
of perfect harmony among each other ; a state
of things widely different from that of our
veterans in Greenwich Hospital, and which is
probably chiefly owing to the cheerfulness and
equanimity of temper which form the best
feature in the French character. There is
something in the style of the architecture of
this building, which accords well with the
object to which it is devoted. The front is
distinguished by a simple manly portico, and a
dome of the finest proportion rises above its
centre, which is visible from all parts of the
city. This dome was gilded by order of Bona-
parte : and however much a fastidious taste
may regret the addition, it certainly gave an
air of splendour to the whole, which was in
perfect unison with the feelings of exultation
which the sight of this monument of military
glory was then fitted to awaken among the
French people. The exterior of this edifice
was formerly surrounded by cannon captured
by the armies of France at different periods:
and ten thousand standards, the trophies of
victory during the wars of two centuries,
waved under its splendid dome, and enveloped
the sword of Frederic the Great, which hung
from the centre, until the 31st of March, 1814,
when they were all burnt by order of Maria
Louisa, to prevent their falling into the vic-
torious hands of the allied powers.
If the character of the architecture of the
Hotel des Invalides accords well with the
object to which that building is destined ; the
character of the Louvre is not less in unison
with the spirit of the fine arts, to which it is
consecrated. It is impossible for language to
convey any adequate idea of the impression
which this exquisite building awakens in the
mind of a stranger. The beautiful proportions,
and the fine symmetry of the great fapade, give
an air of simplicity to the distant view of this
edifice, which is not diminished, on nearer ap-
proach, by the unrivalled beauty of its orna-
ments and detail; but when you cross the
threshold of the portico, and pass under its
noble archway into the inner court, all consi-
derations are absorbed in the throb of admira-
tion, which is excited by the sudden display of
all that is lovely and harmonious in Grecian
architecture. You find yourself in the midst
of the noblest and yet chastest display of archi-
tectural beauty, where every ornament pos-
sesses the character by which the whole is
distinguished, and where the whole possesses
the grace and elegance which every ornament
presents : You find yourself on the spot,
where all the monuments of ancient art are
deposited where the greatest exertions of
mortal genius are preserved and where a
palace has at last been raised worthy of being
the depository of the collected genius of the
human race. It bears a higher character than
that of being the residence of imperial power ;
it seems destined to loftier purposes than to
be the abode of earthly greatness ; and the only
forms by which its halls would not be degraded,
are those models of ideal perfection which the
genius of ancient Greece created to exalt the
character of a heathen world.
Placed in a more elevated spot, and destined
to a still higher object, the Pantheon bears in
its front the traces of the noble purpose for
which it was intended. It was intended to
be the cemetery of all the great men who
had deserved well of their country; and it
bears the inscription, above its entrance, Aux
grands jlmes La Patrie reconnoissanle. The
character of its architecture is well adapted to
the impression it is intended to convey, and
suits the simplicity of the noble inscription
which its portico presents. Its situation has
been selected with singular taste, to aid the
effect which was thus intended. It is placed
at the top of an eminence, which shelves in a
declivity on every side ; and the immediate
approach is by an immense flight of steps,
which form the base of the building, and in-
crease the effect which its magnitude produces.
Over the entrance rises a portico of lofty pil-
lars, finely proportioned, supporting a magni-
ficent entablature of the Corinthian order;
and the whole terminates in a dome of vast
dimensions, forming the highest object in the
whole city. The impression which every one
must feel in crossing its threshold, is that o
religious awe ; the individual is lost in the great-
ness of the objects with which he is surrounded,
and he dreads to enter what seems the abode
of a greater power, and to have been framed
for the purposes of more elevated worship.
The Louvre might have been fitted for the gay
scenes of ancient sacrifice ; it suits the brilliant
conceptions of heathen mythology ; and seems
the fit abode of those ideal forms, in which the
imagination of ancient times imbodied their
conceptions of divine perfection ; but the Pan-
theon is adapted for a holier worship, and
accords with the character of a purer belief;
and the vastness and solitude of its untrodden
chambers awaken those feelings of human
weakness, and that sentiment of human im-
12
102
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
mortality which befit the temple of a spiritual
faith.
The spectator is led, by the sight of this
great monument of sacred architecture in the
Grecian style, to compare it with the Gothic
churches of France, and, in particular, with
the Cathedral of Beauvais, the interior of
which is finished with greater delicacy, and in
finer proportions, than any other edifice of a
similar kind in that country. The impression
which the inimitable choir of Beauvais pro-
duces is widely different from that which we
felt on entering the lofty dome of the Pantheon
at Paris. The light pinnacles, the fretted roof,
the aspiring form of the Gothic edifice, seemed
to have been framed by the hands of aerial
beings ; and produced, even from a distance,
that impression of grace and airiness which it
was the peculiar object of this species of
Gothic architecture to excite. On passing the
high archway which covers the western door,
and entering the immense aisles of the Cathe-
dral, the sanctity of the place produces a deeper
impression, and the grandeur of the forms
awakens profounder feelings. The light of
day is excluded, the rays of the sun come mel-
lowed through the splendid colours with which
the windows are stained, and cast a religious
light over the marble pavement w r hich covers
the floor; while the eye reposes on the har-
monious forms of the lancet windows, or is
bewildered in the profusion of ornament with
which the roof is adorned, or is lost in the
deep perspective of its aisles. The impres-
sion which the whole produces, is that of reli-
gious emotion, singularly suited to the genius
of Christianity ; it is seen in that obscure light
which fits the solemnity of religious duty, and
awakens those feelings of intense delight,
which prepare the mind for the high strain of
religious praise. But it is not the deep feeling
of humility and weakness which is produced
by the dark chambers and massy pillars of the
Pantheon at Paris ; it is not in the mausoleum
of the dead that you seem to wander, nor on
the thoughts of the great that have gone before
you, that the mind revolves ; it is in the scene
of thanksgiving that your admiration is fixed;
it is with the emblems of hope that your devo-
tion is awakened, and with the enthusiasm of
gratitude that the mind is filled. Beneath the
gloomy roof of the Grecian temple, the spirit
is concentrated within itself; it seeks the re-
pose which solitude affords, and meditates on
the fate of the immortal soul ; but it loves to
follow the multitude into the Gothic cathedral,
to join in the song of grateful praise which
peals through its lengthened aisles, and to
share in the enthusiasm which belongs to the
exercise of common devotion.
The Cathedral of Notre Dame is the only
Gothic building of note in Paris, and it is by
no means equal to the expectations that are
naturally formed of it. The style of its archi-
tecture is not that of the finest Gothic ; it has
neither the exquisite lightness of ornament
which distinguish the summit of Gloucester
Cathedral, nor the fine lancet windows which
give so unrivalled a beauty to the interior of
Beauvais, nor the richness of roof which
covers the tombs of Westminster Abbey. Its
character is that of massy greatness ; its orna
ments are rich rather than elegant, and its in-
terior striking, more from its immense size
than the beauty of the proportion in which it is
formed. In spite of all these circumstances,
however, the Cathedral of Notre Dame pro-
duces a deep impression on the mind of the
beholder: its towers rise to a stupendous
height above all the buildings which surround
them ; while the stone of every other edifice
is of a light colour, they alone are black with
the smoke of centuries ; and exhibit a venera-
ble aspect of ancient greatness in the midst of
the brilliancy of modern decoration with which
the city is filled. Even the crowd of ornaments
with which they are loaded, and the heavy
proportion in which they are built, are forgot-
ten in the effect which their magnitude pro-
duces ; they suit the gloomy character of the
building they adorn, and accord with the ex-
pression of antiquated power by which its
aged forms are now distinguished.
To those who have been accustomed to the
form of worship which is established in Pro-
testant countries, there is nothing so striking in
the Catholic churches as the complete oblivion
of rank, or any of the distinctions of estab-
lished society which there universally prevails.
There are no divisions of seats, nor any.places
fixed for any particular classes of society.
All, of whatever rank or station, kneel alike
upon the marble pavement; and the whole
extent of the church is open for the devotion
of all classes of the people. You frequently
see the poorest citizens with their children
kneeling on the stone, close to those of the
highest rank, or the most extensive fortunes.
This custom may appear painful to those who
have been habituated to the forms of devotion
in the English churches ; but it produces an
impression on the mind of the spectator which
nothing in our service is capable of effecting.
To see the individual form lost in the im-
mensity of the objects with which he is sur-
rounded ; to see all ranks and ages blended in
the exercise of common devotion ; to see all
distinction forgotten in the sense of common
infirmity, suits the spirit of that religion which
was addressed to the poor as well as to the
rich, and fits the presence of that being before
whom all ranks are equal.
Nor is it without a good effect upon the feel-
ings of mankind, that this custom has formed
a part of the Catholic service. Amidst that
degradation of the great body of the people,
which marks the greater part of the Catholic
countries amidst the insolence of aristocratic
power, which the doctrines of the Catholic
faith are so well suited to support, it is fitting
there should be some occasions on which the
distinctions of the world should be forgotten ;
some moments in which the rich as well as
the poor should be humbled before a greater
power in which they should be reminded of
the common faith in which they have been
baptized, of the common duties to which they
are called, and the common hopes which they
have been permitted to form.
High Mass was performed in Notre Dame,
with all the pomp of the Catholic service, for
the souls of Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette and
PARIS IN 1814.
103
the Dauphin, on May 9, 1814, soon after the
king's arrival in Paris. The cathedral was
hung with black in every part; the brilliancy
of day wholly excluded, and it was lighted
only by double rows of wax tapers, which
burned round the coffins, placed in the centre
of the choir. It was crowded to excess in every
part ; all the marshals, peers, and dignitaries
of France were stationed with the royal
family near the centre of the cathedral, and
all the principal officers of the allied armies
attended at the celebration of the service.
The king was present, though, without being
perceived by the vast assembly by whom he
was surrounded; and the Duchess d'Angou-
leme exhibited, in this melancholy duty, that
mixture of firmness and sensibility by which
her character has always been distinguished.
It was said, that there were several persons
present at this solemn service who had voted
for the death of the king ; and many of those
assembled must doubtless have been con-
scious, that they had been instrumental in the
death of those for whose souls this solemn
service was now performing. The greater
part, however, exhibited the symptoms of ge-
nuine sorrow, and seemed to participate in
the solemnity with unfeigned devotion. The
Catholic worship was here displayed in its
utmost splendour ; all the highest prelates of
France were assembled to give dignity to the
spectacle ; and all that art could devise was
exhausted to render the scene impressive in
the eyes of the people. To those, however,
who had been habituated to the simplicity
of the English form, the variety of unmean-
ing ceremony, the endless gestures and un-
ceasing bows of the clergy who officiated,
destroyed the impression which the solemnity
of the service would otherwise have produced.
But though the service itself appeared ridi-
culous, the effect of the whole scene- was
sublime in the greatest degree. The black
tapestry hung in heavy folds round the sides
of the cathedral, and magnified the impres-
sion which its vastness produced. The tapers
which surrounded the coffins threw a red and
gloomy light over the innumerable multitude
which thronged the floor; their receding rays
faintly illuminated the further recesses, or
strained to pierce the obscure gloom in which
the summits of the pillars were lost; while
the sacred music pealed through the distant
aisles, and deepened the effect of the thousands
of voices which joined in the strains of re-
pentant prayer.
Among the exhibitions of art to which a
stranger is conducted immediately after his
arrival in the French metropolis, there is
none which is more characteristic of the dis-
position of the people than the Musee des Monu-
wens Francois, situated in the Rue des Petits
Augustins. This is a collection of all the
finest sepulchral monuments from different
parts of France, particularly from the Cathe-
dral of St. Denis, where the cemetery of the
royal family had, from time immemorial,
been placed. It is said by the French, that
the collection of these monuments into one
museum was the only means of preserving
them from the fury oif the people during the
Revolution; and certainly nothing but abso-
lute necessity could have justified the bar-
barous idea of bringing them from the graves
they were intended to adorn, to one spot,
where all associations connected with them
are destroyed. It is not the mere survey of
the monuments of the dead that is interesting,
not the examination of the specimens of art
by which they may be adorned; it is the
remembrance of the deeds which they are
intended to record, of the virtues they are
destined to perpetuate, of the pious gratitude
of which they are now the only testimony
above all, of the dust they actually cover.
They remind us of the great men who formerly
filled the theatre of the world, they carry us
back to an age which, by a very natural illu-
sion, we conceive to have been both wiser
and happier than our own, and present the
record of human greatness in that pleas-
ing distance when the great features of cha-
racter alone are remembered, when time has
drawn its veil over the weaknesses of mor-
tality, and its virtues are sanctified by the
hand of death. It is a feeling fitted to elevate
the soul ; to mingle the thoughts of death
with the recollection of the virtues by which
life had been dignified, and renovate in every
heart those high hopes of religion which
spring from the grave of former virtue.
All this delightful, this purifying illusion, is
destroyed by the way in which the monuments
are collected in the museum at Paris. They
are there brought together from all parts of
France ; severed from the ashes of the dead
they were intended to cover; and arranged in
systematic order to illustrate the history of the
art whose progress they unfold. The tombs
of all the kings of France, of all the generals
by whom its glory has been extended, of the
statesmen by whom its power, and the writers
by whom its fame has been established, are
crowded together in one collection, and heaped
upon each other, without any other connection
than that of the time in which they were origi-
nally raised. The museum accordingly ex-
hibits, in the most striking manner, the power
of arrangement and classification which the
French possess ; it is valuable, as containing
fine models of the greatest men which France
has produced, and exhibits a curious speci-
men of the progress of art, from its first
commencement, to the period of its greatest
perfection ; but it has wholly lost that deep
and peculiar interest which belongs to the
monuments of the dead in their original
situation.
Adjoining to the museum, is a garden
planted with trees, in which many of the
finest monuments are placed; but in which
the depravity of the French taste appears in
the most striking manner. It is surrounded
with high houses, and darkened by the shade
of lofty buildings: yet in this gloomy situa-
tion, they have placed the tomb of Fenelon,
and the united monument of Abelard and
Eloise: profaning thus, by the barbarous
affectation of artificial taste, and the still more
shocking imitation of ancient superstition, the
remains of those whose names are enshrined
in every heart which can feel the beauty of
104
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
moral excellence, or share in the sympathy
with youthful sorrow.
How different are the feelings with which
an Englishman surveys the untouched monu
ments of English greatness ! and treads the
floor of that venerable building which shrouds
the remains of all who have dignified their
native land in which her patriots, her poets
and her philosophers " sleep with her kings
and dignify the scene," which the rage of
popular fury has never dared to profane, and
the hand of victorious power has never been
able to violate ; where the ashes of the im-
mortal dead still lie in undisturbed repose
tinder that splendid roof which covered the
tombs of its earliest kings, and witnessed,
from its first dawn, the infant glory of the
English people. Nor could the remembrance
of these national monuments ever excite in
the mind of a native of France, the same
feeling of heroic devotion which inspired the
sublime expression of Nelson, as he boarded
the Spanish Admiral's ship at St. Vincent's
" Westminster Abbey or victory !"
Though the streets in Paris have an aged
and uncomfortable appearance, the form of
the houses is such, as, at a distance, to present
a picturesque aspect. Their height, their
sharp and irregular tops, the vast variety of
forms which they assume when seen from
different quarters, all combine to render a dis-
tant view of them more striking than the long
rows of uniform houses of which London is
composed. The domes and steeples of Paris,
however, are greatly inferior, both in number
and magnificence, to those of the English
capital.
The gardens of the Tuileries and the
Luxembourg, of which the Parisians think so
highly, and whjch are constantly filled with all
ranks of citizens, are laid out with a singular-
ity of taste, of which, in this country, we can
scarcely form any conception. The straight
walks the dipt trees the marble fountains
are fast wearing out in all parts of England;
they are to be met with only round the man-
sions of ancient families, and, even there are
kept rather from the influence of ancient
prejudice, or from the affection to hereditary
forms, than from their coincidence with the
present taste of the English people. They
are seldom, accordingly, disagreeable, with us,
to the eye of the most cultivated taste ; their
singularity forms a pleasing variety to the
continued succession of lawns and shrub-
beries which are everywhere to be met with ;
and they are regarded rather as the venerable
marks of ancient splendour, than as the bar-
barous affectation of modern distinction. In
France, the native deformity of this taste
appears in its real light, without the colouring
of any such adventitious circumstances as
conceal it in this country. It does not exist
under the softening veil of ancient manners ;
its avenues do not conduct to the decaying
abode of hereditary greatness its gardens do
not mark the scenes of former festivity its
fountains are not covered with the moss which
has grown for centuries. It appears as the mo-
del of present taste ; it is considered as the indi-
cation of existing splendour ; and sought after,
as the form in which the beauty of nature is
now to be admired. All that association
blends in the mind with the style of ancient
gardening in England is instantly divested by
its appearance in France ; and the whole im-
portance is then felt of that happy change in
the national taste, whereby variety has been
made to succeed to uniformity, and the imita-
tion of nature to come in the place of the exhi-
bition of art.
The remarkable characteristic of the taste
of France is, that this love of artificial beauty
continues with undiminished force, at a period
when, in other nations, it has given place to a
more genuine love for the beauty of nature.
In them, the natural progress of refinement
has led from the admiration of the art of imita-
tion to the love of the subjects imitated. In
France, this early prejudice continues in its
pristine vigour at the present moment: they
never lose sight of the effort of the artist ; their
admiration is fixed not on the quality or object
in nature, but on the artificial representation
of it ; not on the thing signified, but the sign.
It is hence that they have such exalted ideas
of the perfection of their artist David, whose
paintings are nothing more than a representa-
tion of the human figure in its most extrava-
gant and phrenzied attitudes ; that they are
insensible to the simple display of real emo-
tion, but dwell with delight upon the vehement
representation of it which their stage exhibits ;
and that, leaving the charming heights of Belle-
ville, or the sequestered banks of the Seine
almost wholly deserted, they crowd to the stiff
alleys of the Elysian Fields, or the artificial
beauties of the gardens of Versailles.
In the midst of Paris this artificial style of
gardening is not altogether unpleasing ; it is
in unison, in some measure, with the regular
character of the buildings with which it is
surrounded ; and the profusion of statues and
marble vases continues the impression which
the character of their palaces is fitted to pro-
duce. But at Versailles, at St. Cloud, and
Fontainbleau, amidst the luxuriance of vegeta-
tion, and surrounded by the majesty of forest
scenery, it destroys altogether the effect which
arises from the irregularity of natural beauty.
Every one feels straight borders, and square
porticoes and broad alleys, to be in unison
with the immediate neighbourhood of an anti-
quated mansion ; but they become painful
when extended to those remoter parts of the
grounds, when the character of the scene is
determined by the rudeness of uncultivated
nature.
There are some occasions, nevertheless, on
which the gardens of the Tuileries present a
Deautiful spectacle, in spite of the artificial
aste in which they are formed. From the
warmth of the climate, the Parisians, of all
classes, live much in the open air, and frequent
he public gardens in great numbers during
he continuance of the fine weather. In the
evening especially, they are filled with citi-
zens, who repose themselves under the shade
of the lofty trees, after the heat and the fa-
igues of the day; and they there present a
spectacle of more than ordinary interest and
beauty. The disposition of the French suits
PARIS IN 1814.
105
the character of the scene, and harmonizes
with the impression which the stillness of the
evening produces on the mind. There is
none of that rioting or confusion by which an
assembly of the middling classes in England
is too often disgraced ; no quarrel ling -or in-
toxication even among the poorest ranks, nor
any appearance of that degrading want which
destroys the pleasing idea of public happiness.
The people appear all to enjoy a certain share
of individual prosperity; their intercourse is
conducted with unbroken harmony, and they
seem to resign themselves to those delightful
feelings which steal over the mind during the
stillness and serenity of a summer evening.
It would seem as if all the angry passions of
the breast were soothed by the voice of repos-
ing nature as if the sounds of labour were
stilled, lest they should break the harmony of
the scene as if vice itself had concealed its
deformity from the overpowering influence of
natural beauty.
Still more beautiful, perhaps, is the appear-
ance of this scene during the stillness of the
night, when the moon throws her dubious rays
over the objects of nature. The gardens of
the Tuileries remain crowded with people,
who seem to enjoy the repose which univer-
sally prevails, and from whom no sound is to
be heard which can break the stillness or the
serenity of the scene. The regularity of the
forms is wholly lost in the masses of light and
shadow that are there displayed ; the foliage
throws a checkered shade over the ground
beneath, while the distant vistas of the Elysian
Fields are seen in that soft and mellow light
by which the radiance of the moon is so pecu-
liarly distinguished. After passing through
the scenes of gaiety and festivity which mark
these favourite scenes of the French people,
small encampments were frequently to be seen,
of the allied troops, in the remote parts of the
grounds. The appearance of these bivouacks,
composed of Cossack squadrons, Hungarian
hussars, and Prussian artillery, in the obscurity
of moonlight, and surrounded by the gloom of
forest scenery, was beyond measure striking.
The picturesque forms of the soldiers, sleeping
on their arms under the shade of the trees, or
half hid by the rude huts which they had
erected for their shelter; the varied attitudes
of the horses standing amidst the wagons- by
which the camp was followed, or sleeping be-
side the veterans whom they had borne through
all the fortunes of war ; the dark masses of the
artillery, dimly discerned in the shades of
night, or faintly reflecting the pale light of the
moon, presented a scene of the most beautiful
description, in which the rude features of war
were softened by the tranquillity of peaceful
life : and the interest of present repose was
enhanced by the remembrance of the wintry
storms and bloody fields through which these
brave men had passed, during the memorable
campaigns in which they had been engaged.
The effect of the whole was increased by the
perfect stillness which everywhere prevailed,
broken only at intervals by the slow step of
the sentinel, as he paced his rounds, or the
sweeter sounds of those beautiful airs, which,
in a far distant country, recalled to the Russian
14
soldier the joys and the happiness of his native
land.
St. Cloud was the favourite residence of
Bonaparte, and, from this circumstance, pos-
sesses an interest which does not belong to
the other imperial palaces. It stands high,
upon a lofty bank overhanging the Seine,
which takes a bold sweep in the plain below ;
and the steep declivity which descends to its
banks, is clothed with magnificent woods of
aged elms. The character of the scenery is
bold and rugged; the trees are of the wildest
forms, and the most stupendous height, and
the banks, for the most part, steep and irregu-
lar. It is here, accordingly, that the French
gardening appears in all its genuine deformity ;
and that its straight walks and endless foun-
tains display a degree of formality and art,
destructive to the peculiar beauty by which
the scene is distinguished. These gardens,
however, were the favourite and private walks
of the emperor ; it was there that he meditated
those schemes of ambition which were des-
tined to shake the established thrones of
Europe ; it was under the shade of its luxu-
riant foliage that he formed the plan of all the
mighty projects which he had in contempla-
tion ; it was in the splendid apartments of
its palace that the Councils of France assem-
bled, to revolve on the means of permanently
destroying the English power: It was here
too, by a most remarkable coincidence, that
his destruction was finally accomplished;
that the last convention was concluded, by
which his second dethronement was com-
pleted ; and that the victorious arms of Eng-
land dictated the terms of surrender to his
conquered capital.
St. Cloud, in 1814, was the head-quarters
of Prince Schwartzenberg ; and the Austrian
grenadiers mounted guard at the gates of the
Imperial Palace. The banks of the Seine,
below the palace, were covered by an immense
bivouac of Austrian troops, and the fires of
their encampment twinkled in the obscurity
of twilight, amidst the low brushwood with
which the sides of the river were clothed. The
appearance of this bivouac, dimly discerned
through the rugged stems of lofty trees, or
half-hid by the luxuriant branches which ob-
scured the view the picturesque and varied
aspect of the camp, covered with wagons, and
all the accompaniments of military service ;
the columns of smoke rising from the fires
with which it was* interspersed, and the in-
numerable horses crowded amidst the con-
fused multitude of men and carriages, or rest-
ing in more sequestered spots on the sides of
the river, with their forms finely reflected in
its unruffled waters presented a spectacle
which exhibited war in its most striking aspect,
and gave a character to the scene which would
have suited the romantic strain of Salvator's
mind.
St. Germain, though less picturesquely situ-
ated than St. Cloud, presents features, never-
theless, of more than ordinary magnificence.
The Palace, now converted into a school of
military education by Napoleon, is a mean
irregular building; though it possesses a cer-
tain interest, by having been long the residence
106
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
of the exiled house of Stuart. The situation,
however, is truly fitted for an imperial dwell-
ing; it stands on the edge of a high bank,
overhanging the Seine, at the end of a magnifi-
cent terrace, a mile and a half long, built on
the projecting heights which edge the river.
The walk along this terrace is the finest spec-
tacle which the vicinity of Paris has to present.
It is backed along its whole extent by the im-
mense forest of St. Germain, the foliage of
which overhangs the road, and in the recesses
of which you can occasionally discern those
beautiful peeps which form the peculiar charac-
teristic of forest scenery. The steep bank
which descends to the river is clothed with
orchards and vineyards in all the luxuriance
of a southern climate., and, in front, there is
spread beneath your feet the immense plain
in which the Seine wanders, whose waters are
descried at intervals through the woods and
gardens with which its banks are adorned ;
while, in the farthest distance, the towers of
St. Denis, and the heights of Paris, form an
irregular outline on the verge of the horizon.
It is a scene exhibiting the most beautiful
aspect of cultivated nature, and would have
been the fit residence for a monarch who loved
to survey his subjects' happiness : but it was
deserted by the miserable weakness of Louis
XIV., because the view terminated in the
cemetery of the kings of France, and his en-
joyment of it would have been destroyed by
the thoughts of mortal decay.
Versailles, which that monarch chose as the
ordinary abode of his splendid court, is less
favourably situate for a royal dwelling, though
the view from the great front of the palace is
beautifully clothed with luxuriant woods. The
palace itself is a magnificent building of im-
mense extent, loaded with the riches of archi-
tectural beauty, but destitute of that fine pro-
portion and lightness of ornament, which
spread so indescribable a charm over the
palace of the Louvre. The interior is in a
state of lamentable decay, having been pillaged
at the commencement of the revolutionary
fury, and formed into a barrack for the repub-
lican soldiers, the marks of whose violence
are still visible in the faded splendour of its
magnificent apartments. They still show, how-
ever, the favourite apartments of Maria An-
toinette, the walls of which are covered with
the finest mirrors, and some remains of the
furniture are still preserved, which even the
licentious fury of the French army seems to
have been afraid to violate. The gardens, on
which all the riches of France, and all the
efforts of art were so long lavished, present a
painful monument of the depravity of taste:
but the Petit Trianon, which is a little palace
built of marble, and surrounded by shrubberies
in the English style, exhibits the genuine
beauty of which the imitation of nature is sus-
ceptible. This palace contains a suite of
splendid apartments, fitted up with singular
taste, and adorned with a number of charming
pictures ; it was the favourite residence of
Maria Louise, and we were there shown the
drawing materials which she used, and some
unfinished sketches which she left, in which,
we were informed, she much delighted, and
which bore the marks of a cultivated taste.
The Empress Maria Louise was everywhere
represented as cold, proud, and haughty in her
manner, andunconciliating in her ordinary ad-
dress. Her time was much spent in private,
j in the erercise of religious duty, or in needle-
work and drawing; and her favourite seat at
St. Cloud was between two windows, from
one of which she had a view over the beauti-
ful woods which clothe the banks of the river,
and from the other a distant prospect of the
towers and domes of Paris.
Very different was the character which be-
longed to the former empress, the first wife of
Bonaparte, Josephine. She passed the close
of her life at the delightful retreat of Mal-
maison, a villa charmingly situated on the
banks of the Seine, seven miles from Paris, on
the road to St. Germain. This villa had been
her favourite residence while she continued
empress, and formed her only home after the
period of her divorce ; here she lived in
obscurity and retirement, without any of the
pomp of a court, or any of the splendour which
belonged to her former rank, occupied entirely
in the employment of gardening, or in allevi-
ating the distresses of those around her. The
shrubberies and gardens were laid out with
singular beauty, in the English taste, and con-
tained a vast variety of rare flowers, which
she had for a long period been collecting.
These grounds were to her the source of never-
failing enjoyment; she spent many hours in
them every day, working herself, or superin-
tending the occupations of others ; and in these
delightful occupations seemed to return again
to all the innocence and happiness of youth.
She was beloved, to the greatest degree, by
all the poor who inhabited the vicinity of her
retreat, both for the gentleness of her man-
ner, a,nd her unwearied attention to their suf-
ferings and their wants ; and during the whole
period of her retirement, she retained the
esteem and affection of all classes of French
citizens. The Emperor Alexander visited her
repeatedly during the stay of the allied armies
in Paris ; and her death occasioned an univer-
sal feeling of regret, rarely to be met with
amidst the corruption and selfishness of the
French metropolis.
There was something singularly striking in
the history and character of this remarkable
woman : Born in an humble station, without
any of the advantages which rank or education
could afford, she was early involved in all the
unspeakable miseries of the French revolution,
and was extricated from her precarious situa-
tion only by being united to that extraordinary
man whose crimes and whose ambition have
spread misery through every country of Eu-
rope; rising through all the gradations of
rank through which he passed, she everywhere
commanded the esteem and regard of all who
had access to admire her private virtues ; and
when at length she was raised to the rank of
Empress, she graced the imperial throne with
all the charities and virtues of an humbler sta-
tion. She bore, with unexampled,magnanimity,
the sacrifice of power and of influence which
PARIS IN 1814.
she was compelled to make: she carried into
the obscurity of humble life all the dignity of
mind which befitted the character of an em-
press of France ; and exercised, in the delight-
ful occupations of country life, or in the alle-
viation of the severity of individual distress,
that firmness of mind and gentleness of dis-
position with which she had lightened the
weight of imperial dominion, and softened the
rigour of despotic power.
The Forest of Fontainbleau exhibits scenery
of a more picturesque and striking character
than is to be met with in any other part of the
north of France. It is situated forty miles from
Paris, on the great road to Rome, and the ap-
pearance of the country through which this
road runs, is, for the most part, flat and unin-
teresting. It runs through a continued plain,
in a straight line between tall rows of elm
trees, whose lower branches are uniformly cut
off for fire-wood to the peasantry ; and exhibits,
for the most part, no other feature than the
continued riches of agricultural produce. At
the distance of seven miles from the town of
Fontainbleau, you first discern the forest,
covering a vast ridge of rocks, stretching as far
as the eye can reach, from right to left, and
presenting a dark irregular outline on the sur-
face of the horizon. The cultivation continues,
with all its uniformity, to the very foot of the
ridge ; but the moment you pass the boundaries
of the forest, you find yourself surrounded at
once with all the wildness and luxuriance of
natural scenery. The surface of the ground
is broken and irregular, rising at times into
vast piles of shapeless rocks, and enclosing at
others small valleys, in which the wood grows
in luxuriant beauty, unblighted by the chilling
blasts of northern climates. In these valleys,
the oak, the ash, and the beech, exhibit the
peculiar magnificence of forest scenery, while,
on the neighbouring hills, the birch waves its
airy foliage round the dark masses of rock
which terminaie the view. Nothing can be
conceived more striking than the scenery
which this variety of rock and wood produces
in every part of this romantic forest. At times
you pass through an unbroken mass of aged
timber, surrounded by the native grandeur of
forest scenery, and undisturbed by any traces
of human habitation, except in those rude
paths which occasionally open a passing view
into the remoter parts of the forest. At others,
the path winds through great masses of rock,
piled in endless confusion upon each other,
in the crevices of which, the fern and the
heath grow in all the luxuriance of southern
vegetation; while their summits are covered
by aged oaks of the wildest forms, whose
crossing boughs throw an eternal shade over
the ravines below, and afford room only to
discern at the farthest distance the summits
of those beautiful hills, on which the light
foliage of the birch trembles in the ray of an
unclouded sun, or waves on the blue of a sum-
mer heaven.
To those who have had the good fortune to
see the beautiful scenery of the Trosachs in
Scotland, of Matlock in Derbyshire, or of the
wooded Fells in Cumberland, it may afford
some idea of the Forest of Fontainbleau, to
107
say that it combines
scription with the aged magnificence "of Wind-
sor Forest. Over its whole extent there are
scattered many detached oaks of vast dimen-
sions, which seem to be of an older race
in the growth of the forest, whose lowest
boughs stretch above the top of the wood
which surrounds them, and whose decayed
summits afford a striking contrast to the
young and luxuriant foliage with which their
stems are enveloped. In May, 1814, it was
occupied by the old imperial guard, which
still remained in that station after the abdica-
tion of Bonaparte; and parties, or detached
stragglers of them, were frequently to be met
with wandering in the most solitary parts of
the forest. Their warlike and weather-beaten
appearance ; their battered arms apd worn
accoutrements ; the dark feathers of their caps,
and the sallow ferocious aspect of their coun-
tenances, suited the savage character of the
scenery with which they were surrounded,
and threw over the gloom and solitude of the
forest that wild expression with which the
genius of Salvator dignified the features of
uncultivated nature.
The town and palace of Fontainbleau is sit-
uated in a small plain near the centre of the
forest, and surrounded on all sides by the
rocky ridges with which it is everywhere in-
tersected. The palace is a large irregular
building, composed of many squares, and
fitted up in the inside with the utmost splen-
dour of imperial magnificence. The apart-
ments in which Napoleon dwelt during his
stay in the palace, after the capture of Paris
by the allied troops ; and the desk at which
he always wrote, and where his abdication
was signed, are there shown. It is covered
with white leather, scratched over in every
direction, and marked with innumerable wip-
ings of the pen, among which his own name,
Napoleon, frequently written as in a hur-
ried and irregular hand, was to be seen ;
and one sentence which began, " Que Dieu,
Napoleon, Napoleon." The servants in the
palace agreed in stating, that the emperor's
gaiety and fortitude of mind never deserted
him during the ruin of his fortune; that he
was engaged in his writing-chamber during
the greater part of the day, and walked for
two hours on the terrace, in close conversa-
tion with Marshal Ney. Several officers of
the imperial guard repeated the speech which
he made to his troops on leaving them after
his abdication of the throne, which was precise-
ly what appeared in the English newspapers.
So great was the enthusiasm produced by this
speech among the soldiers present, that it
was received with shouts and cries of Vive
PEmpereur, a Paris, a. Paris! and when he
departed under the custody of the allied com-
missioners, the whole army wept; there was
not a dry eye in the multitude who were as-
sembled to witness his departure. Even the
imperial guard, who had been trained in scenes
of suffering from their first entry into the
service who had been inured for a long course
of years to the daily sight of human misery,
and had constantly made a sport of all the
afflictions which are fitted to move the human
108
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
heart, shared in the general grief; they seemed
to forget the degradation in which their com-
mander was involved, the hardships to which
they had been exposed, and the destruction
which he had brought upon their brethren in
arms ; they remembered him when he stood
victorious on the field of Austerlitz, or passed
in triumph through the gates of Moscow, and
shed over the fall of their emperor those tears
of genuine sorrow which they denied to the
deepest scenes of private suffering, or the most
aggravated instances of individual distress.
The infantry of the old guard was frequently
to be seen drawn up in line in the streets of
Fontainbleau, and their appearance was such
as fully answered the idea we had formed of
that body of veteran soldiers, who had borne
the French eagles through every capital of
Europe. Their aspect was bold and martial ;
there was a keenness in their eyes which be-
spoke the characteristic intelligence of the
French soldiers, and a ferocity in the expres-
sion of their countenances which seemed to
have been unsubdued even by the unparalleled
disasters in which their country had been in-
volved. The people of the town itself com-
plained in the bitterest terms of their licen-
tious conduct, and repeatedly said that they
dreaded them more as friends than the Cos-
sacks themselves as enemies. They seemed
to harbour the most unbounded resentment
against the people of this country ; their coun-
tenances bore the expression of the strongest
enmity against the English. Whatever the
atrocity of their conduct ; however it might
have been to the people of their own, as well as
every other country, it was impossible not
to feel the strongest emotion at the sight of
the veteran soldiers whose exploits had so
long ri vetted the attention of all who felt an
interest in the civilized world. These were
the men who first raised the glory of the re-
publican armies on the plains of Italy; who
survived the burning climate of Egypt, and
chained victory to the imperial standards at
Jena, at Friedland and Austerlitz who fol-
lowed the career of victory to the walls of the
Kremlin, and marched undaunted through the
ranks of death amid the snows of Russia ;
who witnessed the ruin of France under the
walls of Leipsic, and struggled to save its
falling fortune on the heights of Laon ; and
who preserved, in the midst of national humi-
liation, and when surrounded by the mighty
foreign powers, that undaunted air and un-
shaken firmness, which, even in the moment
of defeat, commanded the respect of their an-
tagonists in arms.
There is no scenery round Paris so striking
as the Forest of Fontainbleau, but the heights
of Belleville exhibit nature in a more pleasing
aspect, and are distinguished by features of a
gentler character. Montmartre, and the ridge
of Belleville, form those celebrated heights
which command Paris on the northern side,
and which were so obstinately contested be-
tween the allies and the French, on the 30th
March, 1814, previous to the capture of Paris
by the allied sovereigns. Montmartre is covered
for the most part with houses, and presents
nothing to attract the eye of the observer, ex-
cept the extensive view which is to be met
with at its summit. The heights of Belleville
are varied with wood, with orchards, vine-
yards, and gardens, interspersed with cottages
and villas, and cultivated with the utmost
care. There are few enclosures, but the whole
extent of the ground is thickly studded with
walnuts, fruit-trees, and forest timber, which,
from a distance, give it the appearance of one
continued wood. On a nearer approach, how-
ever, you find it intersected in every direction
by small paths, which wind among the vine-
yards, or through the woods with which the
hills are covered, and present, at every turn,
those charming little scenes which form the
peculiar characteristic of woodland scenery.
The cottages, half hid by the profusion of
fruit-trees, or embosomed in the luxuriant
woods, with which they are everywhere sur-
rounded, increase the interest which the scene-
ry itself is fitted to produce; they combine the
delightful idea of the peasant's enjoyment with
the beauty of the spot on which his dwelling
is placed; and awaken, in the midst of the
boundless luxuriance of vegetable nature,
those deeper feelings of moral delight, which
spring from the contemplation of human happi-
ness.
The effect of the charming scenery on the
heights of Belleville, is much increased by
the distant objects which terminate some parts
of the view. To the east, the high and gloomy
towers of Vincennes rise over the beautiful
woods with which the sides of the hill are
adorned ; and give an air of solemnity to the
scene, arising from the remembrance of the
tragic events of which it was the theatre. To
the south, the domes and spires of Paris can
occasionally be discovered through the open-
ings of the wood with which the foreground
is enriched, and present the capital at that
pleasing distance, when the minuter parts of
the buildings are concealed, when its promi-
nent features alone are displayed, and the
whole is softened by the obscure light which
distance throws over the objects of nature.
To an English mind, the effect of the whole is
infinitely increased, by the animating asso-
ciations with which this scenery is connected ;
by the remembrance of the mighty struggle
between freedom and slavery, which was here
terminated ; of the heroic deeds which were
here performed, and the unequalled magnani-
mity which was here displayed. It was here
that the expiring efforts of military despotism
were overthrown that the armies of Russia
stood triumphant over the power of France,
and nobly avenged the ashes of their own ca-
pital, by sparing that of their prostrate enemy.
At this time the traces of the recent strug-
gle were visibly imprinted on the villages and
woods with which the hill is covered. The
marks of blood were still to be discerned on
the chaussee which leads through the village
of Pantin ; the elm trees which line the road
were cut asunder or bored through with can-
non shot, and their stems riddled in many
parts, with the incessant fire of the grape shot.
The houses in La Villette, Belleville, and Pantin,
were covered with the marks of musket shot ;
the windows of many were shattered, or wholly
THE LOUVRE IN 1814.
109
destroyed, and the interior of the rooms broken
by the balls which seemed to have pierced
every part of the building. So thickly were
the houses in some places covered with these
marks, that it appeared almost incredible how
any one could have escaped from so destruc-
tive a fire. Even the beautiful gardens with
which the slope of the heights are adorned,
and the inmost recesses of the wood of Ro-
mainville, bore, throughout, the marks of the
desperate struggles which they had lately wit-
nessed, and exhibited the symptoms of frac-
ture or destruction in the midst of the luxu-
riance of natural beauty; yet, though they
had so recently been the scene of mortal com-
bat ; though the ashes of the dead lay yet in
heaps on different parts of the field of battle,
the prolific powers of nature were undecayed :
the vines clustered round the broken fragments
of the instruments of war, the corn spread a
sweeter green over the fields, which were yet
wet with human blood, and the trees waved
with renovated beauty over the uncoffined re-
mains of the departed brave; emblematic of
the decay of man, and of the immortality of
nature.
The French have often been accused of sel-
fishness, and the indifference which they often
manifest to the fate of their relations affords
too much reason to believe that the social af-
fections have little permanent influence on their
minds. They exhibit, however, in misfortunes
of a different kind in calamities which really
press upon their own enjoyments of life the
same gayety of heart, and the same undisturbed
equanimity of disposition. That gayety in
misfortune, which is so painful to every ob-
server, when it is to be found in the midst of
family distress, becomes delightful when it
exists under the deprivation of the selfish gra-
tification to which the individual had been ac-
customed. Both here, and in other parts of
France, where the houses of the peasants had
been wholly destroyed by the allied armies,
there was much to admire in the equanimity
of mind with which these poor people bore
the loss of all their property. For an extent
of thirty miles in one direction, towards the
north of Champagne, every house near the
great road had been burned or pillaged for the
firewood which it contained, both by the French
and allied armies, and the people were every-
where compelled to sleep in the open air. The
men were everywhere rebuilding their fallen
walls, with a cheerfulness which never would
have existed in England under similar circum-
stances ; and the little children laboured in the
gardens during the day, and slept under the
vines at night, without exhibiting any signs
of distress for their disconsolate situation. In
many places we saw groups of these little
children in the midst of the ruined houses, or
under the shattered trees, playing with the
musket shot, or trying to roll the cannon balls
by which the destruction of their dwellings
had been effected: exhibiting a picture of
youthful joy and native innocence, while sport-
ing with the instruments of human destruc-
tion, which the genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds
would have moulded into the expression of
pathetic feeling, or employed as the means of
moral improvement.
THE LOUVRE IN 1814.*
To those who have had the good fortune to
see the pictures and statues which are pre-
served in the Louvre, all description of these
works must appear superfluous ; and to those
who have not had this good fortune, such an
attempt could convey no adequate idea of the
objects which are described. There is nothing
more uninteresting than the catalogue of pic-
tures which are to be found in the works of many
modern travellers ; nor any thing in general
more ridiculous than the ravings of admira-
tion with which this catalogue is described,
and with which the reader in general is little
disposed to sympathize. Without attempting,
therefore, to enumerate the great works which
are there to be met with, it is better to aim at
nothing but the delineation of the general cha-
racter by which the different schools of paint-
ing are distinguished, and the great features
in which they all differ from the sculpture of
ancient times.
* Written during a residence at Paris in May and
June, 1814, ;ind published in "Travels in France," in
1811-15, to the first volume of which the authot con-
tributed a few chapters.
For an attempt of this kind, the Louvre pre-
sents singular advantages, from the unparal-
leled collection of paintings of every school
and description which are there to be met
with, and the facility with which you can
there trace the progress of the art from its
first beginning to the period of its greatest
perfection. And it is in this view that the
collection of these works into one museum,
however much to be deplored as the work of
unprincipled ambition, and however much it
may have diminished the impression which
particular objects, from the influence of asso-
ciation, produced in their native place, is yet
calculated to produce the greatest of all im-
provements in the progress of the art; by
divesting particular schools and particular
works of the unbounded influence which the
effect of early association, or the prejudices of
national feeling, have given them in their ori-
ginal situation, and placing them where their
real nature is to be judged of by a more ex-
tended circle, and subjected to the examination
of more impartial sentiments.
The first hall of the Louvre, in the picture
110
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
gallery, is filled with paintings of the French
school. The principal artists whose works
are here exhibited, are Le Brun, Gaspar and
Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Vernet, and
the modern painters Gerard and David. The
general character of the school of French his-
torical painting, is the expression of passion
and violent emotion. The colouring is for the
most part brilliant; the canvas crowded with
figures, and the incident selected, that in which
the painter might have the best opportunity of
displaying his knowledge of the human frame,
or the varied expression of the human counte-
nance. In the pictures of the modern school
of French painting, this peculiarity is pushed
to an extravagant length, and, fortunately for
the art, displays the false principles on which
the system of their composition is founded. The
moment seized is uniformly that of the strongest
and most violent passion ; the principal actors
in the piece are represented in a state of phren-
zied exertion, and the whole anatomical know-
ledge of the artist is displayed in the endless
contortions into which the human frame is
thrown. In David's celebrated picture of the
three Horatii, this peculiarity appears in the
most striking light. The works of this artist
may excite admiration, but it is the limited
and artificial admiration of the schools ; of
those who have forgot the end of the art in the
acquisition of the technical knowledge with
which it is accompanied, or the display of the
technical powers which its execution in-
volves.
The paintings of Vernet, in this collection,
are perhaps the finest specimens of that beau-
tiful master, and they entitle him to a higher
place in the estimation of mankind than he
seems yet to have obtained from the generality
of observers. There is. a delicacy of colour-
ing, a unity of design, and a harmony of ex-
pression in his works, which accord well with
the simplicity of the subjects which his taste
has selected, and the general effect which it
was his object to produce. In the representa-
tion of the sun dispelling the mists of a cloudy
morning; of his setting rays gilding the waves
of a western sea; or of that undefined beauty
which moonlight throws over the objects of
nature, the works of this artist are perhaps
unrivalled.
The paintings of Claude are by no means
equal to what might have been expected, from
the celebrity which his name has acquired, or
the matchless beauty which the engravings
from him possess. They are but eleven in
number, and cannot be, in any degree, com-
pared with those which are to be found in Mr.
Angerstein's collection. To those, however,
who have been accustomed to study the de-
signs of this great master, through the me-
dium of the engraved copies, and above all,
in the unrivalled works of Woollet, the sight
of the original pictures must, perhaps at
all times, create a feeling of disappointment.
There is a unity of effect in the engravings
which can never be met with amidst the dis-
traction of colouring in the original pictures;
and the imagination clothes the beautiful
shades of the copy with finer tints than even
the pencil of Claude has been able to supply.
" I have shown you," said Corinne to Oswald,
" St. Peter's for the first time, when the bril-
liancy of its decorations might appear in full
splendour, in the rays of the sun : I reserve
for you a finer, and a more profound enjoy-
ment, to behold it by the light of the moon."
Perhaps there is a distinction of the same
kind between the gaudy brilliancy of varied
colours, and the chaster simplicity of uniform
shadows ; and it is probably for this reason,
that on the first view of a picture which you
have long admired in the simplicity of en-
graved effect, you involuntarily recede from
the view, and seek in the obscure light, and
uncertain tint, which distance produces, to
recover that uniform tone and general charac-
ter, which the splendour of colouring is so apt
to destroy. It is a feeling similar to that which
Lord Byron has so finely described, as arising
from the beauty of moonlight scenery:
" Mellow'd to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies."
The Dutch and Flemish school, to which
you next advance, possesses merit, and is dis-
tinguished by a character of a very different
description. It was the well-known object of
this school, to present an exact and faithful
imitation of nature to exaggerate none of its
faults, and enhance none of its excellencies,
but exhibit it as it really appears to the eye of
an ordinary spectator. Its artists selected, in
general, some scene of humour or amusement,
in the discovery of which, the most ignorant
spectators might discover other sources of
pleasure from those which the merit of the art
itself afforded. They did not pretend to aim
at the exhibition of passion or powerful emo-
tion: their paintings, therefore, are free from
that painful display of theatrical effect, which
characterizes the French school ; their object
was not to represent those deep scenes of sor-
row or suffering, which accord with the pro-
found feelings which it was the object of the
Italian school to awaken ; they want, therefore,
the dignity and grandeur which the works of
the greater Italian painters possess. Their
merit consists in the faithful delineation of
those ordinary scenes and common occur-
rences which are familiar to the eye of the most
careless observer. The power of the painter,
therefore, could be displayed only in the mi-
nuteness of the finishing, or the brilliancy of
the effect: and he endeavoured, by the power-
ful contrast of light and shade, to give a
higher character to his works than the nature
of their subjects could otherwise admit. The
pictures of Teniers, Ostade, and Gerard Dow,
possess these merits, and are distinguished by
this character in the highest degree ; but their
qualities are so well known in this country, as
to render any observations on them super-
fluous. There is a very great collection here
preserved, of the works of Rembrandt, and
their design and effect bear, in general, a
higher character than belongs to most of the
works of this celebrated master.
In one respect, the collection in the Louvre
is altogether unrivalled ; in the number and
beauty of the Wouvermans which are there to
be met with ; nor is it possible, without hav-
ing seen it, to appreciate, with any degree of
THE LOUVRE IN 1814.
Ill
justice, the variety of design, the accuracy of
drawing, or delicacy of finishing, which dis-
tinguish his works from those of any other
painter of a similar description. There are
forty of his pieces there assembled, all in the
finest state of preservation, and all displaying
the same unrivalled beauty of colouring and
execution. In their design, however,, they
widely differ ; and they exhibit, in the most
striking manner, the real object to which
painting should be applied, and the causes
of the errors in which its composition has
been involved. His works, for the most
part, are crowded with figures ; his subjects
are in general battle-pieces, or spectacles of
military pomp, or the animated scenes which
the chase presents; and he seems to have ex-
hausted all the efforts of his genius, in the
variety of incident and richness of execution,
which these subjects are fitted to afford. From
the confused and indeterminate expression
however, which the multitude of their objects
exhibit, the spectator turns with delight to
those simpler scenes in which his mind seems
to have reposed, after the fatigues which it
had undergone ; to the representation of a
single incident, or the delineation of a certain
occurrence to the rest of the traveller after
the fatigues of the day to the repose of the
horse in the intermission of labour to the re-
turn of the soldier, after the dangers of the
campaign ; scenes in which every thing com-
bines for the uniform character, and where
the genius of the artist has been able to give
to the rudest occupations of men, and even to
the objects of animal life, the expression of
genuine poetical feeling.
The pictures of Vandyke and Rubens belong
to a much higher school than that which rose
out of the w'ealth and the limited taste of the
Dutch people. There are sixty pictures of the
latter of these masters in the Louvre, and,
combined with the celebrated gallery in the
Luxembourg palace, they form the finest as-
semblage of them which is to be met with in
the world. The character of his works differs
essentially from that both of the French and
the Dutch schools: he was employed, not in
painting cabinet pictures for wealthy mer-
chants, but in designing great altar pieces for
splendid churches, or commemorating the
glory of sovereigns in imperial galleries. The
greatness of his genius rendered him fit to
attempt the representation of the most com-
plicated and difficult objects; but in the confi-
dence of this genius, he seems to have lost
sight of the genuine object of composition in
Bis art. He attempts what it is impossible for
painting to accomplish. He aims at telling a
whole story by the expression of a single pic-
ture; and seems to pour forth the profusion
of his fancy, by crowding his canvas with a
multiplicity of figures, which serve no other
purpose than that of showing the endless
power of creation which the author possessed.
In each figure, there is great vigour of concep-
tion, and admirable power of execution ; but
the whole possesses no general character, and
produces no permanent emotion. There is a
mixture of allegory and truth in many of his
greatest works, which is always painful ; a
grossness in his conception of the female form,
which destroys the symmetry of female beauty;
and a wildness of imagination in his general
design, which violates the feelings of ordinary
taste. You survey his pictures with astonish-
ment and the power of thought and the bril-
liancy of colouring which they display; but
they produce no lasting impression on the
mind ; they have struck no chord of feeling or
emotion, and you leave them with no other
feeling, than that of regret, that the confusion
of objects destroys the effect which each in
itself might be fitted to produce. And if one
has made a deeper impression ; if you dwell
on it with that delight which it should ever be
the object of painting \ produce, you find
that your pleasure proceeds from a single
figure, or the expression of a detached part of
the picture; and that in the contemplation of
it you have, without being conscious of it,
detached your mind from the observation of
all that might interfere with its characteristic
expression, and thus preserved that unity of
emotion which is essential to the existence of
the emotion of taste, but which the confusion
of incident is so apt to destroy.
It is in the Italian school, however, that the
collection in the Louvre is most unrivalled,
and it is from its character that the general
tendency of the modern school of historical
painting is principally to be determined.
The general object of the Italian school ap-
pears to be the expression of passion. The
peculiar subjects which its painters were
called on to represent, the sufferings and death
of our Saviour, the varied misfortunes to
which his disciples were exposed, or the mul-
tiplied persecutions which the early fathers of
the church had to sustain, inevitably pre-
scribed the object to which their genius was
to be directed, and the peculiar character
which their works were to assume. They
have all, accordingly, aimed at the expression
of passion, and endeavoured to excite the pity,
or awaken the sympathy of the spectator;
though the particular species of passion which
they have severally selected has varied with
the turn of mind which the artist possessed.
The works of Dominichino and of the Ca-
raccis, of which there are a very great num-
ber, incline, in general, to the representation
of what is dark or gloomy in character, or
what is terrific and appalling in suffering.
The subjects which the first of these masters
has in general selected, are the cells of monks,
the energy of martyrs, the death of saints, or
the sufferings of the crucifixion ; and the dark-
blue coldness of his colouring, combined with
the depth of his shadows, accord well with the
gloomy character which his compositions pos-
sess. The Caraccis, amidst the variety of ob-
jects which their genius has embraced, have
dwelt, in general, upon the expression of sor-
row of that deep and profound sorrow which
the subjects of sacred history were so fitted to
afford, and which was so well adapted to that
religious emotion which it was their object to
excite.
Guido Reni, Carlo Maratti, and Murillo, are
distinguished by a gentler character; by the
expression of tenderness and sweetness of dis-
112
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
position : and the subjects which they have
chosen are, for the most part, those which
were fitted for the display of this predominant
expression ; the Holy Family, the flight into
Egypt, the youth of St. John, the penitence of
the Magdalene. While, in common with all
their brethren, they have aimed at the expres-
sion of emotion, it was an emotion of a softer
kind than that which arose from the energy
of passion, or the violence of suffering; it was
the emotion produced by more permanent
feelings, and less turbulent affections; and
from the character of this emotion, their exe-
cution has assumed a peculiar cast, and their
composition been governed by a peculiar
principle. Their colouring is seldom brilliant ;
there is a subdued tone pervading the greater
part of their pictures; and they have limited
themselves, in general, to the delineation of a
single figure, or a small group, in which a
single character of mind is prevalent.
There are only six paintings by Salvator
Rosa in this collection, but they bear that wild
and original character which is proverbially
known to belong to the works of this great
artist. One of his pieces is particularly
striking, a skirmish of horse, accompanied by
all the scenery in which he so peculiarly de-
lighted. In the foreground is the ruins of an
old temple, with its lofty pillars finely displayed
in shadow above the summits of the horizon;
in the middle distance the battle is dimly
discerned through the driving rain, which ob-
scures the view; while the back ground is
closed by a vast ridge of gloomy rocks, rising
into a dark and tempestuous sky. The cha-
racter of the whole is that of sullen magnifi-
cence ; and it affords a striking instance of the
power of great genius, to mould the most
varied objects in nature into the expression
of one uniform poetical feeling.
Very different is the expression which be-
longs to the softer pictures of Correggio of
that great master, whose name is associated
in every one's mind with all that is gentle or
delicate in the imitation of nature. Perhaps
it was from the force of this impression that
his works seldom completely come up to the
expectations which are formed of them. They
are but eight in number, and do not compre-
hend the finest of his compositions. Their
general character is that of tenderness and
delicacy : there is a softness in his shading of
the human form which is quite unrivalled, and
a harmony in the general lone of his colour-
ing, which is in perfect unison with the cha-
racteristic expression which it was his object
to produce. There is a want of unity, how-
ever, in the composition of his figures, which
does not accord with this harmony of execu-
tion ; you dwell rather on the fine expression
of individual form, than the combined tendency
of the whole group, and leave the picture with
the impression of the beauty of a single coun-
tenance, rather than the general character of
the whole design. He has represented nature
in its most engaging aspect, and given to in-
dividual figures all the charms of ideal beauty ;
but he wants that high strain of spiritual feel-
ing, which belongs only to the works of Ra-
phael.
There is but one picture by Carlo Dolci in
the Louvre ; but it alone is sufficient to mark
the exquisite genius which its author pos-
sessed. It is of small dimensions, and repre-
sents the Holy Family, with the Saviour asleep.
The finest character of design is here com-
bined with the utmost delicacy of execution ;
the softness of the shadows exceeds that of
Correggio himself; and the dark-blue colour-
ing which prevails over the whole, is in perfect
unison with the expression of that rest and
quiet which the subject requires. The sleep
of the Infant is perfection itself it is the deep
sleep of youth and of innocence, which no
care has disturbed, and no sorrow embittered
and in the unbroken repose of which the
features have relaxed into the expression of
perfect happiness. All the features of the
picture are in unison with this .expression,
except in the tender anxiety of the virgin's
eye ; and all is at rest in the surrounding ob-
jects, save where her hand gently removes the
veil to contemplate the unrivalled beauty of the
Saviour's countenance.
Without the softness of shading or the har-
mony of colour which Correggio possessed,
the works of Raphael possess a higher cha-
racter, and aim at the expression of a sublimer
feeling than those of any other artist whom
modern Europe has produced. Like all his
brethren, he has often been misled from the
real object of his art, and tried, in the energy
of passion, or the confused expression of
varied figures, to multiply the effect which his
composition might produce. Like all the rest,
he has failed in effecting what the constitution
of the human mind renders impossible, and in
this very failure, warned every succeeding age
of the vanity of the attempt which his tran-
scendent genius was unable to effect. It is this
fundamental error that destroys the effect, even
of his finest pieces; it is this, combined with
the unapproachable nature of the presence
which it reveals, that has rendered the transfi-
guration itself a chaos of genius rather than a
model of ideal beauty ; nor will it be deemed
a presumptuous excess, if such sentiments are
expressed in regard to this great author, since
it is from his own works alone that we have
derived the means of appreciating his imper-
fections.
It is in his smaller pieces that the genuine
character of Raphael's paintings is to be seen
in the figure of St. Michael subduing the
demon ; in the beautiful tenderness of the
Virgin and Child; in the unbroken harmony
of the Holy Family ; in the wildness and
piety of the infant St. John; scenes, in which
all the objects of the picture combine for the
preservation of one uniform character, and
where the native fineness of his mind appears
undisturbed by the display of temporary pas-
sion, or the painful distraction of varied suf-
fering.
There are no pictures of the English school
in the Louvre, for the arms of France never
prevailed in our island. From the splendid
character, however, which it early assumed
under the distinguished guidance of Sir Joshua
Reynolds, and from the high and philosophical
principles which he at first laid down for the
THE LOUVRE IN 1814.
113
government of the art, there is every reason
to believe that it ultimately will rival the cele-
brity of foreign genius: And it is in this view
that the continuance of the gallery of the
Louvre, in its present situation, is principally
to be wished by the English nation that the
English artists may possess so near their own
country so great a school for composition and
design ; that the imperfections of foreign
schools may enlighten the views of English
genius; and that the conquests of the French
arms, by transferring the remains of ancient
taste to these northern shores, may throw over
its rising art that splendour which has hitherto
been confined to the regions of the sun.
The great object, therefore, of all the modern
schools of historical painting, seems to have
been the delineation of an affecting scene or in-
teresting occurrence.: they have endeavoured to
tell a story by the variety of incidents in a
single picture; and seized, for the most part,
the moment when passion was at its greatest
height, or suffering appeared in its most ex-
cruciating form. The general character, ac-
cordingly, of the school, is the expression of
passion or violent suffering; and in the pro-
secution of this object, they have endeavoured
to exhibit it under all its aspects, and display
all the effects which it could possibly produce
on the human form, by the different figures
which they have introduced. While this is
the general character of the whole, there are
of course numerous exceptions; and many
of its greatest painters seem, in the representa-
tion of single figures, or in the composition
of smaller groups, to have had in view the ex-
pression of less turbulent affections; to have
aimed at the display of settled emotion or per-
manent feeling, and to have excluded every
thing from their composition which was not
in unison with this predominant expression.
The Sculpture Gallery, which contains above
two hundred remains of ancient statuary, marks
in the most decided manner the different ob-
jects to which this noble art was applied in
ancient times. Unlike the paintings of modern
Europe, their figures are almost uniformly at
rest; they exclude passion or viole^Buffering
from their design ; and the moment which they
select is not that in which a particular or tran-
sient emotion may be displayecfbut in which
the settled character of mind may be expressed.
With the two exceptions of the Laocoon and
the fighting Gladiator, there are none of the
statues in the Louvre which are not the repre-
sentation of the human figure in a state of
repose ; and the expression which the finest
possess, is invariably that permanent expres-
sion which has resulted from the habitual
frame and character of mind. Their figures
seem to belong to a higher class of beings than
that in which we are placed ; they indicate a
state in which passion, anxiety, and emotion
are no more ; and where the unruffled repose
of mind has moulded the features into the per-
fect expression of the mental character. Even
the countenance of the Venus de Medicis, the
most beautiful which it has ever entered into
the mind of man to conceive, and of which no
copy gives the slightest idea, bears no trnce
of emotion, and none of the marks of human
15
feeling; it is the settled expression of celestial
beauty, and even the smile on her lip is not
the fleeting smile of temporary joy, but the
lasting expression of that heavenly feeling
which sees in all around it the grace and love-
liness which belongs to itself alone. It ap-
proaches nearer to that character which some-
times marks the countenance of female beauty
when death has stilled the passions of the
world ; but it is not the cold expression of past
character which survives the period of mortal
dissolution ; it is the living expression of pre-
sent existence, radiant with the beams of im-
mortal life, and breathing the air of eternal
happiness.
The paintings of Raphael convey the most
perfect idea of earthly beauty ; and they de-
note the expression of all that is finest and
most elevated in the character of the female
mind. But there is a "human meaning in
their eye," and they bear the marks of that
anxiety and tenderness which belong to the
relations of present existence. The Venus
displays the same beauty, freed from the cares
which existence has produced ; and her lifeless
eye-balls gaze upon the multitude which sur-
round her, as on a scene fraught only with the
expression of.universal joy.
In another view, the Apollo and the Venus
appear to have been intended by the genius
of antiquity, as expressive of the character of
mind which distinguishes the different sexes ;
and in the expression of this character, they
have exhausted all which it is possible for
human imagination to produce upon the sub-
ject. The commanding air, and advanced step
of the Apollo, exhibit man in his noblest aspect,
as triumphing over the evils of physical na-
ture, and restraining the energy of his dispo-
sition, in the consciousness of resistless power:
the averted eye, and retiring grace of the Ve-
nus, are expressive of the modesty, gentleness
and submission, which form the most beauti-
ful features of the female character.
Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed,
For valour He, and contemplation, formed,
Fcr beauty She, and sweet attractive grace,
He for God only, She for God in Him.
These words were said of our first parents
by our greatest poet, after the influence of a
pure religion had developed the real nature of
the female character, and determined the place
which woman was to hold in the scale of na-
ture; but the idea had been expressed in a
still finer manner two thousand years before,
by the sculptors of antiquity ; and amidst all
the degradation of ancient manners, the pro-
phetic genius of Grecian taste contemplated
that ideal perfection in the character of the
sexes, which was destined to form the boun-
dary of human progress in the remotest ages
of human improvement.
The Apollo strikes a stranger with all its
grandeur on the first aspect ; subsequent exa-
mination can add nothing to the force of the
impression which is then received. The Ve-
nus produces at first less effect, but gains upon
the mind at every renewal, till it rivets the
affections even more than the greatness of its
unequalled rival.
The Dying Gladiator is perhaps, after the
K2
114
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
iwo which have been mentioned, the finest
statue which the Louvre contains. The mo-
ment chosen is finely adapted for the expres-
sion of ideal beauty, from a subject connected
with painful ideas. It is not the moment of
energy or struggling, when the frame is con-
vulsed with the exertion it is making, or the
countenance is deformed by the tumult of pas-
sion ; it is the moment of expiring nature,
when the figure is relaxed by the weakness of
decay, and the mind is softened by the approach
of death ; when the ferocity of combat is for-
gotten in the extinction of the interest which
it had excited, when every unsocial passion is
stilled by the weakness of exhausted nature,
and the mind, in the last moments of life, is
fraught with finer feelings than had belonged
to the character of previous existence. It is
a moment similar to that in which Tasso has
so beautifully described the change in Clorin-
da's mind, after she had been mortally wound-
ed by the hand of Tancred, but in which he
was enabled to give her the inspiration of a
greater faith, and the charily of a more gentle
religion :
Amico h'ai vinto : io te perdon. Perdona
Tu ancora, al corpo no che nulla pave
All' alma si : deh per lei prega ; e dona
Battesnio a me, ch'ogni mia colpa lave ;
In queste voci lansruide risuona
Un non so che di flebile e soave
Ch' al cor gli scende, ed ogni sdegno ammorza,
Egli occhi a lagrimar gl' invoglia e sforza.
The statues of antiquity were addressed to
the multitude of the people ; they were intended
to awaken the devotion of all classes of citi-
zens to be felt and judged by all mankind.
They are free, therefore, from all the peculiar-
ities of national taste; they are purified from
all the peculiarities of local circumstances ;
they have been rescued from that miserable
degradation to which art is uniformly exposed,
by taste being confined to a limited society.
They have assumed, in consequence, that ge-
neral character, which might suit the universal
feelings of our nature, and that permanent ex-
pression which might speak to the heart of
men through every succeeding age. The ad-
miration, accordingly, for those works of art
has been undiminished by the lapse of time;
they excite the same feelings at the present
time, as when they came fresh from the hand
of the Grecian artist, and are regarded by all
nations with the same veneration on the banks
of the Seine, as when they sanctified the
temples of Athens, or adorned the gardens of
Rome.
Even the rudest nations seem to have felt
the force of this impression. The Hungarians
and the Cossacks, during the stay of the allied
armies in Paris, ignorant of the name or the
celebrity of those works of art, seemed yet to
take a delight in the survey of the statues
of antiquity, and in passing through the long
line of marbled greatness which the Louvre
presents, stopt involuntarily at the sight of the
Venus, or clustered round the foot of the pe-
destal of the Apollo; indicating thus, in the
expression of unaffected feeling, the force of
stroy. The poor Russian soldier, whose know-
ledge of art was limited to the crucifix which
he had borne in his bosom from his native
land, still felt the power of ancient beauty, and
in the spirit of the Athenians, who erected an
altar to the Unknown God, did homage in si-
lence to that unknown spirit which had touched
a new chord in his untutored heart.
The character of art in every country ap-
pears to have been determined by the disposi-
tion of the people to whom it was addressed,
and the object of its composition to have va-
ried with the purpose it was called on to fulfil.
The Grecian statues were designed to excite
the devotion of a cultivated people; to imbody
their conceptions of divine perfection ; to real-
ize the expression of that character of mind
which they imputed to the deities whose tem-
ples they were to adorn : it was grace, or
strength, or majesty, or youthful power, which
they were to represent by the figures of Venus,
of Hercules, of Jupiter, or of Apollo. Their
artists accordingly were led to aim at the ex-
pression of general character : to exclude pas-
sion, or emotion, or suffering, from their de-
sign, and represent their figures in that state
of repose where the permanent expression of
mind ought to be displayed. It is perhaps in
this circumstance that is to be found the cause
both of the peculiarity and the excellence of
the Grecian statuary.
The Italian painters were early required to
effect a different object. Their pictures were
destined to represent the sufferings of nature ; to
display the persecution or death of our Saviour,
the anguish of the Holy Family, the heroism
of martyrs, the resignation of devotion. In
the infancy of the arts, accordingly, they were
led to study the expression of passion, of
suffering, and emotion; to aim at rousing the
pity, or exciting the sympathy of the spectators ;
and to endeavour to characterize their paint-
ings by the representation of temporary pas-
sion, nq,t the expression of permanent charac-
ter. Th'ose beautiful pictures in which a dif-
ferent object seems to have been followed in
which itijf expression is that of permanent
emotioj^Rt transient passion, while they cap-
tivate ^r admiration, seem to be exceptions
from 'the gMral design, and to have been
suggested b^Blf peculiar nature of the subject
represented, or a '"particular firmness of mind
in the artist. In thesMJfcauses we may perhaps
discern the origin of^ie peculiar character
of the Italian school.
In the French school, the character and
manners of the people seem to have carried
this peculiarity to a still greater length. Their
character led them to seek in every thing for
stage effect ; to admire the most extravagant
and violent representations, and to value the
efforts of art, not in proportion to their imita-
tion of the qualities of nature, but in propor-
tion to their resemblance to those artificial
qualiti^ on which their admiration was
founde'd. The vehemence of their manner, on
the most ordinary occasions, rendered the
for the
mos,t extravagant gestures requisite
that genuine taste for the beauty of nature, display of real passion; and their drama ac-
which all the rudeness of savage manners, and c6rding!y exhibits a mixture of dignity of sen-
all the ferocity of war had not been abltftWde- .timent, with violence of gesture, beyond mea
THE LOUVRE IN 1814.
115
sure surprising to a foreign spectator. The
same disposition of the people has influencec
the character of their historical painting ; and
it is to be remembered, that the French schoo
of painting succeeded the establishment of the
French drama. It is hence that they have ge-
nerally selected the moment of theatrical effeci
the moment of phrenzied passion, or unpa-
ralleled exertion, and that their composition is
distinguished by so many striking contrasts
and so laboured a display of momentary effect
The Flemish or Dutch school of painting
was neither addressed to the devotional nor
the theatrical feelings of mankind; it was
neither intended to awaken the sympathy of
religious pity, nor excite the admiration of
artificial dispositions it was addressed to
wealthy men of vulgar capacities, capable of
appreciating only the merit of minute detail
or the faithfulness of exact imitation. It is
hence that their painting possesses excellencies
and defects of so peculiar a description ; that
they have carried the minuteness of finishing
to so unparalleled a degree of perfection ; thai
the brilliancy of their lights has thrown a
splendour over the vulgarity of their subjects
and that they are in general so utterly destitute of
all the refinement and sentiment which sprung
from the devotional feelings of the Italian
people.
The subjects which the Dutch painter?
chose were subjects of low humour, calcu-
lated to amuse a rich and uncultivated people:
the subjects of the French school were heroic
adventure, suited to the theatrical taste of a
more elevated society: the subjects of the
Italian school were the incidents of sacred
history, suited to the devotional feelings of a
religious people. In all, the subjects to which
painting was applied, and the character of the
art itself, was determined by the peculiar cir-
cumstances or disposition of the people to
whom it was addressed : so that, in these in-
stances, there has really happened what
Addison stated should ever be the case, that
" the taste should not conform to the art, but
the art to the taste."
The object of statuary should ever be the
same to which it was always confined by the
ancients, viz. the representation of CHARACTER.
The very materials on which the sculptor has
to operate, render his art unfit for the expres-
sion either of emotion or passion; and the
figure, when finished, can bear none of the
marks by which they are to be distinguished.
It is a figure of cold, and pale, and lifeless
marble, without the varied colour which emo-
tion produces, or the living eye which passion
animates. The eye is the feature which is
expressive of present emotion ; it is it which
varies with all the changes which the mind
undergoes ; it is it which marks the difference
between joy and sorrow, between love and
hatred, between pleasure and pain, between
life and death. But the eye, with all the end-
less expressions which it bears, is lost to the
sculptor; its gaze must ever be cold and life-
less to him; its fire is quenched in the stillness
of the tomb. A statue, therefore, can never be
expressive of living emotion ; it can never ex-
press tho^e transient feelings which mark the
play of the living mind. It is an abstraction
of character which has no relation to present
existence; a shadow in which all the perma-
nent features of the mind are expressed, but
none of the passions of the mind are shown :
like the figures of snow, which the magic of
Okba formed to charm the solitude of Leila's
dwelling,rit bears the character of the human
form, but melts at the warmth of human feeling.
While such is the object to which statuary
would appear to be destined, painting embraces
a wider range, and is capable of more varied
expression : it is expressive of the living form;
it paints the eye and opens the view of the
present mind ; it imitates all the fleeting changes
which constitute the signs of present emotion.
It is not, therefore, an abstraction of character
which the painter is to represent; not an ideal
form, expressive only of the qualities of per-
manent character ; but an actual being, alive
to the impressions of present existence, and
bound by the ties of present affection. It is in
the delineation of these affections, therefore,
that the power of the painter principally con-
sists; in the representation, not of simple cha-
racter, but of character influenced or subdued
by emotion. It is the representation of the joy
of youth, or the repose of age ; of the sorrow
of innocence, or the penitence of guilt; of the
tenderness of parental affection, or the gra-
titude of filial love. In these, and a thousand
other instances, the expression of the emotion
constitutes the beauty of the picture; it is that
which gives the tone to the character which it
is to bear; it is that which strikes the chord
which vibrates in every human heart. The
object of the painter, therefore, is the ex-
pression of EMOTION, of that emotion which
is blended with the character of the mind
which feels, and gives to that character the
interest which belongs to the events of present
existence.
The object of the painter being the repre-
sentation of emotion in all the varied situations
which life produces, it follows, that every thing
in his picture should be in unison with the
predominant expression which he wishes it to
bear ; that the composition should be as sim-
ple as is consistent with the development of
this expression ; and the colouring, such as
accords with the character by which this emo-
tion is distinguished. It is here that the genius
of the artist is principally to be displayed, in
the selection of such figures as suit the general
impression which the whole is to produce;
and the choice of such a tone of colouring, as
harmonizes with the feeling of mind which it
is his object to produce. The distraction of va-
ried colours the confusion of different figures
the contrast of opposite expressions, complete-
ly destroy the effect of the composition ; they
fix the mind to the observation of what is par-
icular in the separate parts, and prevent that
uniform and general emotion which arises
from the perception of one uniform expression
in all the parts of which it is composed. It i.s
in this very perception, however, that the source
of the beauty is to be found; it is in the unde-
fined feeling to which it gives me, that the
delight of the emotion of taste c^ns-s's. Like
the harmony of sounds in musical composi-
116
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
tion, it produces an effect, of which we are
unable to give any account; but which we
feel to be instantly destroyed by the jarring
sound of a different note, or the discordant
effect of a foreign expression. It is in the ne-
glect of this great principle that the defect of
many of the first pictures of modern times is
to be found in the confused multitude of un-
necessary figures in the contradictory ex-
pression of separate parts in the distracting
brilliancy of gorgeous colours : in the laboured
display, in short, of the power of the artist, and
the utter dereliction of the object of the art.
The great secret, on the other hand, of the
beauty of the most exquisite specimens of mo-
dern art, lies in the simplicity of expression
which they bear, in their production of one
uniform emotion, from all the parts of one
harmonious composition. For the production
of this unity of emotion the surest means will
be found to consist in the selection of as few
figures as is consistent with the development
of the characteristic expression of the com-
position ; and it is, perhaps, to this circum-
stance, that we are to impute the unequalled
charm which belongs to the pictures of single
figures, or small groups, in which a single ex-
pression is alone attempted.
Both painting and sculpture are wholly
unfit for the representation of PASSION, AS
EXPRESSED BY MOTION ; and that to attempt to
delineate it, necessarily injures the effect of
the composition. Neither, it is clear, can ex-
press actual motion : they should not attempt,
therefore, to represent those passions of the
mind which motion alone is adequate to ex-
press. The attempt to delineate violent
passion, accordingly, uniformly produces a
painful or a ridiculous effect: it does not
even convey any conception of the passion
itself, because its character is not known by
the expression of any single moment, but by
the rapid changes which result from the per-
turbed state into which the mind is thrown.
It is hence that passion seems so ridiculous
when seen at a distance, or without the cause
of its existence being known : and it is hence,
that if a human figure were petrified in any
of the stages of passion it would have so
painful or insane an appearance. As painting,
therefore, cannot exhibit the rapid changes
in which the real expression of passion con-
sists, it should not attempt its delineation at
all. Its real object is, the expression of emotion,
of that more settled state of the human mind
when the changes of passion are gone when
the countenance is moulded into the expres-
sion of permanent feeling, and the existence
of this feeling is marked by the permanent
expression which the features have assumed.
The greatest artists of ancient and modern
times, accordingly, have selected, even in the
representation of violent exertion, that mo-
ment of temporary repose, when a permanent
expression is given to the figure. Even the
Laocoon is not in a state of actual exertion :
it is represented in that moment when the last
effort has been made ; when straining against
an invincible power has given to the figure
the aspect at last of momentary repose ; and
when despair has placed its settled mark on,
the expression of the countenance. The fight-
ing Gladiator is not in a state of present acti-
vity, but in that moment when he is preparing
his mind for the future and final contest, and
when, in this deep concentration of his
powers, the pause which the genius of the
' artist has given, expresses more distinctly to
the eye of the spectator the determined cha-
racter of the combatant, than all that the
struggle or agony of the combat itself could
afterwards display.
The Grecian statues in the Louvre may be
considered as the most perfect works of
human genius, and every one must feel those
higher conceptions of human form, and of
human nature, which the taste of ancient sta-
tuary had formed. It is not in the moment of
action that it has represented man, but in the
moment after action, when the tumult of
passion has ceased, and all that is great or
dignified in moral nature remains. It is not
Hercules in the moment of earthly combat,
when every muscle was swollen with the
strength he was exerting; but Hercules, in
the moment of transformation into a nobler
being, when the exertion of mortality has
passed, and his powers seem to repose in the
tranquillity of heaven ; not Apollo, when
straining his youthful strength in drawing the
bow ; but Apollo, when the weapon was dis-
charged, watching, with un exulting eye, its
resistless course, and serene in the enjoy-
ment of immortal power. And inspired by
these mighty examples, it is not St. Michael
when struggling with the demon, and marring
the beauty of angelic form by the violence of
earthly passion, that Raphael represents ; but
St. Michael, in the moment of unruffled tri-
umph, restraining the might of almighty
power, and radiant with the beams of eternal
mercy.
TYROL.
117
TYROL.*
IT is a common observation, that the cha-
racter of a people is in a great measure influ-
enced by their local situation, and the nature
of the scenery in which they are placed ; and
it is impossible to visit the Tyrol without being
convinced of the truth of the remark. The
entrance of the mountain region is marked
by as great a diversity in the aspect and man-
ners of the population, as in the external
objects with which they are surrounded ; nor
is the transition, from the level plain of Lom-
bardy to the rugged precipices of the Alps,
greater than from the squalid crouching ap-
pearance of the Italian peasant to the mar-
tial air of the free-born mountaineer.
This transition is so remarkable, that it
attracts the attention of the most superficial
observer. In travelling over the states of the
north of Italy, he meets everywhere with the
symptoms of poverty, meanness, and abject
depression. The beautiful slopes which de-
scend from the Alps, clothed with all that is
beautiful and luxuriant in nature, are inha-
bited for the most part by an indigent and
squalid population, among whom you seek
in vain for any share of that bounty with
which Providence has blessed their country.
The rich plains of Lombardy are cultivated
by a peasantry whose condition is hardly
superior to that of the Irish cottager; arid
while the effeminate proprietors of the soil
waste their days in inglorious indolence at
Milan and Verona, their unfortunate tenantry
are exposed to the merciless rapacity of bai-
liffs and stewards, intent only upon augment-
ing the fortunes of their absent superiors. In
towns, the symptoms of general distress are,
if possible, still more apparent. While the
opera and the Corso are crowded with splen-
did equipages, the lower classes of the people
are involved in hopeless indigence : The
churches and public streets are crowded with
beggars, whose wretched appearance marks
but too truly the reality of the distress of
which they complain while their abject and
crouching manner indicates the entire politi-
cal degradation to which they have so long
been subjected. At Venice, in particular, the
total stagnation of employment, and the misery
of the people, strikes a stranger the more
forcibly from the contrast which they afford
to the unrivalled splendour of her edifices,
and the glorious recollections with which her
history is filled. As he admires the gorgeous
magnificence of the piazza St. Marco, or winds
through the noble palaces that still rise with
undecaying beauty from the waters of the
Adriatic, he no longer wonders at the astonish-
ment with which the stern crusaders of the
north gazed at her marble piles, and feels the
rapture of the Roman emperor, when he ap-
proached, " where Venice sat in state throned
on her hundred isles ;" but in the mean and
* Blackvvood's Magazine, Sept. 1819. Written from
notes made during a tour in Tyrol in the preceding year.
pusillanimous race by which they are now
inhabited, he looks in vain for the descendants
of those great men who leapt from their
gallies on the towers of Constantinople, and
stood forth as the bulwark of Christendom
against the Ottoman power; and still less,
when he surveys the miserable population
with which he is surrounded, can he go back
in imagination to those days of liberty and
valour, when
" Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy."
From such scenes of national distress, and
from the melancholy spectacle of despotic
power ruling in the abode of ancient freedom,
it is with delight that the traveller enters the
fastnesses of the Alps, where liberty has im-
printed itself in indelible characters on the
character and manners of the people. In
every part of the Tyrol the bold and martial
air of the peasantry, their athletic form and
fearless eye, bespeak the freedom and inde-
pendence which they have enjoyed. In most
instances the people go armed; and during
the summer and autumn they wear a musket
hung over their shoulders, or some other of-
fensive weapon. Universally they possess
offensive weapons and are trained early to the
use of them, both by the expeditions in search
of game, of which they are passionately fond
and by the annual duty of serving in the
trained bands, to which every man capable of
bearing arms is, without exception, subjected.
It was in consequence of this circumstance,
iri a great measure, that they were able to
make so vigorous a resistance, with so little
preparation, to the French invasion ; and it is
to the same cause that is chiefly to be ascribed
that intrepid and martial air by which they are
distinguished from almost every other peasant-
ry in Europe.
Their dress is singularly calculated to add to
this impression. That of the men consists,
for the most part, of a broad-brimmed hat,
ornamented by a feather; a jacket tight to the
shape, with a broad girdle, richly ornamented,
fastened in front by a large buckle of costly
workmanship; black leather breeches and
gaiters, supported over the shoulders by two
broad bands, generally of scarlet or blue,
which are joined in front by a cross belt of
the same colour. They frequently wear pis-
tols in their girdle, and have either a rifle or
cloak slung over their shoulders. The colours
of the dresses vary in the different parts of
the country, as they do in the cantons of Swit-
zerland; but they are always of brilliant
colours, and ornamented, particularly round
the breast, with a degree of richness which
appears extraordinary in the labouring classes
of the community. Their girdles arid clasps,
with the other more costly parts of their cloth-
ing, are handed down from generation to
generation, and worn on Sundays and festi-
118
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
vals, ivith scrupulous care, by the great-grand-
sons of those by whom they were originally
purchased.
The dress of the women is grotesque and
singular in the extreme. Generally speaking,
the waists are worn long, and the petticoats
exceedingly short; and the colours of their
clothes are as bright and various as those of
the men. To persons habituated however to
the easy and flowing attire of our own coun-
trywomen, the form and style of this dress
appears particularly unbecoming; nor can we
altogether divest ourselves of those ideas of
ridicule which we are accustomed to attach to
such antiquated forms, both on the stage and
in the pictures of the last generation. Among
the peasant girls, you often meet with much
beauty; but, for the most part, the women of
the Tyrol are not nearly so striking as the
men; an observation which seems applicable
to most mountainous countries, and to none
more than to the West Highlands of Scotland.
It is of more importance to observe that the
Tyrolese peasantry are everywhere courteous
and pleasing in their demeanor, both towards
strangers and their own countrymen* In this
respect, their manners have sometimes been
misrepresented. If a traveller addresses them
in a style of insolence or reproach, which is too
often used towards the lower orders in France
or Italy, he will in all probability meet with a
repulse, and if the insult is carried further, he
may, perhaps, have cause permanently to re-
pent the indiscretion of his language. For the
Tyrolese are a free people ; and though sub-
ject to a despotic government, their own state
preserves its liberty as entire as if it acknow-
ledged no superior to its own authority. The
peasantry too are of a keen and enthusiastic
temper; grateful to the last degree for kind-
ness or condescension, but feelingly alive on
the other hand to any thing like contempt or
derision in the manner of their superiors.
Dwelling too in a country where all are equal,
and where few noble families or great proprie-
tors are to be found, they are little accustomed
to brook insults of any kind, or to submit to
language from strangers which they would
not tolerate from their own countrymen. A
similar temper of mind may be observed
among the Scotch Highlanders; it has been
noticed in the mountains of Nepaul and Cabul,
and has long characterized the Arabian tribes ;
and indeed it belongs generally to all classes
of the people in those situations where the
debasing effects of the progress of wealth, and
the division of labour have not been felt, and
where, from whatever causes, the individuals
in the lower ranks of life are called into active
and strenuous exertion, and compelled to act
for themselves in the conduct of life.
If a stranger, however, behaves towards the
Tyrolese peasantry with the ordinary courtesy
with which an Englishman is accustomed to
address the people of his own country, there
is no part of the world in which he will meet
with a more cordial reception, or where he will
find a more affectionate or grateful return for
the smallest acts of kindness. Among these
untutored people, the gratitude for any good
deed on the part of their superiors, is not, as in
more civilized states, the result of any habitual
awe for their rank, or of any selfish considera-
tion of the advantage to be derived from culti-
vating their good will. It is the spontane-
ous effusion of benevolent feeling, of feeling
springing from the uncorrupted dictates of their
hearts, and enhanced by the feudal attachment
| with which they naturally are inclined to re-
gard those in a higher rank than themselves.
Though the Tyrolese are entirely free, and
though the emperor possesses but a nominal
sovereignty over them, yet the warm feelings
of feudal fidelity have nowhere maintained
| their place so inviolate as among their moun-
tains; and this feeling of feudal respect and
affection is extended by them to the higher
classes, whenever they behave towards them
with any thing like kindness or gentleness of
manners. It has arisen from the peculiar
situation of their country, in which there are
few of the higher orders, where the peasantry-
possess almost the entire land of which it
consists, and where, at the same time, the
bonds of feudal attachment have been preserved
with scrupulous care, for political reasons, by
their indulgent government, that the peasantry
have united the independence and pride of re-
publican states with the devoted and romantic
fidelity to their sovereign, which characterizes
the inhabitants of monarchical realms. Like
the -peasants of Switzerland, they regard them-
selves as composing the state, and would dis-
dain to crouch before any other power. Like
the Highlanders of Scotland, they are actuated
by the warmest and most enthusiastic loyalty
towards their sovereign, and like them they
have not scrupled on many occasions to ex-
pose their lives and fortunes in a doubtful and
often hopeless struggle in his cause. From
these causes has arisen, that singular mixture
of loyalty and independence, of stubbornness
and courtesy, of republican pride and chival-
rous fidelity, by which their character is dis-
tinguished from that of every other people in
Europe.
Honesty may be regarded as a leading fea-
ture in the character of the Tyrolese, as indeed
it is of all the German people. In no situation
and under no circumstances is a stranger in
danger* of being deceived by them. They will,
in many instances, sacrifice their own in-
terests rather than betray what they consider so
sacred a duty as that of preserving inviolate
their faith with foreigners. In this respect
their conduct affords a very striking contrast
to the conduct of the French and Italians,
whose rapacity and meanness have long been
observed and commented on by every traveller.
Yet, amidst all our indignation at that charac-
ter, it may well be doubted, whether it does not
arise naturally and inevitably from the system
of government to which they have had the
misfortune to be subjected. Honesty is a virtue
practised and esteemed among men who have
a character to support, and who feel their own
importance in the scale of society. Generally
it will be found to prevail in proportion to the
weight which is attached to individual charac-
ter ; that is, to the freedom which the people
enjoy. Cheating, on the other hand, is the
usual and obvious resource of slaves, of men
TYROL.
119
who have never been taught to respect them-
selves, and whose personal qualities are en-
tirely overlooked by the higher orders of the
state. If England and Switzerland and the
Tyrol had been subjected by any train of un-
fortunate events to the same despotism which
has degraded the character of the lower orders
in France and Italy, they would probably have
had as little reason as their more servile neigh-
bours to have prided themselves on the honesty
and integrity of their national character.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature in the
character of the Tyrolese, is their uniform
PIETY, a feeling which is nowhere so univer-
sally diffused as among their sequestered val-
leys. The most cursory view of the country
is sufficient to demonstrate the strong hold
which religion has taken of the minds of the
peasantry. Chapels are built almost at every
half mile on the principal roads, in which the
passenger may perform his devotions, or which
may awaken the thoughtless mind to a recol-
lection of its religious duties. The rude efforts
of art have there been exerted to pourtray the
leading events incur Saviour's life; and in-
numerable figures, carved in wood, attest, in
every part of the country, both the barbarous
taste of the people, and the fervour of their
religious impressions. Even in the higher
parts of the mountains, where hardly any ves-
tiges of human cultivation are to be found, in
the depth of untrodden forests, or on the sum-
mit of seemingly inaccessible cliffs, the symbols
of devotion are to be found, and the cross rises
everywhere amidst the wilderness, as if to
mark the triumph of Christianity over the
greatest obstacles of nature. Nor is it only in
solitudes or deserts that the vestiges of their
devotion are to be found. In. the valleys and
in the cities it still preserves its ancient sway
over the people. On. the exterior of most
houses the legend of some favourite saint, or
the sufferings of some popular martyr, are to
be found ; and the poor inhabitant thinks him-
self secure from the greater evils of life under
the guardianship of their heavenly aid. In
every valley numerous spires are to be seen
rising amidst the beauty of the surrounding
scene, and reminding the traveller of the piety
of its simple inhabitants. On Sunday the whole
people flock to church in their neatest and
gayest attire ; and so great is the number who
thus frequent these places of worship, that it
is not unfrequent to see the peasants kneeling
on the turf in the churchyard where mass is
performed, from being unable to find a place
within its walls. Regularly in the evening
prayers are read in every family; and the
traveller who passes through the villages at
the hour of twilight, often sees through their
latticed windows the young and the.old kneel-
ing together round their humble fire, or is
warned of his approach to human habitation, by
hearing their evening hymns stealing through
the silence and solitude of the forest.
Nor is their devotion confined to acts of
external homage, or the observance of an un-
meaning ceremony. Debased as their religion
is by the absurdities and errors of the Catholic
form of worship, and mixed up as it is with in-
numerable legends and visionary tales, it yet
preserves enough of the pure spirit of its divine
origin to influence, in a great degree, the con-
duct of their private lives. The Tyrolese have
not yet learned that immorality in private life
may be pardoned by the observance of certain
ceremonies, or that the profession of faith
purchases a dispensation from the rules of
obedience. These, the natural and the usual
attendants of the Catholic faith in richer states,
have not reached their poor and sequestered
valleys. The purchase of absolution by money
is there almost unknown. In no part of the
world are the domestic or conjugal duties
more strictly or faithfully observed: and in.
none do the parish priests 'exercise a stricter
or more conscientious control over the conduct
of their flock. Their influence is not weakened,
as in a more advanced state of society, by a
discordance of religious tenets; nor is the con-
sideration due to this sacred function, lost in
the homage paid to rank, or opulence, or power.
Placed in the midst of a people who acknow-
ledge no superiors, and who live almost univer-
sally from the produce of their little domains,
and strangers alike to the arts of luxury, and
the seductions of fashion, the parish-priest is
equally removed from temptation himself,
and relieved from guarding against the great
sources of wickedness in others. He is at
once the priest, and the judge of his parish ;
the infallible criterion in matters of faith, and
the umpire, in the occasional disputes which
happen among them. Hence has arisen that re-
markable veneration for their spiritual guides,
by which the peasantry are distinguished ; and
it is to this cause that we are to ascribe the
singular fact that their priests were their prin-
cipal leaders in the war with France, and that
while their nobles almost universally kept
back, the people followed with alacrity the call
of their pastors, to take up arms in support of
the Austrian cause.
In one great virtue, the peasants in this
country (in common it must be owned with
most Catholic states) are particularly worthy
of imitation. The virtue of charity, which is
too much overlooked in many Protestant
kingdoms, but which the Catholic religion so
uniformly and sedulously enjoins, is there
practised, to the greatest degree, and by all
classes of the people. Perhaps there are few
countries in which, owing to the absence of
manufactures and great towns, poverty ap-
pears so rarely, or in which the great body of
the people live so universally in a state of
comfort. Yet,.whenever wretchedness does ap-
pear, it meets with immediate and effectual
relief. Nor is their charity confined to actual
mendicants, but extends to all whom accident
or misfortune has involved in casual distress.
Each valley supports its own poor; and the
little store of every cottage, like the meal of
the Irish cottager, is always open to any one
who really requires its assistance. This be-
nevolent disposition springs, no doubt, in a
great measure from the simple state in which
society exists among these remote districts ;
but it is to be ascribed not less to the efforts
of the clergy, who incessantly enjoin this great
Christian duty, and point it out as the chief
means of atoning for past transgressions.
120
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
Much as we may lament the errors of the
Catholic, and clearly as we may see its ten-
dency (at least in its more corrupt forms) to
nourish private immorality, and extinguish
civil liberty, it is yet impossible to deny, that,
in the great duty of Christian charity, which
it invariably enjoins, it has atoned for a multi-
tude of sins ; and to suspect that amidst the
austerity and severity of the presbyterian dis-
cipline, we have too much lost sight of the
charity of the gospel ; and that with us a pre-
tended indignation for the vices which involve
so many of the poor in distress, too often serves
as a pretext for refusing to minister that relief
to which, from whatever cause it has arisen,
our Saviour tells us that it is entitled.
There is something singularly delightful in
the sway which religion thus 'maintains in
these savage and sequestered regions. In
ancient times, we are informed these moun-
tains were inhabited by the Rhoetians, the
fiercest and most barbarous of the tribes,
who dwelt in the fastnesses of the mountains,
and of whose savage manners Livy has given
so striking an account in his description of
Hannibal's passage of the Alps. Many Roman
legions were impeded in their progress, or
thinned of their numbers, by these cruel bar-
barians ; and even after they were reduced to
subjection, by the expedition of Drusus, it was
still esteemed a service of the utmost danger to
leave the high road, or explore the remote re-
cesses of the country. Hence the singular fact,
almost incredible in modern times, that even
in the days of Pliny, several hundred years
after the first passage of these mountains by
the Roman troops, the source of both the Rhine
and the Iser were unknown ; and that the na-
turalist of Rome was content to state, a century
after the establishment of a Roman station at
Sion, that the Rhone took its rise " in the most
hidden parts of the earth, in the region of per-
petual night, amidst forests for ever inacces-
sible to human approach." Hence it is too,
that almost all the inscriptions on the votive
offerings which have been discovered in the
ruins of the temple of Jupiter Pennwus, at the
summit of the great St. Bernard, and many of
which come down to a late period in the history
of the empire, speak of the gratitude of the pas-
sengers for having escaped the extraordinary
perils of the journey. The Roman authors al-
ways speak of the Alps with expressions of dis-
may and horror, as the scenes of only winter and
desolation, and as the abodes of barbarous tribes.
" Nives coelo prope immistoe, tecta informia im-
posita rupibus pecora jumenta que torrida fri-
gore homines intonsi etinculti,animaliainani-
maque omnia rigentia gelu cetera visu quam
dictu foediora terrorem renovarunt."* No at-
tempt accordingly appears to have been made
by any of the Romans in later times to explore
the remoter recesses of the mountains now so
familiar to every traveller ; but while the empe-
rors constructed magnificent highways across
their summits to connect Italy with the northern
provinces of the empire, they suffered the val-
leys on either side to remain in their pristine
state of barbarism, and hastened into remoter
*Liv. lib. 21.
districts to spread the cultivation of which the
Alps, with their savage inhabitants, seemed to
them incapable.
What is it then which has wrought so won-
derful a change in the manners, the habits,
and the condition of the inhabitants of those
desolate regions 1 What is it which has spread
cultivation through wastes, deemed in ancient
times inaccessible to human improvement, and
humanized the manners of a people remarkable
only, under the Roman sway, for the ferocity
and barbarism of their institutions 1 From
what cause has it happened that those savage
mountaineers, who resisted all the acts of civi-
lization by which the Romans established their
sway over mankind, and continued, even to the
overthrow of the empire, impervious to all the
efforts of ancient improvement, should, in later
times, have so entirely changed their charac-
ter, arid have appeared, even from the first
dawn of modern civilization, mild and humane
in their character and manners'? From what
but from the influence of RELIGION of that re-
ligion which calmed the savage feelings of the
human mind, and spread its beneficial in-
fluence among the remotest habitations of men;
and which prompted its disciples to leave the
luxuries and comforts of southern climates, to
diffuse knowledge and humanity through in-
hospitable realms, and spread, even ( amidst the
regions of winter and desolation, the light and
the blessings of a spiritual faith.
Universally it has been observed through-
out the whole extent of the Alps, that the
earliest vestiges of civilization, and the first
traces of order and industry which appeared
after the overthrow of the Roman empire, were
to be found in the immediate neighbourhood
of the religious establishments ; and it is to
the unceasing efforts of the clergy during the
centuries of barbarism which followed that
event, that the -judicious historian of Switzer-
land ascribes the early civilization and hu-
mane disposition of the Helvetic tribes.* Placed
as we are at a distance from the time when
this great change was effected, and accustomed
to manners in which its influence has long
ago been established, we can hardly conceive
the difficulties with which the earlier profess-
ors of our faith had to struggle in subduing
the cruel propensities, and calming the re-
vengeful passions, that subsisted among the
barbarous tribes who had conquered Europe;
nor would we, perhaps r be inclined to credit
the accounts of the heroic sacrifices which
were then made by numbers of great and good
men who devoted themselves to the conver-
sion of the Alpine tribes, did not their institu-
tions remain to this day as a monument of
their virtue ; and did we not still see a number
of benevolent men who seclude themselves
from the world, and dwell in the regions of
perpetual snow, in the hope of rescuing a few
individuals from a miserable death. When
the traveller on the summit of the St. Bernard
reads the warm and touching expressions of
gratitude with which the Roman travellers re-
corded in the temple of Jupiter their gratitude
for having escaped the dangers of the pass,
* Planta, vol. i. p. 17, &c.
TYROL.
121
even in the days of Adrian and the Antonines,
and reflects on the perfect safety with which
he can now traverse the remotest recesses of
the Alps, he will think with thankfulness of
the religion by which this wonderful change
has been effected, and with veneration of the
saint whose name has for a thousand years
been affixed to the pass where his influence
first reclaimed the people from their barbarous
life ; and in crossing the defile of Mount Bren-
ner, where the abbey of Wilten first offered
an asylum to the pilgrim, he will feel, with a
late eloquent and amiable writer, how fortunate
it is "that religion has penetrated these fast-
nesses, impervious to hum'an power, and spread
her influence over solitudes where human law;
are of no avail ; that where precaution is impos-
sible and resistance useless, she spreads her in-
visible aegis over the traveller, and conducts
him secure under her protection through all the
dangers of his way. When, in such situations,
he reflects upon his security, and recollects
that these mountains, so savage and so well
adapted to the purposes of murderers and
banditti, have not, in the memory of man,
been stained with human blood, he ought to
do justice to the cause, and gratefully acknow-
ledge the beneficial influence of religion. Im-
pressed with these reflections, he will behold,
with indulgence, perhaps even with interest,
the crosses which frequently mark the brow of
a precipice, and the little chapels hollowed out
of the rock where the road is narrowed ; he
will consider them as so many pledges of se-
curity; and rest assured, that, as long as the
pious mountaineer continues to adore the
'Good Shepherd,' and to beg the prayer of the
'afflicted mother,' he will never cease to be-
friend the traveller, nor to discharge the duties
of hospitality."*
It must be admitted, at the same time,
that the Tyrolese are in the greatest degree
superstitious, and that their devotion, warm
and enthusiastic as it is, is frequently mis-
placed in the object of its worship. There is
probably no country in which the belief in
supernatural powers, in the gift of prophecy
to particular individuals, and the agency of
spiritual beings in human affairs, is more uni-
versally established. It forms, indeed, part of
their religious creed, and blends in the most
singular manner with the legendary tales and
romantic adventures which they have attached
to the history of their saints. But we would
err most egregiously, if we imagined that this
superstition with which the whole people are
tinged, savours at all of a weak or timid dis-
position, or that it is any indication of a de-
graded national character. It partakes of the
savage character of the scenery in which they
dwell, and is ennobled by the generous senti-
ments which prevail among the lowest classes
of the people. The same men who imagine
that they see the crucifix bend its head in the
dusk of the evening, and who hear the rattle
of arms amid the solitude of the mountains,
are fearless of death when it approaches them
through the agency of human power. It is a
strong feeling of religion, and a disposition to
see, in all the events by which they are sur-
rounded, the marks of divine protection, which
is the foundation of their superstition; and the
more strongly that they feel reliance on spi-
ritual interposition, the less inclined are they
to sink under the reverses of a temporary
life.
There is a wide distinction between supersti-
tion and the belief in sorcery or witchcraft.
The latter is the growth of weakness and
credulity, and prevails most among men of a
timid disposition, or among ignorant and bar-
barous nations. The former, though it is
founded on ignorance, and yields to the ex-
perience and knowledge of mankind, yet
springs from the noblest principles of our
nature, and is allied to every thing by which
the history of our species has been dignified
in former times. It will not be pretended, that
the Grecian states were deficient either in
splejidour of talents or heroism of conduct,
yet superstition, in its grossest form, attached
itself to all their thoughts, and influenced alike
the measures of their statesmen and the dreams
of their philosophers. The Roman writers
placed in that very feeling which we would
call superstition, the most honourable charac-
teristic of their people, and ascribed to it the
memorable series of triumphs by which the
history of the, republic was distinguished.
" Nullaihquam republia aut major aut sanctior
fuit," says Livy ; and it is to their deep sense
of religion that Cicero imputes the unparalleled
success with which the arms of the republic
were attended.* Yet the religious feeling which
was so intimately blended with the Roman
character, and which guided the actions and
formed the minds of the great men who adorned
her history, Was for the most part little else than
that firm reliance on the special interposition
of Providence, which is the origin of supersti-
tion. The Saracens, during the wars which
followed the introduction of the Mohammedan
faith, were superstitious to the highest degree,
yet with how many brilliant and glorious qua-
lities was their character distinguished, when
they triumphantly carried the Crescent of
Mohammed from the snows of the Himmaleh to
the shores of the Atlantic. The crusaders even
of the highest rank, believed firmly in the mi-
racles and prophecies which were said to
have accompanied the march of the Christian
army; nor is it perhaps possible to find in
history an example of such extraordinary con-
sequences as followed the supposed discovery
of the Holy Lance in the siege of Antioch; yet
who will deny to these great men the praise
of heroic enterprise and noble manners ?
Human nature has nowhere appeared in such
glorious colours as in the Jerusalem Delivered
of Tasso, where the firmness and constancy
of the Roman patriot is blended with the
ourtesy of chivalrous manners, and the ex-
alted piety of Christian faith ; yet supersti-
ion formed a part of the character of all his
leroes ; the courage of Tancred failed when
ic heard the voice of Clorinda in the charmed
tree ; and the bravest of his comrades trembled
when they entered the enchanted forest, where
* Eustacn, i. 98.
16
* Liv. lib. i. ; Cic. de Off. lib. i. c. 11.
L
122
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
"Esce all hor de la selva un suon repente,
Che par rimbombo di terren che treme,
E'l mormorar degli Austri in lui si sente,
E'l pianto d'onda, che fra scogli genie."
Examples of this kind may teach us, that
although superstition in the age and among the
society in which we live is the mark of a feeble
inind, yet that in less enlightened ages or parts
of the world, it is the mark only of an ardent
and enthusiastic disposition, such as is the
foundation of every thing that is great or
generous in character, or elevated and spiritual
in feeling. A people, in fact, strongly impressed
with religious feeling, and to whom experi-
ence has not taught the means by which Pro-
vidence acts in human affairs, must be supersti-
tious for it is the universal propensity of un-
instructed man, to imagine that a special in-
terposition of the Deity is necessary to accom-
plish the manifestation of his will, or the ac-
complishment of his purposes in human affairs.
Nor is there any thing impossible or absurd
in such a supposition. It might have been,
that future events were to be revealed on par-
ticular occasions to mankind, as they were
during the days of ancient prophecy, and that
the course of human events was to be main-
tained by special interpositions of divine power.
Experience alone teaches us, that this is not
the case ; it alone shows, that the intentions
of Providence are carried into effect through
the intervention of human agents, and that
the laws of the moral world work out their
own accomplishment by the voluntary acts
of free agents. When we see how difficult it
is to make persons even of cultivated under-
standing comprehend this subject even in the
present age, and with all the experience which
former times have furnished, we may cease
to wonder at the superstition which prevails
among the peasants of the Tyrol; we may
believe, that situated as they are, it is the na-
tural effusion of a pious spirit untaught by the
experience of other ages ; and we may discern,
in the extravagancies of their legendary creed,
not less than in the sublime piety of Newton,
the operation of those common laws by which
man is bound to his Creator.
The scenery of Tyrol, and of the adjacent
provinces of Styria and Carinthia, is singular-
ly adapted to nourish romantic and supersti-
tious ideas among the peasantry. In every
part of the world the grandeur of mountain
scenery has been found to be the prolific parent
of superstition. It was the mists, and the blue
lakes, and the sounding cataracts of Caledonia,
which gave birth to the sublime but gloomy
dreams of Ossian. The same cause has
operated to a still greater degree among the
Alps of Tyrol. The sublimity of the objects
with which man is there surrounded the
resistless power of the elements which he
finds continually in action the utter insig-
nificance of his own species, when compared
with the gigantic objects in which he is placed,
conspire to produce that distrust of himself,
and that disposition to cling to higher powers,
which is the foundation of superstitious feel-
ing. In cities and in plains, the labour of
man effaces in a certain degree these impres-
sions ; the works which he has there accumu-
lated, come to withdraw the attention from the
distant magnificence of nature; while the
weakness of the individual is forgotten in the
aggregate force of numbers, or in the distrac-
tions of civilized life. But amidst the solitude
of the Alps no such change can take place.
The greatest works of man appear there as
nothing amidst the stupendous objects of na-
ture ; the distractions of artificial society are
unknown amongst its simple inhabitants ; and
the individual is left in solitude to receive the im-
pressions which the sublime scenery in which
he is placed is fitted to produce. Upon minds
so circumstanced the changes of external na-
ture come to be considered as the immediate
work of some invisible power; the shadows
that fall in the lakes at sunrise, are interpreted
as the indication of the approach of hostile
bands the howl of the winds through the
forests is thought to be the lamentations of the
dead, who are expiating their sins and the
mists that flit over the summits of the moun-
tains, seem to be the distant skirts of vast
armies borne in the whirlwind, and treading
in the storm.
The Gothic ruins with which the Tyrol is
filled, contribute in a remarkable manner to
keep alive these superstitious feelings. In
many of the valleys old castles of vast dimen-
sions are perched on the summit of lofty crags,
or raise their mouldering towers high on the
mountains above the aged forests with which
they are surrounded. These castles, once the
abode of feudal power, have long since been
abandoned, or have gradually gone to decay,
without being actually dismantled by the pro-
prietors. With all of them the people connect
some romantic or terrible exploit; and the
bloody deeds of feudal anarchy are remem-
bered with terror by the peasants who dwell
in the villages at their feet. Lights are often
observed at night in towers which have been
uninhabited for centuries ; and bloody figures
have been distinctly seen to flit through their
deserted halls. The armour which still hangs
on the walls in many of the greater castles,
has been observed to move, and the plumes
to wave, when the Tyrolese army were victo-
rious in war. Groans are still heard in the
neighbourhood of the dungeons where the vic-
tims of feudal tyranny were formerly slain;
and the cruel baron, who persecuted his peo-
ple in his savage passion for the chase, is
often heard to shriek in the forests of the
Unterberg, and to howl as he flies from the
dogs, whom he had trained to the scent of
human blood.
Superstitions, too, of a gentler and more holy
kind, have arisen from the devout feelings of
the people, and the associations connected with
particular spots where persons of extraordi-
nary sanctity have dwelt. In many of the
farthest recesses of the mountains, on the verge
of perpetual desolation, hermits in former times
fixed their abode ; and the imagination of the
peasants still fancies that their spirits hover
around the spot where their earthly trials were
endured. Shepherds who have passed in the
gloom of the evening by the cell where the
bones of a saint are laid, relate that they dis-
tinctly heard his voice as he repeated his
TYROL.
123
evening prayers, and saw his form as he knelt |
before the crucifix which the piety of succeed-
ing ages had erected in his hermitage. The j
image of many a patron saint has been seen
to shed tears, when a reverse has happened to
the Tyrolese arms ; and the garlands which
are hung round the crosses of the Virgin wither j
when the hand which raised them has fallen
in battle. Peasants who have teen driven by
a storm to take shelter in the little chapels
which are scattered over the country, have
seen the crucifix bow its head; and solemn
music is heard at the hour of vespers, in the
higher chapels of the mountains. The distant
pealing of the organ, and the chant of innu-
merable voices is there distinctly perceptible ;
and the peasant, when returning at night from
the chase, often trembles when he beholds fu-
nereal processions, clothed in white, marching
in silence through the gloom of the forests, or
slowly moving on the clouds that float over
the summit of the mountains.
A country so circumstanced, abounding with
every thing that is grand and beautiful in na-
tural scenery, filled with Gothic castles, over
which ruin has long ago thrown her softening
hand, peopled by the phantoms of an extrava-
gant yet sublime superstition, and still inha-
bited by a valiant and enthusiastic people,
seems of all others to be the fit theatre of poeti-
cal fancy. It is truly extraordinary therefore,
that no poet has appeared to glean the legends
and ballads that are scattered through this in-
teresting country, to perpetuate the aerial beings
with which superstition has filled its wilds,
and to dignify its mouldering castles with the
recital of the many heroic and romantic ad-
ventures which have occurred within their
walls. When we recollect the unparalleled
interest which the genius of the present day
has given to the traditions and the character
of the Scottish people, it is impossible not to
regret, that no kindred mind has immortalized
the still more wild and touching incidents that
have occurred amidst the heroic inhabitants
and sublime scenery of the Tyrol Alps. Let
us hope, that the military despotism of Austria
will not long continue to smother the genius,
by restraining the freedom of those higher
classes of her people where poetical talents are
to be found ; and that, before the present tra-
ditions are forgotten, or the enthusiasm which
the war has excited is subsided, there may yet
arise the SCOTT of the south of Europe.
The great circumstance which distinguishes
the Tyrolese from their neighbours, the Swiss,
to whom in many respects they bear a close
resemblance, is in the animation and cheerful-
ness of their character. The Swiss are by "na-
ture a grave and heavy people ; nor is this pe-
culiar character the result of their republican
institutions, for we are told by Planta, that their
stupidity had become proverbial in France be-
fore the time of their republic. The Tyrolese,
on the other hand, are a cheerful and lively
people, full of fire and animation, enthusiasti-
cally devoted to their favourite pursuits, and
extremely warm in their resentments. Public
games are frequent in every valley ; and the
keen penetrating look of the peasants shows
with what alacrity they enter into any subject
in which they are interested. This striking
difference in the national character of the two
people appears in their different modes of con-
ducting war. Firm in the maintenance of their
purpose, and undaunted in the discharge of
military duty, the Swiss are valuable chiefly
for their stubborn qualities for that obstinate
courage on which a commander can rely with
perfect certainty for the maintenance of any
position which may be assigned for their de-
fence. It was their stubborn resistance, ac
cordingly, which first laid the foundation of the
independence of their republic, and which
taught the Imperialists and the Burgundians
at Laupen and Morat, that the pride of feudal
power, and the ardour of chivalrous enter-
prise, may seek in vain to crush " the might
that slumbers in a peasant's arm." In later
times the same disposition has been evinced
in the conduct of the Swiss Guards, in the
Place Carousel, all of whom were massacred
at their post, without the thought of capitula-
tion or retreat being once stirred amongst them.
The Tyrolese, on the other hand, are more
distinguished by their fiery and impetuous
mode of fighting. In place of waiting, like the
Swiss infantry, the charges of their enemies,
they rush on unbidden to the attack, and often
accomplish, by the hardihood of the enterprise,
what more cautious troops could never suc-
ceed in effecting. In this respect they resemble
more nearly the Highland clans, who, in the
rebellion in 1745, dashed with the broadsword
on the English regiments ; or the peasants of
La Vendee,who,without cannon or ammunition,
assaulted the veteran bands of the republic,
and by the fury of their onset, frequently de-
stroyed armies with whom they would have
been utterly unable to cope in a more regular
system of warfare.
One reflection there is, which may be drawn
from the determined valour of the Tyrolese,
and their success against the disciplined armies
of France, which it is of the utmost importance
to impress steadily on our minds. It is this ;
that the changes in the art of war in modern
times has produced no alteration on the ability
of freedom to resist the aggressions of despotic
powers ; but that still, as in' ancient times, the
discipline and the numbers of arbitrary govern-
ments are alike unavailing against the stub-
born valour of a free people. In every age,
and in every part of the world, examples are
to be found of the defeat of great and power-
ful armies by the cool and steady resistance
which characterizes the inhabitants of fr.ee
states. This is matter of proverbial remark ;
but it is of the more importance to observe,
that this general steadiness and valour, which
seek for no support but in the courage of the
individual, can be attained only by the diffusion
of civil liberty, and that the value of such qua-
lities is as strongly felt in modern wars as it
was in any former period of the world. It is
related by Homer, that at the siege of Troy,
the Trojan troops, in whom the vicinity of
Asia had introduced the customs of oriental
warfare, and the feelings of oriental despotism,
supported each other's courage by shouts and
cries during the heat of the battles ; while the
Grecians, in whom, as Mitford has observed,
124
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
the monarchical form of government was even
then tempered by a strong mixture of republi-
can freedom,* stood firm, in perfect silence,
waiting the command of their chiefs. The
passage is remarkable, as it shows how early,
in the history of mankind, the great lines of
distinction between the courage of freemen and
slaves was drawn; nor can we perhaps a'ny-
where find, in the subsequent annals of the
world, a closer resemblance to what occurred
in the struggle between English freedom and
French despotism on the field of Waterloo.
" The Grecian phalanx," says the poet, " march-
ed in close order, the leaders directing each
his own band. The rest were mute ; inso-
much, that you would say, in so great a multi-
tude there was no voice. Such was the silence
with which they respectfully watched for the
word of command from their officers. But the
cries of the Trojan army resembled the bleat-
ing of sheep when they are driven into the
fold, and hear the cries of their lambs. Nor
did the voice of one people rise from their
lines, but a confused mixture of many tongues."f
The same distinction has been observed in all
periods of the world, between the native un-
bending courage of freemen, and the artificial
or transitory ardour of the troops of despotic
states. It was thus that the three hundred
Spartans stood the shock of a mighty army in
the defile of Thermopylae ; and it was from the
influence of the same feeling, that, with not less
devoted valour, the fifteen hundred Swiss died
in the cemetery of St. James, in the battle of
Basle. The same individual determination
which enabled the citizens of Milan to over-
throw the whole feudal power of Frederic
Barbarossa on the plain of Legnano, animated
the shepherds of the Alps, when they trampled
under foot the pride of the imperial nobility
on the field of Sempach, and annihilated the
chivalry of Charles the Bold on the shores of
Morat. It was among the free inhabitants of
the Flemish provinces, that Count Till}'- found
the materials of those brave Walloon guards,
who, as contemporary writers inform us, might
be knocked down or trampled under foot, -but
could not be constrained to fly by the arms of
Gustavus at the battle of Leipsic # and the
celebrity of the Spanish infantry declined from
the time that the liberties of Arragon and Cas-
tile were extinguished by Charles V. " There
* Mitford, i. 158.
f "ilj r<5r' i-frarrffvrcpai Aavawf Kivwro (t>
NwXc^ewj tr6\c)ii>vf). xiXcve fi olaiv ex
'Hy/i(5/wjr (il 6' aXXot d*r/i/ taav oiifii
T6aaov Xadv TreaOat l\ovr iv ?fi0<riv aixJjji/
XtyJji dsidi6Tf$ Pttiiavroptf dfj.<i>l ifri trasLv
Tev'Xea TTOIKI\' &\a^ne, ra elucvot l^i'xowvro.
Tpwef J', aigr' d'i'ej TrnXvirapovos dvfipds iv ai>\rj
lilupiai is-fiKdaiv d/icXytf/iCvat vaXa \evK6v,
'Ar/xf ftenaKvlcu, dxovovaai bira dpv&v
"ili Tpwwv aXaAifrtff dva srpardy cvpvv dpwpet.
Oil vhp navTMv rjev O/JGJ $p6os, oi>6' ta yijovj.
'AXXa yXoSffff' iueuiKTo' noXvKXrjTOi 6' taav avtipff.
Iliad iv. 427.
} Memoirs of a Cavalier, by Defoe.
is ample room," as a late eminent writer* has
well observed, " for national exultation at the
names of Cressy, Poitiers, and Azincour. So
great was the disparity of numbers upon those
famous days, that we cannot, with the French
historian, attribute the discomfiture of their
hosts merely to mistaken tactics and too im-
petuous valour. They yielded rather to the
intrepid steadiness in danger, which had al-
ready become the characteristic of our English
soldiers, and which, during four centuries, has
ensured their superiority wherever ignorance
or infatuation has not led them into the field.
But these victories, and the qualities that se-
cured them, must chiefly be ascribed to the
freedom of our constitution and the superior
condition of the people. Not the nobility of
England, not the feudal tenants, won the battles
of Cressy and Poitiers, for these were fully
matched in the ranks of France, but the yeo-
men who drew the bow with strong and steady
arms, accustomed to its use in their native
fields, and rendered fearless by personal com-
petence and civil freedom.f
Now, after all that we have heard of the art
of war being formed into a regular system, of
the soldier being reduced to a mere machine,
and of the progress of armies being made the
subject of arithmetical calculation ; it is truly
consoling to find the discomfiture of the great-
est and most disciplined army which the world
has ever seen, brought about by the same
cause which, in former times, have so often
given victory to the cause of freedom ; to find
the victories of Naefels and Morgarten renew-
ed in the triumph of the Tyrolese patriots, and
the ancient superiority of the English yeomanry
asserted, as in the days of Cressy and Azin-
cour, on the field of Waterloo. Nor is it per-
haps the least remarkable fact of that memo-
rable day, that while the French army, like the
Trojans of old, animated their courage by in-
cessant cries; the English battalions, like the
Greek phalanxes, waited in silence the charge
of their enemies : proving thus, in the severest
of all trials, that the art of war has made no
change on the qualities essential in the soldier ;
and that the determined courage of freemen is
still able, as in the days of Marathon and
Plateea, to overcome the utmost efforts of mili-
tary power. It is interesting to find the same
qualities distinguishing the armies of a free
people in such distant periods of the world ;
and it is the fit subject, not merely of national
pride, but of universal thankfulness, to disco-
ver, that there are qualities in the composition
of a great army which it is beyond the power
of despotism to command ; and that the utmost
efforts of the military art, aided by the strongest
incitements to military distinction, cannot
produce that steady and unbending valour
which springs from the enjoyment of CIVIL
LIBERTY.
* Hallam's Middle Ages, i. 74.
f Froissart, i. c. 162.
FRANCE IN 1833.
125
FRANCE IN 1833.*
OBSERVATIONS made on the spot by one who
has long regarded the political changes of
France with interest, may possibly be of ser-
vice, in conveying to the public on the other
side of the Channel some idea of the present
state and future prospects of a nation, avow-
edly followed as the leader by the liberal party
all over the world, in the great work of politi-
cal regeneration. Such a sketch, drawn with
no feeling of political or national animosity,
but with every wish for the present and future
happiness of "the great people among whom it
is composed, may possibly cool many visionary
hopes, and extinguish some ardent anticipa-
tions; but it will at least demonstrate what is
the result, in the circumstances where it has
been most triumphant, of democratic ascend-
ency ; and prepare the inhabitants of Great
Britain for the fate, and the government which
awaits them, if they continue to follow the
footsteps of the French liberals in the career
which has been recently brought, on this side
of the channel, to so triumphant a conclusion.
Most of the educated inhabitants of Great
Britain visited France, during the restoration;
many of them at different times. Every one
thought he had acquired some idea of the
political state and prospects of the country,
and was enabled to form some anticipations
as to its future destiny. We are now enabled
to say, that most of these views were partial
or erroneous. They were so, not so much
from defect in the observation of France, as
ignorance of the political principles and pas-
sions which were at work amongst its inha-
bitants ; from want of experience of the result
of democratic convulsions ; from judging of a
country over which the wave of revolution
had passed, with the ideas drawn from one
which had expelled its fury. We observed
France accurately enough; but we did so with
English eyes ; we supposed its inhabitants to
be actuated by the feelings and interests, and
motives, which were then at work among our-
selves ; and could form no conception of the
new set of principles and desires which are
stirred up during the agitation of a revolution.
In this respect our powers of observation are
now materially improved. We have had some
experience during the last three years of de-
mocratic convulsion; we know the passion
and desires which are developed by arraying
the lower orders against the higher. We have
acquired an acquaintance with the signs and
marks of revolutionary terror. Standing thus
on the confines of the two systems; at the ex-
.tremity of English liberty, and the entrance of
French democracy, we are now peculiarly
qualified to form an accurate opinion of the
tendency of these opposite principles of go-
* Blackvvood'a Magazine, October and December,
1833. Written during a residence at Paris, and in the
north of France, in the autumn of that year.
vernment ; we know the landmarks of the
civilization which is receding from the view,
and have gained some acquaintance with the
perils of that which is approaching; and com-
bining recent with former experience in our
own and the neighbouring country, can form
a tolerably accurate idea of the fate which
awaits them and ourselves.
The leading circumstance in the present
condition of France, which first strikes an
English observer, and is the most important
feature it exhibits in a political point of view,
is the enormous and apparently irresistible
power of the central government at Paris over
all the rest of France. This must appear
rather a singular result after forty years of
ardent aspirations after freedom, but neverthe-
less nothing is more certain, and it constitutes
the great and distinguishing result of the Re-
volution.
Such has been the centralization of power
by the various democratic assemblies, who, at
different times, have ruled the destinies of this
great country, that there is hardly a vestige of
power or influence now left to the provinces.
All the situations of emolument of every de-
scription, from the highest to the lowest, in
every department and line of life, are in the
gift of government. No man, in a situation
approaching to that of a gentleman, can rise
either in the civil or military career in any
part of France, unless he is promoted by the
central offices at Paris. These are general
expressions, which convey no definite idea. A
few examples will render the state of the
country in this particular more intelligible.
The Chamber of Peers, who now hold their
situations only for life, are appointed by the
Crown.
The whole army, now four hundred thou-
sand strong, is at the disposal of government.
All the officers in that great body of course
receive their appointment from the War-office
at Paris.
The navy, no inconsiderable force, is also
appointed by the same power.
The whole artificers and officers connected
with the engineers and artillery, a most nu-
merous body in a country so beset with fortifi-
cations and fortresses as France, derive their
appointments from the central government.
The custom-house officers, an immense
body, whose huts and stations are set down at
short distances all round France, are all no-
minated by the central office at Paris.
The whole .mayors of communes, with their
" adjoints," amounting over all France to
eighty-eight thousand persons, are appointed
by the central government, or the prefects of
departments whom they have nominated.
The post-office, in every department through-
out the kingdom, is exclusively filled by the
servants of government.
126
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
The police, an immense force, having not
less than eighty thousand employes in constant
occupation, and which extends its iron net
over the whole country, are all appointed by
the minister at the head of that department.
The clergy over the whole country receive
their salaries from government, and are ap-
pointed by the crown.
The whole teachers of youth of every de-
scription, in all public or established semina-
ries, whether parochial or departmental, are
appointed by the minister of public instruc-
tion.
The management of the roads, bridges, and
chaussees, throughout all the kingdom, is in-
trusted to persons appointed by the crown. No
man can break a stone, or mend a bridge, or
repair a pavement, from Calais to Bayonne,
unless he is in the service of government; and
all the labourers on the roads have an uniform
hat, with the words "Caritonnier," or " Pon-
tonnier," upon it, indicating that they are in
the service of the state.
The post-horses over all France are under
the control of the crown. Not only the post-
masters, but every postillion from Brest to
Marseilles, and Strasburg to Bourdeaux, are
nominated by the government. No additional
hand can be added in the remotest relay of
horses without the authority of the Parisian
bureaux. On all the great roads in the north
of France there are too few postillions, and
travellers are daily detained hours on the
road, not because horses are awanting, but
because it has not pleased the ministers of the
interior to appoint a sufficient number of pos-
tillions for the different stations. In the south,
the case is the reverse ; the postillions are too
numerous, and can hardly live, from the divi-
sion of their business among so many hands;
but the mandate has gone forth from the
Tuileries, and obedience must be the order of
the day.
The whole diligences, stage-coaches, mails,
and conveyances of every description which
convey travellers by relays of horses in every
part of France, must employ the post-horses
and postillions appointed at the different sta-
tions by the crown. No private individual or
company can run a coach with relays with
their own horses. They may establish as
many coaches as they choose, but they must
all be drawn by the royal horses and postillions,
if they do not convey the travellers en voiturier
with the same horses all the way. This great
monopoly was established by an arret of the
Directory, 9th December, 1798, which is in
these terms ; " Nul autre que les maitres de
poste, munis d'une commission speciale, ne
pourra etablir de relais particuliers, relayer ou
conduire a litre de louage des voyageurs d'un
relais a un autre, a peine d'etre contraint de
payer par forme d'indemnil le prix de la
course, au profit des maitres de poste et des
postilions qui auront ete frustres."
The whole firemen throughout France are
organized in battalions, and wear a uniform
like soldiers, and are appointed by govern-
ment.
The whole judges, superior and inferior,
over the whole kingdom, as well as the prefets,
sous-prefets, procureurs du roi, and in gene-
ral all the legal offices of every description, are
appointed by government. The only excep-
tion are the judges du paix, a sort of arbiters
and mediators in each canton, to settle the
trifling disputes of the peasants, whom they
are permitted to name for themselves.
The whole officers employed in the collec-
tion of the revenue, over the whole country,
are appointed by the government. They are
an extremely numerous body, and add im-
mensely to the influence of the central author-
ity, from whom all their appointments emanate.
It would be tedious to carry this enumera-
tion farther. Suffice it to say, that the govern-
ment of France has now drawn to itself the
whole patronage in every department of busi-
ness and line of life over the whole country.
The army, the navy, the law, the church, the
professors and teachers of every description ;
the revenue, the post-office, the roads, bridges
and canals, the post-horses, the postillions, the
firemen, the police, the gen-d'armes, the pre-
fects, the mayors, the magistrates, constitute so
many different branches in which the whole
patronage is vested in the central government
at Paris, and in which no step can be taken,
or thing attempted, without the authority of
the minister for that department, or the deputy
in the capital. In consequence of this prodi-
gious concentration of power and patronage in
the public offices of Paris, and the total stripping
of every sort of influence from the depart-
ment, the habit has become universal in every
part of France, of looking to Paris, not only
for the initiation in every measure and thought,
but for the means of getting on in every line
of life. Has a man a son to put into the army
or navy, the law, the church, the police, or re-
venue? He finds that he has no chance of
success unless he is taken by the hand by the
government. Is he anxious to make him a
professor, a teacher, or a schoolmaster? He
is obliged to look to the same quarter for the
means of advancement. Is his ambition li-
mited to the humbler situation of a postmaster,
a bridge contractor, a courier, or a postillion?
He must pay his court to the prefect of the de-
partment, in order to obtain a recommendation
to the minister of the interior, or the director
of bridges and roads. Is he even reduced to
earn his bread by breaking stones upon the
highways, or paving the streets of the towns ?
He must receive the wages of government,
and must wear their livery for his twenty sous
a day. Thus in every department and line of
life, government patronage is indispensable,
and the only way in which success is to be
obtained is by paying court to some person in
authority.
In a commercial and manufacturing country
such as England, many and various means
exist of rising to wealth and distinction, inde-
pendent of government; and in some the oppo-
sition line is the surer passport to eminence
of the two. Under the old constitution of
England, when political power was vested in
the holders of great property, and the great
body of the people watched their proceedings
with distrust and jealousy, eminence was to
be attained in any public profession, as the
FRANCE IN 1833.
127
bar or the senate, chiefly by acquiring the suf-
frages of the greater number of the citizens;
and hence the popular independent line was
the one which in general led soonest to fame
and eminence. Commerce and manufactures
opened up a thousand channels of lucrative
industry, independent altogether of government
support; and many of the most important
branches of patronage, great part of the church,
and the majority of all establishments for
education, were in the hands of corporations
or private individuals, often in opposition to,
or unconnected with, ministerial .influence.
But the reverse of all this obtains in France.
There little commerce or manufactures are,
comparatively speaking, to be found. With
the exception of Paris, Lyons, Bourdeaux,
Rouen, and Marseilles, no considerable com-
mercial cities exist, and the innumerable chan-
nels for private adventure which the colonial
possessions and immense trade of Britain open
up are unknown. All the private establish-
ments or corporations vested with patronage
in any line, as the church, education, charity,
or the like, were destroyed during the Revolu-
tion of 1793, and nothing left but the great and
overwhelming power of government, standing
the more prominently forward, from the extinc-
tion of every rival authority which might
compete with its influence.
From the same cause has arisen a degree
of slavish submission, in all the provinces of
France, to the will or caprice of the metropo-
lis, which is almost incredible, and says but
little for the independence of thought and cha-
racter which has grown up in that country
since the schoolmaster has been abroad. From
the habit of looking to Paris for directions in
every thing, from the making of a king to the
repairing of a bridge, from overturning a dy-
nasty to breaking a stone, they have absolutely
lost the power of judging for themselves, or
taking the initiative in any thing either of the
greatest or the smallest moment. This ap-
pears, in the most striking manner, in all the
political changes which have taken place in
the country for the last forty years. Ever since
the bones of old France were broken by the
Constituent Assembly : since the parliaments,
the provinces, the church, the incorporations,
were swept away by their gigantic acts of de-
mocratic despotism, the departments have
sunk into absolute insignificance, and every
thing has been determined by the will of the
capital, and the acts of the central government
at its head. When the Girondists, the illus-
trious representatives of the country districts,
were proscribed, the most violent feelings of
indignation spread through the south and west
of France. Sixty-five, out of the eighty-four
departments, rose in insurrection against the
despotism of the capital; but the unwonted
exertion surpassed their strength, and they
soon yielded, without a struggle worth the no-
tice of history, to its usurped authority. When
Robespierre executed Danton and his adher-
ents ; when he himself sunk under the stroke
of the Tlvermidorians; when Napoleon over-
threw the national guard of Paris, in October,
1795 ; when the Directory were expelled by the
bayonets of Augereau, on the 18th Fructidor,
1797; when Napoleon seized the reins of
power in November, 1799; when he declared
himself emperor, and overturned all the prin-
ciples of the Revolution in 1804; when he was
vanquished by the allies in 1814; when he re-
sumed the helm in 1815; when he was finally
dethroned after the battle of Waterloo; when
the revolt of the barricades established a re-
volutionary government in the capital ; when
the suppression of the insurrection at the
cloister of St. Merri defeated a similar attempt
two years afterwards, the obedient departments
were equally ready with their addresses of
congratulation, and on every one of these va-
rious, contradictory, and inconsistent changes,
France submitted at once to the dictatorial
power of Paris ; and thirty millions of men
willingly took the law from the caprices or
passions of a few hundred thousands. The
subjection of Rome to the Praetorian guards,
or of Turkey to the Janizaries, was never more
complete.
It was not thus in old France. The greatest
and most glorious efforts of her people, in fa-
vour of freedom, were made when the capital
was in the hands of foreign or domestic ene-
mies. The English more than once wrested
Paris from their grasp ; but the forces of the
south rallied behind the Loire, and at length
expelled the cruel invaders from their shores.
The forces of the League were long in posses-
sion of the capital ; but Henry IV., at the head
of the militia of the provinces, at length con-
quered its citizens, and Paris received a master
from the roots of the Pyrenees. The Revolu-
tion of 1789 commenced with the provinces:
it was their parliaments, which, under Louis
XV. and XVI., spread the spirit of resistance
to arbitrary power through the country ; and
it was from their exertions, that the unanimous
spirit, which compelled the court to convoke
the states-general, arose. Now all is changed;
not a murmur, not a complaint against the
acts of the capital, is to be heard from Calais
to Bayonne ; but the obedient departments are
equally ready at the arrival of the mail, or the
receipt of the telegraph, to hail with shouts a
republic or an empire ; a dictator or a consul ;
a Robespierre or a Napoleon ; a monarch, the
heir of fourteen centuries ; or a hero, the child
of an hundred victories.
All the great and useful undertakings, which
in England, and all free countries, emanate
from the capital or skill of individuals, or as-
sociated bodies, in France spring from the go-
vernment, and the government alone. Their
universities, schools, and colleges ; academies
of primary and secondary instruction ; mili-
tary and polytechnic schools ; hospitals, cha-
ritable institutions, libraries, museums, and
public establishments of all sorts; their har-
bours, bridges, roads, canals every thing, in
short, originates with, and is directed by, the
government. Hence, individuals in France
seldom attempt any thing for the public good:
private advantage, or amusement, the rise of
fortune, or the increase of power, constitute
the general motives of action. Like the pas-
sengers in a ship, or the soldiers in an army,
the French surrender themselves, without a
struggle, to the guidance of those in possession
128
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
of the helm ; or if they rise in rebellion against
them, it is not so much from any view to the
public good, as from a desire to secure to them-
selves the advantages which the possession
of political power confers.
This extraordinary concentration of every
thing in the central government at Paris,
always existed to a certain extent in France ;
but it has been increased, to a most extraordi-
nary degree, under the democratic rule of the
last forty years. It was the Constituent As-
sembly, borne forward on the gales of revo-
lutionary fervour, which made the greatest
additions to the power of government not
merely by the concentration of patronage and
direction of every kind in ministers, but by
the destruction of the aristocracy, the church,
the incorporations ; every thing, in short,
which could withstand or counterbalance the
influence of government. The people, charmed
with the installation of their representatives in
supreme power, readily acquiesced in, or rather
strenuously supported, all the additions made
by the democratic legislature to the powers
of the executive; fondly imagining that, by so
doing, they were laying the surest foundation
for the continuance of their own power. They
little foresaw, what the event soon demon-
strated, that they were incapable, in the long
run, of preserving this power; that it would
speedily fall into the hands of ambitious or
designing men, who nattered their passions,
in order to secure the possession of arbitrary
authority for themselves; and that, in the end,
the absolute despotism, which they had created
for the purpose of perpetuating the rule of the
multitude, would terminate in imposing on
them the most abject servitude. When Napo-
leon came to the throne, he found it unneces-
sary to make any great changes in the practical
working of government; he found a despotism
ready made to his hand, and had only to seize
the reins, so tightly bitted on the nation by his
revolutionary predecessors.
The Revolution of July made no difference
in this respect; or rather it tended to concen-
trate still farther in the metropolis the authority
and power of government. The able and in-
defatigable leaders, who during the fifteen years
of the Restoration had laboured incessantly to
subvert the authority of the royalists, had no
sooner succeeded, than they quietly took pos-
session of all the powers which they enjoyed,
and, supported with more talent, and a greater
display of armed force, exercised them with
far greater severity. No concessions to real
freedom were made no division of the powers
of the executive took place. All appointments
in every line still flow from Paris : not a pos-
tillion can ride a post-horse, nor peasant break
a stone on the highways, from the Channel to
the Pyrenees, unless authorized by the cen-
tral authority. The legislature convoked by
Louis Philippe has done much to abridge the
authority of others, but nothing to diminish
that which is most to be dreaded. They have
destroyed the hereditary legislature, the last
remnant of European civilization which the
convulsions of their predecessors had left, but
done nothing to weaken the authority of the
executive. Louis Philippe enjoys, during the
precarious tenure of his crown, at the will of
the Preetorian Guards of Paris, more absolute
authority than ever was held by the most des-
potic of the Bourbon race.
France being held in absolute subjection by
Paris, all that is necessary to preserve this
authority is to secure the mastery of the
capital. Marshal Soult has taught the citizen
king how this is to be done. He keeps an
immense military force, from 35,000 to 40,000
men, constantly in the capital ; and an equal
force is stationed within twelve miles round,
ready to march at a signal from the telegraph on
Montmartre, in a few hours, to crush any at-
tempt at insurrection. In addition to this, there
are 50,000 National Guards in Paris, and
25,000 more in the Banlieue, or rural district
round its walls, admirably equipped, well
drilled, and, to appearance at least, quite equal
to the regular soldiers. Of this great force,
above 5000, half regulars and half National
Guards, are every night on duty as sentinels,
or patrols, in the capital. There is not a
street where several sentinels, on foot or
horseback, are not stationed, and within call
of each a picquet or patrol, ready to render
aid, if required, at a minute's notice. Paris, in
a period of profound peace, without an enemy
approaching the Rhine, resembles rather a city
in hourly expectation of an assault from a
beleaguering enemy, than the capital of a
peaceful monarchy.
In addition to this prodigious display of
military force, the civil employes, the police,
constitute a body nearly as formidable, and,
to individuals at least, much more dangerous.
Not only are the streets constantly traversed
by this force in their appropriate dress, but
more than half their number are always prowl-
ing about, disguised as workmen or trades-
men, to pick up information, mark individuals,
and arrest discontented characters. They enter
coffee-houses, mingle in groups, overhear con-
versations, join in discussions, and if they
discover any thing seditious or dangerous, they
either arrest the delinquent at once, and hand
him over to the nearest guard, or denounce
him to their superiors, and he is arrested at
night by an armed force in his bed. Once
incarcerated, his career, for a long time at
least, is terminated : he is allowed to lie there
till his projects evaporate, or his associates
are dispersed, without either being discharged
or brought to trial. There is not a night at this
time, (August, 1833,) that from fifteen to twenty
persons are not arrested in this way by the
police ; and nothing is heard of their subse-
quent trial.
From the long continuance of these arrests
by the police, the prisons of Paris, spacious as
they are, and ample as they were found during
the Reign of Terror, have become unable to
contain their numerous inmates. Fresh and
extraordinary places of confinement have be-
come necessary. A new jail, of great dimen-
sions, guarded by an ample military force, has
been constructed by the citizen king, near the
cemetery of Pere la Chaise, where the over-
flowings of the other prisons in Paris are safely
lodged. The more dangerous characters are
conveyed to fortresses in the interior, or the
FRANCE IN 1833.
129
Chateau of Mount St. Michael in Normandy.
This great state-prison, capable of holding
many hundred prisoners, is situated in the
sea, on the coast of the Channel, and amply
tenanted now by the most unruly part, of the
population of Paris, under a powerful military
and naval garrison.
Above fifteen hundred persons were arrested
after the great revolt at the Cloister of St.
Merri, in June, 1832, and, though a few have
been brought to trial or discharged, the great
majority still remain in prison, in the charge
of the police, under warrants apparently of
interminable duration. The nightly arrests
and numerous domiciliary visits are con-
stantly adding to this immense number, and
gradually thinning that ardent body who ef-
fected the Revolution of July, and have proved
so formidable to every government of France,
since the beginning of the revolutionary trou-
bles in 1789. The fragment of this body, who
fought at the Cloister of St. Merri, evinced such
heroic courage and invincible determination,
that the government have resolved on a helium ad
internecionem with such formidable antagonists,
and, by the continued application of arrests
and domiciliary visits, have now considerably
weakened their numbers, as well as damped
their hopes. Still it is against this democratic
rump that all the vigilance of the police is
exerted. The royalists are neglected or de-
spised ; but the republicans, whom it is not so
easy to daunt, are sought out with undecaying
vigilance, and treated with uncommon severity.
Public meetings, or any of the other constitu-
tional modes of giving vent to general opinion
in Great Britain, are unknown in France. If
twenty or thirty thousand men were collected
together in that way, they would infallibly be
assailed by the military force, and their dis-
persion, or the overthrow of the government,
would be the consequence.
The only relic of freedom, which has sur-
vived the Revolution of July, is the liberty of
the press. It is impossible to read the journals
which are in every coffee-house every morn-
ing, without seeing that all the efforts of des-
potism have failed in coercing this mighty in-
strument. The measures of public men are
canvassed with unsparing severity: and not
only liberal, but revolutionary measures ad-
vocated with great earnestness, and no small
share of ability. It is not, however, without
the utmost efforts on the part of government
to suppress it, that this licentiousness exists.
Prosecutions against the press have been in-
stituted with a degree of rigour and frequency,
since the Revolution of July, unknown under
the lenient and feeble government of the Re-
storation. The Tribune, which is the leading
republican journal, has reached its eigh y-wcond
prosecution, since the Three Glorious Days.
More prosecutions have been instituted since
the accession of the Citizen King, than during
the whole fifteen that the elder branch of the
Bourbons was on the throne. The govern-
ment, however, have not ventured on the de-
cisive step of suppressing the seditious jour-
nals, or establishing a censorship of the press.
The recollection of the Three Days, which
commenced with the attempts to shut up the
17
printing-offices of some newspapers, prevents
this last act of despotism. The National
Guard, in all probability, would resist such an
attempt, and if not supported by them, it would
endanger the crown of Louis Philippe. Go-
vernment has apparently discovered that the
retention of the power of abuse consoles the
Parisians for the loss of all their other liber-
ties. They read the newspapers and see the
ministry violently assailed, and imagine they
are in full possession of freedom, though they
cannot travel ten leagues from Paris without
a passport, nor go to bed in the evening with
any security that they will not be arrested
during the night by the police, and consigned
to prison, without any possibility of redress,
for an indefinite period.
The present government appears to be
generally disliked, and borne from despair of
getting any other, more than any real attach-
ment. You may travel over the whole coun-
try without discovering one trace of affection
to the reigning family. Their names are
hardly ever mentioned ; by common consent
they appear to be consigned to oblivion by aU
classes. A large and ardent part of the peo-
ple are attached to the memory of Napoleon,
and seize every opportunity of testifying their
admiration of that illustrious man. Another
large and formidable body have openly es-
poused the principles of democracy, and are
indefatigable in their endeavours to establish
their favourite dream of a republic. The
Royalists, few in number in Paris and the
great commercial towns, abound in the south
and west, and openly proclaim their determi-
nation, if Paris will take the lead, to restore
the lawful race of sovereigns. But Louis
Philippe has few disinterested partisans, but
the numerous civil and military employes who
wear his livery or eat his bread. Not a ves-
tige of attachment to the Orleans dynasty is to
be seen in France. Louis Philippe is a man
of great ability, vast energy, and indomitable
resolution : but though these are the qualities
most dear to the French, he has no hold of
their affections. His presence in Paris is
known only by the appearance of a mounted
patrol on each side of the arch in the Place
Carousel, who are stationed there only when
the king is at the Tuileries. He enters the
capital, and leaves it, without any one inquir-
ing or knowing any thing about him. If he
is seen in the street, not a head is uncovered,
not a cry of Vive Ic Roi is heard. Nowhere is
a print or bust of any of the royal family to be
seen. Not a scrap of printing narrating any
of their proceedings, beyond the government
journals, is to be met with. You may travel
across the kingdom, or, what is of more con-
sequence, traverse Paris in every direction,
without being made aware, by any thing you
see or hear, that a king exists i'n France. The
royalists detest him, because he has establish-
ed a revolutionary throne the republicans,
because he "has belied all his professions in
favour of freedom, and reared a military des-
potism on the foundation of the Barricades.
The French, in consequence of these cir-
cumstances, are in a very peculiar state. They
are discontented with every thing, and what i#
130
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
worse, they know not to what quarter to look
for relief. They are tired of the Citizen King,
whom they accuse of saving money, and pre-
paring for America; of having given them the
weight of a despotism without its security, and
the exhaustion of military preparation without
either its glory or its advantages. They (ex-
cluding the royalists) abhor the Bourbons,
whom they regard as priest-ridden, and super-
stitious, weak and feeble, men unfit to govern
the first nation in the world. They dread a
republic as likely to strip them of their sons
and their fortunes ; to induce an interminable
war with the European powers; deprive them
of their incomes, and possibly endanger the
national independence. They are discontented
with the present, fearful of the future, and find
their only consolation in reverting to the days
of Napoleon and the Grand Army, as a bril-
liant drama now lost for ever. They are in
the situation of the victim of passion, or the
slave of pleasure, worn out with enjoyment,
blase with satiety, who has no longer any en-
joyment in life, but incessantly revolts with
the prurient restlessness of premature age to
the orgies and the excesses of his youth.
What then, it may be asked, upholds the
reigning dynasty, if it is hated equally by both
the great parties who divide France, and can
number none but its own official dependents
among its supporters ? The answer is to be
found in the immense extent of the pecuniary
losses which the Revolution of July occasioned
to all men of any property in the country, and
the recollection of the Reign of Terror, which
is still vividly present to the minds of the ex-
isting generation.
On the English side of the channel, few are
aware of the enormous pecuniary losses with
which the triumph of democracy, in July,
1830, was attended. In Paris, all parties are
agreed that the depreciation of property of
every description in consequence of that event
was about a third: in other words, every man
found himself a third poorer after the over-
throw of Charles X. than he was before it.
Over the remainder of France the losses sus-
tained were nearly as great, in some places
still heavier. For the two years which suc-
ceeded the Barricades, trade and commerce
of every description was at a stand; the import
of goods declined a fourth, and one half of the
shopkeepers in Paris and all the great towns
became bankrupt. The distress among the
labouring classes, and especially those who
depended on the sale of articles of manufac-
tured industry or luxury, was unprecedented.
It is the recollection of this long period of na-'
tional agony which upholds the throne of Louis
Philippe. The National Guard of Paris, who
are in truth the ruling power in France, know
by bitter experience to what a revolution, even
of the most bloodless kind, leads decay of
business, decline of credit, stoppage of sales,
pressure of creditors. They, recollect the in-
numerable bankruptcies of 1830 and 1831, and
are resolved that their names shall not enter
the list. They know that the next convulsion
would establish a republic in unbridled sove-
reignty: they know the principles of these
apostles of democracy; they recollect their
actions ; the Reign of Terror, the massacres
in the prisons float before their eyes. They
have a vivid impression also of the external
consequences of such an event: they know
that their hot-headed youth would instantly
press forward to regain the frontier of the
Rhine ; they foresee an European war, a ces-
sation of the influx of foreign wealth into
Paris, and possibly a third visit by the Cos-
sacks to the Champs Elysees. These are the
considerations which maintain the allegiance
of the National Guard, and uphold the throne
of Louis Philippe, when there is hardly a
spark of real attachment to him in the whole
kingdom. He is supported, not because his
character is loved, his achievements admired,
or his principles venerated, but because he is
the last barrier between France and revolu-
tionary suffering, and because the people have
drunk too deep of that draught to tolerate a re-
petition of its bitterness.
Although, therefore, there is a large and en-
ergetic and most formidable party in France,
who are ardently devoted to revolutionary
principles, and long for a republic, as the
commencement of every imaginable felicity;
yet the body in whom power is at present
really vested, is essentially conservative. The
National Guard of Paris, composed of the
most reputable of the citizens of that great me-
tropolis, equipped at their own expense, and
receiving no pay from government, consists
of the very persons who have suffered most
severely by the late convulsions. They form
the ruling power in France; for to them more
than the garrison of the capital, the govern-
ment look for that support which is so neces-
sary amidst the furious factions by whom
they are assailed; and to their opinions the
people attach a degree of weight which does
not belong to any other body in France. The
Chamber of Peers are disregarded, the legis-
lative body despised ; but the National Guard
is the object of universal respect, because every
one feels that they possess the power of
making or unmaking kings. The crown does
not hesitate to act in opposition to a vote of
both Chambers ; but the disapprobation of a
majority of the National Guard is sure to com-
mand attention. In vain the Chamber of De-
puties refused a vote of supplies for the erec-
tion of detached forts round Paris; the ground
was nevertheless purchased, and the sappers
and miners, arnvd to the teeth, were busily
employed from four in the morning till twelve
at nignt, in their construction ; but when seve-
ral battalions of the National Guard, in de-
filing b^for the king, on the anniversary of
the Three Days, exclaimed, "A bas les forts
detaches," the works were suspended, and are
now going on only at Vincennes, and two
other points. Th it which was refused to the
collected wisdom of the Representatives of
France is conceded at once to the cries of
armed men : the ultimate decision is made by
the bayonet; and the boasted improvements
of modern civilization, terminate in the same
appeal to physical strength which character-
ize the days of Clovis.
This contempt into which the legislature
has fallen, is one of the great features of
FRANCE IN 1833.
131
France, since the Revolution of July ; but it is
one which is least known or understood on
the English side of the channel. The causes
which produced it had been long in operation,
but it was that event which brought them fully
and prominently into view. The supreme
power has now passed into other hand:;. It
was neither the Peers nor the Commons, but
the Populace in the streets, the heroes of the
Barricades, who seated Louis Philippe on the
throne. The same force, it is acknowledged,
possesses the power to dethrone htm; and
hence the National Guard of the capital, as
the organized concentration of this power, is
looked to with respect. The departments, it
is known, will hail with shouts whatever king,
or whatever form of government the armed
force in the capital choose to impose; the de-
puties, it is felt, will hasten to make their sub-
mission to the leaders who have got possession
of the treasury, the bank, the telegraph, and
the war office. Hence, the strife of faction
is no longer carried on by debates in the
Chambers, or efforts in the legislature. The
National Guard of Paris is the body to which
all attention is directed ; and if the departments
are considered, it is not in order to influence
their representatives, but to procure addresses
or petitions from members of their National
Guards, to forward the views of the great par-
ties at work in the metropolis. Such petitions
or addresses are daily to be seen in the public
papers, and are referred to with undisguised
satisfaction by the parties whose views they
support. No regard is paid but to the men who
have bayonets in their hands. Every thing
directly, or indirectly, is referred to physical
strength, and the dreams of modern equality
are fast degenerating into the lasting empire
of the sword.
The complete insignificance of the Cham-
bers, however, is to be referred to other and
more general causes than the successful re-
volt of the Barricades. That event only tore
aside the veil which concealed the weakness
of the legislature ; and openly proclaimed
what political wisdom had long feared, that
the elements of an authoritative and pa-
ramount legislature do not exist in France.
When the National Assembly destroyed the
nobility, the landed proprietors, the clergy, and
the incorporations of the country, they rendered
a respectable legislature impossible. It is in
vain to attempt to give authority or weight to
ordinary individuals not gifted with peculiar
talents, by merely electing them as members
of parliament. If they do not, from their
birth, descent, fortune, or estates, already pos-
sess it, their mere translation in the legislature
will never have this effect. The House of
Commons under the old English constitution
was so powerful, because it contained the re-
presentatives of all the great and lasting inte-
rests of the country, of its nobles, its landed
proprietors, its merchants, manufacturers,
burghers, tradesmen, and peasants. It com-
manded universal respect, because every man
felt that his own interests were wound up with
and defended by a portion of that body. But
this is not and cannot be the case in France
the classes are destroyed from whom the re-
presentatives of such varied interests must be
chosen : the interests in the nation do not ex^st
whose intermixture is essential to a weighty
legislature. Elected by persons possessed of
one uniform qualification the payment of di-
rect taxes to the amount of two hundred francs,
or eight pounds sterling a-year the deputies
are the representatives only of one class in
society, the small proprietors. The other in-
terests in the state either do not exist or are
not represented. The persons who are chosen
are seldom remarkable either for their fortune,
family, talent, or character. They are, to use
a homely expression, " neighbour like;" indi-
viduals of a bustling character, or ambitious
views, who have taken to politics as the best
and most lucrative profession they could
choose, as opening the door most easily to the
innumerable civil and military offices which
are the object of universal ambition in France.
Hence they are not looked up to with respect
even by their own department, who can never
get over the homeliness of their origin or
moderation of their fortune, and by the rest of
France are unknown or despised.
The chief complaint against the legislature
in France is, that it is swayed by corruption
and interested motives. That complaint has
greatly increased since the lowering of the free-
hold qualification from three hundred to two
hundred francs of direct taxes, in consequence
of the Revolution of July. This change has
opened the door to a lower and more corruptible
class of men ; numbers of whom got into the
legislature by making the most vehement pro-
fessions of liberal opinions to their constituents,
which they instantly forgot when the seductions
of office and emolument were displayed before
their eyes. The majority of the Chamber, it
is alleged, are gained by corruption ; and the
more that the qualification is lowered the worse
has this evil become. This is founded on the
principles of human nature, and is of univer-
sal application. The more that you descend
in society, the more will you find men accessi-
ble to base and selfish considerations, because
bribes are of greater value to those who pos-
sess little or nothing than those who possess
a great deal. Many of the higher ranks are
corrupt, but the power of resisting seduction
exists to a greater degree among them than
their inferiors. You often run the risk of in-
sult if you offer a man or woman of elevated
station a bribe, but seldom if it is insinuated
into the hand of their valet or lady's maid;
and when the ermine of the bench is unspotted,
so much can frequently not be said of the clerks
or servants of those elevated functionaries.
Where the .legislature is elected by persons
of that inferior description, the influence of
corruption will always be found to increase. It
is for the people of England to judge whether
the Reformed Parliament is or is not destined
to afford another illustration of the rule.
To Whatever cause it may be owing, the fact
is certain, and cannot be denied by any person
practically acquainted with France, that the
Chamber of Deputies has fallen into the most
complete contempt. Their debates have al-
most disappeared; they are hardly reported
by the public press ; seldom is any opposition
132
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
,to be seen amongst them. When Louis Phi-
lippe's crown was in jeopardy in June, 1832, it
w*as to the National Guard, and not to either
branch of the legislature, that all parties look-
ed with anxiety. A unanimous vote of the old
English Parliament would probably have had
great weight with an English body of insur-
gents, as it certainly disarmed the formidable
mutineers at the Nore ; but a unanimous vote
o^both Chambers at Paris would have had little
or no effect. A hearty cheer from three bat-
talions of National Guards would have been
worth a hundred votes of the Chambers ; and
an insurrection, which all the moral force of
Parliament could not subdue, fell before the
vigour of two regiments of National Guards
from the Banlieue.
It is owing apparently to this prodigious as-
cendency of the National Guard of Paris, that
the freedom of discussion in the public jour-
nals has survived all the other liberties of
France. These journals are, in truth, the
pleaders before the supreme tribunals which
govern the country, and they are nattered by
the fearlessness of the language which is em-
ployed before them. They are as tenacious
of the liberty of the press at Paris, in conse-
quence, as the Praetorian Guards or Janizaries
were of their peculiar and ruinous privileges.
The cries of the National Guard, the ruling
power in France, are prejudiced by the inces-
sant efforts of the journals on the different
sides, who have been labouring for months or
years to sway their opinions. Thus the ulti-
mate appeal in that country is to the editors
of newspapers, and the holders of bayonets,
perhaps the classes of all others who are most
unfit to be intrusted with the guidance of pub-
lic affairs ; and certainly those the least quali-
fied, in the end, to maintain their independence
against the seductions or offers of a powerful
executive.
The central government at Paris is omnipo-
tent in France ; but it does by no means follow
from that, that this central government is itself
placed on a stable foundation. The authority
of the seraglio is paramount over Turkey :
but within its precincts the most dreadful
contests are of perpetual recurrence. The
National Assembly, by concentrating all the
powers of government in the capital, necessa-
rily delivered over its inhabitants to an inter-
minable future of discord and strife. When
once it is discovered that the mainspring of
all authority and influence is to be found in
the government offices of Paris, the efforts of
the different parties who divide the state are
incessant to make themselves masters of the
talisman. This is to be done,- not by any
efforts in the departments, any speeches in the
legislature, or any measures for the public
good, but by incessant working at the armed
force of the capital. By labouring in the pub-
lic journals, in pamphlets, books, reviews, and
magazines, for a certain number of years, the
faction in opposition at length succeed in
making an impression on the holders of bay-
onets in Paris, or on the ardent and penniless
youth who frequent its coffee-houses; and
when once this is done, by a well organized
entente, the whole is concluded. The people
are roused; the National Guard hesitate, or
join the insurgents ; the troops of the line re-
fuse to act against their fellow-citizens; the
reigning dynasty is dethroned; a new flag is
hoisted at the Tuileries ; and the submissive
departments hasten to declare their allegiance
to the reigning power now in possession of the
treasury and the telegraph, and disposing of
some hundred thousand civil and military
offices throughout France.
No sooner is this great consummation
effected, than the fruits of the victory begin to
be enjoyed by the successful party. Offices,
honours, posts, and pensions, are showered
down on the leaders, the officers, and pioneers
in the great work of national regeneration.
The editors of the journals whose side has
proved victorious, instantly become ministers :
all their relations and connections, far beyond
any known or computable degree of consan-
guinity, are seated in lucrative or important
offices. Regiments of cavalry, prefetships,
sous-prefetships, procureurships, mayorships,
adjointships, offices in the customs, excise,
police, roads, bridges, church, universities,
schools, or colleges, descend upon them thick
as autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa. Mean-
while the vanished party are universally and
rigidly excluded from office, their whole rela-
tions and connections in every part of France
find themselves suddenly reduced to a state of
destitution, and their only resource is to begin
to work upon the opinions of the armed force
or restless population of the capital, in the
hope that, after the lapse of a certain number
of years, another revolution may be effected,
and the golden showers descend upon them-
selves.
In the Revolution of July, prepared as it
had been by the efforts of the liberal press for
fifteen years in France, and organized as it
was by the wealth of Lafitte, and a few of the
great bankers in Paris, this system was suc-
cessful. And accordingly, Thiers, Guizot, the
Duke de Broglio, and the whole coterie of the
doctrinaires, have risen at once, from being
editors of newspapers, or lecturers to students,
to the station of ministers of state, and dis-
pensers of several hundred thousand offices.
They are .now, in consequence, the objects of
universal obloquy and hatred with the remain-
der of the liberal party, who accuse them of
having sacrificed all their former opinions,
and embraced all the arbitrary tenets of the
royalist faction, whom they were instrumental
in subverting. Their conduct since they came
into office, and especially since the accession
of Casimir Perier's administration on the 13th
March, 1831, has been firm and moderate,
strongly inclined to conservative principles,
and, in consequence, odious to the last degree
to the anarchical faction by whose aid they
rose to greatness.
The great effort of this excluded faction was
made on the 5th and 6th of June, 1832, on
occasion of the funeral of Lamarque. In
England it was not generally known how for-
midable that insurrection was, and how
nearly it had subverted the newly erected
throne of the Barricades. Above eighty thou-
sand persons, including a considerable por-
FRANCE IN 1833.
tion of the National Guard from theFauxbourg
St. Antoine, and other manufacturing districts
of Paris, walked in regular military array,
keeping the step in that procession : no one
could see them without being astonished how
the government survived the crisis. In truth,
their existence hung by a thread; for several
hours a feather would have cast the balance
established a republican government, and
plunged Europe in an interminable war. Till
six o'clock in the evening the insurgents were
continually advancing; and, at that hour, they
had made themselves masters of about one-
half of Paris, including the whole district to
the eastward of a line drawn from the Port
St. Martin through the Hotel de Ville to the
Pantheon. At the first alarm the government
surrounded the Fauxbourg St. Antoine with
troops, and would have perished, but for the
fortunate cutting off of that great revolution-
ary quarter from the scene of active prepa-
rations. Though deprived of the expected
co-operation in that district, however, the in-
surgents bravely maintained the combat ; they
entrenched themselves in the neighbourhood
of the cloister of St. Merri, and among the
narrow streets of that densely peopled quarter,
maintained a doubtful struggle. The minis-
ters, in alarm, sent for the king, with intelli-
gence that his crown was at stake : above
sixty thousand men, with an immense train of
artillery, were brought to the spot ; but still
the issue seemed suspended. The National
Guard of the city, for the most part, hung
back; the cries of others were openly in
favour of the insurgents; if a single battalion,
either of the line or the National Guard, at
that crisis had openly joined the rebels, all
was lost. In this extremity a singular circum-
stance changed the fortune of the day, and
fixed his tottering crown on the head of Louis
Philippe. The little farmers round Paris, who
live by sending their milk and vegetables to
the capital, found their business suspended by
the contest which was raging in the centre
of the city, where the markets for their pro-
duce are held; their stalls and paniers were
seized by the rebels, and run up into barri-
cades. Enraged at this invasion of their pro-
perty and stoppage of their business, these
little dealers joined their respective banners,
and hastened with the National Guard of the
Banlieue to the scene of action : they were
plentifully supplied with wine and spirits on
the outside of the barrier; and before the ex-
citation had subsided, were hurried over the
barricades, and determined 1 the conflict. In its
last extremity the crown of Louis Philippe
was saved, neither by his boasted guards, nor
the civic force of the metropolis, but the anger
of a body of hucksters, gardeners, and milk-
dealers, roused by the suspension of their
humble occupations.
It is this peculiarity in the situation of the
French government which renders it neces-
sary to watch the state of parties in Paris
with such intense anxiety, and renders the
strife in its streets the signal for peace or war
all over the civilized world. The government
of France, despotic as it is over the remainder
of the country, is entirely at the mercy of the
133
metropolis. Ha^ff^to root in the provinces,
being based on n o lasa t*mte rests in the state,
it depends entirely onTffe^axmed force of the
capital a well organized emeute, the defection
of a single regiment of guards, a few seditious
cries from the National Guard, the sight of a
favourite banner, a fortunate allusion to heart-
stirring recollections, may at any moment con-
sign it to destruction. If the insurgents of the
city of Paris can make themselves masters of
the Hotel de Ville, France is more than half
conquered; if their forces are advanced to the
Marche des Innocens, the throne is in greater
danger than if the Rhine had been crossed by
two hundred thousand men : but if their flag
is hoisted on the Tuileries, the day is won, and
France, with its eighty-four departments and
thirty-two millions of inhabitants, is at the
disposal of the victorious faction. If the rebels
who sold their lives so dearly in the cloister
of St. Merri could have openly gained over to
their side one regiment, and many only waited
an example to join their colours, they would
speedily have been in possession of the trea-
sury, and the telegraph, and France was at
their feet. No man knew this peculiarity in
the political situation of the great nation better
than Napoleon. He was little disquieted by
the failure of the Russian campaign, till intelli-
gence of the conspiracy of Mallet reached his
ears; and that firmness which the loss of four
hundred thousand men could not shake, was
overturned by the news that the rebels in
Paris had imprisoned the minister of police,
and were within a hair's breadth of making
themselves masters of the telegraph.
It is not surprising that Paris should have
acquired this unbridled sovereignty over the
rest of the country, if the condition in which
the provinces have been left by the Revolution
is considered. Yon travel through one of the
departments not a gentleman's house or a
chateau is to be seen. As far as the eye can
reach, the country is covered with sheets of
grain, or slopes covered with vines or vege-
tables, raised by the peasants who inhabit the
villages, situated at the distance of a few miles
from each other. Does this immense expanse
belong to noblemen, gentlemen, or opulent
proprietors capable of taking the lead in any
common measures for the defence of the public
liberties ] On the contrary, it is partitioned
out among an immense body of little proprie-
tors, the great majority of whom are in a state
of extreme poverty, and who are chained to
the plough by the most imperious of all
laws that of absolute necessity. Morning,
noon, and night, they are to be seen labouring
in the fields, or returning weary and spent to
their humble homes. Is it possible from such
a class to expect any combined effort in favour
of the emancipation of the provinces from the
despotism of the capital 1 The thing is utter-
ly impossible : as well might you look for an
organized struggle for freedom among the
serfs of Russia or the ryots of Hindostan.
A certain intermixture of peasant proprie-
tors is essential to the well-being of society ;
and the want of such a class to a larger extent
in England, is one of the circumstances most
to be lamented in its social condition. But
M
134
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
there is a medium in all things. As much as
the total want of little landowners is a serious
evil, so much is the total want of any other
class to be deprecated. In the time of the
Duke de Gaeta, (1816,) that able statesman
calculated that there were four millions of
landed proprietors in France, and 14,000,000
of souls constituting their families, independent
of the wages of labour.* At present the num-
ber is computed at twenty-five millions, and
there are above ten millions of separate pro-
perties enrolled and rated for taxation in the
government book. Generally speaking, they
occupy the whole land in the country. Here
and there an old chateau, still held by a rem-
nant of the old noblesse, is to be seen; or
a modern villa, inhabited in summer by an
opulent banker from one of the great manu-
facturing towns. But their number is too in-
considerable, they are too far separated from
each other, to have any weight in the political
scale. France is, in fact, a country of peasants,
interspersed with a few great manufacturing
towns, and ruled by a luxurious and corrupted
capital.
Even the great manufacturing towns are
incapable of forming any counterpoise to tire
power of the capital. They are situated too
far from each other, they depend too complete-
ly on orders from Paris, to be capable of
opposing any resistance to its authority. If
Rouen, Marseilles, Lyons, or Bourdeaux were
to attempt the struggle, the central govern-
ment would quickly crush each singly, before
it could be aided by the other confederates.
They tried to resist, under the most favourable
circumstances, in 1793, when the Convention
were assailed by all the powers of Europe,
when two-thirds of France joined their league,
and the west was torn by the Vendean war,
and totally failed. Any repetition of the at-
tempt is out of the question.
The representative system, the boast of
modern civilization, has been found by ex-
perience to be incapable of affording any
remedy for this universal prostration of the
provinces. That system is admirably adapted
for a country which contains a gradation of
classes in society from the prince to the pea-
sant; but it must always fail where the in-
termediate classes are destroyed, and there
exist only the government and the peasantry.
Where this is the case, the latter body will
always be found incapable of resisting the in-
fluence of the central authority. Who, in
every age, from the signing of Magna Charta,
have taken the lead in the support of English
freedom? The barons, and great landed pro-
prietors, who possessed at once the resolution,
influence, and power of combination, which
are indispensable to such an attempt. Even
the Reform Bill, the last and greatest triumph
of democratic ambition, was forced through
the legislature, by the aid of a large and opu-
lent portion of the aristocracy. If the Revo-
lution of 1642 or 1688 had destroyed this in-
termediate body in the state, the representa-
tive system would speedily have fallen into
contempt. The humble, needy representatives
* Due de Gaeta, ii. 334.
of humble and needy constituents would in
the end have found themselves overshadowed
by the splendour of the court, the power t>f
the metropolis, or the force of the army. In
periods of agitation, when the public mind is
in a ferment, and the chief powers of the state
pulled in one direction, they would have been
irresistible; but in times of tranquillity, when
the voice of passion was silent, and that of
interest constantly heard, they would have
certainly given way. What is required in the
representatives of the people, is a permanent
resistance at all times to the various dangers
which threaten the public freedom; in periods
of democratic agitation, a firm resistance to
precipitate innovation; in times of pacific en-
joyment, a steady disregard of government
seduction. Human nature is weak, and we
must not expect from any body of men, how-
ever constituted, a steady adherence to duty
under such circumstances of varied trial and
difficulty ; but experience has proved, that it
may be expected, with some probability, among
an aristocratic body, because their interests
are permanent, and equally endangered by
each set of perils ; but that it is utterly chimeri-
cal to look for it among the representatives of
a body of peasants or little proprietors, im-
mingled with any considerable intermixture
of the higher classes of society. But the
Revolution has extinguished these classes in
France, and therefore it has not left the ele-
ments out of which to frame a constitutional
monarchy.
These circumstances explain a fact singular-
ly illustrative of the present state of parties in
France, and the power to whom the ultimate
appeal is made, viz. the eminent and illus-
trious persons by whom the daily press is
conducted. Every one knows by what class
in society the daily press is conducted in Eng-
land; it is in the hands of persons of great
ability, but in general of inferior grade in
society. If the leading political characters do
occasionally contribute an article, it is done
under the veil of secrecy, and is seldom ad-
mitted by the author, with whatever fame it
may have been attended. But in France the
case is quite the reverse. There the leading
political characters, the highest of the nobles,
the first men in the state, not only contribute
regularly to the daily or periodical press, but
avow and glory in their doing so. Not only
the leading literary characters, as Chateau-
briand, Guizot, Thiers, and others, regularly
write for the daily press ; but many of the
Peers of France conduct, or contribute to, the
public newspapers. The Gazette de France
and Quotidienne are supported by contribu-
tions from the royalist nobility; the Journal
des Debats is conducted by a Peer of France.
So far from being considered as a discredit, or
a thing to be concealed, these eminent men
pride themselves on the influence they thus
have on public opinion. The reason is ob-
vious ; they are the speakers before the real
National Assembly of France, the National
Guard and armed force of Paris. Considera-
tion and dignity will ever attend the persons
whose exertions directly lead to the possession
of political power. When, in the progress of
FRANCE IN 1833.
135
democratic changes, the Reformed Parliament
of England has sunk as low in public estima-
tion as the Chamber of Deputies in France,
the dukes and earls of England, if such a
class exist, will become the editors of news-
papers, and pride themselves on the occupa-
tion.
The taxation of France is extremely heavy,
and has been increased to a most extraordi-
nary degree since the Revolution of July. In
a table below,* will be found a return of the
budgets of the last ten years, lately published
in Paris by authority of government. From
this it appears that the expenditure of the last
year of Charles X., was 950,000,000 francs,
or about 39,000,000 sterling, while that of
the first year of Louis Philippe, was above
1,500,000,000 francs, or 60,000,000. Thus,
while the Three Glorious Days diminished
every man's property by a third, it added to the
national burdens by a half. Such are the
blessings of democratic ascendency.
The taxation of France has become an evil
of the very greatest magnitude, and with every
addition made to democratic power, it has be-
come worse. The property-tax is thirteen per
cent, on the annual value ; but by the arbitrary
and unfair way in which valuations are taken,
it frequently amounts to twenty, sometimes to
thirty per cent, on what is really received by
the proprietor. Professional persons, whose
income is fluctuating, pay an income-tax on a
graduated scale ; and the indirect taxes bring
in about 500,000,000 francs, or 20,000,000
sterling. The direct taxes amount to about
350,000,000 francs, or 14,000,000 sterling; a
much heavier burden than the income-tax was
on England, for the national income of Eng-
land is much greater than that of France. As
the result of their democratic efforts, the French
have fixed on themselves national burdens,
nearly three times as heavy as those which
were so much complained of in the time of
Louis XVI. ;f and greatly more oppressive
than those which the revolutionary war has
imposed on the English people.
Nor is this all. In addition to this enormous
increase of taxation, the Revolution of July has
occasioned the sale of a very large portion of
the royal domains. In every part of France
the crown lands and forests have been alienated
to a very great extent ; and the words which so
often meet a traveller's eyes, "Biens patrimo-
niaux de la Couronne a vendre," indicate too
clearly how universally the ruthless hand of
the spoiler has been laid on the remaining
public estates of the realm.
Notwithstanding this, however, the charac-
ter of the French government has been essen-
tially changed by the Revolution of the Barri-
cades. It possesses now a degree of power,
* Budgets of France for the last ten years.
1821
951 993,000 i
Yam's, (
>r 38, 100. 000
1825
916.098.000
do.
37,100,000
1826
942,518.000
do.
37.800000
1827
9*f),.V27,00..)
do.
38,730.000
1828
939.313,000
do.
37.330.000
1829
97f).703 000
do.
38,810.000
1830
981,510.000
do.
:>.9.-o.noo
1831
1,5 11. 500,000
do.
60,000.000
1832
1,100,50(5.000
do.
44,000.000
1833
1.120,394,000
do.
44,51)0.000
t They were then about 19,000,000 a year.
vigour, and/despotic authority, to which there
has been nothing comparable since the days
of Napoleon. The facility with which it over-
turned the great democratic revolt at the cloister
of St. Merri, in June, 1832, and at Lyons in No-
vember, 1831, both of which were greatly more
formidable than that of the Three Days, is a
sufficient proof of this assertion. The deeds
of despotism, the rigorous acts of government,
which are now in daily operation under the
citizen king, could never have been attempted
during the restoration. Charles X. declared
Paris in a state of siege, and issued an edict
against the liberty of the press ; and in a few
days, in consequence, he was precipitated from
his throne: Marshal Soult declared Paris in a
state of siege, and still more rigidly fettered
the press ; and the act of vigour confirmed in-
stead of weakening his sovereign's authority.
It is the daily complaint of the republican
press, that the acts of government are now
infinitely more rigorous than they have ever
been since the fall of Napoleon, and that the
nation under the restoration would never have
tolerated the vexatious restraints which are
now imposed upon its freedom. To give one
or two examples from the newspapers lying
before us.
"Yesterday evening, twenty-eight persons,
accused of seditious practices, were arrested
and sent to prison by the agents of the police.
Never did tyranny advance with such rapid
strides as it js doing at the present time."
Tribune, Aug. 20.
" Yesterday night, eighteen more persons,
accused of republican practices, were sent to
prison. How long will the citizens of Paris
permit a despotism to exist among them, to
which there has been nothing comparable since
the days of Napoleon?" Tribune, Aug. 21.
" More barracks are in course of being
rected in the neighbourhood of Graulle. If
matters go on much longer at this rate, Paris
will contain more soldiers than citizens."
Tribune, Aug. 23.
If Charles X. or Louis XVIII. had adventured
upon the extraordinary steps of sending state
prisoners by the hundred to the castle of mount
St. Michael in Normandy, or erecting an ad-
ditional prison of vast dimensions near Pere
la Chaise, to receive the overflowings of the
other jails in Paris, maintaining forty or fifty
thousand men constantly in garrison in the
capital, or placing a girdle of fortified bastiles
round its walls, the vehemence of the public
clamour would either have rendered necessary
the abandonment of the measures, or straight-
way precipitated them from the throne. All
parties now admit that France possessed as
much real freedom as was consistent with
public order under the Bourbons ; there is not
one which pretends that any of 'that liberty is
still enjoyed. They are completely at variance,
indeed, as to the necessity of its removal; the
republicans maintaining that an unnecessary
and odious despotism has been established;
the juste milieu, that a powerful government
is the only remaining barrier between France
and democratic anarchy, and, as such, is ab-
solutely indispensable for the preservation of
order; but all are agreed that the constitu-
136
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
tional freedom of the Restoration no longer fi
exists.
An attentive observation of the present state
of France is all that is requisite to show the
causes of these apparently anomalous facts ;
of the tempered rule, limited authority, and
constitutional sway of the Bourbons, in spite
of the absolute frame of government which
they received from Napoleon and the Revolu-
tion ; and the despotic rigour and irresistible
force of the present dynasty, notwithstanding
the democratic transports which seated it
upon the throne. Such a survey will, at the
same time, throw a great and important light
upon the final effect of the first Revolution on
the cause of freedom, and go far to vindicate
the government of that superintending wis-
dom, which, even in this world, compels vice
to work out its own deserved and memorable
punishment.
The practical and efficient control upon the
executive authority, in every state, is to be
found in the jealousy of the middling and
lower orders of the rule of the higher, who are
in possession of the reins of power. This is
the force which really coerces the governmenr
in every state; it is to be found in the tumults
of Constantinople, or the anarchy of Persia, as
well as in the constitutional opposition of the
British parliament. The representative system
only gives a regular and constitutional channel
to the restraining power, without which society
might degenerate into the anarchy of Poland,
or be disgraced by the strife of the Seraglio.
As long as this jealousy remains entire among
the people, and the fabric of government is
sufficiently strong to resist its attacks on any
of its necessary functions as long as it is a
drag on its movements, not the ruling power,
the operations of the executive are subjected
to a degree of restraint which constitutes a
limited monarchy, and diffuses general free-
dom. This is the natural and healthful state of
society ; where the people, disqualified by their
multitude and their habits from the task of
government, fall into their proper sphere of
observing and controlling its movements ; and
the aristocracy, disqualified by their limited
number from the power of effectually control-
ling the executive, if possessed by the people,
occupy their appropriate station in forming
part of the government, and supporting the
throne. The popular body is as unfit to go-
vern the state, as the aristocracy is to defend
its liberties against a democratic executive.
History has many instances to exhibit, of li-
berty existing for ages with a senate holding
the reins, and a populace checking its en-
croachments ; it has not one to show of the
same blessing being found under a democracy
in possession of the execuiive, with the de-
fence of public freedom intrusted to a displaced
aristocracy. From the Revolution of 1688 to
that of 1832, the annals of England presented
the perfect specimen of public freedom flou-
rishing under the first form of government; it
remains to be seen whether it will subsist for
any length of time under the second.
Experience, accordingly, has demonstrated
what theory had long asserted, that the over-
throw of the liberty of all free states has arisen
rom the usurpation of the executive authority
by the democracy ; and that, as long as the
reins of power are in the hands of the nobles,
the jealousy of the commons was an adequate
security to the cause of freedom. Rome long
maintained its liberties, notwithstanding the
contests of the patricians and plebeians, while
the authority of the senate was unimpaired;
but when the aristocracy, under Cato, Brutus,
and Pompey, were overturned by the demo-
cracy headed by Caesar, the tyranny of the
emperors rapidly succeeded. The most com-
plete despotism of modern times is to be found
in the government of Robespierre and Napo-
leon, both of whom rose to power on the de-
mocratic transports of a successful revolution.
Against the encroachments of their natural
and hereditary rulers, the sovereign and the
nobles, the people, in a constitutional mo-
narchy, are in general sufficiently on their
guard : and against their efforts, the increasing
power which they acquire from the augmenta-
tion of their wealth and intelligence in the
later stages of society, is a perfectly sufficient
security. But of the despotism of the rulers
of their own party, the usurpation of the
leaders whom they have themselves seated in
the chariot, they are never sufficiently jea-
lous, because they conceive that their own
power is deriving fresh accessions of strength
from every addition made to the chiefs who
have so long combated by their side; and this
delusion continues universally till it is too late
to shake their authority, and on the ruins of a
constitutional monarchy, an absolute despotism
has been constructed.
" Le leurre du despotisme qui commence est
toujours," says Guizot, "d'offrir aux hommes
les trompeurs avantages d'une honteuse ega-
lite."*
Had the first Revolution of France, like the
great rebellion of England, merely passed over
the state without uprooting all its institutions,
and destroying every branch of its aristocracy,
there can be little doubt that a constitutional
monarchy might have been established in
France, and possibly a hundred and forty
years of liberty and happiness formed, as in
Britain, the maturity of its national strength.
But the total destruction of all these classes in
the bloody convulsion, and the division of their
estates among an innumerable host of little
proprietors, rendered the formation of such a
monarchy impossible, because one of the ele-
ments was awanting which is indispensable to
its existence, and no counterpoise remained to
the power of the democracy at one time, or of
the executive at another. You might as well
make gunpowder without sulphur, as rear up
constitutional freedom without an hereditary
aristocracy to coerce the people and restrain
the throne. "A monarchy," ^ays Bacon,
"without an aristocracy, is ever an absolute
despotism, for a nobility attempers somewhat
the reverence for the line royal." "The Revo-
lution," says Napoleon, " left France absolutely
without an aristocracy; and this rendered the
formation of a mixed constitution impossible.
The government had no lever to rest upon to
* Guizot, Essais sur 1'histoire de France, 13.
FRANCE IN 1833.
137
direct the people ; it was compelled to navi-
gate in a single element. The French Revolu-
tion has attempted a problem as insoluble as
the direction of balloons!"*
When Napoleon seized the helm, therefore,
he had no alternative but to see revolutionary
anarchy continue in the state, or coerce the
people by a military despotism. He chose the
latter; and under his firm and resolute go-
vernment, France enjoyed a degree of prospe-
rity and happiness unknown since the fall of
the monarchy. Those who reproach him with
departing from the principles of the Revolution,
and rearing up a military throne by means of
a scaffolding of democratic construction, would
do well to show how he could otherwise have
discharged the first of duties in governments,
the giving protection and security to the peo-
ple ; how a mixed and tempered constitution
could be established, when the violence of the
people had totally destroyed their natural and
hereditary rulers ; and how the passions of a
populace, long excited by the uncontrolled riot
in power, were to be coerced- by a senate com-
posed of salaried dignitaries, destitute either
of property or importance, and a body of
ignoble deputies, hardly elevated, either in
station or acquirements, above the citizens to
whom they owed their election.
The overthrow of Napoleon's power by the
arms of Europe, for a time established a con-
stitutional throne in France, and gave its in-
habitants fifteen years of undeserved freedom
and happiness. But this freedom rested on an
unstable equilibrium; it had not struck its
roots into the substratum of society; it was
liable to be overturned by the first shock of
adverse fortune. As it was, however, it con-
tributed, in a most essential manner, to deceive
the world,-^-to veil the irreparable conse-
quences of the first convulsion, and make
mankind believe that it was possible, on the
basis of irreligion, robbery, and murder, to
rear up the fair fabric of regulated freedom.
We have to thank the Revolution of the Bar-
ricades for drawing aside the veil, for dis-
playing the consequences of national delink
quency on future ages ; and beneath the fair
colours of the whited sepulchre, exhibiting the
foul appearances of premature corruption and
decay.
What gave temporary freedom to France
under the Restoration was the prodigious ex-
haustion of the democratic spirit by the cala-
mities which attended the close of Napoleon's
reign ; the habits of submission to which his
iron government had accustomed the people ;
the terror produced by the double conquest of
Paris by the Allies, the insecure and obnoxious
tenure by which the Bourbons held their
authority, and the pacific character and per-
sonal weakness of that race of sovereigns
themselves.
1. The exhaustion of France by the calami-
ties which hurled Napoleon from the throne,
undoubtedly had a most powerful effect in
coercing for a time the fierce and turbulent
passions of the people. It is in the young that
the spirit of liberty and the impatience of
* Napoleon's Memoirs.
18
restraint is ever most fervent, and from their
energy that the firmest principles of freedom
and the greatest excesses of democracy have
equally arisen. But the younger generations
of France were, to a degree unprecedented in
modern times, mowed down by the revolu-
tionary wars. After seventeen years of more
than ordinary consumption of human life,
came the dreadful campaigns of 1812, 1813,
and 1814 ; in the first of which, between Spain
j and Russia, not less than 700,000 men perish-
j ed by the sword or sickness, while, in the two
I latter, the extraordinary levy of 1,200,000
i men was almost entirely destroyed. By these
I prodigious efforts, France was literally ex-
I hausted ; these copious bleedings reduced the
i body politic to a state of almost lethargic
| torpor; and, accordingly, neither the invasion
j and disasters of 1814, nor the return of Napo-
j leon in 1815, could rouse the mass of the
nation to any thing like a state of general
excitement. During the first years of the
Bourbons' reign, accordingly, they had to rule
over a people whose fierce passions had been
tamed by unprecedented misfortunes, and hot
blood drained off by a merciless sword ; and
it was not till the course of time, and the
ceaseless powers of population had in some
degree repaired the void, that that general im-
patience and restlessness began to be mani-
fested which arises from the difficulty of
finding employment, and is the common pre-
cursor of political changes.
2. The government of Napoleon, despotic
and unfettered in its original construction,
after the 18th Brumaire, had become, in pro-
cess of time, the most arbitrar} r and powerful
of any in Europe. Between the destruction
of all ancient, provincial, and corporate au-
thorities, by the successive revolutionary as-
semblies, and the complete centralization of
all the powers and influence of the state in the
government at Paris, which took place during
his government, there was not a vestige of
popular power left in France. The people
had been accustomed, for fourteen years, to
submit to the prefets, sous-prefets, mayors,
adjoints, and other authorities appointed by
the central government at Paris, and they had
in a great degree lost the recollection of the
intoxicating powers which they exercised
during the Revolution. The habit of submis-
sion to an absolute government, which enforced
its mandates by 800,000 soldiers, and had three
hundred thousand civil offices in its gift, had
in a great degree prepared the country for
slavery. To the direction of this immense and
strongly constructed machine the Bourbons
succeeded; and it w r ent on for a number of
years working of itself, without the people ge-
nerally being conscious of the helm having
passed from the firm and able grasp of Napo-
leon to the inexperienced and feeble hands of
his legitimate successors. Louis XVIIL, in-
| deed, gave a charter to his subjects : "Vive la
! Charte" became the cry of the supporters of
j his throne : deputies were chosen, who met at
I Paris ; a Chamber of Peers was established,
I and the forms of a constitutional monarchy
prevailed. But it is not by conferring the
| forms of a limited monarchy that its spirit can
M 2
138
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
be acquired, or the necessary checks either on
the throne or the populace established. France,
under the Bourbons, went through the forms
of a representative government, but she had
hardly a vestige of its spirit. Her people were
composed of a few hundred thousand ardent
citizens in the towns, who longed for demo-
cratic power and a republican government,
and thirty millions of peasants and workmen,
who were ready to submit to any government
established by the ruling population of the
capital. To coerce the former, or invigorate
the latter, no means remained ; and therefore
it is that a constitutional monarchy no longer
exists in France.
3. The consternation produced by the over-
throw of Napoleon's throne, and the double
occupation of Paris by the allied troops, went
far to uphold a government which had risen
up under their protection. While all the army
and ardent patriots of the capital insisted that
it had been surrendered by treachery in both
cases, and could never have been conquered
by force of arms, the astounding events pro-
duced a great and awful impression through-
out France, which is far from being as yet
eradicated. There are some calamities which
remain long in the recollection of mankind.
Volatile, susceptible of new impressions, and
inconsiderate as great part of the French un-
doubtedly are, the successive capture of their
capital in two campaigns sunk deep and
heavily in their minds. It wounded them in
the most sensitive part, the feeling of national
glory; and excited a painful doubt, heretofore
unknown, of the ability of the great nation to
resist a combined attack from the northern
powers. This feeling still subsists ; it may
have little influence with the young and war-
like youth of the capital, but it is strongly im-
pressed upon the more thoughtful and better
informed classes of society, and is in an espe-
cial manner prevalent among the National
Guard of the metropolis, to whom, even more
than the regular army, the nation looks for
the regulation of its movements. It was to the
prevalence of this feeling that the existence
of the Bourbon government, during the fifteen
years of the Restoration, was mainly owing
and so prevalent was it even on the eve of
their overthrow, that the revolt of the Barri
cades originated with, and was long supportec
solely by the very lowest classes ; and it was
not till the defection of the army, and the im-
becility of the government, had rendered i
more than doubtful whether a revolution was
not at hand, that they were joined by any
considerable accession of strength from the
educated or middling classes of society. The
same feeling of secret dread at the northern
powers still exists, notwithstanding the acces
sion of England to the league of revolutionarj
governments; and, whatever the republican
party may say to the contrary, nothing is mor
certain than that the cabinet of Louis Philipp
has been supported in all its principal mea
sures, and especially in the proclamation of a
state of siege by Marshal Soult, and the pacifi
system with the continental powers, by a grea
majority of all the persons of any wealth o
consideration in Paris, now in possession
hrough the National Guard, of a preponderat-
ng influence in the capital, and, consequently,
>ver all France.
The circumstances which have been men-
ioned, contributed strongly to establish a des-
otic government under the Bourbons, the
nly kind of regular authority which the con-
ulsions of the Revolution have rendered
practicable in France ; but to counteract
hese, and temper the rigour of the execu-
ive, there were other circumstances of an
equally important character, which gradually
vent on increasing in power, until they finally
>verbalanced the others, and overturned the
government of the Restoration.
1. The first of these circumstances was the
extreme national dissatisfaction which attend-
ed the way in which the Bourbons reascended
he throne. For a monarch of France to enter
ts capital, in the rear of a victorious invader,
s the most unlikely way that can be imagined
o gain the affections of its inhabitants ; but to
do this twice over, and regain the throne on
he second occasion,, in consequence of such
a thunderbolt as the battle of Waterloo, was a
misfortune which rendered the popularity of
the dynasty out of the question. The people
naturally connected together the two events ;
they associated the republican sway with the
tricolour flag and the conquest of Europe, and
the Bourbon dynasty with the disasters which
had preceded their restoration : forgetting, what
was the truth, that it was under the tricolour
that all these disasters had been incurred ; and
that the white flag was the olive branch
which saved them from calamities, which they
themselves had felt to be intolerable.
This general feeling of irritation at the un-
paralleled calamities in which Napoleon's
reign terminated, was naturally and skilfully
turned to account by the republican party.
They constantly associated together the Bour-
bon reign with the Russian bayonets; and
held out the sovereigns of the Restoration, ra-
ther as the viceroys of Wellington, or the
satraps of Alexander, than the monarchy
either by choice or inheritance of the Franks.
This prejudice, which had too much support
from the unfortunate coincidence of Napoleon's
disasters with the commencement of their
reign, soon spread deeply and universally
among the liberal part of the people ; and the
continuance of the Bourbon dynasty on the
throne came to be considered as the badge of
national servitude, which, on the first dawn
of returning liberation, should be removed.
2. The abolition of the national colours by
the Bourbon princes, and the studious endea-
vour made to obliterate the monuments and
recollection of Napoleon, was a puerile weak-
ness, from which the worst possible effects en-
sued to their government. To suppose that it
was possible to obliterate the remembrance
of his mighty achievements, and substitute
Henry IV. and Saint Louis for the glories of
the empire, was worse than childish, and, as
might have been expected, totally ineffectual.
In vain his portrait was prescribed, his letters
effaced from the edifices, his name hardly
mentioned, except with vituperation by the
ministerial organs ; the admiration for his
FRANCE IN 1833.
139
greatness only increased from the efforts made
to suppress it; and of his, as the images of
Brutus and Cassius at the funeral of Junia, it
might truly be said, "Viginti clarissimanun
familiarum imagines antelatse sunt, sed prce-
fulgebant Cassius atque Brutus, -et eo ipso
quod effigies eorum non videbantur"
The universal burst of public enthusiasm
when the tricolour flag was rehoisted on the
Tuileries, and the statue of the hero replaced
on the pillar in the Place Vendome, in July
last, and the innumerable pictures and statues
which have been exposed in every town and i
village of France since the prohibition was
removed, demonstrate how powerful and gene-
ral this feeling was, and expose the enormity
of the error which the Bourbons committed
in endeavouring to bury it in oblivion. The
tricolour flag was associated in the minds of
the whole young and active part of the French
population with the days of their glory ; the
white standard with the commencement of
their humiliation. To compel them to adopt j
the one and abandon the other, was an error
in policy of the most enormous kind. It was
to perpetuate the feeling of national disgrace ;
to impose upon the nation what they con-
sidered as the livery of servitude; to debar
them from openly giving vent to feelings
which swelled their hearts even to bursting*
The Revolution of July was less against the
edicts of Polignac than the Avhite standard on
the dome of the Tuileries ; and the Citizen
King owes his throne mainly to the tricolour
flag which waves above his head in that au-
gust abode.
3. The religious feelings of the exiled fam-
ily, natural and estimable in persons exposed
to the calamities which they had undergone,
was undoubtedly an inherent weakness in the
government of the Restoration, to which their
fall was in a great degree owing. From what-
ever cause it may have arisen, the fact is cer-
tain, that hatred at every species of religious
observance is the most profound and invete-
rate feeling which has survived the Revolution.
Not that the French are wholly an irreligious
people ; for in a numerous portion of the
community, especially in the rural districts,
the reverence for devotion is undiminished,
nay, is now visibly on the increase ; but that
the active and energetic class in towns, upon
whom the centralization of power produced
by the Revolution has exclusively conferred
political importance and the means of influ-
encing the public mind, are almost entirely of
that description. To these men, the sight of
priests in their sacerdotal habits crossing the
Place Carousal, and entering the royal apart-
ments, was absolute gall and wormwood. The
royalists had not discernment enough to see,
that they might encourage the substantial parts
of religion, without perpetually bringing be-
fore the public eye the obnoxious parts of its
external ceremonial : they fell at once under
the government of pious and estimable, but
weak and ignorant ecclesiastics, who were
totally incapable of steering the vessel of the
state through the shoals and quicksands with
which it was on all sides beset. Thence arose
an inherent weakness in the government of
the Restoration, which went far to counter-
balance the vast political authority which the
centralization of every species of influence in
the public offices in Paris had occasioned.
They received a machine of vast power, and
apparently irresistible strength, but the preju-
dice of the people at their political and reli-
gious principles was so strong that they could
not find the firm hands requisite to direct it.
4. The pacific and indolent character of the
Bourbon princes, and the timorous policy
which they were constrained to adopt, from the
disastrous circumstances which had preceded
their accession to the throne, prevented them
from reviving by personal qualities or brilliant
achievements, any of that popularity which
so many circumstances had contributed to
weaken. A thirst for military glory ever has
been the leading characteristic of the French
people. A pacific and popular king of France
is a contradiction in terms. The princes who
dwell most strongly in their recollection,
Henry IV., Louis XIV., and Napoleon, were
all distinguished either for their military
achievements, or the great conquests which
were effected in their reign. If a king of
France were to possess the virtue of Aristides,
the integrity of Cato, the humanity of Marcus
Aurelius, and the wisdom of Solomon, and re-
main constantly at peace, he would speedily
become unpopular.* The only regal activity
which, in their estimation, can in some degree
compensate the want of military distinction,
is a decided turn for the embellishment of
Paris. Napoleon's vast popularity, after his
external victories, was mainly owing to his
internal decorations; the Pillar of Austerlitz
and the Bourse, almost rivalled, in public
effect, the overthrow of Austria and the sub-
jugation of Prussia. But in neither of these
lines of activity was the family of the Restora-
tion calculated to acquire a distinction. They
remained, partly from inclination, partly from
necessity, almost constantly at peace ; they
languidly and slowly completed the great works
undertaken by Napoleon, but commenced little
new themselves ; they neither pushed their
armies across the Rhine, nor their new con-
structions into th^ obscurer parts of Paris.
The Parisians could neither recount to stran-
gers the victories they had won, nor point with
exultation to the edifices they had constructed.
They remained, in consequence, for the whole
fifteen years that they sat upon the throne,
tolerated and obeyed, but neither admired nor
loved; and the load of obloquy which attached
to them from the disasters which preceded
their accession, was lightened by no redeem-
ing achievements which followed their eleva-
tion.
From the combination of these singular and
opposing circumstances, there resulted a mixed
and tempered government in France, for the
brief period of the Restoration, without any
of the circumstances existing, by which that
blessing can be permanently secured, without
either a powerful aristocracy, or an efficient
and varied representation of the people. The
machine of government was that of an abso-
* Mr. Burke was perfectly right when he said, that the
restored monarch must be constantly in the saddle.
140
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
lute despotism, from the complete centraliza-
tion of every species of influence in the public
offices at Paris, and the total absence of any
authority in the provinces to counterbalance
their influence ; but the royal family had
neither the energy nor the qualities, nor the
fortune, requisite to wield its irresistible pow-
ers. Nothing can be more extraordinary, ac-
cordingly, than the state of France under
Louis XVIII. and Charles X. The government
were almost constantly declining in popularity;
the republican majority in the Chamber of
Deputies was, with some variations, almost
constantly increasing; at last it rose to such a
height as to choke up the wheels of adminis-
tration, and render a coup d'etat, or a resignation
of the throne, an unavoidable alternative. But
although the Family of the Bourbons was thus
declining in influence, the power of government
was undergoing no serious alteration ; no
efficient checks upon the executive, arising
from the combination of the lasting interests
of the state to coerce its encroachment, were
growing up ; the weakness of the throne arose
from dislike to the reigning family, not aver-
sion to the power with which they were in-
vested. They were at last overturned, like the
sultans in the Seraglio, or the Roman em-
perors on the Palatine Mount, by a vast and
well-concerted urban tumult, seconded to a
wish by the imbecility and weakness of the
ruling administration; and the vast machine
of a despotic government passed unimpaired
into the hands of their more energetic assail-
ants.
The Revolution of the Barricades at once
put an end to the temporizing system of the
Restoration, and drew aside the veil which, re-
tained by Bourbon weakness, had so long con-
cealed the stern features of despotic power.
The fatal succession, bequeathed to France,
by the sins and the atrocities of the first Revo-
lution, was then apparent; the bonds, the
inevitable and perpetual bonds of servitude,
were exposed to public gaze. In all the par-
ticulars which constituted the weakness of the
Restoration, and paralyzed the machine of des-
potic government, from hatred at the hands
which wielded it, the Citizen King had the
advantage. The white flag had been a per-
petual eye-sore to the ardent youth of France,
and the white flag was torn down : the tricolour
had been the object of their secret worship,
and the tricolour was displayed from every
tower in France: the recollection of defeat had
clouded the first days of the Restoration, and
the first days of the Revolution of July were
those of astounding triumph : the observance
of Sunday and religious forms had exasperated
an infidel metropolis, under a priest-ridden
dynasty; and their successors allowed them
to revel in every species of amusement and
license on the seventh day: the long con-
tinuance of peace had thrown into sullen dis-
content the ardent youth of the metropolis ;
and the establishment of a revolutionary throne
promised, sooner or later, to bring about a
desperate conflict with the legitimate monarchs
of Europe. The prospect of the convulsions
into which England was speedily thrown by
the contagion of this great example, contri-
buted not a little to fan this exulting flame ;
and in the passing of the Reform Bill, the
French democrats beheld a lasting triumph to
the Gallican party in this country, and an
achievement which consoled them for the
disasters of Trafalgar and Waterloo.
These combined circumstances completely
restored the vigour and efficiency of the cen-
tral authority at Paris over all France. In
possession of a frame of government the
strongest and most despotic of any in Europe,
supported by the ardent and influential part
of the population in the capital, fanned by the
gales of public passion and prejudice, they
speedily became irresistible. Every thing con-
tributed to increase the power of government.
The public hatred at hereditary succession,
which forced on the abolition of the House of
Peers and the appointment of their successors
by the crown, demolished the last barrier (and
it was but a feeble one) which the preceding
convulsions had left between the throne and
universal dominion. The public impatience
for war, which made them bear without mur-
muring an increase of the national expendi-
ture, on the accession of Louis Philippe, from
980,000,000 francs to 1,511,000,000 in one year,
enabled the government to raise the army from
180,000 to 420,000 men, and fan the military
spirit through all France, by the establishment
of National Guards. The Chamber of Depu-
ties, thrown into the shade by the tricolour
flag, and the reviews in the Place Carousel,
was soon forgotten ; its members, destitute, for
the most part, of property, consideration, or
weight in their respective departments, speedily
fell into contempt; the opposition was gained
over or withdrew in despair from a hopeless
cause; and a party which, under the white
flag, and the priest-ridden government, had
risen to a majority in the legislature, was soon
reduced to a miserable remnant of six or eight
members. The debates in the Chamber have
almost disappeared ; they are hardly ever re-
ported; all eyes are turned from the legisla-
ture to the war-office; from the declamations
of disappointed patriots, to the acclamations
of brilliant battalions ; from a thought on the
extinction of public freedom, to the exhilarating
prospect of foreign conquest.
It is this combination of a despotic executive
in possession of all the influence in the state,
with the infusion of popularity into the sys-
tem of government, which has enabled Louis
Philippe, aided by his own great ability, not-
withstanding his extreme personal unpopularity,
to carry through obnoxious and tyrannical
measures never contemplated by Napoleon in
the zenith of his power. One of the most re-
markable of these, is the encircling Paris with
fortified posts, or, as the republicans call it, the
project " d'embastiller Paris." To those who
recollect the transports "of enthusiasm with
which the storming of the Bastile was re-
ceived over all France in 1789, it must appear
the most extraordinary of all things, that
a revolutionary government should venture
upon the step of constructing TEN BASTILES,
many larger, all stronger, than the old one,
around Paris, in such situation, as absolutely
to command the metropolis, by enabling the
FRANCE IN 1833.
141
government, at pleasure, to intercept its sup-
plies of provisions ; yet this has been done,
and is now doing. Vincennes, situated a
league beyond the Barricade de Trone, is
undergoing a thorough repair; and its cannon,
placed within a regular fortification, will com-
pletely command the great road leading into
the Fauxbourg St. Antoine. Other, and simi-
lar fortresses, are in the course of construction,
in a circle round Paris, at the distance of about
two miles from each other, and a mile, or a
mile and a half beyond the external barrier.
When completed, they will at once give the
government the command of the rebellious
capital; not a pound of provisions can enter a
circle inhabited by nearly a million of souls,
but under the guns of these formidable for-
tresses. The plans were completed, the ground
was all purchased, the works were going for-
ward, when they were interrupted by the cries
of part of the National Guard, in defiling be-
fore the king on the 29th July last. The
Chamber of Deputies had in vain refused, in
accordance with the wishes of the capital, a
grant of money for the purpose; the crown
was going on of its own authority, and from
its own funds. And though the undertaking
has been suspended for a time from the cause
above mentioned, excepting at Vincennes,
which is rapidly advancing, government openly
announce their intention of resuming it next
spring, when a majority of the Chamber will
be won over to give it their support.*
The most singular circumstance connected
with the present political state of France, is
the co-existence of a despotic military govern-
ment, with a wild and intemperate republican
press in the capital. This may appear in-
credible, but nevertheless it is certain that it
exists ; and it constitutes an element by no
means to be overlooked, in considering its
future prospects, because it may, in a moment,
hurl the present dynasty from the throne, and
elevate a new family, or different executive, to
the possession of its despotic powers. To give
only a single example of the length to which
this extravagance is carried, we select by mere
chance, an article which recently appeared in
the Tribune.
"Those who place themselves in the current
of political change shouldconsiderwell whither
it will lead them, before they embark on its
waves. The authors of the revolt on the 9th
Thermidor,f were far from intending to extin-
guish public freedom ; but, nevertheless, the
reaction against liberty has been incessant
since the fall of Robespierre, with the excep-
tion perhaps of the Three Days of July.
"It is in vain to say that it was Napoleon,
or the Restoration, or Louis Philippe, who ex-
tinguished the freedom of France: it was the
overthrow of Robespierre which was the fatal
stroke. We have never since known what
liberty was, we have lived only under a suc-
cession of tyrants.
"Impressed with these ideas, a band of pa-
triots have commenced the republication of the
* It has since been completed by the aid of the war
party, heuded by M. Thiers.
f The day when Robespierre was overthrown.
speeches of Robespierre, St. Just, and Marat,
which will be rendered accessible to the very
humblest of the people, by the moderate price
of a sous a number, at which it is to be sold.
We earnestly recommend the works of these
immortal patriots to our readers. They will
find every thing that philosophy could discover,
or learning reveal, or humanity desire, or elo-
quence enforce, in their incomparable produc-
tions." Tribune, Aug. 20.
Again, in the next number we read as fol-
lows :
"The soi-disant patriots of the day are in a
total mistake when they pretend that it is an
erroneous system of taxation which is the root
of the public discontents. This is no doubt
an evil, but it is nothing compared to that
which flows from a defective system of social
organization.
" The tyranny of the rich over the poor is
the real plague which infests society ; the eter-
nal source of oppression, in comparison of
which all others are but as dust in the balance.
What have we gained by the Revolution ? The
substitution of the Chausee d'Antin for the
Fauxbourg St. Germain. An aristocracy of
bankers for one of nobles. What have the
people gained by this change? Are they bet-
ter fed, or clothed, or lodged, than before?
What is it to them that their oppressors are
no longer counts or dukes ? Tyranny can
come from the bureau as well as the palace:
there will be no real regeneration to France
till a more equal distribution of PROPERTY
strikes at the root of all the calamities of
mankind.
"The principles of pure and unmixed de-
mocracy are those of absolute wisdom, of
unwearied philanthropy, of universal happi-
ness. When the rule of the people is com-
pletely established, the reign of justice, free-
dom, equality, and happiness will commence;
all the evils of humanity will disappear before
the awakened energies of mankind." Tribuw,
Aug. 21.
When principles such as these, clothed in
insinuating language, and enforced with no
small share of ability, are daily poured forth
from the Parisian press, and read by admiring
multitudes among its ardent and impassioned
population, we are led to examine how society
can exist with such doctrines familiarly spread
among the lower orders. But the phenomenon
becomes still more extraordinary, when it is
perceived that these anarchical doctrines are
in close juxtaposition to the most complete
and rigorous despotism to which the people
under successive governments submit without
any practical attempt at resistance ; that the
citizens who indulge in these absurd specu-
lations are content to wait for hours at the
police office, before they can go ten leagues
from the capital, and go quietly to jail with
the first gens d'armes who meet them on the
road without their passports.
The truth is, that the French, during all the
phases of the Revolution, as Napoleon re-
marked, not only never tasted one hour of real
freedom, but never formed a conception of
what it was. The efforts of Ihe factions who
for forty years have torn its bosom, have all
142
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
been directed to one object, the acquisition of
political power by themselves, without bestowing
a thought on the far more important matter
of how that power is to be restrained towards
others. The consequence is, that the exertions
of the party in opposition are all directed to
one object, the displacing of their adversaries
from their places in administration, or over-
turning the family on the throne, without the
slightest intention of remodelling the frame of
government, so as to impose any effectual
check on the executive. If the republican
opposition were to succeed to the helm, they
would probably push through such a change
in the composition of the electoral colleges, as
might secure for their party the predominance
in the legislature, but they would make as few
concessions to public freedom as was done by
their predecessors Robespierre and St. Just.
The police would still fetter the actions of
every man in France; the impot foncicre would
still carry off from thirteen to twenty per cent.
of every income from property ; the govern-
ment officers at Paris would still dispose of
every office in the kingdom, from the minister
at the head of the army, to the scavenger at
the tail of the cleaning department.
The party in opposition, who long for the
enjoyment of power and offices, has been im-
mensely weakened by the result of the Three
Days. The royalists, indeed, are everywhere
excluded from the slightest participation in the
government; but so are they from any in-
fluence in the legislature; and a miserable
minority of twenty or thirty members finds it
quite in vain to attempt any struggle in par-
liament. The great body of the popular party
have got into office in consequence of their
triumph : it may safely be affirmed that not
less than 300,000 liberals are now the employes
in civil government alone. Thus the patriots
of France are now very generally and com-
fortably ensconced in official situations ; and
it is utterly impossible, in consequence, to
rouse them to any hostility to the ruling power.
In this way the republican party are, to a great
extent, won over to the government, and they
can afford to allow the disappointed remnant
of their faction to vent their discontent in de-
mocratic publications. This complete division
of the liberal party, and secure anchoring of
four-fifths of its members by the strong tenure
of official emolument, which has followed the
Revolution of July, is the true secret of the
present strength of government; for the dis-
contented royalists in the provinces, though
numerous and brave, will never be able to
throw off the central authority of the capital.
It is not to be imagined, however, from all
this, that the government of Louis Philippe is
established on a solid foundation. No govern-
ment can be so, which is founded not on the
great and lasting interests of the state, but its
fleeting passions which depends not on the
property of the country, but the mob of the
metropolis. The throne of the Barricades
rests entirely on the armed force of the capital.
"A breath may unmake it, as a breath has
made." A well-concerted urban revolt, the
defection of a single regiment, supported by a
majority of the National Guards, may any day
seat a consul, a general, or Henry V. on the
throne. It has lost popularity immensely with
the movement party, out of office, comprehend-
ing all the ardent and desperate characters, by
persisting in an anti-republican policy, and
remaining steadily at peace. Its incessant
and rigorous prosecution of the press, though
inadequate hitherto to extirpate that last re-
main of popular sovereignty, has exposed it to
the powerful assaults of that mighty engine.
The sovereign on the throne, and the whole
royal family, are neglected or disliked, not-
withstanding the great abilities of its head and
estimable qualities of many of its members.
A vigorous and successful foreign war would
at once restore its popularity, and utterly
silence all the clamour about the loss of free-
dom ; but without the aid of that powerful
stimulant, it is impossible to say how soon the
present dynasty may be overturned, and a
fresh race or government be thrown up by an-
other eruption of the revolutionary volcano.
But come what race or form of sovereignty
there may, the government of Paris will equally
remain a perfect and uncontrolled despotism
over France. This is the great and final re-
sult of the first Revolution, which should ever
be kept steadily in view by the adjoining states.
Let Henry V. or the Duke of Orleans, Marshal
Soult, or Odillon Barrot, succeed to supreme
power, the result will be the same. The bones
of Old France have been broken by the vast
rolling-stone which has passed over the state ;
New France has not the elements within it to
frame a constituuonal throne. The people
must remain slaves to the central government,
because they have destroyed the superior classes
who might shield them from its oppression.
Asiatic has succeeded to European civilization,
and political power is no longer to be found
independent of regal appointment. All supe-
riority depends upon the possession of office ;
the distinctions of hereditary rank, the descent
of considerable property, have alike disap-
peared ; over a nation of ryots, who earn a
scanty subsistence by the sweat of their brow,
is placed a horde of Egyptian taskmasters,
who wring from them the fruits of their toil,
and a band of Prcetorian guards who dispose
at pleasure of their government.
In one particular, little understood on the
English side of the Channel, the similarity of
the result of French regeneration to the in-
stitutions of Oriental despotism, is most strik-
ing. The weight of direct taxation is at once
the mark and the result of despotic govern-
ment. It is remarked by Gibbon, that the great
test of the practical power of government is
to be found in the extent to which it can carry
the direct payments by the people to the treasury;
and that whenever the majority of imposts are
indirect, it is a proof that it is compelled to
consult the inclinations and feelings of its sub-
jects. He adduces as an illustration of this
profound yet obvious remark, (all profound
remarks, when once made, appear obvious,)
the excessive weight of direct taxation in the
latter period of the Roman empire. In Gaul,
in the time of Constantine, the capitation-tax
had risen to the enormous sum of nine pounds
sterling for every freeman; an impost so ex-
FRANCE IN 1833.
143
cessive, that among the poorer citizens it could
be made up only by several being allowed to
club together to form one head. Sismondi, in
like manner, observes, that the exorbitant
weight of direct taxes was the great cause of
the progressive depopulation of the Roman
empire. At this moment the burden of the
fixed payment exacted from a Turkish pashal ic
which is never allowed to diminish, and con-
sequently with the decline of the inhabitants
becomes intolerable, is the great cause of the
rapid depopulation of the Ottoman empire.
In Hindostan and China, the proportion of the
fruits of the soil which goes directly to the
government varies from 30 to 50 per cent.
Akin to this, the last and well-known result
of despotic oppression, is the enormous weight
of the direct taxes in France. The tax on
proprietors is fixed at present at 13 per cent. ;
but this, oppressive as it would appear in this
country, where the weight of democratic des-
potism is only beginning to be felt, is nothing
to the real burden which falls on the unhappy
proprietors. By the valuation or cadastre made
by the government surveyor, the real weight
of the burden is liable to indefinite increase,
and in general brings it up to 20, sometimes
30 per cent.* The valuation is taken, not
from the actual receipt of the owner, but what
it is estimated his property is worth ; and as
the smiles of government are directed towards
these official gentlemen nearly in proportion
to the amount to which they can raise the
valuation of their district, the injustice com-
mitted in this way is most extreme. We know
many properties on the Garonne and Rhone,
where, from the exorbitance of the valuation,
the tax comes to 35 and 40 per cent, on the
produce. Its weight may be judged of by the
fact, that this direct impost produces yearly
350,000,000 francs, or about 14,000,000/. ster-
ling, which almost entirely comes from the
land-owners.f Now the income-tax of Great
Britain during the war produced just that sum;
and most certainly the income from all source*
of the British empire at that period was double
the amount of that now enjoyed by the landed
proprietors of France.t The result of this is,
that the French land-owners pay, on the whole,
20 per cent, on the annual worth of their in-
comes. In forty years from the commencement
of their revolutionary troubles, the French
have got nearly to the standard fixed on the
ryots of Hindostan, in the lightest taxed dis-
tricts of India ; and more than tripled the taille,
which was held forth as an insupportable
burden at their commencement! Let them go
on as they are doing, and in half a century
they will again find the enormous capitation-
* From the infinite subdivision of land in France, and
the continual change of hands through which it passes,
it in fact belonirs in property to no one individual, but to
the Public Treasury, from the excessive weight of direct
taxation and the duties on alienations of any kind.
Donnadieu, 2f>fi.
f-Piipin estimates the income of proprietors in France
at !/'% 000,00.) fr-uics, or fi.ViiK) 0(W., so that if 350.000,000
francs, or 1 1,000, OOO/. sterling, is taken from them in
the form of direct taxes, the burden is as 14 to;6 on their
whole income, or 21 per cent. See DUPIN, Force Com-
merciate de France, ii. 20(i.
JThe income of official persona is taken at a different
rate, varying from fij to S per cent.; but it forms a trifling
part of the direct taxation.
tax of Constnntine fixed about their necks.
Thus the result of human folly and iniquity is
the same in all ages and countries ; and the
identical consequences which flowed fifteen
hundred years ago, remotely but surely, from
the madness of Gracchus and the democrats
of Rome, in destroying the Roman aristocracy,
is evidently approaching, though with infinite-
ly swifter steps from the corresponding mad-
ness of the French republicans in extirpating
the higher classes of their monarchy.
We have often asked the proprietors in dif-
ferent parts of France, why they did not en-
deavour to diminish or equalize this enormous
burden, which, in the wine provinces especial-
ly, is felt as so oppressive] They universally
answered, that the thing was impossible; that
they had memorialized Napoleon and Louis
XVIII., the Chamber of Deputies and Peers,
Villele and the Due de Richelieu, but all to no
purpose. The weight of the impot fonciere,
the injustice of the cadastre, remains unchanged
and unchangeable. Four or five millions of
little proprietors, scattered over the vast ex-
panse of France, a majority of whom have not
51. yearly from their land, can effect nothing
against the despotic central government of
Paris. They themselves say, that the direct
burdens on the land are becoming so excessive,
that the sovereign is, as in Oriental dynasties,
the real proprietor, and they are but tenants who
labour for his benefit more than their own.
Herein may be discerned the hand of Provi-
dence> causing the sins of men to work out
their own punishment. If the French people
had not committed the frightful injustice of
confiscating the property of their nobles and
clergy, they would now have possessed within
themselves a vast body of influential proprie-
tors, capable, as in England, under the old
Constitution, either in the Upper or Lower
House, of preventing or arresting the oppres-
sion of the central government, and the enor-
mous burden of 20 per cent, directly laid on
land would never have been permitted. But
proceeding, as they have done, by destroying
all the intermediate classes in the stufe, and
leaving only government employes and peasant
proprietors, they have cut away the shield
which would have protected the poor from the
vexation of the central authority, and left them-
selves and their children for ever exposed to
its oppression. They imagined that by laying
hold of the land of others, they would step into
the comforts and opulence of separate proper-
ty; but the wages of iniquity seldom prosper
in the end, either in nations or individuals.
They have fallen in consequence under an
oppressive taxation, which has more than
counterbalanced all the advantages of the spoil
they have acquired ; the sovereign has grown
up into the real land-owner, and the cultivators,
instead of becoming the peasants of Sw't/er-
land, have degenerated into the ryots of Hin-
dostan.
The effects of the Revolution of July on the
RELIGION of France, is precisely the same as
on its political situation. It has drawn :is:de
the thin veil which concealed the effects of
the irreligious spirit of the first convulsion,
and displayed in its native deformity the con-
144
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
sequence of unmooring the human mind from
the secure haven of faith and virtue.
That the first Revolution was essentially
irreligious in its spirit, that it destroyed not
only the teachers and the property, but the
very name of Christianity, is universally
known. But in this, as in every other respect,
the Restoration drew a veil over its ultimate
and final consequences. The exiled family
returned to the palaces of their fathers, with a
profound sense of religion, rendered only the
more indelible from the disasters which had
preceded their restoration. By the combined
effect of their authority and influence, a gloss
was thrown over the infidel consequences of
the first Revolution; the priests were reinstated
in the smiles of court favour; the Tuileries
again resounded with the strains of devotion;
religious observances were tolerably attended
to; the churches were filled, if not with the
faithful, at least with the ambitious, and pro-
motion, dependent in some degree on attention
to the ceremonial of the Catholic faith, drew
multitudes to the standard of St. Louis. Marshal
Soult was to be seen every Sunday parading
to church, preceded by an enormous breviary ;
he cared not whether the road to power lay
by the chapel of the Virgin, or the altar of the
Goddess of reason. Sunday, especially in the
last ten years, was well observed in the great
towns. Travellers perceived no material dif-
ference between the appearance of London
and Paris during divine service. Literature,
encouraged by this transient glance of sun-
shine, resumed its place by the side of de-
votion ; the mighty genius of Chateaubriand
lent its aid to the Holy Alliance, and poured
over the principles of natural and revealed
religion a flood of resplendent light; Michaux
traced the history of the Crusaders, and the
efforts for the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre,
with an antiquary's knowledge and a poet's
fire; Barante revived in the Annals of Bur-
gundian princes, the old and venerable feel-
ings of feudal devotion; while Guizot, as yet
untouched by the seductions of power, traced
with admirable ability, to admiring multitudes
in the French metropolis, the historical bless-
ings of religious institutions. Almost all ob-
servers, misled by these appearances, flattered
themselves, that the period of the reaction of
the human mind against the principles of ir-
religion had arrived; that the reign of infideli-
ty was drawing to its close; and that the
French Revolution, nursed amidst the mazes
of sophistry and skepticism, was destined to
find refuge at last in the eternal truths of
religion.
But this sudden extinction of evil and resur-
rection of good is not the order of nature.
Infidelity, nursed for half a century, is not ex-
tinguished in a few years. The robbery of
one-third of the national property from the
service of the church is not the way to secure
the fruits of virtue : a hiatus of ten years in
the religious education of the people, snapped
asunder a chain which had descended un-
broken from the apostolic ages. These deplo-
rable events were secretly but securely work-
ing out their natural consequences, through all
the period of the Restoration. The general
and profound hatred in towns at the very sight
even of an ecclesiastic, was a certain indica-
tion of the great extent to which the deadly
weeds of infidelity had spread. The Revolu-
tion of July at once tore aside the veil, and
exposed to view the extraordinary spectacle
of a nation in which the classes who concen-
trate almost the whole political influence of
the state, are almost wholly of an irreligious
character. This is to be ascribed chiefly to
the long chasm in religious instruction which
took place from 1791 to 1800, and the entire
assumption of political power under Napo-
leon, by a class who were entire strangers to
any kind of devotion. Such a chasm cannot
readily be supplied ; ages must elapse before
its effects are obliterated. " Natura tamen,"
says Tacitus, " infirmitatis humanae tardiora
sunt remedia quam mala, et ut corpora lente
augescunt cito extinguuntur, sic ingenia studia-
que oppresseris facilius quam revocaveris."
But to whatever cause it is owing, nothing
can be more certain, than that infidelity again
reigns the lord of the ascendant in Paris. It
is impossible to be a week in the metropolis
without being sensible of this. It is computed
that from sixty to eighty thousand individuals,
chiefly old women, or persons of the poorest
classes, believe in the Christian religion. The
remainder, amounting to about eight hundred
thousand, make no pretension to such a faith.
They do not deny it, or say or think anything
about it ; they pass it by as a doubtful relic of
the olden time, now entirely gone by.* It is
impossible by any external appearances to
distinguish Sunday from Saturday, excepting
that every species of amusement and dissipation
goes on with more spirit on that day that any
other. We are no advocates for the over-rigid
or Judaical observance of the day of rest.
Perhaps some Protestant nations have gone
too far in converting the Christian Sunday
into the Jewish Sabbath, and preventing on it
those innocent recreations which might divert
the giddy multitude from hidden debauchery.
But without standing up for any rigid or puri-
tanical ideas, it may safely be affirmed that the
total neglect, of Sunday by nine-tenths of the
people, indicates a fixed disregard of religion
in any state professing a belief in Christianity.
In Paris the shops are all open, the carts all
going, the workmen all employed on the early
part of Sunday ; and although a part of them
are closed after two o'clock in the afternoon, it
is not with the slightest intention of joining in
any, even the smallest religious duty, that this
is done. It is "pour s'amuser," to forget the
fatigues of the week in the excitement with
which it terminates, that the change takes
place. At two o'clock, all who can disengage
themselves from their daily toil, rush away in
crowds to drink of the intoxicating cup of
pleasure. Then the omnibusses roll with
ceaseless din in every direction out of the
crowded capital, carrying the delighted citi-
zens to St. Cloud, St. Germains, or Versailles,
the Ginguettes of Belleville, or the gardens of
Vincennes; then the Boulevards teem with
volatile and happy crowds, delighted by the
* In this, as in many other respects, a most gratifying
change has, since 1833, begun in France.
FRANCE IN 1833.
145
enjoyment of seeing and being seen ; then the
gardens of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg,
the Jardin des Plantes, and the Champs Ely-
sees, are enlivened with the young, the gay, and
the handsome, of both sexes, both rich and
poor; then the splendid drive to the triumphal
arch of Neuille, is filled with the comparative-
ly few equipages which the two Revolutions
have left to the impoverished hotels of the
capital. While these scenes of gayety and
amusement are going on, the priests in each
of the principal churches are devoutly per-
forming mass before a few hundred' old wo-
men, tottering ecclesiastics, or young children,
and ten or fifteen Protestant churches are as-
sembling as many thousands to the duties of
the reformed faith. Such is a Parisian Sun-
day; and such the respect for a divine ordi-
nance, which remains in what they ambi-
tiously call the metropolis of European civili-
zation.
As evening draws on, the total disregard of
religious observance is, if possible, still more
conspicuous. Never is the opera filled with
such enthusiastic crowds as on Sunday even-
ing; never are the theatres of the Port St.
Martin, the Boulevards, the Opera Comique,
the Vaudeville and the Variet.es, so full as on
that occasion ; never are the balls beyond the
barriers so crowded ; never is Tivoli so en-
livening, or the open air concerts in the
Champs Elysees thronged by so many thou-
sands. On Sunday evening in Paris there
seems to be but one wish, one feeling, one
desire, and that is, to amuse themselves ; and
by incessantly labouring at that one object,
they certainly succeed in it to an extent that
could hardly be credited in colder and more
austere latitudes.
The condition of the clergy over France is,
generally speaking, depressed and indigent in
the extreme. The Constituent Assembly, who
decreed the annexation of the whole property
of the church to the state, and declared " that
they intrusted the due maintenance of reli-
gion and the succour of the poor to the honour
of the great nation," redeemed their pledge, by
giving most of the incumbents of the rural
parishes from 48/. to 60Z. a year. Bishops
have 6000 francs, or 240/., yearly. The arch-
bishop of Paris alone has 600/. In some of
the town parishes, the incumbents, from sub-
sequent endowments or adventitious sources,
have from 200Z. to 300Z. per annum ; but, ge-
nerally speaking, their income, in the richest
parishes, varies from 80/. a year to 120?.; in
the poorest, it is only from 40/. to 501. It may
safely be affirmed, that the clergy of France,
taken as a body, are poorer than the school-
masters of England and Scotland.
The effect of this is seen in the most striking
manner in the appearance of the rural land-
scape of France. You generally, in the vil-
lages, see a parish church, the bequest to the
nation of the pious care of their forefathers ;
but great numbers of these are in a ruinous
or tottering condition. There is an evident
want of any funds to keep them up. The
most trifling repairs of a church, as every
thing else in France, must be executed by the
government; and the ministers of Louis
19
Philippe seem to think that this is one of the
articles upon which economy can best be
practised. But a parsonage-house, or any
sort of separate residence for the cure, is
never to be seen. He is, in general, boarded
in the houses of some farmer or small pro-
prietor; and in habits, society, education,
manners, and rank of life, is in no respect
above the peasantry by whom he is sur-
rounded.
It is not to be imagined from this, however,
that the country clergy are either ignorant or
inattentive to their sacred duties; on the con-
trary, they are most assiduous in discharging
them, and are, in general, justly endeared to
their flocks, not only by an irreproachable life,
but the most constant and winning attentions.
It would be unjust to expect in them the
high education, gentlemanlike manners, or
enlightened views of the English clergy; or
the more discursive but useful information
which is to be met with in the manses of the
Presbyterian ministers in Scotland. We must
not expect to see either Hebers, or Copple-
stones, or Bucklands, or Blairs, or Robertsons,
or Chalmerses, in the modern church of France.
The race of Bossuet and Fenelon, of Massil-
lon and Bourdaloue, of Flechier and Saurin,
of Pascal and Malebranche, is extinct. The
church is cast down into an inferior class in
society. No one would make his son an ec-
clesiastic, who could obtain for him a situation
in a grocer's sho.p. But, in the present state
of the country, it is perhaps as well that this
is the case. The reformation of the corrupted
higher orders in the towns, is out of the ques-
tion ; and if a priesthood, drawn from their
ranks, were to be established, it would speedily
draw to itself such a load of infidel obloquy,
as would lead to its destruction. But the poor
and humble parish priests are overlooked and
despised by the arrogant liberals in possession
of office and power; and, like their predeces-
sors in the apostolic ages, they are, unob-
served, laying the foundation of a spirit
destined, in a future age, to overturn the insti-
tutions of their haughty oppressors, and effect
that real regeneration of society, which can
be found only in the reformation of the morals
and principles of its members.*
The abject poverty of the rural clergy in
most parts of the rural districts of France,
is a most painful object of contemplation to an
English traveller. There is scarce any pro-
vision for them in sickness or old age ; and
when th^ey are compelled, by either of these
causes, to divide their scanty income with a
more robust assistant, their condition becomes
truly pitiable. In most cathedral churches is
to be seen a box, with the inscription " Tronc
pour les malheureux pr6tres ;" a few sous are
thankfully received by the religious teachers
of the great nation. One of these boxes is to
be seen on the pillars of Notre Dame ; another
under the gorgeous aisle of Rouen ; a third in
the graceful choir of Amiens ; a fourth dis-
graces the generation who pass under the
splendid portals of Rheims, and a fifth, that
* The change here predicted has since taken place to
a great extent in France.
146
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
which points with deserved pride to the match- j
less Tower of Chartres.
A superficial observer who should judge of
the religious state of France from the appear-
ance of its great towns, however, would be far
wide of the truth. It is a total mistake to sup-
pose that devotion is extinct, or in the process
of extinction among its country inhabitants. It
is in the great towns that infidelity reigns tri-
umphant; it is among the young, the active,
and the profligate citizens of despotic Paris,
that religion is the subject of ridicule. It is true
this class are now in the exclusive possession
of political power; it is true several hundred
thousand of them are dispersed over the mighty
net which envelopes France in the meshes of
the capital ; it is true that they direct literature,
and influence thought, and stamp its character
upon the nation, in the estimation of foreign
states: still they are not in possession of the
mighty lever which directs the feelings of the
rural inhabitants. As long as forty-eight thou-
sand parish priests, overlooked from their po-
verty, despised from their obscurity, contempt-
ible to this world from their limited information,
are incessantly and assiduously employed in
diffusing religious belief through the peasantry,
the extirpation of Christianity in France is im-
possible. Its foundations are spreading the
deeper its influences becoming more para-
mount in the uncorrupted provinces, from the
total neglect into which it has fallen with the
influential classes in the capital. It is impos-
sible to enter any parish church in any part
of the provinces, without being sensible that a
large and increasingportion of the peasantry are
strongly and profoundly impressed with reli-
gious feelings. In this state of things, the eye
of philanthropy, without pretending to the gift
of prophecy, can perhaps discern the elements
brewing which are destined, in some future age,
to produce another Revolution, an insur-
rection of the provinces against the capital,
a real regeneration of society, by the infusion
of rural simplicity and virtue into urban cor-
ruption and degeneracy, a termination of the
convulsion, which commenced by casting down
religion, in the triumph of the faith which ga-
thers strength from misfortune. But whether
this is to be the final result, or whether, as is
perhaps more probable, the utter prostration
of the internal liberties of the nation, through
the consequences of the Revolution, is to lead
to the loss of its external independence, and
the regeneration of southern weakness by a
race of northern conquerors ; one thing is cer
tain, and may be confidently prophesied, that
France will never know what real freedom is,
till her institutions are founded on the basis of
religion, and that with the triumph of the faith
which her Liberals abhor, and have cast down,
is indissolubly wound up the accomplishment
of the objects which they profess to have at
heart.
The MoHAts of France are in the state which
might be expected in a country which has bro-
ken asunder all the bonds of society, and de-
spises all the precepts of religion. Pleasure
and excitement are the general subjects of
idolatry money, as the key to them, the uni-
versal object. This desire for wealth is per-
haps more strongly felt in Paris, and forms
the great passion of life more completely, than
in any other capital in Europe, because there
are more objects of desire presented to the en-
tranced senses which cannot be gained in any
other way ; and of the prevalence of this desire
the great extent of its gaming-houses affords
ample proof. But money is not the object of
desire to the Parisian, as to the Dutchman or
Englishman, from any abstract passion for ac-
cumulation, or any wish to transmit, by a life
of economy, an ample patrimony to his chil-
dren. It is for the sake of present and immedi-
ate gratification; that he may go more fre-
quently to the opera, or indulge more liberally
in the pleasures of the Ginguette ; that his wife
and daughters may be more gaily dressed on
Sundays, and their Tivoli parties be more bril-
liant, that money is so passionately coveted.
The efforts made by all classes, to gain a live-
lihood, .and the prodigious obstacles which
competition throws in their way, are perhaps
greater in Paris than in any other metropolis
of Europe. " Qua^renda est pecunia primum,
virtus post nummos," is the general maxim of
life. But still there is little accumulation of
capital, comparatively speaking, within its
walls. As fast as money is made, it is spent;
either in the multifarious objects of desire which
are everywhere presented to the sight, or in
the purchase of rentes, or government annui-
ties, which die with the holders. The propor-
tion of annuitants in France is incomparably
greater than in England; and the destitution
of families from the loss of their head, exists
to a painful and unheard of extent.
Pleasure and excitement are the universal
objects ; the maxims of Epicurus the general
observance. To enjoy the passing hour to
snatch from existence all the roses which it
will afford, and disquiet themselves as little as
possible about its thorns, is the grand principle
of life. The state of Paris in this respect has
been well described by a late enlightened and
eloquent author
" Paris is no longer a city which belongs to
any one nation or people: it is in many re-
spects the metropolis of the world ; the ren-
dezvous of all the rich, all the voluptuous on
the face of the earth. For them its artists, as-
sembled from every quarter of Europe, imagine
or invent every day fresh objects of excitement
or desire; for them they build theatres, and
multiply indefinitely all the ephemeral novel-
ties calculated to rouse the senses and stimu-
late expense. There every thing may be pur-
chased, and that too under the most alluring
form. Gold is the only divinity which is wor-
shipped in that kingdom of pleasure, and it is
indifferent from what hand it flows. It is in
that centre of enjoyment that all the business
of France is done that all its wealth is
expended, and the fruit of its toil from one
end of the kingdom to the other brought to the
great central mart of pleasure. The proprie-
tor wrings the last farthing out of his soil the
merchant, the notary, the advocate, flock there
from all quarters to sell their capital, their re-
venue, their virtue, or their talents, for plea-
sure of every description, which a thousand
artists pourtray in the most seducing colours
FRANCE IN 1833.
147
to a nation famishing for enjoyment. And it
is from that corrupted centre that we are told
the regeneration of the state, the progress of
independence and liberty, is to flow."*
As pleasure and excitement are thus the
universal objects, it may readily be conceived
what facilities are afforded in the French me-
tropolis for their gratification. The gaming-
houses, accordingly, are innumerable; and
above a third of the children born within the
barriers are bastards.-j- But those who look
for excitation of that description, will not find
in Paris any thing approaching to the open
and undisguised profligacy of London. There
is nothing in its public places approaching to
the saloons of Drury Lane, or the upper circles
of Covent Garden ; the Strand and Regent
Street at night are infested in a way unknown
even in the Boulevards Italiens, or the Rue de
Richelieu. The two Revolutions have organized
licentiousness. Having become the great object
of life, and, as it were, the staple commodity
of the capital, it has fallen under the direction
of the police. Bicnseance and decorum are
there the order of the day. The sirens of
pleasure are confined to a few minor theatres,
and particular quarters of the town ; they
abound in every street, almost in every house;
but they can openly ply their vocation in ap-
pointed districts only. Even the Palais Royal,
the cradle of both Revolutions, has been purged
of the female anarchists who were their first
supporters. This is certainly a very great
improvement, well worthy of imitation on the
British side of the Channel. Youth and
timidity are not openly assailed as they are in
English great towns, and, though those who
seek for dissipation will meet with it in
abundance, it is not, willing or unwilling,
thrust down their throats. It is possible, in
the Quartier de TUniversite and remoter parts
of Paris, for young men to pursue their stu-
dies, infinitely more clear of temptation than
either at the London University or King's
College.
But while these advantages must be con-
ceded to the organization and arrangements of
the French police on the one hand, it is not
the less certain, on the other, that all these fair
appearances are merely skin-deep, and that
under this thin disguise is half concealed a
mass of licentiousness probably unprecedented
in any modern state. Certainly, never since
the days of the Roman emperors, was pleasure
so unceasingly pursued by both sexes, as it is
now at Paris ; or such efforts made to heighten
natural desire by forced excitement, or talent
and art so openly called in to lend their aid to
the cause of licentiousness. Profligate books
and prints exist everywhere; but in other
capitals, they must be sought after to be
found, and where they are, their character and
appearance show that they are meant for the
brutal classes, or the higher orders in their
moments of brutality, only. But in Paris the
case is the reverse. The treasures of know-
ledir^, the elegance of art, the fascination of
genius, are daily and hourly employed in the
cause of corruption; and of them may truly
* General Donnadieu, 270271.
f Dupin'a Force Commerciale, p. 40.
be said, what Mr. Burke falsely affirmed of the
old French manners, that " vice has lost half
its deformity by having lost all its grossness."
The delicacy and beauty of these productions,
as well as their amazing number, prove that
they find a ready sale with the higher as well
as the lower orders. They have discovered
the truth of the old maxim, "Ars est celare
artem." Voluptuousness is more surely at-
tained by being half disguised ; and corruption
spreads the more securely, from having cast
aside every thing calculated to disgust its un-
hardened votaries. The arts of lithography
and printing go hand in hand in this refined
and elegant system of demoralization ; the
effusions of genius, the beauty of design, the
richness of colouring, are employed together
to throw an entrancing light over the scenes
of profligacy, and the ordinary seductions of a
great capital, heightened by all that taste or
art can suggest to stimulate the passions
emblematic of the mixed good and evil which
has resulted from these great inventions, and
the prodigious force they have given to the
solvents of vice in one age, as well as the
hardening principles of virtue in another.
It is observed by Montesquieu, that honour,
as the national principle, is more durable in
its nature than either virtue or religion ; and
the present state of Paris contrasted with the
military character of the French affords a
strong confirmation of the observation. The
incessant pursuit of pleasure by both sexes,
has in every age been the grand solvent which
has melted away the principle of military vir-
tue ; and the reason is obvious, because those
whose chief object is selfish gratification can-
not endure the fatigues and the privations
attendant on military exploits. There cannot
be a doubt that this destroying principle is in
full operation in the French capital ; but
though it has completely eaten through the
safeguards of religion and virtue, it has hither-
to left undecayed the passion for military dis-
tinction. The extraordinary strength which
this principle has acquired in modern Europe
in general, and France in particular, from the
feudal institutions, and the great development
which it received from the wars of the Revolu-
tion and the triumphs of Napoleon, have, to all
appearance, withstood the enervating influence
of a corrupting ingredient which proved fatal
to the courage of Greece and Rome ; but it is
not the less certain that it will ultimately sink
before its influence. It is by not elevating our
minds' to the slow progress of all such great
changes, that we are at all misled on any oc-
casion as to their progress, or the effect on
public fortune of the principles of decay, which
spring from the progress of private corruption.
The alteration, like the decline of the day in
autumn, is imperceptible from day to day; but
it becomes quite apparent if we contrast one
period or age of the world with another. Com-
pare the age of Regulus or Scipio, with that of
Constantine or Honorius; or that of the Lom-
bard League with the present pusillanimity of
the Italian people ; and the prostration of na-
tional strength by the growth of private selfish-
ness is obvious to the most careless observer.
The French Revolution is not destined to form
148
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
an exception to the general law; its fortune
will be ultimately destroyed by the effects o
the poisoned source from which they sprung
the conquests of its authors will be lost b
their inability to conquer themselves. Boti
revolutions have begun in the Palais Royai
the very focus of corruption from every par
of France ; and through every stage of thei
progress, both have given unequivocal proof
of their impure origin. Let the friends of reli
gion and virtue be of good cheer ; no institu
tions founded on such a basis were ever ye
durable; the French Revolution began in th
haunts of profligacy, and they have spread in
it the seeds of mortality which will bring it to
the grave.
Next to sexual profligacy, gaming is par
excellence the grand vice of Paris ; and it, lik
every other principle of evil, has made rapid
and fearful progress since the Three Days. No
attempts whatever are made to restrain it ; on
the contrary, it is taken under the safeguarc
of the police, and a tax levied on its profits, as
on those of prostitution, which constitutes a
considerable part of the municipal revenue
The prodigious number of suicides which
occur in Paris, amounting on an average to
above one a night, frequently to a great deal
more, chiefly spring from the despair produced
by the inordinate passion for this vice. Unlike
what generally occurs in England, it exists
equally among the poorest as the richest
classes ; their hells are open for the sous of
the labourer or the francs of the artisan, as
well as the Napoleon of the officer or the
rouleaux of the banker. They are to be met
with in every street ; they spread their devas-
tating influence through every workshop and
manufactory in Paris. This perilous vice, like
that of sexual profligacy, is the natural result
of a successful revolution ; of the demolition
of all restraint on the passions, which has
arisen from silencing the voice of religion,
and the bounty offered to instant excitement,
by the uncertainty in regard to the future,
which the destruction of all the institutions of
society inevitably produces.*
In one particular, however, the French capi-
tal offers a pleasing contrast to every con-
siderable town in the British isles. Drunken-
ness, though considerably more prevalent than
formerly, does not exist in France to an extent
at all comparable to what it does in England ;
and hence the manners of the lower orders,
notwithstanding all the anarchy of the Revo-
lution, are not half so coarse and brutal as in
our great manufacturing towns. In truth, the
extraordinary progress of this frightful vice in
Great Britain, since the reduction of the duty
on spirits and the abolition of the beer tax,}
is one of the most woful circumstances in our
social condition, and which, if not rapidly
checked by a proper set of fiscal regulations,
promises soon to plunge our labouring classes
* A great change in this respect has since been made
by the authority and interposition of government, after
the evil here described had become intolerable.
t Nothing ever gave us more pleasure than to observe
from a late Parliamentary return, that, since the slight
addition to the duty on spirits in 1830, the manufacture
of the fiery poison has declined in Scotland, 1,300,000
gallons yearly.
into a state of depravity unparalleled in any
Christian state. Drunkenness, if seen in public
at Paris, is at once punished by the police;
and the prodigious nmnber of civil and mili-
tary employes who are to be met with in every
street at night, renders it impossible for the
inebriated to indulge in those disgraceful
brawls which then disgrace every English
city. The abstinence from this vice depends
chiefly on constitutional causes, the warmth
of the climate, which renders the excitement
of intoxication not so desirable as in northern
latitudes; but much is to be ascribed also to
the happy custom of levying a heavy duty
(a franc a bottle) on wine imported into the
metropolis, a burden which banishes intoxi-
cation in a great degree to the outside of the
barriers, and confines it to the days when a
walk to those remote stations can be under-
taken by the working classes. Would that a
similar burden existed on all spirits imported
into the towns in Great Britain !
The state of LITERATURE, especially those
lighter branches of it which exhibit the faith-
ful picture of the public feeling and ideas, is
equally instructive since the Three Days. It is
difficult to convey to an English reader, un-
acquainted with the modern French novels,
any adequate idea of the extraordinary mix-
ture which they exhibit; and they present
perhaps the most convincing proof which the
history of fiction affords, of the indispensable
necessity of fixed principles in religion and
virtue to restrain the otherwise inordinate flight
of the human imagination.
It was long the fashion with the apologists
of the Revolution to assert that public morals
fiad improved during its progress ; that the
icense and profligacy of the days of Louis
XV. and the Regent Orleans would no longer
tolerated; and that with the commence-
ment of higher duties and the growth of severer
principles, the licentiousness which had so
ong disgraced the French literature had for
ever disappeared. The present state of French
novels may show, whether a successful Revo-
ution, and the annihilation of all the fetters
of religion, is the way to regenerate such a
corrupted mass. Having lost nothing of former
)rofligacy, having abated nothing of former
nfidelity, they have been tinged by the fierce
passions and woful catastrophes which arose
luring the first Revolution. Romance has now
)ecome blended with sensuality; German ex-
ravagance with French licentiousness; the
demons of the air with the corruptions of the
world. The modern French novels are not
ne whit less profligate than those of Louis
XV., but they are infinitely more extravagant,
wild, and revolting. To persons whose minds
lave as yet been only partially shaken by
he terrible catastrophes of a revolution, it is
ardly conceivable how such extravagant fic-
ions should ever have entered the human
magination. They are poured forth, however,
with unbounded profusion by their modern
ovelists, and passionately read by a genera-
ion whose avidity for strong emotions and
r ivid excitement, whether from terror, as-
onishment, despair, or licentiousness, seems
o know no bounds.
FRANCE IN 1833.
149
The limits of an Essay, such as this, embrac-
ing such a variety of objects, though few more
important, forbid us from attempting what we
intended, and possibly may hereafter resume
an analysis of some of these extravagant
and detestable, though often able and power-
ful publications. Suffice it to say, that the
basis of almost the whole of them is adultery,
or other guilty and extravagant sensual pas-
sion ; and they generally terminate in suicide,
or some such hor,rid catastrophe. On details
of this description they dwell with minute and
often coarse avidity; but it is by no means
with such passions that they are solely filled;
they have also borrowed largely from German
fiction and extravagance, from Catholic legends
and superstition, from feudal manners and
oppression, from chivalrous . adventure and
exploits. They form what may be styled the
Romantic Licentious School of Fiction. Murders
and robberies, rapes and conflagrations, the
guillotine and the scaffold, demons and guar-
dian angels, confessors and confidants, Satan
and St. Michael, ghosts, wizards, incest, sen-
suality, parricides, suicides, and every kind
of extravagance, are thrown together in wild
confusion; but the general result is ruinous
to every species of regular or virtuous con-
duct, and may be considered as affording a
specimen of the frame of mind in which the
victims who are shortly after stretched out on
the Morgue, rush from the gambling-houses
in the Palais Royal, to drown the chaos of
contending passions in the waters of the Seine.*
The dramatic pieces which have sprung up
since the Revolution of 1830, afford the same
extraordinary picture of the confusion of ideas,
feelings, and emotions, in which the French
youth are involved since they pushed out to a
stormy sea without either compass or rudder.
They almost all turn upon adultery, incest, or
some such elegant and chastened depravity;
but of the chaos of extravagance, fiction,
allegory, vice, and horror which they present,
it is impossible to convey any idea. Some of
them, particularly " La Reine d'Espagne," have
been hissed from the stage, as too bad even
for a Parisian audience. From others, as "La
Tentation," the most obnoxious scenes, in one
of which a rape was represented almost be-
fore the eyes of the spectators, have been
dropped out. But still they are in general so
extravagant, indelicate, and licentious, that it
is impossible to speak of them in terms of
sufficient reprobation ; and the most respecta-
ble writers of France, of the Liberal school,
regard them with a degree of horror even sur-
passing that which they excite in the mind of
an English spectator. "If its literature," says
Salvandy, " is to be regarded as the expression
of national character, not a hope remains for
France. It is stained with every species of
corruption ; its fundamental principle is to
attack every sentiment and interest of which
* So monstrous have the extravagances become, that
they have excited the attention even of the steadiest
apologists of the French Revolution ; and the Edinburgh
Review, in a recent number, has borne the candid
testimony of an unwilling witness to the demoralizing
effects of their favourite political principles. See the
Late French Novelists, in No. 116 of the Edinburgh
Review.
the social order is composed. You would sup-
pose that it was resolutely bent on restoring
to France all the vices which it had imbibed
at the close of the last century. A sort of
dogmatic cynicism has invaded all its depart-
ments. If, on the strength of a name of
celebrity, or the daily eulogies of the press,
you venture to a theatre, you see represented
scenes where the dignity of the one sex is as
much outraged as the modesty of the other.
Everywhere the same sort of spectacles await
you. There is a class which they keep as yet
behind the curtain, contenting themselves with
announcing atrocities which the public are
not yet prepared to bear. Romance has already
given the example of this depraved species of
composition. The muse now makes use of
obscenities, as formerly it did of passion. What
is to follow when tragedy and romance have
exhausted their brief career, God only knows.
When they have ceased to illuminate these
hideous orgies, the lights of literature will be
extinguished."*
To give some idea of these extraordinary
productions which now are represented with
such prodigious success at the Parisian thea-
tres, we shall give an abstract of two of the
most unexceptionable, and, at the same time,
the most popular pieces which have appeared
at the opera since the Revolution of July, "La
Tentation," and "Robert Le Diable." We
have selected the most delicate which fell
under our observation ; the pieces represented
at the minor theatres could not be borne even
in the decent guise of an English description.
The first of these, which, in splendour of
decoration, exceeds any thing yet represented
even in that most splendid of European theatres,
turns upon the well-known legend of the Temp-
tation of St. Anthony ; but it is so altered and
varied to admit their varied and extravagant
corruptions, that it is hardly possible to re-
cognise in it the simple tale which has been so
often immortalized by the pencil of Teniers.
The piece opens with the saint reposing on
his pallet at the gate of a solitary chapel, de-
dicated to the Virgin Mary, and crowds of pil-
grims of both sexes arrive at the shrine to offer
up their vows ; after which, thev join in festive
amusements, and the danseuses, arrayed as pea-
sant girls, dance round the anchorite with such
graceful motions, that he is tempted to indulge
in a little waltz with the fairest of these daugh-
ters of Eve. Shortly after, when they have
retired, a young woman of extraordinary beauty
comes along to the shrine; dazzled by her
charms, and encouraged by the opportunity
which the solitude of the situation afforded, he
forms the design of seduction, and is endeavour-
ing to carry his intentions into effect, w r hen
she flies to the chapel of the Virgin, and shriek-
ing, implores her powerful aid to ward off im-
pending destruction. Instantly the powers of
heaven and hell appear. Astaroth and his
legions of devils, in a thousand frightful forms,
rise from the earth, and strive to obtain the
mastery of the fallen saint and endangered vir-
gin ; while, high in the clouds above, the an-
gels of heaven appear to throw their shield
* Salvandy, Seize Mois des Revolutionaires, 408.
150
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
over supplicant innocence. At length a truce
is formed between the contending powers ; the
condition of which is, that the saint is to be
surrendered to the powers of darkness, to be
by them subjected to all the temptations which
can endanger human virtue, and if he falls
under any one, he is to be abandoned soul and
body to their dominion ; but if he proves vic-
torious, he is to be borne aloft to the regions of
light. The decorations of this scene are of the
most exquisite description ; the angels in the
clouds are placed in the attitudes pourtrayed
in Raphael's and Correggio's celestial choirs
in the St. Cecilia at Bologna and the St. Je-
rome at Parma ; and a mellow light thrown
over the heavenly group, in so ravishing a
manner, as to produce an indelible impression
on the mind of the spectator.
The next act opens with the convocation of
the powers of darkness in the infernal regions,
to consider the measures they should adopt,
and review the force they could command in
the great undertaking in, which they are en-
gaged. This leads to a grand review of the
powers of hell, in which the whole strength
of the opera and the whole fancy of the artist
are put forth. The legions of devils, arrayed
in every possible garb of extravagance, de-
scend an immense stair, ascending to the top
of the theatre, on the left hand, and march
before Astaroth in such numbers, that it is no
exaggeration to say that three or four hundred
persons, splendidly dressed, are on the stage
at the same time. Yet even here French con-
ceit is curiously manifested, and these legions
of infernal spirits, in naked or savage attire,
are preceded by regular pioneers, with their
shaggy beards, and axes on their shoulders,
precisely as in the reviews on the Place Ca-
rousel ! When the review is concluded, the
infernal conclave, distrustful of their success
by open force, resolve to carry on the war by
more insinuating means, and it is determined
to tempt the saint by means of a young woman
of their own creation, gifted with every beauty
and charm which can entrance the senses, all
which are to be employed to seduce his virtue.
A cauldron appears, the devils in succession
throw in some attractive or malignant ingre-
dient, and shortly the siren steps forth, and
comes forward to give token of her attractive
powers, by dancing and waltzing before the
spectators. At the first representation, she
arose from the cauldron and danced in a flesh-
coloured silk dress, tight to the shape, meant
to represent absolute nudity ; but she is now
arrayed in a slight muslin robe, which throws
a thin veil of decency over her beautiful
form.
In the third act, the saint is subjected to the
double trial of famine and the siren. The
scene is transported to the gate of a palace in
a desolate country, created by the devils for
the purposes of their temptation ; near the gate
of which a crucifix appears, rising out of the
drifting snow. St. Anthony approaches, and
falls down in supplication at the foot of the
cross; his strength is exhausted; his limbs
fail ; his wallet does not contain a single crust
of bread. Astaroth appears, followed by the siren
whom he has created, at the gate of the castle ;
tutored by him, she descends, approaches the
saint, and employs all her art to subjugate his
resolution. She offers to bring him food in
abundance from the palace, to spread a couch
of down for his wearied limbs, to clothe in
rich garments his shivering frame, to abandon
herself to him, if he will surrender the cruci-
fix which hangs round his neck, and abjure
his faith ; but the resolution of Saint Anthony
is immovable. While he lies shivering and
starving at the foot of the cross, a sumptuous
feast is prepared before his eyes by the cooks
in the palace ; the savoury flavour comes over
his fainting senses; he sees it carried up to
the banquet-hall, where Astaroth and his de-
vils are feasting and rioting in luxurious plenty,
and crawls to the gate to implore a crust of
bread to assuage the intolerable pangs of hun-
ger; but it is sternly refused, unless he will con-
sent to part with the cross, in which case he is
offered the most luxurious fare. He still re-
mains firm to his faith, and while drenched
by showers of snow, and starving of hunger,
hears the wild and frantic revelry which pro-
ceeds round the well-covered boards, from the
brilliantly lighted rooms of the palace. Struck
with such heroic resolution, the siren is melted.
She is awakened by the efforts of the Virgin
to a sense of virtue; she secretly supplies him
with provisions from the infernal abode ; and
the daughter of perdition is won over to the
league of heaven by an act of charity. In-
stantly the black spot on her breast, the mark
of reprobation, disappears, and her bosom
regains its snowy whiteness. Astaroth and
the infernal legion issue forth, frantic with
rage at the failure of their design ; they cast
out their unworthy creation ; the palace, with
all its treasures, is consigned to the flames, into
which they plunge, leaving the saint and his
lovely convert alone in the wilderness of snow.
Baffled in this design, Astaroth and his league
next assail the anchorite in a different way.
The scene changes in the next act to the in-
terior of a magnificent harem, where the saint
and the converted maiden are surrounded by
all the pomp of eastern luxury. The sultanas
and ladies of the seraglio are seated round the
walls, and the whole strength of the opera is
again called forth in the entrancing dances
which are there employed to captivate the
senses. Astaroth causes Miranda, the maiden
of his creation, to dance before the Sultan ;
captivated by her beauty, he throws her the
handkerchief; while at the same time Astaroth
endeavours to persuade the saint to murder the
Sultan, on the specious pretence of setting free
the numerous slaves of his passion ; Miranda
seizes the dagger, exclaiming that she alone
should perpetrate the deed of blood ; the Sul-
tan is alarmed; the guards surround the her-
mit and the maid, who throw themselves from
the windows of the seraglio into the sea, while
the demons are swallowed up in a gulf of
fire.
In the opening of the last act, the anchorite
is seen reposing on the grass with the maiden
beside him; the demons surround him during
his sleep, but cannot pass the holy circle which
guards the innocent. When he awakens, he
finds himself enveloped on either side by le-
FRANCE IN 1833.
151
gions of devils in every frightful form, and a I of armour to enter the lists against the prince
circle of sirens who dance round him with the
most voluptuous movements. Meanwhile As-
taroth has seized Miranda, and "1'a rendue
victime de sa brutalite et 1'a frappe ;* the an-
chorite is on the point of yielding to the se-
ductions of the sirens who surround him,
when Miranda, extricated from the arms of
Aslaroth, rushes forward and throws the beads
and cross she had removed from him over his
neck. His reason is restored, he regains the
dominion over his passion. Astarolh plunges
his dagger in the breast of Miranda in despair
at the total failure of his prospects. St. Mi-
chael and the angels descend from heaven; a
desperate conflict ensues between the powers
of light and darkness, in the close of which
Astaroth and his demons are overthrown, and
the saint and Miranda are borne aloft through
the clouds into the bosom of the heavenly
host.
" Robert le Diable" is founded on a different
series of adventures, but the same contest of
the powers of this world with those of hell.
The first act opens on the shore of the har-
bour of Palermo, where Norman knights, un-
der the shade of acacia trees, celebrate their
mistresses, their wines, their games. Robert
and his friend Bertram are s-eated together,
when a minstrel arrives, leading a beauteous
maid, his affianced bride. Robert asks him
for news; he recounts the story of Robert le
Diable, who was the son of Bertha, a noble
maid of Normandy, who had yielded to the
seduction of a demon, in the form of a hand-
some stranger. Unknowingly he is reciting
the tale to Robert himself, who, in a transport
of rage at the narrative, is on the point of
plunging his dagger into his bosom; when he
is restrained by his friend Bertram, who pre-
vails on him to respite the minstrel for an hour.
Meanwhile he promises the handsome
to his chevaliers ; but when she is introduced
to be surrendered to their desires, he discovers
in the maid, Alice, his beauteous foster-sister,
the bearer of the testament of his mother, who
on her deathbed had besought her to convey
her last instructions to her beloved son. Ro-
bert, in return, recounts to Alice his love for
the fair Princess Isabella of Sicily, whom he
was on the point of carrying off from her pa-
rents, when he was assailed by the knights of
Sicily, and only rescued by his friend Bertram.
At this juncture, Bertram approaches; Alice
involuntarily shudders at his sight, from the
resemblance which he bears to the paintings
of Satan combating St. Michael, but having re-
covered from her alarm, undertakes to convey
a letter from Robert to the Princess Isabella.
The next act opens with the princess in the
interior of the palace of Palermo, bewailing
the loss of the faithful Robert, and her unhap-
py fate, in being compelled to wed the Prince
of Grenada, contrary to her inclinations.
Young maidens, the bearers of petitions, are
introduced, among whom is Alice, who insinu-
ates into her hand the letter of Robert. She
consents to see him. He is introduced, and
clothed by her attendants with a splendid suit
* This, though still in the programme of the piece,
was found to be revolting, and is now omitted.
in a tournament, where her hand was to be
the prize of the victor. A herald appears and
defies Robert, in the name of the prince, who
eagerly accepts the challenge. Bertram, who
is Satan in disguise, and had clothed another
demon with the form of the Prince of Grenada,
smiles at the success of his projects, to win
over the soul of Robert to perdition. The
tournament takes place ; Isabella, by her
father's orders, puts on his armour on the
Prince of Grenada, but when the trumpets
sound, she looks in vain for his beloved anta-
gonist. Robert, restrained by the powers of
hell, cannot appear. He is for ever disgraced ;
Bertram beholds his schemes rapidly ap-
proaching their maturity.
In the third act, Bertram, pale and agitated,
emerges from a cavern, the council-hall of
the infernal powers : He is tormented with
anxious thoughts, for he has learned the arret
of Fate that his power over Robert termi-
nates if he is not devoted to the powers of
hell before twelve o'clock that night. There
is not a moment to lo-se. He casts his eyes
on Alice, who had come to that solitude to
meet her betrothed minstrel; the demon is
seized with passion, and strives to seduce her,
but is repulsed with horror. She hears, how-
ever, the choir of hell in the cavern invoking
the name of Robert, and perceives that Ber-
tram is Satan in disguise. By the threat of in-
stant death, he compels her to promise secrecy.
At this juncture Robert enters, overwhelmed
with horror at his involuntary failure to ap-
pear at the tournament: Alice in vain ap-
proaches to warn him of his danger ; bound
by her vow of secrecy, she is compelled to
retire, leaving Robert alone to his satanic con-
fidant. Bertram then informs him that his
rival, the Prince of Grenada, had availed him-
self of the aid of the infernal powers ; and
that he never could overcome him till he had
taken from the tomb of Saint Rosalie, in a
neighbou ring ruin, a green branch, the charmed
wand which would render the lover of Isabella
all-powerful. Misled by the perfidious advice,
Robert enters the cavern which he is told leads
to the tomb, and immediately a scene of match-
less beauty succeeds..
The theatre represents a ruined monastery,
through the lofty desolate arches of which the
moon throws an uncertain light. Many old
tombs are scattered about on the broken pave-
ment, on the top of which the marble figures
of ancient worthies are seen. In the midst of
them is the sepulchre of Saint Rosalie, with a
branch of cypress in the hand of her marble
effigy. Bertram arrives : he conjures up the
shades of all the nuns who had been interred
in the abbey, condemned "en punition d'une
vie trop profane," to rise to aid in seducing
Robert into the accomplishment of his pro-
mise. Instantly the spirits rise out of their
narrow beds; the marble figures, which re-
clined on the monumental slabs, step forth
from every part of the pavement; a hundred
nuns appear dressed in their robes of white,
and slowly moving forward through the gloom,
surround the bewildered knight. Gradually
they seem to be reanimated by the breath and
152
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
the passions of life ; they join in dances, at first
slow and mystical, which insensibly warm into
grace and voluptuousness. They exert all
their attractions to induce Robert to advance
and seize the fated branch. Seduced by so
many charms, he approaches the sepulchre,
but starts back on seeing in the marble image
of the saint a resemblance to his mother; the
nuns, in encircling bands, renew their efforts
to entrance his senses ; he yields at length,
and seizes the branch. Instantly the spell is
broken ; the spectres sink into their graves ;
the figures, late so beauteous, and animated,
freeze again into lifeless marble, and the
knight remains alone with the branch, while
the sacred walls resound with the wild yells of
the demons at the completion of their victory.
In the fourth act, Isabella, surrounded by
her maidens, is represented at her toilet dis-
tributing her marriage gifts to six young
women who are to be married at the same
time that she espouses the Prince of Grenada.
Robert appears with the green branch; its
magical powers overwhelm all her attendants
with lethargic slumbers ; the knight approaches
and makes himself known to the princess ; in
the midst of her transports, she learns by what
means he had obtained the green bough, and
conjures him to cast away the infernal wand;
overcome by love and remorse, he breaks the
branch; the attendants instantly awaken; as-
tonished at the appearance of their lady in the
arms of a stranger knight, they calf in the
men-at-arms; Robert is seized, and Isabella
swoons away.
In the last act, Robert and Bertram appear
in the vestibule of the cathedral at Palermo ;
the knight recounts that he had fought the
Prince of Grenada, and been vanquished by
him. Bertram assures him that this fatality
is owing to his fatal imprudence in breaking
the branch, and that his only hope of success
is to be found in subscribing an instant com-
pact with the powers of darkness. At the
moment when he is about to comply, strains
of religious music are heard from the choir,
which thrill through the heart of the wavering
knight, and recall him to purer sentiments.
In despair at his failure, Bertram reveals his
name and character : he is Robert's father, the
demon who had seduced his mother ; and he
informs him, that, unless he signs the irrevo-
cable deed before twelve o'clock, he loses him
for ever; if he does, he forthwith becomes the
husband of Isabella. Robert exclaims, " L'ar-
rt est prononce, 1'Enfer est le plus fort," and
is just going to sign, when Alice, his foster-
sister, rushes in, places in his hand the testa-
ment of his mother, in which she conjures
him to shun the demon who had ruined her;
he is again shaken. A desperate struggle en-
sues between Alice and Bertram, heaven and
hell, in which Robert is about to yield, when
twelve strikes; Bertram, with a frightful yell,
descends into a gulf of fire; the veil of the
sanctuary is withdraw), Isabella appears in
the choir, where she receives the now disen-
thralled Robert, while an aerial choir celebrates
the triumph of the Most High.
There is one circumstance very remarkable
in these theatrical pieces, which have had so
prodigious a run at the Opera, that each of
them has been represented above a hundred
times. Though they originate in the most li-
centious capital, and are exhibited to the most
corrupted audience in Europe, yet they both
terminate in the triumph of virtue over vice,
of resolution over temptation, of the graces
of heaven over the powers of hell. This, in
such circumstances, is very remarkable. The
excitements to the senses in both are in-
numerable ; the situations and incidents such
as never co"uld have been figured but in a li-
centious capital ; but still the final result is
the triumph of virtue, and the impression
made upon the spectator on the whole de-
cidedly favourable to its cause. Hypocrisy,
says Rochefoucault, is the homage which vice
pays to virtue : it would appear that the senti-
ments of devotion, and the admiration of in-
tegrity, are so strongly implanted in the hu-
man mind, that many ages of corruption must
elapse before they can be wholly extirpated.
The French have still so much of both linger-
ing in their imaginations and their associations
at least, if not in their conduct, that the open
disregard of them cannot be as yet tolerated in
the higher theatres. Centuries of degradation,
however, similar to that in which, from the re-
sult of the Revolution, they are now placed,
will work out this melancholy change, even
in the country of Fenelon and Bossuet. The
modern Italian drama frequently represents
the hero of the piece suffering under the
agonies of fear; and poltroonery is tolerated
on the stage by the descendants of the Romans
and Samnites.
Another circumstance which is well worthy
of observation in the romantic licentious lite-
rature and drama of France, is the frequent use
which is made of the imagery, the language,
and the characters of the Roman Catholic re-
ligion. Even the Romish Calendar, and the
legends of the saints, are diligently ransacked
to furnish stories and situations calculated to
satisfy the avidity of the Parisian public for
strong emotions. It would appear that the
Parisians are now placed at that distance from
religious belief, when they can derive pleasure
from the lingering recollections which it
awakens, without being shocked by the pro-
fanity to which it is exposed. They look upon
religious impressions and the Catholic tradi-
tions, as the English regard the fairy tales
which amused their childhood, and derive a
transient stimulus from their being brought
back to their recollection, as we do from see-
ing Bluebeard or Cinderella on the stage. Re-
ligion is as frequently the engine for moving
the imagination now as classical allusions
were in the last age. The French are in that
stage of corruption, when they class religious
imagery, and the early traditions of Scripture,
with the Gothic superstition of the middle ages,
with drawbridges, knights, giants, and chi-
valry, and are delighted Math their represen-
tation, as we are with the feudal pictures and
ancient imagery of Sir Walter Scott. The
frequent introduction of religious characters
and traditions in the modern works of imagi-
nation in France, affords decisive evidence
that they have passed from the region of be-
FRANCE IN 1833.
153
lief into that of imagination ; from subduing
the passions, or influencing the conduct, to
thrilling the imagination, and captivating the
fancy. A people who entertained a sincere
and practical regard for religion of any sort,
never could bear to see its incidents and cha-
racters blended with hobgoblins and demons,
with the spectres of the feudal, or the mytholo-
gy of the classic ages.
This extraordinary change in the lighter
branches of French literature is almost entirely
the result of the late Revolution. The romantic
school of fiction, indeed, had been steadily
growing up under the Restoration ; and ac-
cordingly, the dramatized tales of Sir Walter
Scott had banished in all but the Theatre
Francais, the works of Racine and Corneille
from the stage. But it was not till the triumph
of the Barricades had cast down the barriers
of authority and influence, and let in a flood
of licentiousness upon all the regions of
thought, that the present intermixture of ex-
travagance and sensuality took place. Still
this grievous and demoralizing effect is not to
be ascribed solely or chiefly to that event, im-
portant as it has been in scattering far and
wide the seeds of evil. It is not by a mere
praetorian tumult in the capital that a nation
is demoralized ; Rome had twenty such urban
and military revolutions as that which over-
threw Charles X. without experiencing any
material addition to the deep-rooted sources of
imperial corruption. It was the first Revolu-
tion, with its frightful atrocities and crying
sins, which produced this fatal effect; the se-
cond merely drew aside the feeble barrier
which the government of the Restoration had
opposed to its devastation. In the present
monstrous and unprecedented state of French
literature is to be seen the faithful mirror of
the state of the public mind produced by that
convulsion ; of that chaos of thoughts and pas-
sions and recollections, which has resulted
from a successful insurrection not only against
the government, but the institutions and the
belief of former times ; of the extravagance and
frenzy of the human mind, when turned adrift,
without either principle or authority to direct
it, into the stormy sea of passion and pleasure.
The graver and more weighty works which
were appearing in such numbers under the
Restoration, have all ceased with the victory
of the populace. The resplendent genius of
Chateaubriand no longer throws its lustre over
the declining virtue of the age : the learning
and philosophy of Guizot is turned aside from
the calm speculations of history to the turbu-
lent sea of politics. Thierry has ceased to
diffuse over the early ages of feudal times, the
discriminating light of sagacious inquiry: the
pen of Parente conveys no Iqnger, in clear
and vivid colours, the manners of the four-
teenth to the nineteenth century: Thiers, trans-
formed into an ambitious politician, strives in
vain, in his measures as a minister, to coun-
teract the influence of his eloquent writings, as
an historian : the fervent spirit of Ber'anger is
stilled ; the poetic <jlow of Lamartine is quench-
ed ; the pictured page of Sal vandy is employed
only in pourtraying the deplorable state of so-
cial and moral disorganization consequent on
20
1 the triumph of the Barricades. Instead of
these illustrious men has sprung up a host of
minor writers, who pander to the depraved
taste of a corrupted age ; the race of Dumas's,
and Latouches, and Janins, men who apply great
talent to discreditable but profitable purposes ;
who reflect, like the cameleon, the colours of
the objects by which they are surrounded, and
earn, like the opera-dancer, a transient liveli-
hood, sometimes considerable wealth, by ex-
citing the passions or ministering to the plea-
sures of a depraved and licentious metropolis.
Thus, on all sides, and in every department
of government, religion, morals, and literature,
is the debasing and pernicious influence of the
Revolution manifesting itself; the thin veil
which concealed the progress of corruption
during the Restoration, is torn aside; govern-
ment is settling down into despotism, religion
into infidelity, morals into licentiousness, lite-
rature into depraved extravagance. What is to
be the final issue of these melancholy changes,
it is impossible confidently to predict; but
of this we maybe well assured, that it is not
till the fountains of wickedness are closed by
the seal of religion, and the stream of thought
is purified by suffering, that the disastrous
consequences of two successful convulsions
can be arrested, or freedom established on a
secure basis, or public felicity based on a du-
rable foundation.
The result of all this is, not only that no
real freedom exists in France, but that the ele-
ments of constitutional liberty do not exist.
Every thing depends on the will of the capital :
and its determination is so much swayed at
present, at least by the public press, and armed
force in the capital, that no reliance on the
stability of any system of government can be
placed. The first Revolution concentrated all
the powers of government in the metropolis ;
the second vested them in the armed force of
its garrison and citizens. Henceforth the strife
of faction is likely to be a mere struggle for
the possession of the public offices, and the
immense patronage with which they are ac-
companied : but no measures for the extension
of public freedom will, to all appearance, be
attempted. If the republican party were to
dethrone Louis Philippe, they would raise the
most violent outcry about the triumph of free-
dom, and in the midst of it quietly take pos-
session of the police-office, the telegraph, the
treasury, and begin to exercise the vast powers
of government for their own behoof in the
most despotic manner. No other system of
administration is practicable in France. After
the state to which it has been reduced by its
two Revolutions, a constitutional monarchy,
such as existed in Great Britain prior to the
revolution of 1832 that is, a monarchy, in
which the powers of sovereignty were really
shared by the crown, the nobles, and the peo-
ple could not stand in France for a week.
The populace of Paris and their despotic lead-
ers, or the crown, with its civil and military
employers, would swallow up supreme power
in a moment.
Every government, in the long run, must be
founded on one of three bases : either the re-
presentation and attachment of all the great
154
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
interests of the state ; or the force of a power-
ful and devoted soldiery; or the influence of
power derived from the possession of all the
patronage and appointments in the kingdom.
Constitutional monarchies, the glory of Eu-
ropean civilization, are founded on the first;
Asiatic despotisms on the last. By the de-
struction of all the intermediate classes be-
tween the throne and the peasant, the French
have rendered the construction of a representa-
tive system and a limited throne impossible :
they have now to choose only between the fet-
ters of a military, or the corruption of an ori-
| ental, despotism ; between the government of
the Praetorian guards, and the servility of the
Byzantine empire. They are perpetually de-
claiming about the new era which their Revo-
lution has opened in human affairs, and the
j interminable career of modern civilization :
! let them fix their eyes on the court of the Great
Mogul and the ryots of Hindostan, and beware
lest their changes afford a new confirmation
of the old adage, That there is nothing new
under the sun ; and the dreams of republican
enthusiasm terminate at last in the strife of
eunuchs and the jealousy of courtesans.
ITALY:
THE scenery of Switzerland is of a dark and
gloomy description. In the higher Alps, which
lie between the canton of Berne and the plains
of Lombardy, the' great elevation of the moun-
tains, the vicinity of perpetual snow, the tem-
pests which frequently occur, and the devasta-
tions of the avalanches, have imprinted a stern
and often dismal aspect on the scenery. As
the traveller ascends any of those paths, which
lead from the canton of Berne over the ridge
of the central Alps to the Italian bailiwicks,
he gradually approaches the region of eternal
desolation. The beech and the oak succes-
sively give place to the larch and the fir, and
these in their turn disappear, or exhibit only
the stunted forms and blasted summits which
are produced by the rigour and severity of the
climate. Towards the summit of the pass,
even these marks of vegetation disappear, and
huge blocks of granite, interspersed with snow,
or surrounding black and gloomy lakes, form
the only features of the scenery.
To the eye which has been habituated for a
few days only to these stern and awful objects,
there is no scene so delightful as that which is
exhibited by the valleys and the lakes which
lie on the southern side of the Alps. The
riches of nature, and the delights of a southern
climate, are there poured forth with a profusion
which is hardly to be met with in any other
part of Europe. The valleys are narrow and
precipitous, bounded on either side by the most
stupendous cliffs, and winding in such a man-
ner as to exhibit, in the most striking point of
view, the unrivalled glories of the scene. But
though the vallies are narrower, and the rocks
are higher on the southern than the northern
side of the Alps, yet the character of the scene
is widely different in these two situations. The
larch and the fir form the prevailing wood in
the higher valleys to the north of the St. Go-
thard; but the birch, the chestnut, and the oak,
clothe the sunny cliffs which look to the Italian
sun. Every crevice, and every projecting
* Blackwood's Magazine, Feb. 1818. and Supplement
to EncyclopsdiaBritannica,article Italy. Written when
travelling in that country in 1816 and 1818.
! point on which vegetation can grow, is cover-
ed with brushwood ; and, instead of the gray
i masses of granite which appear on the north-
ern side, the cliffs of the southern valleys seem
to have caught the warm glow and varied tints
of the Italian sky. Nor is the change less ap-
parent in the agricultural productions of the
soil. At the foot of the stupendous cliffs,
which bound the narrow valleys by which the
mountains are intersected, the vine, the olive,
and the maize, ripen under the rays of a ver-
tical sun, while the sweet chestnut and the
walnut clothe the sloping banks by which the
wider parts of the valleys are surrounded.
While sinking under the heat of a summer
sun, which acquires amazing powers in these
narrow clefts, the traveller looks back with
delight to the snowy peaks from which he had
so lately descended, whose glaziers are soften-
ed by the distance at which they are seen, and
seem to partake in the warm glow by which
the atmosphere is illuminated.
There is another feature by which these
valleys are distinguished, which does not oc-
cur in the Swiss territories. Switzerland is a
country of peasants : the traces of feudal
power have been long obliterated in its free and
happy vallies. But on the Italian side of the
Alps, the remnants of baronial power are
still to be seen. Magnificent castles of vast
dimensions, and placed on the most prominent
situations, remind the traveller that he is ap-
proaching the region of feudal influence ; while
the crouching look and abject manner of the
peasantry, tells but too plainly the sway which
these feudal proprietors have exercised over
their vassals. But whatever may be the in-
fluence of aristocratic power upon the habits
or condition of the people, the remains of
former magnificence which it has left, add
amazingly to the beauty and sublimity of the
scenery. In the Misocco these antiquated re-
mains are peculiarly numerous and imposing.
The huge towers and massy walls of these
Gothic castles,, placed on what seem inacces-
sible cliffs, and frowning over the villages
which have grown up beneath their feet, give
ITALY.
155
an air of antiquity and solemnity to the scene,
which nothing else is capable of producing;
for the works of nature, long as they have
stood, are still covered with the verdure of
perpetual youth. It is in the v/orks of man
alone that the symptoms of age or of decay
appear.
The Italian lakes partake, in some measure,
in the general features which have been men-
tioned as belonging to the valleys on the south-
ern side of the Alps ; but they are charac-
terized also by some circumstances which are
peculiar to themselves. Their banks are al-
most everywhere formed of steep mountains,
which sink at once into the lake without any
meadows or level ground on the water side.
These mountains are generally of great height,
and of the most rugged forms ; but they are
clothed to the summit with luxuriant woods,
except in those places where the steepness of
the precipices precludes the growth of vegeta-
tion. The continued appearance of front and
precipice which they exhibit, would lead to the
belief that the banks of the lake are uninha-
bited, were, it not for the multitude of villages
with which they are everywhere interspersed.
These villages are so numerous and extensive,
that it may be doubted whether the population
anywhere in Europe is denser than on the
shores of the Italian lakes. No spectacle in
nature can be more beautiful than the aspect
of these clusters of human habitations, all
built of stone, and white-washed in the neatest
manner, with a simple spire rising in the cen-
tre of each, to mark the number and devotion
of the inhabitants, surrounded by luxuriant
forests, and rising one above another to the
highest parts of the mountains. Frequently
the village is concealed by the intervention
of some rising ground, or the height of the
adjoining woods ; but the church is always
visible, and conveys the liveliest idea of the
peace and happiness of the inhabitants. These
rural temples are uniformly white, and their
spires are of the simplest form ; but it is dif-
ficult to convey, to those who have not seen
them, an idea of the exquisite addition which
they form to the beauty of the scenery.
On a nearer approach, the situation" of these
villages, so profusely scattered over the moun-
tains which surround the Italian lakes, is often
interesting in the extreme. Placed on the
summit of projecting rocks, or sheltered in the
defile of secluded valleys, they exhibit every
variety of aspect that can be imagined ; but
wherever situated, they add to the interest, or
enhance the picturesque effect of the scene.
The woods by which they are surrounded, and
which, from a distance, have the appearance
of a continued forest, are in reality formed,
for the most part, of the walnuts and sweet
chestnuts, which grow on the gardens that
belong to the peasantry, and conceal beneath
their shade,vineyards, corn-fields, and orchards.
Each cottager has his little domain, which is
cultivated by his own family ; a single chest-
nut, and a few mulberry trees, with a small
vineyard, constitutes often the whole of their
humble property. On this little spot, however,
they find wherewithal both to satisfy their
wants and to occupy their industry; the chil-
dren take care of the mulberries and the silk-
worms, which are here produced in great
abundance; the husband dresses the vineyard,
or works in the garden, as the season may
require. On an incredibly small piece of
ground, a numerous family live, in, what ap-
pears to them, ease and affluence; and if they
can maintain themselves during the year, and
pay their rent at its termination, their desires
never go beyond the space of their own em-
ployment.
In this simple and unambitious style of life,
it may easily be conceived what the general
character of the peasantry must be. Gene-
rally speaking, they are a simple, kind-hearted,
honest people, grateful to the last degree for
the smallest share of kindness, and always
willing to share with a stranger the produce
of their little domains. The crimes of murder
and robbery are almost unknown, at least
among the peasantry themselves, although, on
the great roads in their vicinity, banditti are
sometimes to be found. But if a stranger
lives in the country, and reposes confidence in
the people, he will find himself as secure, and
more respected, than in most other parts of
the world.
There is one delightful circumstance which
occurs in spring in the vicinity of these lakes,
to which a northern traveller is but little ac-
customed. During the months of April and
May, the woods are filled with nightingales,
and thousands of these little choristers pour
forth their strains every night, with a richness
and melody of which it is impossible to form
a conception. In England we are accustomed
frequently to hear the nightingale, and his song
has been celebrated in poetry from the earliest
periods of our history. But it is generally a
single song to which we listen, or at most a
few only, which unite to enliven the stillness
of the night. But on the banks of the lake of
Como, thousands of nightingales are to be
found in every wood ; they rest in every tree,
they pour forth their melody on the roof of
every cottage. Wherever you walk during the
delightful nights of April or May, you hear the
unceasing strains of these unseen warblers,
swelling on the evening gales, or dying away,
as you recede from the woods or thickets
where they dwell. The soft cadence and me-
lodious swelling of this heavenly choir, re-
sembles more the enchanting sounds of the
Eolian harp than any thing produced by mor-
tal organs. To those who have seen the lake
of Como, with such accompaniments, during
the serenity of a summer evening, and with
the surrounding headlands and mountains re-
flected on its placid waters, there are few scenes
in nature, and few moments in life, which can
be the source of such delightful recollection.
The forms of the mountains which surround
the Italian lakes are somewhat similar to those
that are to be met with in the Highlands of
Scotland, or at the Lake of Killarney ; but the
great superiority which they possess over any
thing in this country, consists in the gay and
smiling aspect which nature there exhibits. The
base only of the Highland hills is clothed with
wood; huge and shapeless swells of heath
form the upper parts of the mountains ; and
156
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
the summits partake of the gloomy character
which the tint of brown or purple throws over
the scene. But the mountains which surround
the Italian lakes are varied to the summit with
life and animation. The woods ascend to the
highest peaks, and clothe the most savage
cliffs in a robe of verdure; white and sunny
villages rise one above another, in endless
succession, to the upper parts of the moun-
tains ; and innumerable churches, on every
projecting point, mark the sway of religion,
even in the most remote and inaccessible si-
tuations. The English lakes are often cold
and cheerless, from the reflection of a dark or
lowering sky; but the Italian lakes are per-
fectly blue, and partake of the brilliant colours
with which the firmament is filled. In the
morning, in particular, when the level sun
glitters on the innumerable white villages
which surround the Lago Maggiore, the reflec-
tion of the cottages, and steeples, and woods,
in the blue and glassy surface of the lake,
seems to realize the descriptions of the poets in
their happiest and most inspired veins.
The Lago Maggiore is the most celebrated of
these lakes, because it lies most in the way of
ordinary travellers ; but, in variety of forms,
and in the grandeur of the surrounding objects,
it is decidedly inferior to the Lago Lugano,
which is, perhaps, upon the whole, the most
beautiful lake in Europe. The mountains
which surround this lake are not only very
lofty, from 4000 to 5000 feet high, but broken
into a thousand fantastic forms, and split with
chasms of the most terrific description. On
one of the loftiest of these pinnacles, immedi-
ately above the centre of the lake, is placed the
castle of St. Salvador; and the precipice, from
its turrets to the surface of the water, is cer-
tainly not less than 2000 feet. Nevertheless,
this stupendous cliff is clothed, in every cre-
vice where the birch can fix its root, with
luxuriant woods ; and so completely does this
soft covering change the character of the scene,
that even this dreadful precipice is rather a
beautiful than a terrific object. The great
characteristic and principal beauty of the Lago
Lugano, arises from its infinite variety, occa-
sioned by the numbers of mountains which
project into its centre, and by presenting an
infinite variety of headlands, promontories, and
bays, give it rather the appearance of a great
number of small lakes connected together, than
of one extensive sheet of water. Nor can
imagination itself conceive, any thing equal to
the endless variety of scenery, which is pre-
sented by following the deeply indented shores
of this lake, or the varied effect of the number-
less villages and churches, which present
themselves at every turn, to relieve and ani-
mate the scene.
Foreigners, from every part of Europe, are
accustomed to speak of the Boromcan Islands
with a degree of enthusiasm which raises the
expectation to too high a pitch, and of course
is apt to produce disappointment. They are
laid out in the Italian style of gardening, w^th
stiff alleys, marble fountains, statues, terraces,
and other works of art. But this style, how-
ever curious or meritorious in itself, arid as a
specimen of the skill or dexterity of the gar-
dener, is universally allowed to be ill adapted
to the scenery of real nature, and is more par-
ticularly out of place in the Italian lakes,
where the vast and broken ridge of the Alps
forms the magnificent distance, and gives the
prevailing character to the scene.
The Isola Madre is the most pleasing of these
celebrated islands, being covered with wood in
the interior, and adorned round the shores
with a profusion of the most beautiful flower-
ing shrubs. It is difficult to imagine a more
splendid prospect than the view from this
island, looking towards the ridge of the Simplon.
Numerous white villages, placed at intervals
along the shore, enliven the green luxuriant
woods which descend to the lake ; and in the
farther distance, the broken and serrated ridge
of the mountains, clustering round the snowy
peaks of Monte Rosa, combines the grandeur
of Alpine with the softness of Italian scenery.
The buildings, which are so beautifully dis-
posed along the shore, partake of the elegance
of the scene ; they are distinguished, for the
most part, by the taste which seems to be the
native growth of the soil of Italy ; and the lake
itself resembles a vast mirror, in which the
splendid scenery which surrounds it is reflected,
with more even than its original beauty.
The lake of Como, as is well known, was
the favourite residence of Pliny; and a villa
on its shore bears the name of the Villa Pli-
niana ; but whether it is built on the scite of
the Roman philosopher's dwelling, has not
been ascertained. The immediate vicinity,
however, of the intermitting spring, which he
has so well described, makes it probable that
the ancient villa was at no great distance from
the modern one which bears its name. Eustace
has dwelt, with his usual eloquence, on the
interest which this circumstance gives to this
beautiful lake.
Towards its upper end, the lake of Como
assumes a different aspect from that by which
it is distinguished at its lower extremity. The
hills in the vicinity of Como, and as far to the
north as Menagio, are soft in their forms, and
being clothed to their summits with vineyards
and woods, they present rather a beautiful
than a sublime spectacle. But towards the
upper end the scene assumes a more savage
character. The chestnut woods and orange
groves no longer appear; the oak and the fir
cover the bold and precipitous banks which
hang over the lake ; and the snowy peaks of
the Bernhardin and Mount Splugen rise in
gloomy magnificence at the extremity of the
scene. On approaching Chiavenna, the broad
expanse of water dwindles into a narrow
stream ; the banks on either side approach so
near, as to give the scenery the appearance of
a mountain valley ; and the Alps, which close
it in, are clothed Vith forests of fir, or present
vast and savage precipices of rock. From
this point there is an easy passage over the
Bernhardin to the Rheinthal, and the interest-
ing country of the Grisons ; and the Val de
Misox, through which the road lea"ds, is one of
the most beautiful on the southern side of the
Alps, and particularly remarkable for the
magnificent castles with which its projecting
points are adorned.
ITALY.
157
The tour which is usually followed in the
Italian lakes, is to visit first the Lago Maggion',
and then drive to Como, and ascend to the
Villa Pliniana, or to Menagio, and return to
Como or Lecco. By following this course,
however, the La go Lugano is wholly omitted,
which is perhaps the most picturesque of all
the three. The better plan is to ascend from
Baveno, on the Lago Maggiore, to the upper
end of that lake ; and after exploring its varied
beauties, land at Luvino, and cross from thence
to Ponte Tresa, and there embark for Lugano,
from whence you reach Porlezza by water,
through the most magnificent part of the Lago
Lugano ; from thence cross to Menagio, on the
lake of Como, whence, as from a central
point, the traveller may ascend to Chiavenna,
or descend to Lecco or Como, as his time or
inclination may prescribe.
It is one most interesting characteristic of
the people who dwell on these beautiful lakes,
that they seem to be impressed with a genuine
and unaffected piety. The vast number of
churches placed in every village, and crown-
ing every eminence, is a proof of how much
has been done for the service of religion. But
it is a more interesting spectacle, to behold
the devotion with which the ordinances of
religion are observed in all these places of
worship. Numerous as the churches are, they
seem to be hardly able to contain the numbers
who frequent them; and it is no unusual
spectacle to behold crowds of both sexes
kneeling on the turf in the church-yard on
Sunday forenoon, who could not find room in
the church itself. There is something singu-
larly pleasing in such manifestation of simple
devotion. Whatever may be the diversity in
points of faith, which separate Christians from
each other, the appearance of sincere piety,
more especially in the poorer classes, is an
object of interest, and fitted to produce respect.
We are too apt to imagine, in England, that
real devotion is little felt in Catholic states ;
but whoever has travelled in the Alps, or
dwelt on the Italian Lakes, must be convinced
that this belief is without foundation. The
poor people who attend these churches, are in
general neatly, and even elegantly, dressed;
and the Scripture pieces which are placed
above the altar, rude as they may be, are dis-
tinguished by a beauty of expression, and a
grace of design, which proves in "the most
striking way how universally a taste for the
fine arts is diffused throughout the peasantry
of Italy. While gliding along the placid sur-
face of i these lakes, the traveller beholds with
delight the crowds of well-dressed people who
descend from the churches that are placed
along their shores ; and it is sometimes a most
interesting incident, amidst the assemblage of
forests and precipices which the scenery pre-
sents, to see the white dresses of the peasantry
winding down the almost perpendicular face
of the mountains, or emerging from the luxu-
riant forests with which their sides are clothed.
The climate in these lakes is delightful. The
vicinity of the mountain indeed attracts fre-
quent rains, which has rendered Como pro-
verbial in Lombardy for the wetness of its
climate ; but when the shower is over, the sky
reassumes its delicious blue, and the sun
shines with renovated splendour on the green
woods and orange groves which adorn the
mountain sides. Perhaps the remarkable and
beautiful greenness of the foliage, which cha-
racterizes the scenery of all these lakes, is
owing to the frequent showers which the
i height of the surrounding mountains occa-
| sions ; and if so, we owe to them one of the
! most singular and characteristic beauties by
J which they are distinguished.
ITALY comprises four great divisions: in
each of which the face of nature, the mode of
cultivation, and the condition of the people, is
very different from what it is in the others.
The first of these embraces the vast plain
which lies between the Alps and the Apen-
nines, and extends from Coni on the west to
the Adriatic on the east. It is bounded on the
south by the Apennines, which, branching off
from the Maritime Alps, run in a south-easterly
direction to the neighbourhood of Lorretto;
and on the north by the chain of the Alps,
which presents a continued face of precipices
from sea to sea. This rich and beautiful plain
is, with the exception of a few inconsiderable
hills, a perfect level; insomuch that for two
hundred miles there is not a single ascent to
be met with. Towards its western end, in the
plain of Piedmont, the soil is light and sandy;
but it becomes richer as you proceed to the
eastward, and from Lodi to Ferrara is com-
posed of the finest black mould. It is watered
by numberless streams, which descend from
the adjacent mountains, and roll their tributary
waters to the Po, and this supply of water,
joined to the unrivalled fertility of the soil,
renders this district the richest, in point of
agricultural produce, that exists in Europe.
An admirable system of cultivation has long
been established in this fertile plain ; and three
successive crops annually reward the labours
of the husbandman.
The second extends over all the declivities
of the. Apennines, from the frontiers of France
to the southern extremity of Calabria. This
immense region comprises above half of the
whole superficial extent of Italy, and main-
tains a very great proportion of its inhabitants".
It everywhere consists of swelling hills, rapid
descents, and narrow valleys, and yields spon-
taneously the choicest fruits. The olive, the
vine, the fig tree, the pomegranate, the sweet
chestnut, and all the fruits of northern climates,
flourish in the utmost luxuriance on the sunny
slopes of Tuscany and the Roman Spates ; while
in Naples and Calabria, in addition to these,
are to be found the orange tree, the citron, the
palm, and the fruits of tropical regions. The
higher parts of these mountains are covered
by magnificent forests of sweet chestnuts,
which yield subsistence to a numerous popu-
lation, at the height of many thousand feel
above the sea; while, at the summit, pastures
are to be found, similar to those of the Che-
viot Hills in Scotland.
The third region comprises the plains which
lie between the Apennines and the Mediterra-
nean, and extends from the neighbourhood of
Pisa to the mountains of Terracino. This dis-
trict, once covered by a numerous population,
O
158
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
and cultivated in the most careful manner, is
now almost a desert. It is the region of insa-
lubrious air; and no means have yet been
devised by which it is possible to enable the
human race to flourish under its pestilential
influence. After leaving the highest state of
civilization in Florence or Rome, the traveller
is astonished to find himself in the midst of
vast plains, over which numerous flocks of
cattle wander at large under the care of shep-
herds mounted on horseback, and armed after
the fashion of the steppes of Tartary. This
division includes under it all the plains which
lie between the Apennines and the Mediterra-
nean, in the Neapolitan territory, among which
the Maremma of Pestuni is most conspicuous ;
and nothing but the vast population of Naples
prevents its celebrated Campagna from relaps-
ing into the same desolate state.
The fourtn great division comprehends the
plains which lie to the eastward of the Apen-
nines, in the kingdom of Naples, and is bound-
ed by the Adriatic sea on the one side, and the
irregular line of the mountains on the other. It
is in some places from fifty to one hundred miles
broad, and in others the mountains approach
the sea-shore. The country is flat, or rises into
extensive downs, and is cultivated in large
farms, where it is under agricultural manage-
ment; but a great proportion is devoted entirely
to pasturage. Immense forests of olive are
to be met with in this remote district, and the
hills are covered with vines, and oranges, and
other fruits, with corn growing under them.
The only range of mountains which pro-
perly and exclusively belongs to Italy is the
Apennines ; and they extend over more than
half of the country. Their height is very va-
rious ; in the vicinity of Genoa they rise to
about 4500 feet; above Pontrimoli, on the
borders of Tuscany and Lombardy, they reach
5500 to 6000 feet, and the great ridge which
stretches from Bologna by Valombrosa, to the
south-east, rises in some places to between
6000 and 7000. They are not, in general, very-
rocky ; at least it is only in their higher emi-
nences that this character appears. Their
lower parts, everywhere almost, are covered
with fruit trees, under the shade of which, in
the southern exposures, crops of grain are
brought to maturity. Higher up, the sweet
chestnut covers the ascent, and supports an
immense population at an elevation above the
sea where no food for man could be procured
in our climate. The pine, the beech, and the
fir, occupy those higher regions in which are
Valombrosa, Lavernia, and Camaldoli ; and at
the summits of all, the open dry pastures fur-
nish subsistence to numerous flocks. This
great capability of the Apennines to yield food
for the use of man, is the cause of the extraor-
dinary populousness of its slopes. In the
remotest recesses the traveller discovers vil-
lages and towns ; and on the face of mountains
where the eye at a distance can discern nothing
but wood, he finds, on a nearer approach, every
spot of ground carefully cultivated. The vil-
lages and towns are commonly situated on the
summits of eminences, and frequently sur-
rounded by walls and tqwers ; a practice which
began in the turbulent periods of the Italian re-
publics, and has been since continued from
the dread of malaria in the bottom of the val-
leys. It adds greatly to the picturesque effect
of the mountain scenery, and gives it a cha-
racter altogether peculiar. In the Tuscan
states, the lower ranges of the Apennines have
been the object of the utmost care, and of an
almost inconceivable expenditure of capital.
They are regularly cut in terraces, and when-
ever an opportunity occurs, water is brought
from the adjoining canals to every field, so
that the whole valley is as it were covered
with a network of small streams, which convey
their freshness all around. The olives and
figs which flourish in this delightful region are
foreign to the Tuscan soil ; there is not a tree
there which is the spontaneous production of
nature; they are all planted and pruned by the
hand of man.
Nothing can be imagined more sterile in
itself, or more adverse to any agricultural im-
provement, than the aspect of nature in the
Apennines. Their sides present a series of
broken rocks, barren slopes, or arid cliffs.
The roots of the bushes, laid bare by the au-
tumnal rains, are, by degrees, dried up by the
heat of the sun. They perish, and leave nothing
behind them but a few odoriferous shrubs dis-
persed on the rocks to cover the wreck. The
narrow ravines between them present, in
summer, only the dry beds of torrents, in
which fallen trees, rocks, and gravel, are
accumulated by the violence of the winter
rains. This debris is brought down by the
torrents into the wider valleys, and whole tracts
of country are desolated by a sterile mass of
stone and gravel. Thus the mountains and
the valleys at their feet seem equally incapa-
ble of culture; but the industry of the Italians
has overcome these obstacles, and converted
mountains, to appearance the most sterile that
imagination could conceive, into a succession
of gardens, in which every thing that is most
delightful, as well as useful, is assembled.
This astonishing metamorphosis has been
effected by the introduction of the terrace sys-
tem of culture, an improvement which seems
to have been unknown to the ancient Romans,
and to have spread in Europe with the return
of the Crusaders in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. (Chateauvieux, 300.) Nothing could
oppose the destructive force of the torrents, but
altering the surface of the hills, and thereby
breaking the course of the waters. This was
an immense work, for it required the whole
soil to be displaced, and built up by means of
artificial walls into successive terraces; and
this in many places could be effected only by
breaking solid rocks, and bringing a new soil
from distant places.
The artificial land, so dearly purchased, is
designed for the cultivation of fruits and vege-
tables. The terraces are always covered with
fruit-trees placed in a reflected sun. Amidst
the reverberations of so many walls, the fruit
is most abundant and superior in its kind.
! No room is lost in these limited situations,
: the vine extends its branches along the walls;
I a hedge formed of the same vine branches
surrounds each terrace, and covers it with
verdure. In the corners formed by the meeting
ITALY.
159
of the supporting walls, fig-trees are planted
to vegetate under their protection. The owner
takes advantage of every vacant space left be-
tween the olive-trees to raise melons and vege-
tables ; so that he obtains on a very limited ex-
tent, olive, grapes, pomegranates, and melons.
So great is the produce of this culture that,
under good management, half the crop of seven
acres is sufficient for a family of five persons :
being little more than the produce of three-
fourths of an acre to each soul. This little
space is often divided into more than twenty
terraces.
A great part of the mountainous part of
Italy has adopted this admirable culture : and
this accounts for the great population which
everywhere inhabit the Italian mountains, and
explains the singular fact, that, in scenes
where nothing but continued foliage meets the
eye, the traveller finds, on a nearer approach,
villages and hamlets, and all the signs of a
numerous peasantry.
Continued vigilance is requisite to maintain
these works. If the attention of the husband-
man is intermitted for any considerable time,
the violence of the rains destroys what it had
cost so much labour to create. Storms and
torrents wash down the soil, and the terraces
are broken through or overwhelmed by the
rubbish, which is brought down from the
higher parts of the mountain. Every thing
returns rapidly to its former state ; the vigour
of southern vegetation covers the ruins of
human industry: and there soon remains only
shapeless vestiges covered by briers.
The system of irrigation in the valley of the
Arno is a most extraordinary monument of
human industry. Placed between two ridges
of mountains, one of them very elevated, it was
periodically devastated by numerous torrents,
which were precipitated from the mountains,
charged with stone and rubbish. To control
these destructive inundations, means were
contrived to confine the course of the torrents
within strong walls, which serve, at the same
time for the formation of a great number of
canals. At regular distances, openings are
formed below the mean level of the stream,
that the water may run out laterally, overflow
the land, and remain on it long enough to
deposit the mud with which it is charged. A
great many canals, by successive outlets of the
water, divide the principal current and check
its rapidity. These canals are infinitely sub-
divided, and to such a degree, that there is not
a single square of land, which is not sur-
rounded by them. They are all lined with
walls, built with square bricks; the scarcity
of water rendering the most vigilant economy
of it necessary. A number of small bridges
connect the multitude of little islands, into
which these canals subdivide the country.
These works are still kept in good repair; but
the whole wealth of Tuscany could not now
furnish the sums requisite for their construc-
tion. That was done by Florence in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in the days
of her republican freedom.
The third agricultural division of Italy, is
the Maremma, or the plains on the sea-shore
in Tuscany, and the Roman States, where the
prevalence of the malaria renders it impossible
to live permanently. This region is every-
where divided into great estates, and let in
large farms. The Maremma of Rome, forty
leagues in length and from ten to fifteen in
breadth, and which feeds annually 67,000
horned cattle, is cultivated by only eighty farm-
ers. These farmers live in Rome or Sienna,
for the unhealthiness of the atmosphere pre-
cludes the possibility of their dwelling on the
lands they cultivate. Each farm has on it
only a single house, which rises in the midst
of desolation. No garden, or orchards, or
meadows, announce the vicinity of a human
habitation. It stands alone in the midst of a
vast solitude, with the cattle pasturing up to
the walls of the dwelling.
The whole wealth of these great farms con-
sists in their cattle. The farm servants are
comparatively few, and they are constantly
on horseback. Armed with a gun and a lance,
the shepherds, as in the wilds of Tartary, are
constantly in the open air tending the herds
committed to their care. They receive no
fixed wages, but are paid in cattle, which graze
with the herds of their masters. The mildness of
the climate permits the grass to grow during all
the winter, and so the flocks are maintained there
in that season. In summer, as the excessive heat
renders the pastures parched and scanty, the
flocks are sent to the highest ridges of the Apen-
nines in quest of cool air and fresh herbage.
The oxen, however, and cows of the Hungarian
breed, are able both to bear the heat of sum-
mer, and to find food during its continuance in
the Maremma. They remain, therefore, during
all the year; and the shepherds who tend them
continue exposed to the pestilential air during
the autumnal months. The woods are stocked
with swine, and the marshes with buffaloes.
So great is the quantity of the live-stock on.
these immense farms, that on one visited by
Mr. Chateauvieux were cattle to the value of
16,000/. sterling, and the farmer had two other
farms on which the stocking was of equal
value.
In the Terra di Lavoro, or Campagna of Na-
ples, the extreme richness of the soil has given
rise to a mode of culture different from any
which has yet been described. The aspect of
this great plain is, perhaps, the most striking
in point of agricultural riches that exists in the
world. The great heat of the sun renders it
necessary that the grain should be shaded by
trees ; arid accordingly the whole country is
intersected by rows of elms or willows, which
divide it into small portions of half or three
quarters of an acre each. A vine is planted
at the foot of every tree ; and such is the
luxuriance of vegetation, that it not only rises
in a few years to the very summit, but extends
its branches in a lateral direction, so as to
admit of festoons being trained from one tree
to another. These trees are not pollarded as
in Tuscany and Lombardy, but allowed to
grow to their full height, so that it is not
unusual to see a vine clustering around the
top of a poplar sixty or eighty feet high.
Under their shade the soil produces annually
a double crop, one of which is of wheat or
maize. Melons are cultivated in great quanti-
160
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
ties, and with hardly any manure. Thickets i charming perfumes over the adjoining country;
of fig-trees, of peaches, and aloes, grow spon- ' while the rocky eminences are covered with
taneously on the borders of the fields. Groves vines, which produce fruits of the most deli-
of orange clothe the slopes, and spread their | cious flavour.
SCOTT, CAMPBELL, AND BYRON.*
WE have listened with admiration to the
eloquent strains in which the first in rank-j-
and the first in genius^ have proposed the
memory of the immortal bard whose genius
we are this day assembled to celebrate; but I
know not whether the toast which I have now
to propose has not equal claims to our enthu-
siasm. Your kindness and that of the com-
mittee has intrusted to me the memory of three
illustrious men the far-famed successors of
Burns, who have drank deep at the fountains
of his genius, and proved themselves the worthy
inheritors of his inspiration. And Scotland,
I rejoice to say, can claim them all as her
own. For if the Tweed has been immortalized
by the grave of Scott, the Clyde can boast the
birthplace of Campbell, and the mountains
of the Dee first inspired the muse of Byron.
I rejoice at that burst of patriotic feeling ; I
hail it as the presage, that as Ayrshire has
raised a fitting monument to Burns, and Edin-
burgh has erected a fitting structure to the
author of Waverley, so Glasgow will, ere long,
raise a worthy monument to the bard whose
name will never die while hope pours its balm
through the human heart ; and Aberdeen will,
worthily, commemorate the far-famed tra-
veller who first inhaled the inspiration of na-
ture amidst the clouds of Loch-na-Gar, and
afterwards poured the light of his genius over
those lands of the sun, where his descending
orb sets
" Not as in northern climes obscurely bright,
But one unclouded blaze of living light."
Scotland, my lord, may well be proud of hav-
ing given birth to, or awakened the genius of
such men; but she can no longer call these
exclusively her own their names have be-
come household words in every land. Man-
kind claims them as the common inheritance
of the human race. Look around us, and we
shall see on every side decisive proof how
far and wide admiration for their genius has
sunk into the hearts of men. What is it that
attracts strangers from every part of the world,
into this distant land, and has more than com-
pensated for a remote situation and a churlish
soil, and given to our own northern isle a
splendour unknown to the regions of the sun?
What is it which has brought together this
mighty assemblage, and united the ardent
* Speech delivered at the Burns Festival, on 6th Au-
gust, 1844, on proposing the memory of Scott, Campbell,
and Byron.
t Earl of Eglinton, who presided.
t Professor Wilson.
and the generous from every part of the world,
from the Ural mountains to the banks of the
Mississippi, on the shores of an island in the
Atlantic 1 My lord, it is neither the magni-
ficence of our cities, nor the beauty of our
valleys, the animation of our harbours, nor
the stillness of our mountains: it is neither
our sounding cataracts nor our spreading
lakes : neither the wilds of nature we have
subdued so strenuously, nor the blue hills we
have loved so well. These beauties, great as
they are, have been equalled in other lands ;
these marvels, wondrous though they be, have
parallels in other climes. It is the genius of
her sons which have given Scotland her proud
pre-eminence ; this it is, more even than the
shades of Bruce, of Wallace, and of Mary,
which has rendered her scenes classic ground
to the whole civilized world, and now brings
pilgrims from the most distant parts of the
earth, as on this day, to worship at the shrine
of genius.
Yet Albyn ! yet the praise be thine,
Thy scenes with story to combine ;
Thou bid'st him who by Roslin strays,
List to the tale of other days.
Midst Cartlane crags thou showest the cave,
The refuge of thy champion brave ;
Giving each rock a storied tale,
Pouring a lay through every dale ;
Knitting, as with a moral band,
Thy story to thy native land ;
Combining thus the interest high,
Which genius lends to beauty's eye!
But the poet who conceived these beautiful
lines, has done more than all our ancestors'
valour to immortalize the land of his birth ;
for he has united the interest of truth with the
charms of fiction, and peopled the realm not
only with the shadows of time, but the crea-
tions of genius. In those brilliant creations,
as in the glassy wave, we behold mirrored the
lights, the shadows, the forms of reality; and
yet
So pure, so fair, the mirror gave,
As if there lay beneath the wave,
Secure from trouble, toil, and care,
A world than earthly world more fair.
Years have rolled on, but they have taken no-
thing, they have added much, to the fame of
those illustrious men.
Time but the impression deeper makes,
As streams their channels deeper wear.
The voice of ages has spoken : it has given
Campbell and Byron the highest place, with
Burns, in lyric poetry, and destined Scott
To rival all but Shakgpeare's name below.
Their names now shine in unapproachable
splendour, far removed, like the fixed stars,
SCOTT, CAMPBELL, AND
from the clouds and the rivalry of a lower
world. To the end of time, they will maintain
their exalted station. Never will the culti-
vated traveller traverse the sea of the Archipe-
lago, that "The isles of Greece, the isles of
Greece," will not recur to his recollection ;
never will he approach the shores of Loch
Katrine, that the image of Ellen Douglas will
not be present to his memory ; never will he
gaze on the cliffs of Britain, that he will not
thrill at the exploits of the "mariners of Eng-
land, who guard our native seas." Whence
has arisen this great, this universally acknow-
ledged celebrity 1 My lord, it is hard to say
whether we have most to admire the brilliancy
of their fancy, or the creations of their genius,
the beauty of their verses, or the magic of
their language, the elevation of their thoughts,
or the pathos of their conceptions. Yet can
each boast a separate grace ; and their age
has witnessed in every walk the genius of
poetry elevated to its highest strain. In Scott
it is variety of conception, truth and fidelity
of delineation in character, graphic details of
the olden time, which is chiefly to be admired.
Who can read without transport his glowing
descriptions of the age of chivalry ? Its massy
castles and gloomy vaults, its haughty nobles
and beauteous dames, its gorgeous pageantry
and prancing steeds, stand forth under his
magic pencil with all the colours and bril-
liancy of reality. We are present at the shock
of armies, we hear the shouts of mortal com-
batants, we see the flames of burning castles,
we weep in the dungeon of captive innocence.
Yet who has so well and truly delineated the
less obtrusive but not less impressive scenes
of humble life? Who has so faithfully por-
trayed the virtues of the cottage ; who has done
so much to elevate human nature, by exhibiting
its dignity even in the abyss of misfortune;
who has felt so truly and told so well "the
might that slumbers in a peasant's arm 1" In
Byron it is the fierce contest of the passions,
the yearning of a soul longing for the stern
realities of life, amidst the seduction of its
frivolity; the brilliant conceptions of a mind
fraught with the imagery and recollections of
the east, which chiefly captivates every mind.
His pencil is literally "dipt in the orient hues
" He transports us to enchanted
161
of heaven.
ground, wherdlthe^cenes which speak most
powerfully to "Mj^-l! of man are brought
successively before our eyes. The east, with
its deathless scenes and cloudless skies; its
wooded steeps and mouldering fanes, its glassy
seas and lovely vales, rises up like magic be-
fore us. The haughty and yet impassioned
Turk; the crouching but still gifted Greek;
the wandering Arab, the cruel Tartar, the fa-
natic Moslem, stand before us like livingbeings,
they are clothed with flesh and blood. But
there is one whose recent death we all deplore,
but who has lighted " the torch of Hope at na-
ture's funeral pile," v/ho has evinced a yet
higher inspiration. In Campbell, it is the mo-
ral purposes to which he has directed his
mighty powers, which is the real secret of his
success; the lofty objects to which he has de-
voted his life, which have proved his passport
to immortality. To whatever quarter he has
turned his mind, we behold the working of the
same elevated spirit. Whether he paints the
disastrous day, when,
Oh bloodiest picture in the book of Time,
Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime ;
or portrays with generous ardour the ima-
ginary paradise on Susquehanna's shore,
where
The world was pad, the garden was a wild,
And man, the hermit, sighed till woman smiled ;
or transports us to that awful time when Chris-
tian faith remains unshaken amidst the disso-
lution of nature,
And ships are drifting with their dead,
To shores where all is dumb,
we discern the same mind, seeing every ob-
ject through its own sublime and lofty vision.
Thence has arisen his deathless name. It is
because he has unceasingly contended for the
best interests of humanity; because he has
ever asserted the dignity of a human soul ; be-
cause he has never forgotten that amidst all
the distinctions of time
" The rank is hut the guinea stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that ;"
because he has regarded himself as the high-
priest of nature, and the world which we in-
habit as the abode not merely of human cares
and human joys, but as the temple of the liv-
ing God, in which praise is due, and where
service is to be performed.
21
o2
162
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
SCHOOLS OF DESIGN/
WE stand in this community in a very
peculiar situation, and which loudly calls for
immediate attention of all interested in their
country's greatness. We have reached the very
highest point of commercial greatness. Such
has been the growth of our mechanical power,
such the marvels of our commercial enter-
prise ! But, when we turn to the station we oc-
cupy in the arts of design, in these very arts
in which, as a manufacturing community, we
are so deeply interested, we see a very different
spectacle. We see foreigners daily flocking
from all parts of the world to the shores of the
Clyde or the Mersey, to study our railways,
and our canals; to copy our machinery, to
take models of our steam-vessels but we see
none coming to imitate our designs. On the
contrary, we, who take the lead of all the world
in mechanical invention, in the powers of art,
are obliged to follow them in the designs to
which these powers are to be applied. Gentle-
men, this should not be. We have now arrived
at that period of manufacturing progress, when
we must take the lead in design, or we shall
cease to have orders for performance we
must be the first in conception, or we will be
the last in execution. To others, the Fine Arts
may be a matter of gratification or ornament;
to a manufacturing community it is one of
life or death. We may, however, be encou-
raged to hope that we may yet and ere long
attain to eminence in the Fine Arts, from ob-
serving how uniformly in past times com-
mercial greatness has co-existed with purity
of taste and the development of genius ; in so
much that it is hard to say whether art has
owed most to the wealth of commerce, or com-
merce to the perfection of art. Was it not
the wealth of inland commerce which, even in
the deserts of Asia, reared up that great com-
monwealth, which once, under the guidance
of Zenobia, bade defiance to the armies of
imperial Rome, and the ruins of which, at
Tadmor and Palmyra, still attract the admira-
tion of the traveller? Was it not the wealth
of maritime commerce which, on the shores
of the JEgean sea, raised that great republic
which achieved a dominion over the minds of
men more durable than that which had been
reared by the legions of Caesar, or the phalanx
of Alexander? Was it not the manufactures
of Tuscany which gave birth at Florence to
that immortal school of painting, the works
of which still attract the civilized world to the
shores of the Arno? The velvets of Genoa, the
jewelry of Venice, long maintained their as-
cendency after the political importance of
these republics had declined ; and the school
of design established sixty years ago at Lyons
has enabled its silk manufactures to preserve
the lead in Europe despite the carnage of the
Convention, and the wars of Napoleon. In
* Speech delivered on Nov. 2S, 1843. in proposing the
establishment of a School of Design in Glasgow.
Flanders and Holland the wealth and enter-
prise of commerce, notwithstanding the dis-
advantages of a level soil, a cloudy atmosphere,
and a humid climate, have produced the im-
mortal works of Rubens, Vandyke, and Rem-
brandt. Why should a similar result not take
place here ? "Arrived at the summit of manu-
facturing greatness, why should we be second
to any in the arts of design ? Have they pos-
sessed advantages which we do not enjoy ?
Had they finer cataracts than the Falls of the
Clyde, or glens more romantic than Cartland
Crags had they nobler oaks than those of
Cadzow, or ruins more imposing than those
of Bothwell had they galleries finer than the
halls of Hamilton, or lakes more lovely than
Loch Lomond, or mountains more sublime
than those of Arran? Gentlemen, within two
hours' journey from Glasgow are to be found
combined
" Whate'er Lorrain hath touched with softening hue,
Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew."
The wealth is here, the enterprise is here,
the materials are here ; nothing is wanting
but the hand of genius to cast these precious
elements into the mould of beauty the lofty
spirit, the high aspirations which, aiming at
greatness, never fail to attain it. Are we to
be told that we cannot do these things; that
like the Russians we can imitate but cannot
conceive ? It is not in the nation of Smith
and of Watt, it is not in the land of Burns
and Scott, it is not in the country of Shak-
speare and Milton, it is not in the empire of
Reynolds and Wren, that we can give any
weight to that argument. Nor is it easy
to believe that the same genius which has
drawn in such enchanting colours the lights
and shadows of Scottish life, might not, if
otherwise directed, have depicted, with equal
felicity, the lights and shadows of Scottish
scenery. We have spoken of our interests,
we have spoken of our capabilities, we have
spoken of what other nations have done ; but
there are greater things done than these. No
one indeed can doubt that it is in the moral arid
religious feelings of the people, that the broad
and deep foundations of national prosperity
can alone be laid, and that every attempt to
attain durable greatness on any other basis
will prove nugatory. But we are not only
moral and intellectual, we are active agents.
We long after gratification we thirst for en-
joyment ; and the experienced observer of
man will not despise the subsidiary, but still
important aid to be derived in the great work
of moral elevation, from a due direction of the
active propensities. And he is not the least
friend to his species, who, in an age peculiar-
ly vehement in desire, discovers gratifications
which do not corrupt enjoyments which do
not degrade. But if this is true of enjoyments
simply innocent, what shall we say of those
i which refine, which not only do not lead to
LAMARTINE.
163
vice, but exalt to virtue? which open to the i longer be delayed. Our wealth is so great, it
peasant, equally with the prince, that pure has come on ns so suddenly, it will corrupt if
gratification which arises to all alike from the
contemplation of the grand and the beautiful
in Art and in Nature 1 We have now reached
that point where such an election can no
it does not refine; if not directed to the arts
which raised Athens to immortality, it will
sink us to those which hurled Babylon to per-
dition.
LAMARTINE.*
IT is remarkable, that although England is
the country in the world which has sent forth
the greatest number of ardent and intrepid
travellers to explore the distant parts of the
earth, yet it can by no means furnish an array
of writers of travels which will bear a compa-
rison with those whom France can boast. In
skilful navigation, daring adventure, and heroic
perseverance, indeed, the country of Cook and
Davis, of Bruce and Park, of Mackenzie and
Buckingham, of Burckhardt and Byron, of Par-
ry and Franklin, may well claim the pre-emi-
nence of all others in the world. An English-
man first circumnavigated the globe ; an
Englishman alone has seen the fountains of
the Nile ; and, five years after the ardent spi-
rit of Columbus had led his fearful crews
across the Atlantic, Sebastian Cabot dis-
covered the shores of Newfoundland, and
planted the British standard in the regions
destined to be peopled with the overflowing
multitudes of the Anglo-Saxon race.
But if we come to the literary works which
have followed these ardent and energetic ef-
forts, and which are destined to perpetuate
their memory to future times the interesting
discoveries which have so much extended our
knowledge and enlarged our resources the
contemplation is by no means, to an inhabitant
of these islands, equally satisfactory. The
British traveller is essentially a man of en-
ergy and action, but rarely of contemplation
or eloquence. He is seldom possessed of the
scientific acquirements requisite to turn to the
best account the vast stores of new and original
information which are placed within his reach.
He often observes and collects facts ; but it is
as a practical man, or for professional pur-
poses, rather than as a philosopher. The ge r
nius of the Anglo-Saxon race bold, sagacious,
and enterprising, rather than contemplative
and scientific nowhere appears more strongly
than in the accounts of the numerous and in-
trepid travellers whom they are continually
sending forth into every part of the earth. We
admire their vigou r, we a re moved by their hard-
ships, we are enriched by their discoveries ;
but if we turn to our libraries for works to con-
vey to future ages an adequate and interesting
account of these fascinating adventures, we
shall, in general, experience nothing but dis-
appointment. Few of them are written with
the practised hand, the graphic eye, necessary
to convey vivid pictures to future times;
* Blackwood'B Magazine, Nov. 1844.
and though numerous and valuable books of
I travels, as works of reference, load the shelves
of our libraries, there are surprisingly few
which are fitted, from the. interest and vivacity
of the style in which they are written, to pos-
sess permanent attractions for mankind.
One great cause of this remarkable peculi-
arity is without doubt to be found in the widely
different education of the students in our uni-
versities, arid our practical men. In the for-
mer, classical attainments are in literature the
chief, if not exclusive, objects of ambition ;
and in consequence, the young aspirants for
fame, who issue from these learned retreats,
have their minds filled with the charms and
associations of antiquity, to the almost entire
j exclusion of objects of present interest and im-
portance. The vigorous practical men, again,
who are propelled by the enterprise and exer-
tions of our commercial towns, are sagacious
and valuable observers; but they have seldom
the cultivated minds, pictorial eye, or powers
of description, requisite to convey vivid or in-
teresting impressions to others. Thus our
scholars give us little more than treatises on
inscriptions, and disquisitions on the sites of
ancient towns; while the accounts of our ac-
tive men are chiefly occupied with commercial
inquiries, or subjects connected with trade and
navigation. The cultivated and enlightened tra-
veller, whose mind is alike open to the charm
of ancient story and the interest of modern
achievement who is classical without being
pedantic, graphic and yet faithful, enthusiastic
and yet accurate, discursive and at the same
time imaginative, is almost unknown amongst
us. It will continue to be so as long as edu-
cation in our universities is exclusively devot-
ed to Greek and Latin verses, or the higher ma-
thematics; and in academies, to book-keeping
and the rule of three ; while so broad and sul-
len a line as heretofore is drawn between the
studies of our scholars and the pursuits of our
practical citizens. To travel to good purpose,
requires a mind stored with much and varied
information, in science, statistics, geography,
literature, history, and poetry. To describe
what the traveller has seen, requires, in addi-
tion to this, the eye of a painter, the soul of a
poet, and the hand of a practised composer. Pro-
bably it will be deemed no easy matter to find
such a combination in any country or in any
age ; and most certainly the system of education,
neither at our learned universities nor our com-
mercial academies, is fitted to produce it.
It is from inattention to the vast store of
164
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
previous information requisite to make an ac-
complished traveller, and still more a writer
of interesting travels, that failures in this
branch of literature are so glaring and so fre-
quent. In other departments of knowledge,
a certain degree of information is felt to be
requisite before a man can presume to write
a book. He cannot produce a treatise on ma-
thematics without knowing at least Euclid,
nor a work on history without having read
Hume, nor on political economy without
having acquired a smattering of Adam Smith.
But in regard to travels, no previous informa-
tion is thought to be requisite. If the person
who sets out on a tour has only money in his
pocket, and health to get to his journey's end, he
is deemed sufficiently qualified to come out
with his two or three post octavos. If he is
an Honourable, or known at Almack's, so much
the better ; that will ensure the sale of the first
edition. If he can do nothing else, he can at
least tell the dishes which he got to dinner at
the inns, and the hotels where comfortable
beds are to be found. This valuable informa-
tion, interspersed with a few descriptions of
scenes, copied from guide-books, and anecdotes
picked up at tablea-d'hofe or on board steam-
boats, constitute the stock in trade of many an
adventurer who embarks in the speculation
of paying by publication the expenses of his
travels. We have no individuals in view in
these remarks; we speak of things in general,
as they are, or rather have been ; for we be-
lieve these ephemeral travels, like other ephe-
merals, have had their day, and are fast dying
out. The market has become so glutted with
them that they are, in a great many instances,
unsaleable.
The classical travellers of England, from
Addison to Eustace and Clarke, constitute an
important and valuable body of writers in this
branch of literature, infinitely superior to the
fashionable tours which rise up and disappear
like bubbles on the surface of society. It is
impossible to read these elegant productions
without feeling the mind overspread with the
charm which arises from the exquisite remains
and heart-stirring associations with which they
are filled. But their interest is almost exclu-
sively classical ; they are invaluable to the ac-
complished scholar, but they speak in an un-
known tongue to the great mass of men. They
see nature only through the medium of anti-
quity ; beautiful in their allusion to Greek or
Roman remains, eloquent in the descriptions
of scenes alluded to in the classical writers,
they have dwelt little on the simple scenes of
the unhistoric world. 'To the great moral and
social questions which now agitate society, and
so strongly move the hearts of the great body
of men, they are entire strangers. Their works
are the elegant companions of the scholar or
the antiquary, not the heart-stirring friends of
the cottage on the fireside.
Inferior to Britain in the energy and achieve-
ments of the travellers whom she has sent
forth, and beyond measure beneath her in the
amount of the addition she has made to geo-
graphical science, France is yet greatly supe-
rior, at least of late years, in the literary and
scientific attainments of the wanderers whose
works have been given to the world. Four
among these stand pre-eminent, whose works,
in very different styles, are at the head of Eu-
ropeon literature in this interesting department
Humboldt, Chateaubriand, Michaud, and La-
martine. Their styles are so various, and the
impressions produced by reading them so dis-
tinct, that it is difficult to believe that they have
arisen in the same nation and age of the world.
Humboldt is, in many respects, and perhaps
upon the \vbole, at the head of the list; and to
his profound and varied works we hope to be
able to devote a future paper. He unites, in
a degree that perhaps has never before been
witnessed, the most various qualities, and
which, from the opposite characters of mind
which they require, are rarely found in unison.
A profound philosopher, an accurate observer
of nature, an unwearied statist, he is at the
same time an eloquent writer, an incompara-
ble describer, and an ardent friend of social
improvement. Science owes to his indefati-
gable industry many of her most valuable ac-
quisitions : geography, to his intrepid perse-
verance, many of its most important discove-
ries ; the arts, to his poetic eye and fervid elo-
quence, many of their brightest pictures. He
unites the austere grandeur of the exact
sciences to the bewitching charm of the fine
arts. It is this very combination which pre-
vents his works from being generally popular.
The riches of his knowledge, the magnitude
of his contributions to scientific discovery,
the fervour of his descriptions of nature, al-
ternately awaken our admiration and excite
our surprise; but they oppress the mind. To
be rightly apprehended, they require a reader
in some degree familiar with all these subjects ;
and how many of these are to be met with ?
The man who takes an interest in his scienti-
fic observations will seldom be transported by
his pictures of scenery; the social observer,
who extracts the rich collection of facts which
he has accumulated regarding the people whom
he visited, will be indifferent to his geographi-
cal discoveries. There are few Humboldts
either in the reading or thinking world.
Chateaubriand is a traveller of a wholly
different character. He lived entirely in anti-
quity; but it is not the antiquity of Greece
and Rome which has alone fixed his regards,
as it has done those of Clarke and Eustace it is
the recollections of chivalry, the devout spirit
of the pilgrim, which chiefly warmed his ar-
dent imagination. He is universally allowed
by Frenchmen of all parties to be their first
writer; and it maybe conceived what brilliant
works an author of such powers, and emi-
nently gifted both with the soul of a poet and
the eye of a painter, must have produced in
describing the historic scenes to which his
pilgrimages extended. He went to Greece and
the Holy Land with a mind devout rather than
enlightened, credulous rather than inquisitive.
Thirsting for strong emotions, he would be
satisfied; teeming with the recollections and
visions of the past, he traversed the places
hallowed by his early affections with the fond-
ness of a lover who returns to the home of
his bliss, of a mature man who revisits the
scenes of his infancy. He cared not to inquire
LAMARTINE.
105
what was true or what was legendary in these
time-hallowed traditions ; he gladly accepted
them as they stood, and studiously averted all
inquiry into the foundation on which they
rested. He wandered over the Peloponnesus
or Judea with the fond ardour of an English
scholar who seeks in the Palatine Mount the
traces of Virgil's enchanting description of
the hut of Evander, and rejects as sacrilege
every attempt to shake his faith.
" When Science from Creation's face
Enchantment's visions draws.
What lovely visions yield their place
To cold material law - : "
Even in the woods of America, the same rul-
ing passion was evinced. In those pathless
solitudes, where no human foot had ever trod
but that of the wandering savage, and the
majesty of nature appeared in undisturbed
repose, his thoughts were still of the Old
World. It was on the historic lands that his
heart was set. A man himself, he dwelt on
the scenes which had been signalized by the
deeds, the sufferings, the glories of man.
Michaud's mind is akin to that of Chateau-
briand, and yet different in many important
particulars. The learned and indefatigable
historian of the Crusades, he has traversed
the shores of the Mediterranean the scene,
as Dr. Johnson observed, of all that can ever
interest man his religion, his knowledge, his
arts with the ardent desire to imprint on his
mind the scenes and images which met the
eyes of the holy warriors. He seeks to trans-
port us to the days of Godfrey of Bouillon and
Raymond of Toulouse; he thirsts with the
Christian host at Dorislaus, he shares in its
anxieties at the siejre of Antioch, he partici-
pates in its exultation at the storming of Jeru-
salem. The scenes visited by the vast multi-
tude of warriors who, during two hundred
years, were precipitated from Europe on Asia,
have almost all been visited by him, and de-
scribed with the accuracy of an antiquary and
the enthusiasm of a poet. With the old chro-
nicles in his hand, he treads with veneration
the scenes of former generous sacrifice and
heroic achievements, and the vast and massy
structures erected on either side during those
terrible wars when, for centuries, Europe
strove hand to hand with Asia most of which
have undergone very little alteration, enable
him to describe them almost exactly as they
appeared to the holy warriors. The interest
of his pilgrimage in the east, accordingly, is
peculiar, but very great ; it is not so much a
book of travels as a moving chronicle ; but,
like Sir W. Scott's Minstrelsy *f ihePordcrt t iiis
a chronicle clothed in a very different garb from
the homely dress of the olden time. It trans-
ports us back, not only in time but in idea, six
hundred years; but it does so with the grace
of modern times it clothes the profound feel-
ings, the generous sacrifices, the forgetfulness
of self of the twelfth century, with the poetic
mind, the cultivated taste, the refined imagery
of the nineteenth.
La ma nine has traversed the same scenes
with Chateaubriand and Midland, and yet he
has done so in a different spirit; and the
character of his work is essentially different
from either. He has not the devout credulity
of the first, nor the antiquarian zeal and know-
ledge of the last; but he is superior to either
in the description of nature, and the painting
vivid and interesting scenes on the mind of
the reader. His work is a moving panorama,
in which the historic scenes and azure skies,
and placid seas, and glowing sunsets, of the
east, are portrayed in all their native bril-
liancy, and in richer even than their native
colours. His mind is stored with the associa-
tions and the ideas of antiquity, and he has
thrown over his descriptions of the scenes of
Greece, or Holy Writ, all the charms of such
recollections; but he has done so in a more
general and catholic spirit than either of his
predecessors. He embarked for the Holy
Land shortly before the revolution of 1830;
and his thoughts, amidst all the associations
of antiquity, constantly reverted to the land
of his fathers its distractions, its woes, its
ceaseless turmoil, its gloomy social prospects.
Thus with all his vivid imagination and unri-
valled powers of description, the turn of his
mind is essentially contemplative. He looks
on the past as an emblem of the present; he
sees, in the fall of Tyre, and Athens, and Jeru-
salem, the fate which one day awaits his own
country ; and mourns less the decay of human
things, than the popular passions and national
sins which have brought that instability in
close proximity to his own times. This sen-
sitive and foreboding disposition was much
increased by the death of his daughter a
charming child of fourteen, the companion of
his wanderings, the depositary of his thoughts,
the darling of his affections who was snatched
away in the spring of life, when in health and
joy, by one of the malignant fevers incidental
to the pestilential plains of the east
Though Lamartine's travels are continuous,
he does not, like most other wanderers, fur-
I nish us with a journal of every day's proceed-
ings. He was too well aware that many,
{ perhaps most, days on a journey are monoto-
nous or uninteresting; and that great part
of the details of a traveller's progress are
wholly unworthy of being recorded, because
they are neither amusing, elevating, nor in-
structive. He paints, now and then, with all
the force of his magical pencil, the more bril-
liant or characteristic scenes which he visited,
and intersperses them with reflections, moral
and social ; such as would naturally be aroused
in a sensitive mind by the sight of the ruins
of ancient, and the contemplation of the decay
of modern, times.
He embarked at Marseilles, with Madame
Lamartine and his little daughter Julia, on the
10th of July, 1830. The following is the pic-
ture of the yearnings of his mind on leaving
his native land; and they convey a faithful
image of his intellectual temperament:
'I feel it deeply: I am one only of those
i men, without a distinctive character, of a
transitory and fading epoch, whose sighs have
1 found an echo only because the echo was
more poetical than the poet. I belong to
another age by my desires : I feel in myself
another man: the immense and boundless
horizon of philosophy, at once profound, re-
166
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
ligious, and poetical, has opened to my view;
but the punishment of a wasted youth over-
took me ; it soon faded from my sight. Adieu,
then, to the dreams of genius, to the aspira-
tions of intellectual enjoyment! It is too late:
I have not physical strength to accomplish
any thing great. I will sketch some scenes
I will murmur some strains; and that is all.
Yet if God would grant my prayers, here is
the object for which I would petition a poem,
such as my heart desires, and his greatness
deserves ! a faithful, breathing image of his
creation : of the boundless world, visible and
invisible ! That would indeed be a worthy
inheritance to leave to an era of darkness, of
doubt, and of sadness ! -an inheritance which
would nourish the present age, and cause the
next to spring with renovated youth." (Voy-
ages en Orient, I. 49, 50.)*
One of his first nocturnal reveries at sea,
portrays the tender and profoundly religious
impressions of his mind:
"I walked for an hour on the deck of the
vessel alone, and immersed alternately in sad
or consoling reflections. I repeated in my
heart all the prayers which I learned in in-
fancy from my mother; the verses, the frag-
ments of the Psalms, which I had so often
heard her repeat to herself, when walking in
the evening in the garden of Milly. I experi-
enced a melancholy pleasure in thus scatter-
ing them, in my turn, to the waves, to the
winds, to that Ear which is ever open to every
real movement of the heart, though not yet
uttered by the lips. The prayer which we
have heard repeated by one we have loved, and
who is no more, is doubly sacred. Who among
us would not prefer a few words of prayer taught
us by our mother, to the most eloquent sup-
plication composed by ourselves? Thence it
is that whatever religious creed we may adopt
at the age of reason, the Christian prayer will
be ever the prayer of the human race. I prayed
in the prayer of the church for the evening at
sea ; also for that clear being, who never thought
of danger to accompany her husband, and that
lovely child, who played at the moment on the
poop with the goat which was to give it milk
on board, and with the little kids which licked
her snow-white hands, and sported with her
long and fiiir ringlets." (I. 57.)
A night-scene on the coast of Provence gives
a specimen of his descriptive powers.
"It was night that is, what they call night
in those climates; but how many days have I
seen less brilliant on the banks of the Thames,
the Seine, the Saone, or the Lake of Geneva!
A full moon shone in the firmament, and cast
into the shade our vessel, which lay motion-
less on the water at a little distance from the
quay. The moon, in her progress through
the heavens, had left a path marked as if with
red sand, with which she had besprinkled the
half of the sky: the remainder was clear deep
blue, which melted into white as she advanced.
On the horizon, at the distance of two miles,
between two little isles, of which the one had
* WP hnve translated all the passages ourselves : the
versions bilhorto published in this country five, as mopt
English translations of French works do, a most imper-
fect idea of the original.
headlands pointed and coloured like the Coli-
seum at Rome, while the other was violet
like the flower of the lilac, the image of a vast
city appeared on the sea. It was an illusion,
doubtless ; but it had all the appearance of
reality. You saw clearly the domes glancing
dazzling lines of palaces quays flooded by
a soft and serene light ; on the right and the
left the waves were seen to sparkle and en-
close it on either side : it was Venice or Malta
reposing in the midst of the waters. The
illusion was produced by the reflection of the
moon, when her rays fell perpendicularly on
the waters ; nearer the eye, the radiance spread
and expanded in a stream of gold and silver
between two shores of azure. On the left, the
gulf extended to the summit of a long and ob-
scure range of serrated mountains ; on the
right opened a narrow and deep valley, where
a fountain gushed forth beneath the shade of
aged trees ; behind, rose a hill, clothed to the
top with olives, which in the night appeared
dark, from its summit to its base a line of
Gothic towers and white houses broke the ob-
scurity of the wood, and drew the thoughts to
the abodes, the joys, and the sufferings of man.
Further off, in the extremity of the gulf, three
enormous rocks rose, like pillars without base,
from the surface of the waters their forms
were fantastic, their surface polished like flints
by the action of the waves ; but those flints
were mountains the remains, doubtless, of
that primeval ocean which once overspread
the earth, and of which our seas are but a
feeble image." (I. 66.)
A rocky bay on the same romantic coast,
now rendered accessible to travellers by the
magnificent road of the Corniche, projected,
and in part executed by Napoleon, furnishes
another subject for this exquisite pencil :
" A mile to the eastward on the coast, the
mountains, which there dip into the sea, are
broken as if by the strokes of enormous clubs
huge fragments have fallen, and are strewed
in wild confusion at the foot of the cliffs, or
amidst the blue and green waves of the sea,
which incessantly laves them. The waves
break on these huge masses without inter-
mission, with a hollow and alternating roar,
or rise Tip in sheets of foam, which besprinkle
their hoary fronts. These masses of moun-
tains for they are too large to be called rocks
are piled and heaped together in such num-
bers, that they form an innumerable number
of narrow havens, of profound caverns, of
sounding grottoes, of gloomy fissures of
which the children of some of the neighbouring
fishermen alone know the windings and the
issues* One of these caverns, into which you
enter by a natural arch, the summit of which
is formed by an enormous block of granite,
lets in the sea, through which it flows into a
dark and narrow valley, which the waters fill
entirely, with a surface as limpid and smooth
as the firmament which they reflect. The sea
preserves in this sequestered nook thatbeautiful
tint of bright green, of which marine painters
so strongly feel the value, but which they can
never transfer exactly to their canvas; for
the eye sees much which the hand strives in
vain to imitate.
LAMARTINE.
167
" On the two sides of that marine valley rise
two prodigious walls of perpendicular rock,
of an uniform and sombre hue, similar to that
of iron ore, after it has issued and cooled from
the furnace. Not a plant, not a moss can find
a slope or a crevice wherein to insert its roots
or cover the rocks with those waving garlands
which so often in Savoy clothe the cliffs, where
they flower to God alone. Black, naked, per-
pendicular, repelling the eye by their awful
aspect they seem to have been placed there
for no other purpose but to protect from the
sea-breezes the hills of olives and vines, which
bloom under their shelter; an image of those
ruling men in a stormy epoch, who seem placed
by Providence to bear the fury of all the tem-
pests of passion and of time, to screen the
weaker but happier race of mortals. At the
bottom of the bay the sea expands a little, as-
sumes a bluer tint as it comes to reflect more
of the cloudless heavens, and at length its tiny
waves die away on a bed of violets, as closely
netted together as the sand upon the shore. If
you disembark from the boat, you find in the
cleft of a neighbouring ravine a fountain of
living water, which gushes beneath a narrow
path formed by the goats, which leads up from
this sequestered solitude, amidst overshadow-
ing fig-trees and oleanders, to the cultivated
abodes of man. Few scenes struck me so
much in my long wanderings. Its charm con-
sists in that exquisite union of force and grace
which forms the perfection of natural beauty
as of the highest class of intellectual beings;
it is that mysterious hymen of the land and
the sea, surprised, as it were, in their most
secret and hidden union. It is the image of
perfect caJm and inaccessible solitude, close
to the theatre of tumultuous tempests, where
their near roar is heard with such terror, where
their foaming but lessened waves yet break
upon the shore. It is one of those numer-
ous chefs-d'avvre of creation which God has
scattered over the earth, as if to sport with
contrasts, but which he conceals so frequently
on the summit of naked rocks, in the depth of
inaccessible ravines, on the unapproachable
shores of the ocean, like jewels which he
unveils rarely, and that only to simple be-
ings, to children, to shepherds or fishermen,
or the devout worshippers of nature." (I. 73
74.)
This style of description of scenery is
peculiar to this age, and in it Lamartine may
safe'y be pronounced without a rival in the
whole range of literature. It was with Scott
and Chateaubriand that the p-nphic style of
description arose in England and France; but
he has pushed the art further ihan either of
his great predecessors. Milton and Thomson
had long ago, indeed, in poetry, painted nature
in the most enchanting, as well as the truest
colours; but in prose little was to be found
except a general and vague description of a
class of objects, as hikes, mountains, and
rivers, without any specification of features
and details, so as to convey a definite and dis-
ti ; ct impression to the mind of the reader.
Even the classical mir.d and refined taste of
Addison could not attain this graphic style ; his
descriptions of scenery, like that of all pro&e
writers down to the close of the eighteenth
century, are lost in vague generalities. Like
almost all descriptions of battles in modern
times, before Napier, they are so like each
other that you cannot distinguish one from the
other. Scott and Chateaubriand, when they
did apply their great powers to the delineation
f nature, were incomparably faithful, as well
as powerfully imaginative; but such descrip-
tions were, for the most part, but a secondary
object with them. The human heart was their
great study; the vicissitudes of life, the inex-
haustible theme of their genius. With La-
martine, again, the description of nature is the
primary object. It is to convey a vivid im-
pression of the scenes he has visited that he
has written ; to kindle in his reader's mind the
train of emotion and association which their
contemplation awakened in his own, that he
has exerted all his powers. He is much more
laboured and minute, in consequence, than
either of his predecessors ; he records the
tints, the forms, the lights, the transient effects
with all a painter's enthusiasm and all a poet's
power ; and succeeds, in any mind at all fa-
miliar with the objects of nature, in conjuring
up images as vivid, sometimes perhaps more
beautiful, than the originals which he por-
trayed.
From the greatness of his powers, however,
in this respect, and the facility with which he
commits to paper the whole features of the
splendid phantasmagoria with which his me-
mory is stored, arises the principal defect of
his work; and the circumstance which has
hitherto prevented it, in this country at least,
from acquiring general popularity commen-
surate to its transcendent merits. He is too
rich in glowing images ; his descriptions are
redundant in number and beauty. The mind
even of the most imaginative reader is fatigued
by the constant drain upon its admiration
the fancy is exhausted in the perpetual effort to
conceive the scenes which he portrays to the
eye. Images of beauty enough are to be found
in his four volumes of Travels in the Eust, to
emblazon, with the brightest colours of the
rainbow, forty volumes of ordinary adventure.
We long for some repose amidst the constant
repetition of dazzling objects; monotony, in-
sipidity, ordinary life, even dulness itself,
would often be a relief amidst the ceaseless
flow of rousing images. Sir Walter Scott
says, in one of his novels "Be assured that
whenever I am particularly dull, it is not with-
out an object;'' and Lamartine would some-
times be the better of following the advice.
We generally close one of his volumes with
the feeling so well known to travellers in the
Italian cities, "I hope to God there is nothing
more to be seen here." And having given the
necessary respite of unexciting disquisition to
rest our readers' minds, we shall again bring
forward one of his glowing pictures:
"Between the sea and the last heights of
Lebanon, wlrch sink rap'dly almost to the
wateVs edge, extends a plain eight leagues in
length tjy one or two broad ; sandy, bare,
covered only with thorny arbutus, browsed by
the camels of caravans. From it darts out into
the sea an advanced peninsula, linked to the
168
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
continent only by a narrow chaussee of shining
sand, borne hither by the winds of Egypt.
Tyre, now called Sour by the Arabs, is situated
at the extremity of this peninsula, and seems,
at a distance, to rise out of the waves. The
modern town, at first sight, has a gay and
smiling appearance; but a nearer approach
dispels the illusion, and exhibits only a few
hundred crumbling and half-deserted houses,
where the Arabs, in the evening, assemble to
shelter their flocks which have browsed in the
narrow plain. Such is all that now remains
of the mighty Tyre. It has neither a harbour to
the sea, nor a road to the land ; the prophecies
have long been accomplished in regard to it.
" We moved on in silence, buried in the
contemplation of the dust of an empire which
we trod. We followed a path in the middle
of the plain of Tyre, between the town and the
hills of gray and naked rock which Lebanon
has thrown down towards the sea. We arrived
abreast of the city, and touched a mound of
sand which appears the sole remaining ram-
part to prevent it from being overwhelmed by
the waves of the ocean or the desert. I thought
of the prophecies, and called to mind some of
the eloquent denunciations of Ezekiel. As I
was making these reflections, some objects,
black, gigantic, and motionless, appeared upon
the summit of one of the overhanging cliffs of
Lebanon which there advanced far into the
plain. They resembled five black statues,
placed on a rock as their huge pedestal. At
first we thought it was five Bedouins, who
were there stationed to fire upon us from their
inaccessible heights ; but when we were at the
distance of fifty yards, we beheld one of them
open its enormous wings, and flap them
against its sides with a sound like the unfurl-
ing of a sail. We then perceived that they
were five eagles of the largest species I have
ever seen, either in the Alps or our museums.
They made no attempt to move when we ap-
proached ; they seemed to regard themselves
as kings of the desert, looked on Tyre as an
appanage which belonged to them, and whither
they were about to return. Nothing more
supernatural ever met my eyes ; I could almost
suppose that behind them I saw the terrible
figure of Ezekiel, the poet of vengeance, point-
ing to the devoted city which the divine wrath
had overwhelmed with destruction. The dis-
charge of a fe\v muskets made them rise from
their rock : but they showed no disposition to
move from their ominous perch, and, soon
returning, floated over our heads, regardless
of the shots fired at them, as if the eagles of
God were beyond the reach of human injury."
(II. 89.)
Jerusalem was a subject to awaken all our
author's enthusiasm, and call forth all his
descriptive powers. The first approach to it
has exercised the talents of many writers in
prose and verse ; but none has drawn it in
such graphic and brilliant colours as our
author :
" We ascended a mountain ridge strewed
over with enormous gray rocks piled one on
another as if by human liands. Here and
there a few stunted vines, yellow with the co-
lour of autumn, crept along the soil in a few
places cleared out in the wilderness. Fig-
trees, with their tops withered or shivered by
the blasts, often edged the vines, and cast their
black fruit on the gray rock. On our right,
the desert of St. John, where formerly the
voice was heard crying in the wilderness,'
sank like an abyss in the midst of five or six
black mountains, through the openings of
which, the sea of Egypt, overspread with a
dark cloud, could still be discerned. On the
left, and near the eye, was an old tower, placed
on the top of a projecting eminence; other
ruins, apparently of an ancient aqueduct, de-
scended from that tower, overgrown with ver-
dure, now in the sere leaf; that tower is
Modin, the stronghold and tomb of the last
heroes of sacred story, the Maccabees. We
left behind us the ruins, resplendent with the
first rays of the morning rays, not blended as
in Europe in a confused and vague illumi-
nation, but darting like arrows of fire tinted
with various colours, issuing from a dazzling
centre, and diverging over the whole heavens
as they expand. Some were of blue, slightly
silvered, others of pure white, some of tender
rose-hue, melting into gray; many of burning
fire, like the coruscations of a flaming confla-
gration. All were distinct, yet all united in
one harmonious whole, forming a resplendent
arch in the heavens, encircling, and issuing
from a centre of fire. In proportion as the
day advanced, the brilliant light of these sepa-
rate rays was gradually dimmed or rather,
they were blended together, and composed the
colourless light of day. Then the moon, which
still shone overhead, ' paled her ineffectual
fire,' and melted away in the general illumina-
tion of the heavens.
"After having ascended a second ridge,
more lofty and naked than the former, the
horizon suddenly opens to the right, and pre-
sents a view of all the country which extends
between the last summits of Judea and the
mountains of Arabia. It was already flooded
with the increasing light of the morning; but
beyond the piles of gray rock which lay in the
foreground, nothing was distinctly visible but
a dazzling space, like a vast sea, interspersed
with a few islands of shade, which stood forth
in the brilliant surface. On the shores of that
imaginary ocean, a little to the left, and about
a league distant, the sun shone with uncom-
mon brilliancy On a massy tower, a lofty min-
aret, and some edifices, which crowned the
summit of a low hill of which you could not
see the bottom. Soon the points of other mi-
narets, a few loopholed walls, and the dark
summits of several domes, which successively
came into view, and fringed the descending
slope of the hill, announced a city. It was
JETIUSALKM, and every one of the party, with-
out addressing a word to the guides or to each
other, enjoyed in silence the entrancing spec-
tacle. We rested our horses to contemplate
that mysterious and dazzling apparition ; but
when we moved on, it was soon snatched from
our view; for as we descended the hill, and
plunged into the deep and profound valley
which lay at its feet, we lost sight of the holy
city, and were surrounded only by the solitude
and desolation of the desert." (II. 163165.)
LAMARTINE.
169
The environs of Jerusalem are describee
with equal force by the same master-hand :
"The general aspect of the environs of Je
rusalem may be described in a few words
Mountains without shade, and valleys withoui
water the earth without verdure, rocks with-
out grandeur. Here and there a few blocks
of gray stone start up out of the dry and fis-
sured earth, between which, beneath the shade
of an old fig-tree, a gazelle or a hyaena are oc-
casionally seen to emerge from the fissures
of the rock. A few plants or vines creep over
the surface of that gray and parched soil ; in
the distance, is occasionally seen a grove of
olive-trees, casting a shade over the arid side
of the mountain the mouldering walls and
towers of the city appearing from afar on the
summit of Mount Sion. Such is the, general
character of the country. .The sky is ever
pure, bright, and cloudless ; never does even
the slightest film of mist obscure the purple
tint of evening and morning. On the side of
Arabia, a wide gulf opens amidst the black
ridges, and presents a vista of the shining sur-
face of the Dead Sea, and the violet summits
of the mountains of Moab. Rarely is a breath
of air heard to murmur, in the fissures of the
rocks, or among the branches of the aged
olives; not a bird sings, nor an insect chirps
in the waterless furrows. Silence reigns uni-
versally, in the city, in the roads, in the fields.
Such was Jerusalem during all the time that
we spent within its walls. Not a sound ever
met our ears, but the neighing of the horses,
who grew impatient under the burning rays of
the sun, or who furrowed the earth with their
feet, as they stood picketed round our camp,
mingled occasionally with the crying of the
hour from the minarets, or the mournful ca-
dences of the Turks as they accompanied the
dead to their cemeteries. Jerusalem, to which
the world hastens to visit a sepulchre, is itself
a vast tomb of a people; but it is a tomb with-
out cypresses, without inscriptions, without
monuments, of which ihey have broken the
gravestones, and the ashes of which appear to
cover the earth which surrounds it with mourn-
ing, silence and sterility. We cast our eyes
back frequently from the top of every hill
which we passed on this mournful and deso-
late region, and at length we saw for the last
time, the crown of olives which surmounts the
Mount of the same name, and which long rises
above the horizon after you have lost sight of
the town itself. At length it also sank beneath
the rocky screen, and disappeared like the
chaplets of flowers which we throw on a se-
pulchre." (II. 275276.)
From Jerusalem he made an expedition to
Balbec in the desert, which produced the same
impression upon him that it does upon all
other travellers:
" We rose with the sun, the first rays of
which struck on the temples of Balbec, and
gave to those mysterious ruins that edat which
his brilliant light throws ever over ruins
which it illuminates. Soon we arrived, on the
northern side, at the foot of the gigantic walls
which surround those beautiful remains. A
clear stream, flowing over a bed of granite,
murmured around the enormous blocks of
22
stone, fallen from the top of the wall which
obstructed its course. Beautiful sculptures
wore half concealed in the limpid stream.
We passed the rivulet by an arch formed by
these fallen remains, and mounting a narrow
breach, were soon lost in admiration of the
scene which surrounded us. At every step a
fresh exclamation of surprise broke from our
lips. Every one of the stones of which that
wall was composed was from eight to ten feet
in length, by five or six in breadth, and as
much in height. They rest, without cement,
one upon the other, and almost all bear the
mark of Indian or Egyptian sculpture. At a
single glance, you see that these enormous
stones are not placed in their original site
that they are the precious remains of temples
of still more remote antiquity, which were
made use of to encircle this colony of Grecian
and Roman citizens.
" When we reached the summit of the
breach, our eyes knew not to what object first
to turn. On all sides were gates of marble of
prodigious height and magnitude ; windows or
niches, fringed with the richest friezes ; fallen
pieces of cornices, of entablatures, or capitals,
thick as the dust beneath our feet ; magnificent
vaulted roofs above our heads ; everywhere a
chaos of confused beauty, the remains of
which .lay scattered about, or piled on each
other in endless variety. So prodigious was
the accumulation of architectural remains,
that it defies all attempts at classification, or
conjecture of the kind of buildings to which
the greater part of them had belonged. After
passing through this scene of ruined magnifi-
cence, we reached an inner wall, which we
also ascended; and from its summit the view
of the interior was yet more splendid. Of
much greater extent, far more richly decorated
than the outer circle, it presented an immense
platform in the form of a long rectangle, the
level surface of which was frequently broken
by the remains of still more elevated pave-
ments, on which temples to the sun, the object
of adoration at Balbec, had been erected. All
around that platform were a series of lesser
temples or chapels, as we should call them
decorated with niches, admirably engraved,
and loaded with sculptured ornaments to a de-
gree that appeared excessive to those who had
seen the severe simplicity of the Parthenon or
the Coliseum. But how prodigious the accu-
mulation of architectural riches in the middle
of an eastern desert ! Combine in imagination
the Temple of Jupiter Stator and the Coliseum
at Rome, of Jupiter Olympius and the Acropo-
lis at Athens, and you will yet fall short of that
marvellous assemblage of admirable edifices
and sculptures. Many of the temples rest on
columns seventy feet in height, and seven feet
in diameter, yet composed only of two or three
blocks of stone, so perfectly joined together
that to this day you can barely discern the
lines of their junction. Silence is the only
language which befits man when words are
inadequate to convey his impressions. We
remained mute with admiration, gazing on the
eternal ruins.
'The shades of night overtook us while we
yet rested in amazement at the scene by which
170
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
we were surrounded. One by one they enve-
loped the columns in their obscurity, and added
a mystery the more to that magical and mys-
terious work of time and man. We appeared,
as compared with the gigantic mass and long
duration of these monuments, as the swallows
which nestle a season in the crevices of the
capitals, without knowing by whom, or for
whom, they have been constructed. The
thoughts, the wishes, which moved these
masses, are to us unknown. The dust of marble
which we tread beneath our feet knows more
of it than we do, but it cannot tell us what it
has seen; and in a few ages the generations
which shall come in their turn to visit our
monuments, will ask, in like manner, wherefore
we have built and engraved. The works of
man survive his thought. Movement is the
law of the human mind ; the definite is the
dream of his pride and his ignorance. God is
a limit which appears ever to recede as hu-
manity approaches him; we are ever advanc-
ing, and never arrive. This great Divine Fi-
gure which man from his infancy is ever striv-
ing to reach, and to imprison in his structures
raised by hands, for ever enlarges and ex-
pands; it outsteps the narrow limits of tem-
ples, and leaves the altars to crumble into
dust ; and calls man to seek for it where alone
it resides in thought, in intelligence, in vir-
tue, in nature, in infinity." (II. 39,46, 47.)
This passage conveys an idea of the peculiar
style, and perhaps unique charm, of Lamar-
tine's work. It is the mixture of vivid paint-
ing with moral reflection of nature with sen-
timent of sensibility to beauty, with gratitude
to its Author, which constitutes its great attrac-
tion. Considering in what spirit the French
Revolution was cradled, and from what infide-
lity it arose, it is consoling to see such senti-
ments conceived and published among them.
True they are not the sentiments of the major-
ity, at least in towns; but what then] The
majority is ever guided by the thoughts of the
great, not in its own but a preceding age. It
is the opinions of the great among our grand-
fathers that govern the majority at this time ;
our great men will guide our grandsons. If
we would foresee what a future age is to
think, we must observe what a few great men
are now thinking. Voltaire and Rousseau
have ruled France for two generations; the
day of Chateaubriand and Guizot and Lamar-
tine will come in due time.
But the extraordinary magnitude of these
ruins in the middle of an Asiatic wilderness,
suggests another consideration. We are per-
petually speaking of the march of intellect, the
vast spread of intelligence, the advancing civi-
lization of the world ; and in some respect our
boasts are well founded. Certainly, in one
particular, society has made a mighty step in
advance. The abolition of domestic slavery
has emancipated the millions who formerly
toiled in bondage; the art of printing has mul-
tiplied an hundred fold the reading. and think-
ing world. Our opportunities, therefore, have
been prodigiously enlarged; our means of ele-
vation are tenfold what they were in ancient
times. But has our elevation itself kept pace
with these enlarged means 1 Has the in-
| creased direction of the popular mind to lofty
; and spiritual objects, the more complete subju-
! gation of sense, the enlarged perception of the
1 useful and the beautiful, been in proportion
i to the extended facilities given to the great
i body of the people 1 Alas ! the fact is just the
i reverse. Balbec was a mere station in the
desert, without territory, harbour, or subjects
maintained solely by the commerce of the
East with Europe which flowed through its
walls. Yet Balbec raised, in less than a cen-
tury, a more glorious pile of structures de-
voted to religious and lofty objects, than Lon-
don, Paris, and St. Petersburg united can now
boast. The Decapolis was a small and remote
mountain district of Palestine, not larger in
proportion to the Roman, than Morayshire is
in proportion to the British empire ; yet it
contained, as its name indicates, and as their
remains still attest, ten cities, the least consi-
derable of which, Gebora, contains, as Buck-
ingham tells us in his Travels beyond the Jordan,
the ruins of more sumptuous edifices than any
city in the British islands, London itself not ex-
cepted, can now boast. It was the same all over
the east, and in all the southern provinces of the
Roman empire. Whence has arisen this asto-
nishing disproportion between the great things
done by the citizens in ancient and in modern
times, when in the latter the means of enlarged
cultivation have been so immeasurably extend-
ed ? It is in vain to say, it is because we have
more social and domestic happiness, and our
wealth is devoted to these objects, not external
embellishment. Social and domestic happiness
are in the direct,notin the inverse ratio of gene-
ral refinement and the spread of intellectual
intelligence. The domestic duties are better
nourished in the temple than in the gin-shop ;
the admirers of sculpture will make better
fathers and husbands than the lovers of whisky.
Is it that we want funds for such undertakings 1
Why, London is richer than ever Rome was ;
the commerce of the world, not of the eastern
caravans, flows through its bosom. The sums
annually squandered in Manchester and Glas-
gow on intoxicating liquors, would soon make
them rival the eternal structures of Tadmbr
and Palmyra. Is it that the great bulk of our
people are unavoidably chained by their cha-
racter and climate to gross and degrading en-
joyment's 1 Is it that the spreading of know-
ledge, intelligence, and free institutions, only
confirms the sway of sensual gratification ; and
that a pure and spiritual religion tends only
to strengthen the fetters of passion and self-
ishness 1 Is it that the inherent depravity of
the human heart appears the more clearly as
man is emancipated from the fetters of autho-
rity : must we go back to early ages for noble
and elevated motives of action; is the spread
of freedom but another word for the extension
of brutality ? God forbid that so melancholy
a doctrine should have any foundation in hu-
man nature ! We mention the facts, and leave
it to future ages to discover their solution :
contenting ourselves with pointing out to our
self- applauding countrymen how ranch they
have to do before they attain the level of their
advantages, or justify the boundless blessings
which Providence has bestowed upon them
LAMARTINE.
171
The plain of Troy, seen by moonlight, fur- 1 of the seraglio, which prolongs those of the city,
nishes the subject of one of our author's most I and form at the extremity of the hill which sup-
striking passages. | ports the proud Starnboul, the angle which
"It is midnight: the sea is calm as a mir- 1 .separates the sea of Mivrmora from the canal
ror; the vessel floats motionless on the re- ! of the Bosphorus, and the harbour of the Gold-
splendent surface. On our left, Tenedos rises ' en Horn. It is there that God and man, na-
above the waves, and shuts out the view of the J tnre and art, have combined to form the most
open sea ; on our right, and close to us. stretched marvellous spectacle which the human eye
can behold. I uttered an involuntary cry when
the magnificent panorama opened upon my
sight; I forgot for ever the bay of Naples and
all its enchantments ; to compare any thing to
that marvellous and graceful combination would
out like a dark bar. the low shore and indented
coasts of TROT. The full moon, which rises
behind the snow-streaked summit of Mount
Ida, sheds a serene and doubtful light over the
summits of the mountains, the hills, the plain;
its extending rays fall upon the sea, and reach
the shadow of our brig, forming a bright path
which the shades do riot venture to approach.
We can discern the tumuli, which tradition still
marks as the tombs of Hector and Patroclus.
The full moon, slightly tinged with red, which
discloses the undulations of the hills, resembles
the bloody buckler of Achilles; no light is to
be seen on the coast, but a distant twinkling,
lighted by the shepherds on Mount Ida not a
sound is to be heard but the flapping of the
sail on the mast, and the slight creaking of the
mast itself; all seems dead, like the past, in
that deserted land. Seated on the forecastle,
I see that shore, those mountains, those ruins,
those tombs, rise like the ghost of the departed
world, reappear from the bosom of the sea with
shadowy form, by the rays of the star of night,
which sleep on the hills, and disappear as the
moon recedes behind the summits of the moun-
tains. It is a beautiful additional page in the
poems of Homer, the end of all history and of
all poetry! Unknown tombs, ruins without
a certain name; the earth naked and dark, but
imperfectly lighted by the immortal luminaries ;
new spectators passing by the old coast, and
repeating for the thousandth time the common
epitaph of mortality ! Here lies an empire,
here a town, here a people, here a hero ! God
alone is great, and the thought which seeks
and adores him alone is imperishable upon
earth. I feel no desire to make a nearer ap-
proach in daylight to the doubtful remains of
the ruins of Troy. I prefer that nocturnal ap-
parition which allows the thought to repeople
those deserts, and sheds over them only the dis-
tant light of the moon and of the poetry of Homer.
And what concerns me Troy, its heroes, and its
gods ! That leaf of the heroic world is turned
for ever !" (II. 248250.)
What a magnificent testimonial to the genius
of Homer, written in a foreign tongue, two
thousand seven hundred years after his death !
The Dardanelles and the Bosphorus have,
from the dawn of letters, exercised the descrip-
tive talents of the greatest historians of modern
Europe. The truthful chronicle of Villehar-
douin, and the eloquent pictures of Gibbon and
Sismondi of the siege of Constantinople, will
immediately occur to every scholar. The fol-
lowing passage, however, will show that no
subject can be worn out when it is handled by
the pen of genius:
"It was five in the morning, I was standing
on deck; we made sail towards the mouth of
the Bosphorus, skirting the walls of Constan-
tinople. Afier half an hour's navigation
through ships at anchor, we touched the walls
be an injury to the fairest work of creation.
"The walls which support the circular ter-
races of the immense gardens of the seraglio
were on our left, with their base perpetually
washed by the waters of the Bosphorus, blue
and limpid as the Rhone at Geneva; the ter-
raees which rise one above another to the pa-
lace of the sultana, the gilded cupolas of which
rose above the gigantic summits of the plane-
tree and the cypress, were themselves clothed
with enormous trees, the trunks of which over-
hang the walls, while their branches, over-
spreading the gardens, spread a deep shadow
even far into the sea, beneath the protection
of which the panting rowers repose from their
toil. These stately groups of trees are from
time to time interrupted by palaces, pavilions,
kiosks, gilded and sculptured domes, or bat-
teries of cannon. These maritime palaces form
part of the seraglio. You see occasionally
through the muslin curtains the gilded roofs
and sumptuous cornices of those abodes of
beauty. At every step, elegant Moorish foun-
tains fall from the higher parts of the g.irdens,
and murmur in marble basins, from whence,
before reaching the sea, they are conducted in
little cascades to refresh the passengers. As
the vessel coasted the walls, the prospect ex-
panded the coast of Asia appeared, and the
mouth of the Bosphorus, properly so ca'led,
began to open between hills, on one side of
dark green, on the other of smiling verdure,
which seemed variegated by all the colours of
the rainbow. The smiling shores of A-ia, dis-
tant about a mile, stretched out to our right,
surmounted by lofty hills, sharp at the top. and
clothed to the summit with dark forests, with
their sides varied by hedge-rows, villas, or-
chards, and gardens. Deep precipitous ravines
occasionally descended on this side into the sea,
overshadowed by hu:e overgrown oaks, the
branches of which dipped into the water. Fur-
ther on still, on the Asiatic side, an advanced
headland projected into the waves, covered
with white houses it ^was Scutari, with its
vast white barracks, its resplendertt mosques,
its animated quays, forming a vast city. Fur-
ther still, the Bosphorus, like a deeply imbed-
ded river, opened between opposing moun-
tains the advancing promontories and re-
ceding bays of which, clothed to the water's
edge with forests, exhibited a confused assem-
blage of masts of vessels, shady groves, noble
palaces, hanging gardens, and tranquil ha-
vens.
"The harbour of Constantinople is not, pro-
perly speaking, a port. It is rather a great
river like the Thames, shut in on either side
172
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
by hills covered with houses, and covered by
innumerable lines of ships lying at anchor
along the quays. Vessels of every description
are to be seen there, from the Arabian bark,
the prow of which is raised, and darts along
like the ancient galleys, to the ship of the line,
with three decks, and its sides studded with
brazen mouths. Multitudes of Turkish barks
circulate through that forest of masts, serving
the purpose of carriages in that maritime city,
and disturb, in their swift progress through the
waves, clouds of albatros, which, like beau-
tiful white pigeons, rise from the sea on their
approach, to descend and repose again on the
unruffled surface. It is impossible to count the
vessels which lie on the water from the Se-
raglio point to the suburb of Eyoub and the
delicious valley of the Sweet Waters. The
Thames at London exhibits nothing compara-
ble to it." (II. 262265.)
"Beautiful as the European side of the
Bosphorus is, the Asiatic is infinitely more
striking. It owes nothing to man, but every
thing to nature. There is neither a Buyukdere
nor a Therapia; nor palaces of ambassadors,
nor an Armenian nor Frank city; there is no-
thing but mountains with glens which separate
them ; little valleys enamelled with green,
which lie at the foot of the overhanging rocks ;
torrents which enliven the scene with their
foam ; forests which darken it by their shade,
or dip their boughs in the waves ; a variety of
forms, of tints, and of foliage, which the pen-
cil of the painter is alike unable to represent
or the pen of the poet to describe. A few
cottages perched on the summit of projecting
rocks, or sheltered in the bosom of a deeply
indented bay, alone tell you of the presence
of man. The evergreen oaks hang in such
masses over the waves that the boatmen glide
under their branches, and often sleep cradled
in their arms. Such is the character of the
coast on the Asiatic side as far as the castle
of Mahomet II., which seems to shut it in as
closely as any Swiss lake. Beyond that, the
character changes ; the hills are less rugged,
and descend in gentler slopes to the water's
edge; charming little plains, checkered with
fruit-trees and shaded by planes, frequently
open ; and the delicious Sweet Waters of Asia
exhibit a scene of enchantment equal to any
described in the Arabian Nights. Women,
children, and black slaves in every variety of
costume and colour; veiled ladies from Con-
stantinople ; cattle and buffaloes ruminating in
the pastures ; Arab horses clothed in the most
sumptuous trappings of velvet and gold;
caiques filled with Armenian and Circassian
young women, seated under the shade or play-
ing with their children, some of the most
ravishing beauty, form a scene of variety and
interest probably unique in the world." (III.
331,332.)
These are the details of the piece: here is
the general impression :
"One evening, by the light of a splendid
moon, which was reflected from the sea of
Marmora, and the violet summits of Mount
Olympus, I sat alone under the cypresses of
the 'Ladders of the Dead;' those cypresses
which overshadow innumerable tombs of
Mussulmen, and descend from the heights of
Pera to the shores of the sea. No one ever
passes at that hour: you would suppose your-
self an hundred miles from the capital, if a
confused hum, wafted by the wind, was not
occasionally heard, which speedily died away
among the branches of the cypress. These
sounds weakened by distance; the songs of
the sailors in the vessels ; the stroke of the
oars in the water; the drums of the military
bands in the barracks ; the songs of the women
who lulled their children to sleep ; the cries of
the Muetzlim who, from the summits of the
minarets, called the faithful to evening prayers;
the evening gun which boomed across the
Bosphorus, the signal of repose to the fleet-
all these sounds combined to form one con-
fused murmur, which strangely contrasted
with the perfect silence around me, and pro-
duced the deepest impression. The seraglio,
with its vast peninsula, dark with plane-trees
and cypresses, stood forth like a promontory
of forests between the two seas which slept
beneath my eyes. The moon shone on the nu-
merous kiosks; and the old walls of the palace
of Amurath stood forth like huge rocks from
the obscure gloom of the plane-trees. Before
me was the scene, in my mind was the recol-
lection, of all the glorious and sinister events
which had there taken place. The impression
was the strongest, the most overwhelming,
which a sensitive mind could receive. All
was there mingled man and God, society and
nature, mental agitation, the melancholy repose
of thought. I know not whether I participated
in the great movement of associated beings
who enjoy or suffer in that mighty assemblage,
or in that nocturnal slumber of the elements,
which murmured thus, and raised the mind
above the cares of cities and empires into the
bosom of nature and of God." (III. 283,284.)
"II fa nt du terns," says Voltaire, "pourque
les grandes reputations murissent." As a de-
scriber of nature, we place Lamartine at the
head of all writers, ancient or modern above
Scott or Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael or
Humboldt. He aims at a different object from
any of these great writers. He does not, like
them, describe the emotion produced on the
mind by the contemplation of nature; he
paints the objects in the scene itself, their
colours and traits, their forms and substance,
their lights and shadows. A painter following
exactly what he portrays, would make a glo-
rious gallery of landscapes. He is, moreover,
a charming poet, an eloquent debater, and has
written many able and important works on
politics, yet we never recollect, during the last
twenty years, to have heard his name men-
tioned in English society except once, when
an old and caustic, but most able judge, now
no more, said, "I have been reading Lamar-
tine's Travels in the East it seems a perfect
rhapsody."
We must not suppose, however, from this,
that the English nation is incapable of appre-
ciating the highest degree of eminence in the
fine arts, or that we are never destined to rise
to excellence in any but the mechanical. It is
the multitude of subordinate writers of mode-
rate merit who obstruct all the avenues to
THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION.
173
great distinction, which really occasions the
phenomenon. Strange as it may appear, it is
a fact abundantly proved by literary history,
and which may be verified by every day's ex-
perience, that men are in general insensible to
the highest class of intellectual merit when it
first appears, and that it is by slow degrees j
and the opinion oft repeated, of the really su-
perior in successive generations, that it is at |
length raised to its deserved and lasting pedes-
tal. There are instances to the contrary, such j
as Scott and Byron : but they are the excep- j
tion, not the rule. We seldom do justice but j
to the dead. Contemporary jealousy, literary
envy, general timidity, the dread of ridicule, the
confusion of rival works, form so many obsta-
cles to the speedy acquisition of a great living
reputation. To the illustrious of past ages,
however, we pay a universal and willing
homage. Contemporary genius appears with
a twinkling and uncertain glow, like the shift-
ing and confused lights of a great city seen at
night from a distance : while the spirits of the
dead shine with an imperishable lustre, far re-
moved in the upper firmament from the dis-
tractions of the rivalry of a lower world.
THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION.'
WHOEVER has contemplated of late years the
state of British literature, and compared it with
the works of other countries who have preceded
England in the career of arts or of arms, must
have become sensible that some very power-
ful cause has, for a long period, been at work
in producing the ephemeral character by which
it is at present distinguished. It is a matter
of common complaint, that every thing is now
sacrificed to the desires or the gratification of
the moment ; that philosophy, descending from
its high station as the instructor of men, has
degenerated into the mere handmaid of art;
that literature is devoted rather to afford amuse-
ment for a passing hour, than furnish improve-
ment to a long life ; and that poetry itself has
become rather the reflection of the fleeting
fervour of the public mind, than the well from
which noble and elevated sentiments are to be
derived. We have only to take up the columns
of a newspaper, to see how varied and endless
are the efforts made to amuse the public, and
how few the attempts to instruct or improve
them; and if we examine the books which lie
upon every drawing-room table, or the cata-
logues which show the purchases that have
been made by any of the numerous book-clubs
or circulating libraries which have sprung up
in the country, we shall feel no surprise 'at the
ephemeral nature of the literature which
abounds, from the evidence there afforded of
the transitory character of the public wishes
which require to be gratified.
It is not to be supposed, however, from this
circumstance, which is so well known as to
have attracted universal observation, that the
taste for standard or more solid literature has
either materially declined, or is in any danger
of becoming extinct. Decisive evidence to the
contrary is to be found in the fact, that a
greater number of reprints of standard works,
both on theology, history, and philosophy, have
issued from the press within the last ten years,
than in any former corresponding period of
British history. And what is still more re-
markable, and not a little gratifying, it is evi-
* Bhickwood's Magazine, January, 1842. Written
when Lord Mahon's Copyright Bill, since passed into a
law, was before Parliament.
dent, from the very different character and
price of the editions of the older works which
have been published of late years, that the de-
sire to possess these standard works, and this
thirst for solid information, is not confined to
any one class of society; but that it embraces
all ranks, and promises, before a long period
has elapsed, to extend through the middle and
even the working classes in the state a mass
of useful and valuable information to which
they have hitherto, in great part at least, been
strangers. Not to mention the great extent to
which extracts from these more valuable works
have appeared in Chambers' Journal, the Penny
Magazines, and other similar publications of
the day, it is sufficient to mention two facts,
which show at once what a thirst for valuable
information exists among the middle classes
of society. Regularly every two years, there
issues from the press a new edition of Gibbon's
Rome; and Burke 's Works are now published,
one year, in sixteen handsome volumes octavo,
for the peer and the legislator, and next year
in two volumes royal octavo, in double co-
lumns, for the tradesman and the shopkeeper.
As little is the false and vitiated taste of our
general literature the result of any want of
ability which is now directed to its prosecution.
We have only to examine the periodical litera-
ture, or criticism of the day, to be convinced
that the talent which is now devoted to litera-
ture is incomparably greater than it ever was
in any former period of our history ; and that
ample genius exists in Great Britain, to render
this age as distinguished in philosophy and the
higher branches of knowledge, as the last was
in military prowess and martial renown. If
any one doubts this, let him compare the milk-
and-water pages of the Monthly Review forty
years ago, with the brilliant criticisms of
Lockhart and Macaulay in the Quarterly or Ed-
inburgh Review at this time ; or the periodical
literature at the close of the war, with that
which is now to be seen in the standard ma-
gazines of the present day. To a person
habituated to the dazzling conceptions of the
periodical writers in these times, the corre-
sponding literature in the eighteenth century
appears insupportably pedantic and tedious,
p 2
174
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
Nobody now reads the Rambler or the Idler ;
and the colossal reputation of Johnson rests
almost entirely upon his profound and caustic
sayings recorded in Boswell. Even the Spec-
tator itself, though universally praised, is by
no means now generally read; and nothing
but the exquisite beauty of some of Addison's
papers, prevents the Delias and Lucindas, who
figure in its pages, from- sinking them into
irrecoverable obscurity.
Here then is the marvel of the present time.
We have a population, in which, from the
rapid extent of knowledge among all classes, a
more extended class of readers desiring in-
formation is daily arising; in which the great
and standard works of literature in theology,
philosophy, and history, are constantly issuing
in every varied form from the press ; in which
unparalleled talent of every description is con-
stantly devoted to the prosecution of literature ;
but in which the new works given forth from
the press are, with very few exceptions, fri-
"volous or ephemeral, and the greater part of
the serious talents of the nation is turned into
the perishable channels of the daily, weekly,
monthly, or the quarterly press. That such a
state of things is anomalous and extraordinary,
few probably will doubt ; but that it is alarm-
ing and prejudicial in a national point of view,
and may, if it continues unabated, produce both
a degradation of the national character, and, in
the end, danger or ruin to the national fortunes,
though not so generally admitted, is not the
less true, nor the less capable of demonstra-
tion.
In the first place, this state of things, when
the whole talent of the nation is directed to
periodical literature, or works of evanescent
interest, has a tendency to degrade the national
character, because it taints the fountains from
which the national thought is derived. We
possess, indeed, in the standard literature of
Great Britain, a mass of thoughts and ideas
which may well make the nation immortal,
and which, to the end of time, will constitute
the fountains from which grand and generous
thoughts will be drawn by all future races of
men. But the existence of these standard works
is not enough; still less is it enough in an age
of rapid progress and evident transition, such
as the present, when new interests are every-
where arising, new social and political com-
binations emerging, new national dangers to
be guarded against, new national virtues to be j
required. For a nation in such a state of I
society to remain satisfied with its old standard j
literature, and not to aspire to produce any
thing which is at once durable and new, is the
same solecism as it would be for a man to re-
main content with a wardrobe of fifty years'
standing, and resolutely to resist the introduc-
tion of any of the fashions or improvements
of later times. A nation which aspires to
retain its eminence either in arts or in arms,
must keep abreast of its neighbours ; if it does
not advance, it will speedily fall behind, be
thrown into the shade, and decline. It is not
sufficient for England to refer to the works of
Milton, Shakspeare, Johnson, or Scott ; she
must prolong the race of these great men, or
her intellectual career will speedily come to a
close. Short and fleeting indeed is the period
of transcendant greatness allotted to any na-
tion in any branch of thought. The moment
it stops, it begins to recede ; and to every em-
pire which has made intellectual triumphs, is
prescribed the same law which was felt by-
Napoleon in Europe and the British in India,
that conquest is essential to existence.
But if the danger to our national literature
is great, if the intellect and genius of Britain
do not keep pace with the high destinies to
which she is called, and the unbounded men-
tal activity with which she is surrounded,
much more serious is the peril thence inevit-
ably accruing to the national character and
the public fortunes. Whence is it that the
noble and generous feelings are derived, which
in time past have animated the breasts of our
patriots, our heroes, and our legislators!
Where, but in the immortal pages of our
poets, our orators, and historians? What
noble sentiments has the air of "Rule Britan-
nia" awakened; how many future Nelsons
may the "Mariners of England," or Southey's
inimitable " Lives of our Naval Heroes" pro-
duce? Sentiments such as these immortal
works imbody, "thoughts that breathe, and
words that burn," are the true national inhe-
ritance; they constitute the most powerful
elements of national strength, for they form the
character, without which all others are una-
vailing; they belong alike to the rich and to
the poor, to the prince and to the peasant ;
they form the unseen bond which links to-
gether the high and the low, the rich and the
poor; and which, penetrating and pervading
every class of society, tend both to perpetuate
the virtues which have brought us to our pre-
sent greatness, and arrest the decline, which
the influx of wealth, and the prevalence of
commercial ideas, might otherwise have a
tendency to produce. What would be the
effect upon the fortunes of the nation, if this
pure and elevated species of literature were to
cease amongst us ; if every thing were to be
brought down to the cheapest market, and
adapted to the most ordinary capacity ; if cut-
ting articles for reviews, or dashing stories
for magazines, were henceforth to form our
staple literature; and the race of the Miltops,
the Shakspeares, the Grays, and the Camp-
bells, was to perish under the cravings of an
utilitarian age? We may safely say that the
national character would decline, the national
spirit become enfeebled ; that generous senti-
ments would be dried up under the influence
of transient excitement, and permanent resolve
be extinguished by the necessity of present
gain ; and that the days of Clive and Wellesley
in India, and of Nelson and Wellington in
Europe, would be numbered among the things
that have been.
But if such dangers await us from the
gradual extinction of the higher and nobler
branches of our literature, still more serious
are the evils which are likely to arise from the
termination of the more elevated class of works
in history, philosophy, and theology, which are
calculated and are fitted to guide and direct the
national thought. The dangers of such a ca-
lamity, though not so apparent at first sight,
THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION.
175
are, in reality, still more serious. For whence
is the thought derived which governs the world;
the spirit which guides its movements; the
rashness which mars its fortunes; the wisdom
which guards against its dangers 1 Whence
but from the great fountains of original thought,
which are never unlocked in any age but to the
few master-spirits thrown at distant intervals
by God among mankind. The press, usually
and justly deemed so powerful; the public
voice, whose thunders shake the land; the le-
gislature, which imbodies and perpetuates, by
legal force, its cravings, are themselves but the
reverberation of the thought of the great of the
preceding age. The tempests sweep round
and agitate the globe; but it is to the wisdom
of Juno alone that jEolus opens the cavern of
the winds.
This truth is unpalatable to the masses; it
is distasteful to legislators; it is irksome to
statesmen, who conceive they enjoy, and appear
to have, the direction of affairs; but it is illus-
trated by every page of history, and a clear
perception of its truth constitutes one of the
most essential requisites of wise government.
In vain does the ruling power, whether mo-
narchical, aristocratic, or republican, seek to
escape from the government of thought: it is
itself under the direction of the great intellects
of the preceding age. When it thinks it is
original, when it is most fearlessly asserting
its boasted inherent power of self-government,
it is itself obeying the impulse communicated
to the human mind by the departed great. All
the marked movements of mankind, all the
evident turns or wrenches communicated to
the current of general opinion, have arisen
from the efforts of individual genius. The
age must have been prepared for them, or
their effect would have been small; but the
age without them would never have disco-
vered the light: the reflected sunbeams must
have been descending on the mountains, but
his earliest rays strike first on the summit.
Who turned mankind from the abuses of the
Roman Catholic church, and preserved the
primeval simplicity of Christianity from the
pernicious indulgences of the Church of Rom.e,
and opened a new era of religious right to both
hemispheres ? Martin Luther. Who fearlessly
led his trembling mariners across the seem-
ingly interminable deserts of the Atlantic wave,
and discovered at length the new world, which
had haunted even his infant dreams 1 Chris-
topher Columbus. Who turned mankind aside
from the returning circle of syllogistic argu-
ment to the true method of philosophic inves-
tigation 1 Lord Bacon. Who introduced a
new code into the contests of nations, and sub-
jected even the savage passions of war to a
human code? Grotius". The influence of Mon-
ti-scjuieu has been felt for above a century in
every country of Europe, in social philosophy.
Who discovered the mechanism of the uni-
verse, and traced the same law in the fall of
an apple as the giant orbit of the comets'? Sir
Isaac Newton. Who carried the torch of
severe and sagacious inquiry into recesses of
the human mind, and weaned men from the
endless maze of metaphysical scepticism?
Dr. Reid. W T ho produced the fervent spirit
which, veiled in philanthropy, redolent of be-
nevolence, was so soon to be extinguished in
the blood of the French Revolution ? Rous-
seau and Voltaire. Who discovered the mira-
cle nt' stearn, and impelled civilization, as by
the force of central heat, to the desert places
of the earth ? James Watt. What unheeded
power shook even the solid fabric of the
British constitution, and all but destroyed, by
seeking unduly to extend, the liberties of Eng-
land ? Lord Brougham, and the Edinburgh
Reviewers. Whose policy has ruled the com-
mercial system of England for twenty years,
and by the false application of just abstract prin-
ciples overthrew the Whig ministry? Adam
Smith. Whose spirit arrested the devastation
of the French Revolution, and checked the
madness of the English reformers? Edmund
Burke. Who is the real parent of the blind
and heartless delusion of the New Poor-Law
Bill? Malthus. Who have elevated men from
the baseness of utilitarian worship to the gran-
deur of mental elevation? Coleridge and
Wordsworth. All these master-spirits, for
good or for evil, communicated their own im-
press to the generation which succeeded them ;
the seed sown took often many years to come
to maturity, and many different hands, often a
new generation, were required to reap it; but
when the harvest appeared, it at once was
manifest whose hand had sown the seed.
"Show me what one or two great men, de-
tached from public life, but with minds full,
which must be disburdened, are thinking in
their closets in this age, and I will tell you
what will be the theme of the orator, the study
of the philosopher, the staple of the press, the
guide of the statesman, in the next."
Observe, too and this is a most essential
point in the present argument that all these
great efforts of thought which have thus given
a mighty heave to human affairs, and, in the
end, have fairly turned aside into a new
channel even the broad and varied stream of
general thought, have been in direct contradic-
tion- to the spirit of the age by which they
were surrounded, and which swayed alike the
communities, the press, and the government,
under the influence of which they were placed.
Action and reaction appear to be the great
law, not less of the moral than the material
world ; the counteracting principles, which,
like the centripetal and centrifugal force in
physics, maintain, amid its perpetual oscilla-
tion, the general equilibrium of the universe.
But whence is to come the reaction, if the
human mind, influenced by the press, is itself
retained in a self-revolving circle? if reviews,
magazines, and journals, all yielding to, or
falling in with, the taste of the majority, direct
and form public opinion: if individual thought
is nothing but the perpetual re-echo of what it
hears around it? It is in the solitary thought
of individual greatness that this is found. Ii
is there that the fountains are unlocked which
j let in a new stream on human affairs which
I communicate a fresh and a purer element to
the flood charged with the selfishness and vices
of the world; it is there that the counteracting
I force is found, which, springing from small
I beginnings, at length converts a world in error.
176
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
Archimedes was physically wrong, but he was
morally right, when he said, "Give me a ful-
crum, and I will move the whole earth." Give
me the fulcrum of a great mind, and I will turn
aside the world.
It is always in resisting, never by yielding
to public opinion, that these great master-
spirits exert their power. The conqueror, in-
deed, who is to act by the present arms of
men; the statesman who is to sway by present
measures the agitated masses of society, have
need of general support. Napoleon said truly
that he was so long successful, because he
always marched with the opinions of five mil-
lions of men. But the great intellects which
are destined to give a permanent change to
thought which are destined to act generally,
not upon the present but the next generation
are almost invariably in direct opposition to
general opinion. In truth, it is the resistance
of a powerful mind to the flood of error by
which it is surrounded, which, like the com-
pression that elicits the power of steam, creates
the moving power which alters the moral des-
tiny of mankind.
Was it by yielding to public opinion that
Bacon emancipated mankind from the fetters
of the Aristotelian philosophy? Was it by
yielding to the Ptolemaic cycles that Coperni-
cus unfolded the true mechanism of the hea-
vens ? Was it by yielding to the dogmas of
the church that Galileo established the earth's
motions ? Was it by yielding to the Romish
corruptions that Luther established the Re-
formation 1 Was it by concession that Lati-
mer and Ridley " lighted a flame which, by
the grace of God, shall never be extinguished ?"
Was it by conceding to the long-established
system of commercial restriction, that Smith
unfolded the truths of the wealth of nations 1
or by chiming in with the deluge of infideli-
ty and democracy, with which he was sur-
rounded, that Burke arrested the devastation
of the French Revolution 1 What were the
eloquence of Pitt, the arms of Nelson and
Wellington, but the ministers of those princi-
ples which, in opposition to general opinion,
he struck out at once, and with a giant's arm?
"Genius creates by a single conception; in a
single principle, opening, as it were, on a
sudden to genius, a great and new system of
things is discovered. The statuary conceives
a statue at once, which is afterwards slowly
executed by the hands of many."*
If such be the vast and unbounded influence
of original thought on human affairs, national
character, public policy, and national fortunes,
what must be the effect of that state of things
which goes to check such original concep-
tion 1 to vulgarize and debase genius, and
turn aside the streams of first conception into
the old and polluted channels'? If the reac-
tion of originality against common-place of
freedom against servility of truth against
falsehood of experience against speculation
is the great steadying power in human af-
fairs, and the only safe regulator of the oscil-
lations of public thought, what are we to say
to that direction of literary effort, and that
*D' Israeli's Essay oa Lit. Char.
tendency in the public mind, which evidently
tend to express, and may, ere long, altogether
extinguish these great and creative concep-
tions ? Yet, that such is the evident tendency
of society and public opinion around us, is ob-
vious, and universally observed. " The time
has come," says Sir Edward Bulwer,* one of
the brightest ornaments of the liberal school,
"when nobody will fit out a ship for the intel-
lectual Columbus to discover new worlds, but
when everybody will subscribe for his setting
up a steamboat between Dover and Calais.
The immense superficies of the public, as it
has now become, operates two ways in de-
tracting from the' profundity of writers it
renders it no longer necessary for an author
to make himself profound before he writes ;
and it encourages those writers who are pro-
found, by every inducement, not of lucre mere-
ly, but of fame, to exchange deep writing for
agreeable writing. The voice which animates
the man ambitious of wide fame, does not, ac-
cording to the beautiful line in Rogers, whis-
per to him, 'Aspire, but descend.' He must
' stoop to conquer.' Thus, if we look abroad
in France, where the reading public is much
less numerous than in England, a more subtle
and refined tone is prevalent in literature;
while in America, where it is infinitely larger,
the literature is incomparably more superfi-
cial. Some high-souled literary men, indeed,
desirous rather of truth than of fame, are ac-
tuated unconsciously by the spirit of the times ;
but actuated they necessarily are, just as the
wisest orator who uttered only philosophy to
a thin audience of Sages, and mechanically
abandons his refinements and his reasonings,
and expands into a louder tone and more fami-
liar manner as the assembly increases, and
the temper of the popular mind is insensibly
communicated to the mind that addresses it."
" There is in great crowds," says Cousin, " an
ascendant which is almost magical, which
subdues at once the strongest minds ; and the
same man who had been a serious and in-
structive professor to a hundred thoughtful
students, soon becomes light and superficial
where he is called to address a more extended
and superficial audience."
There can be no doubt of the justice of
the principles advanced by these profound
writers : in truth, they are not new ; they
have been known and acted upon in every
age of mankind. "You are wrong to pride
yourself," said the Grecian sage to an Athe-
nian orator, who first delivered a speech
amidst the thundering acclamations of his
audience; "if you had spoken truly, these
men would have given no signs of approba-
tion." It is in the extension of the power of
judging of literary compositions of confer-
ring wealth and bestowing fame on their au-
thors to the vast and excitable, but superficial
mass of mankind, that the true cause of the
ephemeral and yet entrancing and exciting
character of the literature of the present^- age
is to be found. Some superficial observers
imagine that the taste for novels and romances
will wear itself out, and an appreciation of a
* England and English, p. 446.
THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION.
177
higher class of literature spread generally
among the middle classes. They might as
well suppose that all men are to become Ho-
mers, and all women Sapphos.
It is in this fact, the immense number of
mankind in every age who are influenced by
their passions or their feelings, compared with
the small portion who are under the influence
of their reason, lhat the true cause and extra-
ordinary multitude of a certain class of novels
in the present day is to be found. Without de-
preciating the talent of many of these writers
without undervaluing the touching scenes
of pathos, and admirable pictures of humour
which they present it may safely be affirmed,
that they exhibit a melancholy proof of the
tendency of our lighter literature ; and that if
such works were to become as general in
every succeeding age as they have been in
the present, a ruinous degradation both to our
literary and national character would ensue.
The cause which has led to their rapid rise
and unprecedented success, is obvious. It is,
that the middle classes have become the most
numerous body of readers ; and therefore, the
humour, the incidents, the pathos, which are
familiar to them, or excite either amusement
or sympathy in their breasts, constitute the
surest passports to popularity. ^It was the
same cause which produced the boors of
Ostade, or the village wakes of Teniers in
republican Holland, and the stately declama-
tions of Racine and Corneille in monarchical
France.
It is nevertheless perfectly true, as has been
well remarked hy Lord Brougham, that there
never was such a mistake as to imagine that
mob oratory consists only in low buffoonery,
quick repartee, or happy personal hits. On
some occasions, and certainly on the hustings,
it generally does. But there are other occa-
sions on which the middle and even the work-
ing classes are accessible to the most noble
and elevated sentiments; and exhibit an apti-
tude both for the quick apprehension of an
argument, and the due appreciation of a gene-
rous sentiment, which could not be surpassed
in any assembly in the kingdom. The higher
class of operatives, moreover, especially in
the manufacturing districts, are so constantly
in contact with each other, and are so much
habituated to the periodical press, that they
have acquired an extraordinary quickness of
perception in matters which fall within their
observation; while the numerous vicissitudes
to which they are exposed by commercial dis-
tress, have, in many places, given a serious
and reflecting turn to their minds, which will
rarely be met with amidst the frivolities of the
higher, or the selfish pursuits of the middle
ranks. In assemblies of the working classes,
brought together by the call for some social,
and not political object, as the promotion of
emigration, the extension of education, or the
arresting the evils of pauperism, no one can
have addressed them without observing that
he cannot state his argument too closely, en-
force it with facts too forcibly, or attend to
the graces of composition with too sedulous
care.
But ail this notwithstanding, it is in vain to
23
expect that the patronage or support of the
middle or working classes is ever to afford a
sufficient inducement to secure works either
of profound or elevated thought, or of the
highest excellence in any branch either of
poetry, philosophy, history, or economics.
The reason is, that it is only by appealing to
principles or ideas already in some degree fami-
liar to the great body of the people, that you can
ever succeed in making any impression upon
them. Truth, if altogether new, is, in the first
instance at least, thrown away upon them ;
it is of exceeding slow descent, even through
the most elevated intellects of the middle
classes; upon the working it produces at first
no effect whatever. The reason is, that the
great majority of them have not intellects suf-
ficiently strong to make at once the transition
from long cherished error to truth, unless the
evils of their former opinions have been long
and forcibly brought before their senses. If
that be the case, indeed, the humblest classes
are the very first to see the light. Witness
the Reformation in Germany, or the Revolu-
tion in France. They are so, because they
are less interested than their superiors in the
maintenance of error. But if the new disco-
veries of thought relate not to present but re-
mote evils, and do not appeal to what is
universally known to the senses, but only to
what may with difficulty be gathered from
study or reflection, nothing is more certain
than that the progress even of truth is exceed-
ingly slow that the human min'd is to the
last degree reluctant to admit any great change
of opinion ; and that, in general, at least one
generation must descend to their graves before
truths, ultimately deemed the most obvious,
are gradually forced upon the reluctant con-
sent of mankind. Mr. Burke's speeches never
were popular in the House of Commons, and
his rising up acted like a -dinner-bell in thin-
ning the benches. Now his words are dwelt
on by the wise, quoted by the eloquent, dif-
fused among the many. Oratory, to be popu-
lar, must be in advance of the audience, and
but a little in advance; profound thought may
rule mankind in future, but unless stimulated
by causes obvious to all, will do little for pre-
sent reputation. Hence it was that Bacon
bequeathed his reputation to the generation
after the next.
As little is there any reason to hope that the
obvious and gratifying return to serious and
standard publications, evinced by the numer-
ous reprints of our classical writers that issue
from the press, can be taken as any sufficient
indication that there exists in the public mind
an adequate antidote to these evils. The fact
of these reprints of standard works issuing
from the press, certainly proves sufficiently
that there is a class, and a numerous one too,
of persons who, however much they may like
superficial literature as an amusement for the
hour, yet look to our standard works for the
volumes which are to fill their libraries. But
that by no means affords a sufficient guarantee
that the public will give any encouragement
to the composition or publication of standard
works at the present time, and with the present
temper of the national mind. There is a most
178
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
material difference between the reprint of a
standard book, which has already acquired a
fixed reputation, and the composition of a new
work of a serious and contemplative cast, es-
pecially by an unknown author, and more
particularly if it is in opposition to the general
current of public opinion. It may safely be
predicted of such a work, that if it really con-
tains new and important truths, it will be dis-
tasteful to the majority of readers in all classes ;
and that whatever fame may in future be be-
stowed on its author, or however widely it may
hereafter be read by the public, or command
the assent of mankind, he will be in his grave
before either effect takes place. Adam Smith,
if we mistake not, had died before the Wealth
of Nations had got past even a second edition,
certainly before its principles had made any
material progress in the general mind. Seve-
ral years had elapsed before a hundred copies
of Mr. Hume's History were sold ; and he him-
self has told us, that nothing but the earnest
entreaties of his friends induced him, in the
face of such a cold and chilling reception, to
continue his historical labours. Although,
therefore, there exists a steady demand for
standard classical works, it is by no means
equally apparent that any thing like an ade-
quate encouragement in the general case for
the composition of new standard works, is to
be found in the present state of society. Few
men have the self-denial, like Bacon, to be-
queath their reputation to the generation after
the next, and to labour for nothing during the
whole of their own lifetime; and the chance
of finding persons who will do so, is much
diminished, when society has reached that
period in which, by simply lowering his mode
of composition, and descending from being the
instructor to be the amuser of men, the author
can obtain both profit and celebrity from a
numerous and flattering class of readers.
Nor is there the slightest ground for the
hope, that the strong diversion of philosophi-
cal and literary talent into the periodical litera-
ture of the day, has only turned it into a new
channel, and not diminished its amount or im-
paired its usefulness. If we contemplate,
indeed, the periodical literature, of the day,
every one must be struck with astonishment
at the prodigious amount and versatility of
lalent which it displays. But how much of
that has realized itself in works of a perma-
nent or durable character, calculated to instruct
or delight future ages? Turn to the early
criticisms of the Edinburgh Review, flowing, as
they did, from the able and varied pens of
Brougham, Jeffrey, and Sydney Smith, and see
how many of them will stand the test which
thirty years' subsequent experience has afford-
ed ? Few persons now read the early cri-
tiques in the Quarterly Review, supported as
they were by the talent of Gifford, Lockhart,
Croker, and Dudley, which affords decisive
evidence of the way in which each succeeding
wave of periodical criticism buries in oblivion
the last. Various attempts have been made to
select from the immense mass of these periodi-
cals, such of the pieces as appeared likely to
attract permanent interest; but none of them
have any remarkable success, if we except the
best criticisms of Jeffrey and the splendid essays
of Macaulay, which have formed a valuable
addition to our standard literature.
The reason why periodical essays, how able
soever, seldom succeed in acquiring a lasting
reputation, is this. It is too deeply impreg-
nated with the passions, the interests, and the
errors of the moment. This arises from the
same cause which Bulwer and Cousin have
remarked as necessarily changing the character
of oratory in proportion to the size of the audi-
ence to which it is addressed. Temporary
literature necessarily shares in the temporary
nature of the passions of which it is the mirror.
Every one who is accustomed to that species
of composition knows, that if he does not strike
at the prevailing feeling of the moment, in the
great majority of his readers he will produce
no sort of impression, and he will very soon,
find his contributions returned upon his hand
by the editor. " The great talent of Mirabeau,"
says Dumont, " consisted in this, that he in-
tuitively saw to what point in the minds of his
audience to apply his strength, and he sent it
home there with the strength of a giant." That
is precisely the talent required in periodical
literature ; and accordingly, every one engaged
in it, is aware that he writes an article for a
magazine or review in a very different style
from what he does in any composition intended
for durable existence. If we turn to the politi-
cal articles in any periodical ten or fifteen
years old, what a multitude of facts do we find
distorted, of theories disproved by the result,
of anticipations which have proved fallacious,
of hopes which have terminated only in disap-
pointment 1 This is no reproach to the writers.
It is the necessary result of literary and philo-
sophical talent keenly and energetically applied
to the interests of the hour. It is in the cool
shade of retirement, and by men detached from
the contests of the world, that truth in social
and moral affairs is really to be discovered;
but how are we to look for that quality amidst
the necessary cravings of an excited age, seek-
ing after something new in fiction, or the
passions of a divided community finding vent
on politics in the periodical press ?
The great profits which now accrue to
authors who are lucky enough to hit upon a
popular view with the public, is another cir-
cumstance which tends most powerfully to
stamp this fleeting and impassioned character,
both upon our creations of imagination and
periodical effusions of political argument
The days are gone past when Johnson wrote
in a garret in Fleet Street the sonorous periods
which a subsequent century have admired,
under the name of Chatham. The vast in-
crease of readers, particularly in the middle
and lower ranks, has opened sources of literary
profit, and avenues to literary distinction, un-
known in any former age. A successful article
in a magazine or review brings a man into
notice in the literary world, just as effectually
as a triumphant debvt makes the fortune of an
actress or singer. But how is this success to
be kept up ! or how is this profit to be con-
tinued ? Not certainly by turning aside from
periodical literature to the cool shades of medi-
tation or retirement, but by engaging still more
THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION.
179
deeply in the stirring bustle of the limes ; by
catering to the craving for continued excite-
ment, or plunging into the stream of turbulent
politics. If, instead of doing so, he sits " on a
hill retired," and labours for the benefit of
mankind, and the instruction of posterity in a
future age, he will soon find the cold shoulder
of the public turned towards him. He may
acquire immortal fame by his labours, but he
will soon find that, unless he has a profession
or independent fortune, he is gradually verging
towards a neglected home the garret. Where-
as, if he engages in the pursuit of fiction, or
plunges into the stream of politics, he will ere-
long be gratified by finding, if he has talents
adequate to the undertaking, that fame and
fortune pour in upon him, that his society is
courted, and his name celebrated, and not un-
frequently political patronage rewards passing
talent or service with durable honours or
rewards.
Nothing, indeed, is more certain than that
nothing great, either in philosophy, literature,
or art, was ever purchased by gold ; that genius
unfolds her treasures to disinterested votaries
only; and that but one reason can be assigned
why such clusters of great men occasionally
appear in the world, that "God Almighty," in
Hallam's words, "has chosen at those times to
create them." But admitting that neither gold
nor honours can purchase genius, or unlock
truth, the question is, to what extent they may
draw aside talent, even of the highest class, from
the cold and shivering pinnacles of meditation
and thought, into the rich and flowery vales of
politics, amusement, or imagination. The
point is not what they can do, but what they
can cause to be left undone. Doubtless there
are occasionally to be found men of the very
highest character of intellect and principle,
who, born to direct mankind, feel their destiny,
and, in defiance of all the seductions of fame or
interest, pursue it with invincible perseverance
to the end. But such men are rare; they sel-
dom appear more than once in a generation.
Above all, they are least likely to arise, and
most likely to be diverted from their proper
destiny in an age of commercial opulence and
greatness, or of strong political or social ex-
citement. The universal thirst for gold, the
general experience of its necessity to confer
not merely comfort but respectability the faci-
lity with which genius may acquire it, if it will
condescend to fall in with the temper of the
times the utter barrenness of its efforts, if it
indulges merely in the abstract pursuit of truth,
how clearly soever destined for immortality in
a future age the distinction to be immediately
acquired by lending its aid to the strife of parties,
or condescending to amuse an insatiable pub-
lic the long-continuedneglect which is certain
to ensue, if works likely to procure durable
celebrity are attempted are so many tempta-
tions which assail the literary adventurer on
his path, and which, if not resisted by the he-
roic sense of duty of a Thalaba, will infallibly
divert him from his appointed mission of pierc-
ing the Idol of Error to the heart.
These causes of danger to our standard lite-
rature become more pressing, when it is recol-
lected that, by the fixed practice and apparently
constitutional usage of this mixed aristocratic
and commercial realm, no distinctions of rank
are ever conferred upon literary ability, how
distinguished soever. Sir Walter Scott, indeed,
and Sir Edward Bulwer have been made baro-
nets; but, in the first instance, it was on the
personal friend of George IV. that this honour
was conferred, not the great novelist; in the
second, to the literary parliamentary support-
er, not the author of England and the English,
that the reward was given. Both indeed were
entirely worthy of the honour; but the honour
would never have been bestowed on the Scotch
novelist, if he had been unknown in the aris-
tocratic circles of London, and never dined
at Carlton House ; or on the English, if he had
been a stranger to the Whig coteries of the
metropolis. The proof of this is decisive.
Look at what we have done for our greatest
men, who had not these adventitious aids to
court favour. We made Burns an excise of-
ficer and Adam Smith a commissioner of cus-
toms.
The influence of this circumstance is very
great; and the want of any such national ho-
nours is an additional cause of the fleeting and
ephemeral character of our general literature.
The soldier and the sailor are certain, if they
distinguish themselves, of obtaining such re-
wards. Look at the long list of knights com-
manders of the Bath, in both services, who were
promoted by the last brevet. Nothing can be
more just than conferring such distinctions on
these gallant men ; they compensate to them the
inequality of their fortunes, and stimulate them
to heroic and daring exploits. The successful
lawyer often comes in the end to take prece-
dence of every peer in the realm, and becomes
the founder of a family which transmits his
wealth and his honours' to remote generations.
The honoured names of Hardwicke, Loughbo-
rough, Mansfield, and Eldon, have been trans-
mitted with princely fortunes to an ennobled
posterity. But to literary abilities none of these
higher and elevating objects of ambition are
open. The great author can neither found a
family nor acquire a title; and if he does not
choose to degrade himself by falling in with
the passions or frivolities of the age, it is more
than probable that, like the Israelites of old,
his life will be spent in wandering in the de-
sert, and he will see only, in his last hour, and
that from afar, the promised land. And yet
what is the influence of the soldier, the lawyer,
or the statesman, compared to that which a
great and profound writer exercises ? and what
do the monarchs, the cabinets, and the generals
of one age do, but carry into effect the princi-
ples enforced by the master-spirits of the pre-
ceding?
It is evident, therefore, that there are a vari-
ety of causes, some of a positive, some of a
negative kind, which are operating together to
depress the character of our literature; to chill
the aspirations of genius, or the soarings of
intellect ; to enlist fancy on the side of fashion,
and genius in the pursuit of fiction ; to bind
down lasting intellect to passing interests, and
compel it to surrender to party what was meant
for mankind. This is not a cl->~s interest; it
is an universal concern. It involves nothing
180
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
less than the dearest interests and future fate
of the nation ; for what sort of people will we
soon become, if temporary passions, interests,
or frivolities, alone engross the talent of the
empire; and the great lights of genius and in-
tellect, which might enable us to keep abreast
of our fortunes, become extinct among us ?
What are we to say are likely to be the prin-
ciples of our statesmen, our legislators, or our
rulers, if the elevating and ennobling principles
of former times are gradually forgotten, and
no successors to the race of giants arise to di-
rect, purify, and elevate the public mind, amidst
the rapidly increasing dangers which assail it,
in the later and more opulent stages of society 1
What are we to expect but that we are to fall
into the listless cravings of the Athenians, who
were constantly employed in seeing and hear-
ing something new ; or to the deplorable destiny
of the Byzantine empire, which, amidst inces-
sant literary exertion and amusement, did not
produce a single work of genius for a thousand
years? And if such mingled talent and frivo-
lity should permanently lay hold of the British
mind, what can we expect but that our latter
end shall be like theirs, and that centuries of
progressive degradation and ultimate national
extinction will terminate the melancholy era
of social regeneration on which we have just
entered.
It is perhaps of still more importance to ob-
serve, what, though equally true, is not so gene-
rally admitted, that these causes of degradation,
so far from being likely to be alleviated or ar-
rested by the progressive extension of the taste
for reading among the middle and lower classes
of society, are, unhappily, too likely to be daily
increased by that very circumstance. As it is
the extension of the power of reading to the mid-
dle and working classes, that has. in a great part,
produced the present ephemeral character of our
literature, and the incessant demand for works
of excitement; so nothing appears more cer-
tain, than that this tendency is likely to aug-
ment with the extension of that class of readers.
The middle and lower orders, indeed, who are
so closely brought into contact with the real
difficulties and stern realities of life, will al-
ways, in every popular community, cause a
large part of the talent and intellect of the nation
to be directed, not merely to works of amuse-
ment, but works of utility, and having an im-
mediate bearing on the improvement of art, the
extension of commerce, or the amelioration of
the material interests of society. But these
labours, however useful and important, belong
to a secondary class of thought, and encourage
only a second class of literary labourers.
They are the instruments of genius, not genius
itself; they are the generals and colonels in the
great army of thought, but not the comrnander-
in-chief. "In the infancy of a nation," says
Bacon, "arms do prevail; in its manhood,
arms and learning for a short season ; in its de-
cline, commerce and the mechanical arts."
The application of energy, talent, and industry,
to material purposes, however useful or neces-
sary those purposes may be, savours of the
physical necessities, not the spiritual dignity of
man ; and the general turning of public effort
in that direction is a symptom of the decline
of nations. Let us not therefore lay the flat-
tering unction to our souls, that the craving
for the excitement of fiction, or the realities
of mechanical improvement, which have ex-
tended so immensely among us, with the spread
of knowledge among the middle and working
classes, are to prove any antidote to the decline
of the highest class of literature amongst us.
On the contrary, they are among the most
Dowerful causes which produce it.
Real genius and intellect of the highest cha-
racter, it can never be too often repeated, works
only for the future ; it rarely produces any im-
pression, or brings in any reward whatever, at
he present. Works of fiction or imagination,
ndeed, such as Sir Walter Scott's orBulwer's
novels, or Lord Byron's poetical romances,
may produce an immediate impression, and
yet be destined for durable existence ; but such
a combination is extremely rare, and is in
general confined entirely to works that please.
Those that instruct or improve, destined to a
yet longer existence, have a much slower
growth, and often do not come to maturity till
after the death of the author.
" The solitary man of genius," says D'Israeli,
; 'is arranging the materials of instruction and
curiosity from every country and every age;
lie is striking out, in the concussion of new
light, a new order of ideas for his own times ;
he possesses secrets which men hide from
their contemporaries, truths they dared not
utter, facts they dared not discover. View him
in the stillness of meditation, his eager spirit
busied over a copious page, and his eye spark-
ling with gladness. He has concluded what
his countrymen will hereafter cherish as the
legacy of genius. You see him now changed;
and the restlessness of his soul is thrown into
his very gestures ! Could you listen to the
vaticinator ! But the next age only will quote
his predictions. If he be the truly great au-
thor, he will be best comprehended by posterity;
for the result of ten years of solitary medita-
tion has often required a whole century to be
understood and to be adopted."
We are no enemies to the conferring the
honours of the crown upon the most distin-
guished of our literary men. To many, such
elevation would form a most appropriate re-
ward ; to all, a legitimate object of ambition.
But we are exceedingly jealous of the influence
of all such court favours upon the assertors
of political, social, or historical truth. We
look to other countries, and we behold the
withering effect of such distinctions upon the
masculine independence of thought. We re-
collect the titled and well-paid literature of
Prance, under the Emperor Napoleon, and we
ask, what has come of all that high-sounding
panegyric? We read the annals of the digni-
fied historians of Austria, Prussia, and Russia,
and we sicken for the breath of a freeman.
We remember 1 it was only under* a Trajan that
a Tacitus could pour forth the indignation of
expiring virtue at surrounding baseness, and
we shudder to think how few Trajaus are to
be found in the decline of nations.
The only legitimate and safe reward of the
highest class of literary merit, next to the con-
sciousness of discharging its mission, is to be
THE COPYRIGHT QUESTION.
181
found in the prolongation of the period during
which its profits are to accrue to the family of
the author. We at once concede that even
this motive, higher and more honourable than
that of present or selfish gain, will never be
sufficient to induce the loftiest class of genius
or intellect to produce any great work. It is
an overpowering sense of public duty an
ardent inspiration after deserved immortality
the yearnings of a full mind, which must be
delivered that are the real causes of such
elevated efforts. They are given only to a
few, because to a few only has God assigned
the power of directing mankind. But, admit-
ting that the divine inspiration is the fountain
of truth the "pure well of genius undefined"
the point to be considered is, how is the
stream which it pours forth to be kept in its
proper channel! how is it to be prevented
from becoming rapidly merged in the agitated
waves of human passion, or sunk in the bot-
tomless morasses of interest or selfishness ?
By giving something like perpetuity to the
rights of authorship, this can be best effected ;
because it is by so doing that we will most
effectually ally it to the purest and most ele-
vated motives which, in sublunary matters,
can influence mankind.
Look at the merchant, the lawyer, the manu-
facturer, at all who amass fortunes, and leave
the colossal estates which gradually elevate
their possessors to the ranks of the aristocracy,
and fill up in that class the chasms which for-
tune, extravagance, or the extinction of fami-
lies, so often produce. What are the motives
which animate the founders of such families
to a life of exertion, and produce the astonish-
ing effects in the accumulation of wealth which
we daily see around us 1 It is not the desire
of individual enjoyment; for, whatever his son
may have, the father seldom knows any thing
of wealth but of the labour by which it is
created. It is not even for the distinction
which he is to acquire during his own lifetime,
that the successful professional maa or mer-
chant labours ; for, if that were his object, it
would be far more effectually and more plea-
santly gained, by simply spending his wealth
as fast as he made it. What, then, is the
motive which animates him to a life of labour,
and stimulates him through half a century to
such incessant exertions'! It is the hope of
transmitting his fortune to his children of
securing the independence of those most dear
to him; it is the desire of founding a family
of leaving his descendants in a very different
rank of life from that in which he himself
moved, or his fathers before him. They know
little of the human mind who are not aware
that this desire, when it once takes hold of the
mind, supplies the want of all other enjoy-
ments, and that it is the secret, unobserved
cause of the greatest individual and national
efforts that have ever been achieved among
mankind.
To the due action of this important principle,
however, a certain degree of permanence in the
enjoyment of the fortune acquired is indispen-
sable. Men will never make such long-con-
tinued or sustained efforts for a temporary or
passing interest. Does any man suppose that
a merchant or lawyer would toil for fifty years,
if he knew that he could only expect an eight-
and-twenty years' lease of his fortune ! " Give
a man," says Arthur Young, "a seven years'
lease of a garden, and he will soon convert it
into a wilderness: give him a freehold in an
arid desert, and he will not be long of convert-
ing it into a garden." Is it probable that the
industry of Great Britain would continue, if
the old Jewish system of making all estates
revert to the nation at the end of every fifty
years were to be introduced, or Bronterre
O'Brien's more summary mode of dividing
every fortune at the death of the owner were
put in practice 1 Truly, we should soon be-
come an ephemeral and fleeting generation in
wealth, as well as literature, if such maxims
were acted upon; and " to-day let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we die," would at once
become the order of the day.
If the combined force of all these circum-
stances be taken into consideration, it must be
evident to every impartial mind, not only that
it is not surprising that new standard literature
has of late years so much declined amongst
us, but that the only wonderful thing is, that it
has not sunk much more than it has. The
causes which produce great and sustained
efforts in every other department of human ac-
tivity, are not only withheld from the highest
class of literary or philosophical exertion, but
the persons engaged in them are perpetually
exposed to the disturbing and detracting in-
fluence of the prospect of fame and fortune
being attained by condescending to cater for
the passions or wants of the moment. To the
continued energy and activity of the merchant
or manufacturer, we offer the possession of
unbounded wealth, and the prospect of trans-
mitting an elevated, perhaps an ennobled race
to future times. To the soldier or the sailor
we hold out a vast succession of titled rewards,
and, to the highest among such race of heroes,
hereditary peerages the deserved reward of
their valour. To the indefatigable industry
and persevering energy of the lawyer, we offer
a seat on the Woolsack, precedence of every
temporal peer in the realm, the highest tempo-
ral dignities and hereditary honours which the
state can afford. What, then, do we offer to
the philosopher, the poet, or the historian, to
the leaders of thought and the rulers of nations,
to counteract the attractions of immediate or
temporary ambition, and lead them abreast of
their brethren at the bar, in the field, or the
senate, to great and glorious efforts, to durable
and beneficent achievement? Why, we pre-
sent them with petty traders anxiously watch-
ing the expiration of eight-and-twenty years
of copyright, or hoping for the death of the
author, if he has survived it ; and ready, with
uplifted hands, to pounce upon the glorious
inheritance of his children, and realize for
their own business-like skill and mercantile
capital the vast profits which had been be-
queathed by genius to the age which follow-
ed it.
It is a total mistake, to imagine that the
profits of works of imagination, unless they
are of the very highest class, ever equal those
which in the end accrue to the publishers of
182
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
standard works of history or philosophy. The
booksellers, since Gibbon's death, are said to
have made 200,000/. of his Decline and Fall of
the Raman Empire and hardly a year passes,
that a new edition of his immortal work, or
of Hume's History of England, does not issue
from the press. The sums realized by the
bookselling trade from the different editions of
the Wealth of Nations, would have constituted a
large inheritance to the heirs of Adam Smith.
What a princely fortune would Milton or
Shakspeare have left to their descendants, if
any there be, if they could have bequeathed to
them the exclusive right of publishing their
own works, even for half a century after their
own death. Look at the classics. What count-
less sums have been realized by the booksellers
and publishers from the successive reprints, in
every country of Europe, of the works of Livy,
Cicero, and Tacitus, since the revival of letters
three hundred years ago 1 Why, the profits
made by the publication of any one of these
works would have made a princely fortune,
and founded a ducal family. So true is it that
literary or philosophical talent of the highest
description, so far from being unproductive of
wealth to its possessors, is in the end produc-
tive of a far greater and more lasting source
of income than the efforts either of the lawyer,
the merchant, or the statesman. It has this
invaluable quality: it is permanent; it creates
an estate which produces fruits after the author
is no more. The only reason why great for-
tunes are not made in the one way as well as
in the other, is because the labour employed
on that, the highest species of human adven-
ture, is almost always unproductive in the out-
set, and lucrative only in the end ; and that the
injustice of human laws confiscates the pro-
perty at the very monient when the crop is beginning
to come to maturity. They know little of human
nature who imagine that such prospect of
remote advantage would have little influence
on literary exertion. Look at life insurances.
How large a proportion of the most active and
useful members of society, especially among
the middle and higher classes, are connected
with these admirable institutions. How many
virtuous and industrious men deny themselves,
during a long life, many luxuries, and even
comforts, in order that, after their death, they
may bequeath an independence to their chil-
dren. Eighty thousand persons are now con-
nected with these institutions in Great Britain,
and that number is hourly on the increase.
Here, then, is decisive evidence of the ex-
tent to which the desire of transmitting in-
dependence to our children acts upon man-
kind, even where it is to be won only by a life
of continued toil and self-denial. Can there
be the slightest doubt that the same motive,
combining with the desire to benefit mankind,
or acquire durable fame, would soon come to
operate powerfully upon the highest class of
intellectual effort, and that an adequate coun-
teraction would thus be provided to the nume-
rous attractions which now impel it into tem-
porary exertion] And observe, the motives
which lead to present self-denial in order to
transmit an independence to posterity, by the
effecting life assurances, are nearly allied to
those which prompt great minds to magnani-
mous and durable efforts for the good of their
species ; for both rest upon the foundation of
all that is noble or elevated in human affairs
a denial of self, a regard to futurity, and a love
for others.
The tenacity with which any extension even
of the term of copyright enjoyed by authors,
or their assignees, is resisted by a certain por-
tion of the London booksellers, and those who
deal in the same line, affords the most decisive
proof of the magnitude of the profits which
are to be obtained by the republication, the
moment the copyright has expired, of works
that have acquired a standard reputation, and
of the vast amount of literary property, the
inheritance of the great of the past age, which
is annually confiscated for the benefit of the
booksellers in the present. These men look
to the matter as a mere piece of mercantile
speculation; their resistance is wholly founded
upon the dread of a diminution of their profits,
wrung from the souls of former authors; they
would never have put forward, with so much
anxiety as they have done, Mr. Warburton and
Mr. Wakley to fight their battles, if they had
not had very extensive profits to defend in the
contest. The vehemence of their opposition
affords a measure of the magnitude of the in-
justice which is done to authors by the present
state of the law, and of the amount of en-
couragement to great and glorious effort, which
is annually withheld by the legislature. The
struggle, in which they have hitherto proved
successful, is not a contest between authors
and a particular section of the booksellers; it
is, in reality, a contest between the nation and
a limited section of the bookselling trade. It
is, in the most emphatic sense, a class against
a national interest. For on the one side are a
few London booksellers who make colossal
fortunes, by realizing, shortly after their de-
cease, the profits of departed greatness; and
on the other, the whole body of the people of
England, whose opinions and character are
necessarily formed by the highest class of its
writers, and whose national destiny and future
fate is mainly dependent upon the spirited and
exalted direction of their genius.
The only argument founded upon public
considerations which is ever adduced against
these views, is founded upon the assertion,
that, under the monopoly produced by the copy-
right to the author, while it lasts, the price of
works is seriously enhanced to the public, and
they are confined to editions of a more costly
description, and that thus the benefit of the
spread of knowledge among the middle and
humbler classes is diminished. If this argu-
ment were well founded, it may be admitted,
that it would afford, to a certain degree, a coun-
terbalancing consideration to those which have
been mentioned, although no temporary or
passing advantages could ever adequately
compensate the evils consequent upon drying
up the fountains of real intellectual greatness
amongst us. But it is evident that these ap-
prehensions are altogether chimerical, and that
the clamour devised about the middle classes
being deprived of the benefit of getting cheap
editions of wqrks that have become standard,
THE COPYRIGHT QUESTIO1
183
is now altogether unfounded. It may be con- [ blished. at different prices, adapted to the rates
ceded that in the former age, when the rich at which purchasers inajN|^||0jB|0fil^TOiy;
and the affluent alone were the purchasers of just as the manager of a theatre understands
books, and education had not opened the trea- that it is expedient not only to have the dress-
sures of knowledge to a larger circle, the price circle for the nobility and gentry, but the pit
of books during the copyright were, in general, j for the people of business, and the galleries for
high, and that the prices were too often suited
Nay, it
only to the higher class of readers.
may also be admitted, that some publishers
have often, by the reprint of works of a stand-
ard nature, at a cheaper rate, the moment the
copyright expired, of late years materially ex-
tended the circle of their readers, and thereby
conferred an important benefit on society. But
nothing can be plainer than that this circum-
stance has taken place solely from the recent
introduction of the middle classes into the
reading and book-purchasing public; and be-
cause experience had not yet taught authors
or publishers the immense profits to be some-
times realized by adapting, during the con-
tinuance of the copyright., the varied classes of
editions of popular works, to the different
classes of readers who have now risen into
activity. But their attention is now fully
awakened to this subject. Every one now
sees that the greatest profit is to 'be realized
during the copyright, for works of durable in-
terest, by publishing editions adapted for all,
even the very humblest classes. The proof of this
is decisive. Does not Mr. Campbell publish
annually a new edition of the Pleasures of Hope,
in every possible form, from the two guinea
edition for the duchess or countess, down to
the shilling copy for the mechanic and the
artisan] Have not Sir Walter Scott's Novels
been brought down, during the subsistence of
the copyright, to an issue of the Waverley
Novels, at four shillings each novel, and lat-
terly to an issue at twopence a week, avowedly
for the working-classes'! Moore's, Southey's,
and Wordsworth's Poems, have all been pub-
lished by the authors or their assignees, in a
duodecimo form, originally at five, but which
can now be had at four, or three shillings and
sixpence a volume. James's Naval History has
already issued from the press in monthly num-
bers, at five shillings; and the eighth edition
of Hallam's Middle Ages is before the public in
two volumes, at a price so moderate, that it
never can be made lower to those who do not
wish to put out their eyes by reading closely
printed double columns by candle-light. In
short, authors and booksellers now perfectly
understand that, as a reading and book-buying
public has sprung up in all classes, it has
become not only necessary, but in the highest
degree profitable, to issue different editions
even simultaneously from the press, if the
reputation of a work has become fully esta-
the humbler classes. No doubt can be enter-
tained that as the craving for intellectual en-
joyment, to those who feel it the more insatia-
ble of any, spreads more generally through the
middle classes, this effect will more extensively
take place. No one imagines that, because the
seats in the dress-circle are seven shillings, he
will close the pit, which is three and sixpence,
or the gallery, which is one shilling. In this
age of growing wealth and intelligence in the
middle and humbler classes, there is no danger
of their being forgotten, if they do not forget
themselves. There is more to be got out of
the pit and the galleries than the dress-circle.
Thus we have argued this great question of
copyright upon its true ground the national
character, the national interests, the elevation
and improvement of all classes. W T e disdain
to argue it upon the footing of the interests of
authors; we despise appeals to the humanity,
even to the justice of the legislature. We
have' not even mentioned the names of Mr. Ser-
geant Talfourd or Lord Mahon, who" have so
strenuously and eloquently advocated the in-
terest of authors in the point at issue. We
have done so because we look to higher objects
in connection with the question than any per-
sonal or class advantage. We tell our legis-
lators, that those who wield the powers of
thought are fully aware of the strength of the
lever which they hold in their hand; they
know that it governs the rulers of men ; that
it brought on the Revolution of France, and
stopped the Revolution of England. The only
class of writers to whom the extension of the
present copyright would be of any value, are
actuated by higher motives to their exertions
than any worldly considerations of honour or
profit ; those who aspire to direct or bless man-
kind, are neither to be seduced by courts, nor
to be won by gold. It is the national cha-
racter which is really affected by the present
downward tendency of our literature ; it is
the national interests which are really at stake;
it is the final fate of the empire which is at
issue in the character of our literature. True,
an extension of the copyright will not affect
the interests of a thousandth part of the writers,
or a hundredth part of the readers in the pre-
sent or any future age ; but what then it is
they who are to form the general opinion of
mankind in the next; it is upon that thou-
sandth and that hundredth that the fate of the
world depends.
184
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
MICHELET'S FRANCE.*
IT is a common and very just observation,
that modern historical works are not so inte-
resting as those which have been bequeathed
to us by antiquity. Even at this distance of
time, after two thousand years have elapsed
since they were written, the great histories of
Greece and Rome still form the most attractive
subject of study to all ages. The young find
in their heart-stirring legends and romantic
incidents, keen and intense delight; the mid-
dle-aged discover in their reflections and max-
ims the best guide in the ever-changing, but
yet ever the same, course of human events :
the aged recur to them with still greater plea-
sure, as imbodying at once the visions of their
youth and the experience of their maturer years.
It is not going too far to assert, that in their
own style they are altogether inimitable, and
that, like the Greek statues, future ages, ever
imitating, will never be able to rival them.
This remarkable and generally admitted
perfection is not to be ascribed, however, to any
superior genius in the ancient to the modern
writers. History was a different art in Greece
and Rome from what it now is. Antiquity
had no romances their histories, based in
early times on their ballads and traditions,
supplied their place. Narrative with them
was simple in event, and single in interest
it related in general the progress of a single
city or commonwealth ; upon that the whole
light of the artist required to be thrown : the
remainder naturally was placed in shade, or
slightly illuminated only where it came in con-
tact with the favoured object. With the ex-
ception of Herodotus, who, though the oldest
historian in existence, was led by the vigour
of his mind, his discursive habits, and exten-
sive travelling, to give, as it were, a picture
of the whole world then known these ancient
histories are all the annals of individual towns
or little republics. Xenophon, Thucydides,
Sallust, Livy, Diodorus Siculus, Dionysius
Halicarnassensis, are all more or less of this
character. The mighty genius of Tacitus
alone seems to have embraced the design of
giving a picture of the vast empire of Rome ;
and even in his hands history was still dis-
tinguished by its old character the Forum
was still the object of reverential interest the
Palatine Mount embraced the theatre of almost
all the revolutions which he has so admirably
portrayed ; and his immortal work is less a
picture of the Roman world under the Caesars,
than a delineation of the revolutions of the
palace which shook their empire, and the con-
vulsive throes by which they were attended
throughout its various provinces.
In modern times, a far more difficult task j
awaits the historian, and wholly different quali- j
ties are required in him who undertakes to
perform it. The superior age of the world
*Histoirede France. ParM Mirhelet. 6 vole. Paris,
1832-3. Foreign and Colonial Review, April, 1844.
I the eighteen hundred years which have elapsed
| since the Augustan age of Roman literature
| the discovery of new nations, quarters of the
globe, and hemispheres, since Livy concluded,
in one hundred and forty books, the majestic
annals of Roman victories the close connec-
tion of nations among each other, which have
interlaced their story like the limbs of ancient
wrestlers the new sciences which have grown
up and come to bear upon human events, with
the growth of mankind and the expansion of
knowledge and the prodigious perplexity of
transactions, military, political, and moral,
which require to be unravelled and brought in
a clear form before the mind of the reader,
have rendered the task of the historian now as
laborious, complicated, and confused, as in
former times it was simple, clear, and undi-
vided. Unity of effect that preciotfs and im-
portant object in all the Fine Arts has been
rendered always difficult, sometimes impossi-
ble. The story is so complicated, the trans-
actions so various, the interests so diverse, that
nothing but the most consummate skill, and in-
cessant attention on the part of the historian
to the leading objects of his narrative, can
prevent the mind of the reader from being lost
in a boundless sea of detached occurrences.
It is not the " tale of Troy divine," nor the
narrative of Roman heroism; nor the conquest
of Jerusalem, which requires to be recorded;
but the transactions of many different nations,
as various and detached from each other as
the adventures of the knights errant in Ariosto.
For these reasons history cannot be written
now on the plan of the ancients, and if at-
tempted, it would fail of success. The family
of nations has become too large to admit of
interest being centred only on one member of
it. It is in vain now to draw the picture of the
groups of time, by throwing the whole light on
one figure, and all the rest in shade. Equally
impossible is it to give a mere narrative of
interesting events, and cast all the rest over-
board. All the world would revolt at such an
attempt, if made. The transactions of the one
selected would be unintelligible, if those of the
adjoining states were not given. One set of
readers would say, " Where are your statis-
tics 1" Another, " There is no military discus-
sion the author is evidently no soldier." A
third would condemn the book as wanting
diplomatic transactions ; a fourth, as destitute
of philosophic reflection. The statesman would
throw it aside as not containing the informa-
tion he desired; the scholar, as affording no
cine to contemporary and original authority;
the man of the world, as a narrative not to be
relied on, and to which it was hazardous to
trust without farther investigation. Women
would reject it as less interesting than novels;
men, as not more authentic than a romance.
Notwithstanding, , however, this great and
increasing difficulty of writing history in
MICHELET'S FRANCE.
185
modern times, from the vast addition to the
subjects which it embraces and must embrace,
the fundamental principles of the art are still
the same as they were in the days of Thucydi-
des or Sallust. The figures in the picture are
greatly multiplied ; many cross lights disturb
the unity of its effect; infinitely more learning
is required in the drapery and still life; but
the object of the painter has undergone no
change. Unity of effect, singleness of emotion,
should still be his great aim : the multiplication
of objects from which it is to be produced, has
increased the difficulty, but not altered the
principles of the art. And that this difficulty
is not insuperable, but may be overcome by
the light of genius directing the hand of in-
dustry, is decisively proved by the example of
Gibbon's Rome, which, embracing the events
of fifteen centuries, and successive descriptions
of all the nations which, during that long period,
took a prominent part in the transactions of
the world, yet conveys a clear and distinct im-
pression in every part to the mind of the reader;
and presents a series of pictures so vivid, and
drawn with such force, that the work, -more
permanently than any romance, fascinates
every successive generation.
It is commonly said that accuracy and im-
partiality are the chief requisites in an histo-
rian. That they are indispensable to his utility
or success, is indeed certain ; for if the im-
pression once be lost, that the author is to be
relied on, the value of his production, as a
record of past events, is at an end. No bril-
liancy of description, no magic of eloquence,
no power of narrative, can supply the want of
the one thing needful trustworthiness. But
fully admitting that truth and justice are the
bases of history, there never was a greater mis-
take than to imagine that of themselves they
will constitute an historian. They may make
a valuable annalist a good compiler of ma-
terials ; but .very different qualities are re-
quired in the artist who is to construct the
edifice. In him we expect the power of com-
bination, the inspiration of genius, the bril-
liancy of conception, the generalization of effect.
The workman who cuts the stones out of the
quarry, or fashions and dresses them into en-
tablatures and columns, is a very different man
from him who combines them into the temple,
the palace, or the cathedral. The one is a
tradesman, the other an artist the first a
quarrier, the last a Michael Angelo.
Mr. Fox arranged the arts of composition
thus : 1. Poetry ; 2. History ; 3. Oratory. That
very order indicated that the great orator had
a just conception of the nature of history, and
possessed many of the qualities requisite to
excel in it, as he did in the flights of eloquence.
It is, in truth, in its higher departments, one
of the fine arts ; and it is the extraordinary
difficulty of finding a person who combines the
imagination and fervour requisite for emi-
nence in their aerial visions, with the industry
and research which, are indispensable for the
correct narrative of earthly events, which
renders great historians so very rare, even in
the most brilliant periods of human existence.
Antiquity only produced six; modern times
can hardly boast of eight. It is much easier
to find a great epic than a great history ; there
were many poets in antiquity, but only one
Tacitus. Homer himself is rather an annalist
than a poet: it is his inimitable traits of na-
ture which constitute his principal charm : the
Iliad is a history in verse. Modern Italy can
boast of a cluster of immortal poets and paint-
ers ; but the country of Raphael and Tasso has
not produced one really great history. The
laboured annals of Guicciardini or Davila can-
not bear the name; a work, the perusal of
which was deemed worse than the fate of a
galley-slave, cannot be admitted to take its
place with the master-pieces of Italian art.*
Three historians only in Great Britain have
by common consent taken their station in the
highest rank of historic excellence. Sismondi
alone, in France, has been assigned a place
by the side of Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson.
This extraordinary rarity of the highest excel-
lence demonstrates the extraordinary difficulty
of the art, and justifies Mr. Fox's assertion,
that it ranks next to poetry in the fine arts;
but it becomes the more extraordinary, when
the immense number of works written on his-
torical subjects is taken into consideration,
and the prodigious piles of books of history
which are to be met with in every public
library.
The greatest cause of this general failure
of historical works to excite general attention,
or acquire lasting fame, is the want of power
of generalization and classification in the
writers. Immersed in a boundless sea of de-
tails, of the relative importance of which they
were unable to form any just estimate, the au-
thors of the vast majority of these works have
faithfully chronicled the events which fell un-
der their notice, but in so dry and uninterest-
ing a manner that they produced no sort of
impression on mankind. Except as books of
antiquity or reference, they have long since
been consigned to the vault of all the Ca-
pulets. They were crushed under their own
weight they were drowned in the flood of
their own facts. While they were straining
every nerve not to deceive their readers, the
whole class of those readers quietly slipped
over to the other side. They, their merits and
their faults, were alike forgotten. It may safely
be affirmed, that ninety-nine out of a hundred
historical works are consigned to oblivion
from this cause.
The quality, on the other hand, which dis-
tinguishes all the histories which have acquired
a great and lasting reputation among men, has
been the very reverse of this. It consists in
the power of thro wing into the shade the sub-
ordinate and comparatively immaterial facts,
and bringing into a prominent light those only
on which subsequent ages love to dwell, from
the heroism of the actions recounted, the tragic
interest of the catastrophes portrayed, or the
important consequences with which they have
been attended on the future generations of
men. It was thus that Herodotus painted with
* It is reported in Italy, that a palley-slave was offer-
ed a commutation of his sentence, if he would read
through Guicciardini's War of Florence with Pisa. After
labouring at it for some time, he petitioned to be sent
back to the oar Si non I vero & bent trdvato.
186
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
so much force the memorable events of the
Persian invasion of Greece ; and Thucydides,
the contest of aristocracy and democracy in
the Greek commonwealths; and Livy, the im-
mortal strife of Hannibal and Scipio in Roman
story. No historian ever equalled Gibbon in
this power of classification, and giving breadth
of effect ; for none ever had so vast and com-
plicated a series of events to recount, and none
ever portrayed them with so graphic and lu-
minous a pen. Observe his great pictures :
the condition of the Roman empire in the time
of Augustus the capture of Constantinople by
the Latin crusaders the rise of Mohammed
the habits and manners of the pastoral nations
the disasters of Julian and the final decay
and ruin of the Eternal City. They stand out
from the canvas with all the freshness and
animation of real life ; and seizing powerfully
on the imagination of the reader, they make an
indelible impression, and compensate or cause
to be forgotten all the insignificant details of
revolutions in the palace of Constantinople, or
in the decline of the Roman empire, which
necessarily required to be introduced.
Struck with the fate of so prodigious a host
of historical writers, who had sunk into obli-
vion from this cause, Voltaire, with his usual
vigour and originality, struck out a new style
in this department of literature. Discarding
at once the whole meager details, the long de-
scriptions of dress and ceremony, which filled
the pages of the old chronicles or monkish
annalists, he strove to bring history back to
what he conceived, and with reason, was its
true object a striking delineation of the prin-
cipal events which had occurred, with a picture
of thechanges of manners, ideas, and principles
with which they were accompanied. This was
a great improvement on the jejune narratives
of former times ; and proportionally great was
the success with which, in the first instance at
least, it was attended. While the dry details of
Guicciardini, the ponderous tomes of Villaret
or Mezeray, and the trustworthy quartos of De
Thou, slumbered in respectable obscurity on the
dusty shelves of the library, the " Siecle de Louis
XIV.," the Life of Peter the Great and Charles
XII., were on every table, and almost in every
boudoir ; and their popular author was elevated
to the pinnacle of worldly fame, while his more
laborious and industrious predecessors were
nigh forgotten by a frivolous age. A host of
imitators, as usual with every original writer,
followed in this brilliant and lucrative path ; of
whom, Raynal in France, Schiller in Germany,
and Watson in England, were the most suc-
cessful.
But it was ere long discovered that this bril-
liant and sketchy style of history was neither
satisfactory to the scholar nor permanently
popular with the public. It was amusing ra-
ther than interesting, brilliant than profound.
Its ingenious authors sprung too suddenly to
conclusions they laid down positions which
the experience of the next age proved to be er-
roneous. It wanted that essential requisite in
history, a knowledge of the human heart and a
practical acquaintance with men. Above all,
it had none of the earnestness of thought, the
impassioned expression, which springs from
deep and sincere conviction, and which is ever
found to be the only lasting passport to the hu-
man heart. After the first burst of popularity
was over, it began to be discovered that these
brilliant sketches were not real history, and
could never supply its place. They left an im-
mense deal untold, of equal or greater import-
ance than what was told. They gave an
amusing, but deceptive, and therefore not per-
manently interesting, account of the periods they
embraced. Men design something more in
reading the narrative of great and important
events in past times, than an able sketch of
their leading features and brilliant characters,
accompanied by perpetual sneers at priests,
eulogies on kings, or sarcasms on mankind.
This was more particularly the case when the
political contests of the 18th century increased
in vehemence, and men, warmed with the pas-
sions of real life, turned back to the indifferent
coolness, the philosophic disdain, the ton deri-
swrc, with which the most momentous or tragic
events had been treated in these gifted but su-
perficial writers. Madame de Stael has said,
that when derision has become the prevailing
characteristic of the public mind, it is all over
with the generous affections or elevated senti-
ments. She was right, but not for ever only
till men are made to feel in their own persons
the sufferings they laugh at in others. It is
astonishing how soon that turns derision into
sympathy. The " aristocrats derisoires" emerged
from the prisons of Paris, on the fall of Robes-
pierre, deeply affected with sympathy for hu-
man wo.
The profound emotions, the dreadful suffer-
ings, the heart-stirring interest of that eventful
era, speedily communicated themselves to the
style of historical writers; it at once sent the
whole tribe of philosophic and derisory histo-
rians overboard. The sketchy style, the philo-
sophic contempt, the calm indifference, the
skeptical sneers of Voltaire and his followers,
were felt as insupportable by those who had
known what real suffering was. There early
appeared in the narratives of the French Revo-
lution, accordingly, in the works of Toulon-
geon, Bertrand de Molleville, the Deux Amis
de la Liberte, and Lacretelle, a force of paint-
ing, a pathos of narrative, a vehemence of lan-
guage, which for centuries had been unknown
in modern Europe. This style speedily became
general, and communicated itself to history in
all its branches. The passions on all sides were
too strongly roused to permit of the calm nar-
ratives of former philosophic writers being
tolerated; men had suffered too much to allow
them to speak or think with indifference of the
sufferings of others. In painting with force
and energy, it was soon found that recourse
must be had to the original authorities, and, if
possible, the eye-witnesses of the events ; all
subsequent or imaginary narrative appeared
insipid and lifeless in comparison ; it was like
studying the mannerist trees of Perelle or
Vivares after the vigorous sketches from na-
ture of Salvator or Claude. Thence has
arisen the great school of modern French his-
tory, of which Sismondi was the founder ; and
which has since been enriched by the works
of Guizot, Thierry, Barante, Thiers, Mignet,
:
MICHELET'S FRANCE.
187
Michaud, and Michelet : a cluster of writers,
which, if none of them singly equal the master-
pieces of English history, present, taken as a
whole, a greater mass of talent in that depart-
ment than any other country can boast.
The poetical mind and pictorial eye of Gib-
bon had made him anticipate, in the very midst
of the philosophic school of Voltaire, Hume,
and Robertson, this great change which mis-
fortune and suffering impressed generally upon
the next generation. Thence his extraordinary
excellence and acknowledged superiority as a
delineator of events to any writer who has pre-
ceded or followed him. He united the philo-
sophy and general views of one age to the
brilliant pictures and impassioned story of
another. He warmed with the narratives of
the crusaders or the Saracens he wandered
with the Scythians he wept with the Greeks
he delineated with a painter's hand, and a
poet's fire, the manners of the nations, the fea-
tures of the countries, the most striking events
of the periods which were passed under review ;
but at the same time he preserved inviolate
the unity and general effect of his picture,
his lights and shadows maintained their just
proportions, and were respectively cast on the
proper objects. Philosophy threw a radiance
over the mighty maze ; and the mind of the
reader, after concluding his prodigious series
of details, dwelt with complacency on its most
striking periods, skilfully brought out by the
consummate skill of the artist, as the recollection
of a spectator does on any of the magic scenes
in Switzerland, in which, amidst an infinity of
beautiful objects, the eye is fascinated by the
calm tranquillity of the lake, or the rosy hues of
the evening glow on the glacier. We speak of
Gibbon as a delineator of events ; none can
feel more strongly or deplore more deeply the
fatal blindness the curse of his age which
rendered him so perverted on the subject of
religion, and left so wide a chasm in his im-
mortal work, which the profounder thought
and wider experience of Guizot has done so
much to fill.
Considered as calm and philosophic narra-
tives, the histories of Hume and Robertson
will remain as standard models for every fu-
ture age. The just and profound reflections
of the former, the inimitable clearness arid im-
partiality with which he has summoned up
the arguments on both sides, on the most mo-
mentous questions which have agitated Eng-
land, as well as the general simplicity, uniform
clearness and occasional pathos of his story,
must for ever command the admiration of
mankind. In vain we are told that he is often
inaccurate, sometimes partial ; in vain are
successive attacks published on detached parts
of his narrative, by party zeal or antiquarian
research; his reputation is undiminished ;
successive editions issuing from the press
attest the continued sale of his work ; and it
continues its majestic course through the sea
of time, like a mighty three-decker, which
never even condescends to notice the javelins
darted at its sides from the hostile canoes
which from time to time seek to impede its
progress.
Robertson's merits are of a different, and
upon the whole, of an inferior kind. Gifted
with a philosophic spirit, a just and equal
mind, an eloquent and impressive expression,
he had not the profound sagacity, the penetrat-
ing intellect, which have rendered the obser-
vation of Bacon, Hume, and Johnson as endur-
ing as the English language. He had not
enjoyed the practical acquaintance with man,
which Hume acquired by mingling in diplo-
macy ; and without a practical acquaintance
with man, no writer, whatever his abilities
may be, can rightly appreciate the motives, or
probable result of human actions. It was this
practical collision with public affairs which
has rendered the histories of Thucydides, Sal-
lust, and Tacitus so profoundly descriptive of
the human heart. Living alternately in the
seclusion of a Scotch manse, or at the head of
a Scotch university, surrounded by books, re-
spect, and ease, the reverend Principal took an
agreeable and attractive, but often incorrect
view of human affairs. In surveying the ge-
neral stream of human events, and drawing
just conclusions regarding the changes of
centuries, he was truly admirable ; and in
those respects his first volume of " Charles V."
may, if we except Guizot's "Civilisation Eu-
ropeen," be pronounced without a parallel in
the whole annals of literature. The brilliant
picture, too, which he has left of the discovery
of America, and the manner of the savage
tribes which then inhabited that continent,
proves that he was not less capable of wield-
ing the fascination of description and romance.
But in narrating political events, and diving
into the mysteries of human motives, his want
of practical acquaintance with man is at once
apparent. He described the human heart from
hearsay, not experience; he was an historian
by reading, not observation. We look in vain
in his pages for a gallery of historical portraits,
to be placed beside the noble one which is to
be found in Clarendon. As little can we find
in them any profound remarks, like those of
Bacon, Hume, or Tacitus, the justice of which
is perpetually brought home by experience to
every successive generation of men. His re-
putation, accordingly, is sensibly declining ; and
though it will never become extinct, it is easy
to foresee that it is not destined to maintain,
in future times, the colossal proportions which
it at first acquired.
Both Hume and Robertson, however, left
untouched one fertile field of historic interest
which Herodotus and Gibbon had cultivated
with such success. This is the geographical
feld, the description of countries, as well as men
and manners. It is surprising what variety
and interest this gives to historical narrative ;
how strongly it fixes places and regions in the
memory of the reader ; and how much it aug-
ments the interest of the story, by filling up
and clothing in the mind's eye the scenes in
in which it occurred. Doubtless this must not
be carried too far ; unquestionably the narra-
tive of human transactions is the main object
of history; and the one thing needful, as in fic-
tion, is to paint the human heart ; but still there,
as elsewhere in the Fine Arts, variety and con-
trast contribute powerfully to effect; and amidst
the incessant maze of villany and suffering
388
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
which constitutes human transactions, it is j
sometimes refreshing to contemplate for a while i
the calm serenity and indestructible features .
of Nature.
The modern French historians, forcibly j
struck with the insipidity and tameness of the j
philosophical histories, and fraught with the
heart-rending recollections and fervent pas- i
sions of the Revolution, have sought to give
life and animation, as well as fidelity and ac- 1
curacy, to their works, by a sedulous recur- j
rence to contemporary annals and authority, \
and an introduction of not only the facts and !
statements, but the ideas and words to be found ,
in the ancient chronicles. Hence the habitual {
recurrence to original authority, hot only by j
reference at the foot of the page, but by quota-
tion in the words of the old authors, of the
actual expressions made use of on the more
important occasions. There can be no doubt
that this is in some respects an improvement,
both with a view to the fidelity and accuracy
of history ; for it at once affords a guarantee
for the actual examination of original authority
by the writer, provides a ready and immediate j
check on inaccuracy or misrepresentation,
and renders his work a "Catalogue Raisonne,"
where those who desire to study the subject
thoroughly, may discover at once where their
materials are to be found. The works of both
the Thierrys,* of Barante, Sismondi, and Miche-
let, are, throughout, constructed on this prin-
ciple ; and thence, in a great measure, the
fidelity, spirit, and value of their productions.
But fully admitting, as we do, the importance
of this great improvement in the art of histori-
cal composition, it has its limits ; and writers
who adopt it will do well to reflect on what
those limits are. Though founded on fact,
though based on reality, though dependent for
its existence on truth, History is still one of
the Fine Arts. We must ever recollect that
Mr. Fox assigned it a place next to Poetry, and
before Oratory. All these improvements in
the collection and preparation of materials add
to the solidity and value of the structure, but
they make no alteration in the principles of its
composition. However the stones may be cut
out of the quarry, however fashioned or carved j
by the skill of the workman, their united effect
will be entirely lost if they are not put together
by the conception of a Michael Angelo, a Pal-
ladio, or a Wren. Genius is still the soul of
history; its highest inspirations must be de-
rived from the Muses. The most valuable
historical works, if not sustained by this divine
quality, will speedily sink into useful quarries
or serviceable books of reference. In vain
does a Utilitarian age seek to discard the in-
fluence of imagination, and subject thought to
the deductions of fact and reason, and the
motives of temporal comfort. The value of
fancy and ardour of mind, is more strongly
felt in the narration of real, than even the con-
ception of fictitious events: for this reason,
that it is more easy to discard uninteresting
facts from a romance than render them inte-
* In the "Histoire de la Conquete de 1'Angleterre par
,es Normands, par Aneuste Thierry," and the " Histoire
Jes Gaulois," and "Histoire des Rois Merovingiens, par
Amfedee Thierry" (brother of Auguste).
resting in a history. They may be rejected
altogether in the former; in the latter they
must be retained. It is easier to throw aside
a burden than contrive how to bear it. Induc-
tion may enable the author to sustain the
weight, but it will never make his reader do so.
Imagination alone can lighten the burden. It
is the wings of Genius which must support
Truth itself through the sea of Time. " Ces
ouvrages ne sont pas que de 1'imagination."
" De 1'Imagination !" replied Napoleon, " He
bien, c'est 1'Imagination qui domine le monde."
This eternal and indestructible superiority
of genius to all the efforts of industry and in-
telligence, when unenlightened by its divine
light, is not only noways inconsistent with the
most minute acquaintance with facts and sedu-
lous attention to historic accuracy, but it can
attain its highest flights only by being founded
on that basis. Mere imagination and fancy
will never supply the want of a faithful deline-
ation of nature. The most inexperienced
observer has no difficulty in distinguishing the
one from the other. No great and universal
reputation was ever gained, either in fiction,
history, or the arts of imitation, but by a close
and correct representation of reality. Romance
rises to its highest flights when it transports
into the pages of the novelist the incidents,
thoughts, and characters of real life. History
assumes its most attractive garb when it clothes
reality with the true but brilliant colours of
romance. Look at the other arts. How did
Homer and Shakspeare compose their immor-
tal works ? Not by conceiving ideal events
and characters, the creation only of their own
prolific imaginations, but by closely observing
and describing nature, and by giving to their
characters (albeit cast in the mould of fancy)
those traits of reality, which, being founded on
the general and universal feelings of the hu-
man breast, have spoken with undiminished
force to every succeeding age. How did
Raphael and Claude elevate Painting to its
highest and most divine conceptions, as well
as its most exquisite and chastened finishing?
By assiduously copying nature, by drawing
every limb, every feature, every branch, every
sunset, from real scenes, and peopling the
world of their brilliant imaginations, not with
new creations, but those objects and those
images with which in reality all men were
familiar. True, they moulded them into new
combinations ; true, they gave them an ex-
pression, or threw over them a light more
perfect than any human eye had yet witnessed:
but that is precisely the task of genius ; and
it is in performing it that its highest excellence
is attained. It is by moulding reality into the
expression of imagination, that the greatest tri-
umphs of art are attained; and he who sepa-
rates the one from the other will never rise to
durable greatness in either.
We are the more inclined to insist on this
eternal truth, as we perceive in the present style
of historical composition, both in this country
and on the continent, unequivocal indications
of a tendency to lose sight of the great end and
aim of history, in the anxiety of attaining accu-
racy in its materials. Again and again we as-
sert, that such accuracy is the indispensable
MICHELET'S FRANCE.
189
basis of history; it must form its elements and
characterize all its parts. But it will not of
itself form an historian ; it is to history, what
the sketches from nature in the Liber I'cntu'is
are to the inimitable Claudes of the Doria Pa-
lace at Rome, or the National Gallery in Lon-
don. Writers in this age have been so forcibly
struck with the necessity of accuracy in their
facts, and original drawing in their pictures,
that they have gone into the opposite extreme ;
and the danger now is, not so much that they
will substitute imagination for reality, or
neglect original drawing in their pictures, as
that, in their anxiety to preserve the fidelity of
the sketches from which their pictures are
taken, they will neglect the principles of their
composition, and the great ends, moral, poli-
tical, and religious, of their art.
This tendency is more particularly conspi-
cuous in the continental authors; but it is also
very visible in several justly esteemed histo-
rical writers of our own country. If you take
up any of the volumes of Thierry, Barante,
Michaux, Sismondi, or Michelet, you Mail find
the greater part of their pages filled with quo-
tations from the old chronicles and contempo-
rary annalists. In their anxiety to preserve
accuracy of statement and fidelity in narrative,
they have deemed it indispensable to give, on
almost all occasions, the very words of their
original authorities. This is a very great mis-
take, and indeed so great a one, that if perse-
vered in, it will speedily terminate that school of
historical composition. Itis impossible to make
an harmonious whole, by a selection of passages
out of a vast mass of original writers of vari-
ous styles and degrees of merit, and running
perhaps over a course of centuries. It would
be just as likely that you could make a perfect
picture, by dovetailing together bits of mosaic,
dug up from the ruins of ancient Rome ; or an
impressive temple, by piling on the top of each
other, the columns, entablatures, and archi-
traves of successive structures, raised during
a course of many centuries. Every composi-
tion in the fine arts, to produce a powerful im-
pression, and attain a lasting success, must
have that unity of expression, which, equally as
in poetry and the drama, is indispensable to
the production of emotion or delight in the
mind of the person to whom it is addressed ;
and unity of expression is to be attained equal-
ly in ten thousand pages and by recording ten
thousand facts, as in an epic of Milton, a pic-
ture of Claude's, or a drama of Sophocles.
Sharon Turner, Lingard, Tytler, and Hal-
lam, are most able writers, indefatigable in
the collection of facts, acute in the analysis of
authorities, luminous in the deductions they
have drawn from them. Immense is the addi-
tion which their labours have made to the real
and correct annals of the British empire. But
though many of their episodes are most capti;
rating, and parts of their works must entrance
every reader, there is no concealing the fact,
that their pages are often deficient in interest,
and are far from possessing the attraction
which might have been expected from subjects
of such varied and heart-stirring incident,
treated by writers of such power of composi-
tion and learned acquirements. The reason is,
that they have not regarded history as one of
the fine arts; they have not studied unity of
effect, or harmony of composition ; they have
forgot the place assigned it by Fox, next to
poetry in the arts of composition. In the
search of accuracy, they have sometimes in-
jured effect; in the desire to give original words,
they have often lost originality of thought.
Their pages are invaluable to the annalist
and as books of reference or of value to scho-
lars they will always maintain a high place in
our literature; but they will not render hope-
less, like Livy, Tacitus, or Gibbon, future his-
tories on the subjects they have treated. From
the facts they have brought to light, a future
historian will be able to give a correct detail
of British story, which, if clothed in the garb
of imagination, may attain durable celebrity,
and may possibly come in the end to rival the
simpler but less truthful narrative of Hume,
in popularity and interest.
Colonel Napier's descriptions of battles and
the heart-stirring events of military warfare
are superior to any thing in the same style, not
only in modern but almost in ancient history.
His account of the battles of Albuera and Sala-
manca, of the sieges of Badajos and St. Sebas-
tian, of the actions in the Pyrenees, and the
struggle of Toulouse, possess a heart-stirring
interest, a force and energy of drawing, which
could have been attained only by the eye of
genius animated by the reminiscences of reali-
ty. But the great defect of his brilliant work
is the want of calmness in the judgment of
political events, arid undue crowding in the de-
tails of his work. He is far too minute in the
account of inconsiderable transactions. He
throws the light too equally upon all the figures
in his canvas; the same fault which charac-
terizes the home scenes of Wilkie, and will
render them, with equal, perhaps superior, ge-
nius, inferior in lasting effect to the paintings
of Teniers or Gerard Dow. So prodigious is
the accumulation of detached facts which he
describes, that the most enthusiastic admirer
of military narrative is speedily satiated, and
ordinary readers find their minds so confused
by the events passed under review, that, with
the exception of a few brilliant actions and
sieges, they often close the work without any
distinct idea of the events which it has so ad-
mirably recorded.
This defect is equally conspicuous in the
pages of M. Michelet. That he is a man not
merely of extensive and varied reading, but
fine genius and original thought, is at once ap-
parent. He states in his preface, and the pe-
rusal of his work amply justifies the asser-
tion, " that the most rigid criticism must con-
cede to him the merit of having drawn his
narrative entirely from original sources." But
it were to be wished, that amidst this anxious
care for the collection of materials, find the
impress of a faithful and original character
upon his work, he had been equally attentive
to the great art of history, viz. the massing
objects properly together, keeping them in the
due subordination and perspective which their
relative importance demands, and conveying
a distinct impression to the reader's mind
of the great aeras and changes which the va-
190
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
ried story of his subject presents. Want of
attention to this has well nigh rendered all the
rest of no avail. To the learned reader, who is
previously familiar with the principal events he
describes, his narrative may convey something
like a definite idea of the thread of events :
but how many are they compared to the great
mass of readers ? Perhaps one in a hundred
in France one in five hundred in all other
countries. The great bulk of readers may
shut his last volume after the most careful
perusal, without retaining any distinct recol-
lection of the course of French History, or
any remembrance at all of any thing but a
few highly wrought up and interesting pas-
sages. This is the great defect of the work,
arising from want of attention to the due pro-
portion of objects, and not throwing subordi-
nate objects sufficiently into the shade. The
same grievous mistake is conspicuous in
Mackintosh, Lin gard, andTurner's Histories of
England. It is the great danger of the new or
graphic school of history; and unless care be
taken to guard against it, the whole produc-
tions of that school will be consigned by future
ages to oblivion.
We cannot admit that the magnitude or in-
tricacy of a subject affords any excuse what-
ever for this defect. Livy did not fall into it
in recording seven centuries of Roman vic-
tories ; Gibbon did not fall into it in spanning
the dark gulf which separates ancient from
modern times. Claude produced one uniform
impression, out of an infinity of details, in
some of his pieces, solitary and rural in
others crowded with harbours, shipping, and
figures. Gaspar Poussin finished with scru-
pulous accuracy every leaf in his forest
scenes; but he managed the light and the
shade with such exquisite skill, that the charm
of general effect is produced on the spectator's
mind. Virgil produces one uniform impres-
sion from the homely details of his Georgics
equally as the complicated events of the
./Eneid. Amidst an infinity of details and
episodes, Tasso has with consummate skill
preserved unity of emotion in his Jerusalem
Delivered : Milton has not lost it even in re-
cording the events of heaven and earth. Look
at Nature : every leaf, every pebble, every
cliff, every blade of grass, in the most exten-
sive scene, is finished with that perfection that
characterizes all her works: yet what majesty
and generality of effect in the mighty whole !
That is the model of historical composition :
every object should be worked out; nothing
omitted ; nothing carelessly touched : but a
bright light should be thrown only on the bril-
liant events, the momentous changes ; whole
generations and centuries of monotonous
events cast into the shade, that is, slightly and
rapidly passed over; and the most sedulous
care taken to classify events into periods, in
such a way as to form so many cells as it
were in the memory of the reader, wherein to
deposit the store of information afforded in
regard to each.
There is, in truth, only one really great style
in history, as there is in poetry, painting, or
music. Superficial observers speak of a new
school of history, or a new mode of treating
human affairs, as they would of a new plant
or a new opera : they might as well speak of
a new style in sculpture or painting, in mathe-
matics or astronomy, in epic or dramatic
poetry. We should like to see any one who
would improve on the style of Phidias and
Raphael, of Homer and Virgil, of Tasso and
Milton, of Sophocles or Racine. In inferior
styles, indeed, there is a very great variety in
this, as there is in all the other Fine Arts ; but
in the highest walks there is but one. The
principles of the whole are the same ; and
those principles are to produce generality of
effect out of specialty of objects ; to unite fidelity
of drawing with brilliancy of imagination.
Observe with what exquisite skill Tasso works
this uniform impression out of the varied
events of his "Jerusalem Delivered;" therein
ies his vast superiority to the endless adven-
tures of the more brilliant and imaginative
Ariosto. The principles which regulated the
compositions of the " Prometheus Vinctus" of
^Eschylus and the "Hamlet" of Shakspeare
are the same: the Odes of Pindar are the
counterparts of those of Gray: the sculpture
of Phidias and the painting of Raphael are
nothing but the same mind working with dif-
ferent materials. The composition of Gibbon
is directed by exactly the same principles as
he sunsets of Claude: the battle-pieces of
Napier and the banditti of Salvator are fac-
similes of each other: the episodes of Livy
and the " Good Shepherds" of Murillo produce
the same emotions in the breast. Superficial
readers will deride these observations, and ask
what has painting external objects to do with
the narration of human events 1 We would
recommend them to spend twenty years in the
study of either, and they will be at no loss to
discover in what their analogy consists.
On this account we cannot admit that history
is necessarily drier or less interesting than
poetry or romance. True, it must give a faith-
ful record of events: true, unless it does so it
loses its peculiar and highest usefulness ; but
are we to be told that reality is less attractive
than fiction ? Are feigned distresses less poig-
nant than real ones imaginary virtues less
ennobling than actual t The advantage of fic-
tion consists in the narrower compass which it em-
brace?, and consequently the superior interest
which it can communicate by working up the
characters, events, and scenes. That, doubt-
less, is a great advantage ; but is it beyond the
reach of history ? May not the leading cha-
racters and events there be delineated with the
same force, brilliancy, and fidelity to nature?
Has it not the additional source of interest
arising from the events being real ? an inte-
rest which all who tell stories to children will
see exemplified in their constant question, "Is
it *rK? M None can see more strongly than
we do, that the highest aim and first duty of
history is not to amuse, but to instruct the
world : and that mere amusement or interest
are of very secondary importance. But is
amusement irreconcilable with instruction
interest with elevation ? Is not truth best con-
veyed when it is clothed in an attractive garbl
Is not the greatest danger which it runs that of
being superseded by attractive fiction ? How
MICHELET'S FRANCE.
191
many readers are familiar with English history
through Shakspeare and Scott, rather than
Hume and Lingard? That illustrates the risk
of leaving truth to its unadorned resources.
Was it not in parables that Supreme Wis-
dom communicated itself to mankind? The
wise man will never disdain the aid even of
imagination and fancy, in communicating in-
struction. Recollect the words of Napoleon
" C'est 1'Imagination qui domine le monde."
We have been insensibly led into these ob-
servations by observing in what manner Sis-
mondi, Thierry, Barante, Michelet, and indeed
all the writers of the antiquarian and graphic
school, have treated the history of France.
They are all men of powerful talent, brilliant
imagination, unbounded research, and philo-
sophic minds: their histories are so superior
to any which preceded them, that, in reading
them, we appear to be entering upon a new
and hitherto unknown world. But it is in the
very richness of their materials the extent of
their learning the vast stores of original ideas
and authority they have brought to bear on the
annals of the monarchy of Clovis that we
discern the principal defect of their compo-
sitions. They have been well nigh over-
whelmed by the treasures which themselves
have dug up. So vast is the mass of original
documents which they have consulted of de-
tails and facts which they have brought to
light that they have too often lost sight of the
first rule in the art of history unity of com-
position. They have forgotten the necessity
of a distinct separation of events in such a
manner as to impress the general course of
time upon the mind of their readers. They
are accurate, graphic, minute in details ; but
the " tout ensemble" is too often forgotten, and
the Temple of History made up rather of a
chaos 'of old marbles dug up from the earth,
and piled on each other without either order or
symmetry, than of the majestic proportions
and colossal masses of the Pantheon or St.
Peter's.
The annals of no country are more distinctly
separated into periods than those of France :
in none has the course of events more clearly
pointed out certain resting places, at which
the historian may pause to show the progress
of civilization and the growth of the nation.
The first origin of the Gauls, and their social
organization, before the conquest of the Ro-
mans their institutions under those mighty
conquerors, and the vast impress which their
wisdom and experience, not less than their
oppression and despotism, communicated to
their character and habits the causes which
led to the decay of the empire of the Ceesars,
and let in the barbarians as deliverers rather
than enemies into its vast provinces the es-
tablishment of the monarchy of Clovis by these
rude conquerors, and its gradual extension
from the Rhine to the Pyrenees the decay of
the Merovingian dynasty, and the prostration
of government under the " /tots Faine.i-ns" the
rise of the "Maires de Palais," and their final
establishment on the throne by the genius of
Charlemagne the rapid fall of his successors,
and the origin of the Bourbon dynasty, con-
temporary with the Plantagenets of England
the crusades, with their vast effects, moral,
social, and political, on the people and insti-
tutions of the country, and the balance of
power among the different classes of society
the expulsion of the English by the ability of
Philip Augustus, and the restoration of one
monarchy over the whole of France the
frightful atrocities of the religious war against
the Albigeois the dreadful wars with England,
which lasted one hundred and twenty years,
from Edward III. to Henry V., with their im-
mediate effect, analogous to that of the Wars
of the Roses on this side of the Channel, in
destroying the feudal powers of the nobility
the consequent augmentation of the power of
the crown by the standing army of Charles
VII. the indefatigable- activity and state
policy of Louis XL the brilliant but ephe-
meral conquests of Italy by the rise and pro-
gress of Charles IX. the rivalry of Francis I.
and Charles V. the religious wars, with their
desolating present effects, and lasting ultimate
consequences the deep and Machiavelian
policy of Cardinal Richelieu, and its entire suc-
cess in concentrating the whole influence and
power of government in Paris the brilliant aera
'of Louis XIV., with its Augustan halo, early
conquests, and ultimate disasters the corrup-
tions of the Regent Orleans and Louis XV.
the virtues, difficulties, and martyrdom of Louis
XVI. the commencement of the cera of Revo-
lutions, ending in the fanaticism of Robes-
pierre and the carnage of the Empire form
a series of events and periods, spanning over
the long course of eighteen centuries, and
bringing down the annals of mankind from the
Druids of Gaul and woods of Germany, to the
intellect of La Place and the glories of Na-
poleon.
To exhibit such a picture to the mind's eye
in its just colours, due proportions, and real
light to trace so long a history fraught with
such changes, glories, and disasters to unfold,
through so vast a progress, the unceasing de-
velopment of the human mind, and simulta-
neously with it the constant punishment of hu-
man iniquity, is indeed a task worthy of the
greatest intellect which the Almighty has ever
vouchsafed to guide and enlighten mankind.
It will never be adequately performed but by
one mind: there is a unity which must pervade
every great work of history, as of all the other
Fine Arts ; a succession of different hands
breaks the thread of thought and mars the
uniformity of effect as much in recording the
annals of centuries, as in painting the passions
of the heart, or the beauties of a single scene
in nature. That it is not hopeless to look for
such a mind is evident to all who recollect
how Gibbon has painted the still wider ex-
panse, and traced the longer story, of "The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire :" but
how often in a century does a Gibbon appear
in the world !
In the outset of this noble task, Michelet
has displayed very great ability ; and the
defects, as it appears to us, of his work, as
it proceeds, strikingly illustrate the dangers
to which the modern and graphic style of his-
tory is exposed. He is admirable, equally
with Sismondi, Thierry, and Guizot, in the de-
192
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
scription of the condition of Gaul under the I objects at a distance in their just proportions ;
Romans, and the causes which paralysed the and, not being distracted with details, he threw
strength, and at length overthrew the power,
of the empire of the Caesars. With a discri-
and a master's hand, he
initiating eye, and a master's hand, he has
drawn the different character of the Celtic and
German races of mankind, and the indelible
impress which they have severally communi-
cated to their descendants. The early settle-
ment of the German tribes in Gaul, and the
amalgamation of the victorious savage with
the vanquished civilized race, is drawn in the
spirit of a philosopher, and with a graphic
power. If he had continued the work as it
was thus begun, it would have left nothing to
be desired.
But when he comes down to later times, and
above all when he becomes involved in the
endless maze and minute details of the Chroni-
cles and early French Memoirs, the work as-
sumes a different character. Though you still,
in occasional expressions, see the reflections
of the philosopher in frequent pictures, the
eye of the painter yet the narrative in gene-
ral is flooded by an ocean of details. Fatigued
with the endless maze of intrigues, wars,
tumults, tortures, crusades, and crimes, which
succeed one another in rapid succession, the
reader in despair shuts the volume, with hardly
any recollection of the thread of events. He
recollects only that almost all the kings appear
to have been wicked, almost all the nobles
ambitious, almost all the priests cruel, almost
all the people ferocious. There is nothing
which tends so strongly to make us satisfied
with our own lot, and inclined to return thanks
to Heaven for having cast it in our age, as
the study of the crimes, disasters, and sufferings
sufferings of those which have preceded it.
But still "the mighty maze is not without
a plan." In the midst of these hideous crimes
and atrocities, of this general anguish and
suffering, fixed laws were operating, a silent
progress was going forward, and Providence
was patiently and in silence working out its
ultimate designs by the free agency of an in-
finity of separate individuals. A great system
of moral retribution was unceasingly at work;
and out of the mingled virtues and vices, joys
and sorrows, crimes and punishment, of pre-
vious centuries, were slowly forming the ele-
ments of the great and glorious French mo-
narchy. It is in the development of this
magnificent progress, and in the power of
exhibiting it in lucid colours to the eye of the
spectator, that Michelet is chiefly deficient in
his later volumes. This seems at first sight
inexplicable, as in the earlier ones, relating to
Gaul under the Romans, the settlement of the
Franks, and the early kings of the Merovingian
race, his powers of generalization and philoso-
phic observation are eminently conspicuous.
They form, accordingly, by much the most inte-
resting and instructive part of his history. But
a closer examination will at once unfold the
cause of this difference, and point to the chief
changes of the graphic and antiquarian school
of history. He generalized in the earlier vo-
lumes, because his materials were scanty; he
has not done so in the later ones, because they
were redundant. In the first instance, he saw
broad lights and shadows over their great fea-
tures ; in the last, the objects were so near the
eye, and the lights so perplexed and frequent,
that he has in some degree lost sight of all ge-
neral effect in his composition, or at least failed
in conveying any lucid impression to the
reader's mind.
In common with all later writers who have
observed much or thought deeply on human
affairs, M. Michelet is a firm believer in the
inherent and indelible influence of race, both
on the character and destiny of nations. His
observations on this subject, especially on the
peculiarities of the Celtic race, and their vital
difference from the German, form one of the
most interesting and valuable parts of his
work. He traces the same character through
the Scotch Highlanders, the mountaineers of
Cumberland and Wales, the native Irish, the
inhabitants of Brittany, and the mountaineers
of Gascony and Beam. On the other hand,
the same national characteristics may be ob-
served in the German race, under whatever
climate and circumstances ; in Saxony as in
England; in the Swiss mountains as in the
Dutch marshes ; in the crowded marts of Flan-
ders as in the solitude of the American forest.
Of the inherent character of the Celtic race,
he gives the following animated description:
"The mixed races of Celts who are called
French, can be rightly understood only by a
study of the pure Celts, the Bretons and Welsh,
the Scotch Highlanders and Irish peasants.
While France, undergoing the yoke of repeat-
ed invasion, is marching through successive
ages from slavery to freedom, from disgrace
to glory, the old Celtic races, perched on their
native mountains, or sequestered in their far
distant isles, have remained faithful to the
poetic independence of their barbarous life,
till surprised by the rude hand of foreign con-
quest. It was in this state that England sur-
prised, overwhelmed them ; vainly, however,
has the Anglo-Saxon pressed upon them
they repel his efforts as the rocks of Brittany
or Cornwall the surges of the Atlantic. The
sad and patient Judea, which numbered its
ages by its servitude, has not been more stern-
ly driven from Asia. But such is the tenacity
of the Celtic race, such the principle of life in
nations, that they have endured every outrage,
and still preserve inviolate the manners and
customs of their forefathers. Race of granite !
Immovable, like the huge Druidical blocks
which they still regard with superstitious vene-
ration.
" One might have expected that a race which
remained for ever the same, while all was
changing around it, would succeed in the end
in conquering by the mere inert force of re-
sistance, and would impress its character on
the world. The very reverse has happened,
the more the race has been isolated, the more
it has fallen into insignificance. To remain
original, to resist all foreign intermixture, to
repel all the ideas or improvements of the
stranger, is to remain weak and isolated in the
world. There is the secret of the Celtic race
there is the key to their whole history. It has
MICHELET'S FRANCE.
193
never had but one idea, it has communicated
that to other nations, but it has received none
from them. From age to age it has remained
strong but limited, indescribable but humili-
ated, the enemy of the human race, and its
eternal stain. Woful obstinacy of individual-
ity, which proudly rests on itself alone, and
repels all community with the rest of the world.
" The genius of the Celts, and above all of
the Gauls, is vigorous and fruitful, strongly
inclined to material enjoyments, to pleasure
and sensuality. The pleasures of sex have
ever exercised a powerful influence over them.
They are still the most prolific of the human
race. In France, the Vert Galant is the true
national king. We know how marvellously
the native Irish have multiplied and overflow-
ed all the adjoining states. It was a common
occurrence in Brittany, during the middle
ages, for a seigneur to have a dozen wives.
They constantly praised themselves, and sent forth
their sons fearless to battle. Universally,
among the Celtic nations, bastards succeeded,
even among kings, as chief of the clan. Woman,
the object of desire, the mere sport of volup-
tuousness, never attained the dignified rank
assigned to her among nations of the German
descent.
"No people recorded in history have resist-
ed so stubbornly as the Celts. The Saxons
were conquered by the Normans in a single
battle ; but Cambria contended two hundred
years with the stranger. Their hopes sustain
them after their independence is lost: an un-
conquerable will is the character of their race.
While awaiting the day of its resurrection, it
alternately sings and weeps: its chants are
mingled with tears, as those of the Jews, when
by the waters of Babylon they sat down and
wept. The few fragments of Ossian which
can really be relied on as ancient, have a
melancholy character. Even our Bretons,
though they have less reason to lament than
the rest of the race, are sad and mournful in
their ideas ; their sympathy is with the Night,
with Sorrow, with Death. 'I never sleep,'
says a Breton proverb, 'but I die a bitter
death.' To him who walks over a tomb they
say, ' Withdraw from my domain.' They
have little reason to be gay; all has conspired
against them : Brittany and Scotland have at-
tached themselves to the weaker side, to causes
which were lost. The power of choosing its
monarchs has been taken from the Celtic race
since the mysterious stone, formerly brought
from Ireland into Scotland, has been transport-
ed to Westminster.
"Ireland ! Poor first-born of the Celtic race !
So far from France, yet its sister, whom it
cannot succour across the waves ! The Isle of
Saints the Emerald Isle so fruitful in men,
so bright in genius! the country of Berkeley
and Toland, of Moore and O'Connell ! the land
of bright thought and the rapid sword, which
preserves, amidst the old age of this world, its
poetic inspiration. Let the English smile
when, in passing some hovel in their towns,
they hear the Irish widow chant the coronach
for her husband. Weep! mournful country;
and let France too weep, for degradation which
she cannot prevent calamities winch she
25
! cannot avert ! In vain have four hundred
j thousand Irishmen perished in the service of
' France. The Scotch Highlanders will ere
long disappear from the face of the earth ; the
mountains are daily depopulating; the great
estates have ruined the land of the Gaul as
they did ancient Italy. The Highlander will
ere long exist only in the romances of Walter
Scott. The tartan and the claymore excite
surprise in the streets of Edinburgh : they
disappear they emigrate ; their national airs
will ere long be lost, as the music of the Eolian
harp when the winds are hushed.
"Behind the Celtic world, the old red gra-
nite of the European formation has arisen a
new world, with different passions, desires,
and destinies. Last of the savage races
which overflowed Europe, the Germans were
the first to introduce the spirit of independence;
the thirst for individual freedom. That bold and
youthful spirit that youth of man, who feels
himself strong and free in a world which he
appropriates to himself in anticipation in
forests of which he knows not the bounds on
a sea which wafts him to unknown shores
that spring of the unbroken horse which bears
him to the Steppes and the Pampas all
worked in Alaric, when he swore that an un-
known force impelled him to the gates of
Rome; they impelled the Danish pirate when
he rode on the stormy billow; they animated
the Saxon outlaws when under Robin Hood
they contended for the laws of Edward the
Confessor against the Norman barons. That
spirit of personal freedom, of unbounded in-
dividual pride, shines in all their writings it
is the invariable characteristic of the German
theology and philosophy. From the day, when,
according to the beautiful German fable, the
' Wargus scattered the dust on all his rela-
tions, and threw the grass over his shoulder,
and resting on his staff, overleapt the frail pa-
ternal enclosure, and let his plume float to the
wind from that moment he aspired to the em-
pi re of the world. He deliberated with Attila
whether he should overthrow the empire of the
east or west; he aspired with England to over-
spread the western and southern hemispheres.
"It is from this mingled spirit of poetry and
adventure, that the whole idealism of the Ger-
mans has taken its rise. In their robust race
is combined the heroic spirit and the wander-
ing instinct they unite alone the 'Iliad' and
' Odyssey' of modern times gold and women
were the objects of their early expeditions;
but these objects had nothing sensual or de-
grading in them. Woman was the companion,
the support of man ; his counsel in difficulty,
his guardian angel in war. Her graces, her
charms, consisted in her courage, her con-
stancy. Educated by a man by a warrior
the virgin was early accustomed to the use of
arms 'Gothorum gens perfida, sed pudica;
Saxones crudelitate efFeri sed castitate mirandi.'
Woman in primitive Germany was bent to the
earth beneath the weight of agricultural labour;
but she became great in the dangers of war
the companion and partner of man. she shared
his fate, and lightened his sorrows. 'Sic vi-
vendum, sic pereundum,' says Tacitus. She
withdrew not from the field of battle she faced
194
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
its horrors she turned not aside from its blood.
She was the Goddess of War the charming and
terrible spirit which at once animated its spirit,
and rewarded its dangers which inspired the
fury of the charge, and soothed the last moments
of the dying warrior. She was to be seen on the
field of blood, as Edith the swan-necked sought
the body of Harold after the defeat, of Hastings,
or the young Englishwoman, who, to find her
lost husband, turned over the dead on the field
of Waterloo." (Vol. I. pp. 150, 175.)
" si sic omnia !" The mind is rendered
dizzy; it turns round as on the edge of a pre-
cipice by the reflections arising out of this ani-
mated picture. In truth may it be said, that
these observations demolish at one blow the
whole revolutionary theories of later times
they have turned the streams of French philo-
sophy by their source. It was the cardinal
point, the leading principle of the whole poli-
tical speculation of the last half of the eight-
eenth century, that institutions were every thing,
character nothing; that man was moulded
entirely by the government or religion to which
he was subjected ; and that there was no essen-
tial difference in the disposition of the different
races which had overspread the earth. The
first half of the nineteenth century was spent
in the practical application of this principle.
The French Jacobins conceived themselves
adequate to forge constitutions for the whole
world, and sent forth their armies of starving
republicans to force them at the point of the
bayonet on all mankind. Less vehement in
their constitutional propagandism, the English
have been more persevering, and incomparably
more pernicious. Their example allured, as
much as the horrors of the Revolution repelled,
mankind. The ardent, the generous, the philan-
thropic, everywhere sighed for the establish-
ment of a government which should give them
at once the energy of the British character, the
glories of the British empire. And what has
been the result! The desolation of Spain, the
ruin of Portugal, the depopulation and blasting
of South America. Vain have been all at-
tempts to transplant to nations of Celtic or
Moorish descent, the institutions which grew
and nourished among those of Anglo-Saxon
blood. The ruin of the West India islands
proves their inapplicability to those of negro
extraction; the everlasting distraction of Ire-
land, to those of unmixed Celtic blood. A cen-
tury of bloodshed, devastation, and wretched-
ness will be spent ere mankind generally learn
that there is an essential and indelible distinc-
tion between the character of the different races
of men ; and, in Montesquieu's words, " that no
nation ever attained to durable greatness but
by institutions in harmony with its spirit."
Nor is there any foundation for the common
observation, that this presents a melancholy
view of human affairs ; and that it is repugnant
to our ideas of the beneficence of an overruling
Providence to suppose that all nations are not
adapted for the same elevating institutions. Are
all nations blessed with the same climate, or
soil, or productions? Will the v vine and the
olive flourish on every slope the maize or the
wheat on every plain? No. Every country
has its own productions, riches, and advan-
tages ; and the true wisdom of each is found
to consist in cultivating the fruits, or develop-
ing the riches, which Nature has bestowed.
It is the same in the moral world. All nations
were not framed in the same mould, because all
were not destined for the same ends. To some
was given, for the mysterious but beneficent
designs of Providence, excellence in arms, and
the ensanguined glory of ruthless conquest; to
others supremacy in commerce, and the mis-
sion of planting their colonies in distant lands ;
to a few, excellence in literature and the arts,
and the more durable dominion over the
thoughts and minds of men. What sort of a
world would it be if all nations were sanguinary
and barbarous like the Tartars or meek and
patient like the Hindoos 1 If they all had the
thirst for conquest of the Grand Army or the
rage for transplanting the institutions of the
English? We boast, and in some respects
with reason, of our greatness, our power, our
civilization. Is there any man amongst us who
would wish to see that civilization universal,
with its accompaniments of nearly a seventh*
of the whole population of the empire paupers ;
of Chartists, Socialists, Repealers, Anti-Corn-
Law Leaguers, and landed selfishness ?
As a specimen of Michelet's powers of de-
scription, we extract his account of the battle
of Azincour:
" The two armies presented a strange con-
trast. On the side of the French were three
enormous squadrons, three forests of lances,
who formed in the narrow plain, and drew up as
they successively emerged from the defiles in.
their rear. In front were the Constables, the
Princes, the Dukes of Orleans, Bar and Alen-
on, the Counts of Nevers, D'Eu, Richemont,
and Vendome, amidst a crowd of barons, daz-
zling in gold and steel, with their banners float-
ing in the air, their horses covered with scales
of armour. The French had archers also, but
composed of the commons only; the haughty
seigneurs would not give them a place in their
proud array. Every place was fixed ; no one
would surrender his own ; the plebeians would
have been a stain on that noble assembly
They had cannons also, but made no use oi
them : probably no one would surrender his
place to them.
" The English army was less brilliant in ap-
pearance. The archers, 10,000 in number, had
no- armour, often no shoes; they were rudely
equipped with boiled skins, tied with osier
wands, and strengthened by a bar of iron on
their feet. Their hatchets and axes suspended
from their girdles, gave them the appearance
of carpenters. They all drew the bow with the
left arm those of France with the right. Many
of these sturdy workmen had stripped to the
shirt, to be the more at ease; first, in drawing
the bow, and at last in wielding the hatchet,
when they issued from their hedge of stakes
to hew away at those immovable masses of
horses."
"It is an extraordinary but well authenticated
fact, that the French army was so closely
wedged together, and in great part so stuck in
* Viz. 1,446,000 in England and Wales; 76.000 in
Scotland ; and 2,000,000 in Ireland. In all, 3,522,000, out
of 27,000,000. Census c/1841.
MILITARY TREASON AND CIVIC SOLDIERS.
195
the mud, that they could neither charge nor re-
treat; but just stood still to be cut to pieces.
At the decisive moment, when the old Thomas
of Erpingham arranged the English army, he
threw his staff in the air, exclaiming, ' Now
strike !' The shout of ten thousand voices was
raised at once ; but to their great surprise, the
French army stood still. Men and horses
seemed alike enchained or dead in their ar-
mour. In truth, these weighty war-horses, op-
pressed with the load of their armour and
riders, were unable to move. The French were
thirty-two deep the English only four.* That
enormous depth rendered the great bulk of the
French army wholly useless. The front ranks
alone combated, and they were all killed. The
remainder, unable either to advance or retreat,
served only as a vast target to the unerring Eng-
lish arrows, which never ceased to rain down
on the deep array. On the other hand, every
Englishman wielded either his lance, his bow,
or his hatchet, with effect. So thick was the
storm of arrows which issued from the English
stakes, that the French horsemen bent their
heads to their saddle-bows, to avoid being
pierced through their visors. Twelve hundred
horse, impatient of the discharge, broke from
the flanks, and charged. Hardly a tenth part
reached the stakes, where they were pierced
through, and soon fell beneath the English axes.
Then those terrible archers issued from their
palisade, and hewed to pieces the confused
mass of wounded horses, dismounted men, and
furious steeds, which, galled by the incessant
discharge of arrows, was now turmoiling in the
bloody mud in which the chivalry of France
was engulfed." (Vol. IV. pp. 307, 311.)
We take leave of M. Michelet, at least for the
present, as his work is only half finished, with
admiration for his genius, respect for his eru-
dition, and gratitude for the service he has ren-
dered to history; but we cannot place him in
the first rank of historians. He wants the art
of massing objects and the spirit of general
observation. His philosophy consists rather
in drawing visions of the sequence of events,
or speculations on an inevitable progress in
human affairs, than an enlightened and manly
recognition of a supreme superintendence. He
unites two singularly opposite sets of princi-
ples a romantic admiration for the olden time,
though with a full and just appreciation of its
evils, with a devout belief in the advent of a
perfect state of society, the true efflorescence of
the nation, in the equality produced by the Re-
volution. Yet is his work a great addition to
European literature; and the writers of Eng-
land would do well to look to their laurels, if
they wish, against the able phalanx now arising
on the other side of the Channel, to maintain
the ancient place of their country in historic
literature.
MILITARY TREASON AND CIVIC SOLDIERS.!
"I AM surprised," said Condorcet to La-
fayette, upon seeing him enter the room in the
uniform of a private of the National Guards of
Paris, of which he had so recently been the
commander, "I am surprised at seeing you,
General, in that dress." "Not at all," replied
Lafayette, " / was tired of obeying, and wished to
command, and therefore I laid down my general's
commission, and took a musket on my shoul-
der." "Gnarus," says Tacitus, "bellis civili-
bus, plus militibus quam ducibus licere." It
is curious to observe how, in the most remote
ages, popular license produces effects so pre-
cisely similar.
Of the numerous delusions which have over-
spread the world in such profusion during the
last nine months, there is none so extraordinary
and so dangerous as the opinion incessantly
inculcated by the revolutionary press, that the
noblest virtue in regular soldiers is to prove
themselves traitors to their oaths, and that a
national guard is the only safe and constitutional
force to whom arms can be intrusted. The
troops of the line, whose revolt decided the
*This formation was the same on both sides, when
Napoleon's Imperial Guard attacked the British Guards
at Waterloo. See the indelible difference of race.
t Black wood's Magazine, April, 1R31 : written nine
months after-the Revolution in Paris of 1830. It forma
No. IV. on the French Revolution in that miscellany.
three days in July in favour of the revolution-
ary party, have been the subject of the most
extravagant eulogium fr6m the liberal press
throughout Europe; and even in this country,
the government journals have not hesitated to
condemn, in no measured terms, the Royal
Guard, merely because they adhered, amidst a
nation's treason, to their honour and their
oaths.
Hitherto it has been held the first duty of
soldiers to adhere with implicit devotion to
that fidelity which is the foundation of military
duties. Treason to his colours has been con-
sidered as foul a blot on the soldier's scutcheon
as cowardice in the field. Even in the most
republican states, this principle of military
subordination has been felt to be the vital
principle of national strength. It was during
the rigorous days of Roman discipline, that
their legions conquered the world; and the
decline of the empire began at the time that
the Praetorian Guards veered with the mutable
populace, and sold the empire for a gratuity to
themselves. Albeit placed in power by the
insurrection of the people, no men knew better
than the French republican leaders that their
salvation depended on crushing the military
insubordination to which they had owed their
elevation. When the Parisian levies be^an to
evince a mutinous spirit in ihe camp at St.
196
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
Menehould, in Champagne, which they had
imbibed during the license of the capital, Du-
mourier drew them up in the centre of his in-
trenchments, and showing them a powerful
line of cavalry in front, with their sabres
drawn, ready to charge, and a stern array of
artillery and cannoneers in rear, with their
matches in their hands, soon convinced the
most licentious that the boasted independence
of the soldier must yield to the dangers of
actual warfare.* "The armed force," said
Carnot, "is essentially obedient; it acts but
should never deliberate," and in all his com-
mands, that great man incessantly inculcated
upon his soldiers the absolute necessity of im-
plicit submission to the power which employed
them.-j- When the recreant Constable de Bour-
bon, at the head of a victorious squadron of
Spanish cavalry, approached the spot where
the rear-guard, under the Chevalier Bayard,
was covering the retreat of the French army
in the Valley of Aosta, he found him seated,
mortally wounded, under a tree, with his eyes
fixed on the cross which formed the hilt of his
sword. Bourbon began to express pity for his
fate. "Pity not me," said the high-minded
Chevalier; "pity those who fight against their
king, their country, and their oath."
These generous feelings, common alike to
republican antiquity and modern chivalry,
have disappeared during the fumes of the
French Revolution. The soldier who is now
honoured, is not he who keeps, but he who
violates his oath ; the rewards of valour shower-
ed, not upon those who defend, but those who
overturn the government; the incense of po-
pular applause offered, not at the altar of
fidelity, but at that of treason. Honours, re-
wards, promotion, and adulation, have been
lavished on the troops of the line, who over-
threw the government of Charles X. in July
last, while the Royal Guard, who adhered io
the fortune of the falling monarch with ex-
emplary fidelity, have been reduced to beg their
bread from the bounty of strangers in a foreign
land. A subscription has recently been opened
in London for the most destitute of those de-
fenders of royalty; but the government jour-
nals have stigmatized, as " highly dangerous,"
any indication of sympathy with their fidelity
or their misfortunes, t
If these ancient ideas of honour, however,
are to be exploded, they have at least gone out
of fashion in good company. The National
Guard, who took up arms to overthrow the
throne, have not been long in destroying the
altar. During the revolt of February, 1831,
the Cross, the emblem of salvation, 'was taken
down from all the steeples in Paris by the
citizen soldiers, and the image of our Saviour
effaced, by their orders, from every church
within its bounds ! The two principles stand
and fall together. The Chevalier, without fear
and without reproach, died in obedience to his
oath, with his eyes fixed on the Cross; the
National Guard lived in triumph, while their
comrades bore down the venerated emblem
from the towers of Notre Dame.
* Mem. de Dumourier, iii. 172.
t Carnot's Memoirs, 73.
t Courier.
" I can discover no other reason for the
uniform progress of the republic," says Cicero,
" but the constant sense of religion which has
actuated its members. In numbers the Spa-
niards excel us in military ardour, the Gauls
in hardihood and obstinacy, the Germans ;
but in veneration to the gods, and fidelity to
their oaths, the Roman people exceed any
nation that ever existed." We shall see
whether the present times are destined to form
an exception from these principles ; whether
treason and infidelity are to rear the fabric in
modern, which fidelity and religion construct-
ed in ancient times.
The extreme peril of such principles renders
the inquiry interesting. What have been the
effects of military treachery in times past 7
Has it aided the cause of virtue, strengthened
the principles of freedom, contributed to the
prosperity of mankind! Or has it unhinged
the fabric of society, blasted the cause of
liberty, blighted the happiness of the people 1
The first great instance of military treachery
in recent times, occurred in the revolt of the
French Guards, in June, 1789. That un-
paralleled event immediately brought on the
Revolution. The fatal example rapidly spread
to the other troops brought up to overawe the
capital, and the king, deprived of the support
of his own troops, was soon compelled to sub-
mit to the insurgents. It was these soldiers,
not the mob of Paris, who stormed the Bastile ;
all the efforts of the populace were unavailing
till those regular troops occupied the adjoining
houses, and supported tumultuary enthusiasm
by military skill.
Extravagant were the eulogiums, boundless
the gratitude, great the rewards, which were
showered down on the Gardes Francoises for
this shameful act of treachery. Never were
men the subjects of such extraordinary adu-
lation. Wine and women, gambling and in-
toxication, flattery and bribes, were furnished
in abundance. And what was the conse-
quence ? The ancient honour of the Guards
of France, of those guards who saved the
Body Guards at Fontenoy, and inherited a line
of centuries of splendour, perished without
redemption on that fatal occasion. Tarnished
in reputation, disunited in opinion, humbled in
character, the regiment fell to pieces from a
sense of its own shame; the early leader of
the Revolution, its exploits never were heard
of through all the career of glory which fol-
lowed ; and the first act of revolt against their
sovereign was the last act of their long and
renowned existence.
Nor were the consequences of this unexam-
pled-defection less dangerous to France than to
the soldiers who were guilty of it. The insu-
bordination, license, and extravagance of revolt
were fatal to military discipline, and brought
France to the brink of ruin. The disaffected
soldiers, as has been observed in all ages,
were intrepid only against their own sove-
reign. When they were brought to meet the
armies of Prussia and Austria, they all took
to flight; and on one occasion, by the admis-
sion of Dumourier himself, ten thousand regu-
lar soldiers fled from one thousand five hun-
dred Prussian hussars, A little more energy
MILITARY TREASON AND CIVIC SOLDIERS.
197
and ability in the allied commanders would
have then destroyed the revolutionary govern-
ment.
Notwithstanding all the enthusiasm of the
people, the weakness of insubordination con-
tinued to paralyze all the efforts of the re-
publican armies. France was again invaded,
and brought to the brink of ruin in 1793, and
the tide was then, for the first time, turned,
when the iron rule of the mob began, and the
terrific grasp of Carnot and Robespierre ex-
tinguished all those principles of military
license which had so much been the subject
of eulogium at the commencement of the
Revolution.
Did this abandonment of military duty serve
the cause of freedom, or increase the prosperi-
ty of France ? Did it establish liberty on a
secure basis, or call down the blessings of
posterity 1 It led immediately to all the an-
guish and suffering of the Revolution the
murder of the king the anarchy of the king-
dom the reign of terror the despotism of
Napoleon. They forgot their loyalty amidst
the glitter of prostitution and the fumes of in-
toxication ; their successors were brought back
to it by the iron rule of the Committee of Pub-
lic Safety : they revolted against the beneficent
sway of a reforming monarch : they brought
on their country a tyranny, which the pencil
of Tacitus would hardly be able to portray.
The revolt of the Spanish troops at the Isle
of Leon, in 1819, was the next great, example
of military defection. What have been its
consequences'? Has Spain improved in free-
dom risen in character augmented in wealth,
since that glorious insurrection? It raised up,
for a few years, the phantom of a constitu-
tional throne, ephemeral as the dynasties of
the east, pestilent as the breath of contagion.
Spain was rapidly subjugated when it rested
on such defenders treason blasted their ef-
forts, and the nation, which had gloriously re-
sisted for six years the formidable legions of
Napoleon, sunk under the first attack of an
inexperienced army of invaders led by a Bour-
bon prince. Since that time, to what a deplor-
able condition has Spain been reduced! De-
pressed by domestic tyranny, destitute of
foreign influence the ridicule and scorn of
Europe this once great power has almost
been blotted from the book of nations.
Portugal, Naples, and Piedmont, all had
military revolutions about the same time.
Have they improved the character, bettered
the condition, extended the freedom, of these
countries 1 They have, on the contrary, esta-
blished constitutions, the failure and absurdity
of which have brought the cause of freedom
itself into disrepute. The valiant revolters
against the Neapolitan throne fled at the first
sight of the Austrian battalions ; and the free
institutions of Piedmont and Portugal, without
foreign aggression, have all fallen from their
own inherent weakness. All these premature
attempts to introduce freedom by military re-
volt, have, failed ; and sterner despotism suc-
ceeded, from the moral reaction consequent on
their disappearance.
Great part of the armies in South America
revolted from the Spanish throne, and success
has crowned their endeavours. What has
been the consequence? Anarchy, confusion,
and military confiscation the rule of bayonets
instead of that of mitres suffering, dilapida-
tion, and ruin, which have caused even the
leaden yoke of the Castilian monarch to be
regretted.
At length the glorious days of July, 1830,
arrived, and the declaration of the whole regu-
lar troops of the line in Paris against the
government, at once decided the contest in
favour of the populace. Never was more ex-
travagant praise bestowed on any body of men,
than on the soldiers who had been guilty of
this act of treason. It is worth while, there-
fore, to examine what have been its effects,
and whether the cause of freedom has really
been benefittedin France by the aid of treach-
ery.
The French nation has got quit of the priest-
ridden, imbecile race of monarchs ; men whose
principles were arbitrary, habits indolent, in-
tellects weak ; who possessed the inclination,
but wanted the capacity to restrain the liberty
of their people.
They have terminated a pacific era, during
which the country made unexampled progress
in wealth, industry, and prosperity; during
which many of the wounds of the Revolution
were closed, and new channels of opulence
opened ; during which the principles of real
freedom struck deeply their roots, and the in-
dustrious habits were extensively spread, which
can alone afford security for their continuance.
They have begun, instead, the career of
anarchy and popular tyranny. Industry has
been paralyzed, credit suspended, prosperi-
ty blighted. Commercial undertakings have
ceased, distrust succeeded to confidence de-
spair to hope the victims of the Revolution
have disappeared, and the poor who gained it
are destitute of bread.
They have begun again the career of Re-
publican ambition and foreign aggression ;
they aim openly at revolutionizing other coun-
tries, and they are unable to maintain the go-
vernment they have established in their own.
The Conscription is again rending asunder
the affections 'of private life ; the fountains of
domestic happiness are closed ; and war, with
its excitements and its dangers, is again threat-
ening to rouse the energies of its population.
In the shock of contending factions, liberty is
fast expiring. The imbecility of Polignac has
been succeeded by the energy of Soult the
arbitrary principles of feeble priests is about
to yield to the unbending despotism of ener-
getic republicans.
By the confession of the journals who sup-
port the Revolution, its advantages are all to
come; bitter and unpalatable have been its
fruits to this hour. The three per cents, have
fallen from 80 to 50 ; twelve thousand work-
men, without bread, in Paris alone, are main-
tained on the public works ; great part of the
banks and mercantile houses are bankrupt;
Lafitte himself is barely solvent; the opulent
classes are rapidly leaving the capital ; no one
expends his fortune ; universal distrust and
apprehension have dried up the sources of
industry.
n 2
198
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
The government, blown about with every
wind of doctrine, is wholly unable to prevent
the downward progress of the Revolution.
As usual in public convulsions, the audacious,
the reckless, the desperate, are pressing for-
ward to the front ranks, and the moderate
and rational sinking into obscurity. The
Doctrinaires were subverted by the tumults in
October; their successors by the crisis in De-
cember ; the last ministers, by the explosion
in February. Without authority, power, or
influence, the throne is rapidly falling into
contempt; the private virtues and firm cha-
racter of the king, are alone adequate to stem
the swelling flood of democracy.
Impelled by revolutionary ambition into
foreign war, the government of France, whe-
ther republican or monarchical, must inevita-
bly become despotic. If the allies succeed,
the Bourbons will be restored at the point of
the bayonet. If the republicans are victo-
rious, military despotism will speedily be esta-
blished. The victorious legions will not sur-
render the authority they have won. A second
successful commander will, under the name
of Consul, Dictator, or Emperor, re-establish the
empire of the sword. After drenching Europe
with blood, democratic ambition will in the end
find itself mastered by the power it has pro-
duced ; victorious or vanquished, it will prove
fatal to its parent freedom.
Such have been the fruits of military treach-
ery in France.
Does Belgium afford a more flattering pros-
pect to the advocates of military defection 'I
Has treason, pestilential and blasting else-
where, there brought forth the sweet and lasting
fruits of peace, tranquillity, and industry? Is
the independence of Flanders as secure, its
commerce as flourishing, its people as con-
tented, its agriculture as prosperous, its poor as
well fed, as under the hateful reign of the
Orange dynasty 1 By the admission of the ad-
vocates of revolution, according to the state-
ment of M. Potter himself, they have gained
only anarchy and wretchedness, "discord with-
in, contempt without the intrigues of kings
the divisions of faction the apathy of despair."
Eifects so uniform, consequences so unva-
rying, must spring from some common cause.
Victorious or vanquished, military treachery
has proved fatal to every state where it has pre-
vailed : it has everywhere blighted industry,
shaken credit, destroyed freedom. Liberty has
never suffered so much as from the rude and
sacrilegious hands of such defenders.
"It must constantly be understood, and it is
not sufficiently recollected," said Guizot in the
Chamber of Deputies on the 3d of February,
1831, " that freedom is never in such danger as
after a successful revolution. Habits cannot
be conceived so much at variance with the pro-
tection of the people as the excitation, ambi-
tion, and misrule, which arise from their first
triumph." These were the words of the repub-
lican minister established in office by the revolt
in July ; after he had been driven from the helm
by the increasing vigour of the democratic fac-
tion to which he owed his elevation.
If the matter be considered coolly, it must at
once appear that freedom never can be purchased
by the revolt of soldiers ; and that the military
treachery which is so much the object of eulo-
gium, is more dangerous to the liberty which
has excited it, than to any other human interest.
Freedom consists in the coercion of each
class by the jealousies and exertions of the
others. The crown is watched by the people,
the aristocracy by the crown, the populace by
the aristocracy. It is the jealousy and efforts
of these different interests to keep each other
within due bounds, which form the balance of
power indispensable to civil liberty. Without
such an equilibrium, one or other of the con-
stituent bodies must be crushed, and the ascen-
dency of the other rendered subversive of gene-
ral freedom.
But when an established government is over-
turned by a revolt of its own soldiers, the event
occurs which is of all others the most fatal to
public liberty, viz., the destruction of subsisting
power by an armed and limited class in the
state. The bayonet becomes thenceforward
the irresistible argument of the dominant body,
and liberty, exterminated by its own defenders,
sinks in the struggle which was created in her
name.
It is quite in vain to expect that men of reck-
less and licentious habits, like the majority of
soldiers in every country, will quietly resign
the supreme authority after having won it at
the peril of their lives. Individuals sometimes
may make such a sacrifice large bodies never
have, and never will. The Praetorian Guards
of Rome, and the Janizaries of Constantinople,
have often revolted against the reigning power,
and bestowed the throne on their own favourite ;
but it has never been found that general free-
dom was improved by the result, or that indi-
viduals were better defended against oppres-
sion after it than before.
Freedom cannot be established in a day by
the successful issue of a single revolt. Its
growth is as slow as that of industry in the in-
dividual : its preservation dependent on the es-
tablishment of regular habits, and the main-
tenance of a courageous spirit in the people.
Nothing can be so destructive to these habits
as a successful revolt of the soldiery. The
ambition Avhich it awakens, the sudden eleva-
tion which it confers, the power which it lodges
in armed and inexperienced hands, are, of all
things, the most fatal to the sober, patient and
unobtrusive habits, which are the parent of
real freedom. The industry, frugality, and mo-
deration of pacific life, appear intolerable to
men who are dazzled by the glittering prospect
of revolutionary triumph.
A successful insurrection in the army lodges
upreme authority at once in an armed force.
No power capable of counteracting it remains.
The majesty of the throne, the sense of duty,
the sanctity of an oath, the awe of the legis-
lature, have all been set at naught. The ener-
gy of the citizens has never been developed,
because the revolt of the soldiers terminated
the contest before their support was required.
The struggle has depended entirely between
the throne and the army; the interest of the
state can never be promoted by the victory of
either of these contending parties.
This is the circumstance which must always
MILITARY TREASON AND CIVIC SOLDIERS.
199
render treason in the army destructive to last-
ing freedom. It terminates the struggle at once,
before any impulse has been communicated to
the unarmed citizens, or they have acquired the
vigour and military prowess which is alone ca-
pable of controlling them. The people merely
change masters ; instead of the king and his
ministers, they get the general and his officers.
The rule of the sovereign is looked back to
with bitter regret, when men have tasted of the
seventy of military license, and experienced
the rigour of military execution. Whereas,
during the vicissitudes of a civil war, the ener-
gy of all classes is brought into action, and the
chance of obtaining ultimate freedom improved
by the very difficulty with which it has been
won. The British constitution, the gradual re-
sult of repeated contests between the crown
and the people, has subsisted unimpaired for
centuries the French, effected at once by the
treachery of the army, has been as short-lived
as the popularity of its authors. There is no
royal road to freedom any more -than to geo-
metry ; it is by patient exertion and progressive
additions to their influence, that freedom is ac-
quired by nations not less than eminence by
individuals.
What then, it may be asked, are soldiers to
do when a sovereign like Charles X. promul-
gates ordinances subversive of public freedom]
Are they to make themselves the willing instru-
ment in enslaving their fellow citizens 1 We
answer, Certainly; if they have any regard for
the ultimate maintenance of their liberty. If
illegal measures have been adopted, let them
be repealed by the civil authorities or by the
efforts of the people; but never let the soldiers
take the initiative in attempting their over-
throw. The interests of liberty require this as
indispensably as those of order. Nothing short
of an unanimous declaration of the national
will by the higher classes, should lead to a de-
fection from loyalty on the part of its sworn
defenders.
In former times, no doubt, many examples
have occurred of the incipient efforts of free-
dom being entirely extinguished by military
execution; but no such catastrophe need be
apprehended in countries where the press is
established; the republicans themselves have
everywhere proclaimed this truth. The opi-
nions and interests of the many must prevail
where their voice is heard. The only thing to
be feared for them is from their own passions.
The only danger to liberty in such circum-
stances is from its own defenders ; the violence
to be apprehended is not that of the throne,
but of the populace.
No stronger proof of this can be imagined
than has been furnished by the recent revolu-
tion in France and Belgium. The revolt of the
soldier at once established the rule of the mob
in these countries, and put an end, for a long
time at least, to every hope of freedom. What
security is there afforded for property, life, or
character? Confessedly none; every thing is
determined by the bayonet of the National
Guard and army ; neither the throne nor the
people can withstand them. Freedom was as
little confirmed by their revolt, as at Constan-
tinople by an insurrection of the Janizaries.
j Liberty in France was endangered for the mo-
ment by the ordinances of the Bourbons : it
has been destroyed by the insurrection planned
I to overthrow them. Freedom, supported as it
then was, by an energetic and democratic press,
and a republican population, ran no risk of per-
manent injury from the intrigues of the court.
A priest-ridden monarch, guided by imbecile
ministers, could never have subjugated an
ardent, high-spirited, aad democratic people.
But the danger is very different from the en-
ergy of the republicans, and the ambition of the
soldiers. Marshal Soult and his bayonets are
not so easily dealt with as Prince Polignac
arid his Jesuits. The feeble monarchy of
Louis XVI. was overturned with ease ; the
terrible Committee of Public Safety, the des-
potic Directory, the energetic sway of Napo-
leon, ruled the Revolution, and crushed free-
dom, even in its wildest fits. Three days'
insurrection destroyed the feeble government
of Charles. A revolt ten times more formi-
dable was crushed with ease by the military-
power of the Convention.
Had the soldiers not. revolted in July, what
would have been the consequence 1 The in-
surrection in Paris, crushed by a garrison of
twelve thousand men, would have speedily
sunk. A new Chamber, convoked on the
basis of the royal ordinance, would have
thrown the ministers into a minority in the
Chamber of Deputies, and by them the obnox-
ious measure would have been repealed. If
there is any truth in the growing influence of
public opinion, so uniformly maintained by
liberal writers, this must have been the result.
No representatives chosen by any electors in
France, could have withstood the odium which
supporting the measures of the court would
have produced. Thus liberty would have been
secured without exciting the tempest which
threatens its own overthrow. Public credit,
private confidence, general prosperity, would
have been maintained; the peace of the world
preserved ; the habits conducive to a state of
national freedom engendered.
What have been the consequences of the
boasted treachery of the troops of the line in
July 1 The excitation of revolutionary hopes ;
the rousing of democratic ambition ; a ferment
in society; the abandonment of useful indus-
try; the government of the mob; the arming
of France; the suspension of pacific enterprise.
A general war must in the end ensue from its
effects. Europe will be drenched with blood,
and whatever be the result, it will be equally
fatal to the cause of freedom. If the aristo-
cracy prevail, it will be the government of the
sword; if the populace, of the guillotine.
A civil war in France would have been far
more serviceable to the cause of real liberty
than the sudden destruction of the government
by the revolt of the army. In many periods
of history, freedom has emerged from the col-
lision of different classes in society, in none
from military insubordination.
If Charles I. had possessed a regular army,
and it had betrayed its trust on the first break-
ing out of the great Rebellion, would the result
have been as favourable to the cause of liberty,
I as the long contest which ensued ? Nothing
200
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
can be clearer than that it would not. No
greater consequences would have followed
such a revolt, than any of the insurrections of
the barons against the princes of York and
Lancaster. A revolution so easily achieved,
would as easily have been abandoned : liberty
would never have been gained, because the
trials had not been endured by which it is to
be won. The only security for its continu-
ance is to be found in the energy and courage
of the citizens : it is not by witnessing the de-
struction of government by a mutinous sold iery
that these habits are to be acquired.
Soldiers, therefore, who adhere to their ho-
nour and their oaths, are in reality the best
friends of the cause of freedom. They pre-
vent the struggle for its maintenance from
being converted into a mortal combat, in which
the victory of either party must prove fetal to
the very object for which they are contending.
They prevent the love of independence from
being transformed into the spirit of insubordi-
nation, and the efforts of freedom blasted by
the violence of popular, or the irresistible
weight of military ambition. They turn the
spirit of liberty into a pacific channel; and
averting it from that direction where it falls
under the rule of violence, retain it in that
where wisdom and foresight duly regulate its
movements.
The institution of a National Guard, of which
so much is now said, is not less the subject
of delusion, than the boasted treachery of regu-
lar soldiers.
Citizen soldiers are most valuable additions
to the force of a regular army, and when actu-
ated by a common and patriotic feeling, they are
capable of rendering most effective service to
the state. The landwehr of Prussia, and the vo-
lunteers of Russia, sufficiently demonstrated that
truth during the campaigns of 1812 and 1813.
They are a valuable force also for preserv-
ing domestic tranquillity up to a certain point,
when little real peril is to be encountered, and
a display of moral opinion is of more weight
than the exertion of military prowess. But
they are a force that cannot be relied on dur-
ing the shades of opinion which take place
in a revolution, and still less in the perilous
strife which follows the actual collision of one
class of the state with another. This has been
completely demonstrated during both theFrench
Revolutions.
The National Guard of Paris was first em-
bodied on the 20th July, 1789, a week after the
capture of the Bastile. During the first fer-
vour of the revolutionary ardour, and before
the strife of faction had brought the opposite
parties into actual contest, they frequently ren-
dered effective service to the cause of order.
On more than one occasion, headed by Lafa-
yette, they dispersed seditious assemblages,
and once, in June, 1792, were brought to fire
upon the Jacobins in the Champ de Mars. Bm
whenever matters approached a crisis, when
the want and suffering consequent on a revo-
lution had brought forward angry bodies of
workmen from the Fauxbourg; when the
question was not one of turning out to parade,
but of fighting an exasperated multitude, they
uniformly failed.
The citizen soldiers, headed by Lafayette,
were under arms in great force on the 5th Oc-
tober, 1789, when a furious rabble marched
to Versailles, broke into and plundered the
palace, attempted to murder the queen, and
brought the Royal Family in captivity to Paris,
preceded by the heads of their faithful Body
Guards. They refused for five hours to listen
to the entreaties of their commander to march
to protect the palace of the king against that
atrocious insult ; and when they did go, were
too irresolute to prevent the violence which
followed.
They stood by on 20th June, 1792, when a
vociferous rabble broke into the hall of the
Assembly, threatening the obnoxious deputies
with instant death; when they rushed into the
Palace of the Tuileries, pushed their pikes at
the breast of Louis, placed the Cap of Liberty
on his head, and brought the Royal Family and
the monarchy into imminent danger.
They assembled at the sound of the generate,
when the Fauxbourgs rose in revolt on the
10th August, and their dense battalions, plen-
tifully supported by cavalry and artillery, ac-
cumulated in great force round the Tuileries.
But division, irresolution, and timidity, para-
lyzed their ranks. First the Gendarmerie de-
serted to the assailants ; then the cannoneers
unloaded their guns ; several battalions next
joined the insurgents, and the few that re-
mained faithful were so completely paralyzed
by the general defection of their comrades,
that they were unable to render any effective
support to the Swiss Guard. From amidst a
forest of citizen bayonets, the monarch was
dragged a captive to the Temple, and the go-
vernment of France yielded up to a sanguinary
rabble. Seven thousand National Guards, on
that day, yielded up their sovereign to a despi-
cable rabble ; as many hundred faithful regular
soldiers in addition to the heroic Swiss Guard
would have established his throne and pre-
vented the Reign of Terror.
When Lafayette, indignant at the atrocities
of the Jacobins, repaired to Paris from the
army, and assigned a rendezvous at his house,
in the evening of June 27, 1792, to the Na-
tional Guard, of which he had so lately been
the popular commander, in order to march
against the Jacobin club, only thirty men
obeyed the summons. The immense majority
evinced a fatal apathy, and surrendered up
their country, without a struggle, to the empire
of the Jacobins.
When Louis, Marie Antoinette, and the
Princess Elisabeth, were successively led out
to the scaffold ; when the brave and virtuous
Madame Roland became the victim of the free-
dom she had worshipped; when Vergniaud
and the illustrious leaders of the Gironde
were brought to the block ; when Danton and
Camille Desmoulins were destroyed by the
mob whom they excited, the National Guard
lined the streets and attended the cars to the
guillotine.
When the executions rose to a hundred
daily ; when the shopkeepers closed their win-
clows, to avoid witnessing the dismal spectacles
of the long procession which was approaching
the scaffold ; when a ditch was dug to convey the
MILITARY TREASON AND CIVIC SOLDIERS.
201
blood of the victims to the Seine ; when France
groaned under tyranny, unequalled siiLce the
beginning of the world, forty thousand National
Guards, with arms in their hands, looked on in
silent observation of the mournful spectacle.
When indignant nature revolted at the cruelty;
when, by a generous union, the members of all
sides of the Assembly united, the power of the
tyrants was shaken ; when Robespierre was de-
clared hors la Im, and the generak was beat to
summon the citizen soldiers to make a last
effort in behalf, not only of their country,, but of
their own existence, only three thousand obeyed
the summons ! Thirty-seven thousand declined
to come forward in the contest for their lives,
their families, and every thing that was dear to
them. With this contemptible force was Robes-
pierre besieged in the Hotel de Ville ; and but
for the fortunate and unforeseen defection of
the cannoneers of the Fauxbourgs in the Place
de Greve, the tyrants would have been success-
ful, the Assembly destroyed, and the reign of
the guillotine perpetuated on the earth.
When tTie reaction in favour of the victors,
on the 9th Thermidor, had roused, the Parisian
population against the sanguinary rule of the
Convention; when, encouraged by the contempt-
ible force at the disposal of government, forty
thousand of the National Guard assaulted five
thousand regular soldiers, in position at the
Tuileries, on Oct. 31, 1795, Napoleon showed
what reliance could be placed on the citizen
soldiers. With a few discharges of artillery he
checked the advance of the leading battalions,
spread terror through their dense columns,
and a revolt, which was expected to overthrow
the tyranny of the delegates of the people, ter-
minated by the establishment of military des-
potism.
When Augereau, on 4th Sept., 1797, at the
command of the Directory, seized sixty of the
popular leaders of the legislature; when the
law of the sword began, and all the liberties of
the Revolution were about to be sacrificed aj
the altar of military violence, the National
Guard declined to move, and saw their fellow-
citizens, the warmest supporters of their liber-
ties, carried into captivity and exile, without
attempting a movement in their behalf.
When Napoleon overthrew the government
in 1800 ; when, like another Cromwell, he
seized the fruits of another Revolution ; when
he marched his grenadiers into the council of
Five Hundred, and made the stern rule of the
sword succeed to the visions of enthusiastic
freedom, the National Guard remained quiet
spectators of the destruction of their country's
liberties, and testified the same submission to
the reign of military, which they had. done to
that of democratic violence.
The National Guard was re-organized in
August, 1830, and their conduct since that time
has been the subject of unmeasured eulogium
from all the liberal journals of Europe. The
throne was established by their bayonets; the
Citizen King has thrown himself upon their
support ; they were established in great force
in every quarter of Paris, and the public tran-
quillity intrusted to their hands. History has
a right to inquire what they have done to justify
the high praises of their supporters, and how
far the cause of order and rational liberty has
gained by their exertions.
They had the history of the former Revolu-
tion clearly before their eyes ; they knew well,
by dear-bought experience, that when popular
violence is once roused, it overthrows ali the
bulwarks both of order and freedom ; they
were supported by all the weight of govern-
ment: they had every thing at stake, in keep-
ing down the ferment of the people. With so
many motives to vigorous action, what have
they done 1
They permitted an unruly mob of thirty
thousand persons to assemble round the Palace
of Louis Philippe, on October 25, 1830, and so
completely shatter his infant authority, thai he
was obliged to dismiss the able and philosophic
Guizot, the greatest historian of France, and
the whole cabinet of the Doctrinaires, from his
councils, to make way for republican leaders
of sterner mould, and better adapted to the in-
creasing violence of the popular mind.
At the trial of Polignac, the whole National
Guard of Paris and the departments in the
neighbourhood, seventy thousand strong, was
assembled in the capital ; and what was the
proof which the government gave of confidence
in their loyalty and efficiency in the cause of
order 1 Albeit encamped, as Lafayette said, at
the Luxembourg, amidst twenty thousand Na-
tional Guards, four thousand troops of the line,
three thousand cavalry, and forty pieces of ar-
tillery, the government did not venture to with-
draw the state prisoners to Vincennes in day-
light ; and, but for the stratagem of Montalivet,
in getting them secretly conveyed away in the
middle of the night, in his own caleche, from
the midst of that vast encampment of citizen
soldiers, they would have been murdered in
the street, within sight of that very supreme
tribunal which had pronounced that sentence,
and saved their lives. ' ,
At that critical moment, the cannoneers of
the National Guard, placed with their pieces at
the Louvre, declared, that, if matters came to
extremities, they would have turned their can-
non against the government. Great part of
the infantry, it was found, could not be relied
on. The agitation occasioned by these events
produced another change in the ministry, but
no additional security to the throne.
In February last, the National Guard joined
the populace in pillaging the palace of the
Archbishop of Paris; and joining in the in-
fernal cry against every species of religion,
scaled every steeple in Paris, with sacrilegious
hands tore down the cross from their summits,
and disgraced their uniforms by effacing the
image of our Saviour in all the churches in
the metropolis. The apathy and irresolution
of the National Guard in repressing the disor-
der of the populace on this occasion, was such
as to call for a reproof even from the most ar-
dent supporters of republican institutions. The
consequence has been a third change of minis-
ters in little more than six months.
The Paris journals are daily full of the dis-
tress of the labouring classes, the stagnation
of commercial enterprise, the want of confi-
dence, and the disgraceful tumults which in-
cessantly agitate the public mind, and have
202
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
prevented the resumption of any industrial
occupation. All this takes place in the midst,
and under the eye of fifty thousand National
Guards, in the city alone.
History will record that the National Guard
of France was instituted in 1789, for the con-
solidation of free institutions, and the preserva-
tion of public tranquillity.
That since its establishment, the government
and prevailing institutions have been the sub-
ject of incessant change; that they have had
in turn a constitutional monarchy, a fierce de-
mocracy, a sceptre of blood, a military consti-
tution, a despotic consulate, an imperial throne,
a regulated monarchy, and a citizen king.
That during their guardianship, a greater
number of lives have perished in civil war
a greater number of murders taken place on
the scaffold a greater extent of confiscation
of fortune been inflicted a greater quantity
of wealth destroyed a greater degree of vio-
lence exerted by the people a greater sum of
anguish endured than in an equal extent of
time and population, in any age or country,
since the beginning of the world!
That it has almost invariably failed at the de-
cisive moment; that, instituted for the defence
of property, it has connived at unheard-of spo-
liation ; appointed for the preservation of order,
its existence has been chiefly signalized by-
misrule ; charged with the defence of life, it
has permitted blood to flow in ceaseless tor-
rents.
Nothing therefore can be more unfounded
in fact, than the applause so generally bestowed
on this popular institution, considered as the
sole or principal support of government. <It
has been of value only as an auxiliary to the
regular force ; it is utterly unserviceable in
the crisis of civil warfare ; and is then only
of real utility when some common patriotic
feeling has sunk all minor shades of opinion
in one general emotion.
It is impossible it ever should be otherwise
citizen soldiers are extremely serviceable
when they are subjected to the bonds of dis-
cipline, and obedient to the orders of the
supreme power. But when they take upon
themselves to discuss the measures or form
of government, and instead of obeying orders
to canvass principles, there is an end not only
of all efficiency in their force, but of all utility
in their institution. Fifty thousand legislators,
with bayonets in their hands, form a hopeless
National Assembly.
This is the circumstance which, in every
decisive crisis between the opposing parties,
paralyzed the National Guard of Paris, and to
the end of time will paralyze all volunteer
troops in similar extremities : They shared in
the opinions of their fellow-citizens ; they were
members of clubs, as well as the unarmed
multitude; they were as ready to fight with
each other, as with the supporters of anarchy.
The battalions drawn from the Fauxbourg St.
Germains or the quarters of the Palais Royal,
and the Chaussee d'Antin, were disposed to
support the monarchy ; but those from the
Fauxbourg St. Antoine and St. Marceau, were
as determined to aid the cause of democracy;
and in this divided state, the battalions of a
democratic cast, from their superior numbers,
acquired a fatal ascendency.
The case would be the same in London if a
similar crisis should arrive. The battalions
from the Regent Park, Regent Street, Picca-
Idilly, the West End, and all the opulent
' quarters, might be relied on to support the
cause of order; but what could be expected
from those raised in Wapping, Deptford, St.
Giles, Spitalfields, or all the innumerable lanes
and alleys of the city, and its eastern suburbs 1
If the National Guard of London were an.
hundred thousand strong, at least twenty thou-
sand of them would, from their habits, incli-
nations, and connections, side, on the first real
crisis, with the democratic party.
It is a fatal delusion to suppose that at all
events, and in all circumstances, the National
Guard would be inclined to support the cause
of order, and prevent the depredation from
which they would be first to suffer : They un-
questionably would be inclined to do so up to
a certain point of danger, and as long as they
believed that the ruling power in the state was
likely to prove victorious. But no sooner does
the danger become more urgent, no sooner
does the government run the risk of defeat,
than the National Guard is paralyzed, from the
very circumstance of its being in great part
composed of men of property. The great ca-
pitalist is the most timid animal in existence ;
next comes the great shopkeeper, lastly the
little tradesman. Their resolution is inversely
as their wealth. In all ages, desperate daring
valour has been found in the greatest degree
amongst the lowest class of society. The
multiplied enjoyments of life render men un-
willing to incur the risk of losing them.
No sooner, therefore, does the democratic
party appear likely to become victorious, than
the shopkeepers of the National Guard begin
to think only of extricating their private affairs
from the general ruin. Sauve qui peut is then,
if not the general cry, at least the general feel-
ing. The merchant sees before him a dismal
vista of sacked warehouses and burnt stores;
the manufacturer, of insurgent workmen and
suspended orders; the tradesman, of pillaged
shops and ruined custom. Despairing of the
commonwealth, they recur, as all men do in
evident peril, to the unerring instinct of self-
preservation ; and from the magnitude of their
stake, fall under the influence of this appre-
hension long before it has reached the lower
and more reckless classes of society.
Admirable, therefore, as an auxiliary to the
regular force in case of peril from foreign in-
vasion, a National Guard is not to be relied on
during the perils and divisions of civil con-
flict. It always has, and always will fail in
extremity, when a war of opinion agitates the
state.
The only sure support of order in such
unhappy circumstances is to be found in a
numerous and honourable body of regular sol-
diers. Let not the sworn defender of order be
tainted by the revolutionary maxim, that the
duties of the citizen are superior to those of
the soldier, and that nature formed them as
men, before society made them warriors. The
first duty of a soldier, the first principle of
ARNOLD'S ROME.
military honour, is fidelity to the executive
power. In crushing an insurrection of the
populace in a mixed government, he is not
enslaving his fellow-citizens ; he is only turn-
ing the efforts of freedom into their proper
channel, and preventing the contest of opinion
from degenerating into that of force. Liberty
has as much to hope from his success as tran-
quillity : nothing is so fatal to its establishment
as the violence exerted for its extension. In
this as in other instances, it is not lawful to
do evil that good may come of it; and phi-
losophy will at length discover, what reason
and religion have long ago taught, that the
only secure foundation for ultimate expedi-
ence, is the present discharge of duty.
ARNOLD'S HOME.*
THE history of Rome will remain, to the lat-
est age of the world, the most attractive, the
most useful, and the most elevating subject of
human contemplation. It must ever form the
basis of a liberal and enlightened education ;
it must ever present the most important object
to the contemplation of the statesman ; it must
ever exhibit the most heart-stirring record to
the heart of the soldier. Modern civilization,
the arts, and the arms, the freedom and the in-
stitutions of Europe around us, are the bequest
of the Roman legions. The roads which we
travel are, in many places, those which these
indomitable pioneers of civilization first cleared
through the wilderness of nature ; the language
which we speak is more than half derived from
Roman words ; the laws by which we are pro-
tected have found their purest fountains in the
treasures of Roman jurisprudence; the ideas
in which we glory are to be found traced out
in the fire of young conception in the Roman
writers. In vain does the superficial acquire-
ment, or shallow variety, of modern liberalism
seek to throw off the weight of obligation to the
grandeur or virtue of antiquity; in vain are
we told that useful knowledge is alone worthy
of cultivation, that ancient fables have gone
past, and that the study of physical science
should supersede that of the ancient authors.
Experience, the great detector of error, is per-
petually recalling to our minds the inestimable
importance of Roman history. The more that
our institutions become liberalized, the more
rapid the strides which popular ideas make
amongst us, the more closely do we cling to the
annals of a state which underwent exactly the
same changes, and suffered the consequences of
the same convulsions ; and the more that we ex-
perience the insecurity, the selfishness, and the
rapacity of democratic ambition, the more high-
ly do we come to appreciate the condensed wis-
dom with which the great historians of anti-
quity, by a word or an epithet, stamped its
character, or revealed its tendency.
There is something solemn, and evidently
providential, in the unbroken advance and ul-
timate boundless dominion of Rome. The his-
tory of other nations corresponds nearly to the
vicissitudes of prosperity and disaster, of good
* History of Rome. By Thomas Arnold, D. D., Head
Master of 'Ruj;hy School ; late Fellow of Oriel College,
Oxford ; and member of the Archaeological Society of
Rome. London : B. Fellowes. 1838. Blackwood's Ma-
gazine, August, 1838
and evil fortune, which we observe in the na-
tions of the world at this time. The brilliant
meteor of Athenian greatness disappeared from
the world almost as soon as the bloody phantas-
magoria of the French Revolution. In half-a-
century after they arose, naught remained of
either but the works of genius they had pro-
duced, and the deeds of glory they had done.
The wonders of Napoleon's reign faded as ra-
pidly as the triumphs of the Macedonian con-
queror; and the distant lustre of Babylon and
Nineveh is faintly recalled by the ephemeral
dynasties which have arisen, under the pres-
sure of Arabian or Mogul conquest, in the re-
gions of the east in modern times. But, in the
Roman annals, a different and mightier system
developes itself. From the infancy of the re-
public, from the days even of the kings, and the
fabulous reigns of Romulus and Numa, an un-
broken progress is exhibited which never ex-
perienced a permanent reverse till the eagles
of the republic had crossed the Euphrates, and
all the civilized world, from the wall of Anto-
nius to the foot of Mount Atlas, was subjected
to their arms. Their reverses, equally with
their triumphs their defeats, alike with their
victories their infant struggles with the cities
of Latium, not less than their later contests
with Carthage and Mithridates contributed to
develope their strength, and may be regarded
as the direct causes of their dominion. It was
in the long wars with the Etruscan and Sam-
nite communities that the discipline and tactics
were slowly and painfully acquired, which en-
abled them to face the banded strength of the
Carthagenian confederacy, and in the des-
perate struggle with Hannibal, that the resolu-
tion and skill were drawn forth which so soon,
on its termination, gave them the empire of the
world. The durability of the fabric was in
proportion to the tardiness of its growth, and
the solidity of its materials. The twelve vul-
tures which Romulus beheld on the Palatine
Hill were emblematic of the twelve centuries
which beheld the existence of the empire of the
west; and it required a thousand years more
of corruption and decline to extinguish in the
east this brilliant empire, which, regenerated
by the genius of Constantine, found, in the
riches and matchless situation of Byzantium,
a counterpoise to all the effeminacy of oriental
manners, and all the ferocity of the Scythian
tribes.
It is remarkable that time has not yet pro-
204
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
duced a history of this wonderful people com-
mensurate either to their dignity, their import-
ance, or their intimate connection with modern
institutions. The pictured pages and matchless
descriptions of Livy, indeed, will, to the end
of the world, fascinate the imagination and
subdue the hearts of men ; but it is a fragment
only of his great work which has descended to
our times ; and even when complete, it came
down only to the time of Augustus, and broke
off exactly at the period when nations, arrived
at the stage of existence to which we have
grown, are most interested in its continuance.
The condensed wisdom, energetic expressions,
and practical experience of Sallust and Taci-
tus, apply only to detached periods of the later
annals ; and, though not a page of their im-
mortal works can be read without suggesting
reflections on the extraordinary political saga-
city which they had acquired from experience,
or received from nature, yet we shall look in
vain, in the fragments of this work which have
survived the wreck of time, for a connected
detail even of the later periods of Roman story.
The moderns appear to have been deterred, by
the exquisite beauty of these fragments of an-
cient history, from adventuring at all on the
same field. Ferguson's is considered by the
English, and admitted by the Germans, to be
the best connected history of the Republic
which exists ; but not only does it embrace
merely, with adequate fulness, the period from
the rise of the Gracchi to the ascent of the
throne by Augustus, but it does not contain the
views, nor is it dictated by the practical ac-
quaintance with human affairs which is neces-
sary for a real history of Roman policy. The
Scotch professor has, with much ability, illus-
trated the contests of Sylla and Marius, of Cas-
sar and Pompey ; but he lived in a pacific age,
amidst the unbroken seclusion of an academi-
cal life, and, consequently, could not possibly
attain those clear and decisive views of the
tendency and springs of action, in civil con-
tests, which are brought home to the minds of
the most illiterate by the storms and crimes of
a revolution.
Niebuhr is universally allowed to have
opened a new era in the early history of the
Republic. Before his time historians were
content with adopting, without examination,
the legends which, in the Roman annals, passed
for the narrative of real events, and, despairing
of adding any thing to their beauty, simply
presented their readers with a translation of
Livy and Dionysius. Dissatisfied with such a
mode of recording the progress of so celebrated
a people, Ferguson rejected the early legends
altogether, and passing, in the most cursory
and unsatisfactory manner over the first five
hundred years of Roman story, professed him-
self unable to discover firm historic ground till
he came down to the second Punic war. But
neither of these methods of treating the subject
suited the searching eye and inquisitive mind
of the German historian. Possessed of extraor-
dinary learning, and a matchless faculty of
drawing, with intuitive sagacity, important
historical and political conclusions from de-
tached and, to ordinary observers, unmeaning
details of subordinate historians, he has con-
trived to rear up from comparatively authentic
data, a veracious picture of the early Roman
annals. Instead of rejecting in despair the
whole history prior to the invasion of the Gauls
as a mass of fables, erected by the vanity of pa-
trician families, and adopted by the credulity
of an uninformed people, he has succeeded in
supporting a large portion of those annals by
unquestionable evidence ; and stripping it only,
in some parts, of those colours which the elo-
j quence of Livy has rendered immortal, for the
improvement and delight of mankind. It is a
common reproach against this great antiquary,
that he has overthrown the whole early history
of Rome, but no reproach was ever more un-
founded. In truth, as Dr. Arnold has justly
observed, it must be evident to every one ac-
quainted with the subject, that he has built up
much more than he has destroyed, and fixed on
firm historic grounds a vast deal which the in-
quisitive eye of modern skepticism was in-
clined to lay aside as entirely fictitious. No
stronger proof of this can be desired than is tp
be found in the fact, that while Ferguson began
his history as authentic only with the exploits
of Hannibal, Niebuhr has deemed it certain
that historical truth is to be found not only
under the kings, but so early as Ancus Martius.
It is inconceivable, indeed, how it ever could
have been seriously believed that the annals
of the kings were entirely fictitious, when the
Cloaca Maxima still exists, a durable monu-
ment both of the grandeur of conception and
power of execution which at that early period
had distinguished the Roman people. Two
thousand five hundred years have elapsed
since this stupendous work was executed, to
drain the waters of the Forum and adjacent
hollows to the Tiber; and there it stands at
this day, without a stone displaced, still per-
forming its destined service ! Do any of the
edifices of Paris or London promise an equal
duration ] From the moment that we beheld
that magnificent structure, formed of the actual
stone of the eternal city, all doubts as to the
authenticity of Roman annals, so far, at least,
as they portray a powerful flourishing kingdom
anterior to the Republic, vanished from our
minds. If nothing else remained to attest the
greatness of the kings at this period but the
Cloaca Maxima and the treaty with Carthage
in the first year of the Republic, it would be
sufficient to demonstrate that the basis of the
early history of the kings was to be found in
real" events. And this Niebuhr, after the most
minute and critical examination, has declared
to be his conviction.
Doubtless, the same historic evidence does
not exist for the romantic and captivating part
of early Roman history. We cannot assert
that we have good evidence that Romulus
fought, or that Numa prayed; that Ancus con-
quered, or that Tarquin oppressed; that the
brethren of the Horatii saved their country, or
Curtius leaped headlong into the gulf in the
Forum. The exquisite story of Lucretia; the
heart-stirring legend of Corioli ; the invasion
of Porsenna, the virtue of Cincinnatus, the
siege of Veine, the deliverance of Camillus, are
probably all founded in some degree on real
events, but they have come down to our
ARNOLD'S ROME.
205
glowing with the genius of the ancient histori-
ans, and gilded by the colours which matchless
eloquence has communicated to the additions
with which the fondness of national or family
vanity had clothed the artless narrative of
early times. Simplicity is the invariable cha-
racteristic of the infancy of the world. Homer
and Job are often in the highest degree both
pathetic and sublime; but they are so just
because they are utterly unconscious of any
such merits, and aimed only at the recital of
real events. The glowing pages and beautiful
episodes of Livy are as evidently subsequent
additions as the pomp and majesty of Ossian
are to the meager ballads of Caledonia.
But it is of no moment either to the great
objects of historical inquiry or the future
improvement and elevation of the species,
whether the Roman legends can or cannot be
supported by historical evidence. It is suffi-
cient that they exist, to render them to the end
of the world the most delightful subject of study
for youth, not the least useful matter for con-
templation in maturer years. They may not
be strictly historical, but rely upon it they are
founded in the main upon a correct picture of
the manners and ideas of the time. Amadis
of Gaul is not a true story, but it conveys,
nevertheless, a faithful though exaggerated
picture of the ideas and manners of the chi-
valrous ages. There is, probably, the same
truth in the Roman legends that there is in
Achilles and Agamemnon in Front de Boeuf,
Richard Coeur de Lion, and I van hoe. We will
not find in Roman story a real Lucretia or Vir-
ginia, any more than in British history a
genuine Rebecca or Jeanie Deans ; but the
characters are not the less founded in the
actual manners and spirit of the times. It is
of little moment to us whether Romulus watch-
ed the twelve emblematic vultures on the Pa-
latine Hill, or Numa consulted Egeria in the
shades of the Campagna, or Veioe was stormed
through the mine sprung in the Temple of
Juno, or the Roman ambassador thrust his
hand into the fire before Porsenna, or Lucretia,
though guiltless in intent, plunged the dagger
in her bosom rather than survive the honour
of her house. It is sufficient that a people
have existed, to whom the patriotic devotion,
the individual heroism, the high resolves, the
undaunted resolution portrayed in these im-
mortal episodes, were so familiar, that they
had blended with real events, were believed to
be true, because they were felt to be credible,
and formed part of their traditional annals.
No other people ever possessed early legends
of the same noble, heart-stirring kind as the
Romans, because none other were stamped
with the character destined to win, and worthy
to hold, the empire of the world. To the latest
times the history of infant Rome, with all its
attendant legends, must, therefore, form the
most elevating and useful subject for the in-
struction of youth, as affording a faithful
picture, if not of the actual events of that in-
teresting period, at least of the ideas and feel-
ings then prevalent amongst a nation called to
such exalted destinies ; and without being em-
bued with a similar spirit, we may safely assert
no other people will ever either emulate their
fame, or approach to their achievements.
Notwithstanding the high place which we
have assigned to Niebuhr in the elucidation
and confirmation of early Roman history,
nothing can be more apparent than that his
work never will take its place as a popular
history of the Republic, and never rival in
general estimation the fascinating pages of
Livy. No one can read it for half an hour
without being satisfied of that fact. Invalu-
able to the scholar, the antiquary, the philolo-
gist, it has no charms for the great mass of
readers, and conveys no sort of idea to the un-
learned student of the consecutive chain of
events even among the very people whose his-
tory it professes to portray. In this respect it
labours under the same fault which is, in a less
degree, conspicuous in the philosophic pages
of Sir James Mackintosh's English history;
that it pre-supposes an intimate acquaintance
with the subject in the reader, and is to all,
not nearly as well versed in it as himself,
either in great part unintelligible, or intolerably
dull. Heeren, whose labours have thrown
such a flood of light on the Persian, Egyptian,
and Carthaginian states, has justly remarked
that Niebuhr, with all his acuteness, is to be
regarded rather as an essayist on history, than
an actual historian. He has elucidated with
extraordinary learning and skill several of the
most obscure subjects in Roman annals ; and
on many, especially the vital subjects of the
Agrarian law, struck out new lights, which, if
known at all to the later writers of the empire,
had been entirely lost during the change of
manners and ideas consequent on the Gothic
conquests. But his work is in many places
so obscure, and so much overloaded with
names, and subjects, and disquisitions, in great
part unknown to readers, even of fair classi-
cal attainments and extensive general know-
ledge, that it never can take its place among
the standard histories of the world. He is
totally destitute of two qualities indispensable
to a great historian, and particularly conspi-
cuous in the far-famed annalists of antiquity
powers of description, and the discriminat-
ing eye, which, touching on every subject,
brings those prominently forward only which,
from their intrinsic importance, should attract
the attention of the reader. He works out
every thing with equal care and minuteness,
and, in consequence, the impression produced
on the mind of an ordinary reader, is so con-
fused, as to amount almost to nothing. Like
Pere4e or Waterloo, in the imitation of nature,
(and landscape painting, and historical de-
scription in this particular are governed by the
same principles,) he works out the details of
each individual object with admirable skill;
but there'is no Ineadth of general effect on his
canvas, and he wants the general shade and
subdued tones, which in Claude, amidst an in-
finity of details, not less faithfully portrayed,
rivet the eye of the spectator on a few brilliant
spots, and produce on the mind even of the
most unskilled the charm of a single emotion.
Niebuhr's history, however, with all its me-
rits and defects, comes only down to the com-
8
206
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
mencement of the most important era in the
annals of the republic. It is in the empire that
the great want of continued annals is felt. Li-
terally speaking, there is nothing, either in
ancient or modern literature, which deserves
the name of a history of the whole period of
the emperors. Tillemont has, with unwearied
industry and admirable accuracy, collected
all that the inimitable fragments of Tacitus,
and detached lights of Seutonius, Florus, and
the panegyrists have left on this vast subject;
and Gibbon has, with incomparable talent,
thrown, in his first chapters, over the general
conditions of the empire, the light of his ge-
nius and the colouring of his eloquence. But
Tiliemont, though a laborious and valuable
compiler, is no historian ; if any one doubts
this, let him take up one of his elaborate
quartos and try to read it. Gibbon, in his im-
mortal work, the greatest monument of his-
torical industry and ability that exists in the
world, has given a most luminous view of the
events which led to the decline and fall of the
empire, and erected, with consummate talent,
a bridge across the gulf which separates an-
cient from modern story. But he begins only
to narrate events with any minuteness at the
period when the empire had already attained
to its highest elevation ; he dismisses in a few
pages the conquests of Trajan, the wisdom of
Nerva, the beneficence of Marcus Aurelius,
and enters into detail for the first time,' when
the blind partiality of Marcus Antoninus, and
the guilt of his empress, had prepared in the
accession and vices of Commodus, the com-
mencement of that long series of depraved
emperors who brought about the ruin of the
empire. What do we know of the conquests
of Trajan, the wars of Severus, the victories
of Aurelian ? Would that the pencil of the
author of the Decline and Fall had thrown
over them the brilliant light which it has shed
over the disasters or Julian, the storming of
Constantinople, the conquests of Mahomet, or
the obstinate wars of the Byzantine emperors
with the Parthian princes. But his history
embraces so vast a range of objects, that it
could not satisfy our curiosity on the annals
even of the people who formed the centre of
the far-extended group, and it is rather a pic-
ture of the progress of the nations who over-
threw Rome, than of Rome itself.
There is ample room, therefore, for a great
historical work, as voluminous and as elo-
quent as Gibbon, on the Rise and Progress of
Roman greatness; and it embraces topics of
far more importance, in the present age of the
world, than the succession of disasters and
fierce barbarian inroads which long shook,
and at last overturned the enduring fabric of
the empire. Except as a matter of curiosity,
we have little connection with the progress of
the Gothic and Scythian nations. Christianity
has turned the rivers of barbarism by their
source; civilization has overspread the wilds
of Scythia; gunpowder and fortified towns
have given knowledge a durable superiority
over ignorance ; Russia stands as an impene-
trable barrier between Europe and the Tartar
horse. But the evils which the Roman insti-
tutions contained in their own bosom, as well
as the deeds of glory and extent of dominion
to which they led, interest us in the most vital
particulars. Our institutions more closely re-
semble theirs than those of any other people
recorded in history, and the causes which have
led to the vast extent of our dominion and du-
rability of our power, are the same which gave
them for centuries the empire of the world.
The same causes of weakness, also, are now
assailing us which once destroyed them; we,
too, have wealth imported from all parts of the
world to corrupt our manners, and an over-
grown metropolis to spread the seeds of vice
and effeminacy, as from a common centre,
over the length and breadth of the land; we,
too, have patricians striving to retain power
handed down to them by their ancestors, and
plebeians burning with the desire of distinc-
tion, and the passion for political elevation
which springs from the spread of opulence
among the middle classes ; we, too, have Grac-
chi ready to hoist the standard of disunion
by raising the question of the Agrarian law,
ana" Syllas and Mariuses to rear their hostile
banners at the head of the aristocratic and de-
mocratic factions ; in the womb of time, is
provided for us as for them, the final over-
throw of our liberties, under the successful
leader of the popular party, and long ages of
decline under the despotic rule imposed upon
us by the blind ambition and eastern equality
of the people. A fair and philosophic history
of Rome, therefore, is a subject of incalculable
importance to the citizens of this, and of every
other constitutional monarchy ; in their errors
we may discern the mirror of our own in
their misfortunes the prototypes of those we
are likely to undergo in their fate, that which,
in all human probability, awaits ourselves.
Such a history never, in modern times, could
have been written but at this period. All sub-
sequent ages, from the days of Cicero, have
been practically ignorant of the very elements
of political knowledge requisite for a right
understanding or fair discussion of the sub-
ject. In vain were the lessons of political wis-
flom to be found profusely scattered through
the Roman historians in vain did Sallust and
Tacitus point, by a word or an epithet, to the
important conclusions deducible from their
civil convulsions ; the practical experience,
the daily intercourse with republican institu-
tions were awanting, which were necessary to
give the due weight to their reflections. The
lessons of political wisdom were so constantly
brought home to the citizens of antiquity by the
storms and dissensions of the Forum, that they
deemed it unnecessary to do more than allude
to them, as a subject on which all were agreed,
and with which every one was familiar. Like
first principles in our House of Commons, they
were universally taken for granted, and, there-
fore, never made the theme of serious illustra-
tion. It is now only that we begin to perceive
the weighty sense and condensed wisdom of
many expressions which dropped seemingly
unconsciously from their historical writers,
that dear-bought experience has taught us that
pride, insolency, and corrupt principles are the
main sources of popular ambition in our times,
as in the days of Catiline ; and that the saying
ARNOLD'S ROME.
207
of Johnson ceases to pass for a witty paradox :
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
Dr. Arnold has now fairly set himself to
work with this noble task, and he is, in many
respects, peculiarly fitted for the undertaking.
Long known to the classical world as an ac-
complished scholar, and the learned editor of
the best edition of Thucydides extant, he is
still more familiar to many of our readers as
the energetic head-master of Rugby school ;
and is to this hour looked up to with mingled
sentiments of awe and affection by many of
the most celebrated characters of the age.
The first volume of the great work in which
he is engaged alone is published, which brings
down the history of the Republic to the burn-
ing of Rome by the Goths, but it affords a fair
specimen of the spirit and ability with which
the remainder is likely to be carried on. In
many respects he has shown himself ad-
mirably calculated for the great but difficult
task which he has undertaken. His classical
attainments, both in Greek and Roman litera-
ture, are of the very highest order; his indus-
try is indefatigable, and he possesses much of
that instinctive glance or natural sagacity
which enabled Niebuhr, amidst the fictions
and chaos of ancient annals, to fix at once on
the outlines of truth and the course of real
events. His powers of description are of no
ordinary kind, as our readers will at once per-
ceive from the extracts we are about to lay be-
fore them; and many of his reflections prove
that he is endowed with that faculty of draw-
ing general conclusions from particular events,
which, when not pushed too far, is the surest
sign of the real genius for philosophical his-
tory.
Dr. Arnold, it is well known, is a whig per-
haps, we may add, an ultra-liberal. So far
from objecting to his book on this account, we
hail it with the more satisfaction that it does
come from an author of such principles, and
therefore that it can safely be referred to as a
work in which the truth of ancient events is
not likely to be disguised or perverted to an-
swer the views at least of the conservative party
in Great Britain. We are satisfied from many
instances, in the volume before us, that he is
of an inquisitive, searching turn of mind, and
that he would deem himself dishonoured if
he concealed or altered any well-ascertainec
facts in Roman history. More than this we do
not desire. We not only do not dislike, we
positively enjoy, his occasional introduction of
liberal views in what we may call Roman poli-
tics. We see in them the best guarantee tha
the decisive instances against democratic prin
ciples, with which all ancient history, and, mos
of all, Roman history, abounds, will not be per
verted in his hands, and may be relied on a
authentic facts against his principles. Pro
vided a writer is candid, ingenuous, and liberal
we hold it perfectly immaterial to the ultimate
triumph of truth what is the shade of his poli
tical opinions. The cause is not worth defend
ing which cannot be supported by the testimon)
of an honest opponent. Every experience
lawyer knows the value of a conscientious
but unwilling witness. Enough is to be found
in their apologist, Thiers, to doom the French
Devolution to the eternal execration of mankind,
"here is no writer on America who has brought
orward such a host of facts decisive against
epublican institutions as Miss Martineau,
-horn the liberals extol as the only author who
as given a veracious account of the transat-
antic democracies ; and we desire no other
vitness but Dr. Arnold to the facts which de-
nonstrate that it was the extravagant preten-
ion and ambition of the commons, which, in
the end, proved fatal to the liberties of Rome.
The Campagna of Rome, the fields of Latium,
he Alban Mount, the Palatine Hill, were fami-
iar to the childhood of us all ; and not the least
elightful hours of the youth of many of us
lave been spent in exploring the realities of
hat enchanting region. We transcribe with
pleasure Dr. Arnold's animated and correct
lescription of it, drawn from actual observa-
ion with the hand of a master.
" The territory of the original Rome during
ts first period, the true Ager Romanus, could be
gone round in a single day. It did not extend
)eyond the Tiber at all, nor probably beyond
he Anio; and on the east and south, where it
lad most room to spread, its limit was between,
ive and six miles from the city. This Ager
Romanus was the exclusive property of the
Joman people, that is of the houses ; it did not
nclude the lands conquered from the Latins,
and given back to them again when the Latins
became the plebs or commons of Rome. Ac-
cording to the augurs, the Ager Romanus was
a peculiar district in a religious sense; aus-
pices could be taken within its bounds which
could be taken nowhere without them.
4 And now, what was Rome, and what was
the country around it, which have both acquired
an interest such as can cease only when earth
itself shall perish ? The hills of Rome are such
as we rarely see in England, low in height, but
with steep and rocky sides. In early times the
natural wood still remained in patches amidst
the buildings, as at this day it grows here and
there on the green sides of the Monte Testaceo.
Across the Tiber the ground rises to a greater
height than that of the Roman hills, but its
summit is a level, unbroken line; while the
heights, which opposite to Rome itself rise im-
mediately from the river, under the names of
Janiculus and Vaticanus, then swept away to
some distance from it, and return in their high-
est and boldest form at the Mons Marius, just
above the Milvian bridge and the Flaminian
road. Thus to the west the view is immedi-
ately bounded; but to the north and north-east
the eye ranges over the low ground of the Cam-
pagna to the nearest line of the Apennines,
which closes up, as with a gigantic wall, all
the Sabine, Latin, and Volcian lowlands, while
over it are still distinctly to be seen the high
summits of the central Apennines, covered
with snow, even at this day, for more than six
months in the year. South and south-west lies
the wide plain of the Campagna; its level line
succeeded by the equally level line of the sea,
which can only be distinguished from it by the
brighter light reflected from its waters. East-
ward, after ten miles of plain, the view is bound-
ed by the Alban hills, a cluster of high bold
points rising out of the Campagna, like Arran
208
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
from the sea, on the highest of which, at nearly
the same height with the summit of Helvellyn,
stood the Temple of Jupiter Latiaris, the scene *
of the common worship of all the people of the
Latin name. Immediately under this highest j
point lies the crater-like basin of the Alban |
lake ; and on its nearer rim might be seen the
trees of the grove of Florentia, where the Latins
held the great civil assemblies of their nation.
Further to the north, on the edge of the Alban
hills, looking towards Rome, was the town and
citadel of Tusculum ; and beyond this, a lower
summit, crowned with the Avails and towers of
Labicum, seems to connect the Alban hills with
the line of the Apennines just at the spot where
the citadel of Praeneste, high up on the moun-
tain side, marks the opening into the country
of the Hernicians, and into the valleys of the
streams that feed the Liris.
" Returning nearer to Rome, the lowland coun-
try of the Campagna is broken by long green
swelling ridges, the ground rising and falling,
as in the heath country of Surrey and Berk-
shire. The streams are dull and sluggish, but
the hill sides above them constantly break away
into little rocky cliffs, where on every ledge the
wild fig now strikes out its branches, and tufts
of broom are clustering, but which in old times
formed the natural strength of the citadels of
the numerous cities of Latium. Except in
these narrow dells, the present aspect of the
country is all bare and desolate, with no trees
nor any human habitation. But anciently, in
the time of the early kings of Rome, it was full
of independent cities, and, in its population and
the careful cultivation of its little garden-like
farms, must have resembled the most flourish-
ing parts of Lombardy or the Netherlands."
We have already adverted to the difficulty o'f
determining where fiction ends and real history
begins in the early Roman annals, and the scan-
ty foundation there is in authentic records, for
any of the early legends of their history. Fully
alive, however, to the exquisite beauty of these
remains, and the influence they had on the Ro-
man history, as well as their importance as
evincing the lofty character of their infant peo-
ple, Dr. Arnold has adopted the plan of not re-
jecting them altogether, but giving them in a
simple narrative, something like the Bible, and
commencng with his ordinary style when he
arrives at events which really rest on historic
ground. This is certainly much better than
entirely rejecting them; but, at the same time,
it introduces a quaint style of writing, in re-
counting these early events, to which we can
hardly reconcile ourselves, after the rich colour-
ing and graphic hand of Livy. As an example
of the way in which he treats this interesting
but difficult part of his subject, we give his ac-
count of the story of Lucretia, the exquisite
episode with which Livy terminates his first
book and narrative of the kings of Rome.
"Now when they came back to Rome, Kins:
Tarquinius was at war with the people of Ar-
dea; and as the city was strong, his army lay
a long while before it, till it should be forced to
yield through famine. So the Romans had lei-
sure for feasting and for diverting themselves :
and once Titus and Anins were supping with !
their brother Sextus, and their cousin Tarqui-
nius of Collatia was supping with them. And
they disputed about their wives, whose wife of
them all was the worthiest lady. Then said
Tarquinius of Collatia, ' Let us go and see with
our own eyes what our wives are doing, so
shall we know which is the worthiest/ Upon
this they all mounted their horses and rode first
to Rome ; and there they found the wives of Ti-
tus, and of Aruns, and of Sextus, feasting and
making merry. Then they rode on to Collatia,
and it was late in the night; but they found
Lucretia, the wife of Tarquinius of Collatia,
neither feasting, nor yet sleeping, but she was
sitting with all her handmaids around her, and
all were working at the loom. So when they
saw this, they all said, 'Lucretia is the worthi-
est lady.' And she entertained her husband
and his kinsmen, and after that they rode back
to the camp before Ardea.
"But a spirit of wicked passion seized upon
Sextus, and a few days afterwards he went alone
to Collatia, and Lucretia received him hospita-
bly, for he was her husband's kinsman. At
midnight he arose and went to her chamber,
and he said that if she yielded not to him he
would slay her and one of her slaves with her,
and would say to her husband that he had slain
her in her adultery. So when Sextus had ac-
complished his wicked purpose he went back
again to the camp.
"Then Lucretia sent in haste to Rome, to
pray that her father Spurius Lucretius would
come to her ; and she sent to Ardea to summon
her husband. Her father brought along with
him Publius Valerius, and her husband brought
with him Lucius Junius, whom men. called
Brutus. When they arrived, they asked ear-
nestly, 'Is all well?' Then she told them of
the wicked deed of Sextus, and she said, ' If ye
be men, avenge it.' And they all swore to her,
that they would avenge it. Then she said again,
'I am not guilty; yet must I too share in
the punishment of this deed, lest any should
think that they may be false to their husbands
and live.' And she drew a knife from her
bosom, and stabbed herself to the heart.
" At that sight her husband and her father
cried aloud ; but Lucius drew the knife from
the wound, and held it up, and said, ' By this
blood I swear that I will visit this deed upon
King Tarquinius, and all his accursed race ;
neither shall any man hereafter be king in
Rome, lest he do the like wickedness.' And he
gave the knife to her husband, and to her fa-
ther, and to Publius Valerius. They marvel-
led to hear such words from him whom men
called dull ; but they swore also, and they took
up the body of Lucretia, and carried it down
into the forum; and they said, 'Behold the
deeds of the wicked family of Tarquinius.'
All the people of Collatia were moved, and
the men took up arms, and they set a guard at
the gates, that none might go out to carry the
tidings to Tarquinius, and they followed Lu-
cius to Rome. There, too, all the people came
together, and the crier summoned them to as-
semble before the tribune of the Celeres, for
Lucius held that office. And Lucius spoke to
them of all the tyranny of Tarquinius and his
sons, and of the wicked deed of Sextus. And
the people in their curias took back from Tar-
ARNOLD'S ROME.
quinius the sovereign power, which they had
given him, and they banished him and all his
family. Then the younger men followed Lu-
cius to Ardea, to win over the army there to
join them ; and the city was left in the charge
of Spurius Lucretius. But the wicked Tullia
fled in haste from her house, and all, both men
and women, cursed her as she passed, and
prayed that the furies of her father's blood
might visit her with vengeance.
"Meanwhile King Tarquinius set out with
speed to Rome to put down the tumult. But
Lucius turned aside from the road that he
might not meet him, and came to the camp ;
and the soldiers joyfully received him, and
they drove out the sons of Tarquinius. King
Tarquinius came to Rome, but the gates were
shut, and they declared to him from the walls
the sentence of banishment which had been
passed against him and his family. So he
yielded to his fortune, and went to live at Crere
with his sons Titus and Aruns. His other
son, Sextus, went to Gabii, and the people
there, remembering how he had betrayed them
to his father, slew him. Then the army left
the camp before Ardea and went back to Rome.
And all men said, ' Let us follow the good laws
of the good King Servius ; and let us meet in
our centuries, according as he directed, and
let us choose two men year by year to govern
us, instead of a king.' Then the people met
in their centuries in the field of Mars, and
they chose two men to rule over them, Lucius
Junius, whom men called Brutus, and Lucius
Tarquinius of Collatia."
Every classical reader must perceive the
object which our author had in view. He has
in great part translated Livy, and he wishes to
preserve the legend which he has rendered im-
mortal; but he is desirous, at the same time,
of doing it, as he himself tells us, in such a
manner that it shall be impossible for any
reader, even the most illiterate, to imagine that
he is recording a real event. It may be pre-
judice, and the force of early association, but
we can hardly reconcile ourselves to this Mo-
saic mode of writing the history of the most
remote events. Every author's style, to be
agreeable, should be- natural. The reader ex-
periences a disagreeable feeling in coming
upon such quaint and perhaps affected pas-
sages, after being habituated to the flowing and
vigorous style of the author. It would be bet-
ter, we conceive, to write the whole in one
uniform manner, and mark the difference be-
tween the legendary and authentic parts by a
difference in the type, or some other equally
obvious distinction. But this is a trivial mat-
ter, affecting only the commencement of the
work; and ample subject of meditation is sug-
gested by many facts and passages in its later
pages.
We have previously noticed the decisive
evidence which the Cloaca Maxima and the
treaty with Carthage in the time of Tarquin
afford of the early greatness of the Roman
monarchy. But we were not aware, till read-
ing Arnold even Niebuhr has not so distinctly
brought out the fact that at the time of the
expulsion of the Tarquins and the commence
ment of the Republic, Rome was already a
27
>owerful monarchy, whose sway extended
rom the northern extremity of the Campagna
o the rocks of Terracina; and that it was
hen more powerful than it ever was for the
first hundred and fifty years of the Com-
non wealth ! The Roman kingdom is corn-
ered by Arnold, under the last of the kings,
o Judea under Solomon ; and the fact of a
reaty, recorded in Polybius, being in that year
concluded with Carthage, proves that the state
lad already acquired consideration with dis-
ant states.
" Setting aside," says our author, "the tyran-
ny ascribed to Tarquinius, and remembering
hat it was his policy to deprive the commons
of their lately acquired citizenship, and to
reat them like subjects rather than members
of the state, the picture given of the wealth
and greatness of Judea under Solomon may
convey some idea of the state of Rome under
ts latter kings. Powerful amongst surround-
ng nations, exposed to no hostile invasions,
with a flourishing agriculture and an active
commerce, the country was great and pros-
perous ; and the king was enabled to execute
public works of the highest magnificence, and
o invest himself with a splendour unknown in
the earlier times of the monarchy."
But mark the effect upon the external power
and internal liberties of the nation, conse-
quent on the violent change in the' govern-
ment and establishment of the Commonwealth,
as portrayed in the authentic pages of this
liberal historian.
"In the first year of the commonwealth, the
Romans still possessed the dominion enjoyed
by their kings ; all the cities of the coast of
Latium, as we have already seen, were subject
to them as far as Terracina. IViihin twelve
years, we cannot ccrtdinly sny how much sooner, these
were all become intkpendenf. This is easily in-
telligible, if we only take into account the loss
to Rome of an able and absolute king, the na-
tural weakness of an unsettled government,
and the distractions produced by the king's at-
tempts to recover his throne. The Latins may
have held, as we are told of the Sabines in
this very time, that their dependent alliance
with Rome had been concluded with King
Tarquinius, and that as he was king no longer,
and as his sons had been driven out with him,
all covenants between Latium and Rome were
become null and void. But it is possible also,
if the chronology of the common story of
these times can be at all depended on, that the
Latin cities owed their independence to the
Etruscan conquest of Rome. For that war,
which has been given in its poetical version
as the war with Porsenna r was really a great
outbreak of the Etruscan power upon the na-
tions southward of Etruria, in the very front
of whom lay the Romans. In the very next
year after the expulsion of the king, according
to the common story, and certainly at some
time within the period with which we are now
concerned, the Etruscans fell upon Rome. The
result of the war is, indeed, as strangely dis-
guised in the poetical story as Charlemagne's
invasion of Spain is in the romances. Rome
was completely conquered; all the territory
which the kings had won ou the right bank of
a
210
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
the Tiber was now lost. Rome itself was sur-
rendered to the Etruscan conqueror; his sove-
reignty was fully acknowledged, the Romans
gave up their arms, and recovered their city
and territory on condition of renouncing the
nse of iron except for implements of agricul-
ture. But this bondage did not last long; the
Etruscan power was broken by a great defeat
sustained before Aricia; for after the fall of
Rome the conquerors attacked Latium, and
while besieging Aricia, the united force of the
Latin cities, aided by the Greeks of Cumse,
succeeded in destroying their army, and in
confining their power to their own side of the
Tiber. Still, however, the Romans did not re-
cover their territory on the right bank of that
river, and the number of their tribes, as has
been already noticed, was consequently less-
ened by one-third, being reduced from thirty to
twenty.
"Thus within a short time after the banish-
ment of the last king, the Romans lost all their
territory on the Etruscan side of the Tiber,
and all their dominion over Latium. A third
people were their immediate neighbours on
the north-east, the Sabines. The cities of the
Sabines reached, says Varro, from Reate, to
the distance of half a day's journey from
Rome; that is, according to the varying esti-
mate of a day's journey, either seventy-five
or an hundred stadia, about ten or twelve
miles.
" It is certain, also, that the first enlarge-
ment of the Roman territory, after its great
diminution in the Etruscan war, look place
towards the north-east, between the Tiber and
the Anio ; and here were the lands of the only
new tribes that were added to the Roman na-
tion, for the space of more than one hundred
and twenty years after the establishment of
the commonwealth/'
Such were the disastrous effects of the re-
volution which expelled Tarquinius Superbus,
even though originating, if we may believe the
story of Lucretia, in a heinous crime on his
part, on the external power and territorial
possessions of Rome. Let us next inquire
whether the social condition of the people was
improved by the change, and the plebeians
reaped those fruits from the violent change of
the government which they were doubtless led
to expect.
"The most important part," says Arnold,
" in the history of the first years of the com-
monwealth is the tracing, if possible, the gra-
dual depression of the .commons to that ex-
treme point of misery which led to the institu-
tion of the tribunalship. We have seen that
immediately after the expulsion of the king,
the commons shared in the advantages of the
revolution ; but within a few years we find
them so oppressed and powerless, that their
almost hopes aspired, not to the assertion of
rlitical equality wilh the burghers, bul mere-
lo the obtaining protection from personal
injuries.
"The specific character of their degradation
is stated to have been this ; that there pre- !
vailed among them severe distress, amounting '
in many cases to actual ruin ; that to relieve '
themselves from their poverty, they were in !
| the habit of borrowing money of the burghers ;
thai the distress continuing, they became ge-
nerally insolvent; and that as the law of
debtor and creditor was exceedingly severe,
they became liable in their persons to the
cruelty of the burghers, were trealed by Ihein as
slaves, confined as such in Iheir workhouses,
kept to taskwork, and often beaten at the dis-
cretion of their lask-maslers."
Various were Ihe miseries to which the
commons were reduced in consequence of
the revolulion, and inexorable Ihe rigour with
which the nobles pressed the advantage they
had gained by the abolition of the kingly form
of government. The civil convulsions and
general distress, Dr. Arnold tells us, terminated
in the eslablishment of an exclusive oppressive
aristocracy, interrupted occasionally by the le-
galized despotism of a single individual.
"Thus Ihe monarchy was exchanged for an
exclusive aristocracy, in which Ihe burghers or
patricians possessed the whole dominion of the
state. For mixed as was the influence in the
assembly of the centuries, and although the
burghers Ihrough Iheir clienls exercised no
small control over it, still they did not think it
safe to intrust it with much power. In the
election of consuls, the cenluries could only
choose out of a number of patrician or burgher
candidates ; and even after this eleclion it re-
mained for Ihe burghers in their greal council
in the curiae to ratify it or to annul it, by con-
ferring upon, or refusing to the persons so
elected the ' Imperium ;' in other words, that
sovereign power which belonged to the con-
suls as the successors of the kings, and which,
except so far as it was limited within the walls
of the city, and a circle of one mile without
them, by the right of appeal, was absolute over
life and death. As for any legislative power,
in this period of Ihe commonweallh, the con-
suls were their own law. No doubt the burgh-
ers had their customs, which in all great
points the consuls would duly observe, be-
cause, otherwise on the expiration of their
office they would be liable to arraignment be-
fore the curiae, and to such punishment as
that sovereign assembly might please to inflict;
but the commons had no such security, and
the uncertainty of the consul's judgments was
the particular grievance which afterwards led
to the formation of the code of Ihe iwelve
lables.
" We are lold, however, lhat wilhin len years
of the first instilulion of the consuls the burgh-
ers found it necessary to create a single magistrate
with powers s'ill more absolute, who was to exer-
cise the full sovereignty of a king, and even
without that single check to which the kings of Rome
had been subjected. The Master of the people,
that is, of the burghers, or, as he was other-
wise called, the Dictator, was appointed, it is
true, for six' months only ; and therefore liable,
like the consuls, to be arraigned after the ex-
piration of his office, for any acts of tyranny
which he might have committed during its
continuance. But whilst he retained his of-
fice he was as absolute without the walls of the
city as the consuls were within them ; neither
commoners nor burghers had any right of ap-
peal from his sentence, although the latter had
ARNOLD'S ROME.
211
enjoyed this protection in the times of the mo-
narchy."
At length the misery of the people, flowing
from the revolution, became so excessive that
they could endure it no longer, and they took
the resolution to separate altogether from their
oppressors, and retire to the sacred hill to found
a new commonwealth.
" Fifteen years after the expulsion of Tar-
quinius, the commons, driven to despair by
their distress, and exposed without protection
to the capricious cruelty of the burghers, re-
solved to endure their degraded state no longer.
The particulars of this second revolution are
as uncertain as those of the overthrow of the
monarchy ; but thus much is certain, and is
remarkable, that the commons sought safety,
not victory ; they desired to escape from Rome,
not to govern it. It may be true that the com-
mons who were left in Rome gathered together
on the Aventine, the quarter appropriated to
their order, and occupied the hill as a fortress ;
but it is universally agreed that the most effi-
cient part of their body, who were at that time
in the field as soldiers, deserted their generals,
and marched off to a hill beyond the Anio ; that
is, to a spot beyond the limits of the Ager Ro-
manus, the proper territory of the burghers,
but within the district which had been assigned
to one of the newly created tribes of the com-
mons, the Crustuminian. Here they establish-
ed themselves, and here they proposed to found
a new city of their own, to which they would
have gathered their families, and the rest of
their order who were left behind in Rome, and
have given up their old city to its original pos-
sessors, the burghers and their clients. But
the burghers were as unwilling to lose the
services of the commons, as the Egyptians in
the like case to let the Israelites go, and they
endeavoured by every means to persuade them
to return. To show how little the commons
thought of gaining political power, we have
only to notice their demands. They required
a general cancelling of the obligations of in-
solvent debtors, and the release of all those
whose persons, in default of payment, had
been assigned over to the power of their credi-
tors ; and further, they insisted on having two of
their own body acknowledged by the burghers
as their protectors ; and to make this protec-
tion effectual, the persons of those who afforded
it were to be as inviolable as those of the her-
alds, the sacred messengers of the gods ; who-
soever harmed them was to be held accursed,
and might be slain by any one with impunity.
To these terms the burghers agreed ; a solemn
treaty was concluded between them and the
commons, as between two distinct nations ; arid
the burghers swore for themselves, and for
their posterity, that they would hold inviolable
the persons of two officers, to be chosen by
the centuries on the field of Mars, whose busi-
ness it should be to extend full protection to
any commoner against a sentence of the con-
sul; that is to say, who might rescue any
debtor from the power of his creditor, if they
conceived it to be capriciously or cruelly exert-
ed. The two officers thus chosen retained the
name which the chief officers of the commons
had borne before, they were called Tribuni,
or tribe masters; but instead of being merely
the officers of one particular tribe, and exer-
cising an authority only over Ihe members of
their own order, they were named tribunes of
the commons at large, and their power, as
protectors in stopping any exercise of oppres-
sion towards their own body, extended over
the burghers, and was by them solemnly ac-
knowledged. The number of the tribunes was
probably suggested by that of the consuls;
there were to be two chief officers of the com-
mons, as there were of the burghers."
Thus, all that the Roman populace gained
by the revolution which overturned the kingly
power, was such a diminution of territory and
external importance as it required them more
than one hundred and fifty years to recover,
and such an oppressive form of aristocratic
government as compelled them to take refuge
under a dictator, and led to such a degree of
misery as, eighteen years after the convulsion,
made them ready to quit their country and
homes, and become exiles from their native
land !
At the close of the third century of Rome,
and fifty years after the expulsion of the Tar-
quins, Arnold gives the following picture of
the external condition of the Republic:
"At the close of the third century of Rome,
the warfare which the Romans had to main-
tain against the Opican nations was generally
defensive ; that the ^Equians and Volscians
had advanced from the line of the Apennines
and established themselves on the Alban hills,
in the heart of Latium ; that of the thirty Latin
states which had formed the league with Rome in
the year 261, thirteen were now either destroy-
ed, or were in the possession of the Opicans ;
that on the Alban hills themselves, Tusculum
alone remained independent; and that there
was no other friendly city to obstruct the ir-
ruptions of the enemy into the territory of
Rome. Accordingly, that territory was plun-
dered year after year, and whatever defeats
the plunderers may at times have sustained,
yet they were never deterred from renewing a
contest which they found in the main profitable
and glorious. So greatly had the power and do-
minion of Rome fallen since t)ie overthrow of the
monarchy."
It was by slow degrees, and in a long series
of contests, continued without intermission for
two hundred years, that the commons recover-
ed the liberties they had lost from the conse-
quences of this triumph in this first convul-
sion ; so true it is, in all ages, that the people
are not only never permanent gainers, but in
the end the greatest losers by the revolution in
which they had been most completely victorious.
The next great social convulsion of Rome
was that consequent on the overthrow of the
Decemvirs. The success of that revolution
operated in the end grievously to the prejudice
of the commons, and retarded, by half a cen-
tury, the advance of real freedom. Every one
knows that the Decemvirs were elected to re-
model the laws of the commonwealth; that
they shamefully abused their trust, and con-
stituted themselves tyrants without control;
and that they were at last overthrown by the
general and uncontrollable in. ^nation excited
212
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
by the atrocious violence of Appius to the
daughter of Virginius. A juster cause for re-
sistance, a fairer ground for the overthrow of
existing authority, could not be imagined ; it
was accordingly successful, and the immediate
effect of the popular triumph was a very great
accession of political power to the commons.
Arnold tells us
" The revolution did not stop here. Other
and deeper changes were effected ; but they
lasted so short a" lime, that their memory has
almost vanished out of the records of history.
The assembly of the tribes had been put on a
level with that of the centuries, and the same
principle was followed out in the equal divi-
sion of all the magistracies of the state be-
tween the patricians and the commons. Two
supreme magistrates, invested with the high-
est judicial power, and discharging also those
important duties which were afterwards per-
formed by the censors, were to be chosen every
year, one from the patricians, and the other from
the commons. Ten tribunes of the soldiers,
or decemviri, chosen, five from the patricians
and five from the commons, were to command
the armies in war, and to watch over the rights
of the patricians ; while ten tribunes of the
commons, also chosen in equal proportions
from both orders, were to watch over the liber-
ties of the commons. And as patricians were
thus admitted to the old tribuneship, so the as-
semblies of the tribes were henceforth, like
those of the centuries, to be held under the
sanctions of augury, and nothing could be. de-
termined in them if the auspices were unfa-
vourable. Thus the two orders were to be
made fully equal to one another ; but at the
same time they were to be kept perpetually dis-
tinct ; for at this very moment the whole twelve
tables of the laws of the decemvirs received
the solemn sanction of the people, although,
as we have seen, there was a law in one of
the last tables which declared the marriage of
a patrician with a plebeian to be unlawful.
"There being thus an end of all exclusive
magistracies, whether patrician or plebeian ;
and all magistrates being now recognised as
acting in the name of the whole people, the
persons of all were to be regarded as equally
sacred. Thus the consul Horatius proposed
and carried a law which declared that, who-
ever harmed any tribune of the commons, any
aedile, any judge, or any decemvir, should be
outlawed and accursed ; that any man might
slay him, and that all his property should be
confiscated to the temple of Ceres. Another
law was passed by M. Duilius, one of the tri-
bunes, carrying the penalties of the Valerian
law to a greater height against any magistrate
who should either neglect to have new magis-
trates appointed at the end of the year, or who
should create them without giving the right of
appeal from their sentence. Whosoever vio-
lated either of these provisions was to be
burned alive as a public enemy.
" Finally, in order to prevent the decrees of
the senate from being tampered with by the
patricians, Horatius and Valerius began the
practice of having them carried to the temple
of Ceres on the Aventine, and there laid up
under the care of the sediles of the commons.
" This complete revolution was conducted
chiefly, as far as appears, by the two consuls,
and by M. Duilius. Of the latter we should
wish to have some further knowledge ; it is an
unsatisfactory history, in which we can only
judge of the man from his public measures,
j instead of being enabled to form some estimate
of the merit of his measures from our acquaint-
ance with the character of the man. But there
is no doubt that the new constitution attempted
to obtain objects for which the time was not
yet come, which were regarded rather as the
triumph of a party, than as called for by the
wants and feelings of the nation ; and therefore
the Roman constitution of 306 was as short-
lived as Simon de Montfort's provisions of Ox-
ford, or as some of the strongest measures of
the Long Parliament. An advantage pursued
too far in politics, as well as in war, is apt to
end in a repulse."
After a continued struggle of seven years,
however, this democratic constitution yielded
to the reaction in favour of the old institutions
of the state, and the experienced evils of the
new, and another constitution was the result
of the struggle which restored matters to the
same situation in which they had been before
the overthrow of the Decemvirs ; with the ad-
dition of a most important officer the Censor,
endowed with almost despotic power to the
patrician faction. This decided reaction is
thus described, and the inferences deducible
from it. fairly stated by Dr. Arnold.
" In the following year we meet for the first
time with the name of a new patrician magis-
tracy, the Censorship; and Niebuhr saw clear-
ly that the creation of this office was connected
with the appointment of tribunes of the sol-
diers; and that both belong to what maybe
called the constitution of the year 312.
"This constitution recognised two points;
a sort of continuation of the principle of the
decemvirate, inasmuch as the supreme govern-
ment was again, to speak in modern language,
put in commission, and the kingly powers,
formerly united in the consuls or praetors,
were now to be divided between the censors
and tribunes of the soldiers ; and secondly, the
eligibility of the commons to share in some of
the powers thus divided. But the partition,
even in theory, was fyr from equal: the two
censors, who were to hold their office for five
years, were not only chosen from the patricians,
but, as Niebuhr thinks, by them, that is, by
the assembly of the curiae ; the two quaestors,
who judged in cases of blood, were also chosen
from the patricians, although by the centuries.
Thus the civil power of the old praetors was in
its most important points still exercised ex-
clusively by the patricians; and even their
military power, which was professedly to be
open to both orders, was not transmitted to the
tribunes of the soldiers, without some diminu-
tion of. its majesty. The new tribuneship was
not an exact image of the kingly sovereignty;
it was not a curule office, and therefore no tri-
bune ever enjoyed the honour of a triumph, in
which the conquering general, ascending to
the Capitol to sacrifice to the guardian gods
of Rome, was wont to be arrayed in all the
insignia of royalty.
ARNOLD'S ROME.
213
" But even the small share of power thus
granted in theory to the commons, was in
practice withheld from them. Whether from
the influence of the patricians in the centuries,
or by religious pretences urged by the augurs,
or by the enormous and arbitrary power of
refusing votes which the officer presiding at
the comitia was wont to exercise, the college
of the tribunes was for many years filled by
the patricians alone. And, while the censor-
ship was to be a fixed institution, the tribunes
of the soldiers were to be replaced whenever
it might appear needful by two consuls; and
to the consulship no plebeian was so much as
legally eligible. Thus the victory of the aris-
tocracy may seem to have been complete, and
we may wonder how the commons, after
having carried so triumphantly the law of
Canuleius, should have allowed the political
rights asserted for them by his colleagues, to
have been so partially conceded in theory, and
in practice to be so totally withheld.
"The explanation is simple, and it is one
of the most valuable lessons of history. The
commons obtained those reforms which they
desired, and they desired such only as their
stale was ripe for. They had withdrawn in
times past to the Sacred Hill, but it was to
escape from intolerable personal oppression;
they had recently occupied the Aventine in
arms, but it was to get rid of a tyranny which
endangered the honour of their wives and
daughters, and to recover the protection of
their tribunes ; they had more lately still re-
tired to the Janiculum, but it was to remove
an insulting distinction which embittered the
relations of private life, and imposed on their
grandchildren, in many instances, the incon-
veniences, if not the reproach of illegitimacy.
These were all objects of universal and per-
sonal interest; and these the commons were
resolved not to relinquish. But the possible
admission of a few distinguished members of
their body to the highest offices of state con-
cerned the mass of the commons but little.
They had their own tribunes for their personal
protection ; but curule magistracies, and the
government of the commonwealth, seemed to
belong to the patricians, or at least might be
left in their hands without any great sacrifice.
So it is that all things come best in their
season ; that political power is then most
happily exercised by a people, when it has not
been given to them prematurely, that is, before,
in the natural progress of things, they feel the
want of it. Security for person and property
enables a nation to grow without interruption;
in contending for this a people's sense of law
and right is wholesomely exercised ; mean-
time national prosperity increases, and brings
with it an increase of intelligence, till other
and more necessary wants being satisfied, men
awaken to the highest earthly desire of the
ripened mind, the desire of taking an active
share in the great work of government. The
Roman commons abandoned the highest ma-
gistracies to the patricians for a period of many
years ; but they continued to increase in pros*
perity and in influence ; and what the fathers
had wisely yielded, their sons in the fulness
of time acquired. So the English House of
Commons, in the reign of Edward III., declined
to interfere in questions of peace and war, as
being too high for them to compass ; but they
would not allow the crown to take their money
without their own consent; and so the nation
grew, and the influence of the House of Com-
mons grew along with it, till that house has
become the great and predominant power in
the British constitution.
"If this view be correct, Trebonius judged
far more wisely than M. Duilius ; and the
abandonment of half the plebeian tribuneship
to the patricians, in order to obtain for the
plebeians an equal share in the higher magis-
tracies, would have been as really injurious to
the commons as it was unwelcome to the pride
of the aristocracy. It was resigning a weapon
with which they were familiar, for one which
they knew not how to wield. The tribuneship
was the foster-nurse of Roman liberty, and
without its care that liberty never would
have grown to maturity. What evils it after-
wards wrought, when the public freedom was
fully ripened, arose from that great defect of
the Roman constitution, its conferring such
extravagant powers on all its officers. It pro-
posed to check one tyranny by another; in-
stead of so limiting the prerogatives of every
magistrate and order in the state, whether
aristocratical or popular, as to exclude tyranny
from all."
Our limits will not admit of any other ex-
tracts, how interesting soever they may be.
Those already made will sufficiently indicate
the character of the work. It is clear that Dr.
Arnold, in addition to his M r ell-known classical
and critical acquirements, possesses a discri-
minating judgment, a reflecting philosophic
turn of mind, and the power of graphic inte-
resting description. These are valuable quali-
ties to any historian : they are indispensable
to the annalist of Rome, and promise to render
his work, if continued in the same spirit, the
best history of that wonderful state in the
English, perhaps in any modern, language.
We congratulate him upon the auspicious
commencement of his labours ; we cordially
wish him success, and shall follow him, with
no ordinary interest, through the remainder
of his vast subject, interesting to the student
of ancient events, and the observer of contem-
porary transactions.
There are two points which we would
earnestly recommend to the consideration of
this learned author, as essential to the success
of his work as a popular or durable history.
The first is, to avoid, as much as possible,
in the text, all discussions concerning questiones
vexataa, or disputed points, and give the con-
clusions at which he arrives in distinct propo-
sitions, without any of the critical or antiquarian
reasoning on which they are founded. These
last, indeed, are of inestimable importance to
the learned or the thoughtful. But how few
are they, compared to the mass of readers !
and how incapable of giving to any historical
work any extensive celebrity ! They should
be given, but in notes, so as not, to ordinary
readers, to interrupt the interest of the narra-
tive, or break the continuity of thought
The second is, to exert himself to the utmost,
214
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
and, on every occasion which presents itself,
to paint, with graphic fire, the events, or peo-
ple, or scenes which occur in the course of his
narrative, and to give all the interest in his
power to the description of battles, sieges,
incidents, episodes, or speeches, which present
themselves. More even than accuracy of de-
tail, or any other more solid qualities, these
fascinating graces determine, with future ages,
the celebrity and permanent interest of an his-
torical work. What is the charm which at-
tracts all ages, and will do so to the end of the
world, to the retreat of the Ten Thousand, the
youth of Cyrus, the early annals of Rome, the
Catiline conspiracy, the reign of Tiberius, the
exploits of Alexander, the Latin conquest of
Constantinople, the misfortunes of Mary, the
death of Charles I.? The eloquent fictions
and graphic powers of Xenophon and Livy,
of Sallust and Tacitus, of Quintus Curtius and
Gibbon, of Robertson and Hume. In vain
does criticism assail, and superior learning
disprove, and subsequent discoveries overturn
their enchanting narratives; in vain does the
intellect of the learned few become skeptical
as to the facts they relate, and which have
sunk in the hearts of the many. The imagi-
nation is kindled, the heart is overcome, and
the works remain, not only immortal in cele-
brity, but undecaying in influence through
every succeeding age. Why should not his-
tory, in modern as in ancient times, unite the
interest of the romance to the accuracy of the
annalist 1 ? Why should not real events en-
chain the mind with the graces and the colours
of poetry 1 ? That Dr. Arnold is learned, all
who have studied his admirable edition of
Thucydides know; that he can paint with
force and interest, none who read the volume
before us can doubt. Why, then, should not
the latter qualities throw their brilliant hues
over the accurate drawing of the former 1
We have already said that we find no fault
with Dr. Arnold on account of his politics ;
nay, that we value his work the more, because,
giving, as it promises to do, in the main, a
faithful account of the facts of Roman history,
it cannot fail to furnish, from a source the least
suspicious, a host of facts decisive in favour
of Conservative principles. By Conservative
principles we do not mean attachment to
despotic power, or aversion to genuine free-
dom : on the contrary, we mean the utmost
abhorrence of the former, and the strongest
attachment to the latter. We mean an attach-
ment to that form of government, and that
balance of power, which alone can render
these blessings permanent, which render pro-
perty the ruling, and numbers only the con-
trolling power, which give to weight of pos-
session and intellect the direction of affairs,
and intrust to the ardent feelings of the multi-
tude the duty only of preventing their excesses,
or exposing their corruption. Without the
former, the rule of the people degenerates, in
a few years, in every instance recorded in
history, into licentious excess, and absolute
tyranny; without the latter, the ambition or
selfishness of the aristocracy perverts to their
, own private purposes the domain of the state.
j Paradoxical as it may appear, it is strictly and
literally true, that the general inclination of
abstract students, remote from a practical
intercourse with mankind, to republican prin-
ciples, is a decisive proof of the experienced
necessity for Conservative policy that has
always been felt in the actual administration
of affairs. Recluse or speculative men become
attached to liberal ideas, because they see them
constantly put forth, in glowing and generous
language, by the popular orators and writers
in every age : they associate oppression with
the government of a single ruler, or a compa-
ratively small number of persons of great
possessions, because they see, in general, that
government is established, on one or other of
these bases; and, consequently, most of the
oppressive acts recorded in history have ema-
nated from such authority. They forget that
the opportunity of abusing power has been so
generally afforded to these classes by the ex-
perienced impossibility of intrusting it to any
other; that if the theory of popular govern-
ment had been practicable, Democracy, instead
of exhibiting only a few blood-stained specks
in history, would have occupied the largest
space in its annals; that if the people had been
really capable of directing affairs, they would,
in every age, have been the supreme authority,
and the holders of property the decl aimers
against their abuses ; and that no proof can be
so decisive against the practicability of any
form of government, as the fact, that it has
been found, during six thousand years, of such
rare occurrence, as to make even learned
persons, till taught by experience, blind to its
tendency.
MIRABEAU.
MIRABEAU.*
215
" IT is a melancholy fact," says Madame de
Stael, " that while the human race is conti-
nually advancing by the acquisitions of intel-
lect, it is doomed to move perpetually in the
same circle of error, from the influence of the
passions." If this observation was just, even
when this great author wrote, how much more
is it now applicable, when a new generation
has arisen, blind to the lessons of experience,
and we in this free and prosperous land, have
yielded to the same passions, and been seduced
by the same delusions, which, three-and-forty
years ago, actuated the French people, and
have been deemed inexcusable by all subse-
quent historians, even in its enslaved popula-
tion !
It would appear inconceivable, that the same
errors should thus be repeated by successive
nations, without the least regard to the les-
sons of history; that all the dictates of expe-
rience, all the conclusions of wisdom, all the
penalties of weakness, should be forgotten,
before the generation which has suffered under
their neglect is cold in their graves ; that the
same vices should be repeated, the same crimi-
nal ambition indulged, to the end of the world;
if we did not recollect that it is the very essence
of passion, whether in nations or individuals,
to be insensible to the sufferings of others, and
to pursue its own headstrong inclinations, re-
gardless alike of the admonitions of reason,
and the experience of the world. It would
seem that the vehemence of desire in nations
is as little liable to be influenced by considera-
tions of prudence, or the slightest regard to the
consequences, as the career of intemperance in
individuals ; and that, in like manner, as every
successive age beholds multitudes who, in 'the
pursuit of desire, rush headlong down the gulf
of perdition, so every successive generation
is doomed to witness the sacrifice of national
prosperity, or the extinction of national exist-
ence, in the insane pursuit of democratic am-
bition. Providence has appointed certain
trials for nations as well as individuals.; and
for those who, disregarding the admonitions
of virtue, and slighting the dictates of duty,
yield to the tempter, certain destruction is ap-
pointed in the inevitable consequences of their
criminal desires, not less in the government
of empires, than the paths of private life.
Forty years ago, the passion for innovation
seized a great and powerful nation in Europe,
illustrious in the paths of honour, grown gray
in years of renown : the voice of religion was
discarded, the lessons of experience rejected :
visionary projects were entertained, chimeri-
cal anticipations indulged: the ancient insti-
tutions of the country were not amended, but
* Souvenirs sur Mirabeau, ft sur les Premieres As-
semblies Legislatives. Par Etienne Dnmont, de Geneve,
ftvo. London: E. Bull. 1832. We have translated the
quotations ourselves, not having seen the English ver-
sion. Blackwood's Magazine, May, 1832. Written
when the Reform Bill was before the'llouse of Peers.
"
destroyed: a new constitution introduced
amidst the unanimous applause of the peo-
ple : the monarch placed himself at the head
of the movement, the nobles joined the com-
mons, the clergy united in the work of reform :
all classes, by common consent, conspired in
the demolition and reconstruction of the con-
stitution. A new era was thought to have
dawned on human affairs ; the age of gold to
be about to return from the regeneration of
mankind.
The consequence, as all the world knows,
was ruin, devastation, and misery, unparalleled
in modern times : the king, the queen, the royal
family were beheaded, the nobles exiled or
guillotined, the clergy confiscated and banish-
ed, the fundholders starved and ruined, the
merchants exterminated, the landholders beg-
gared, the people decimated. The wrath of
Heaven needed no destroying angel to be the
minister of its vengeance : the guilty passions
of men worked out their own and well-de-
served punishment. The fierce passion of de-
mocracy was extinguished in blood: the Reign
of Terror froze every heart with horror: the
tyranny of the Directory destroyed the very
name of freedom : the ambition of Napoleon
visited every cottage with mourning, and
doomed to tears every mother in France; and
the sycophancy of all classes, the natural re-
sult of former license, so paved the way for
military despotism, that the haughty emperor
could only exclaim with Tiberius " O ho-
mines ad servitutem parati !"
Forty years after, the same unruly and reck-
less spirit seized the very nation who had wit-
nessed these horrors, and bravely struggled for
twenty years to avert them from her own
shores. The passion of democracy became
general in all the manufacturing and trading
classes : a large portion of the nobility were
deluded by the infatuated idea, that by yield-
ing to the 'torrent, they could regulate its di-
rection : the ministers of the crown put them-
sehrea at the head of the movement, and
wielded the royal prerogative- to give force
and consistence to the ambition of the mul-
titude: political fanaticism again reared its
hydra head: the ministers of religion became
the objects of odium ; every thing sacred, every
thing venerable, the subject of opprobrium,
and, by yielding to this tempest of passion
and terror, enlightened men seriously antici-
pated, not a repetition of the horrors of the
French Revolution, but the staying of the fury
of democracy, the stilling of the waves of fac-
tion, the calming the ambition of the people.
That a delusion so extraordinary, a blind-
ness so infatuated, should have existed so soon
after the great and bloody drama had been
acted on the theatre of Europe, will appear alto-
gether incredible to future ages. It is certain,
however, that it exists, not only among the
unthinking millions, who, being incapable of
216
ALT
SON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
judging of the consequences of political
changes, are of no weight in a philosophical
view of the subject, but among thinking thou-
sands who are capable of forming a correct
judgment, and whose opinions on other sub-
jects are highly worthy of consideration. This
is the circumstance which furnishes the real
phenomenon, and into the causes of which fu-
ture ages will anxiously inquire. It is no more
surprising that a new generation of shop-
keepers, manufacturers, and artisans, should
be devoured by the passion for political
power, without any regard to its recent con-
sequences in the neighbouring kingdom, than
that youth, in every successive generation,
should yield to the seductions of pleasure, or
the allurements of vice, without ever thinking
of the miseries it has brought upon their fa-
thers, and the old time before them. But how
men of sense, talent, and information ; men
who really have a stake in the country, and
would themselves be the first victims of revo-
lution, should be carried away by the same in-
fatuation, cannot be so easily explained ; and,
if it cannot be accounted for from some acci-
dental circumstances, offers the most gloomy
prospects for the cause of truth, and the future
destinies of mankind.
" The direction of literature and philosophy
in France, during the last half of the 18th
century," says Madame de Stael, " was ex-
tremely bad ; but, if I may be allowed the ex-
pression, the direction of ignorance has been
still worse; for no one book can do much
mischief to those who read all. If the idlers
in the world, on the other hand, occupy them-
selves by reading a few moments, the work
which they read makes as great an impression
on them as the arrival of a stranger in the
desert ; and if that work abounds in sophisms,
they have no opposite arguments to oppose to
it. The discovery of printing is truly fatal to
those who read only by halves or chance ; for know-
ledge, like the Lance of Argail, inflicts wounds
which nothing but itself can heal."* In this
observation is to be found the true solution of
the extraordinary political delusions which
now overspread the world; and it is much
easier to discern the causes of the calamity,
than perceive what remedy can be devised for it.
If you could give to all who can read the
newspapers, either intellect to understand, or
taste to relish, or money to buy, or time to read,
works of historical information, or philoso-
phical wisdom, there might be a reasonable
hope that error in the end would be banished
from thought, and that political knowledge,
like the Thames water in the course of a long
voyage, would work itself pure. But as it is
obvious to every one practically acquainted
with the condition of mankind, that ninety-
nine out of the hundred who peruse the daily
press, are either totally incapable of forming a
sound opinion from their own reflections on
any subject of thought, or so influenced by
prejudice as to be inaccessible to the force of
reason, or so much swayed by passion as to
be deaf to argument, or so destitute of infor-
mation as to be insensible to its force, it is
* De I'Allemagne, iii. 247.
hardly possible to discern any mode in which,
with a daily press extensively read, and poli-
tical excitement kept up, as it always will be
by its authors, either truth is to become gene-
rally known, or error sufficiently combated.
Every one, how slender soever his intellect,
how slight his information, how limited his
time for study, can understand and feel gra-
tified by abuse of his superiors. The com-
mon slang declamation against the aristocrats,
the clergy, and the throne, in France, and
against the boroughmongers, the bishops, and
the peers, in England, is on the level of the
meanest capacity ; and is calculated to seduce
all those who are " either," in Bacon's words,
" weak in judgment, or infirm in resolution ;
that is, the greater proportion of mankind."
It is this circumstance of the universal dif-
fusion of passion, and the extremely limited
extent of such intellect or information as
qualifies to judge on political subjects, which
renders the future prospects of any nation,
which has got itself involved in the whirlwind
of innovation, so extremely melancholy. Every,
change which is proposed holds out some im-
mediale or apparent benefit, which forms the
attraction and inducement to the multitude.
Every one can see and understand this imme-
diate or imaginary benefit ; and therefore the
change is clamorously demanded by the people.
To discern the ultimate effects again, to see how
these changes are to operate on the frame of so-
ciety, and the misery they are calculated to bring
on the very persons who demand them, requires
a head of more than ordinary strength,and know-
ledge of more than ordinary extent. Nature has
not given the one, education can never give
the other, to above one in a hundred. Hence
the poison circulates universally, while the
antidote is confined to a few; and therefore,
in such periods, the most extravagant mea-
sures are forced upon government, and a total
disregard of experience characterizes the na-
tional councils.
It is to this cause that the extremely short
duration of any institutions, which have been
framed under the pressure of democratic in-
fluence, is to be ascribed, and the rapidity with
which they are terminated by the tranquil des-
potism of the sword. Rome, in two generations,
ran through the horrors of democratic convul-
sions, until they were stopped by the sword of
the Dictator. France, since the reform trans-
ports of 1789 began, has had thirteen different
constitutions ; none of which subsisted two
years, except such as were supported by the
power of Napoleon and the bayonets of the
allies. England, in five years after the people
ran mad in 1642, was quietly sheltered under
the despotism of Cromwell; and the convulsions
of the republics of South America have been
so numerous since their struggles began, that
civilized nations have ceased to count them.
Historians recording events at a distance
from the period of their occurrence, and ig-
norant of the experienced evils which led to
their adoption, have often indulged in eloquent
declamation against the corruption and debase-
ment of those nations, such as Florence, Milan,
Sienna, and Denmark, which have by common
consent, and a solemn act, surrendered their
MIRABEAU.
237
liberties to a sovereign prince. There is no-
thing, however, either extraordinary or de-
basing about it; they surrendered their privi-
leges, because they had never known what
real freedom was ; they invoked the tranquillity
of despotism, to avoid the experienced ills of
anarchy ; they chose the lesser, to avoid the
greater evil. Democracy, admirable as a
spring, and when duly tempered by the other
elements of society, is utterly destructive
where it becomes predominant, or is deprived
of its regulating weight. The evils it pro-
duces are so excessive, the suffering it occa-
sions so dreadful, that society cannot exist
under them, and the people take refuge in
despair, in the surrender of all they have
been contending for, to obtain that peace
which they have sought for in vain amidst
its stormy convulsions. The horrors of de-
mocratic tyranny greatly exceed those either
of regal or aristocratic oppression. History
contains numerous examples of nations, who
have lingered on for centuries, under the
bowstring of the sultan, or the fetters of the
feudal nobility ; but none in which democratic
violence, when once fairly let loose, has not
speedily brought about its own extirpation.
But although there is little hope that the
multitude, when once infected by the deadly
contagion of democracy, can right themselves,
or be righted by others, by the utmost efforts
of reason, argument, or eloquence, nature has
in reserve one remedy of sovereign and uni-
versal efficacy, which is as universally under-
stood, and as quick in its operation, as the
poison which rendered its application neces-
sary. This Remedy is SUFFERING. Every
man cannot, indeed, understand political rea-
soning; but every man can feel the want of
a meal. The multitude may be insensible to
the efforts of reason and eloquence; but they
cannot remain deaf to the dangers of murder
and conflagration. These, the natural and
unvarying attendants on democratic ascend-
ency, will as certainly in the end tame the
fierce spirits of the people, as winter will suc-
ceed summer; but whether they will do so in
time to preserve the national freedom, or up-
hold the national fortunes, is a very different,
and far more doubtful question. It is seldom
that the illumination of suffering comes in
time to save the people from the despotism of
the sword.
It is in this particular that the superior
strength and efficiency of free constitutions,
such as Britain, in resisting the fatal encroach-
ments of democracy, to any possessed by a
despotic government, is to be found. The
habits of union, intelligence, and political ex-
ertion, which they have developed, have given
to the higher and more influential classes such
a power of combining to resist the danger, that
obstacles are thrown in the way of change,
which retard the fatal rapidity of its course.
Discussion goes on in the legislature ; talent is
enlisted on the side of truth ; honour and
patriotism are found in the post of danger ;
virtue receives its noblest attribute in the
universal calumnies of wickedness. These
generous efforts, indeed, are totally unavailing
to alter the opinion of the many-headed mon-
28
ster which has started into political activity;
but they combine the brave, the enlightened,
and the good, into a united phalanx, which,
if it cannot singly resist the torrent, may, at
least, arrest its fury, till the powers of nature
come to its aid. These powers do come at last
with desperate and resistless effect, in the uni-
versal suffering, the far-spread agony, the hope-
less depression of the poor; but the danger
is imminent, that before the change takes place
the work of destruction may be completed, and
the national liberties, deprived of the ark of the
constitution, be doomed to perish under the
futile attempts to reconstruct it.
There never was a mistake so deplorable,
as to imagine that it is possible, to give to any
nation at once a new constitution ; or to pre-
serve the slightest guarantee for freedom,
under institutions created at once by the
utmost efforts of human wisdom. It is as im-
possible at once to give a durable constitution
to a nation as it is to give a healthful frame
to .an individual, without going through the
I previous changes of childhood and youth.
j " Governments," says Sir James Mackintosh,
" are not framed after a model, but all their
parts grow out of occasional acts, prompted
by some urgent expedience, or some private
interest, which in the course of time coalesce
and harden into usage ; and this bundle x>f
usages is the object of respect, and the guide
of conduct, long before it is imbodied, defined,
or enforced in written laws. Government
may be, in some degree, reduced to system,
but it cannot flow from it. It is not like a
machine, or a building, which may be con-
structed entirely, and according to a previous
plan, by the art and labour of man. It is
better illustrated by comparison with vege-
tables, or even animals, which may be, in a
very high degree, improved by skill and care
which may be grievously injured by neglect,
or destroyed by violence, but which cannot be
produced by human contrivance. A govern-
ment can, indeed, be no more than a mere
draught or scheme of rule, when it is not com-
posed of habits of obedience on the part of
the people, and of an habitual exercise of cer-
tain portions of authority by the individuals or
bodies who constitute the sovereign power.
These habits, like all others, can only be
formed by repeated acts ; they cannot be sud-
denly infused by the lawgiver, nor can they
immediately follow the most perfect convic-
tion of their propriety. Many causes having
more power over the human mind than writ-
ten law, it is extremely difficult, from the mere
perusal of a written scheme of government, to
! foretell what it will prove in action. There
( may be governments so bad that it is justifi-
able to destroy them, and to trust to the proba-
bility that a better government will grow in
their stead. But as the rise of a worse is also
possible, so terrible a peril is never to be incurred
except in the case of tyranny which it is impossible to
reform. It may be necessary to burn a forest
containing much useful timber, but giving
shelter to beasts of prey, who are formidable
to an infant colony in its neighbourhood, and
of too vast an extent to be gradually and safely
thinned by their inadequate labour. It is fit,
T
218
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
however, that they should be apprized, before | superior to what we are what is meant is,
they take an irreparable step, how little it is ; that the customs which they adopted were the
possible to foresee, whether the earth, stripped result of experienced utility and known neces-
of its vegetation, shall become an unprofitable
desert or a pestilential marsh."*
The great cause, therefore, of the devastat-
ing march of revolutions, and the total sub-
version which they in general effect in the
sity; and that the collection of usages, called
the constitution, is more perfect than any hu-
man wisdom could at once have framed, be-
cause it has arisen out of social wants, and
been adapted to the exigencies of actual prac-
liberties of the people, is the fundamental [ lice, during a long course of ages. To demo-
changes in laws and institutions which they ! lish and reconstruct such a constitution, to
effect. As long as these remain untouched,
or not altered in any considerable degree, any
passing despotism, how grievous soever, is
only of temporary effect; and when the tyran-
ny is overpast, the public freedom again runs
into its wonted and consuetudinary channels.
Thus the successive tyrannies of Richard the
Third, Henry the Eighth, and James the Se-
cond, produced no fatal effects on English
freedom, because they subsisted only during
the lifetime of an arbitrary or capricious sove-
reign ; and, upon his death, the ancient privi-
leges of the people revived, and the liberties
of the nation again were as extensive as ever.
The great rebellion hardly partook at all, at
least in its early stages, of a democratic move-
ment. Its leaders were the House of Com-
mons, who possessed four-fifths of the landed
property of the kingdom, and were proprietors
of three times as much territory as the Upper
House; hence no considerable changes in laws,
institutions, or customs, took
courts of law," says Lingard,
place. " The
' still adminis-
tered law on the old precedents, and, with the
exception of a change of the dynasty on the
throne, the people perceived little change in
the administration of government.''! Power
was not, during the course of the Revolution,
transferred into other and inferior hands, from
whence it never can be wrenched but at the
sword's point; it remained in the House of
Commons, the legal representatives of the
kingdom, till it was taken from them by the
hand of Cromwell. The true democratic spi-
rit appeared at the close of the struggles in the
Fifth Monarchy men, but their numbers were
too inconsiderable to acquire any preponder-
ance before the usurpation of the daring Pro-
tector. Accordingly, on the Restoration, the
first thing that government did, was to issue
writs for all persons to return members to
Parliament who were qualified prior to 1640;
and after an abeyance of twenty years, the
blood of the constitution was again poured
into its ancient veins. The Revolution of
1688, as it is called, was not strictly speaking
remove power from the hands in which it was
formerly vested, and throw it into channels
where it never was accustomed to flow, is
an evil incomparably greater, an experiment
infinitely more hazardous, than the* total sub-
version of the liberties of the people by an
ambitious monarch or a military usurper, be-
cause it not only destroys the balance of power
at the moment, but renders it impossible for
the nation to right itself at the close of the ty-
ranny, and raises up a host of separate revo-
lutionary interests, vested at the moment with
supreme authority, and dependent for their ex-
istence upon the continuance of the revolu-
tionary regime. It is to government what a
total change of landed property is to the body
politic ; a wound which, as Ireland sufficiently
proves, a nation can never recover.
As the Reform Bill proposes to throw a
large part of the political power in the state
into new and inexperienced hands, the change
thereby contemplated is incomparably greater
and more perilous than the most complete
prostration of the liberties, either of the people
or the aristocracy, by a passing tyranny. It is
the creation of new and formidable revolu-
tionary interests which will never expire; the
vesting of-power in hands jealous of its pos-
session, in proportion to the novelty of its
acquisition, and their own unfitness to wield
it, which is the insuperable evil. Such a ca-
lamity is inflicted as effectually by the tranquil
and pacific formation of a new constitution,
as by the most terrible civil wars, or the se-
verest military oppression. The liberties of
England survived the wars of the Roses, the
fury of the Covenant, and the tyranny of
Henry VIII.; but those of France were at
once destroyed by the insane innovations of
the Constituent Assembly. And this destruc-
tion took place without any bloodshed or op-
position, under the auspices of a reforming
king, a conceding nobility, and an intoxicated
people, by the mere unresisted votes of the
States-General.
The example of France is so extremely and
a revolution; it was merely a change of dy- 1 exactly applicable to our changes the pacific
nasty, accompanied by a unanimous effort I and applauded march of its innovations was
of the public will, and unattended by the least ; so precisely similar to that which has so long
change in the aristocratic influence, or the ba- I been pressed upon the legislature in this coun-
lance of powers in the state. | try, that it is not surprising that it should be
The wisdom of our ancestors is a foolish j an extremely sore subject with the Reformers-
phrase, which does not convey the meaning | and that they should endeavour, by every me,
which it is intended to express. When it is j thod of ingenuity, misrepresentation, and con-
said that institutions formed by the wisdom of cealment, to withdraw the public attention
former ages should not be changed, it is not from so damning a precedent. It is fortunate,
meant that our ancestors were gifted with any therefore, for the cause of truth, that at this
extraordinary sagacity, or were in any respect juncture a work has appeared, flowing from
the least suspicious quarter, which at once
puts this matter on the right footing, and de-
monstrates that it was not undue delay, but
* Mackintosh's History of England,
t Lingard, xi. 11, 12.
73.
MIRABEAU.
219
over rapidity of concession, which brought
about the unexampled horrors of its Revolu-
tion.
M. Dumont, whose
; Souvenirs sur Mira-
beau" is prefixed to this article, was the early
and faithful friend of that extraordinary man.
He wrote a great proportion of his speeches,
and composed almost entirely the Courier de
Provence, a journal published in the name of
Mirabeau, and to which a great part of his
political celebrity was owing. The celebrated
declaration on the Rights of Man, published
by the Constituent Assembly, was almost en-
tirely composed by him. He was the intimate
friend of Brissot, Garat, Roland, Vergniaud,
Talleyrand, and all the leaders of the popular
party, and his opinion was deemed of so much
importance, that he was frequently consulted
by the ministers as to the choice of persons to
fill the highest situations. In this country he
was the intimate and valued friend of Sir
Samuel Romilly, Mr. Whitbread, Lord Lans-
downe, Lord Holland, and all the party at
Holland House. Latterly, he was chiefly oc-
cupied in arranging, composing, and putting
into order the multifarious effusions of Mr.
Bentham's genius ; and from his pen almost
all the productions of that great and original
man have flowed. Half the fame of Mirabeau,
and more than half that of Bentham, rest on
his labours. He was no common person who
was selected to be the coadjutor of two such j
men, and rendered the vehicle of communicat-
ing their varied and original thoughts to the
world.
Before quoting the highly interesting ob-
servations of this able and impartial observer
on the French Constituent Assembly, and
comparing them with the progress of Reform
in this country, we shall recall to our readers'
recollection the dates of the leading measures
of that celebrated body, as, without having
them in view, the importance of M. Dumont's
observations cannot be duly appreciated. Such
a survey will at the same time bring to the
test the accurac)'- of Mr. Macaulay's and Sir
John Hobhouse's assertion, that it was not the
concession, but the resistance, of the privi-
leged orders, which precipitated the fatal ca-
taract of their Revolution. The abstract is
abridged from Mignet, the ablest historian on
the republican side of which France can
boast, and Lacretelle, the well known, annal-
ist of its events.
In August, 1788, Louis, in obedience to the
wishes of the nation, agreed to assemble the
States-General, which had not met in France
since 1614.
In September, 1789, the king, by the advice
of Neckar, by a royal ordinance, doubled the
number
Etat; in other words, he doubled the House
of Commons of France,* while those of the
clergy and nobles were left at their former
amount.
The elections in April, 1789, were conduct-
ed with the utmost favour to the popular par-
ty. No scrutiny of those entitled to vote took
place; after the few first days, every person
ar, by
of th
e representatives of the Tiers
* Mignet, i. 23.
decently dressed was allowed to vote, without
asking any questions.*
When the States-General met in May 6,
1789, the king and his minister, Neckar, were
received with cold and dignified courtesy by
the nobles and clergy, but rapturous applause
by the Tiers Etat, who saw in them the au-
thors of the prodigious addition which the
number and consequence of their order had
received.f
May 9. No sooner had the States-General
proceeded to business, than the Tiers Etat de-
manded that the nobles and clergy should sit
and vole with them in one chamber ; a proceeding
unexampled in French history, and which it
was foreseen would give them the complete
ascendency, by reason of their numerical su-
periority to those of both the other orders
united.t
May TO to June 9. The nobles and clergy
resisted for a short while this prodigious inno-
vation, and insisted that, after the manner of
all the States-General which had assembled in
France from the foundation of the monarchy,
the orders should sit and vote by separate
chambers ; and that this was more especially
indispensable since the recent duplication of
the Tiers Etat had given that body a numeri-
cal superiority over the two other orders taken
together.^
June 17. The Tiers Etat declared themselves
the National Assembly of France, a designa-
tion, says Dumont, which indicated their in-
tention to usurp the whole sovereignty of "the
state."
June 21. The king, terrified at the thoughts
of a collision with the Commons, and thinking
to put himself at the head of the movement,
first persuaded, and at length, through the
medium of Marshal Luxembourg, commanded
the nobles to yield to this demand of the Tiers
Etat.||
The nobles and clergy gradually yielded.
On the 19th June, 1789, one hundred and forty-
seven of the clergy joined the Tiers Etat, and
on the 25th, the Duke of Orleans, with forty-
seven of the nobles, also deserted their order,
and adhered to the opposite party. The re-
mainder finding their numbers so seriously
weakened, and urged on by their Reforming
Sovereign, also joined the Tiers Etat, and sat
with them in one assembly on 27th June.J
"On that day (says Dumont) the Revolution
was completed."
On the 23d June, 1789, the king held a
solemn meeting of the whole estates in one
assembly, and while he declared the former
proceedings of the Tiers Etat unconstitutional,
granted such immense concessions to the peo-
ple, as never, says Mirabeau, were before
granted by a king to his subjects. All the
objects of the Revolution, says Mignet, were
gained by that royal ordinance.**
July 13. The king ordered the troops, who
had been assembled in the vicinity of the ca-
pital, to be withdrawn, and sanctioned the es-
tablishment of National Guards.ff
* Dumont. f Mignet, i. 30. . $ Mignet, i. 37.
$ Mignet, i. 37. || Lacretelle, Pr. Hist. p. 3.
IT Lacretelle, Pr. Hist. i. 42. ** Ibid. i. 43.
ft Ibid. i. 3.
220
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
July 14. The Bastile taken, and all Paris in
au insurrection*
July 16. The king appointed Lafayette com-
mander of the National Guard, and Bailly, the
president of the Assembly, mayor of Paris.
July 17. The king visited Paris in the midst
of a mob of 200,000 revolutionary democrats.
Aug. 4. The whole feudal rights, including
tithes, abandoned in one night by the nobility,
on the motion of the Duke de Noailles.
Aug. 13. Decree of the Assembly declaring
all ecclesiastical estates national property.
Aug. 20. The Declaration of the Rights of
Man issued.
Aug. 23. Freedom of religious opinions pro-
claimed.
Aug. 24. The unlimited freedom of the press
established.
Aug. 25. Dreadful disturbances in Paris on
account of famine.
Sept. 13. A new decree on account of the
extreme suffering at Paris.
OcU5. Versailles invaded by a clamorous
mob. .The king and queen nearly murdered,
and brought captives by a furious mob to Pa-
ris.
Nov. 2. Decree passed, on the motion of the
Bishop of Autun, for the confiscation and dis-
posal of all ecclesiastical property.
Feb. 24, 1790. Titles of honour abolished.
Feb. 26. New division of the kingdom into
departments ; and all appointments, civil and
military, vested in the people.
March 17. Sale of 400 millions of the na-
tional domains authorized, and assignats, bear-
mg a forced circulation, issued, to supply the
immense deficiency of the revenue.*
It is unnecessary to go farther. Here it ap-
pears, that within two months of the meeting of
the States-General, the union of the orders in
one chamber, in other words, the annihilation
of the House of Peers, was effected, the feudal
rights abolished, and the entire sovereignty
vested in the National Assembly. In three
months, the church property was confiscated,
the Rights of Man published, titles annihilated,
and the unlimited freedom of the press pro-
claimed. In five months, the king and royal
family were brought prisoners to Paris. In
.fix months,t\ie distress naturally consequent on
these convulsions had attracted the constant
attention of the Assembly, and spread the ut-
most misery among the people ; and in ten
months, the total failure of the revenue had
rendered the sale of church property, and the
issuing of assignats bearing a forced circula-
tion, necessary, which it is well known soon
swallowed up property of every description
throughout France. We do not know what
the reformers consider as tardy concessions
of the nobility and throne ; but when it is re-
collected that all these.proceedings were agreed
to by the king, and passed by the legislature at
the dates here specified, it is conceived that a
more rapid revolutionary progress could hard-
ly be wished for by the most ardent reformer.
The authority of Madame de Stael was ap-
pealed to in the House of Commons, as illus-
trative of the vain attempts of a portion of the
aristocracy to stem the torrent. Let -us hear
the opinion of the same great writer, as to
who it was that put it in motion. " No revolu-
tion," she observes, " can succeed in a great
country, unless it is commenced by the aristocratical
class. The people afterwards get possession
of it, but they cannot strike the first blow.
When I recollect that it was the parliaments, the
nobles, and the clergy of France, who first strove
to limit the royal authority, I am far from in-
sinuating that their design in so doing was
culpable. A sincere enthusiasm then ani-
mated all ranks of Frenchmen public spirit
had spread universally ; and among the higher
classes, the most enlightened and generous
were those who ardently desired that public
opinion should have its due sway in the direc-
tion of affairs. But can the privileged ranks, who
commenced (he Revolution, accuse those who only
carried it on ? Some will say, we wished only
that the changes should proceed a certain
length; others, that they should go a step far-
ther; but who can regulate the impulse of a great
people ivhen once put in motion'/"* These are
the words of sober wisdom, and coming, as
they do, from the gifted daughter of M. Neckar,
who had so large a share, by the duplication
of the Tiers Etat, in the raising of the tempest,
and who was so devoted a worshipper of her
father's memory, none were ever uttered worthy
of more profound meditation.
This is the true principle on the subject.
The aid of the Crown,- or of a portion of the
aristocracy, is indispensable to put the torrent
of democracy in motion. After it is fairly set
agoing, all their efforts are unavailing to re-
strain its course. This is what we have 1 all
along maintained. Unless the French nobility
had headed the mob in demanding the States-
General, matters could never have been brought
to a crisis. After they had roused the public
feeling, they found, by dear-bought experience,
that they were altogether unable to restrain its
fury. In this country, the revolutionary party
could have done nothing, had they not been
supported in their projects of reform by the
ministers of the Crown and the Whig nobility.
Having been so, we shall see whether they will
be better able than their compeers on the other
side of the Channel to master the tempest they
have raised.
It has been already stated, that a large por-
tion of tne nobility supported the pretensions
of the Tiers Etat. Dumont gives the following
picture of the reforming nobles, and of the ex-
travagant expectations of the different classes
who supported their favourite innovations:
" The house of the Duke de Rochefoucauld,
distinguished by its simplicity, the purity of its
manners, and the independence of its princi-
ples, assembled all those members of the no-
bility who supported the people, the double re-
presentation of the Tiers Etat, the vote per ca-
pita, the abandonment of all privileges, and the
like. Condorcet, Dupont, Lafayette, the Duke
de Liancourt, were the chief persons of that
society. Their ruling passion was to create for
France a new constitution. Such of the nobility
and princes as wished to preserve the ancient
* See Lacretelle, Pr. Hist. p. 19, Introduction.
Revolution Fran^aise, i. 125.
MIRABEAU.
221
constitution of the States-General, formed the aris-
tocratic party, against which the public in-
dignation was so general; but although much
noise was made about them, their numbers
were inconsiderable. The bulk of the nation
saw only in the States-General the means of di-
minishing the taxes the fundholders, so often
exposed to the consequences of a violation of
public faith, considered them as an invincible
rampart against national bankruptcy. The defi-
cit had made them tremble. They were on the
point of ruin'; and they embraced with warmth
the hope of giving to the revenues of the state
a secure foundation. These ideas were utterly
inconsistent with each other. The nobility had
in their bosom a democratic as well as an aristo-
cratic party. The clcrgfwcre divided in the same
manner, and so were the commons. No words
can convey an idea of the confusion of ideas,
the extravagant expectations, the hopes and
passions of all parties. You would imagine
the world was on the day after the creation."
Pp. 37, 38.
We have seen that the clergy, by their join-
ing the Tiers Etat, first gave them, a decided
superiority over the other orders, and vested
in their hands omnipotent power, by compel-
ling the nobles to sit and vote with them in an
assembly where they were numerically infe-
rior to the popular party. The return they
met with in a few months was, a decree confis-
cating all their properly to the service of the
state. With bitter and unavailing anguish did
they then look back to their insane conduct in
so strongly fanning a flame of which they were
soon to be the victims. Dumont gives the fol-
lowing striking account of the feelings of one
of their reforming bishops, when the tempest
they had raised reached their own doors.
"The Bishop of Chartres was one of the bi-
shops who were attached to the popular party ;
that is to say, he was a supporter of the union
of the orders, of the vote by head, and tlte new
constitution. He was by no means a man of
a political turn, nor of any depth of understand-
ing; Vtut he had so much candour and good
faith that he distrusted no one; he never ima-
gined that the Tiers Etat could have any other
design but to reform the existing abuses, and
do the good which appeared so easy a matter
to all the world. A stranger to every species
of intrigue, sincere in his intentions, he fol-
lowed no other guide than his conscience, and
what he sincerely believed to be for the public
good. His religion was like his politics ; he
was benevolent, tolerant, and sincerely re-
joiced to see the Protestants exempted from
every species of constraint. He was well
aware that the clergy would be called on to
make great sacrifices; but never anticipated
that he was destined to be the victim of the Re-
volution. I saw him at the time when the
whole goods of the church were declared na-
tional property, with tears in his eyes, dismiss-
ing his old domestics, reducing his hospitable
mansion, selling his most precious effects to
discharge his debts. He found some relief by
pouring his sorrow into my bosom. His re-
grets were not for himself, but he incessantly
accused himself for having suffered himself to
be deceived, and embraced the party of the
Tiers Etat, which violated, when triumphant,
all the engagements which it had made when
in a state of weakness. How grievous it must
have been to a man of good principles to have
contributed to the success of so unjust a party !
Yet never man had less reason, morally speak-
ing, to reproach himself." Pp. 66, 67.
This spoliation of the clergy has already
commenced in this country, even before the
great democratic measure oif Reform is carried-
As usual also, the supporters of the popular
party are likely to be its first victims. We all
recollect the decided part which Lord Milton
took in supporting the Reform Bill, and the
long and obstinate conflict he maintained with
Mr. Cartwright, and the Conservative party in
Northamptonshire, at the last election. Well,
he gained his point, and he is now beginning
to taste its fruits. Let us hear the proclama-
tion which he has lately placarded over all his
extensive estates in the county of Wicklow
" Grosvenor Place, March 10.
"I was in hopes that the inhabitants of our
part of the country had too deep sense of the
importance of respecting the rights of property,
and of obeying the laws, to permit them to con-
template what I can call by no other name
than a scheme of spoliation and robbery. It seems
that the occupier proposes to withhold payment
of tithe, &c. ; but let me ask, what is it that en-
titles the occupier himself to the land which he
occupies 1 Is it not the law which sanctions
the lease by which he holds it 1 The law gives
him a right to the cattle which he rears on his
land, to the plough with which he cultivates it,
and to the car in which he carries his produce
to the market; the law also gives him his right
to nine-tenths of the produce of his land, but
the same law assigns the other tenth to another
person. In this distribution of the produce of
the land, there is no injustice, because the te-
nant was perfectly aware of it when he entered
upon his land; but in any forcible change of
this distribution there would be great injustice,
because it would be a transfer of properly from one
person to another without an equivalent in other
words, it would be a robbery. The occupier must
also remember that the rent he pays to the
landlord is calculated upon the principle of his
receiving only nine-tenths of the produce if
he were entitled to the other tenth, the rent
which we should call upon him to pay would
be proportionably higher. All our land is va-
lued to the tenants upon this principle; but if
tithes, &c., are swept away without an equiva-
lent, we shall adopt a different principle, and
the landlord, not the tenant, will be the gainer.
Mn/r<>\."
There can be no doubt that the principles
here laid down by Lord Milton are well found-
ed ; but did it never occur to his lordship that
they are somewhat inconsistent with those of
the Reform Bill? If the principle be correct,
"that the transfer of property from one person
to another without an equivalent is robbery,'*
what are we say of the disfranchising the
electors of 148 seats in Parliament, and the
destruction of property worth 2,500,000/., vest-
ed before the Reform tempest began, in the
Scotch freeholders ? Lords Eldon and Tenter-
den, it is to be recollected, have declared that
**
222
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
these rights "are a property as well as a trust."*
They stand, therefore, on the same foundation
as Lord Fitzwilliam's right to his Irish tithes.
No more injustice is done by confiscating the
one than the other. But this is just an in-
stance how clear-sighted men are to the "rob-
bery" of revolutionary measures when they
approach their own door, and how extremely
blind when it touches upon the freeholds of
others. Lord Milton was a keen supporter of
schedule A, and disregarded the exclamations
against "robbery and spoliation," which were
so loudly made by the able and intrepid Con-
servative band in the House of Commons.
Did his lordship ever imagine that the system
of spoliation was to stop short at the freehold
corporations, or the boroughs of Tory Peers 1
He will learn to his cost that the radicals can
find as good plunder in the estates of the Whig
as the Conservative nobility. But when the
day of reckoning comes, he cannot plead the
excuse of the honest and benevolent Bishop of
Chartres. He was well forewarned of the con-
sequences ; the example of France was before
his eyes, and it was clearly pointed out to his
attention ; but he obstinately rushed forward in
the insane career of innovation, which, almost
under his own eyes, had swallowed up all the
reforming nobility and clergy of that unhappy
kingdom.
The vast importance of words in revolution-
ary convulsions, of which Napoleon was so
well aware when he said that "it was by epi-
thets that you govern mankind," appears in the
account given by this able and impartial writer
on the designation which the Tiers Etat chose
for themselves before their union with the
other orders.
" The people of Versailles openly insulted
in the streets and at the gates of the Assembly
those whom they called Aristocrats. The power
of that word became magical, as is always the
case with party epithets. What astonishes me
is, that there was no contrary denomination
fixed on by the opposite party. They were
called the Nation. The effects of these two
words, when constantly opposed to each other,
may readily be conceived.
"Though the Commons had already become
sensible of their power, there were many opi-
nions on the way in which it should be exerted,
and the name to be given to the Assembly.
They had not as yet all the audacity which
they have since evinced; but the men who
looked into futurity clearly saw that this de-
termination would have been of the most im-
-portant consequences. To declare themselves
the National Assembly was to count for nothing
the king, the noblesse, and the clergy; it was
equivalent to a declaration of civil war, if the
government had had sufficient vigour to make
any resistance. To declare themselves the
Assembly of the Commons, was to express
what undoubtedly was the fact, but What would
not have answered the purpose of compelling
the clergy and nobles to join them. Many de-
nominations were proposed which were neither
the one nor the other of these ; for every one as
yet was desirous to conceal his ultimate pre-
*In debate on Reform Bill, Oct. 8, 1831.
tensions ; and even Sieyes, who rejected every
thing which tended to preserve the distinction
of orders, did not venture to table the expres-
sion, National Assembly. It was hazarded for
the first time by a deputy named Le Grand ;
there was an immediate call for the vote, and
it was carried by a majority of 500 to 80
voices." Pp. 73, 74.
This is the never-failing device of the demo-
cratic party in all ages. Trusting to the ma-
jority of mere numbers on their side, they
invariably represent themselves as the whole
nation, and the friends of the constitution as a
mere fragment, utterly unworthy of consider-
ation or regard. " Who are the Tiers Etat?"
said the Abbe Sieyes. "They are the French
nation, -minus 150,000 privileged individuals."
" Who are the Reformers 7" says the Times. .
" They are 24,000,000 of men, minus. 200 bo-
roughmongers." By such false sweeping as-
sertions as these, are men's eyes blinded not
only to what is honourable, but to what is safe
and practicable. By this single device of call-
ing the usurping Commons the National As-
sembly, the friends of order were deterred from
entering into a struggle with what was called,
and therefore esteemed, the national will; and
many opportunities of stemming the torrent,
which, as Dumont shows, afterwards arose,
irrecoverably neglected.
Of the fatal weakness which attended the
famous sitting of the 23d June, 1789, when
Louis made such prodigious concessions to
his subjects, without taking at the same time
any steps to make the royal authority respected,
the opinion of Dumont is as follows:
" Neckar had intended by these concessions
to put democracy into the royal hands ; but they had
the effect of putting the aris'ocracy under the des-
potism of the people. We must not consider that
royal sitting in itself alone. Viewed in this
light, it contained the most extensive concessions
that, ever monarch made to his people. They would,
at any other time, have excited the most lively
gratitude. Is a prince powerful 7 Every thing
that he gives is a gift, every thing that he does
not resume is a favour. Is he weak? every
thing that he concedes is considered as a debt;
every thing that he refuses, as an act of in-
justice.
"The Commons had now set their heart
upon, being the National Assembly. Every
thing which did not amount to that was nothing
in their estimation. But to hold a Bed of Jus-
tice, annul the decrees of the Commons, make
a great noise without having even foreseen any
resistance, or taken a single precaution for the
morrow, without having taken any steps to
prepare a party in the Assembly, was an act
of mndness, and from it may be dated the ruin
of the monarchy. Nothing can be more dan-
gerous than to drive a weak prince to acts of
vigour which he is unable to sustain ; for when
he has exhausted the terrors of words he has
no other resource; the authority of the throne
has been lowered, and the people have dis-
covered the secret of their monarch's weak-
ness." P. 87.
The Reformers in this country say, that these
immense concessions of Louis failed in their
effect of calming the popular effervescence,
MIRABEAU.
223
because they came too late. It is difficult to
say what they call soon enough, when it is
recollected that these concessions were made
before the deputies had even verified (heir poirers ; be-
fore a single decree of the Assembly had passed,
at the very opening of their sittings; and when
all their proceedings up to that hour had been
an illegal attempt to centre in themselves all
the powers of government. But, in truth, what
rendered that solitary act of vigour so disas-
trous was, that it was totally unsupported ; that
no measures were simultaneously taken to
make the royal authority respected; that the
throne was worsted from its own want of fore-
sight in the very first contest with the Com-
mons, and above all, that the army betrayed their
sovereign and rendered resistance impossible,
by joining the rebels to his government.
The National Assembly, like every other
body which commits itself to the gale of popu-
lar applause, experienced the utmost disquie-
tude at the thoughts of punishing any of the
excesses of their popular supporters. How
exactly is the following description applicable
to all times and nations !
u The disorders which were prolonged in the
provinces,, the massacres which stained the
streets of Paris, induced many estimable per-
sons to propose an address of the Assembly,
condemnatory of such proceedings to the peo-
ple. The Assembly, however, was so appre-
hensive of offending the multitude, that they
regarded as a snare every motion tending to re-
press (fie disorders, or censure the popular excesses.
Secret distrust and disquietude was at the
bottom of every heart. They had triumphed
by means of the people, and they could not
venture to show themselves severe towards
them; on the contrary, though they frequently
declared, in the preambles of their decrees,
that they were profoundly afflicted at the burn-
ing of the chateaux and the insults to the no-
bility, they rejoiced in heart at the propagation of
a terror which they regarded as indispensable to their
design?. They had reduced themselves to the
necessity of fearing the noblesse, or being
feared by them. They condemned publicly,
they protected secretly; they conferred com-
pliments on the constituted authorities, and
gave encouragement to license. Respect for
the executive power was nothing but words of
style ; and in truth, when the ministers of the
crown revealed the secret of, their weakness,
the Assembly, which remembered well its own
terrors, was not displeased that fear had
changed sides. If you are sufficiently power-
ful to cause yourselves to be respected by the
people, you will be sufficiently so to inspire us
with dread ; that was the ruling feeling of the
Cote Gauche." P. 134.
This is precisely a picture of what always
must be the feeling in regard to tumult and
disorders of all who have committed their
political existence to the waves of popular
support. However much, taken individually,
they may disapprove of acts of violence, yet
when they feel that intimidation of their oppo-
nents is their sheet-anchor, they cannot have
an insurmountable aversion to the deeds by
which it is to be effected. They would prefer,
indeed, that terror should answer their pur-
poses without the necessity of blows being
actually inflicted; but if mere threats are in-
sufficient, they never fail to derive a secret
satisfaction from the recurrence of examples
calculated to show what risks the enemy runs.
The burning of castles, the sacking of towns,
may indeed alienate the wise and the good;
but alas ! the wise and the good form but a
small proportion of mankind; and for one
whose eyes are opened by the commencement
of such deeds of horror, ten will be so much
overawed, as to lose all power of acting in
obedience to the newly awakened and better
feelings of his mind.
"Intimidation," as Lord Brougham has well
observed, "is the never-failing resource of the
partisans of revolution in all ages. Mere popu-
larity is at first the instrument by which this unsteady
legislature is governed ; but when it becomes ap-
parent that whoever can obtain the direction or
command of it must possess the whole author-
ity of the state, parties become less scrupulous
about the means they employ for that purpose, and
soon find out that violence and terror are infinitely
more effectual and expeditious than persuasion and
eloquence. Encouraged by this state of affairs,
the most daring, unprincipled, and profligate,
proceed to seize upon the defenceless legisla-
ture, and, driving all their antagonists before
them by violence or intimidation, enter without
opposition upon the supreme functions of go-
vernment. The arms, however, by which they
had been victorious, are speedily turned against
themselves, and those who are envious of their
success, or ambitious of their distinction, easily
find means to excite discontents among the
multitude, and to employ them in pulling down
the very individuals whom they had so recently
elevated. This disposal of the legislature then
becomes a prize to be fought for in the clubs
and societies of a corrupted metropolis, and the
institution of a national representation has no
other effect than that of laying the government
open to lawless force and flagitious audacity.
It was in this manner that, from the want of a,
natural and efficient aristocracy to exercise the
functions of hereditary legislators, the National
Assembly of France was betrayed into extra-
vagance, and fell a prey to faction; that the
Institution itself became a source of public
misery and disorder, and converted a civilized
monarchy first into a sanguinary democracy,
and then into a military despotism."* How
exactly is the progress, here so well described,
applicable to these times! "Take this bill or
anarchy," says Mr. Macauley. "Lord Grey,"
says the Times, "has brought the country into
such a state, that he must either carry the
Reform Bill or incur the responsibility of a
revolution."! How exactly is the career of
democratic insanity and revolutionary ambi-
tion the same in all ages and countries !
Dumont, as already mentioned, was a lead-
ing member of the committee which prepared
the famous declaration on the Rights of Man.
He gives the following interesting account of
the revolt of a candid and sagacious mind at
the absurdities which a regard to the popular
opinion constrained them to adopt:
Kdinhurah Review, vi. 148.
* Kdinhurah Review, vi.
t Tiraei, March 27, 1832.
224
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
"Duroverai, Claviere, and myself, were
named by Mirabeau to draw up that celebrated
declaration. During the course of that mourn-
ful compilation, reflections entered my mind
which had never before/found a place there.
I soon perceived the ridiculous nature of the
undertaking. A declaration of rights, I im-
mediately saw, may be made after the procla-
mation of a constitution, but not before it; for
it is laws which give birth to rights they do
not follow them. Such general maxims are
highly dangerous; you should never bind a
legislature by general propositions, which it
afterwards becomes necessary to restrain or
modify. ' Men,' says the declaration, ' are born
free and equal;' that is riot true; they are so
far from being born free, that they are born in
a state of unavoidable weakness and depend-
ence: Equal where are they? where can they
be? It is in vain to talk of equality, when
such extreme difference exists, and ever must
exist, between the talents, fortune, virtues, in-
dustry, and condition of men. In a word, I
was so strongly impressed with the absurdity
of the declaration 'of the Rights of Man, that for
once I carried along with me the opinions of
our little committee; and Mirabeau himself,
when presenting the report to the Assembly,
ventured to suggest difficulties, and to propose
that the declaration of rights should be delayed
till the constitution was completed. 'I tell
you,' said he, in his forcible style, ' that any
declaration of rights you may make before the
constitution is framed, will never be but a one
year's almanac? Mirabeau, always satisfied
with a happy expression, never gave himself
the trouble to get to the bottom of any subject,
and never would go through the toil to put
himself in possession of facts sufficient to de-
fend what he advanced. On this occasion he
suffered under this: this sudden change be-
came the subject of bitter reproach. < Who is
this,' said the Jacobins, ' who seeks to employ
his ascendant over the Assembly, to make us
say yes and no alternately? Shall we be for
ever the puppets of his contradictions ?' There
was so much reason in what he had newly
advanced, that he would have triumphed if he
had been able to bring it out; but he aban-
doned the attempt at the very time when seve-
ral deputies were beginning to unite themselves
to him. The deplorable nonsense went tri-
umphantly on, and generated that unhappy
declaration of the Rights of Man which subse-
quently produced such incredible mischief. I
am in possession at this moment of a complete
refutation of it, article by article, by the hand
of a great master, and it proves to demonstra-
tion the contradictions, the absurdities, the
dangers of that seditious composition, which
of itself was sufficient to overturn the consti-
tution of which it formed a part; like a pow-
der magazine placed below an edifice, which
the first spark will blow into the air." Pp.
141, 142.
These are the words of sober and expe-
rienced wisdom ; and coming, as they do, from
one of the authors of this celebrated declara-
tion, are of the very highest importance. They
prove, that at the very time when Mirabeau and
the popular party in the Assembly were draw-
ing up their perilous and highly inflammatory
declaration, they were aware of its absurdity,
and wished to suppress the work of their own
hands. They could not do so, however, and
were constrained, by the dread of losing their
popularity, to throw into the bosom of an ex-
cited people a firebrand, which they themselves
foresaw would speedily lead to a conflagration.
Such is the desperate, the hopeless state of
slavery, in which, during periods of excite-
ment, the representatives of the mob are held
by their constituents. The whole purposes
of a representative form of government are at
once destroyed; the wisdom, experience, study,
and reflection of the superior class of states-
men are trodden under foot; and the enlight-
ened have no chance of keeping possession of
the reins of power, or even influencing the
legislature, but by bending to the passions of
the ignorant.
This consideration affords a decisive argu-
ment in favour of the close, aye, the nomination
boroughs. Their existence, and their exist-
ence in considerable numbers, is indispensable
towards the voice of truth being heard in the
national councils in periods of excitement, and
the resistance to those measures of innovation,
which threaten to destroy the liberties, and
terminate the prosperity, of the people. From
the popular representatives during such pe-
riods it is in vain to expect the language of
truth; for it would be as unpalatable to the
sovereign multitude as to a sovereign despot
Members of the legislature, therefore, are in-
dispensably necessary in considerable num-
bers, who, by having nopopular constituents, can
venture to speak out the truth in periods of
agitation, innovation, and alarm. The Re-
formers ask, what is the use of a representa-
tive of a green mound, or a ruined tower, in a
popular parliament? We answer, that he is
more indispensable in such a parliament than
in any other. Nay, that without such a class
the liberties of the nation cannot exist for any
long period. Representatives constantly act-
ing under the influence or dread of popular
constituents, never will venture, either in their
speeches to give vent to the language of truth,
nor in their conduct to support the cause of
real freedom, if it interferes with the real or
supposed interests of their constituents. They
will always be as much under the influence of
their tyrannical task-masters, as Mirabeau and
Dumont were in drawing up, against their
better judgment, the Rights of Man. It is as
absurd to expect rational or independent mea-
sures from such a class, in opposition to the
wishes or injunctions of those who returned
them to parliament, as it is to look for freedom
of conduct from the senate of Tiberius or the
council of Napoleon. We do not expect the
truth to be spoken by the representative of a
mound, in a question with its owner, or his
class in society, nor by the representatives of
the people, in a question which interests or
excites the public ambition. But we expect
that truth will be spoken by the representa-
tives of the people, as against the interests of
the owner of the mound; and by the repre-
sentatives of the mound, as against the pas-
sions of the people; and that thus, between the
MIRABEAU.
225
two, the language of reason will be raised on
every subject, and that fatal bias the public
mind prevented, which arises from one set of
doctrines and principles being alone presented
to their consideration. In the superior fear-
lessness and vigour of the language of the
Conservative party in the House of Lords, to
what is exhibited in the House of Commons,
on the Reform question, is to be found decisive
evidence of the truth of these principles, and
their application to this country and this age.
Of the fatal 4th August, " the St. Barthelerny
of properties," as it was well styled by Rivarol,
and its ruinous consequences upon the public
welfare, we have the following striking and
graphic account:
" Never was such an undertaking accom-
plished in so short a time. That which would
have required a year of care, meditation, and
debate, was proposed, deliberated on, and voted
by acclamation. I know not hov many laws
were decreed in that one sitting; the abolition
of feudal rights, of the tithes, of provincial pri-
vileges; three articles, which of themselves
embraced a complete system of jurisprudence
and politics, with ten or twelve others,, were
decided in less time than would be required in
England for the first reading of a bill of ordi-
nary importance. They began with a report
on the disorders of the provinces, chateaux
burnt, troops of banditti who attacked the
nobles and ravaged the fields. The Duke
d'Aguillon, the Duke de Noailles, and several
others of the democratic part of the nobility,
after the most disastrous pictures of these
calamities, exclaimed that nothing but a great
act of generosity could calm the people, and
that it was high time to abandon their odious
privileges, and let the people taste the full
benefits of the Revolution. An indescribable
effervescence seized upon the Assembly.
Every one proposed sacrifice: every one laid
some offering on the altar of their country,
proposing either to denude themselves or de-
nude others; no time was allowed for reflec-
tion, objection, or argument; a sentimental
contagion seized every heart. That renuncia-
tion of privileges, that abandonment of so
many rights burdensome to the people, these
multiplied sacrifices, had an air of magnanim-
ity which withdrew the attention from the fatal
precipitance with which they were made. I
saw on that night many good and worthy
deputies who literally wept for joy at seeing
the work of regeneration advance so rapidly,
and at feeling themselves every instant carried
on the wings of enthusiasm so far beyond their
most ardent hopes. The renunciation of the
privileges of provinces was made by their re-
spective representatives ; those of Brittany had
engaged to defend them, and therefore they
were more embarrassed than the rest; but
carried away by the general enthusiasm, they
advanced in a body, and declared in a body,
that they would use their utmost efforts with
their constituents to obtain the renunciation
of their privileges. That great and superb
operation was necessary to confer political
unity upon a monarchy which hid been suc-
cessively formed by the union of many inde-
pendent states, every one of which had certain
29
rights of its own anterior to their being blended
together.
"On the following day, every one began to
reflect on what had been done, and sinister
presentiments arose on all sides. Mirabeau
and Sieyes, in particular, who had not been
present at that famous sitting, condemned in
loud terms its enthusiastic follies. This is a
true picture of France, said they; we spend a
month in disputing about words, and we make
sacrifices in a night which overturn every
thing that is venerable in the monarchy. In
the subsequent meetings, they tried to retract
or modify some of these enormous conces-
sions, but it was too late; it was impossible to
withdraw what the people already looked upon
as their rights. The Abbe Sieyes, in particu-
lar, made a discourse full of reason and justice
against the extinction of tithes, which he looked
upon with the utmost aversion. He demon-
strated, that to extinguish the tithes, was to
spoliate the clergy of its property, solely to
enrich the proprietors of the lands ; for every
one having bought or inherited his estate
minus the value of the tithe, found himself
suddenly enriched by a tenth, which was given
to him as a pure and uncalled for gratuity. It
was this speech, which never can be refuted, which
terminated with the well-known expression:
* They would be free, and they know not how
to be just.* The prejudice was so strong,
that Sieyes himself was not listened to; he
was regarded merely as an ecclesiastic, who
could not get the better of his personal interest,
and paid that tribute of error to his robe. A
little more would have made him be hooted and
hissed. I saw him the next day, full of bitter
indignation against the injustice and brutality
of the Assembly, which in truth he never after-
wards forgave. He gave vent to his indigna-
tion, in a conversation with Mirabeau, who
replied, ' My deir Abbe, you have unchained the
bull ; do you e.rpect he is not to gore wit h his horns ?'
" These decrees of Aug. 4 were so far from
putting a period to the robbery and violence
which desolated the country, that they only
tended to make the people acquainted with
their own strength, and impress them with the
conviction that all their outrages against the
nobility would not only not be punished, but
actually rewarded. Again I say, every thing
which is done from fear fails in accomplish-
ing its object ; those whom you erpect to disarm by
concessions, only redouble in confidence and auda-
city." Pp. 14G 149.
Such is the conclusion of this enlightened
French Reformer, as to the consequences of
the innovations and concessions, in promoting
which he took so large a share, and which
it was then confidently expected, would not
only pacify the people but regenerate the mon-
archy, and commence a new era in the history
of the world. These opinions coming from
the author of the Rights of Man, the preceptor
of Mirabeau, the fellow-labourer of Bentham,
should, if any thing can, open the eyes of our
young enthusiasts, who am so vehement in
urging the necessity of concession, avowedly
from the effects of intimidation, who expect to
"1ft loose the bull and escape his horns."
It is on this question of the effects to be ex-
226
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
pected from concession to public clamour, that
the whole question of Reform hinges. The
supporters of the bill in both Houses have
abandoned every other argument. "Pass this
bill, or anarchy will ensue," is their sole princi-
ple of action. But what says Dumont, taught by
the errors of the Constituent Assembly 1 "Pass
this bill, and anarchy will ensue." " Whatever
is done," says he, " from fear, fails in its object ;
those whom you expect to disarm by conces-
sion, redouble in confidence and audacity."
This is the true principle; the principle con-
firmed by universal experience, and yet the
Reformers shut their eyes to its application.
The events which have occurred in this age
are so decisive on this subject, that nothing
more convincing could be imagined, if a voice
from the dead were to proclaim its truth.
Concession, as Dumont tells us, and as every
one acquainted with history knows, was tried
by the French government and Assembly, in
the hope of calming the people, and arresting
the Revolution. The monarch, at the opening
of the States-General, made " greater conces-
sions than ever king made to his people ;" the
nobles abandoned, on their own motion, in one
night, all their rights; and what was the con-
sequence 1 The revolutionary fervour was
urged into a fury ; the torrent became a cata-
ract, and horrors unparalleled in the history of
the world ensued.
Resistance to popular ambition, a firm op-
position to the cry for reform, was at the same
period, under a lion-hearted king and an in-
trepid minister, adopted in th midst of the
greatest dangers by the British government.
What was the consequence ? Universal tran-
quillity forty years of unexampled prosperity
the triumph of Trafalgar the conquest of
Waterloo.
Conciliation and concession, in obedience,
and with the professed design of healing the
disturbances of that unhappy land, were next
tried in Ireland. Universal tranquillity, con-
tentment, and happiness, were promised from
the great healing measure of emancipation.
What has been the consequence? Disturb-
ances, massacres, discord, practised sedition,
threatened rebellion, which have made the old
times of Protestant rule be regretted.
Conciliation and concession were again put
in practice by the Whig Administration of
England. What was the result ? Perils great-
er than assailed the monarchy from all the
might of Napoleon; dissension, conflagration,
and popular violence, unexampled since the
great rebellion; a falling income and an in-
creasing expenditure; the flames of a servile
war in Jamaica ; and general distress unequal-
led since the accession of the House of Bruns-
wick.
The character of Mirabeau, both as a writer
and orator, and an individual, is sketched with
no ordinary power by this author, probably
better qualified than any man in existence to
portray it with accuracy :
"Mirabeau had within his breast a sense of
the force of his mind, which sustained his
courage in situations which would have crush-
ed a person of ordinary character: his imagi-
nation loved the vast; his mind seized the
gigantic ; his taste was natural, and had been
cultivated by the study of the classical authors.
He knew little; but no one could make a bet-
ter use of what he had acquired. During the
whirlwind of his stormy life he had little lei-
sure for study; but in his prison of Vincennes
he had read extensively, and improved his style
by translations, as well as extensive collections
from the writings of great orators. He had
little confidence in the extent of his erudition ;
but his eloquent and impassioned soul animat-
ed every feature of his countenance when he
was moved, and nothing was easier than to
inflame his imagination. From his youth up-
wards he had accustomed himself to the dis-
cussion of the great questions of erudition and
government, but he was not calculated to go to
the bottom of them. The labour of investiga-
tion was not adapted to his powers ; he had too
much warmth and vehemence of disposition
for laborious application ; his mind proceeded
by leaps and bounds, but sometimes they were
prodigious. His style abounded in vigorous
expressions, of which he had made a particu-
lar study.
"If we consider him as an author, we must
recollect that all his writings, without one
single exception, were pieces of Mosaic, in
which his fellow-labourers had at least as large
a share as himself, but he had the faculty of
giving additional eclat to their labours, by
throwing in here and there original expres-
sions, or apostrophes, full of fire and elo-
quence. It is a peculiar talent, to be able in
this manner to disinter obscure ability, intrust
to each the department for which he is fitted,
and induce them all to labour at the work of
which he alone is to reap the glory.
" As a political orator, he was in some re-
spects gifted with the very highest talents a
quick eye, a sure tact, the art of discovering at
once the true disposition of the assembly he
was addressing, and applying all the force of
his mind to overcome the point of resistance,
without weakening it by the discussion of
minor topics. No one knew better how to
strike with a single word, or hit his mark with
perfect precision ; and frequently he thus
carried with him the general opinion, either
by a happy insinuation, or a stroke which in-
timidated his adversaries. In the tribune he
was immovable. The waves of faction rolled
around without shaking him, and he was
master of his passions in the midst of the ut-
most vehemence of opposition. But what he
wanted as a political orator, was the art of dis-
cussion on the topics on which he enlarged.
He could not embrace a long series of proofs
and reasonings, and was unable to refute in a
logical or convincing manner. He was, in
consequence, often obliged to abandon the
most important motions, when hard pressed
by his adversaries, from pure inability to re-
fute their arguments. He embraced too much,
and reflected too little. He plunged into a dis-
course made for him on a subject on which he
had never reflected, and on which he had been
at no pains to master the facts ; and he was,
in consequence' greatly inferior in that particu-
lar to the athletse who exhibit their powers in
the British parliament." P. 277.
MIRABEAU.
227
What led to the French Revolution 1 This
question will be asked and discussed, with all
the anxiety it deserves, to the end of the world.
Let us hear Dumonton the subject.
"No event ever interested Europe so much
as the meeting of the States-General. There
was no enlightened man who did not found the
greatest hopes upon that public struggle of
prejudices with the lights of the age, and who
did not believe that a new moral and political
world was about to issue from the chaos. The
besoin of hope was so strong, that all faults
were pardoned, all misfortunes were represent-
ed only as accident ; in spite of all the calami-
ties which it induced, the balance leaned always
towards the Constituent Assembly. It was the
struggle of humanity with despotism.
" The States-General, six weeks after their
convocation, was no longer the States-General,
but the National Assembly. Its first calamity
was to have owed its new title to a revolution ;
that is to say, to a vital change in its power,
its essence, its name, and its means of authority.
According to the constitution, the commons
should have acted in conjunction with the
nobles, the clergy, and the king. But the com-
mons, in the very outset, subjugated the nobles,
the clergy, and the king. It was in that, that the
Revolution consisted.
"Reasoning without end has taken place on
the causes of the Revolution ; there is but one,
in my opinion, to which the whole is to be as-
cribed; and that is, the character of the king.
Put a king of character and firmness in the place
of Louis XVI., and no revolution would have en-
sued. His whole reign was a preparation for
it. There was not a single epoch, during the
whole Constituent Assembly, in which the
king, if he could only have changed his cha-
racter, might not have re-established his au-
thority, and created a mixed constitution far
more solid and stable than its ancient mon-
archy. His indecision, his weakness, his half
counsels, his want of foresight, ruined every
thing. The inferior causes which have con-
curred were nothing but the necessary conse-
quences of that one moving cause. When the
king is known to be weak, the courtiers be-
come intriguers, the factious insolent, the
people audacious; good men are intimidated,
the most faithful services go unrewarded, able
men are disgusted, and ruinous councils adopt-
ed. A king possessed of dignity and firmness
would have drawn to his side those who were
against him; the Lafayettes, the Lameths, the
Mirabeaus, the Sieyes, would never have
dreamed of playing the part which they did;
and, when directed to other objects, they would
no longer have appeared the same men."
Pp. 343, 344.
These observations are of the very highest
importance. The elements of discord, rebel-
lion, and anarchy, rise into portentous energy
when weakness is at the head of affairs. A
reforming, in other words a democratic, ad-
ministration, raise them into a perfect tempest.
The progress of time, and the immense defects
of the ancient monarchical system, rendered
change necessary in France; but it was the
weakness of the king, Ihe concessions of the
nobility and clergy, which converted it into a
revolution. All the miseries of that country
sprung from the very principle which is in-
cessantly urged as the ruling consideration in
favour of the Reform Bill.
No body of men ever inflicted such disasters
on France, as the Constituent Assembly, by
their headlong innovations and sweeping de-
molitions. Not the sword of Marlborough nor
the victories of Wellington not the rout of
Agincourt nor the carnage of Waterloo not
the arms of Alexander nor the ambition of Na-
poleon, have proved so fatal to its prosperity.
From the wounds they inflicted, the social sys-
tem may revive from those of their own in-
novators, recovery is impossible. They not
only destroyed freedom in its cradle they not
only induced the most cruel and revolting
tyranny ; but they totally destroyed the mate-
rials from which it was to be reconstructed in
future, they bequeathed slavery to their chil-
dren, and they prevented it from ever being
shaken off by their descendants. It matters not
under what name arbitrary power is adminis-
tered: it can be dealt out as rudely by a reform-
ing assembly, a dictatorial mob, a committee
of Public Safety, a tyrannical Directory, a mili-
tary despot, or a citizen King, as by an abso-
lute monarch or a haughty nobility. By destroy-
ing the whole ancient institutions of France
by annihilating the nobles and middling ranks,
who stood between the people and the throne
by subverting all the laws and customs of
antiquity by extirpating religion, and induc-
ing general profligacy, they have inflicted
wounds upon their country which can never
be healed. Called upon to revive the social
system, they destroyed it: instead of pouring
into the decayed limbs the warm blood of youth,
they severed the head from the body, and all
subsequent efforts have been unavailing to re-
store animation. It is now as impossible to
give genuine freedom, that is complete protec-
tion to all classes, to France, as it is to restore
the vital spark to a lifeless body by the convul-
sions of electricity. The balance of interests,
the protecting classes, are destroyed : nothing
remains but the populace and the government:
Asiatic has succeeded to European civiliza-
tion : and, instead of the long life of modern
freedom, the brief tempests of anarchy, and '.he
long night of despotism, are its fate.
The Constituent Assembly, however, had
the excuse of general delusion: they were en-
tering on an untrodden field : the consequence
of their actions were unknown: enthusiasm
as irresistible as that of the theatre urged on
their steps. Great reforms required to be made
in the political system; they mistook the ex-
cesses of democratic ambition for the dictates
of ameliorating wisdom : the corruption of a
guilty court, and the vices of a degraded no-
bility, called loudly for amendment. But what
shall we say to those who adventured on the
samfc.perilous course, with their fatal example
before their eyes, in a country requiring no
accession to popular power, tyrannized over by
no haughty nobility, consumed by no internal
vices, weakened by no foreign disasters?
What shall we saj to those who voluntarily
.shut their eyes to all the pen'!-; of i!ie head-
llong reformers of the ncighbcu.. . a ..ingdom;
228
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
who roused passions as impetuous, proposed and virtue uncorrupted was to be found, and
changes as sweeping, were actuated by ambi- glory unparalleled had been won'? Who ad-
tion as perilous, as that which, under their own i ventured on a course which threatened to tear
eyes, had torn civilization to pieces in its bleed- j in pieces the country of Milton and Bacon, of
ing dominion ? What shall we say to those j Scott and Newton, of Nelson and Wellington ?
rho did this in the state where freedom had
existed longer, and was at their accession more
History will judge their conduct: no tumultu-
ous mobs will drown its voice: from its deci-
unfettered than in any other country that ever sion there will be no appeal, and its will be the
existed; where prosperity unexampled existed, I voice of ages.
BULWER'S ATHENS.
is *
IT is a remarkable fact, that so numerous
and pregnant are the proofs afforded by history
in all ages, of the universal and irremediable
evils of democratic ascendency, that there is
hardly an historical writer of any note, in any
country or period of the world, who has not
concurred in condemning it as the most dan-
gerous form of government, and the most fatal
enemy of that freedom which it professes to
support. In the classical writers, indeed, are
to be found numerous and impassioned, as
well as perfectly just eulogies on the ennobling
effects of civil liberty; but it is liberty, as con-
tradistinguished from slavery, which is the ob-
ject of their encomium : and none felt so strong-
ly, or have expressed so forcibly, the pernicious
tendency of unbridled democracy to undermine
and destroy the civil freedom and general pro-
tection of all classes, which is unquestionably
the first of human Jblessings. Thucydides,
whose profound mind was forcibly attracted
by the varied operations of the aristocratic and
democratic factions, which in his age distract-
ed Greece, and whose conflict forms the sub-
ject of his immortal work, has told us, that " in-
variably in civil contests it was found at
Athens that the worst and most abandoned
public characters obtained the ascendency."
Aristotle has condensed in six words the ever-
lasting characteristic of democratic govern-
ment rUTT^V TCHV T'JPirtdtoV TSASWTiW it JiiU5Kj>*.Tiil.
Sallust has pointed to the " Egestas cupida no-
varum rerum," as the most prolific source of
the. evils which first undermined, and at last
overthrew the solid foundations of Roman
liberty; and left in his Catiline conspiracy a
picture of the demagogue, so just and true in
all its touches, that in every age it has the air
of having been drawn from the exisiing popu-
lar idol; and the phrase "Alieni appetens, sui
profusus," has passed into a proverbial charac-
teristic of that mixture of rapacity and insol-
vency which ever forms the basis of the cha-
racters who attain to democratic ascendency.
Livy, amidst the majestic and heart-stirring
narrative of Roman victories, never loses an
opportunity of throwing in a reflection ci> the
mingled instability and tyranny of popular as-
semblies; and all the experience of the woful
tyranny which the triumph of democracy under
Cffisar brought upon the Roman common-
* Athens, its Rise nnd Fall. By E. I,. Rnlwer, Eoq.
8ndpr* and Oiley : London, 1837. BInckwood's Maga-
*iue, July, 18.17.
wealth, and the leaden chains of the centralized
government of his successors, has not blinded
the far-seeing sagacity of Tacitus to the origin
of all these evils in the wide-spread force of
popular wickedness and folly, and the fatal
overthrow of the long established sway of the
Senate by the military talents and consummate
address of the first emperor of the world.
In modern times the same striking charac-
teristic of all the greatest observers of human
events is equally conspicuous. Five hundred
years ago Machiavel deduced from a careful
retrospect of Roman history, not less than the
experience of the Republican States with which
he was surrounded, the clearest views of the
enormous perils of unbridled democracy: and
he has left in his Discourses on Livy and
" Principe," maxims of government essentially
adverse to democratic establishments, which,
in depth of thought and justice of observation,
have never been surpassed. Bacon clearly
perceived, even amidst all the servility of the
nation, and tyranny of the government of Eng-
land under the Tudor princes, the opposite
dangers of republican rule, and his celebrated
apophthegm, that political changes, to be safe,
" should resemble those of nature, which albeit
the greatest in the end, are imperceptible in
their progress," has passed into a consuetudi-
nary maxim, to which, to the end of the world,
the wise will never cease to refer, and against
which the rash and reckless will never cease
to chafe. The profound mind of Hume, it is
well known, beheld the long and varied story
of England's existence with perhaps too great
a bias in favour of monarchical institutions;
and Gibbon, even amidst the long series of
calamities which accumulated round the sink-
ing fortunes of the empire, has sufficiently
evinced his strong sense of the impracticable
nature, and tyrannic tendency of democratic
institutions.* Sir James Mackintosh, in his
maturer years, strongly supported the same
sound and rational principles ; and all the fer-
vour and energy of the youthful author of (he
V-m-Hricp Gallica could not blind his better in-
formed juderment later in life, to the frightful
dangers of democratic ascendency, and the ul-
timate conclusion "that the only government
which offers a rational prospect of establishing
or preserving freedom, is that where the power
*In tiis iPttern and nnd miscellaneous works, bto
opinions on thia subject are clearly expressed.
BULWER'S ATHENS.
229
of directing affairs is vested in the aristocratic
interests, under the perpetual safeguard of po-
pular watchfulness."* Burke, almost forgot-
ten as a champion of Whig doctrines in the
earlier part of his career, stands forth in im-
perishable lustre as the giant supporter of
conservative principles in the zenith of his in-
tellect. Pitt has told us that "democracy is
not the government of the few by the many,
but the many by the few, with this addition,
that the few who are thus raised to power are
the most dangerous and worthless of the com-
munity;" and Fox, who spent his life in sup-
porting liberal principles, with his dying breath
bequeathed to his successors a perpetual strug-
gle with the gigantic power which had risen
out of its spirit, and unbodied its desires.
Nor is France behind England in the same
profound and far-seeing views of human af-
fairs. Napoleon, elevated on the wave, and
supported by the passions of the Revolution,
conceived himself, as he himself told, to be the
commissioned hand of Heaven to chastise its
crimes and extinguish its atrocity. Madam de
Stael, albeit passionately devoted to the me-
mory of her father, the parent of the Revolution,
and the author of the French Reform Bill, has
yet devoted the maturity of her intellect to il-
lustrate the superior advantages which the
mixed form of government established in Eng-
land afforded ; and in her Treatise on the
French Revolution, supported with equal wis-
dom and eloquence the conservative princi-
ples, in which all minds of a certain elevation
in every age have concurred : while Chateau-
briand, the illustrious relic of feudal grandeur,
and the graphic painter of modern suffering,
has arrived, from the experience of his varied
and interesting existence, at the same lofty and
ennobling conclusions ; and M. deToqueville,
the worthy conclusion to such a line of great-
ness, has portrayed, amidst the most impartial
survey of American equality, seeds in the un-
disguised " tyranny of the majority," of the
eventual and speedy destruction of civil li-
berty.
These enemies of democracy in every age.
have been led to these conclusions, just bee wse
they were the steadiest friends of freedom. They
deprecated and resisted the unbridled sway of
the people, because they saw clearly that it
was utterly destructive to their real and dura-
ble interests; that it permitted that sacred fire
which, duly restrained and repressed, is the
fountain of all greatness, whether in nations
or individuals, to waste itself in pernicious
flames, or expand into ruinous conflagration.
They supported the establishment of Conser-
vative checks on popular extravagance, be-
cause they perceived from experience, and had
learned from history, that the gift of unbridled
power is fatal to its possessors, and that least
of all is it tolerable where the responsibility,
the sole check upon its excesses, is destroyed
by the number among whom it is divided.
They advocated a mixed form of government,
because they saw clearly, that under such, and
such only, had the blessings of freedom in any
age been enjoyed for any length of time by the
* Mackintosh's Memoirs, I. 174.
people. They were fully aware that demo-
cratic energy has, in every age, been the
mainspring of human improvement ; but they
were riot less aware, that this spring is one of
such strength and power, that if not duly
loaded, it immediately tears the machine to
pieces. They admired and cherished the
warmth of the fire, but they were not so
blinded by its advantages, as to permit it to
escape its iron bars, and wrap the house in
flames ; they enjoyed the vigour of the horses
which whirled the chariot along; but they
were not so insane as to cast the charioteer
from his seat, and allow their strength and
energy to overturn and destroy the vehicle:
they acknowledged with gratitude the genial
warmth of the central heat, which clothed the
sides of the volcano with luxuriant fruits; but
they looked to either hand, and beheld in the
black furrow of desolation the track of the
burning lava which had issued from its sum-
mit when it escaped its barriers, and filled the
heavens with an eruption.
Nothing daunted by this long and majestic
array of authority against him, Mr. Bulwer
has taken the field in two octavo volumes, in
order to illustrate the beneficial effect of re-
publican institutions upon social greatness
and national prosperity. He has selected for
his subject the Athenian democracy the eye
of Greece the cradle of history, tragedy, and
the fine arts ; the spot in the world where, in
the narrowest limits, achievements the most
mighty have been won, and genius the most
immortal has been developed. He con-
ceived, doubtless, that in Attica at least the
extraordinary results of democratic agency
could not be disputed; the Roman victories
might be traced to the wisdom of the senate;
the Swiss patriotism to the simplicity of its
mountains; the prosperity of Holland to the
protection of canals, or the prudence of its
burgomasters; the endurance of America to
the boundless- vent afforded by its back settle-
ments ; but in Athens none of these peculiari-
ties existed, and there the brilliant results of
popular ruJe and long established self-govern-
ment were set forth in imperishable colours.
We rejoice he has made the attempt; we anti-
cipate nothing but good to the conservative
cause from his efforts. It is a common saying
among lawyers, that falsehood may be exposed
in a witness by cross-examination; but that
truth only comes out the more clearly from all
the efforts which are made for its confusion.
It is a fortunate day for the cause of historic
truth when the leaders of the democratic pany
leave the declamation of the hustings and the
base flattery of popular adulation, and betake
themselves to the arena of real argument.
We feel the same joy at beholding Mr. Bulwer
arm himself in the panoply of the field, and
court the assaults of historical investigation,
with which the knights of old saw themselves
extricated from the mob of plebeian insurrec-
tion, and led forth to the combat of highborn
chivalry.
Mr. Bulwer is, in every point of view, a dis-
tinguished writer. His work on England and
the English is a brilliant performance, abound-
ing with sparkling, containing some profound,
230
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
observations, and particularly interesting to
the multitude of persons to whom foreign tra-
velling has rendered the comparison of Eng-
lish and French character and institutions an
object of interest. ' His novels in profound
knowledge of the human heart, brilliancy of
description, pathos of incident, and eloquence
of language, are second to none in the English
language. The great defects of his \vritings,
in a political point of view, are the total ab-
sence of any reference to a superintending
power and the moral government of the world ;
and the continual and laboured attempt to ex-
culpate the errors, and screen the vices, and
draw a veil over the. perils of democratic go-
vernment. The want of the first, in an inves-
tigation into human affairs, is like the absence
of the character of Hamlet in the play bearing
his name: the presence of the second a con-
tinued drawback on the pleasures which an
impartial mind derives from his otherwise
able and interesting observations. More espe-
cially is a constant sense of the corruption
and weakness of human nature an indispen-
sable element in every inquiry or observation
which has for its object the weighing the capa-
bility of mankind to bear the excitements, and
wield the powers, and exercise the responsi-
bility of self-government. We are not going
to enter into any theological argument on
original sin, how intimately soever it may be
blended with the foundation of all investiga-
tions into the right principles of government;
we assert only a fact, demonstrated by the ex-
perience of every age, and acquiesced in by
the wise of every country, that there is an
universal tendency to corruption and license
in human nature that religion is the only
effectual bridle on its excesses, and that the
moment that a community is established, with-
out the effective agency of that powerful curb
on human passion, the progress of national
affairs becomes nothing but the career of the
prodigal, brilliant and alluring in the outset,
dismal and degrading in the end. It is on this
account that the friends of freedom have in
every age been the most resolute and perse-
vering enemies of democracy; because that
fervent and searching element, essential to the
highest national greatness, and the best ingre-
dient in its prosperity, if duly coerced and
tempered, becomes its most devouring and
fatal enemy the instant that it breaks through
its barriers, and obtains the unrestrained di-
rection of the public destinies.
The views of the republican and the demo-
crat are the very reverse of all this. Accord-
ing to them, wickedness arid corruption are the,
inheritance of the oligarchy alone ; aristocra-
cies are always selfish, grasping, rapacious ;
democracies invariably energetic, generous,
confiding. Nobles, they argue, never act but
from designing or selfish views ; their constant
agent is human corruption ; their incessant
appeal to the basest and most degrading prin-
ciples of our nature. Republicans alone are
really philanthropic in their views ; they alone
attend to the interests of the masses; they alone
lay the foundations of the social system on the
broad basis of general well-being. Monarchi-
cal governments are founded on the caprice of
a single tyrant; aristocratic on the wants of a
rapacious oligarchy; democratic alone on the
consulted desires and grateful experience of
the whole community. If these propositions
were all true, they would be decisive in favour
of popular, and highly popular institutions ;
but unfortunately, though it is perfectly correct
that monarchies and aristocracies are mainly
directed, if uncontrolled by the people, to sup-
port the interests of a single or an oligarchical
government, it is no less true, that the rapacity
of a democracy is just as great; that the re-
sponsibility of its leaders, from the number of
those invested with power, is infinitely less,
and that the calamities which, in its unmiti-
gated form it in consequence lets loose on the
community, are such as in every age have led
to its speedy subversion.
The Conservative principle of government,
on the other hand, is, that mankind are radi-
cally and universally corrupt; that when in-
vested with power, in whatever form of govern-
ment, and from whatever class of society, they
are immediately inclined to apply it to their
own selfish ends ; that the diffusion of education
and knowledge has no tendency whatever to
eradicate this universal propensity, but only
gives it a different, less violent, but not less
interested direction ; that the diffusion of su-
preme power among a multitude of hands di-
minishes to nothing the responsibility of each
individual, while it augments in a proportionate
degree the rapacity and selfishness which is
brought to bear on public affairs; that when
the multitude are the spectators of government,
they are inclined to check or restrain its abuses,
because others profit, and they suffer by them;
but when they become government itself, they
instantly support them, because they profit, and
others suffer from their continuance; that
democratic institutions thus, when once fully
and really established, rapidly deprave the
public mind, and engender an universal spirit
of selfishness in the majority of the people,
which speedily subverts the foundations of
national prosperity; and that it is only when
property is the directing, and numbers the con-
trolling power, that the inherent vices and self-
ishness of the depositaries of authority can be
effectually coerced by the opinion of the great
majority who are likely to suffer by its ex-
cesses, or a lasting foundation be laid in the
adherence of national opinion to the principles
of virtue for any lengthened enjoyment of the
blessings of prosperity, or any durable dis-
charge of the commands of duty.
These are the opposite and conflicting prin-
ciples of government which are now at issue
in the world: and it is to support the former
that Mr. Bulwer has brought the power of a
cultivated mind and the vigour of an enlarged
intellect. Athens was a favourable ground to
take, in order to enforce the incalculable pow-
ers of the democratic spring in society. No-
where else is to be found a state so small in
its origin, and yet so great in its progress : so
contracted in its territory, and yet so gigantic
in its achievements: so limited in numbers,
and yet so immortal in genius. Its dominions
on the continent of Greece did not exceed an
English county; its free inhabitants never
BULWER'S ATHENS.
231
amounted to thirty thousand citizens yet these
inconsiderable numbers have filled the world
with their renown ; poetry, philosophy, archi-
tecture, sculpture, tragedy, comedy, geometry,
physics, history, politics, almost date their
origin from Athenian genius ; and the monu-
ments of art with which they have overspread
the world still form the standard of taste in
every civilized nation on earth. It is not sur-
prising that so brilliant and captivating a
spectacle should in every age have dazzled and
transported mankind ; and that seeing demo-
cratic institutions co-existing with so extra-
ordinary a development of the intellectual
faculties, it should have come to be generally
imagined that they really were cause and effect,
and that the only secure foundation which could
be laid for the attainment of the highest hon-
ours of our being was in the extension of the
powers of government to the great body of the
people.
Athens, however, has its dark as well as its
brilliant side ; and if the perfection of its sci-
ence, the delicacy of its taste, and the refine-
ment of its arts, furnish a plausible, and, in a
certain degree, a just ground for representing
democratic institutions as the greatest stimu-
lant to the human mind, the brevity of its ex-
istence, the injustice of its decisions, the insta-
bility of its councils, and the cruelty of its de-
crees, afford too fair a reason for doubting the
wisdom of imitating, on a larger scale, any of
its institutions. Its rise was rapid and glori-
ous ; but the era of its prosperity was brief;
and it sunk, after a short space of existence,
into an obscure, and, politically speaking, in-
significant old age. The sway of the multitude,
who formed the council of last resort in the
commonwealth, was capricious and tyrannical ;
and such as thoroughly disgusted all the states
in the confederacy of which it was the head.
There was the secret of its weakness. Instead
of protecting and cherishing the tributary and
allied states, the Athenian democracy insulted
and oppressed them, and in consequence, on
the first serious reverse, they all revolted; and
the fleets which had constituted their strength
were at once ranged on the side of the enemies
of the state. The flames of Aigospotamos con-
sumed the Athenian navy ; but that disaster,
great as it undoubtedly was, was not greater
than the rout of Trasymene, the slaughter of
Cannre, the irruption of the Gauls to Rome.
But Athens had not the steady persevering rule
of the Roman patricians; nor the. wise and
beneficent policy of the Senate to the states and
alliance, and thence they wanted both the
energy requisite to rise superior to all their
misfortunes, and the grateful feelings which,
in moments of disaster, ranged the allied states
in steady and durable array around them.
During the invasion by Hannibal, which, as
involving a civil contest between the Patricians
and Plebeians in all the Italian cities, very
nearly resembled the Peloponnesian war, not
one state of any moment revolted from t he-
Roman alliance till after the disaster of Cannae ; '
and even then it was only Capua, the rival of j
Rome, which took any vigorous part with the
Carthagenians, and a very little effort was
sufficient to retain the other allied cities in the
I Roman confederacy, or reclaim such as, from
j the presence of the Punic arms, had passed
j over to their enemies. Whereas, in Greece,
on the very first reverse, the whole states and
colonies in alliance constantly passed over to
the Lacedemonian league ; and the growth of
the power of Athens was repeatedly checked
by the periodical reduction of its strength to
the resources of its own territory. Had the
Athenian multitude possessed the enduring
fortitude and beneficent rule of the Roman
! aristocracy, they might, like them, have risen
superior to every reverse, and gradually spread,
by the willing incorporation of lesser states
with their dominions, into a vast empire, ex-
tending over the whole shore's of the Mediter-
ranean, and giving law, like the mighty empire
which succeeded them, for a thousand years
to the whole civilized world.
Mr. Bulwer appears to be aware of the brief
tenure of existence which Athens enjoyed ; but
he erroneously ascribes to general causes or
inevitable necessity what in its case was the
result merely of the fever of democratic ac-
tivity.
" In that restless and unpausing energy,
which is the characteristic of an intellectual
republic, there seems, as it were, a kind of
destiny : a power impossible to resist urges the
state from action to action, from progress to
progress, with a rapidity dangerous while it
dazzles ; resembling in this the career of indi-
viduals impelled onward, first to attain, and
thence to preserve power, and who cannot
struggle against the fate which necessitates
them to soar, until, by the moral gravitation
of human things, the point which has no beyond
is attained; and the next effort to rise is but the
prelude of their fall. In such states Time, in-
deed, moves with gigantic strides ; years con-
centrate what would be the epochs of centuries
in the march of less popular institutions. The
planet of their fortunes rolls with an equal
speed through the cycle of internal civilization
as of foreign glory. The condition of their
brilliant life is the absence of repose. The
accelerated circulation of the blood beautifies
but consumes, and action itself, exhausting the
stores of youth by its very vigour, becomes a
mortal but divine disease."
Now, in this eloquent passage there is an
obvious error; and it is on this point that the
Conservative or Constitutional principle of
Government mainly differs from the Movement
or Democratic. Aware of the violence of the
fever which in Republican states exhausts the
strength and wears out the energy of the people,
the Conservative would not extinguish but
regulate it; he would stop its diseased and
feverish, to prolong and strengthen its healthy
and vital action. He would not allow the
youth to waste his strength and life in a brief
period of guilty excess, or unrestrained indul-
gence, but so chasten and moderate the fever
of the blood as to secure for him a useful man-
hood and a respected old age. The democrat,
on the other hand, would plunge him at once
into all the excesses of youth and intemperance,
throw him into the arms of harlots arid the
orgies of drunkenness, and, amidst wine and
women, the harp and the dance, lead him to
232
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
poverty, sickness, and premature dissolution.
And ancient history affords a memorable con-
trast in this particular; for while Athens, worn
out and exhausted by the fever of democratic
activity, rose like a brilliant meteor only to
fall after a life as short as that of a single
individual, Rome, in whom this superabundant
energy was for centuries coerced and restrained
by the solidity of Patrician institutions and the
steadiness of Patrician rule, continued steadily
to rise and advance through a succession of
ages, and at length succeeded in subjecting
the whole civilized earth to its dominion.
It has long been a matter of reproach to
Athens, that she behaved with the blackest in-
gratitude to her greatest citizens; and that
Miltiades, Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, So-
crates, Thucydides, and a host of other illus-
trious men, received exile, confiscation, ordeath
as the reward for the inestimable benefits they
had conferred upon their fellow-citizens. Mr.
Bulwer is much puzzled how to explain away
these awkward facts; but as the banishment
of these illustrious citizens, and the death of
this illustrious sage, from the effects of popu-
lar jealousy, cannot be denied, he boldly en-
deavours to justify these atrocious acts of the
Athenian democracy. In regard to Miltiades
he observes :
" The case was simply this, Miltiades was
accused whether justly or unjustly no matter
it was clearly as impossible not to receive
the accusation, and to try the cause, as it
would be for an English court of justice to
refuse to admit a criminal action against Lord
Grey or the Duke of Wellington. Was Mil-
tiades guilty or not? This we cannot tell.
We know that he was tried according to the
law, and that the Athenians thought him guilty,
for they condemned him. So far this is not
ingratitude it is the course of law. A man
is tried and found guilty if past services
and renown were to save the great from pun-
ishment when convicted of a state offence,
society would, perhaps, be disorganized, and
certainly a free state would cease to exist.
The question, therefore, shrinks to this was
it, or was it not ungrateful in the people to
relax the penalty of death, legally incurred,
and commute it to a heavy fine? I fear we
shall find few instances of greater clemency in
monarchies, however mild. Miltiades unhap-
pily died. But nature slew him, not the Athe-
nian people. And it cannot be said with
greater justice of the Athenians, than of a
people no less illustrious, and who are now
their judges, that it was their custom, < de tuer
un Jlmiral pour encourapcr les avtres.' "
This passage affords an example of the
determination which Mr. Bulwer generally
evinces to justify and support the acts of his
darling democracy, however extravagant or
monstrous they may have been. Doubtless,
we are not informed very specifically as to the
nature of the evidence adduced in support of
the charge of bribery brought against Miltiades.
Doubtless, also, it was necessary to receive the
charge when once preferred ; but was it neces-
sary to convict him, and send the hero of Mara-
thon, the saviour of his country, into a painful
exile, which ultimately proved his death?
That is the point, and, as the evidence is not
laid before us, what right has Mr. Bulwer to
assume that the Athenian multitude were not
ungrateful or unjust in their decision? For
their conduct, in this instance, they received
the unanimous condemnation of the historian
of antiquity, and yet Mr. Bulwer affirms that
never was complaint more unjust. The fact
is certain, that all the greatest benefactors of
Athens were banished by the ostracism, or vote
of all the citizens, though the evidence adduced
in support of the charges is, for the most part,
unknown ; but as these deeds were the acts of
democratic assemblies, Mr. Bulwer, without
any grounds for his opinion, in opposition to
the unanimous voice of antiquity, vindicates
and approves them.
Ii is clear, from Mr. Bulwer's own admission,
that the banishment of almost all these illus-
trious benefactors of Athens was owing to their
resisting democratic innovations, or striving
to restore the constitution to the mixed condi-
tion in which it existed previous to the great
democratic innovations of Solon and Themis-
tocles : but such resistance, or attempts even
by the most constitutional means to restore, he
seems to consider as amply sufficient to justify
their exile ! In regard to the banishment of
Cimon he observes :
" Without calling into question the integrity
and the patriotism of Cimon, without sup-
posing that he would have entered into any
intrigue against the Athenian independence
of foreign powers a supposition his subse-
quent conduct effectually refutes he might,
as a sincere and warm partisan of the nobles,
and a resolute opposer of the popular party,
have sought to restore at home the aristocratic
balance of power, by whatever means his
reat rank, and influence, and connection with
the Lacedaemonian party could afford him.
We are told, at least, that he not only op-
posed all the advances of the more liberal
party that he not only stood resolutely by the
interests and dignities of the Areopagus, which
had ceased to harmonize with the more modern
institutions, but that he expressly sought to
estorc certain prerogatives which that assem-
bly had formally lost during his foreign expe-
ditions, and that he earnestly endeavoured to
bring back the whole constitution to the more
aristocratic government established by Clis-
thenes. It is one thing to preserve, it is
another to restore. A people may be deluded,
under popular pretexts, out of the rights they
lave newly acquired, but they never submit
to be openly despoiled of them. Nor can we
call that ingratitude which is but the refusal
o surrender to the merits of an individual the
acquisitions of a nation.
" All things considered, then, I believe, that
f ever ostracism was justifiable, it was so in
the case of Cimon nay, it was, perhaps,
absolutely essential to the preservation of the
constitution. His very honesty made him re-
solute in his attempts against that constitution.
His talents, his rank, his fame, his services,
only rendered those attempts more dangerous.
"Could the reader be induced to view, with
an examination equally dispassionate, the seve-
ral ostracisms of Aristides and Themistocles,
BULWER'S ATHENS.
he might see equal causes of justification, both
in the motives and in the results. The firs
was absolutely necessary for the defeat of the
aristocratic party, and the removal of restric
tions on those energies which instantly founc
the most glorious vents for action ; the seconc
was justified by a similar necessity, that pro-
duced similar effects. To impartial eyes a
people may be vindicated without traducing
those whom a people are driven to oppose
In such august and complicated trials the ac-
cuser and defendant may be both innocent.'
Here then is the key to the hideous ingrati-
tude of the Athenian people to their two most
illustrious benefactors, Anstides and Cimon.
They obstructed ike Movement Parly : they held
by the constitution, and endeavoured to bring
back a mixed form of government. Thi.'
heinous offence was, in the eyes of the Athe^
nian democracy, and their apologist, Mr. Bui-
wer, amply sufficient to justify their banish-
ment: a proceeding, he says, which was right,
even although they were innocent of the charges
laid against them as if injustice can in any
case be vindicated by state necessity, or the
form of government is to be approved which
requires for its maintenance the periodical
sacrifice of its noblest and most illustrious
citizens !
In another place, Mr. Bulwer observes
"Themistocles was summoned to the ordeal
of the ostracism, and condemned by the majo-
rity of 'suffrages. Thus, like Aristides, not
punished for offences, but paying the honourable
penalty of rising by genius to that state of eminence,
u'hich threatens danger to the equality of republic*.
"He departed from Athens, and chose his
refuge at Argos, whose hatred to Sparta, his
deadliest foe, promised him the securest pro-
tection.
"Death soon afterwards removed Anstides
from all competitorship with Cimon; accord-
ing to the most probable accounts he died at
Athens ; and at the time of Plutarch his monu-
ment was still to be seen at Phalerum. His
countrymen, who, despite all plausible charges,
were never ungrateful except where their, lib-
erties appeared imperilled, (whether rightly or
erroneously our documents are too scanty to
prove,) erected his monument at the public
charge, portioned his three daughters, and
awarded to his son Lysimachus a grant of one
hundred minae of silver, a plantation of one
hundred plethra of land, and a pension of four
drachmae a day, (double the allowance of an
Athenian ambassador.")
There can be no doubt that the admission
here candidly made by Mr. Bulwer is well-
founded; and that jealousy of the eminence of
their great national benefactors, or anxiety to
remove aristocratic barriers to further popular
innovations, was the real cause of that ingra-
titude to their most illustrious benefactors,
which has left so dark a stain on the Athenian
character. But can it seriously be argued that
that constitution is to be approved, and held
up for imitation, which in this manner re-
quires that national services should almost
invariably be followed by confiscation and ex-
ile; and anticipates the overthrow of the public
liberties from the ascendency of every illus-
trious man, if he is not speedily sent into ban-
ishment] Is this the boasted intelligence of
the masses ] Is this the wisdom which demo-
cratic institutions bring to bear upon public
affairs 1 Is this the reward which, by a perma-
nent law of nature, freedom must ever provide
for the most illustrious of its champions 7 Why
is it necessary that great men and beneficent
statesmen or commanders should invariably
be exiled 1 The English constitution required
for its continuance the exile neither of Pitt nor
Fox, of .Nelson nor Wellington. The Roman
republic, until the fatal period when the au-
thority of the aristocracy was overthrown by
the growing encroachments of the plebeians,
retained all its illustrious citizens, with a few
well-known exceptions, in its own bosom : ar<d
the tomb of the Scipios still attests the num-
ber of that heroic race, who, with the exception
of the illustrious conqueror of Hannibal, the
victim, like Themistocles, of democratic jea-
lousy, were gathered to the tomb of their fa
thers. There is no necessity in a well-regulated
state, where the different powers are duly ba-
lanced, of subjecting the illustrious to the os-
tracism: good government provides against
danger without committing injustice.
Mr. Bulwer has candidly stated the' perni-
cious effect of those most vicious of the many
vicious institutions of Athens the exacting
tribute from their conquered and allied states
to the relief of the dominant multitude in the
ruling city; and the fatal devolution to the
whole citizens of the duties and responsibility
of judicial power. On the first subject he ob-
serves :
"Thus at home and abroad, time and for-
tune, the occurrence of events, and the happy
accident of great nwn, not only maintained the
present eminence of Athens, but promised, to
rdinary foresight, a long duration of her glory
and her power. To deeper observers, the pic-
ture might have presented dim, but prophetic
shadows. It was clear that the command .
Athens had obtained was utterly dispropor-
tioned to her natural resources that her great-
ness was altogether artificial, and rested partly
upon "moral rather than physical causes, and
partly upon the fears and the weakness of her
neighbours. A sterile soil, a limited territory,
a scanty population all these the drawbacks
and disadvantages of nature the wonderful
energy and confident daring of a free state
might conceal in prosperity ; but the first ca-
lamity could not fail to expose them to jealous
and hostile eyes. The empire delegated to the
Athenians, they must naturally desire to retain
and to increase; and there was every reason
o forebode that their ambition would soon ex-
ceed their capacities to sustain it. As the state
jecome accustomed to its power, it would learn
o abuse it. Increasing civilization, luxury, and
art, brought with them new expenses, and
Athens had already been permitted to indulge
h impunity the dangerous passion of ex-
acting tribute from her neighbours. Dependence
ipon other resources than those of the native
lopulation has ever been a main cause of the
destruction of despotisms, and it cannot fail,
sooner or later, to be equally pernicious to the
republics that trust to it. The resources of
v 2
234
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
taxation confined to freemen and natives, are
almost incalculable : the resources of tribute
wrung from foreigners and dependents, are
sternly limited and terribly precarious they
rot away the true spirit of industry in th<
people that demand the impost they implan
ineradicable hatred in the states that concede
it."
There can be no doubt that these observa
tions are well-founded; and let us beware
lest they become applicable to ourselves. Al-
ready in the policy of England has been evinced
a sufficient inclination to load colonial industry
with oppressive duties, to the relief of the do-
minant island, as the enormous burdens im-
posed on West India produce, to the entire re-
lief of the corresponding agricultural produce at
home, sufficiently demonstrates. And if the pre
sent democratic ascendency in this country
should continue unabated for any considerable
time, we venture to prophesy, that if no other and
more immediate cause of ruin sends the com-
monwealth to perdition, it will infallibly see
its colonial empire break off, and consequently
its maritime power destroyed, by the injustice
done to, or the burdens imposed on, its colo-
nial possessions, by the impatient ruling mul-
titude at home, who, in any measure calculated
to diminish present burdens on themselves, at
whatever cost to their colonial dependencies,
will ever see the most expedient and popular
course of policy.*
The other enormous evil of the Athenian
constitution viz., the exercise of judicial
powers of the highest description by a mob
of several thousand citizens, is thus described
by our author :
"A yet more pernicious evil in the social
state of the Athenians was radical in their con-
stitution, it was their courts of justice. Pro-
ceeding upon a theory that must have seemed
specious and plausible to an inexperienced and
infant republic, Solon had laid it down as a
principle of his code, that as all men were in-
terested in the preservation of law, so all men
might exert the privilege of the plaintiff and
accuser. As society grew more complicated,
the door was thus opened to every species of
vexatious charge and frivolous litigation. The
common informer became a most harassing
and powerful personage, and made one of a
fruitful and crowded profession : and in the
very capital of liberty there existed the worst
species of espionage. But justice was not
thereby facilitated. The informer was regarded
with universal hatred and contempt ; and it is
easy to perceive, from the writings of the
great comic poet, that the sympathies of the
Athenian audience were, as those of the Eng-
lish public at this day, enlisted against the
man who brought the inquisition of the law to
the hearth of his neighbour.
"Solon committed a yet more fatal and in-
curable error when he carried the democratic
principle into judicial tribunals. He evidently
considered that the very strength and life of
his constitution rested in the Heliaea a court
the numbers and nature of which have been
already described. Perhaps, at a time when
* How soon has this prophecy been accomplished?
Sept. 5, 1844.
the old oligarchy was yet so formidable, it
might have been difficult to secure justice to
the poorer classes, while the judges were se-
lected from the wealthier. But justice to all
classes became a yet more capricious uncer-
tainty when a court of law resembled a popu-
lar hustings.
"If we intrust a wide political suffrage to
the people, the people at least hold no trust for
others than themselves and their posterity
they are not responsible to the public, for they
are the public. But in law, where there are two
parties concerned, the plaintiff and defendant,
the judge should not only be incorruptible, but
strictly responsible. In Athens the people be-
came the judge ; and, in offences punishable by
fine, were the very party interested in procuring
condemnation ; the numbers of the jury prevent-
ed all responsibility, excused all abuses, and
made them susceptible of the same shameless
excesses that characterize self-elected corpora-
tions from which appeal is idle, and over
which public opinion exercises no control.
These numerous, ignorant, and passionate as-
semblies, were liable at all times to the heats
of party, to the eloquence of individuals
to the whims, and caprices, the prejudices, the
impatience, and the turbulence, which must
ever be the characteristics of a multitude orally
addressed. It was evident also that from ser-
vice in such a court, the wealthy, the eminent,
and the learned, with other occupation or
amusement, would soon seek to absent them-
selves. And the final blow to the integrity
and respectability of the popular judicature
was given at a later period by Pericles, when
ic instituted a salary, just sufficient to tempt
he poor and to be disdained by the affluent,
to every dicast or juryman in the ten ordinary
courts. Legal science became not the pro-
ession of the erudite and the laborious few,
nut the livelihood of the ignorant and idle mul-
itude. The canvassing the cajoling the
Bribery that resulted from this, the most
vicious, institution of the Athenian democracy
are but too evident and melancholy tokens
f the imperfection of human wisdom. Life,
jroperty, and character, were at the hazard of
a popular election. These evils must have
seen long in progressive operation; but per-
laps they were scarcely visible till the fatal
nnovation of Pericles, arid the flagrant ex-
cesses that ensued allowed the people them-
selves to listen to the branding and terrible
satire upon the popular judicature, which is
still preserved to us in the comedy of Aristo-
phanes.
At the same lime, certain critics and his-
orians have widely and grossly erred in snp-
?osing that these courts of ' the sovereign
multitude' were partial to the poor, and hostile
o the rich. All testimony proves that the fact
was lamentably the reverse. The defendant
was accustomed to engage the persons of rank
>r influence whom he might number as his
riends, to appear in court on his behalf. And
>roperty was employed to procure at the bar
)f justice the suffrages it could command at a
>olitical election. The greatest vice of the
democratic Helisea was, that by a fine the
wealthy could purchase pardon by interest
BULWER'S ATHENS.
235
the great could soften law. But the chanc.es
were against the poor man. To him litigation
was indeed cheap, but justice dear. He had
much the same inequality to struggle against
in a suit with a powerful antagonist, that he
would have had in contesting with him for an
office in the administration. In all trials rest-
ing on the voice of popular assemblies, it ever
has been and ever will be found, that, rcsteris
paribus, the aristocrat will defeat the plebeian."
These observations are equally just and lu
minous ; and the concluding one in particular,
as to the tendency of a corrupt or corruptible
judicial multitude to decide in favour of the
rich aristocrat in preference to the poor ple-
beian, in an author of Mr. Bulwer's prepos-
sessions, highly creditable. The only surpris-
ing thing is how an author, who could see so
clearly, and express so well, the total incapa-
city of a multitude to exercise the functions
of a judge, should not have perceived, that, for
the same reason, they are disqualified from
taking an active part to any good or useful
purpose in the formation of laws or practical
administration of government, except by pre-
serving a vigilant eye on the conduct of others.
In fact, the temptations to the poor to swerve
from the path of rectitude, or conscience, in
the case of government appointments or mea-
sures, are just as much the stronger than in
the judgment of individuals, as the subjects
requiring investigation are more intricate or
difficult, the objects of contention more import-
ant and glittering, and the wealth which will
be expended in corruption more abundant.
And there in truth lies the eternal objection to
democratic institutions, that, by withdrawing
the people from their right province that of
the censors or controllers of government and
vesting in them the perilous powers of actual
administration or direction of affairs, they ne-
cessarily expose them to such a deluge of flat-
tery or corruption, from the eloquent or wealthy
candidates for power, as not merely unfits them
for the sober or rational discharge of any pub-
lic duties, but utterly confounds and depraves
their moral feelings; and induces, before the
time when it would naturally arrive, that uni-
versal corruption of opinion which speedily
attaches no other test to public actions but
success, and leads men to consider the exer-
cise of public duties as nothing but the means
of individual elevation or aggrandizement.
We have given some passages from Mr.
Bulwer from which we dissent, or in the prin-
ciples of which we differ. Let us now, in
justice both to his principles and his powers
of description, give a few others, in which we
cordially concur, or for which we feel the high-
est admiration. The first is the description of
the memorable conduct of the Laconian go-
vernment, upon occasion of the dreadful revolt
of the Helots which followed the great earth-
quake which nearly overthrew Lacedeemon,
and rolled the rock of Mount Taygetus into the
streets of Sparta
"An earthquake, unprecedented in its vio-
lence, occurred in Sparta. In many places
throughout Laconia, the rocky soil was rent '
asunder. From Mount Taygetus, which over- j
hung the city, and on which the women of j
Lacedaemon were wont to hold their bacchana-
lian orgies, huge fragments rolled into the
i suburbs. The greater portion of the city was
absolutely overthrown; and it is said, proba-
bly with exaggeration, that only five houses
wholly escaped the shock. This terrible cala-
mity did not cease suddenly as it came ; its
concussions were repeated; it buried alike
men and treasure: could we credit Diodorus,
no less, than twenty thousand persons perished
in the shock. Thus depopulated, impoverished,
and distressed, the enemies whom the cruelty
of Sparta nursed within her bosom, resolved
to seize the moment to execute their ven-
geance, and consummate her destruction. Un-
der Pausanias, we have seen before, that the
Helots were already ripe for revolt. The death
of that fierce conspirator checked, but did not
crush, their designs of freedom. Now was
the moment, when Sparta lay in ruins
now was the moment to realize their dreams.
From field to field, from village to village, the
news of the earthquake became the watchword
of revolt. Up rose the Helots they armed
themselves, they poured on a wild and gather-
ing and relentless multitude resolved to slay,
by the wrath of man, all whom that of nature
had yet spared. The earthquake that levelled
Sparta, rent her chains ; nor did the shock
create one chasm so dark and wide as that be-
tween the master and the slave.
" It is one of the sublimest and most awful
spectacles in history that city in ruins the
earth still trembling the grim and dauntless
soldiery collected amidst piles of death and
ruin ; and in such a time, and such a scene,
the multitude sensible, not of danger, but of
wrong, and rising, not to succour, but to re-
venge : all that should have disarmed a fee-
bler enmity, giving fire to theirs; the dreadest
calamity their blessing dismay their hope : it
was as if the Great Mother herself had sum-
moned her children to vindicate the long-
abused, the all-inalienable heritage derived
from her ; and the stir of the angry elements
was but the announcement of an armed and
solemn union between Nature and the Op-
pressed.
" Fortunately for Sparta, the danger was not
altogether unforeseen. After the confusion
and horror of the earthquake, and while the
people, dispersed, were seeking to save their
effects, Archidamus, who, four years before,
had succeeded to the throne of Lacedoemon,
ordered the trumpets to sound as to arms.
That wonderful superiority of man over mat-
ter which habit and discipline can effect, and
which was ever so visible amongst the Spar-
tans, constituted their safety at that hour.
Forsaking the care of their property, the Spar-
tans seized their arms, flocked around their
king, and drew up in disciplined array. In
tier most imminent crisis, Sparta was thus
saved. The Helots approached, wild, disor-
derly, and tumultuous ; they came intent only
to plunder and to slay; they expected to find
scattered and affrighted foes they found a
formidable army ; their tyrants were still their
lords. They saw, paused, and fled, scattering
themselves over the country exciting all they
met to rebellion, and, soon, joined with the
23fi
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
Messenians. kindred to them by blood and an-
cient reminiscences of heroic struggles, they j
seized that same It home which their hereditary
Aristodemus had before occupied with unfor- :
gotten valour. This they fortified ; and occu- <
pying also the neighbouring lands, declared ]
open war upon their lords. As the Messe- j
nians were the more worthy enemy, so the
general insurrection is known by the name of
the Third Messenian War."
The incident here narrated of the King of
Sparta, amidst the yawning of the earthquake !
and the ruin of his capital, sounding the trum-
pets to arms, and the Lacedjemonians assem- I
blirig in disciplined array around him, is one j
of the sublimest recorded in history. The |
pencil of Martin would there find a fit subject
lor its noblest efforts. We need not wonder
that a people, capable of such conduct in such
a moment, and trained by discipline and habit
to such docility in danger, should acquire and
maintain supreme dominion in Greece.
The next passage with which we shall gra-
tify our readers, is an eloquent eulogium on a
marvellous topic the unrivalled grace and
beauty of the Athenian edifices, erected in the
time of Pericles.
" Then rapidly progressed those glorious fa-
brics which seemed, as Plutarch gracefully
expresses it, endowed with the bloom of a
perennial youth. Still the houses of private
citizens remained simple and unadorned; still
were the streets narrow and irregular; and
even centuries afterwards, a stranger entering
Athens would not at first have recognised the
claims of the mistress of Grecian art. But to
the homeliness of her common thoroughfares
and private mansions, the magnificence of her
public edifices now made a dazzling contrast.
The Acropolis that towered above the homes
and thoroughfares of men a spot too sacred
for human habitation became, to use a pro-
verbial phrase, 'a city of the gods.' The citi-
zen was everywhere to be reminded of the
majesty of the STATE his patriotism was to
be increased by the pride in her beauty his
taste to be elevated by the spectacle of her
splendour. Thus flocked to Athens all who
throughout Greece were eminent in art. Sculp-
tors and architects vied with each other in
adorning the young Empress of the Seas ; then
rose the masterpieces of Phidias, of Callicrates,
of Menesicles, which, even either in their
broken remains, or in the feeble copies of imi-
tators less inspired, still command so intense
a wonder, and furnish models so immortal.
And if, so to speak, their bones and relics ex-
cite our awe and envy, as testifying of a love-
lier and grander race, which the deluge of time
has swept away, what, in that day, must have
been their brilliant effect unmutilated in their
fair proportions fresh in all their lineaments
and hues 1 For their beauty was not limited
to the symmetry of arch and column, nor their
materials confined to the marbles of Pentelli-
cus and -Faros. Even the exterior of the
temples glowed with the richest harmony of
colours, and was decorated with the purest
gold; an atmosphere peculiarly favourable
both to the display and the preservation of art,
permitted to external pediments and friezes all
the minuteness of ornament all the brilliancy
of colours; such as in the interior of Italian
churches may yet be seen vitiated, in the last,
by a gaudy and barbarous taste. Nor did the
Athenians spare any cost upon the works that
were, like the tombs and tripods of their he-
roes, to be ihe monuments of a nation to dis-
tant ages, and to transmit the most irrefragable
proof 'that the power of ancient Greece was
not an idle legend.' The whole democracy
were animated with the passion of Pericles ;
arid when Phidias recommended marble as a
cheaper material than ivory for the great sta-
tue of Minerva, it was for that reason that
ivory was preferred by the unanimous voice of
the assembly. Thus, whether it were extrava-
gance or magnificence, the blame in one case,
the admiration in another, rests not more with
the minister than the populace. It was, in-
deed, the great characteristic of those works,
that they were entirely the creations of the
people : without the people, Pericles could not
have built a temple, or engaged a sculptor.
The miracles of that day resulted from the
enthusiasm of a population yet young full of
the first ardour for the beautiful dedicating
to the state, as to a mistress, the trophies ho-
nourably won, or the treasures injuriously
extorted and uniting the resources of a na-
tion with the energy of an individual, because
the toil, the cost, were borne by those who
succeeded to the enjoyment and arrogated the
glory."
This is eloquently said: but in searching
for the causes of the Athenian supremacy in
taste and art, especially sculpture and architec-
ture, we suspect the historic observer must
look for higher and more spiritual causes than
the mere energy and feverish excitement of
democratic institutions. For, admitting that
energy and universal exertion are in every
age the characteristic of republican states, how
did it happen that, in Athens alone, it took so
early and decidedly the direction of taste and
art? That is the point which constitutes the
marvel, as well as the extraordinary perfection
which it at once acquired. Many other nations
in ancient and modern times have been re-
publican, Corinth, Tyre, Carthage, Sidon,
Sardis, Syracuse, Marseilles, Holland, Switzer-
land, America, but where shall we find one
which produced the Parthenon or the Apollo
Belvidere, the Tragedies of ^Eschylus or the
wisdom of Socrates, the thought of Thucydides
or the visions of Plato? How has it happened
that those democratic institutions, which in
modern times are found to be generally as-
sociated only with vulgar manners, urban dis-
cord, or commercial desires, should there have
elevated the nation in a few years to the high-
est pinnacle of intellectual glory that, instead
of Dutch ponderosity, or Swiss slowness, of
American ambition, or Florentine discord, re-
publicanism on the shores of Attica produced
the fire of Demosthenes, the grace of Euripides,
the narrative ofXenophon,the taste of Phidias?
After the most attentive consideration, we find
it impossible to explain this marvel of marvels
by the agency merely of human causes ; and
are constrained to ascribe the placing of the
eye of Greece on the shores of Attica to the
BULWER'S ATHENS.
237
same invisible hand which has fixed the won- 1 bucklers, waited with a stern patience the
ders of vision in the human forehead. There | time of their leader and of Heaven. Then fell
are certain starts in human progress, and more
especially in the advance of art, which it is
utterly hopeless to refer to any other cause but
the immediate design and agency of the Al
mighty. Democratic institutions afford no sort
of explanation of them : we see no Parthenons
nor Sophocles, nor Platos in embryo, either in
America since its independence, or France
during the Revolution, nor England since the
passing of the Reform Bill. When we reflect
that taste, in Athens, in thirty years after the
Persian invasion, had risen up from the in-
fantine rudeness of the JGgina Marbles to the
faultless peristyle and matchless sculpture of
the Parthenon; that in modern Italy, the art of
painting rose in the lifetime of a single in
dividual, who died at the age of thirty-eight,
from the stiff outline and hard colouring of
Pietro Perrugino to the exquisite grace of
Raphael: and that it was during an age when
the barons to the north of the Alps could nei-
ther read nor write, and when rushes were
strewed on the floors instead of carpets, lhat
the unrivalled sublimity of Gothic Cathedrals
was conceived, and the hitherto unequalled
skill of their structure attained : we are con-
strained to admit that a greater power than
that of man superintends human affairs, and
that, from the rudest and most unpromising
materials, Providence can, at the appointed
season, bring forth the greatest and most ex-
aJted efforts of human intellect.
As a favourable specimen of our author's
powers of military description, no unimport
ant quality in an historian, we shall gratify our
readers by his account of the battle of Platea;
the most vital conflict to the fortunes of the
species which occurred in all antiquity, and
which we have never elsewhere read in so
graphic and animated a form
"As the troops of Mardonius advanced, the
rest of the Persian armament, deeming the
task was now not to fight but to pursue, raised
their standards and poured forward tumultu-
ously, without discipline or order.
" Pausanias, pressed by the Persian line,
and if not of a timorous, at least of an irre-
solute, temper, lost no time in sending to the
Athenians for succour. But when the latter
were on their march with the required aid,
they were suddenly intercepted by the auxiliary
Greeks in the Persian service, and cutoff from
the rescue of the Spartans.
"The Spartans beheld themselves thus left
unsupported, with considerable alarm. Yet
their force, including the Tegeans and Helots,
was fifty-three thousand men. Committing
himself to the gods, Pausanias ordained a
solemn sacrifice, his whole army awaiting the
result, while the shafts of the Persian bowmen
poured on them near and fast. But the entrails
presented discouraging omens, and the sacri-
fice was again renewed. Meanwhile the Spar-
tans evinced their characteristic fortitude and
discipline not one man stirring from his
ranks until the auguries should assume a
more favouring aspect; all harassed, and
some wounded, by the Persian arrow?, they
yet, seeking protection only beneath their broad
Callicrates, the stateliest and strongest soldier
in the whole army, lamenting, not death, but
that his sword was as yet undrawn against
the invader.
"And still sacrifice after sacrifice seemed to
forbid the battle, when Pausanias, lifting his
eyes that streamed with tears, to the temple
of Juno, that stood hard by, supplicated the
tutelary goddess of Cithseron, that if the fates
forbade the Greeks to conquer, they might at
least fall like warriors. And while uttering
this prayer, the tokens waited for became
suddenly visible in the victims, and the augurs
announced the promise of coming victory.
" Therewith, the order of battle rang instant-
ly through the army, and, to use the poetical
comparison of Plutarch, the Spartan phalanx
suddenly stood forth in its strength, like some
fierce animal erecting its bristles and pre-
paring its vengeance for the foe. The ground
broken in many steep and precipitous ridges,
and intersected by the Asopus, whose sluggish
.stream winds over a broad and rushy bed, was
unfavourable to the movements of cavalry,
and the Persian foot advanced therefore on
the Greeks.
"Drawn up in their massive phalanx, the
Lacedaemonians presented an almost impene-
trable body sweeping slowly on, compact and
serried whi!e the hot and undisciplined va-
lour of the Persians, more fortunate in the
skirmish than the battle, broke itself in a
thousand waves upon that moving rock. Pour-
ing on in small numbers at a time, they fell
fast round the progress of the Greeks their
armour slight against the strong pikes of
Sparta their courage without skill their
numbers without discipline; still they fought
gallantly, even when on the ground seizing
the pikes with their naked hands, and with the
wonderful agility which still characterizes the
Oriental swordsmen, springing to their feet,
and regaining their arms, when seemingly over-
come; wresting away their enemy's shields, and
grappling with them desperately hand to hand.
" Foremost of a band of a thousand chosen
Persians, conspicuous by his white charger,
and still more by his daring valour, rode Mar-
donius, directing the attack fiercer wherever
his armour blazed. Inspired by his presence,
the Persians fought worthily of their warlike
fame, and, even in falling, thinned the Spartan
ranks. At length the rash but gallant leader
of the Asiatic armies received a mortal wound
his skull was crushed in by a stone from the
hand of a Spartan. His chosen band, the boast
of the army, fell fighting round him, but his
death was the general signal of defeat and flight.
Encumbered by their long robes, and pressed
by the relentless conquerors, the Pershns fled
in disorder towards their camp, which was
secured by wooden entrenchments, by gates,
and towers and walls. Here, fortifying them-
selves a.s they best migh% they cont Mitl^d suc-
cessfully, and with advantage, against the
Licedremonians, who were ill skilled in assault
and siege.
"Meanwhile, the Athenians obtained the
victory on the plains over the Greeks of Mar-
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
donius finding their most resolute enemy in
the Thebans (three hundred of whose princi-
pal warriors fell in the field) and now joined
the Spartans at the Persian camp. The Athe-
nians are said to have been better skilled in
the art of siege than the Spartans ; yet at that
time their experience could scarcely have been
greater. The Athenians were at all limes,
however, of a more impetuous temper; and
the men who had ' run to the charge' at Mar-
athon, were not to be baffled by the desperate
remnant of their ancient foe. They scaled the
walls they effected a breach through which
the Tegeans were the first to rush the Greeks
poured fast and fierce into the camp. Appalled,
dismayed, stupified, by the suddenness and
greatness of their loss, the Persians no longer
sustained their fame they dispersed them-
selves in all directions, falling, as they fled,
with a prodigious slaughter, so that out of that
mighty armament scarce three thousand effect-
ed an escape."
Our limits will admit of only one extract
more, but it is on a different subject, and ex-
hibits Mr. Bulwer's powers of criticism in the
fields of poetry and romance, with which he
has long been familiar:
" Summoning before us the eternal character
of the Athenian drama, the vast audience, the
unroofed and enormous theatre, the actors
themselves enlarged by art above the ordinary
proportions of men, the solemn and sacred
subjects from which its form and spirit were
derived, we turn to J3schylus, and behold at
once the fitting creator of its grand and ideal
personifications. I have said that Homer was
his original; but a more intellectual age than
that of the Grecian epic had arrived, and with
^Eschylus, philosophy passed into poetry.
The dark doctrine of Fatality imparted its
stern and awful interest to the narration of
events men were delineated, not as mere self-
acting and self-willed mortals, but as the agents
of a destiny inevitable and unseen the gods
themselves are no longer the gods of Homer,
entering into the sphere of human action for
petty motives, and for individual purposes
drawing their grandeur, not from the part they
perform, but from the descriptions of the poet;
they appear now as the oracles or the agents
of fate they are visitors from another world,
terrible and ominous from the warnings which
they convey. Homer is the creator of the ma-
terial poetry, JEschylus of the intellectual.
The corporeal and animal sufferings of the
Titan in the epic hell become exalted by tragedy
into the portrait of moral fortitude defying
physical anguish. The Prometheus of ^Eschy-
lus is the spirit of a god disdainfully subjected
to the misfortunes of a man. In reading this
wonderful performance, which in pure and
sustained sublimity is perhaps unrivalled in
the literature of the world, we lose sight
entirely of the cheerful Hellenic worship; and
yet it is in vain that the learned attempt to
trace its vague and mysterious metaphysics to
any old symbolical religion of the east. More
probably, whatever theological system it
shadows forth, was rather the gigantic con-
ception of the poet himself, than the imperfect
revival of any forgotten creed, or the poetical
disguise of any existent philosophy. How-
ever this be, it would certainly seem, that in
'this majestic picture of the dauntless enemy
of Jupiter, punished only for his benefits to
man, and attracting all our sympathies by his
courage and his benevolence, is conveyed
something of disbelief or defiance of the creed
of the populace a suspicion from which
^Eschylus was not free in the judgment of his
contemporaries, and which is by no means in-
consonant with the doctrines of Pythagoras."
Mr. Bulwer justifies this warm eulogium by
some beautiful translations. We select his
animated version of the exquisite passage so
well known to scholars, where Clytemnestra de-
scribes to the chorus the progress of the watch-
fires which announced to expecting Greece the
fall of Troy a passage perhaps unrivalled in
the classical authors in picturesque and vivid
images, and which approaches more nearly,
though it has surpassed in sublimity, Sir Wal-
ter Scott's description of the bale-fires which
announced to the Lothians a warden inroad of
the English forces :
" A gleam a gleam from Ida's height,
By the Fire-god sent, it came ;
From watch to watch it leapt that light,
As a rider rode the Flame !
It phot through the startled sky,
And the torch of that blazing glory
Old Lemnos caught on high,
On its holy promontory.
And sent it on, the jocund sign,
To Athos, Mount of Jove divine.
Wildly the while, it rose from the isle,
So that the might of the journeying light
Skimmed over the back of the gleaming brine
Farther and faster speeds it on,
Till the watch that keep Macistus steep-
See it burst like a blazing sun!
Doth Macistus sleep
On his townr-clad steep?
No ! rapid and red doth the wild fire sweep ;
It flashes afar, on the wayward stream
Of the wild Euripus, the rushing beam !
It rouses the lieht on Messapion's height,
And they feed its breath with the withered heath.
But it may not stay!
And away away
It bounds in its freshening might.
Silent and soon,
Like a broadened moon,
It passes in sheen, Asopus green,
And hursts on Cithseron Cray :
The warder wakes to the signal-rays,
And it swoops from the hill with a broader biaee,
On on the fiery glory rode
Thy lonely lake, Gorgopis, glowed
To Megara's mount it came ;
They feed it again,
And it streams amain
A giant beard of flame !
The headland cliffs that darkly down
O'er the Saronic waters frown,
Are pass'd with the swift one's lurid stride,
And the husre rock glares on the glaring tide,
With mightier march and fiercer power
It pained Arachne's neiphhotiring tower
Thence on our Arsive roof its rest it won,
Of Ida's fire the long-descended Son !
Brieht ha Hunger of glory and of joy !
So first and last with equal honour crown'd,
In solemn feasts the race-torch circlea round.
And ihese my heralds ! this my SIGN OF PEACE;
Lo ! while we breathe, the victor lords of Greece,
Stalk, in stern tumult, through the halls of Troy."
We have now discharged the pleasing duty
of quoting some of the gems, and pointing out
some of the merits of this remarkable work.
It remains with equal impartiality, and in no
unfriendly spirit, to glance at some of its faults
faults which, we fear, will permanently pre-
vent it from taking the place to which it is en-
BULWER'S ATHENS.
239
titled, from its brilliancy and research, in the
archives of literature.
The first of these defects is the constant
effort which is made to justify the proceedings,
and extenuate the faults, and magnify the |
merits of democratic societies ; and the equally
uniform attempt to underrate the value of
aristocratic institutions, and blacken the pro-
ceedings of aristocratic states. This, as
Fouche would say, is worse than an offence
it is a fault. Its unfairness and absurdity is
so obvious, that it neutralizes and obliterates
the effect which otherwise might be produced
by the brilliant picture which Mr. Bulwer's
transcendent subject, as well as his own re-
markable powers of narrative and description,
afford. By the common calculation of chances,
it is impossible to suppose that the aristocra-
cies are always in the wrong, and the demo-
cracies always in the right; that the former
are for ever actuated by selfish, corrupt, and
discreditable motives, and the latter everlast-
ingly influenced by generous, ennobling, and \
upright feelings. We may predicate with per- '
feet certainty of any author, be he aristocratic,
monarchical, or republican, who indulges in
such a strain of thought and expression, ex-
travagant eulogiums from his own party in
the outset, and possibly undeserved but certain
neglect from posterity in the end. Mankind,
in future times, when present objects and party
excitement have ceased, will never read or,
at least, never attach faith to any works
which place all the praise on the one side and
all the blame to the other of any of the child-
ren of Adam. Rely upon it, virtue and vice
are very equally divided in the world: praise
and blame require to be very equally bestowed.
Different institutions produce a widely different
effect upon society and the progress of human
affairs: but it is not because the one makes
all men good, the other all men bad ; but be-
cause the one permits the bad or selfish quali-
ties of one class to exercise an unrestrained
influence the other, because it arrays against
their excesses the bad or selfish qualities of
the other classes. All theories of government
founded upon the virtue of mankind or the per-
fectability of human nature, will, to the end of
the world, be disproved by the experience, and
discarded by the common sense of mankind.
Mother Eve has proved, and will prove, more
than a match for the strongest of her descend-
ants. Instability, selfishness, folly, ambition,
rapacity, ever have and ever will characterize
alike democratic and aristocratic societies and
governors. The wisdom of government and
political philosophy consists not in expecting
or calculating on impossibilities from a cor-
rupted being, but in so arranging society and
political powers that the selfishness and ra-
pacity of the opposite classes of which it is
composed may counteract each other.
The second glaring defect is the asperity
and bitterness with which the author speaks
of those who differ from him in political opi-
nion. He in an especial manner is unceasing
in his attacks upon Mr. Mitford : the historian
whose able researches have added so much to
our correct infor.nation on the state of the
Grecian commonwealth. Here, too, ij more
than an impropriety there is a fault. By dis-
playing such extraordinary bitterness on the
subject, Mr. Bulwer clearly shows that he feels
the weight of the Mitford fire ; the strokes de-
livered have been so heavy that they have
been felt. Nothing could be more impolitic
than this, even for the interests of the party
which he supports. It is not by perpetually
attacking an author on trifling points or minor
inaccuracies that you are to deaden or neutra-
lize the impression he has made on mankind:
it is by stating facts, and adducing arguments
inconsistent with his opinions. The maxim,
" ars est edare artem" nowhere applies more
clearly than here : Lingard is the model of a
skilful controversialist, whose whole work,
sedulously devoted to the upholding of the
Catholic cause through the whole history of
England, hardly contains a single angry or en-
venomed passage against a protestant histori-
an. Mr. Bulwer would be much the better of
the habits of the bar, before he ventured into
the arena of political conflict. It is not by his
waspish notes that the vast influence of Mit-
ford's Greece on public thought is to be obvi-
ated : their only effect is to diminish the force
of his attempted and otherwise able refutation.
The future historian, who is to demolish the
influence of Colonel Napier's eloquent and
able/ but prejudiced and, in political affairs,
partial history of the Peninsular war, will
hardly once mention his name.
The last and by far the most serious objec-
tion to Mr. Bulwer's work is the complete
oblivion which it evinces of a superintending
Providence, either in dealing out impartial
retribution to public actions, w r hether by na-
tions or individuals in this world, or in deduc-
ing from the agency of human virtue or vice,
and the shock of conflicting passions, the
means of progressive improvement. We do
not say that Mr. Bulwer is irreligious; far
from it. From the brightness of his genius,
as well as many exquisite passages in his
novels, we should infer the reverse, and we
hope yet to see his great powers exerted in
the noblest of labours, that of tracing the wis-
dom of Providence amidst the mighty maze
of human events. We say only that he as-
cribes no influence in human affairs to a su-
perintending agency. This is being behind
the age. It is lagging in arrear of his com-
peers. The vast changes consequent on the
French Revolution have blown the antiquated
oblivion of Providence in Raynal or Voltaire
out of the water. The convulsions they had
so large a share in creating have completely
s.et at rest their irreligious dogmas. Here,
too, Mr. Bulwer has fallen into an imprudence,
for his own sake, as much as an error. If he
will take the trouble to examine the works
which are rising into durable celebrity in this
country, those which are to form the ideas of
la jntnt Jlngletcrre, he will find them all, with-
out being fanatical, religious in their tendency.
For obvious reasons we do not 'give the names
of living authors ; but we admire Mr. Bulwer's
talents; we would fain, for the sake of the public,
see them enlisted in the Holy Alliance for the
sake of himself, fall in more with the risingspi-
rit of the age; and we give a word to the wise
240
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
As an example of the defect of which we
complain, and to avoid the suspicion of injus-
tice in the estimate we have formed of the
tendency in this particular of his writings, we
shall give an extract. Perhaps there is no
event in the history of the world which has
fceen so momentous in its consequences, so
vital in its effects, as the repulse of the Per-
sian invasion of Greece by Xerxes, and none
ia which the superintending agency of an
overruling Providence was so clearly evinced.
Observe the reflections which Mr. Bulwer de-
duces from this memorable event.
" When the deluge of the Persian arms rolled
back to its eastern bed, and the world was once
more comparatively at rest, the continent of
Greece rose visibly and majestically above the
rest of the civilized earth. Afar in the Latian
plains, the infant state of Rome was silently
and obscurely struggling into strength against
the neighbouring and petty states in which the
old Etrurian civilization was rapidly passing
to decay. The genius of Gaul and Germany,
yet unredeemed from barbarism, lay scarce
known, save where colonized by Greeks, in the
gloom of its woods and wastes. The pride of
Carthage had been broken by a signal defeat
in Sicily; and Gelo, the able and astute tyrant
of Syracuse, maintained, in a Grecian colony,
the splendour of the Grecian name.
"The ambition of Persia, still the great mo-
narchy of the world, was permanently checked
and crippled; the strength of generations had
been wasted, and the immense extent of the
empire only served yet more to sustain the
general peace, from the exhaustion of its
forces. The defeat of Xerxes paralyzed the
East.
" Thus, Greece was left secure, and at liberty
to enjoy the tranquillity it had acquired, and
to direct to the arts of peace the novel and
amazing energies which had been prompted
by the danger*, and exalted by the victories,
of war.
"The Athenians, now returned to their city,
Saw before them the arduous task of rebuild-
ing its ruins, and restoring its wasted lands.
The vicissitudes of the war had produced many
silent and internal, as well as exterior, changes.
Many great fortunes had been broken ; and the
ancient spirit of the aristocracy had received
no inconsiderable shock in the power of new
families; the fame of the base-born and demo-
cratic Themistocles and the victories which
a whole people had participated broke up
much of the prescriptive and venerable sanc-
tity attached to ancestral names, and to parti-
cular families. This was salutary to the spirit
of enterprise in all classes. The ambition of
the grc-at was excited to restore, by some active
means, their broken fortunes and decaying in-
fluence the energies of the humbler ranks,
already aroused by their new importance, were
stimulated to maintain and to increase it. It
was the very crisis in which a new direction
might be given to the habits and the character
of a whole people; and to seize all the advan-
tages of that crisis, FATE, in Themistocles, had
allotted to Athens, a man whose qualities were
not only pre-eminently great in themselves, but
peculiarly adapted to the circumstances of the
time. And, as I have elsewhere remarked, it
is indeed the nature and prerogative of free
states, to concentrate the popular will into
something of the unity of despotism, by pro-
ducing, one after another, a series of repre-
sentatives of the wants and exigencies of The
Hour each leading his generation, but only
while he sympathizes with its will ; and either
baffling or succeeded by his rivals, not in pro-
portion as he excels or he is outshone in ge-
nius, but as he gives, or ceases to give, to the
widest range of the legislative power, the most
concentrated force of the executive ; thus unit-
ing the desires of the greatest number, under
the administration of the narrowest possible
control ; the constitution popular the go-
vernment absolute but responsible."
Now, in this splendid passage is to be seen
a luminous specimen of the view taken of the
most memorable events in history by the libe-
ral writers. In his reflections on this heart-
stirring event, in his observations on the
glorious defeat of the arms of Eastern despot-
ism by the infant efforts of European freedom,
there is nothing said of the incalculable con-
sequences dependent on the struggle nothing
on the evident protection afforded by a super-
intending Providence to the arms of an incon-
siderable Republic nothing on the marvellous
adaptation of the character of Themistocles to
the mighty duty with which he was charged,
that of rolling back from the cradle of civil-
ization, freedom and knowledge, the wave of
barbaric conquests. It was FATE which raised
him up! Against such a view of human af-
fairs we enter our solemn protest. We allow
nothing to fate, unless that is meant as another
way of expressing the decrees of an overrul-
ing, all-seeing, and beneficent intelligence.
We see in the defeat of the mighty armament
by the arms of a small city on the Attic shore
in the character of its leaders in the efforts
which it made in the triumphs which it
achieved, and the glories which it won the
clearest evidence of the agency of a superin-
tending power, which elicited, from the collision
of Asiatic ambition with European freedom,
the wonders of Grecian civilization, and the
marvels of Athenian genius. And it is just
because we are fully alive to the important
agency of the democratic element in this me-
morable conflict ; because we see clearly what
inestimable blessings, when duly restrained, it
is capable of bestowing on mankind ; because
we trace in its energy in every succeeding
age the expansive force which has driven the
blessings of civilization into the recesses of
the earth, that we are the determined enemies
of those democratic concessions which entire-
Iv destroy the beneficent agency of this power-
ful element, which permit the vital heat of
society to burst forth in ruinous explosions, or
tear to atoms the necessary superincumbent
masses, and instead of the smiling aspect of
early and cherished vegetation, leave only in
its traces the blackness of desolation and the
ruin of nature.
THE REIGN OF TERROR.
241
THE REIGN OF TERROR.*
THE French Revolution is a subject on which
neither history nor public opinion have been
able as yet to pronounce an impartial verdict;
nor is it perhaps possible that the opinions of
mankind should ever be unanimous, upon the
varied events which marked its course. The
passions excited were so fierce, the dangers
incurred so tremendous, the sacrifices made
so great, that the judgment not only of con-
temporary but of future generations must be
warped in forming an opinion concerning it;
and as long as men are divided into liberal and
conservative parties, so long will they be at
variance in the views they entertain in regard
to the great strife which they first maintained
against each other.
There are some of the great events of this
terrible drama, however, concerning which
there appears now to be scarcely any discre-
pancy of opinion. The execution of the king
and the royal family the massacre of the
Girondists the slaughter in the prisons, are
generally admitted to have been, using Four-he's
words, not only crimes but faults; great errors
in policy, as well as outrageous violations of
the principles of humanity. These cruel and
unprecedented actions, by drawing the sword
and throwing away the scabbard, are allowed
to have dyed with unnecessary blood the
career of the Revolution; to have needlessly
exasperated parties against each other; and
by placing the leaders of the movement in the
terrible alternative of victory or death, rendered
their subsequent career one incessant scene
of crime and butchery. With the exception of
Levasseur de la Sarthe, the most sturdy and
envenomed of the republican writers, there is
no author with whom we are acquainted, who
now openly defends these atrocities ; who pre-
tends, in Barrere's words, that " the tree of
liberty cannot flourish unless it is watered by
the blood of kings and aristocrats ;" or seriously
argues that the regeneration of society must
be preceded by the massacre of the innocent
and the tears of the orphan.
But although the minds of men are nearly
agreed on the true character of these sangui-
nary proceedings, there is a great diversity of
opinion as to the necessity under which the
revolutionists acted, and the effects with which
they were attended on the progress of freedom.
The royalists maintain that the measures of
the Convention were as unnecessary as they
were atrocious ; that they plunged the progress
of social amelioration into an ocean of blood;
devastated France for years with fire and
sword ; brought to an untimely end above a
million of men ; and finally riveted about the
neck of the nation an iron despotism, as the
inevitable result and merited punishment of
such criminal excesses. The revolutionists,
* TTistoire de In Convention Nationtife. Par M. I, ,
Convfimionel Paris, 1*33. Foreign Quarterly Review,
No. XXV., February, 1831.
31
on the other hand, allege that these severities,
however much to be deplored, were unavoid-
able in the peculiar circumstances in which
France was then placed : they contend that the
obstinate resistance of the privileged classes to
all attempts at pacific amelioration, their im-
placable resentment for the deprivation of their
privileges, and their recourse to foreign bayo-
nets to aid in their recovery, left to their an-
tagonists no alternative but their extirpation ;
that in this " mortal strife " the royalists showed
themselves as unscrupulous in their means,
and would, had they triumphed, been as un-
sparing in their vengeance, as their adver-
saries ; and they maintain, that notwithstanding
all the disasters with which it has been at-
tended, the triumph of the Revolution has pro-
digiously increased the productive powers and
public happiness of France, and poured a flood
of youthful blood into her veins.
The historians of the Revolution, as might
have been expected, incline to one or other of
these two parties. Of these the latest and most
distinguished are Bertrand de Molleville and
Lacretelle on the royalist side, and Mignetand
Thiers on that of the Revolution, the reputation
of whose works is now too well established to
require us to enter here .into an appreciation
of their merits or defects, or to be affected by
our praise or our censure. The work now
before us, which is confined to the most stormy
and stirring period of the Revolution, does not
aspire, by its form, to a rivalry with all or any
of those we have just mentioned. It consists
of a series of graphic sketches of the National
Convention, drawn evidently by one well ac-
quainted with the actors in its terrific annals,
and interspersed with a narrative composed at
a subsequent period, with the aids which the
memoirs and historians of later times afford.
As such, it possesses a degree of interest equal
to any work on the same subject with which
we are acquainted. Not only the speeches, but
the attitudes, the manner, the appearance, and
very dress of the actors in the drama are
brought before our eyes. The author seems,
VA general, to speak in the delineation of cha-
racter from his own recollections ; the speeches
which he has reported are chiefly transcribed
from the columns of the Moniteur; but in some
instances, especially the conversations of
Danton, Robespierre, Barrere, and the other
leaders of the Jacobins, we suspect that he has
mingled his historical reminiscences with sub-
sequent acquisitions, and put into the mouths
of the leading characters of the day, prophecies
too accurate in their fulfilment to have been
the product of human sagacity. Generally
speaking, however, the work bears the impress
of intimate acquaintance with the events and
persons who are described; and although from
being published without a name, it has not the
guarantee for its authenticity which known
character and respectability afford, yet, in so
far as internal evidence is concerned, we are
X
242
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
inclined to rank it with the most faithful nar-
ratives of the events it records which have
issued from the press. Its general accuracy,
we are enabled, from a pretty extensive com-
parison of the latest authorities, to confirm.
We shall give some extracts, which, if we are
not greatly mistaken, will justify the tone of
commendation in which we have spoken of it.
The period at which the work commences
is the opening of the Convention, immediately
after the revolt on the 10th of August had over-
turned the throne, and when a legislature,
elected by almost universal suffrage, in a state
of unprecedented exasperation, was assembled
to regenerate the state.
Robespierre and Marat, the Agamemnon
and Ajax of the democracy, are thus ably
sketched :
" Robespierre and Marat enemies in secret,
to external appearance friends were early
distinguished in the Convention ; both dear to
the mob, but with different shades of character.
The latter paid his court to the lowest of the
low, to the men of straw or in rags, who were
then of so much weight in the political sys-
tem. The needy, the thieves, the cut-throats
in a word, the dregs of the people, the caput
mortuum of the human race, to a man supported
Marat.
" Robespierre, albeit dependent on the same
class to which his rival was assimilated by his
ugliness, his filth, his vulgar manners, and
disgusting habits, was nevertheless allied to a
more elevated division of it: to the shopkeep-
ers and scribes, small traders, and the inferior
rank of lawyers. These admired in him the
politesse bourgemfe ; his well-combed and pow-
dered head, the richness of his waistcoats, the
whiteness of his linen, the elegant cut of his
coats, his breeches, silk stockings carefully
drawn on, bright knee and shoe buckles ; every
thing, in short, bespoke the gentlemanly preten-
sions of Robespierre, in opposition to the sans-
culottism of Marat.
"The shopkeepers and the lower ranks of
the legal profession never identify themselves
with the populace, even during the fervour of
a revolution. There is in them an innate
spirit of feudality, which leads them to despise
the canaille and envy the noblesse : they de-
sire equality, but only with such as are above
themselves, not such as would confound them
with their workmen. The latter class is
odious to them ; they envy the great, but they
have a perfect horror for those to whom they
give employment; never perceiving that the
democratic principle can admit of no such
distinction. This is the reason which made
the aristocratic bmtrgeoise prefer Robespierre ;
they thought they saw in his manners, his
dress, his air, a certain pledge that he would
never degrade them to the multitude; never
associate them with those whose trade was
carried on in the mnd, like Marat's supporters.
Amidst these divisions, one fixed idea alone
united these opposite leaders; and that was,
to give such a pledge to the Revolution, as
would render it impossible to doubt their sin-
cerity, and that pledge was to be the blood of
Louis XVI." Vol. i. p. 28.
Roland and his wife, the beautiful victim of
Jacobin vengeance, are thus portrayed:
" Roland was a man of ordinary capacity,
but he obtained the reputation of genius by
means of his wife, who thought, wrote, and
spoke for him. She was a woman of a most
superior mind; with as much virtue as pride,
as much ambition as domestic virtue. Daugh-
ter of an engraver, she commenced her career
by wishing to contend with a queen ; and no
sooner had Marie Antoinette fallen, than she
seemed resolute to maintain the combat, no
longer against a person of her own sex, but
with the men who pretended to rival the repu-
tation of her husband.
" Madame Roland had great talent, but she
wanted tact and moderation. She belonged to
that class in the middling ranks that scarcely
knows what good breeding is; her manners
were too brusque ; she trusted implicitly to
her good intentions, and was quite indifferent
in regard to external appearances, which, after
all, are almost every thing in this world. Like
Marie Antoinette, she was master in her own
family; the former was king, the latter was
minister; her husband, whom she constantly
put forward, as often disappeared in her pre-
sence, which gave rise to the bon mot of Con-
dorcet: 'When I wish to see the minister of
the interior, I never can see any thing but the
petticoat of his wife.' This was strictly true :
persons on business uniformly applied to Ma-
dame Roland instead of the minister; and
whatever she may have said in her memoirs,
it is certain that unconsciously she opened the
portfolio with her own hand. She was to the
last degree impatient under the attacks of the
tribune, to which she had no means of reply,
and took her revenge by means of pamphlets
and articles in the public journals. In these
she kept up an incessant warfare, which Ro-
land sanctioned with his name, but in which
it was easy to discover the warm and brilliant
style of his wife " i. 38.
These observations exhibit a fair specimen
of the author's manner. It is nervous, brief,
and sententious, rather than eloquent or impres-
sive. The work is calculated to dispel many
illusions under which we, living at this dis-
tance, labour, in regard to the characters of the
Revolution. They are here exhibited in their
genuine colours, alike free from the dark shades
in which they have been enveloped by one party,
and the brilliant hues in which they are array-
ed by the other. In the descriptions, we see
the real springs of human conduct on this ele-
vated stage ; the same littlenesses, jealousies,
and weaknesses which are every day conspi-
cuous around us in private life.
The Girondists in particular are stripped of
their magic halo by his caustic hand. He dis-
plays in a clear light the weakness as well as
brilliant qualities of that celebrated party:
their ambition, intrigues, mob adulation, when
rising with the Revolution; their weakness,
irresolution, timidity, when assailed by its fury.
Their character is summed up in the following
words, which are put into the mouth of Lan-
juinais, one of the most intrepid and noble-
minded of the moderate party.
THE REIGN OF TERROR.
243
" The Girondists are in my mind a living
example of the truth of the maxim of Beaumar
chais : ' My God ! what idiots these men oi
talent are !' All their speeches delivered a
our tribune are sublime; their actions are in
explicable on any principles of common sense
They amuse themselves by exhausting thei:
popularity in insignificant attacks, and wast<
it by that means in such a manner that already
it is almost annihilated. They destroyed them
selves when they overturned the monarchy
they flattered themselves that they would reigr
afterwards by their virtue and their brillian
qualities, little foreseeing how soon the Jaco
bins would mount on their shoulders. At pre
sent, to maintain themselves in an equivoca
position, they will consent to the trial of the
king, flattering themselves that they will decide
his fate they are mistaken ; it is the Mountain
not they, that will carry the day. The Mountain
is so far advanced in the career of crime tha
it cannot recede. Besides, it is indispensable
for it to render the Gironde as guilty as itself
in order to deprive it of the possibility of treat
ing separately ; that motive will lead to the
destruction of Louis XVI." i. 142, 143.
These observations are perfectly just; whe-
ther they were made by Lanjuinais or not at the
period when they are said to have been spoken
may be doubtful ; but of this we are convinced
that they contain the whole theory and true
secret of the causes which convert popular
movements into guilty revolutions. It is the
early commission of crime which renders sub-
sequent atrocities unavoidable ; men engage
in the last deeds of cruelty to avoid the pun
ishment of the first acts of oppression. The
only rule which can with safety be followed,
either in political or private life, is uniformly
to abstain from acts of injustice ;. never to do
evil that good may come of it; but invariably to
ask, in reference to any proposed measure, not
merely whether it is expedient, but whether it
is just. If any other principle be adopted if
once the system is introduced of committing
acts of injustice or deeds of cruelty, from the
pressure of popular clamour, or the supposed
expediency of the measures, the career of guilt
is commenced, and can seldom be arrested.
The theory of public morals, complicated as
it may appear, is in reality nothing but a re-
petition, on a greater scale, of the measures
of virtue in private life ; crime cannot be com-
mitted with impunity in the one more than the
other, with this difference, that if the individuals
who commit the wrong escape retribution, it
will fall on the state to which they belong.
One of the most important steps in the pro-
gress of the Revolution, and from which so
much evil subsequently flowed, was the failure
in the impeachment of Marat by the Girondists
in 1792. Marat's defence on that occasion,
which is here given from the Moniteur, is a
choice specimen of the revolutionary talent
which thjn exercised so-powerful a sway.
"I am accused of having conspired with
Robespierre and Danton for a triumvirate;
that accusation has not a shadow of truth, ex-
cept so far as concerns myself. I am bound
in duty to declare that my colleagues, Danton
and Robespierre, have constantly rejected the
idea alike of a triumvirate or a dictatorship.
If any one is to blame for having scattered
these ideas among the public, it is myself; I
invoke on my own head the thunder of the na
tional vengeance but before striking, deign
to hear me.
" When the constituted authorities exerted
their power only to enchain the people ; to
murder the patriots under the name of the law,
can you impute it to me as a crime that I in-
voked against the wicked the tempest of popu-
lar vengeance? No if you call it a crime,
the nation would give you the lie ; obedient to
the law, they felt that the method I proposed
was the only one which could save them, and
assuming the rank of a dictator, they at once
purged the land of the traitors who infested
it.
"I shuddered at the vehement and disorderly
movements of the people, when I saw them
prolonged beyond the necessary point; in order
that these movements should, not for ever fail,
to avoid the necessity of their recommencement,
I proposed that some wise and just citizen
should be named, known for his attachment to
freedom, to take the direction of them, and ren-
der them conducive to the great ends of public
freedom. If the people could have appreciated
the wisdom of that proposal, if they had adopt-
ed it in all its plenitude, they would have swept
off, on the day the Bastile was taken, five hun-
dred heads from the conspirators. Every thing,
had this been done, would now have been tran-
quil. For the same reason, I have frequently
proposed to give instantaneous authority to a
wise man, under the name of tribune, or dicta-
tor, the title signifies nothing ; but the proof
that I meant to chain him to the public service
is, that I insisted that he should have a bullet
at his feet, and that he should have no power
but to strike off criminal heads. Such was my
opinion ; I have expressed it freely in private,
and given it all the currency possible in my
writings ; I have affixed my name to these com-
positions; I am not ashamed of them; if you
cannot comprehend them, so much the worse
for you. The days of trouble are not yet ter-
minated ; already a hundred thousand patriots
iiave been massacred because you would not
isten to my voice; a hundred thousand more
will suffer, or are menaced with destruction; if
he people falter, anarchy will never come to
an end. I have diffused those opinions among
he public ; if they are dangerous, let enlight-
ened men refute them with the proofs in their
hands ; for my own part, I declare I would be
he first to adopt their ideas, and to g;ve a sig-
nal proof of my desire for peace, order, and
he supremacy of the laws, whenever I am con-
vinced of their justice.
" Am I accused of ambitious views ? I will not
condescend to vindicate myself; examine my
conduct; judge my life. If I had chosen to sell
my silence for profit, I might have now been
he object of favour to the court. What on the
)ther hand has been my fate ? I have buried
myself in dungeons; condemned myself to
every species of danger; the sword of twenty
housand assassins is perpetually suspended
ver me ; I preached the truth with my head
aid on the block. Let those who ::re now ter-
244
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
rifying you with the shadow of a dictator, unite
with me; unite with all true patriots, press
the Assembly to expedite the great measure?
which will secure the happiness of the people
and I will cheerfully mount the scaffold an
day of my life." Vol. i. pp. 75, 76.
We have given this speech at length, be
cause it contains a fair sample of revolutionary
logic, and displays that mixture of truth anc
error, of generous sentiments and pervertec
ambition, which characterized the speeches a
well as the actions of the leaders. Marat wa
well acquainted with his power before he made
these admissions; he knew that the armed
force of the multitude would not permit a hair
of his head to be touched ; he already saw his
adversaries trembling under the menaces
which encircled the hall, and the applause of
the galleries which followed his words; he had
the air of generous self-devotion, when in truth
he incurred no real danger. The principles
here professed were those on which he and
his party constantly acted. Their uniform doc-
trine was, that they must destroy their enemies,
or be destroyed by them ; that the friends of the
Revolution were irrevocably engaged in a strife
of life or death with the aristocracy ; that there
was no alternative in the struggle it must be
victory or death. Such were the maxims of
the Jacobins, and we should greatly err if we
ascribed them to any peculiar or extraordinary
ferocity or wickedness in their character. They
sprung entirely from their early commission
of unpardonable offences, and the recklessness
with which they perpetrated acts of violence
and spoliation, the moment that they obtained
supreme power. The conclusion to be drawn
from this is, not that the progress of innova-
tion and social amelioration inevitably leads
to wickedness, but that the commission of one
crime during its progress necessarily occa-
sions another, because it is in the commission
of the second that impunity for the first is alone
looked for; and therefore, that the only way
during such trying times to prevent the pro-
gress from terminating in disaster, is steadily
to adhere to the principles of justice and hu-
manity; and if violence is once unavoidable,
to revert to the temper and moderation of hap-
pier times, the moment that such a return is
practicable.
The Jacobin Club, the Dom-daniel where all
the bloody scenes of the Revolution were hatch-
ed, must ever be an object of interest and cu-
riosity to future ages. The author's picture of
it is so graphic, that we shall give it in his own
words, for fear of weakening their force by
translation; it will also serve as a fair speci-
men of his style.
" Le club des Jacobins etait veritablement le
double de la puissance souveraine, et la por-
tion la plus energique : on ne pouvait assez
la redouter, tant sa susceptibilite etait ex-
treme et ses vengeances terribles. II se mon-
trait inquiet, pusillanime, mefiant, cruel et
fernce ; il ne concevait la liberte qu'avec le
concours des prisons, des fers, et a deminoyee
dans le sang. Tous les maux, tous les crimes,
(outes les resolutions funestes. qui pendant trois
annees desolerent la Frnnce, partirent de cet
antre d'horreur. Les Jacobins dominerent
avec une tyrannic epaisse, vaste et lourde, qui
nous enveloppa tous comme un cauchemar
permanent. Inquisition terrible, violente, et
neanmoins cauteleuse, il se nourrissait d'epou-
vante calculee, de fureurs, de denonciations,
et de 1'effroi general qu'il inspirait. Les plus
importans parmi les revolutionaires tirerent
de la toute leur force, et en meme temps ne
cesserent de flagorner, d'adulerceclub, et cela
avec autant de persistance, que de bassesse :
a tel point la masse du club abait du pouvoir,
et a tel point celui qu'obtenaient des particuli-
ers devait remonter a lui, comme a son origine
unique.
"Jamais un homme d'honneur, jamais la
vertu paree de ses qualites precieuses ne pure-nt
etre soufferls dans cette societe: elle etait an-
tipathique avec tout ce qui n'etait pas entache
d'une maniere quelconque. Un voleur, un as-
sassin, y trouvait plus d amnite que le vole ou
le victime. Le propos celebre, Qu'as in fait
pour etre pendu, xi I' 'nncicn regime revenait? pou-
vait s'applique egalement a la morale, qu'a la
politique. Quiconque se presentait avec une
vie exempte de reproches devenait suspect ne-
cessairement: mais 1'impur inspirait de Tin-
teret, et se trouvait en harmonic, ou en point
de contact avec les habitues de ce cloaque.
Le club se reunissait a 1'ancien convent des
Jacobins, dans la Rue St. Honore, au local de
la bibliotheque: c'etait une salle vaste de forme
gothique. On orna le local de drapeaux tri-
colores, de devises anarchiques, de quelques
portraits et busies des revolutionaires les plus
fameux. J'ai vu, bien anterieurement au
meurtre de Louis XVI., deux portraits, ceux de
Jacques Clement et de Ravaillac, environnes
d'une guirlande de chene, en maniere de cou-
ronne civique : au-dessous leur nom, accom-
pagne de la date de leur regicide, et au-dessus
il y avoit ces mots Us furcnt heurcux Us tuerent
un ,-oi." Tom. i. pp. 110 112.
It may be imagined from these and similar
passages that the author is a royalist: but such
n reality is not the case. He is equally severe
on the other parties, and admits that he him-
self acquiesced in all the savage measures of
he Convention. The Jacobins in fact have
5ecome equal objects of detestation to all par-
ies in the Revolution : to the royalists, by the
cruelties which they exercised to the republi-
cans, by the horror which they excited, and the
reaction against the principles of popular go-
rernment which they produced. The descrip-
ion of them by Thiers and Mignet is nearly as
>lack as that given by our author.
It is a curious speculation what it is during
revolutionary troubles that gives an influence
o men of desperate character. Why is it that
when political institutions are undergoing a
change, the wicked and profligate should ac-
luire so fearful an ascendency 7 That thieves
nd robbers should emerge from their haunts
when a conflagration is raging, is intelligible
enough, but that they should then all at once
>ecome omnipotent, and rule their fellow citi-
zens with absolute sway, is the surprising phe-
nomenon. In considering the causes of this
jatastrophe in France, much is no doubt to be
ascribed to the corrupt and rotten state of
ociety under the monarchy, and the total want
THE REIGN OF TERROR.
245
of all those habits of combination for mutua
defence and support, which arise from th<
long-continued enjoyment of freedom. More
however, we are persuaded, is to be ascribec
to the general and unparalleled desertion of
their country by the great majority of the
nobility and landed proprietors, and their im
prudent to give it no severer name union
with foreign powers to regain their privileges
by main force. If this immense and powerful
body of men had remained at home, yielded to
the torrent when they could not resist it, anc
taken advantage of the first gleams of return
ing sense and moderation, to unite with the
friends of order of every denomination, it is
impossible to doubt that a great barrier agains
revolutionary violence must have been erected
But what could be done by the few remaining
priests and royalists, or by the king on the
throne, when a hundred thousand proprietors
the strength and hope of the monarchy, de-
serted to the enemy, and appeared combating
against France under the Austrian eagles]
There was the fatal error. Every measure of
severity directed against them or their de-
scendants, appeared justifiable to a people
labouring under the terrors of foreign subjuga-
tion; if they had remained at home and armed
against the stranger, as the worst mediator in
their internal dissensions, the public feelin
would not have been so strongly roused against
them, and many of the worst measures of the
Revolution would have been prevented. The
comparatively bloodless character of the Eng-
lish civil war in the time of Charles I. is in a
great measure to be ascribed to the courageous
residence of the landed proprietors at home,
even during the hottest of the struggle ; and but
for that intrepid conduct, they might, like the
French noblesse, have been for ever stript of
their estates, and the cause of freedom stained
by unnecessary excesses.
Our author visited Dumourier, when he re-
turned to Paris, to endeavour to stem the tor-
rent of the Revolution. On that occasion, the
general addressed him in these remarkable
words:
"If the men of honour in the country would
act as I do, these miserable anarchists would
speedily be reduced to their merited insignifi-
cance, and France would be delivered; but
they fear them, and the terror which they in-
spire constitutes their whole strength. I shall
never permit them at least to extend their pow-
er over my determinations."
" Dumourier was right; it is the weakness
of honest men which in every age has consti-
tuted the strength of the rabble." Vol. i.
p. 128.
He mentions a singular fact, well known to
all who are tolerably acquainted with the his-
tory of the Revolution, which remarkably illus-
trates the slender reliance which during the
fervour of a revolution can be placed on the
support of the populace.
" The Girondists trusted to their patriotism,
to the pledges they had never ceased to give to
the popular cause; they constantly flattered
themselves that the people would keep their
qualities in remembrance ; and experience ne-
ver taught them that the people, ever ungrate-
ful and forgetful of past services, have neither
eyes nor ears but for those who flatter them
without intermission. They had another rea-
son for their confidence, in the enormous ma-
jority which had recently re-elected Petion
to the important situation of mayor of Paris.
No less than 14,000 voices had pronounced
in his favour, while Robespierre had only 23,
Billaud-Varennes 14, and Danton 11. The
Girondists flattered themselves that their influ-
ence was to be measured in the same propor-
tion; that error was their ruin, for they con-
tinued to cling to it down to the moment when
necessity constrained them to see that they
stood alone in the commonwealth. Bailly, the
virtuous Bailly, that pure spirit who had the
misfortune to do so much evil with the best
intentions, had only two votes." Vol. i.p. 130.
Thus the Girondists, only a few months be-
fore their final arrest and overthrow by the
mob of Paris, had fourteen thousand votes,
while Robespierre and Danton, who led them
out to the slaughter, had only thirty-four.
Whence arose this prodigious decline of popu-
larity in so short a time, and when they had
done nothing in the intervening period to jus-
tify or occasion it? Simply from this, that
having latterly endeavoured to repress the
movement, that instant their popularity dis-
solved like a rope of sand, and they were con-
signed in a few months to the scaffold by their
late noisy supporters.
This respectable writer adds his testimony
to a fact now generally admitted, that the well-
known novel of Faublas gave a correct picture
of the manners of France at the outset of the
Revolution. In such a corrupt state of society,
it is not surprising that political change should
have led to the most disastrous results : nor
can any thing be imagined much worse than
the old regime.
'Louvet de Courtray, born at Paris in 1764,
was the son of a shopkeeper, and made his
debut, not as an advocate, but as a shopman
in ihe employment of Brault, the bookseller.
He there acquired a taste for literature, which
he soon made known by his well-known novel
of Faublas. The Revolution commenced, and
despite its agitation, the ' Amours and gallant
Adventures of the Chevalier de Faublas' soon
obtained a deserved reputation. You find in
that book a faithful picture of the manners of
the age its levity, its follies ; the mode of life
of good company is there accurately depicted ;
and if decency is little respected, it is because
it met with as little respect at the period when
the hero of the story was supposed to be liv-
'ng." Vol. L p. 145.
But we must hasten to yet more interesting
scenes. The appearance of the Duke of Or-
eans when he voted for the death of the king
s thus described.
"Egalite, walking with a faltering step and
a countenance paler than the corpse already
stretched in the tomb, advanced to the place
where he was to put the seal to his eternal in-
"amy ; and there, unable to utter a word in
>ublic unless it was written down, he read in
hese terms his fearful vote :
" ' Exclusively governed by my duty, and
convinced that all those who have resisted the
x 2
246
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
sovereignty of the people deserve death, my
vote is for DEATH !'
"'Oh, the monster!' broke forth from all
sides; 'how infamous!' and general hisses
and imprecations attended Egalite as he re-
turned to his seat. His conduct appeared so
atrocious, that of all the assassins of Septem-
ber, of all the wretches of every description
who were there assembled, and truly the num-
ber was not small, not one ventured to applaud
him : all, on the contrary, viewed him with
distrust or maledictions ; and at the conclu-
sion of his vote, the agitation of the assembly
was extreme. One would have imagined from
the effect it produced, that Egalite, by that
single vote, irrevocably condemned Louis to
death, and that all that followed it was but a
vain formality." Vol. ii. p. 48.
One of the most instructive facts in the
whole history of the Revolution, was the una-
nimous vote of the assembly on the guilt of
Louis. Posterity has reversed the verdict ; it
is now unanimously agreed that he was inno-
cent, and that his death was a judicial murder.
That the majority, constrained by fear, misled
by passion, or seduced by ambition, should
have done so, is intelligible enough; but that
seven hundred men should unanimously have
voted an innocent man guilty, is tne real phe-
nomenon, for which no adequate apology can
be found even in the anxieties and agitation of
that unhappy period. Like all other great acts
of national crime, it speedily brought upon it-
self its own punishment. It rendered the march
of the Revolution towards increasing wicked-
ness inevitable, because it deprived its leaders
of all hope of safety but in the rule of the mul-
titude, supported by acts of universal terror.
The result of the vote which, by a majority
of forty-seven, condemned Louis to death, is
well described :
"When the fatal words were pronounced,
an explosion of satanic joy was expected from
the tribunes : nothing of the kind occurred. A
universal stupor took possession of the whole
assembly, damping alike the atrocious hurras
and the infernal applause. The victory which
had been obtained filled the victors with as.
much awe as it inspired the vanquished with
consternation; hardly was a hollow murmur
heard; the members gazed at each other in
death-like silence; every one seemed to dread
even the sound of his own voice. There is
something so over-powering in great events,
that those even whose passions they most com-
pletely satisfy, are restrained from giving vent
to their feelings." Vol. ii. p. 61.
The death of the king, and its effect on the
people, is very impressive :
"The sight of the royal corpse produced
divers sensations in the minds of the specta-
tors. Some cut off parts of his dress ; others
sought to gather a few fragments of his hair;
a few dipped their sabres in his blood ; and
many hurried from the scene, evincing the
most poignant grief in their countenances.
An Englishman, bolder than the rest, threw
himself at the foot of the scaffold, dipped his
handkerchief in the blood which covered the
ground, and disappeared. .
" In the capital, the great body of the citi-
zens appeared to be overwhelmed by a general
stupor : they hardly ventured to look each other
in the face in the street : sadness was depicted
in every countenance: a heavy disquietude
seemed to have taken possession of every mind.
The day following the execution they had not
got the better of their consternation, which ap-
peared then to have reached the members of
the Convention, who were astonished and ter-
rified at so bold a stroke, and the possible con-
sequences with which it might be followed.
Immediately after the execution, the body of
Louis XVI. was transported into the ancient
cemetery of the Madeleine : it was placed in a
ditch of six feet square, with its back against
the wall of the Rue d'Anjou, and covered with
quick-lime, which was the cause of its being so
difficult afterwards, in 1815, to discover the
smallest traces of his remains.
" The general torpor, without doubt, para-
lyzed many minds, but shame had a large
effect upon others. It was certainly a deplo-
rable thing to see the king put to death without
the smallest effort being made to save him from
destruction ; and on the supposition that such
an attempt might have led to his assassination
by the Jacobins, even that would have been
preferable to the disgraceful tranquillity which
prevailed at his execution. I am well aware
that all who had emigrated had abandoned the
king; but as there remained in the interior so
many loyal hearts devoted to his cause, it is
astonishing that no one should have shown
himself on so rueful an occasion. Has crime
then alone the privilege of conferring audacity?
is weakness inseparable from virtue? I can-
not believe it, although every thing conspired
to favour it at that period, when the bravest
trembled and retired into secrecy." Vol. ii.
pp. 13, 44.
The Girondists were far from reaping the
benefits they expected from the death of the
king; Lanjuinais's prophecy in this respect
proved correct: it was but the forerunner of
their own ruin.
"The death of Louis, effected by a combina-
tion of all parties, satisfied none. The Giron-
dists in particular, as Lanjuinais had foretold,
found in it the immediate cause of their ruin.
Concessions made to crime benefit none but
those who receive them: they make use of
them and speedily forget the givers. This was
soon demonstrated ; for no sooner was the trial
of Louis concluded by his death, than the Ja-
cobins commenced their attacks on Roland, the
minister of the interior, with such vehemence,
that on the day after the king's execution he
sent in his resignation.
"The Girondists did every thing in their
power to prevent him from proceeding to this
extremity: his wife exerted all her influence
to make him retain his situation, offering to
share all his labours, and take upon herself
the whole correspondence. It was all in vain:
he declared that death would be preferable to
the mortifications he had to undergo ten times
a day. What made his friends so anxious to
retain him was their, conviction that they
could find no one to supply his place. They
clearly saw their situation, when it was no
longer possible to apply a remedy. The
THE REIGN OF TERROR.
247
Mountain, strong through their weakness,
overwhelmed them : already it broke through
every restraint, and the system of terror, so
well organized after the revolution of the 10th
of August, was put into full activity." Vol.ii.
pp. 153, 154.
It has never yet been clearly explained how
Robespierre rose to the redoubtable power
which he possessed for sixteen months before
his death. His contemporaries are unanimous
in their declarations that his abilities were ex-
tremely moderate, that his courage was doubt-
ful, and his style of oratory often tiresome and
perplexed. How, if all this be true, did he
succeed in rising to the head of an assembly
composed of men of unquestioned ability, and
ruled by the oldest and most audacious orators
in France? How did he compose the many
and admirable speeches, close in reasoning,
energetic in thought, eloquent in expression,
which he delivered from the tribune, and which
history has preserved to illustrate his name?
Supposing them to have been written by others,
how did he maintain his authority at the Ja-
cobin Club, whose noctural orgies generally
took a turn which no previous foresight could
have imagined, and no ordinary courage could
withstand? How did he conduct himself in
such a manner as to destroy all his rivals, and,
at a time when all were burning with ambi-
tion, contrive to govern France with an au-
thority unknown to Louis XIV.? The truth
is, Robespierre must have been a man of most
extraordinary ability; and the depreciatory
testimony of his contemporaries probably pro-
ceeded from that envy which is the never-fail-
ing attendant of sudden and unlooked-for ele-
vation. The account of the system he pursued,
in order to raise himself to supreme power, is
pregnant with instruction.
"It was at this period (March, 1793) that
Robespierre began to labour seriously at the
plan which was destined to lead him to the
dictatorship. It consisted, in the first instance,
in getting rid of the Gironde by means of the
Mountain ; and secondly, in destroying by their
aid every man of the ancient regime, capable
by his rank, his talent, or his virtue, of stand-
ing in his way. It was indispensable to reduce
to his own level all the heads above himself
which he suffered to exist, and among those
which it was necessary to cut off, he ranked in
the first class those of the queen and of Ega-
lite. Having done this, his next object was to
destroy the Mountain itself: he resolved to
decimate it in its highest summits, in such a
manner that he alone would remain, and no-
thing oppose his governing France with abso-
lute sway. Robespierre at the same time as-
sailed with mortal anxiety all the military re-
putations which might stand in his way; and,
in the end, death delivered him from every ge-
neral from, whose opposition he had any thing
to apprehend.
"That this frightful plan existed, is but too
certain; that it was executed in most of- its
parts, is historically known. That it did not
finally succeed, was merely owing to the cir-
cumstance that the Jacobins, made aware of
their danger before it was too late, assailed
him when he was unprepared, and overturned
him in a moment of weakness." Vol. ii. pp.
192195.
Fouquier-Tinville, the well-known public
accuser in the revolutionary tribunal, is drawn
in the following graphic terms :
"Fouquier-Tinville, a Picard by birth, born
in 1747, and procureur in the court of the
Chatelet, exhibited one of those extraordinary
characters in which there i '-%uch a mixture of
bad and strange qualities as to be almost incon-
ceivable. Cioomy, cruel, atrabilious: the un-
spariay enemy of every species of merit or
rirfl i; ; jealous, artful, vindictive: ever ready
co suspect, to aggravate the already overwhelm-
ing dangers of innocence, he appeared imper-
vious to every feeling of compassion or equity;
justice in his estimation consisted in condem-
nation ; an acquittal caused him the most se-
vere mortification ; he was never happy but
when he had sent all the accused to the scaf-
fold: he prosecuted them with an extreme
acharnemcnt, made it a point of honour to repel
their defences: if they were firm or calm in
presence of the judges of the tribunal, his rage
knew no bounds. But with all this hatred to
what generally secures admiration and esteem,
he showed himself alike insensible to the allure-
ments of fortune, and the endearments of do-
mestic life : he was a stranger to every species
of recreation : women, the pleasures of the
table, the theatres, had for him no attractions.
Sober in his habits of life, if he ever became
intoxicated, it was with the commonest kind
of wine. The orgies in which he participated
had all a political view, as, for example, to
procure a feu defile on such occasions he was
the first to bring together the judges and juries,
and to provoke bacchanalian orgies. What he
required above every thing was human blood.
"A feu de file, in the Jacobin vocabulary,
was the condemnation to death of all the ac-
cused. When it took place, the countenance
of Fouquier Tinville became radiant; no one
could doubt that he was completely happy;
and to attain such a result he spared no pains.
He was, to be sure, incessantly at work : he
went into no society, hardly ever showed him-
self at the clubs : it was not there, he said, that
his post lay. The only recreation which he
allowed himself was to go to the place of exe-
cution, to witness the pangs of his victims :
on such occasions his gratification was ex-
treme.
"Fouquier Tinville might have amassed a
large fortune: he was, on the contrary, poor,
and his wife, it is said, actually died of starva-
tion. He lived without any comforts : his
whole furniture, sold after his decease, only
produced the sum of five hundred francs. He
was distinguished by the appearance of po-
verty and a real contempt of money. No
species of seduction could reach him: he was
a rock, a mass of steel, insensible to every
thing which usually touches men, to beauty
and riches : he became animated only at tl e
prospect of a murder which might be com-
mitted, and on such occasions he was almost
handsome, so radiant was the expression of
his visage.
" The friend of Robespierre, who fully ap-
preciated his valuable qualities, he was the
248
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
depository of his inmost thoughts. The Dic-
tator asked him one day, what he could offer
him most attractive, when supreme power was
fully concentrated in his hands. 'Repose,'
replied Fouquier Tinville, 'but not till it is
proved that not another head remains to fall ;
incessant labour till then.' " Vol. ii. 216, 217.
On reading these and similar passages re-
garding the Reign of Terror, and the charac-
ters which then rose to eminence, one is
tempted to ask, is human nature the same un-
der such extraordinary circumstances as in
ordinary times; or is it possible, that by a
certain degree of political excitement, a whole
nation may go mad, and murders be perpe-
trated without the actors being in such a state
as to be morally responsible for their actions 1
In considering this question, the conclusion
which is irresistibly impressed on the mind by
a consideration of the progress of the French
Revolution, is, that the error lies more in the
head than in the heart, and that it is by the
incessant application of false principles to
the understanding, that the atrocious actions
which excite the astonishment of posterity are
committed. Without doubt there are in all
troubled times a host of wicked and aban-
doned men, who issue from their haunts,
stimulated by cupidity, revenge, and every
evil passion, and seek to turn the public cala-
mities to their individual advantage. But
neither the leaders nor the majority of their
followers are composed of such men. The
political fanatics, those who do evil that good
may come, who massacre in the name of hu-
manity, and imprison in that of public free-
dom, these are the men who are most to be
dreaded, and who, in general, acquire a peril-
ous sway over the minds of their fellow citi-
zens. When vice appears in its native
deformity, it is abhorred by all : it is by as-
suming the language and working upon the
feelings of virtue that it acquires so fatal an
ascendant, and that men are led to commit the
most atrocious actions, in the belief that they
are performing the most sacred of duties. The
worst characters of the Revolution who sur-
vived the scaffold, were found in private life
to have their humanity unimpaired, and to lead
peaceable and inoffensive lives. Barrere is
now, or was very recently, at Brussels, where
his time is devoted to declaiming on the ne-
cessity of entirely abolishing capital punish-
ments ; and yet Barrere is the man who pro-
posed the famous decree for the annihilation
of Lyons, beginning with the words "Lyons
faisait la guerre a la libert : Lyons n'est
plus;" and constantly affirmed, that "le vais-
seau de la Revolution ne peut arriver au port
que sur une ocean du sang."
The origin and composition of the" famous
Committee of Public Safety, and the manner in
which it gradually engrossed the whole powers
of the state, and became concentrated in the
persons of the Triumvirate, are thus given:
"It was on the 6th April, 1793," says our
author, "that the terrible Committee of Public
Safety was constituted: which speedily drew
to itself all the powers in the state. It did not
manifest its ambition at the outset: it was
useful at starting: it exhibited no symptoms
of an ambitious disposition, but that prudent
conduct ceased after the great revolt of 31st
May. Then the Convention, its committees,
and in an especial manner that of General
Safety, fell under the yoke of the Committee
of Public Safety, which performed the part of
the Council of Ten and the Three inquisitors
in the Venetian state. Its power was mon-
strous, because it was in some sort concealed;
because amidst the multitude of other com-
mittees it veiled its acts ; because, renewing
itself perpetually among men of the same
stamp, it constantly destroyed the personal re-
sponsibility of its members, though its mea-
sures were ever the same.
" The Committee of Public Safety terminated
by being concentrated, not in the whole of its
members, but in three of their number. Robes-
pierre was the real chief, but half concealed
from view ; the two others were Couthon and
St. Just. There was between these monsters
a perfect unanimity down to the moment of
their fall : in proportion as the Mountain was
divided and its chiefs perished, the alliance
between them became more firmly cemented.
I have every reason to believe that they had
resolved to perpetuate their power in "unison,
and under the same title which Bonaparte
afterwards adopted at the 18th Brumaire.
Robespierre, Couthon, and St. Just were to
have formed a supreme council of three con-
suls. The first, with the perpetual presidency,
was to have been intrusted with the depart-
ments of the exterior, of justice, and of the
finances : Couthon was to have had the in-
terior; and St. Just the war portfolio, which
suited his belligerent inclination." p. 229.
One of the most singular circumstances in
all civil convulsions, when they approach a
crisis, is the mixed and distracted feelings of
the great majority, even of the actors, in the
anxious scenes which are going forward. A
signal instance occurred on occasion of the
revolt of 31st May, which overturned the Gi-
rondists, and openly established the supremacy
of the armed force of Paris over the National
Convention. This eventful crisis is thus power-
fully described by our author :
" The assembly, in a body, rose to present
itself at the great gate to go out upon the Place
de Carousel. We were all uncovered, in token
of the danger of the country: the president
alone wore his hat. The officers of the as-
sembly preceded him : he ordered them to
clear a passage. Henriot, at that decisive
moment, breaking out into open revolt, ad-
vanced on horseback at the head of his aides-
de-camp. He drew his sabre and addressed
us in a tone, the arrogance of which was de-
serving of instant punishment 'You have no
orders to give here,' said he, ' return to your
posts, and surrender the rebellious deputies to
the people.' Some amongst us insisted: the
president commanded his officers to seize that
rebel. Henriot retired fifteen paces, and ex-
claimed: ' Cannoniers, to your pieces!' The
troops that surrounded him at the same time
made preparations to charge us. Already the
muskets were raised to take aim, the hussars
drew their sabres, the artillerymen inclined
their lighted matches towards their pieces. At
THE REIGN OF TERROR.
249
this spectacle, Herault de Sechelles, the presi-
dent, was disconcerted, turned about, and we
followed him. He went to all the other gates,
followed by the same escort: traversed the
gardens of the Tuileries, and the Place de
Carousel, in vain seeking to escape: at every
issue a barrier of cannon and bayonets opposed
his exit.
" At the same time, who would believe it 1
the greater part of the troops, with their hats
on the point of their bayonets, were shouting:
' Vive la Convention Nationale !' ' Vive la
Republique !' ' Peace Laws a Constitution !'
Some cried out : ' Vive la Montagne !' a still
smaller number, 'A la mort Brissot, Gensonne,
Vergniaud, Guadet !' A few voices exclaimed,
'Purge the Convention! let the blood of the
wicked flow !" Pp. 379, 380.
Yet though the opinions of the national
guard, the armed force of Paris, were thus
divided, and a minority only supported the
violent measures of Henriot and the insurgents,
this minority, by the mere force of unity of
action, triumphed over all the others, and
made their unwilling fellow-soldiers the in-
struments in imposing violence on the legisla-
ture, and dragging its most illustrious mem-
bers to prison. Such was the French Revo-
lution ; and such is the ascendency which in
all extreme cases of public agitation is acquired
by audacious, united wickedness, over irre-
solute, divided virtue.
It is interesting to examine the line of con-
duct adopted by the moderate members of the
assembly after this crisis, which prostrated
the legislature before the municipality and
armed force of Paris. The author gives us
the following account of the principles by
which he himself and the majority of the mem-
bers were actuated :
"Overwhelmed with consternation as all men
of property were by the audacity of the revolu-
tionists, and convinced of our impotence at
that time, (for virtue has but feeble nerves,
and none of that vigour which was manifested
not only by antiquity, but even by our fathers,)
I asked myself, I am not ashamed to confess,
whether a public sacrifice to the country would
ultimately be more advantageous than a silent,
cautious opposition, which in the end might
unite to itself all whom the fury of the Moun-
tain had spared. My answer was, that every
one must carry on war according to his means ;
and, as in our case, ah open resistance would
have been followed by a speedy overthrow, I
resolved to assume the appearance of absolute
indifference, which might leave me at liberty to
aid many unfortunate persons, and keep alive
the hope of finally overturning that abomina-
ble tyranny.
" Having formed this resolution, I immedi-
ately proceeded to act upon it. I was present
at the assembly; I quitted it without any one
being sensible of my presence. I lived on
terms of tolerable intimacy with Danton,
Tallien, the younger Robespierre, so that by
the aid of their hints and indiscretions, I was
prepared for every storm which was approach-
ing.
"This line of conduct, which was pursued
at the same time by Durand, Garau, Dupuis,
32
I Demartin, and a number 01 others, perfectly
succeeded. We were soon forgotten, while
the remnants of the Jacobin faction assailed
each other without mercy; we were passed
over in silence for fifteen months, and that
happy state of oblivion proved our salvation ;
for all at once, changing our tactics, and de-
claring against Robespierre, our unexpected
vote gave his opponents the majority, and
soon drew after it the whole Assembly. In less
than an hour after it was given, we became
an authority which it was necessary to con-
sult, and which, continually increasing, be-
cause it had struck in at the fortunate moment,
speedily made itself master of that supreme
authority which the Jacobins were no longer
in a condition to dispute.
" I know that our conduct is blamed, and
was blamed by many persons. A number of
knights of the saloon exclaim against it : I will
only ask, which of them, with all their boast-
ing, did any thing useful at the fail of Robes-
pierre?
"It is necessary in difficult times to dis-
tinguish obstinate folly from measured energy;
there would be no wisdom in attempting to
overthrow the pyramids of Egypt by striking
them with the hand : but in beginning with the
upper tier, and successively pulling down all
those which compose the mass, the object
might be accomplished." Vol. iii. p. 78.
This passage involves a question of the
utmost moment to all true patriots in periods
of public danger from civil convulsion; which
is, what should be their conduct when they are
openly assailed by an anarchical faction? The
answer to this is to be found in the situation
of the parties, at the time when the collision
takes place. If supreme authority, that of the
armed force, has not passed into the hands of
the anarchists, every effort should be made to
retain it in the possession of the holders of
property ; but if that is impossible, the conduct
pursued by these members of the Convention
at that period is not only the most prudent, but
in the end the most useful. To " stoop to con-
quer" is a maxim often as applicable to politi-
cal as to private life; and when the majority
of a nation are so heated by passion as to be
incapable of appreciating the force of reason,
it is only by waiting for the moment when they
have begun to feel the consequences, that a
favourable reaction can be anticipated.
The Reign of Terror is thus described:
"The Reign of Terror was a terrible epoch,
when the patriotic party acted with indescrib-
able fury, and resistance to it appeared only in
the feeblest form ; a frightful struggle, during
which punishment was daily inflicted in the
name of freedom ; when the people were go-
verned with the most despotic forms, and
equality existed only for the vilest of assassins.
Those who have not lived through it can have
no idea of what it really was ; those who do
remember it are monsters if they do not do
their utmost to prevent its recurrence : any go-
vernment, of whatever kind, and from what-
ever quarter, should be embraced in prefer-
ence. Eternal curses on the man who should
bring it back to his country!
" Yes, I repeat it : that era has no resem-
250
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
blance to any other. I have seen the despot-
ism of Napoleon ; I have witnessed the terror
of 1815 ; paltry imitations of those tremendous
years ! France in 1793 and 1 794 was furrowed
in every direction by the revolutionary thun-
der; the most insignificant commune had its
denouncers and its executioners. Ridicule
was frequently joined to atrocity. Recollect
that village of the Limousin, from the top of
whose steeple the tricolour flag suddenly dis-
appeared. A violent disturbance was in-
stantly raised; search was made for the daring
offender, who could not be found, and in con-
sequence a dozen persons were instantly ar-
rested on suspicion. At length the fragments
of the flag were discovered suspended from the
branches of a tree, and it was found that a
magpie had made its nest with the remains of
the national colour. Oh, the tyrannical bird!
they seized it, cut off its head, and transmitted
the proces verbal to the Convention. We re-
ceived it without bursting into laughter: had
any one ventured to indulge himself in that
way, he would have run the risk of perishing
on the public scaffold.
" The Jacobins were not ashamed to propose
to us, and we passed into a law the decree,
which awarded 50 francs to every girl who
should any how become a mother. This
abominable demoralization flowed naturally
from the manners of that period. They made
a Goddess of Reason, whose altar was the
scaffold. They there sacrificed to crime by
massacring virtue ; nothing sacred or respect-
able remained : things arrived at length at such
a point, that the denunciation of the innocent
was recommended as a duty to sons, friends,
and servants ; in a word, there was no degree
of degradation to which we did not descend."
Vol. iii. pp. 42, 43.
It is well known that when the Duke of
Orleans was sent to the scaffold, he was de-
tained nearly ten minutes opposite to the Palais
Royal, for no intelligible reason which has yet
been divulged. The following explanation of
that circumstance, which our author says he
received from Tallien, is new to us ; we give
it as we find it, without either vouching for or
discrediting its truth.
" It was not without full consideration that
Robespierre formed his plan in regard to the
Duke of Orleans, which consisted in this :
two presidents were to be established for
France ; the one to preside over the war depart-
ment, the other over the interior ; the one was
to execute, the other to direct. The first of
these places was destined, not for Egalite, but
for his son, whose character was unsullied;
the second was to be occupied by Robespierre
himself. But to cement this alliance, Robes-
pierre insisted as a sine qua non that the daugh-
ter of Egalite should be given to him in mar-
riage. The proposition was made by Couthon,
and Egalite consulted his son upon it, whose
resolution was decidedly opposed to the alli-
ance. It was accordingly refused, with every
affectation of regret on the part of the Duke of
Orleans ; and thereafter Robespierre's indigna-
tion knew no bounds. The proposition, how-
ever, was afterwards renewed through Tallien,
who had many pecuniary connections with
Egalite, but with no better success. He
evinced an invincible repugnance to such a
son-in-law. 'In that resolution,' said Tallien,
'I clearly saw the prince of the blood ; he was
deaf to all the offers and considerations of
advantage which I pointed out.'
"After Tallien had received this positive
refusal, he returned to his constituent, who was
immediately seized with a violent fit of rage,
and swore to avenge the affront by the destruc-
tion of the whole family. Every one knows
how, in consequence, he forced Dumourier to
throw off the mask, and from that incident de-
duced the flight of young Egalite from the king-
dom, and the arrest of his father. After he
was imprisoned, Robespierre let him know that
his fate would be different if he would recon-
sider his refusal. The answer was still in the
negative; the rage of the Jacobin then knew
no bounds, and he decided upon the prompt
execution of his intended father-in-law. At the
last moment, a new proposal was made,
according to Tallien's statement; and if Egal-
ite, when the fatal car was stopped opposite
the Palais Royal, had made a signal to indicate
that he now acquiesced, the means of extri-
cating him from punishment by means of a
popular insurrection were prepared. He still
refused to make the signal, and after wailing
ten minutes, Robespierre was obliged to let
him proceed to the scaffold. I give the story
as Tallien related it to me, without vouching
for its truth; but it is well known that this
was not the only alliance with the royal family
which Robespierre was desirous of contract-
ing, and which would have covered with still
greater infamy the Bourbon race." Vol. iii.
179, 180.
There is no character so utterly worthless,
that some redeeming point or other is not to be
found in it. The Duke of Orleans has hitherto
been considered as one of the most abandoned
of the human race ; and the eye of impartial
history could find nothing to rest on, except
the stoicism of his death, to counterbalance the
ignominy of his life. If the anecdote here told
be true, however, another and a nobler trait
remains ; and the picture of the first prince of
the blood standing between death and an alli-
ance with the tyrant of his country, and pre-
ferring the former, may be set off" against his
criminal vote for the death of Louis, and trans-
mit his name to posterity with a lesser load of
infamy than has hitherto attached to it.
The worship of the Goddess of Reason has
past into a proverb. Here is the description
of the initiatory " festival " in honour of the
goddess.
" The day after the memorable sitting when
the Christian religion was abolished, the Fes-
tival of Reason was celebrated in Notre Dame,
which became the temple of the new divinity.
The most distinguished artists of the capital,
musicians and singers, were enjoined to assist
at the ceremony, under pain of being con-
sidered suspected and treated as such. The
wife of Monmoro represented the new divinity ;
four men, dressed in scarlet, carried her on
their shoulders, seated in a gilt chair adorned
with garlands of oak. She had a scarlet cap
on her head, a blue mantle over her shoulders,
THE REIGN OF TERROR.
251
a white tunic covered her body; in one hand
she held a pike, in the other an oaken branch.
Before her marched young women clothed in
white, with tricolour girdles and crowned with
flowers. The legislature with red caps, and
the deputies of the sections brought up the
rear.
"The cortege traversed Paris from the hall
of the Convention to Notre Dame. There the
goddess was elevated on the high altar, where
she received successively the adoration of all
present, while the young women filled the air
with incense and perfumes. Hymns in honour
of the occasion were sung, a discourse pro-
nounced, and every one retired, the goddess no
longer borne aloft, but on foot or in a hackney
coach, I forget which.
" The most odious part of the ceremony con-
sisted in this, that while the worship of the
goddess was going on in the nave and in the
sanctuary, every chapel round the cathedral,
carefully veiled by means of tapestry hangings,
became the scene of drunkenness, licentious-
ness and obscenity. No words can convey an
idea of the scene ; those who witnessed it alone
can form a conception of the mixture of disso-
luteness and blasphemy which took place. Pros-
titutes abounded in every quarter; the mysteries
of Lesbos and Gnidos were celebrated without
shame before assembled multitudes. The
thing made so much noise that it roused the
indignation of Robespierre himself ; and on the
day of the execution of Chaumette, who had
presided over the ceremony, he said that he
deserved death if it was only for the abomi-
nations he had permitted on that occasion."
Vol. iii. p. 195, 196.
The concluding months of the Reign of
Terror are thus vividly depicted :
" I have now arrived at the solemn period
when the evil rapidly attained its height, by
the usual progress of human events, which
perish and disappear after a limited period,
though not without leaving on some occasions
bloody marks of its passage. The revolution-
ary excesses daily increased, in consequence
of the union of the depraved perpetrators of
them. One would have imagined that these
monsters had but one body, one soul, to such
a degree were they united in their actions. The
Mountain in the Assembly, the Committees of
Public Safety and of General Safety without
its walls, the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Mu-
nicipality of Paris, the Clubs of the Jacobins
and the Cordeliers; all, according to their
different destinations, conspired successively
to bring about the death of the king, the over-
throw of the monarchy ; then all the acts of
popular despotism ; finally, the overthrow of
the Girondists, who, notwithstanding their
faults, and even their crimes, were, fairly
enough, entitled to be placed comparatively
among the upright characters of the Con-
vention.
" This combination of wicked men had filled
France with terrror; by them opulent cities
were overturned; the inhabitants of the com-
munes decimated; the country impoverished
by means of absurd and terrible regulations ;
agriculture, commerce, and the arts destroyed;
the foundations of every species of property
shaken ; and all the youth of the kingdom
driven to the frontiers, less to uphold the in-
tegrity of France, than to protect themselves
against the just vengeance which awaited them
both within and without.
"All bowed the neck before this gigantic,
assemblage of Avickedness; virtue resigned
itself to death or dishonour. There was no
medium between falling the victims of such
atrocities or taking a part in them. A uni-
versal disquietude, a permanent anxiety settled
over the realm of France ; energy appeared
only in the extremity of resignation ; it was
evident that every Frenchman preferred death
to the effort of resistance, and that the nation
would submit to this horrid yoke as long as it
pleased the Jacobins to keep it on.
" Was then all hope of an amelioration of
our lot finally lost] Unquestionably it was,
if it had depended only on the efforts of the
virtuous classes; but as it is the natural effect
of suffering to induce a remedy, so it was in
the shock of the wicked among themselves
that our only hope of salvation remained ; and
although nearly a year was destined to elapse
before this great consummation was effected,
yet from the beginning of 1794, men gifted
with foresight began to hope that heaven
would at length have pity on them, throw the
apple of discord among their enemies, and
strike them with that judicial blindness which
is the instrument it makes use of to punish
men and nations." Vol. iii. p. 230.
The first great symptom of this approaching
discord was the quarrel between Danton and
Robespierre, which terminated in the destruc-
tion of the former. It was impossible that two
such characters, both eminently ambitious,
and both strongly entrenched in popular attach-
ment, could long continue to hold on their
course together; when their common enemies
were destroyed, and the adversaries of the
Revolution scattered, they necessarily fell upon
each other. It is the strongest proof of the
ability of Robespierre that he was able to crush
an adversary who had the precedence of him
in the path of popularity, who possessed many
brilliant qualities of which he was destitute ;
whose voice of thunder had so often struck
terror into the enemies of the Revolution, and
who was supported by a large and powerful
party in the capital. It is in vain, after such
an achievement, to speak of the insignificance
,of Robespierre's abilities, or the tedium of his
speeches. This great contest is thus described
Robespierre is addressing the assembly on
occasion of the impeachment of his rival.
"'The Orleans party was the first which
obtained possession of power; its ramifications
extended through all the branches of the public
service. That criminal party, destitute of
boldness, has always availed itself of existing
circumstances and the colours of the ruling
party. Thence has come its fall; for ever
trusting to dissimulation and never to open
force, it sank before the energy of men of good
faith and public virtue. In all the most favour-
able circumstances, Orleans failed in resolu-
tion ; they made war on the nobility to prepare
the throne for him; at every step you see the
efforts of his partisans to ruin the court, his
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
enemy, and preserve the throne; but the fall |
oi' the one necessarily drew after it that of the j
other. No royalist could endure a parricide. |
" ' A new scene opens. The opinion of the i
people was so strongly opposed to royalty, that '
it became impossible to maintain it openly, j
Then the Orleans party dissembled anew; it j
was they who proposed the banishment of the
Bourbons. That policy, however, could not
resist the energy of the partisans of the Revo-
lution. In vain did Dumourier, the friend of
kings and of Orleans, make his calculations ;
the policy of Brissot and his accomplices was
soon seen through. It was a king of the Or-
leans family that they wished ; thenceforward
no hope of peace to the republic till the last
of their partisans has expired.
"'Danton! you shall answer to inflexible
justice. Let us examine your past conduct.
Accomplice in every criminal enterprise, : you
ever espoused the cause which was adverse to
freedom ; you intrigued alike with Mirabeau
and Dumourier, with Hebert and Herault de
Sechelles. Danton! you have made yourself
the slave of tyranny; you opposed Lafayette,
it is true, but Mirabeau, Orleans, Dumourier,
did the same. It was by the influence of Mira-
beau that you were appointed administrator
of the Department of Paris. Mirabeau, who
meditated a change of dynasty, felt the value
of your audacity, and secured it; you then
abandoned all your former principles, and
nothing more was heard of you till the massa-
cre in the Champ de Mars. What shall I say
of your cowardly desertion of the public inte-
rest in every crisis, where you uniformly
adopted the party of retreating.'
" At the conclusion of this incomprehensible
tirade, he proposed that Camille Desmoulins,
Herault, Danton, Lacroix, Philippaux, convict-
ed of accession to the conspiracy of Dumou-
rier, should be sent to the revolutionary tri-
bunal.
"Not one voice ventured to raise itself in
favour of the accused. Their friends trembled
and were silent. The decree passed unani-
mously, and with every expression of enthusi-
asm. The galleries imitated us: and from
those quarters, from whence so often had
issued bursts of applause in favour of Danton,
now were heard only fierce demands for his
head. This is the ordinary march of the
public mind during a revolution. Fervid ad-
miration of no one is of long duration: a
breath establishes, a breath undoes it. In
France this change was experienced in its
turn by every leader of the Mountain. Vol. iii.
p. 338.
The final struggle which led to the over-
throw of Robespierre has exercised the talents
of many historians. None have given it in
more vivid terms than our author:
"The battalions of the sections, who had
been convoked by the emissaries sent into the
different quarters of Paris, arrived successively
at the Tuileries around the National Assem-
bly. Tallien said to the chief of the civic
force ' Depart, and when the sun rises, may
he not shine on one conspirator in Paris.'
"The night was dark; the moon was in its
first quarter ; but the public anxiety had sup-
plied that defect by a general illumination.
The defenders of the National Convention
followed the line of the quay, bringing with
them several pieces of cannon; they marched
in silence. Impressed with the grandeur of
their mission, they sustained each other's cou-
rage without the aid of the vociferations and
exclamations which are the resource of those
who march to pillage and disorder.
"The place in front of the H6tel-de-Ville
was filled with detachments of the national
guard attached to the cause of the insurgents,
companies of cannoniers and squadrons of
gendarmerie, and with a multitude of indivi-
duals, some armed, others not, all inflamed
with the most violent spirit of Jacobinism, or
perhaps in secret sacrificing to fear.
" Leonard Bourdon, who was uncertain whe-
ther he should commence hostilities by at once
attacking the different groups assembled on
the place, before coming to that extremity re-
solved to despatch an agent of the Committee
of Public Safety, named Dulac, a courageous
man, but notapt unnecessarily to expose his life.
Dulac did so, and read to the assembled crowd
the decree of the Convention which declared
Robespierre and his associates hors la loi. Im-
mediately, the greater part of those who were
assembled came over and arranged themselves
with the forces of the Convention. Bourdon,
however, still hesitated to advance, as the re-
port was spread that the Hotel-de-Ville was
undermined, and that, rather than surrender,
the conspirators would blow it and themselves
in the air. Bourdon therefore kept his posi-
tion and remained in suspense.
" Meanwhile every thing in the Hotel-de-
Ville was in a state of the utmost agitation.
Irresolution, contradictory resolutions pre-
vailed. Robespierre had never wielded a sa-
bre ; St. Just had dishonoured his ; Henriot,
almost drunk, knew not what to do. The mu-
nicipal guards, a troop well accustomed to
march towards crime, were stupified when
they in their turn became the objects of attack.
All seemed to expect death, without having
energy enough to strive to avert it by victory.
"At this crisis Payen read to the conspira-
tors the decree of the Convention which de-
clared them hors la loi, and included in the list
the names of all those in the galleries who
were applauding their proceedings. The ruse
was eminently successful, for no sooner did
these noisy supporters hear their names read
over in the fatal list, than they dropped off
one by one, and in a short time the galleries
were empty. They soon received a melan-
choly proof how completely they were desert-
ed. Henriot in consternation descended the
stairs to harangue the cannoniers, upon whose
fidelity every thing now depended. All had
disappeared ; the place was deserted, and in
their stead Henriot perceived only the heads
of the columns of the national guard advanc-
ing in battle-array.
" He reascended with terror in his looks and
imprecations in his mouth ; he announced the
total defection of the troops ; instantly terror
and despair took possession of that band of
assassins; every one turned his fury on his
neighbour; nothing but mutual execrations
^(^THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.
253
could be heard. Some tried to hide them-
selves, others to escape. Coffinhal, maddened
by a transport of rage, seized Henriot in his
arms, and exclaiming, 'Vile wretch, your
cowardice has undone us all!' threw him out
of a window. Henriot was not destined to die
then ; a dunghill on which he fell so broke
his fall as to preserve his life for the punish-
ment which he so richly merited. Lebas took
a pistol and blew out his brains ; Robespierre
tried to imitate him; his hand trembled, he
only broke his jaw, and disfigured himself in
the most frightful manner. St. Just was found
vrith a poignard in his hand, which he had not
the courage to plunge in his bosom. Couthon
crawled into a sewer, from whence he was
dragged by the heels ; the younger Robespierre
threw himself from the window."
The scene here described is, perhaps, the
most memorable in the history of modern
times; that in which the most vital interests
of the human race were at stake, and millions
watched with trembling anxiety the result of
the insurrection of order and virtue against
tyranny and cruelty. It is a scene which, to
the end of time, will warmly interest every
class of readers ; not those merely who delight
in the dark or the terrible, but all who are in-
terested in the triumph of freedom over op-
pression, and are solicitous to obtain for their
country that first of blessings a firm and well
regulated system of general liberty.
Happen what may in this country, we do
not anticipate the occurrence of such terrible
scenes as are here described. The progress
of knowledge the influence of the press,
which is almost unanimous in favour of hu-
mane measures the vast extent of property
at stake in the British islands the habit of
acting together, which a free government and
the long enjoyment of popular rights have
confirmed, will in all probability save us from
such frightful convulsions. If the English are
ever to indulge in unnecessary deeds of cruel-
ty, they must belie the character which, with
the single exception of the wars of the Roses,
they ha>ve maintained in all their domestic
contests since the Norman Conquest.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.*
THOSE who are conscious of a good cause,
and of the support of historical facts, should
never despair of making truth triumph, even
under circumstances the most adverse and ap-
parently hopeless. When we began to treat
of the French Revolution two years ago, never
did a resolute journal attempt to stem a more
vehement torrent of public opinion. It was al-
most like striving in the days, of Peter the
Hermit against the passion for the Crusades.
The public mind had been so artfully prepared
by the incessant abuse of the revolutionary
press in France and England for years before,
against Charles X. and the Polignac Adminis-
tration, to receive the worst impressions con-
cerning them : they were so completely de-
ceived by the same channels as to the real
nature of the Parisian revolt, the objects to
which it was directed, and the consequences
with which it was attended, that it was all but
hopeless to resist the torrent. But we knew
that our case was rested on historical facts ;
and, therefore, though not possessed of any in-
formation concerning it, but what we derived
from the public journals, and shared with the
rest of our countrymen, we did not scruple to
make the attempt.
We had looked into the old Almanac, and
we did not find it there recorded, that constitu-
tions, cast off like a medal at a single stroke,
were of long duration ; we did not find that the
overthrow of government by explosions of the
populace in great cities had been found to be
* Rlackwood's Magazine, December, 1832.
Snint C'lminnns sur la Revolution de 1830, et sea
Huitcs. Paris, 1832.
Pfyronnet Questions concerning 1 Parliamentary Ju-
rwdirtion. Parin. 1831 ; and Blackwood, Edinburgh.
Polirnac Consideration* Politiqnes snr 1'Epoque Ac-
tuelle. Paris, 1832; and Blackwood, 1832.
instrumental in increasing the happiness or
tranquillity of mankind; we did not know of
many examples of industry thriving during the
reign of the multitude, or expenditure increas-
ing by the destruction of confidence, or credit
being augmented by a successful exertion of
the sacred right of insurrection ; and we saw
no reason to conclude that a government ar-
ranged in a back-shop in the neighbourhood
of the Hotel de Ville, by half a dozen democrats,
supported by shouting bands of workmen, and
hot-headed students, and sent down by the dili-
gence or the telegraph to the provinces of
France, was likely to meet the views, or pro-
tect the interests, of thirty-two millions of souls
in its vast territory. For these reasons, though
possessed of no private information in regard
to that important event, we ventured from the
very first to differ from the great majority of
our countrymen regarding it, and after doing
all we could to dispel the illusion, quietly wait-
ed till the course of events should demonstrate
their justice.
That course has come, and with a rapidity
greatly beyond what we anticipated at the out-
set. The miserable state of France since the
glorious days, has been such as to have been
unanimously admitted by all parties. Differ-
ing on other subjects as far as the poles are
asunder, they are yet unanimous in repre-
senting the state of the people since the R vo-
lution as miserable in the extreme. The Roy-
alists, the Republicans, the Orleanists, the
Doctrinaires, vie with each other in painting
the deplorable slate of their country. They
ascribe it to different causes; the Republicans
are clear that it is all owing to Casimir Pener
and the Doctrinaires, who have arrested the
people in the middle of their glorious career,
254
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
and turned to gall and wormwood the sweet
fruits of popular conquest; Guizot, the Duke
de Broglie, and the Doctrinaires, ascribe it to
the mad ambition of the democrats, and the in-
cessant efforts they have made to agitate and
distract the public mind ; Saint Chamans and
the Royalists trace it to the fatal deviation
from the principle of legitimacy, and the inter-
minable dissensions to which the establishment
of a right in the populace of Paris to choose
their sovereign must necessarily lead ; while
Marshal Soult has a clear remedy for all the
disorders of the country, and without stopping
to inquire whether they are revolting from
starvation, ambition, or experienced evils, cuts
them down by grape-shot, and charges their
determined bands by squadrons of cuirassiers.
Men in this country may vary in the causes to
which they ascribe these evils, according to
the side to which they incline in politics ; but
in regard to their existence and magnitude, af-
ter such a concurrence in the testimony of un-
willing witnesses, no doubt can be entertained
by Tory, Reformer, or Radical.
One single fact is sufficient to place in the
clearest light the disastrous effect of this con-
vulsion upon the internal industry of the coun-
try. It appears from the returns of the French
Commerce lately published, that their imports
before and after the Three Glorious Days stood
thus:
Franca.
General imports, 1830, 638,338,000
Do. 1831, 519,825,000
Decrease, 118,513,000
Imports for home consump-
tion, 1830,
Do. 1831,
489,242,000
374,188,000
Decrease, 111,054,000
Thus it appears, that although the Revolu-
tion did not break out till July 1830, so that
one-half of the imports of that year was affect-
ed by the revolt of July, yet still the general
imports in 1831, as compared with 1830, had
fallen nearly a fifth, and those for home con-
sumption about a. fourth in a single year ! Such
is the deplorable effects of popular triumph
upon public industry, and the suffering and
starvation brought upon the poor by the crimi-
nal ambition of their demagogues.
The progress of events, and, above all, the
necessity under which Marshal Soult was laid,
of quelling the insurrection of June, 1832, by
" a greater number of armed men than com-
batted the armies of Prussia or Russia at Jena
or Austerlitz,"* and following up his victory
by the proclamation of a state of siege, and or-
dinances more arbitrary than those which were
the immediate cause of the fall of Char-es X.,
have gone far to disabuse the public mind on
this important subject. In proof of this, WP
cannot refer to stronger evidence than is af-
forded by the leading Whig journal of this city,
one of the warmest early supports of the Rp-
volution of July, and which is honoured by the
communications of all the official men in the
* Sarrann.
Scottish metropolis. The passage is as ho-
nourable to their present candour, as their for-
mer intemperate and noisy declamation in
favour of democratic insurrection was indica-
tive of the slender judgment, and limited his-
torical information, which they bring to bear
on political questions. It is contained in the
preface with which the " Caledonian Mercury"
ushers in to their readers a series of highly in-
teresting and valuable papers, by a most re-
spectable eye-witness of the Parisian revolt :
" It has appeared to us desirable to lay be-
fore our readers a view of a great event, or
rather concatenation of events, so different
from any which they have hitherto been ac-
customed to have presented to them ; and we
have been the more easily induced to give in-
sertion to these papers, because hitherto one
side of the question has been kept wholly in
the shade, and because differing as we do,
toto calo, from the author in general political
principle, we are, nevertheless, perfectly at one
with him in regard to the real origin or primum
mobile of the Revolution of July, as well as the
motives and character of the chief personages
who benefited by that extraordinary event.
The truth is, that, in this country, we prejudged
the case, and decided before inquiry, upon the re-
presentations of one side, which had the ad-
vantage of victory to recommend and accredit
the story which it deemed it convenient to
tell : nor first impressions being proverbially
strong has it hitherto been found possible to
persuade the public to listen with patience to
any thing that might be alleged in justification,
or even in extenuation of the party which had
had the misfortune to play the losing game.
Of late, however, new light has begun to break
in upon the public. All have been made sen-
sible that the Revolution has retrograded ; that
its movement has been, crab-like, backwards;
and that the best of republics' has shown it-
self the worst, because the least secure, of actual dcs-
po'isms ; while the 'throne, surrounded by re-
publican institutions' that monster of fancy,
engendered by the spirit of paradoxical anti-
thesis has proved a monster in reality, broken
down all the fantastic and baseless fabrics by
which it was encircled, and swept away the
very traces of the vain restraints imposed upon
it. The empire, in short, has been recon-
structed out of the materials cast up by a de-
mocratical movement ; with this difference
only, that, instead of a Napoleon, we now see
a Punchinello at the head of it; and hence .the
same public, which formerly be'ieved Louis
Philippe to be a sort of Citizen Divinity, now
discover in that personage only a newly-cre-
ated despot without any of the accessories or
advantages which give, even to despotism,
some hold on public opinion. A reaction has
accordingly taken place: and men are in con-
sequence prepared to listen to things against
which, previously, they, adderwise, closed their
ears, and remained deaf to the voice of the
charmer, charm he never so wisely."
But although from the very first we clearly
discerned and forcibly pointed out the disas-
trous effects on the freedom, peace, and tran-
quillity, first of France, and then of the world,
which the Parisian revolt was calculated to
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1
produce, yet we were not aware of the strong
grounds in constitutional law and public jus-
tice there were for the ordinances of Charles X.
We considered them as a coup d'etat justified by
necessity, and the evident peril in which
Charles stood of losing his crown, and throw-
ing the nation back to the horrors of revolu-
tion, if he did otherwise, but as confessedly an
infraction of the constitution. Upon this sub-
ject we are now better informed: The great
and energetic ability of the royalist party has
been exerted in France to unfold the real
grounds of the question, and it is now mani-
fest that the ordinances were not only imperi-
ously called for by state necessity, but strictly
justified by the Charter and the constitutional
law of France. Many of those who now ad-
mit the lamentable effects of the overthrow of
Charles X. are not disposed to go this length,
and are not aware of the grounds on which it
is rested. Let such persons attend to the fol-
lowing considerations :
The king's defence of the ordinances is con-
tained in the following proposition:
1. That by an article of the Charter, granted
by Louis XVIII. to the French, and the founda-
tion of the constitution, power is reserved to
the king to make such regulations and ordi-
nances as are necessary for the execution of
the laws, and the safely of tfte state.
2. That matters, through the efforts of the
Revolutionists, had been brought to such a
pass, that the ordinances of July were necessary
" for the execution of the laws, and the safety
of the state."
The 14th article in the Charter is in these
terms " Reserving to the king the power to
make regulations and ordinances necessary to
insure the execution of the laws, and the safety
of Ike state" On these words we will not in-
jure, by attempting to abridge, the argument
of M. Peyronnet.
"The alleged treason is> a violation of the
Charter; and how can the Charter have been
violated by the exercise of a power, of which
it authorized the use 1 It has been asserted re-
peatedly, that the Charter authorized the king to
make regulations and ordinances, necessary for
the execution of the laws, and for the safe'y of the state.
'The execution of the laws, and the safety of
the state ;' these words demand attention. They
were not written without a motive, nor without
their signification and force being understood.
Those who introduced these words info the
Charter, well knew that they expressed two
things, between which there was still more
difference than analogy.
" If the first words had sufficed, the latter
would not have been added. It is quite ob-
vious, that if the framers of the Charter had
understood that (he safe.'y of the state was in
every case to be provided for only by the execu-
tion of the 1'iwf, these last words would have
been sufficient. Why give an explanation in
a special case, of the execution, of the laic*, after
having decreed a general rule, including every
case, whatever it might be? Can it be ima-
gined, that a legislator could have spoken
thus, 'You are to execute the laws: and,
farther, if the safety of the state be in danger,
still you will execute the laws?'
" A very obvious
mission, either, that the poi
the safety of the state, was independent of the
power to enforce the execution of the laws ;
or, that the rules commonly admitted in legis-
lation must be abandoned, to the extent of as-
suming that a positive provision, which has a
known object an evident meaning a natural
and important reference means, however, no-
thing by itself, but is confounded and lost, as
though it did not exist in the preceding provi-
sion, to which it adds nothing. Lawyers lit-
erary men all men of sense well know that
such an assumption is inadmissible. When
the law is clear, nothing remains but to exe-
cute it ; and even when it is obscure, the right
of interpretation only extends to the preferring
one meaning to another; it does not authorize
the declaring it of no effect. The interpreter
of the law does not annihilate it. He expounds
and gives it life. ' Quoties oratio ambigua est,
commodissimun cst id accipi, quo res de qua agilur
in into sit.' Whenever the meaning of a law is
doubtful, that interpretation is to be adopted
which will insure its effect. This is what the
law pronounces of itself; and this maxim has
been transmitted to us by the Romans.
"Besides, what are the true interpreters of
the law? They are, at first, example; and
subsequently, the opinions of persons of au-
thority, expressed at the period of the publica-
tion of these laws. Let the provisions of the
Charter be submitted to this double test, and it
will be seen, that, from the first days of the
Restoration, the most enlightened, the most es-
teemed, and the most impartial men, have ex-
plained this provision as I have done. Of this,
the Moniteur has collected the proofs. It will
be farther seen, that in 1814, 1815, and 1816,
even the founder of the Charter exercised with-
out dispute the right I refer to, sometimes as
regarded the press sometimes in relation to
the enemies of the Crown and sometimes, but
in an opposite sense, as regarded the elections.
No one has, however, asserted that the Minis-
ters who signed the ordinances have been im-
peached as traitors, and threatened with death.
On the contrary, they were not only obeyed,
but applauded. Some have thought the ordi-
nances of 1815 to have been just; others have
considered those of 1816 salutary. Approval
was general, and was given by all parties in
succession. The measures were various, it is
true, and could not fail to produce different re-
sults; but the source whence they sprang was
the same the right to dictate them was the
same ; and thus, whoever has approved of
these measures, has consequently admitted this
right."
M. Peyronnet proceeds to confirm, by exam-
ples, what is here adduced in regard to the
power reserved to the king by this clause, and
the practice which had followed upon it. The
following instances, in none of which the exer-
cise of the dispensing power was challenged
as illegal, afford sufficient evidence of this po-
sition.
" In 1822, when the law relating to the cen-
sorship of the press was proposed, the follow-
ing declaration was addressed to the Chamber
of Deputies by its commissioners :
256
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
" 'la virtue of the 14th article of the Char-
ter, the king possesses the right to decree by
an ordinance the measure which is submitted
to you, and under this view it might be thought
that this proposition was not necessary. But
since the government has thought that the in-
tervention of the Chambers would be attended
with some advantages, they cannot hesitate to
consent to it.'
"In 1828, when a new law was framed to
abrogate and replace the former one, the com-
missioners, by their reporter M. Simeon, ad-
dressed the Chamber of Peers in the following
terms:
" The 14th article of the Charter reserves
to the king the power to make the regulations
and ordinances necessary to insure the execu-
tion of the la\vs, and the safety of the state. It
is not therefore necessary that the law should con-
firm to him that which he holds from the Charter,
and from his prerogative as supreme head of
the state. If any danger be imminent, a dicta-
torship, to the extent of providing against it,
devolves upon him during the absence of the
Chambers. He may also, in case of imminent
danger, suspend personal liberty.'
" But all this is only theory. Let us refer to
acts. The Charter declared, that the laws
which were not inconsistent with it should re-
main in force till they should be legally re-
pealed. (Art. 63.)
" It declared, also, that the election of depu-
ties should be made by the electoral colleges,
the organization of which would be regulated
by the laws. (Art. 35.)
"Thus, then, according to the letter of the
Charter, the electoral laws existing previous
to 1814, were to continue in force until new
laws were made. ' New laws,' be it well re-
membered.
"What happened, however? On the 13th
July, 1815, and on the 5th September, 1816, two
new and different systems of election were
created in turns ; and they were created by or-
dinances.
" Where was the right to act thus found, if
not in the 14th article of the Charter?
"But this is little: The Charter declares
that no one can be elected who is not forty
years of age, and that no one can be an elector
under the age of thirty. (Art. 38 and 40.)
"What happened, however? On the 13th
of July, 1815, it was decreed that a person
might exericse the right of an elector at the
age of twenty-one, and be chosen deputy at
the age of twenty-five.
"And how was this decreed? By what act
was this important change in the Charter ef-
fected ? By a law ? No ! By an ordinance.
" Where was the right to act thus found, if
not in the 14th article of the Charter?
"This is still but of minor importance: The
Charter declared that each department should
return the same number of deputies which it
had hitherto done. (Art. 36.) What, how-
ever, happened ?
"On the 13th July, 1815, the number of depu-
ties was augmented from two hundred and sixty-
two to three hundred and ninety-five : and by what
au'hnrity? Ty an ordinance.
"Again, what happened? In 1816, when it
was resolved to return to the number of depu-
ties fixed by the Charter, instead of five depu-
ties being returned for the department of 1'Ain,
three deputies for Corsica, and two for the de-
partment of Finistere, as was the case in 1814,
three were allotted to the first, two to the
second, and four to the third: and by what
act? By an ordinance.
" Where was the right to act thus found, if
not in the 14th article of the Charter?
"Farther, the Charter declared that those
persons only could be electors who themselves
paid direct taxes to the amount of three hun-
dred francs, and those only be deputies who
paid them to the extent of one thousand francs.
(Art. 38 and 40.)
" However, what happened ? In 1816, it was
decided, that to become an elector, or a deputy,
the individual need not possess property in
his own right chargeable with those taxes, but
that it was sufficient if the requisite sums were
paid by a wife, a minor child, a widowed
mother, a mother-in-law, a father-in-law, or a
father.
"What farther happened? In 1815, and
again in 1816, it was decided that members of
the Legion of Honour might be admitted to
vote in the minor assemblies of the arrondisse-
ment, without paying taxes of any kind; and,
on paying only three hundred francs, in the
superior assemblies of the departments, where
only those were entitled to vote, who were as-
sessed at the highest rate of taxation.
" How were all these things decreed ? By
ordinances. And where was the right to act
thus found? Evidently it existed only in the
14th article of the Charter. Now, let us re-
capitulate these facts. A double change of
system a double change of numbers a
double change as to age a double change as
to taxation a change as to the particular
rights of three departments. All this without
any law. A direct formal, and essential en-
croachment on the articles 35, 36, 38, 40, and
63, of the Charter. All this without any law ;
all established by ordinances; all this by virtue
of the 14th article; all this without crime
without condemnation without even accusa-
tion : and now !"
These examples are worthy of the most
serious consideration, and, in truth, are de-
cisive of this legal question How is it pos-
sible to stigmatize that as illegal in 1830,
which had been exercised to fully as great an
cxent, on more than a dozen different occa-
sions, from 1815 onwards ? How is the change
on the electoral law in 1815 and 1816 to be
vindicated? And who ever complained of
this ? But, above all, attend to the important
changes introduced in 1815, on the qualifica-
tion of electors, and the representative body,
by ordinances. The age of an elector was
lowered from 30 to 21 years, and of a deputy
from 40 to 25; the number of deputies in-
creased from 262 to 395, by an ordinance.
Did the French liberals ever complain of these
ordinances as illegal? Did they ever object
to that which declared that the 300 francs a-
year, which is the qualification for an elector,
might be paid not only by the elector, but his
wife, child, mother, mother-in-law, father-in-
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.
25'
It is quite another question, whether it was
wise or constitutional to have conferred this
power on the crown. Suffice it to say, that it
did possess it; that its exercise had repeatedly
taken place on many different occasions, with
the full concurrence and applause of the popu-
lar party; and therefore that the legality of the
ordinances is beyond a doubt.
The question remains, whether the exercise
of the power was justified by necessity, or
called for by expedience?
Upon this subject, 'if any doubt existed, it
has been removed by the events of the last two
years. No one who contemplates the state of
France during that period can doubt, that the
power of the democracy has become too great,
not merely for royalty, but for freedom ; that
the balance has been altogether subverted ; and
that the martial law, arbitrary measures, and
relentless prosecution of the press, which has
distinguished the administration of Casimir
Perier and Marshal Soult, were imperatively
called for, to restrain the anarchy which was
rapidly conducting society in France to its
dissolution. What the power of the demo-
cracy was what formidable weapons it pos-
sessed how complete was its organization, is
proved by what it has done. It has subverted
the most beneficent government that ever ruled
in France since the days of Clovis; whose
wisdom and moderation had gone far to close
the frightful wounds of the Revolution ; which
gave perfect freedom to individuals, and abso-
lute protection to property, during the fifteen
years of its rule; and the unexampled pros-
perity resulting from whose administration all
the anarchy and wretchedness consequent on
the Revolution of July have not been able alto-
gether to extinguish. The Revolutionists were
victorious in the strife; they got a king of
their own choosing, and a government of their
own formation ; their journalists were made
Ministers of State, and the system for which
they contended established; and what was the
consequence ? Why, that out of the triumph
of the Liberals has arisen such turbulence,
anarchy, and wretchedness, as rendered it ab-
solutely necessary for the Liberals themselves
to re-enact Prince Polignac's ordinances with
still more arbitrary clauses, and support them
by a bloody fight in the streets of Paris, and
the array of " a greater number of armed men,"
as Sarrans tells us, "than combated Prussia
or Russia at Jena or Austerlitz." This result
is decisive of the question ; it is the experi-
menfum cruris which solves the doubt. It
proves that Polignac and Charles were correct
in their view of the terrible nature of the pow-
er they had to combat; that they foresaw, be-
fore they occurred, what the progress of events
was destined to bring forth, took the measures
best calculated to prevent them, and erred only
by not duly estimating the magnitude of the
physical strength which their adversaries had
at their disposal.
On this subject we cannot do better than
quote the able and eloquent observations of
the Viscount Saint Chamans:
* National. June 20th 18.11. ed to the 11th nrticle by the Liberal*, and contends only
f Sitting of 1) -c. 2.). 1810 -Poliffrnr, .11. F 2. Poti-rnic frr such n power ns is essential to save the remainder
Jvatly disclaim* ao arbitrary a power as inhere attritmt- 1 of the constitution.
33 2
law, or father? Or that which admitted mem-
bers of the Legion of Honour to vote in the
minor assemblies without paying any taxes?
Why were not the ministers impeached who
signed the ordinances in favour of the Liberal
parly? Not a whisper was heard of their ille-
gality on any of these occasions. But this is
the uniform conduct of the Revolutionists in
all ages and countries, and in all matters,
foreign and domestic. Whatever is done in
their favour is lauded to the skies, as the
height of liberality, wisdom, and justice;
whatever is aimed at their supremacy, is in-
stantly stigmatized as the most illegal and op-
pressive act that ever was attempted by a
blood-thirsty tyrant. Had the ordinances of
July, instead of restoring the number of depu-
ties to something approaching to that fixed by
the Charter, and restraining the licentiousness
of the press, been directed to the increase of
democratic power, they would have been prais-
ed as the most constitutional act that ever
emanated from the throne; and Charles X.,
for the brief period of popularity allotted to
conceding monarchs, been styled " the most
popular monarch that ever set on the throne
since the days of Charlemagne."
There are many other instances of the exer-
cise of the same power by the crown. In
particular, in a report made in 1817 to the
Chamber of Peers, respecting the jury law,
which also contained several enactments, it is
declared, to remove the fears expressed by the
adversaries of the project of the law, that if
these fears were realized, "the king would
have the resource of using the extraordinary
power provided by the 14'/t article of the Charter"
This report was received without opposition
by the liberal part of the Chamber. Prince
Polignac has adduced two instances, among a
host of others which might be adduced, of the
manner in which these acts of the crown were
received by the Liberal party in France. " The
Charter," says the National, " without the
14th article, would have been an absurdity"
The founder of the Charter said, and was right
in saying, " I am willing to make a conces-
sion ; but not such a concession as 'would in-
jure me and mine. If, therefore, experience
proves that I have conceded too much, I re-
serve to myself the faculty to revise the constitu-
tion, and it is that which I express by the 14th
article. This was perfectly reasonable ; those
who supported legitimacy and the Restoration,
were right in insisting that the king was not
to yield up his sword."*
An equally decisive testimony was borne by
a learned writer, in the tribune of the Chamber
of Deputies, now a minister of France. " Wh^n
the Charter appeared in 1814, what did the
supreme authority do? It took care to put in
the preamble the word 'octroye,' and in the
text the 14th article, which conferred the power
of making ordinances for the safety of the
state; that is, he attributed to himself before
the Charter an anterior right prior to the Char-
ier, or, in other words, a sovereign, constituent,
absolute power." f
258
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
" The Ordinances of July, and the sedition
which followed them, were no more the cause
of the Revolution of July than the dismissal
of M. Neckar, and the storming of the Bastile,
were the cause of the Revolution of 1789. I
see in both these events the first acts of a Re-
volution, of which the causes had existed long
before, but not the origin of that Revolution
itself. You might just as well say that the
battle of Arbela was the cause of the ruin of
Darius : as if, when the enemy had invaded
your territory, and penetrated to the heart of
your dominions, you had any chance of safety
by laying down your arms and submitting to
his terms as if it was not better to risk a
struggle which would save yon, if it was
gained, and renders you no worse than you
were before, if it is lost. Such was ihe posi-
tion of Charles X. He is unjustly accused of
having committed suicide ; but there are many
others to whom the reproach can with more
reason be applied.
"Louis XVIII. committed suicide on his
race, when he caused his ministers, in 1817,
to bring forward a democratic law for the election
of Deputies to Parliament, drawn in such a
manner as gave little chance of success to the real
friends of the monarchy, and when he created
sixty Peers to hinder the reparation of that fatal
step when it was yet time.
" The Chamber of Peers committed suicide,
when, with a childish desire for popularity,
they joined themselves to the Opposition (an
unnatural union) to overturn the minister,
who stood out as the last defender of mo-
narchical and aristocratic principles, and to
give a triumph to liberal ideas. They have
received their reward in the overthrow of the
hereditary Peerage.
"They committed suicide, the Royalists of
every shade and description, who enrolled
themselves under the Liberal banners, from
whence, after the triumph was completed, they
were ignominiously expelled.
"The courtiers committed suicide when
they weakly joined the Liberals, not seeing
that the principles of that party are inconsist-
ent with their existence.
"The crowd of commercial and industrious
persons committed suicide, when, become the
soldiers and pioneers of Liberalism, they at-
tacked with all their might, and finally over-
turned, that constitution which had conferred
such blessings on them, and prosperity on
their country, and under which France had
enjoyed a prosperity without example.
"It is in the faults of these parties, in Ihe
situation of parties anterior to the Ordinances
which resulted from these faults, that we must
seek for the causes of the catastrophe, and not
in the faults of Charles X. or his Ordinances.
It is evident that the event has not created the
situation, but only brought it to light; that his
sceptre did not fall in pieces at the first stroke,
from being then for the first time assailed, but
because the blow unfolded the rottenness of
the heart, brought, about by anterior causes."
S'.. Chamanf, 3, 4.
We had begun to underline the parts of this
striking passage, which bear in an obvious
manner on the recent events in this country,
now, alas ! beyond the reach of redemption,
but we soon desisted. Every word of it ap-
plies to our late changes ; and demonstrates a
coincidence between the march of revolution
in the two countries, which is almost miracu-
lous. At the distance of about ten years, our
liberal Tories and revolutionary Whigs have
followed every one of the steps of the Jacobins
and Doctrinaires of France. While they were
hastening down the gulf of perdition at a gal-
lop, we followed at a canter, and have adopted
every one of the steps which there rendered the
downward progress of the Revolution irretriev-
able, and spread unheard-of misery through
every part of France. We too have had Roy-
alists of every shade inclining to liberal ideas ;
and the courtiers entering into alliance with
their enemies, and a crowd of commercial and
manufacturing citizens combining to overturn
the constitution under which they and their
fathers had, not for fifteen, but an hundred
and fifty years, enjoyed unheard-of prosperity ;
and the Crown bringing forward a new and
highly democratical system of election ; and
the concurrence of the Peers forced by a
threatened creation of sixty members. Hav-
ing sown the same seed as the French, can we
hope to reap a different crop 1 May Heaven
avert from these realms the last and dreadful
catastrophe to which these measures led on
the other side of the Channel!
With regard to the conduct of Charles X.
after ascending the throne, the following ac-
count is given by the same writer:
" The goodness of Charles X., his love for
his people, his beneficence, his affability, his
piety, his domestic virtues, doubtless have
placed his private character beyond the reach
of attack. Let us see whether his public con-
duct justifies any more the accusations of his
enemies.
"On ascending the throne, he resisted the
natural desire of giving the direction of affairs
to his political confidants, and, sacrificing his
private affections to his public duty, he re-
tained the administration of his deceased bro-
ther who had raised France to so high a pitch
of happiness. When, shortly after, public
opinion, misled by the press, became weary
of the prosperity of France, and overturned in
its madness the ministers who had restored
its prosperity within, and regained its conside-
ration without, did Charles X. make use of
any coup d'etat to maintain in his government
the principles which he deemed necessary to
the salvation of France? No. He yielded:
he sacrificed all his own opinions, he changed
his ministers and his system, and in good faith
embraced the new course which was pre-
scribed to him. He conceded every thing that
was demanded. As the reward of the many
sacrifices made to opinion, he was promised a
peaceable, beloved, and cherished existence.
But bitter experience soon taught him that
what was conceded passed for nothing, or ra-
ther was considered only as the means of ob-
tainingfresh concessions; that the party which
he hoped to have satisfied, multiplied one de-
mand on another, moved incessantly forward
from session to session, and evidently would
not stop till it had fallen with him into the
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.
259
gulf of democracy; that public opinion, that
is to say, its tyrant, the press, was soon as much
irritated at the new ministers as it had been
at those which preceded them; that his go-
vernment was harassed with as great obsta-
cles as before ; that the sacrifice made was
therefore useless, and that the system on
which, against his better judgment, he had
entered, instead of being followed by the ad-
vantages which had been promised, was in
fact precipitating him into those evils, the
foresight of which had at first inclined him to
a contrary system.
"Charles X., confirmed by that essay in his
first ideas, reverted then to his own opinions,
and the men who shared them ; and, whatever
calumny may assert to the contrary, neither
those men nor those opinions were contrary
to the charter. The real violators of the
charter were to be found in the majority of
the Chamber of Deputies; in the 221 who re-
fused to respect the constitutional right of the
monarch to choose his ministers, and who
were resolved to force him to dismiss them,
though they could not allege a single illegal
act of which they had been guilty. And, in
truth, their administration was perfectly legal
and constitutional, down to the promulgation
of the Ordinances, on which opinions are so
much divided, and which necessity alone dic-
tated to prevent the crown being taken off the
head of the sovereign.
"Let the truth then be proclaimed boldly.
Prior to the Ordinances, Charles X. merited
reproach as little in his public as his private
life. I may defy his most implacable enemies
and his daily libellers, who have with such
fury attacked a fallen victim, to point out one
real grievance, or single illegal act of his
whole reign. Are there any more reproaches
to make to the family who surrounded him]
You will find, on the contrary, in them an as-
semblage of all the virtues, of the noblest
courage in the extremities of misfortune. If
these virtues, these qualities, the inheritance
of a noble race, are lost to us by our ingrati-
tude, they are at least springing up again in
another generation ; they are yet growing for
France." St. Chtimans, 7, 9.
In this particular, our own experience of the
illustrious exiles in this city fully corroborates
the testimony of the French royalists. Never,
in truth, did simple, unobtrusive virtue work a
more surprising change in favour of any family
than that of Charles X. did in the opinion of this
city. When he first arrived in Edinburgh, he
was regarded by the great majority of the citi-
zens, deluded by the revolutionary press, as a
blood-thirsty tyrant, who took a pleasure in
cutting down the people by discharges of
grape-shot, and was intent only on the most
arbitrary proceedings. His followers took no
pains whatever to disabuse the public mind;
not a pamphlet, nor a newspaper paragraph,
issued from Holyrood; they lived in retire-
ment, and were known only to a limited circle
by the elegance of their manners, and to all
by the extent and beneficence of their chari-
ties, and the sincere and unaffected discharge
of their religious duties. By degrees the mask
placed by the Revolutionists dropped from
their faces ; instead of a blood-thirsty tyrant,
a beneficent monarch, bravely enduring the
storms of adversity, was discovered; and be-
fore the royal family departed for the conti-
nent, they had secured the interest, and won
the affection, of all classes of the citizens.
"Were, then," continues M. St. Chamans,
"the Ordinances the cause of the catastrophe
which ensued 1
useless if the
Yes ! if the Ordinances were
throne and the Constitution
were not in danger; or if, though in danger,
they could have been saved without a coup
d'etat. Not, if they were necessary and una-
voidable ; if the throne, the dynasty, the Con-
stitution, were about to perish; if the illegal
attacks of the enemies of the monarchy had
left the king no other resource but a des-
perate effort. What signifies whether you
perish of the operation, or the progress of the
disease 1
" What was the situation of affairs at the
epoch of the Ordinances 1 On that depends
the solution of the question.
" The Chamber had been dissolved, because
the majority was hostile; the elections had
sent back a majority still more numerous and
hostile ; the Chamber was to assemble on the
3d August.
" Charles X. could not govern France with
that Chamber, but by composing a ministry in
harmony with the majority of its members ;
that is, by assuming nearly the same men,
who, after the 7th August, formed the cabinet
of Louis Philippe, and adopting the same
system ; for such a ministry could not have
existed a day without conceding the same
democratic demands which were granted in
the modified charter of August 7th. We may
judge, then, of the situation in which Charles
X. would have been placed, by that in which
we now see Louis Philippe. Now, if, in the
short space of eighteen months three adminis-
trations have been overturned; if the throne
itself is shaken without authority, without
force, without consideration what must have
been the fate of the royalty of Charles X.? If
the liberal party has acted in this manner by a
king whom they regarded as their own the
darling of their own creation, and who by his
conduct and his personal qualities possessed
all the sympathies of the revolutionary party;
if, in spite of so many titles to their favour,
that prince has been obliged to throw them out
two or three administrations as morsels to de-
vour; if the journals, the caricatures, the tu-
mults, have troubled his days and his nights; if
he has been obliged to deliver up to them even
the arms of his race, and to degrade his own
palace by effacing the fleur-de-lis ; if they have
thus treated their friend, their chosen prince,
their citizen king, is it conceivable that they
would have respected the crown of a king, the
object of their hatred and jealousy, under
which they would have incessantly trembled
for concessions evidently extorted by force?
Who can doubt that in these circumstances
the throne of Charles X. would have perished
some months sooner than that of Louis
Philippe 1 Charles X. delivered over to a
ministry and a chamber chosen from his ene-
mies, would have found
nearly in the
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
same position as Louis XVI. in 1792. The
result would have been the same. If, then, the
danger of destruction awaited him equally,
whichever course he adopted, it was far better
to perish when combating like a king of
France than in weakly yielding. An open
strife offered at least the chance of safety ; con-
cessions offered none." St. Chamans, 11, 12.
"And that necessity is a sufficient ground for
such violent measures as coups d'etat, cannot
surely be denied by those whose subsequent
conduct has been entirely founded on that
basis. What authorized them to revolt against
the authority of the king? They answer,
necessity, in default of constitutional means
of resistance. Who gave them a right to
change the dynasty 7 They answer, necessity.
Who authorized them to overturn the charter
sworn to by all the French ? Necessity. Who
authorized them to mutilate the chamber of
peers, and to change into a life-rent their rights
of eternal property? They answer, necessity.
Necessity is their sole law: and, if necessity
justifies measures evidently calculated to over-
turn, not only the throne but the constitution,
with what reason can it be pretended that it
does not justify a measure intended to pre-
serve both?" Ibid. 18, 19.
Saint Chamans gives an account of the real
causes of the Revolution of July. These are,
the democratic law of Feb. 5, 1817, regarding
the elections; the licentious press; and the
centralization of all the powers of France in
Paris. - This part of the subject is of the ut-
most importance, and is treated by our author
with his usual ability. We shall endeavour
only to do justice to the subject in our trans-
lation.
"Two causes have, in an especial manner,
precipitated the monarchy into the abyss from
which there was no escape. These were the
license of the daily press, and the democratic
law of elections. It was against them that
the Ordinances were directed.
"I will not here repeat what I have often
advanced in regard to the periodical press. I
will only say, that ever since it has been unre-
strained, it has engaged in a battle of life and
death with the authority, whatever it was,
which held the reins of government: that it
stabbed to the heart the constitutional monar-
chy of 1791, established in the first fervour of
the Revolution ; that it afterwards slew the
Girondists, who had overthrown the monar-
chy; that it itself was crushed on three differ-
ent occasions, first by the Reign of Terror,
then by the cannons of the 13th Vendemiaire,
when Napoleon overthrew the sections, and
again by the transportations which followed
the 18th Fructidor; that having reappeared
after an interval of twenty years, it destroyed
the ministry of 181U, and shook the throne of
the Restoration; that it overturned succes-
sively the ministry of Villele, of Martignac,
and after that at one fell swoop the ministry,
the throne, the charter, and the constitutional
monarchy; that since that time it has slain
the ministry of the Duke de Broglio and Gui-
zot, and of M. Lafitte ; the two last in a few
months, and the third has no better lease of
life than the popular throne. That is lo say,
during twenty years that the press has been
unfettered since 1789, it has uniformly come
to pass, that in a short time it has either over-
turned the authority of government, or been,
overturned by it, through a violent coup d'etat.
It was the shock of these opposing powers,
each of which felt that its existence could be
secured only by the destruction of its enemy,
which produced the terrible struggle and the
catastrophe of 1830. To appreciate, in a
word, all the force of that demon-like power,
it is sufficient to recall to recollection that the
press succeeded in a few months in making
the weak and unfortunate Louis XVI. pass for
a blood-thirsty tyrant; and that latterly it
created that strong disaffection, which, in the
crisis of their fate, Charles X. and his noble
family experienced in the population of Paris
and its environs ; the very men who were
daily witnesses of their virtues, and literally
overwhelmed with their benefactions.
"As to the law of elections, of February, 1817,
it 'was framed in the true spirit of democracy;
the necessary result of which was, that it de-
livered the whole influence in the state into the
hands of the middling class, incapable of any
practical instruction in public affairs, passion-
ately devoted to change and disorder, from which
it hopes to obtain its elevation to the head of
affairs, as if it ever could maintain itself there.
That law annulled at once the influence both of
the higher classes intrusted in the preservation
of order, and of the lower, ever ready, no doubt,
to disturb the public peace, by the prospect of
pillage, but who can never be led into long
disorders, by the dream of governing the state.
It follows, from these principles, that the law
of February 5, 1817, whose enactments regu-
lated three-fifths of the electors, gave the ma-
jority, and, by consequence, the control of the
state, precisely to ihe class the most dangerous to
the puliic order, and ever disposed to support
revolutions, from the belief that it will benefit
by their progress." St. Chamavs, 21, 22.
"The revolution, long previously prepared,
broke out on occasion of the Ordinances, which
were directed to the coercion of the press, and
an alteration on the law of elections. The
press could have been placed under no re-
straints if the elections had returned a Cham-
ber of Deputies, enemies alike .to order and
public repose. It was the law of the elections,
therefore, that alone rendered indispensable the
employment of a violent remedy. The law
of the election of 5th February, 1817, \vith the
ordinance of 5th September following on it,
and the creation of Peers which was its re-
sult these were the true causes of the Revolu-
tion of 1830, and these causes existed before
the reign of Charles X. He therefore is not
to be blamed for it. If the throne has perished,
it is not because the battle was engaged, but
because it was lost. It was reduced to such a
state, that nothing but a victory gained could
have saved it.
"These were the causes which directly pro-
duced the catastrophe; but it would neither
have been so complete nor so rapid, had it not
been for the effects of that absurd centraliza-
tion, of which the Constituent Assembly pre-
pared the scourge, by dividing France into so
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.
261
many departments, nearly equal, and breaking
down all the ties of the provinces cemented
by time. That universal levelling paved the
way for tyranny, by concentrating the whole
moral strength of the nation in Paris. The
universal destruction of the provinces has
deprived France of all internal strength ; the
whole remainder of the country has been re-
duced to mimic the movements of Paris, and
ape its gestures, like a reflection in a glass.
Since that period, the provinces, or rather the
departments, have not had a thought or a wish,
but what they received from Paris ; they have
changed masters ten times, without knowing
why, almost always against their will, begin-
ning with the 10th August, 1792, and ending
with the 29th July, 1830. How, in fact, can an
eighty-sixth part of France organize any resist-
ance to the central authority ? The neighbour-
ing departments first receive the impulse, which
is instantly communicated like an electric
shock to the others. All France being con-
centrated in Paris, there is neither force nor
opinion beyond that limited spot. The mo-
ment that Paris falls, the whole kingdom in-
stantly falls under the yoke of the stranger;
the vast monarchy of France is reduced to the
circuit of a single city. It was not thus with
old France. A king of England reigned six-
teen years in Paris, but the provinces resisted
and saved France. Guise and the League, and
latterly the Fronde, chased the king from Paris ;
but the provinces did not abandon their sove-
reign, and not. only preserved his throne, but
led him back in triumph to Paris.
"What a deplorable change is now exhi-
bited ? The great centralization of Paris is
repeated in detail in the little centralization of
the chief towns of the departments, which
communicate their movement to all the dis-
tricts of which they are the head. In each of
these, a few of the rabble, headed by half a
dozen advocates, make a little revolution,
always following the model of the great one.
This is what has been seen in bur days, but
never before in so extraordinary and disgrace-
ful a manner. Who would believe it? A few
thousand workmen and students, who had ob-
tained the mastery in Paris by means of a
sedition, changed the colours of the nation,
and hoisted the tri-colour flag. The depart-
ments instantly covered themselves with white,
blue, and red. Throughout all France they
changed their colours, without knowing whose
they were to mount; whether those of a re-
public, a military despotism, or a democratic
government. They knew nothing of all this ;
but, as mobs must have a rallying cry, they
called out, Viva Id Charte, when they were sup-
porting a faction which had overturned it. If
you asked them what they wanted, what they
complained of, whom they served, what they
proposed to themselves 1 They answered, We
will tell you when the next courier arrives
from Paris.' They are in transports, and ready
to lay down their life for whom 1 Why, for
the ruler whose name shall be proclaimed
from the first mail-coach. Unhappily this is
no pleasantry ; the tri-colour was received in
several departments many days before they
knew what sort of government it was to bring
them. Thirty or forty shopkeepers in Paris
had as many millions in our noble France at
their disposal, as if it were a matter which
they could mould according to their will. They
made use of our illustrious country as a sta-
tuary does of a block of marble, who asks
himself, ' Shall I make a god, a devil, or a
table ]' Be he whom he may, it is certain that
he is the very man whom the provinces would
most desire, and whom they would instantly
love with transport the moment he is on the
throne. Who can be surprised after that, if
these revolutionary improvisatores are not
supported by the same profound affections
which ancient habits and old feelings have im-
planted in the hearts. How disgraceful to the
age to see our countrymen, and precisely those
amongst them who are most vociferous in
support of liberty, make themselves the mute
slaves of Paris, and accept with their eyes
shut whoever is crowned there, whether he be
a Nero, a Caligula, or a Robespierre !" Cha-
rnans, 24 27.
These observations are worthy of the most
serious attention. The utter arid disgraceful
state of thraldom in which France is kept by
Paris in other words, by twenty or thirty in-
dividuals commanding the press there has
long been proved,'and was conspicuous through
all the changes of the Revolution; and without
doubt, the destruction of all the provincial
courts, and the annihilation of the whole an-
cient distinctions of the provinces, has gone
far to break down and destroy the spirit of the
remainder of France. But the evil lies deeper
than in the mere centralization of all the in-
fluences of France in Paris ; its principal
cause is to be found in the destruction of the
higher ranks of the nobility, which took place
during the first Revolution. In no part of
France are there now to be found any great or
influential proprietors, who can direct or
trerigthen public opinion in the provinces, or
create any counterpoise to the overwhelming
preponderance of the capital. Here and there
may be found an insulated proprietor who lives
on his estates ; but, generally speaking, that
class is extinct in the provinces, and so far
from being able to resist the influence of Paris,
ts peasant landholders are unable to withstand
the ascendant of their prefect, or the chief
;own of their department. Napoleon was per-
fectly aware of this. He knew well, that in
consequence of the destruction of the higher
orders, regulated freedom was impossible in
France, and he therefore signalized his first
accession to the throne by the creation of a
new order of noblesse, who, he flattered him-
elf, would supply the place of that which had
been destroyed. Imperfectly as a nobility, for
the most part destitute of property, can supply
the place of one who centre in themselves the
great mass of the national property, it yet con-
tributed something to preserve the balance of
society ; and of this the great prosperity and
regulated freedom of the Restoration afforded
decisive evidence. But this did not answer
the purpose of the revolutionists. It raised
few of them to supreme power; the editors of
journals were not yet ministers of state, and
therefore the" never ceased agitating the pub-
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
lie mind, and spreading the most false and
malicious reports concerning all men in au-
thority, till at length they succeeded in over-
turning, not only the throne, but the hereditary
peerage, and have thus destroyed the last bul
wark which stood between the Parisian mob
and despotism, over the whole of France.
Such is the unseen but resistless manner in
which. Providence counteracts the passions
of individuals, and brings out of the furnace of
democracy the strong government, which is
ultimately destined to coerce it, and restore
society to those principles which can alone
insure the safety or happiness of its members.
Let us now hear M. St. Chamans on the ef-
fects of that great triumph of democracy.
" Let us now attend to the deplorable effects
of the Revolution of 1830. To riches has suc-
ceeded misery; commerce, flourishing when
the Glorious Days began, is now in the depth
of suffering; industry, then so active, is lan-
guishing; the bankers, so splendid before that
catastrophe, now attract the public attention
by nothing but the eclat of their bankruptcies.
Before it, consumption was continually in-
creasing; order and tranquillity reigned uni-
versally in France ; the public revenue was
abundant, and easily collected: since it, con-
sumption has greatly decreased; disorder and
disquietude trouble every man in the country ;
the public receipts are constantly diminish-
ing, and becoming of more difficult collection.
Contrast the moderate imposts which were
sufficient when peace was certain, with the
extraordinary expenses and total deficiency of
the ordinary receipts which have taken place
since the Revolution disturbed the peace of
Europe, and the disastrous effects of this ca-
lamitous event will distinctly appear.
"Instead of the perfect order which under
the Restoration prevailed in France, we now
see universally violence going on against
churches, priests, juries, electors, and inof-
fensive citizens; against the collectors of the
public revenue, their registers and furniture;
against the organs of the press, and the press
itself; royalty is obliged everywhere to efface
the word ' Royal ;' government addressing to
the departments telegraphic despatches, which
the prefects are in haste to affix on their walls,
and which the public read with avidity; the
great, the important news is, that on such a
day, the 14th or 28th of July, Paris was tranquil,
Paris was tranquil ! Why, tranquillity was so
usual under the former reign, that no one
thought of mentioning it, more than that the
sun had risen in the morning.
" Nor have the effects of the Three Glorious
Days been less conspicuous in every other de-
partment. We see regiments, ill-disciplined,
acting according to their fancy; sometimes
raging with severity against the insurrections;
sometimes regarding, without attempting to
suppress them; sometimes openly joining
their violence; the theatres alternately shock-
ing religion, its ministers, manners, and public
decency; the minister opposing nothing to
that torrent of insanity, though he knows
where to apply the scissors of the censorship
when the license extends to his own actions."
Ibid. 31, 32.
i " Thus the Revolution, without having given
us one of the ameliorations so loudly demand-
ed by the Liberals, has exhibited no other re-
sult but anarchy and misery; the one the ob-
ject of well-known terror to every friend to his
country, the other universal suffering. It is
needless to give any proofs of this state of de-
cay and suffering ; we have only to open our
eyes to see it ; all the world knows it, and not
the least the authors of the Revolution of July ;
not only those who have been its dupes, but
those who have been enriched by it, (if indeed
it has benefited any one,) make no attempt to
conceal the state of anarchy and disquietude
into which France is plunged ; on the contrary,
they seek to turn it to their profit, by constantly
exhibiting before the public eye a dismal per-
spective of evils suspended over our heads
disorder, anarchy, a republic, pillage, popular
massacres, in fine, the Reign of Terror. They
do not pretend that their rule can give us pros-
perity, but only that it stems the torrent of ad-
versity.
"These disastrous consequences are ma-
turing throughout France with a frightful ra-
pidity. The inhabitants of Paris, and possibly
the government, are not aware of the extent to
which the principles of anarchy have spread
in every part of France. They believe that
the earth is undermined only where explosions
have taken place, but they are in a mistake ;
it is everywhere, and on all sides, a bouleverse-
ment is threatened. Certainly, if any thing is
more deplorable than the present state of
things, it is the future, which to all appearance
is in store for us.
" Discord and anarchy have penetrated
everywhere ; into most of the regiments of the
army, into almost all the departments of
France. In the army, it is well known that
the non-commissioned officers have more au-
thority than the officers ; in the villages, the
electors of the magistrates and municipal
councils, with the officers of the National
Guard, have everywhere created two parties,
and distracted every thing. The source of
their discord is deeper than any political con-
tests ; it is the old struggle of the poor against
the rich; it is the efforts of the democracy in
waistcoats, trying to subvert the intolerable
aristocracy of coats.
'The disastrous effects of the Revolution of
1830 have not been confined to political sub-
jects. To complete the picture of our interior
condition, it is necessary to add that anarchy
has spread not only into the state, but into re-
ligion, literature, and the theatres, for it will
invariably be found that disorder does not con-
fine itself to one object; that the contagion
spreads successively into every department of
human thought. It was reserved for the lights
of the 19th century to draw an absurd and in-
credible religion from the principle that ' la-
bour is the source of riches.' The first conse-
quence they deduce is, that there is no one use-
ful in the world but he who labours ; those who
do not are useless : The second, that all the
good things of this world should belong to
those who are the most useful, that is the day-
labourers. M. St. Simon thence concludes that
a shoemaker is more useful to society than the
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.
263
Duchess d'Angouleme. He never hesitated as
to his divine mission, and gave himself out for
the prophet of a new religion, the high priest
of a new church.
" In literature what a chaos of new and ex-
travagant ideas what a torrent of absurd re-
volting madness has burst forth in a short pe-
riod! It is especially during the last eighteen
months, that all men of reflection have become
sensible of the reality of our state of perfection ;
they have seen that the inefficiency of our lite-
rary and political character is at least equal to
their pride, and nothing more can be said of
them.
"One would imagine, in truth, that Provi-
dence had intentionally rendered the triumph of the
Revolutionists so sudden and complete, expressly in
order to open the eyes of those by a new example, to
whom the first would not suffice. Nothing has con-
tended against them but the consequence of
their own principles, and yet where are they 1
They have declaimed for fifteen years against
the undue preponderance of the royal authori-
ty, and the want of freedom ; and yet they have
proved by their actions that they could take
nothing from that authority, and add nothing
to that freedom, without plunging us into anar-
chy. Follow attentively their reign their own
principles have been sufficient to destroy them,
without the intervention of a human being.
The first ministry, M. Guizot and the Duke de
Broglio, had the favour of the king, and of the
majority in both chambers. Under the Resto-
ration, a ministry could never have been over-
turned which stood in such a situation ; but
nevertheless it did not exist three months ;
without being attacked it perished; disap-
peared in the midst of a tumult. The repres-
sion of that disorder was the nominal, the prin-
ciples of the government itself the real cause.
The same causes overthrew in a few months
more the succeeding ministry. The adminis-
tration of Casimir Perier had also the support
of the king and of the chambers, and no one
attacked it ; but nevertheless it was compelled
to purchase a disgraceful and ephemeral exist-
ence, by the suppression of the hereditary
peerage. Such is the state of this government ;
with all the elements of force it is incapable of
governing; with 500,000 men, and an annual
budget of 1500,000,000, (64,000,000^.,) which it
has at its disposal, it is not obeyed. At Paris,
nothing has occurred but revolt upon revolt,
which could be suppressed only by abandoning
to their fury the Cross, the emblem of Chris-
tianity, the palace of the Archbishop, and the
arms of the throne ; while in the provinces in-
surrections have broken out on all sides, some-
times against the authority of the magistrates,
sometimes with their concurrence, which have
led to such a stoppage of the revenue, as has
led to the contraction of debt to the amount of
20,000,000/. a year.
"Whence is it, that with the same elements
from whence Charles X. extracted so much
prosperity, and maintained such perfect peace,
nothing can be produced under Louis Philippe
but misery and disorder? It is impossible to
blink the question; it is with the same capital
that industry and commerce are perishing; with
the same manufactures that you cannot find
employment for your workmen; with the same
ships that your merchants are starving; with
the same revenues that you are compelled to
sell the royal forests, contract enormous loans,
pillage the fund laid aside for the indemnity
of individuals, and incessantly increase the
floating debt; that it is with peace both with-
in and without that you are obliged to aug-
ment the army, and restore all the severity of
the conscription. How is it that the ancient
dynasty preserved us from so many misfor-
tunes, and the new one has brought us such
terrible scourges? I will explain the cause.
" Confidence creates this prosperity of na-
tions. Disquietude and apprehension cause
it to disappear. Security, for the future, given
or taken away, produces activity or languor,
riches or misery, tranquillity or trouble. You
have made your election for the wrong side of
that alternative, when instead of Right you
substitute Might: because Right, which never
changes, bears in itself all the elements of
stability, while Power, which changes every
day, brings home to every breast the feeling
of instability. I know well, that to the present
triumph of power its leaders strive to annex
an idea of right; but it will be just as easy,
when the next heave of the revolutionary
earthquake displaces the present authority, to
clothe that which succeeds it with a similar
title to permanent obedience. Every succes-
sive party in its turn can rest its pretensions
to sovereignty on the authority of the People.
On the other hand, our right of succession
depends on an immovable basis. If Charles
X. or Henry V. is on the throne, every one
knows that no person can claim the crown on
the same title as that by which they held it:
but under the present government, how is it
possible to avoid the conviction, that if it
pleases 300 persons at Metz or Grenoble to
proclaim a republic, or 300 others at Toulouse
or Bordeaux, Henry V., and if a general stupor,
arising from the weakness of each of the de-
partments taken singly, prevents any effectual
resistance, the new government will immedi-
ately acquire the same title to obedience as
that which now fills the throne ?" St. Cha-
mans, 57, 58.
" It is therefore in the principle on which the
government is founded, that we must look for
the cause of our suffering and our ruin. If to this
cause we add the consequences, not less power-
ful, of a. democratic constitution, that is, to an
organized anarchy, we may despair of the
safety of'our country, if it is not destroyed by
the seeds of destruction which such a govern-
ment carries in its bosom. In no country, and
in no age, has democracy made a great state
prosper, or established it in a stable manner;
and even though it should become inured to
the climate elsewhere, it would always prove
fatal in France.. The foundation of the French
character is vanity; and that feeling which,
under proper direction, becomes a noble desire
for illustrators, which has been the source of
our military glory, and of our success in so
many different departments, is an invincible
bar to our essays in democracy, because every
one is envious of the superiority of his neigh-
bour, conceives himself qualified for every
264
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
thing, and pretends to every situation."
Ibid. 60.
"The Revolution of 1830 has lighted anew
the torch of experience on many controverted
points, and I appeal with confidence upon them
to the many men of good faith who exist among
our adversaries. They seek like us the good
of our common country, and the welfare of
humanity; they hold that in the Charter there
was too little political power conferred upon
the people. Let them judge now, for the proof
has been decisive. They will find that on
every occasion, without one exception, in
which political power, unrestrained by strict
limits, has been conferred upon the people,
personal liberty had been destroyed,- that the latter
has lost as much as the former has gained.
Such an extension of political power is no-
thing but democracy or supreme authority
lodged in the hands of the people. Reflect
upon the fate of personal freedom under the
democratic constitutions which promised us
the greatest possible extension of individual
liberty. Was there liberty under the Consti-
tuent Assembly, for those who were massacred
in the streets, and whose heads they carried on
the ends of pikes 1 Was there liberty for the
seigniors whose chateaux they burnt, and who
saved their lives only by flight? Was there
liberty for those who were massacred at
Avignon, or whom the committee of Jacobins
tore from the bosoms of their families to con-
duct to the guillotine 1 Was there liberty for
the King, who was not permitted to move be-
yond the barriers of Paris, nor venture to
breathe the fresh air at the distance of a league
from the city ? No, there was liberty only, for
their oppressors : the only freedom was that
which the incendiaries, jailers, and assassins
enjoyed.
"Since the Revolution of July, has there
been any freedom for the clergy, who do not
venture to show themselves in the streets of
Paris, even in that dress which is revered by
savage tribes ; for the Catholics, who can no
longer attend mass but at midnight; for the
Judges, who are threatened in the discharge
of their duties by the aspirants for their places ;
for the Electors, whose votes are overturned
with the urns which contain them, and who
return lacerated and bleeding from the place
of election ; for the Citizens arbitrarily thrust
out of the National Guard; for the Archbishop
of Paris, whose house was robbed and plun-
dered with impunity, at the very moment when
the ministers confessed in the chambers they
could allege nothing against him ; for the
officers of all grades, even the generals ex-
pelled from their situations at the caprice of
their inferiors ; for the curates of churches,
when the government, trembling before the
sovereign multitude, close the churches to
save them from the profanation and sacking
of the mob ; for the King himself, condemned
by their despotism, to lay aside the arms of
his race?"
" These evils have arisen from confounding
personal with political liberty; a distiction
which lies at the foundation of thes matters.
"I call personal freedom the right to dispose,
without molestation, of one's person and es-
tate, and be secure that neither the one nor
the other will be disquieted without your con-
sent. That liberty Ls an object of universal in-
terest; its preservation the source of universal
solicitude. I support the extension of that
species of liberty to the utmost extent that
society can admit; and I would carry it to a
much greater length than ever has been im-
agined by our democrats. I would have every
one's property held sacred ; his person and
estate inviolable, without the consent of his
representatives, or the authority of the law ;
absolute security against forced service of any
kind, or against either arrest or punishment,
but under the strongest safeguard, for the
protection of innocence.
" The other species of liberty, called Politi-
cal Liberty, is an object of interest to the great
body of the citizens ; it consists in the right of
taking a part in the government of the state.
It cannot affect the great body, because in every
country the immense majority can influence
government neither by their votes nor their
writings. This latter kind of liberty should
be restrained within narrow limits, for experi-
ence proves it cannot be widely extended with-
out destroying the other."
These observations appear to be as novel as
they are important. They are not, strictly
speaking, new ; for in this Magazine for Feb-
ruary, 1830,* the same principles are laid down
and illustrated; and this furnishes another
proof, among the many which might be col-
lected, of the simultaneous extrication of the
same original thought, in different countries at
the same time, from the course of political
events. But to any one who calmly and dis-
passionately considers the subject, it must be
manifest that they contain the true principle
on the subject. The difference, as St. Cha-
mans says, between personal and political lib-
erty, or, as we should say in this country, be-
tween Freedom and Democracy, is the most
important distinction which ever was stated ;
and it is from confounding these two different
objects of popular ambition, that all the misery
has arisen, which has so often attended the
struggle for popular independence, and that
liberty has so often been strangled by its own
votaries.
To produce the greatest amount of personal
freedom and security with the smallest degree
of political power in the lower classes ; to
combine the maximum of liberty with the mi-
nimum of democracy, is the great end of good
government, and should be the great object of
the true patriot in every age and country.
There is no such fatal enemy to Freedom as
Democracy; it never fails to devour its off-
spring in a few years. True liberty, or the
complete security of persons, thoughts, pro-
perty, and actions, in all classes, from injury
or oppression, never existed three months under
an unrestrained Democracy ; because the worst
of tyrannies is a multitude of tyrants. The
coercion of each class of society by the others ;
* French Revolution, No. 2. February, 1830, written
by the author.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.
265
of the impetuosity and vehemence of the po-
pulace and their demagogues by the steadiness
and weight of the aristocracy; of the ambi-
tion and oppression of the aristocracy by the
vigour and independence of the commons, is
indispensable to the equilibrium of govern-
ment and the preservation of freedom; but it
is precisely the state of things which the re-
volutionists will ever assail with most vehe-
mence, because it affords the most effectual
coercion to their passions and despotic ambi-
tion. The spirit of democracy, that keen and
devouring element which has produced, and is
producing, such ravages in the world, is to the
political what fire is to domestic life. Politi-
cal freedom cannot exist without it, and when
properly regulated, it vivifies and improves
every department of society; but if once al-
lowed to get ahead, if not confined within iron
bars, it will instantly consume the fabric in
which it is placed.
Napoleon has left the following picture of
the manner in which freedom was devoured
by democracy, during the first French Revolu-
tion : " Liberty," said he, " was doubtless the
first cry of the people when the Revolution
arose ; but that was not what they really de-
sired. The first lightning of the Revolution
showed what talents then existed, which the
levelling principle would restore to society for
the advantage and glory of the state. Thus it
was equality which the French people always
desired; and to tell the truth, liberty hath never
existed since it, was proclaimed. For the proper
definition of liberty is the power of freely ex-
ercising all our faculties ; and with the excep-
tion of some speeches which the orators of the
sections were allowed to make in 1795, show
me a period when the people were at liberty to
say or do what they wished since 1789 ] Was
it when the crowds of women and malecon-
tents besieged the Convention ! Begone ; think
of your business, said they ; and yet these poor
people only asked for bread. Will any one
pretend that the years 1793 or 1794 were the
eras of freedom T Under the Directory, no one
dared to open their mouth ; and after the 18th
Fructidor in 1797, a second Reign of Terror
arose. Never have the people, even under
Louis XL or Cardinal Richelieu, or in the most
despotic states, had less liberty than during the
whole period which has elapsed since the first Revo-
lution broke out. What France always wished,
what she still wishes, is equality; in other
words, the equal partition of the means of ris-
ing to glory and distinction in the state."*
This lesson would not suffice. The revolu-
tionists saw their despotic rule melting away
under the just and equal sway of the Bourbons,
and therefore they inflamed the public mind
till they got their government overthrown.
Despotism of one kind or another instantly re-
turned: that of the National Guard, the Pari-
! sian Emeutes, or Marshal Soult's cannoniers,
I and liberty has been destroyed by the dema-
gogues who roused the people in its name.
Thus it ever has been ; thus it ever will be to
: the end of time. Individuals may be instructed
I by history or enlightened by reflection; the
1 great masses of mankind will never learn wis-
dom but from their own suffering.
This distinction between individual freedom
and political power, between liberty and demo-
cracy, is the great point of separation between
the Whigs and Tories. The Conservatives
strive to increase personal freedom to the ut-
| most degree, and to effect that they find it in-
I dispensable to restrain the efforts of its worst
j enemies, the democracy. . The Whigs attend
| only to the augmentation of popular power,
j and in so doing they instantly trench on civil
i liberty. When were persons, property, life,
j and thoughts, more free, better protected or
secured, than in Great Britain from 1815 to
1830, the days when the Democracy was re-
strained 1 When have they been so ill secured
| since the time of Cromwell, as during the last
two years, illuminated as they have been by
| the flames of Bristol, and the conflagration of
Jamaica, the days of democratic ascendency ]
Ireland, at present under the distracting rule
of O'Connell, the demagogue, is the prototype
of the slavery to which we are fast driving,
under the guidance of the Whigs : England,
from 1815 to 1830, the last example of the
freedom from which we are receding, estab-
lished by the Tories. What farther evils the
farther indulgence of this devouring principle
is to produce, we know not, though experience
gives us little hopes of amendment till we have
gone through additional suffering; but of this
we are well assured, that the time will come
when these truths shall have passed into
axioms, and experience taught every man of
intelligence, that the assassins of freedom are
the supporters of democratic power.
* Napoleon, en Duchease Abrantes, vii. 169, 170.
34
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ASSAYS.
THE FALL OF TURKEY.*
THE long duration and sudden fall of the
Turkish Empire is one of the most extraordi-
nary and apparently inexplicable phenomena
in European history. The decay of the Otto-
man power had been constantly the theme of
historians ; their approaching downfall, the
unceasing subject of prophecy for a century;
but yet the ancient fabric still held out, and
evinced on occasions a degree of vigour which
confounded all the machinations of its enemies.
For eighty years, the subversion of the empire
of Constantinople had been the unceasing
object of Moscovite ambition: the genius of
Catherine had been incessantly directed to
that great object; a Russian prince was christ-
ened after the last of the Palceologi expressly
to receive his throne, but yet the black eagle
made little progress towards the Danube ; the
Mussulman forces arrayed on its banks were
still most formidable, and a host arrayed under
the banners of the Osmanleys, seemingly ca-
pable of making head against the world. For
four years, from 1808 to 1812, the Russians
waged a desperate war with the Turks ; they
brought frequently an hundred and fifty, some-
times two hundred thousand men into the
field; but at its close they had made no sensi-
ble progress in the reduction of the bulwarks
of Islamism : two hundred thousand Mussul-
mans had frequently assembled round the ban-
ners of the Prophet; the Danube had been
stained with blood, but the hostile armies still
contended in doubtful and desperate strife on
its shores; and on the glacis of Roudschouk,
the Moscovites had sustained a bloodier defeat
than they ever received from the genius of
Napoleon. In the triumph of the Turks at
that prodigious victory, the Vizier wrote exult-
in gly to the Grand Seignior, that such was the
multitude of the Infidel heads which he had
taken, that they would make a bridge for the
souls of the Faithful from earth to heaven.
But though then so formidable, the Ottoman
power has within these twenty years rapidly
and irrecoverably declined. The great barrier
of Turkey was reached in the first campaign
of the next war, the Balkan yielded to Russian
genius in the second, and Adrianople, the an-
cient capital of the Osmanleys, became cele-
brated for the treaty which sealed for ever the
degradation of their race. On all sides the
provinces of the empire have revolted: Greece,
through a long and bloody contest, has at length
worked out its deliverance from all but its own
passions; the ancient war-cry of Byzantium,
Victory to the Cross, has been again heard on
the JGgean Sea ;f and the Pasha of Egypt, tak-
* Travels in Turkey, by F. Slade, Esq. London, 1832.
Blackwood's Magazine, June, 1833.
f When the brave Canaris passed under the bows of
the Turkish admiral's ship, to which he had grappled
the fatal fireship, at Scio, the crew in his boat exclaimed,
" Victory to the Cross !" the old war-cry of Byzantium.
Gordon's Greek Revolution, i. 274.
I ing advantage of the weakness consequent on
so many reverses, has boldly thrown off the
I yoke, and, advancing from Acre in the path of
Napoleon, shown to the astonished world the
justice, of that great man's remark, that his
I defeat by Sir Sidney Smith under its walls
j made him miss his destiny. The victory of
j Koniah prostrated the Asiatic power of Turkey ;
the standards of Mehemet Ali rapidly ap-
j proached the Seraglio; and the discomfited
I Sultan has been driven to take refuge under
the suspicious shelter of the Russian legions.
I Already the advanced guard of Nicholas has
passed the Bosphorus ; the Moscovite standards
I are floating at Scutari ; and, to the astonish-
j ment alike of Europe and Asia, the keys of the
Dardanelles, the throne of Constantine, are laid
at the feet of the Czar.
The unlocked for rapidity of these events, is
not more astonishing than the weakness which
the Mussulmans have evinced in their last strug-
gle. The Russians, in the late campaign, never
assembled forty thousand men in the field. In
the battle of the llth June, 1828, which de-
cided the fate of the war, Diebitsch had only
thirty-six thousand soldiers under arms ; yet this
small force routed the Turkish army, and laid
open the far-famed passes of the Balkan to the
daring genius of its leader. Christendom
looked in vain for the mighty host which, at
the sight of the holy banner, was wont to as-
semble round the standard of the Prophet. The
ancient courage of the Osmanleys seemed to
have perished with their waning fortunes;
hardly could the Russian outposts keep pace
with them in the rapidity of their flight; and a
force, reduced by sickness to twenty thousand
men, dictated peace to the Ottomans within
twenty hours' march of Constantinople. More
lately, the once dreaded throne of Turkey has
become a jest to its remote provinces ; the
Pasha of Egypt, once the most inconsiderable
of its vassals, has compelled the Sublime
Porte, the ancient terror of Christendom, to
seek for safety in the protection of Infidel
battalions; and the throne of Constantine, in-
capable of self-defence, is perhaps ultimately
destined to become the prize for which Mos-
covite ambition and Arabian audacity are to
contend on the glittering shores of Scutari.
But if the weakness of the Ottomans is sur-
prising, the supineness of the European pow-
ers is not less amazing at this interesting crisis.
The power of Russia has long been a subject
of alarm to France, and having twice seen the
Cossacks at the Tuileries, it is not surprising
that they should feel somewhat nervous a/
every addition to its strength. England, jea-
lous of its maritime superiority, and appre-
hensive whether reasonably or not is imma-
terial of danger to her Indian possessions,
from the growth of Russian power in Asia, has
long made it a fixed principle of her policy to
THE FALL OF TURKEY.
267
coerce the ambitious designs of the Cabinet of
St. Petersburg, and twice she has saved Turkey
from their grasp. When the Russians and
Austrians, in the last century, projected an
alliance for its partition, and Catherine and
Joseph had actually met on the Wolga to
arrange its details, Mr. Pitt interposed, and by
the influence of England prevented the design :
and when Diebitsch was in full march for
Constantinople, and the insurrection of the
Janissaries only waited for the sight of the
Cossacks to break out, and overturn the throne
of Mahmoud, the strong arm of Wellington in-
terfered, put a curb in the mouth of Russia, and
postponed for a season the fall of the Turkish
power. Now, however, every thing is changed ;
France and England, occupied with domestic
dissensions, are utterly paralysed ; they can no
longer make a show of resistance to Moscovite
ambition ; exclusively occupied in preparing
the downfall of her ancient allies, the Dutch
and the Portuguese, England has not a thought
to bestow on the occupation of the Dardanelles,
and the keys of the Levant are, without either-
observation or regret, passing to the hands of
Russia.
These events are so extraordinary, that they
almost make the boldest speculator hold his
breath. Great as is the change in external
events which we daily witness, the alteration
in internal feeling is still greater. Changes
which would have convulsed England from
end to end, dangers which would have thrown
European diplomacy into agonies a few years
ago, are now regarded with indifference. The
progress of Russia through Asia, the capture
of Erivan and Erzeroum, the occupation of the
Dardanelles, are now as little regarded as if
we had no interest in such changes ; .as if we
had no empire in the East threatened by so
ambitious a neighbour; no independence at
stake in the growth of the Colossus of northern
Europe.
The reason is apparent, and it affords the
first great and practical proof which England
has yet received of the fatal blow, which the
recent changes have struck, not only at her
internal prosperity, but her external independ-
ence. England is now powerless; and, what
is worse, the European powers know it. Her
government is so incessantly and exclusively
occupied in maintaining its ground against the
internal enemies whom the Reform Bill has
raised up into appalling strength ; the neces-
sity of sacrificing something to the insatiable
passions of the revolutionists is so apparent,
that every other object is disregarded. The
allies by whose aid they overthrew the con-
stitution, have turned so fiercely upon them,
that they are forced to strain every nerve to
resist these domestic enemies. Who can think
of the occupation of Scutari, when the malt tax
is threatened with repeal 1 ? Who care for the
thunders of Nicholas, when the threats of
O'Connell are ringing in their ears 1 The
English government, once so stable and stead-
fast in its resolutions, when rested on the firm
rock of the Aristocracy, has become unstable
as water since it was thrown for its support
upon the Democracy. Its designs are as
phangeable, its policy as fluctuating, as the
volatile and inconsiderate mass from which it
sprung; and hence its menaces are disre-
garded, its ancient relations broken, its old
allies disgusted, and the weight of its influence
being no longer felt, projects the most threat-
ening to its independence are without hesita-
tion undertaken by other states.
Nor is the supineness and apathy of the
nation less important or alarming. It exists
to such an extent as clearly to demonstrate,
that not only are the days of its glory num-
bered, but the termination even of its inde-
pendence may be foreseen at no distant period.
Enterprises the most hostile to its interests,
conquests the most fatal to its glory, are un-
dertaken by its rivals not only without the
disapprobation, but with the cordial support,
of the majority of the nation. Portugal, for a
century the ally of England, for whose defence
hundreds of thousands of Englishmen had died
in our own times, has been abandoned without
a murmur to the revolutionary spoliation and
propagandist arts of France. Holland, the
bulwark of England, for whose protection the
great war with France was undertaken, has
been assailed by British fleets, and threatened
by British power ; and the shores of the
Scheldt, which beheld the victorious legions of
Wellington land to curb the power of Napo-
leon, have witnessed the union of the tricolour
and British flags, to beat down the indepen-
dence of the Dutch provinces. Constantino-
ple, long regarded as the outpost of India
against the Russians, is abandoned without
regret ; and, amidst the strife of internal fac-
tion, the fixing of the Moscovite standards on
the shores of the Bosphorus, the transference
of the finest harbour in the world to a growing
maritime power, and of the entrepot of Europe
and Asia to an already formidable commercial
state, is hardly the subject of observation.
The reason cannot be concealed, and is too
clearly illustrative of the desperate tendency
of the recent changes upon all the classes of
the empire. With the revolutionists the pas-
sion for N change has supplanted every other
feeling, and the spirit of innovation has extin-
guished that of patriotism. They no longer
league in thought, or word, or wish, exclusive-
ly with their own countrymen ; they no longer
regard the interests and glory of England, as
the chief objects of their solicitude ; what they
look to is the revolutionary party in other
states ; what they sympathize with, the pro-
gress of the tricolour in overturning other dy-
nasties. The loss of British dominion, the
loss of British colonies, the downfall of British
power, the decay of British glory, the loss of
British independence, is to them a matter of
no regret, provided the tricolour is triumphant,
and the cause of revolution is making progress
in the world. Well and truly did Mr. Burke
say, that the spirit of patriotism and Jacobin-
ism could not coexist in the same state ; and
that the greatest national disasters are lightly
passed over, provided they bring with them
the advance of domestic ambition.
The Conservatives, on the other hand, are
so utterly desperate in regard to the future
prospects of the empire, from the vacillation
and violence of the Democratic party who are
268
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
installed in sovereignty, that external events,
even of the most threatening character, are
regarded by them but as dust in the balance,
when compared with the domestic calamities
which are staring us in the face. What al-
though the ingratitude and tergiversation of
England to Holland have deprived us of all
respect among foreign states 1 That evil,
great as it is, is nothing to the domestic em-
barrassments which overwhelm the country
from the unruly spirit which the Whigs fos-
tered with such sedulous care during the Re-
form contest. What although the empire of
the Mediterranean, and ultimately our Indian
possessions, are menaced by the ceaseless
growth of Russia; the measures which go-
vernment have in contemplation for the ma-
nagement of that vast dominion, will sever it
from the British empire before any danger is
felt from external foes ; and long ere the Mos-
covite eagles are seen on the banks of the In-
dus, the insane measures of the Ten Pounders
will in all probability have banished the Bri-
tish standards from the plains of Hindostan.
Every thing, in short, announces that the
external weight and foreign importance of
Great Britain are irrecoverably lost; and that
the passing of the Reform Bill will ultimately
prove to have been the death-warrant of the
British empire. The Russians are at Con-
stantinople ! the menaces, the entreaties of
England, are alike disregarded ; and the ruler
of the seas has submitted in two years to de-
scend to the rank of a second-rate power.
That which a hundred defeats could have
hardly effected to old England, is the very first
result of the innovating system upon which
new England has entered. The Russians are
at Constantinople! How would the shade of
Chatham, or Pitt, or Fox thrill at the an-
nouncement ! But it makes no sort of im-
pression on the English people : as little as
the robbery of the Portuguese fleet by the
French, or the surrender of the citadel of Ant-
werp to the son-in-law of Louis Philippe. In
this country we have arrived, in an incon-
ceivably short space of time, at that weakness,
disunion, and indifference to all but revolu-
tionary objects, which is at once the forerun-
ner and the cause of national ruin.
But leaving these mournful topics, it is more
instructive to turn to the causes which have
precipitated, in so short a space of time, the
fall of the Turkish empire. Few more curious
or extraordinary phenomena are to be met
with in the page of history. It will be found
that the Ottomans have fallen a victim to the
same passion for innovation and reform which
have proved so ruinous both in this and a
neighbouring, country ; and that, while the
bulwarks of Turkey were thrown down by
the rude hand of Mahmoud, the States of West-
ern Europe were disabled, by the same frantic
course, from rendering him any effectual aid.
How well in every age has the spirit of Jaco-
binism and revolutionary passion aided the
march, and hastened the growth of Russia!
The fact of the long duration of Turkey, in
the midst of the monarchies of Europe, and
the stubborn resistance which she opposed for
a series of ages to the attacks of the two great-
est of its military powers, is of itself sufficient
to demonstrate that the accounts on which we
had been accustomed to rely of the condition,
of the Ottoman empire were partial or exag-
gerated. No fact is so universally demonstrated
by history as the rapid and irrecoverable de-
cline of barbarous powers, when the career
of conquest is once terminated. Where is
now the empire of the Caliphs or the Moors'?
What has survived of the conquests, one hun-
dred years ago, of Nadir Shah ? How long
did the empire of Aurengzebe, the throne of
the Great Mogul, resist the attacks of England,
even at the distance of ten thousand miles
from the parent state 1 How then did it hap-
pen that Turkey so long resisted the spoiler]
What conservative principle has enabled the
O.smanleys so long to avoid the degradation
which so rapidly overtakes all barbarous and
despotic empires; and what has communi-
cated to their vast empire a portion of the
undecaying vigour which has hitherto been
considered as the grand characteristic of Eu-
ropean civilization 1 The answer to these
questions will both unfold the real causes of
the long endurance, and at length the sudden
fall, of the Turkish empire.
Though the Osmanleys were an Asiatic
power, and ruled entirely on the principles of
Asiatic despotism, yet their conquests were
effected in Europe, or in those parts of Asia
in which, from the influence of the Crusades,
or of the Roman institutions which survived
their invasion, a certain degree of European
civilization remained. It is difficult utterly to
exterminate the institutions of a country where
they have been long established; those of the
Christian provinces of the Roman empire have
in part survived all the dreadful tempests
which for the last six centuries have passed
over their surface. It is these remnants of
civilization,- it is the institutions which still
linger among the vanquished people, which
have so long preserved the Turkish provinces
from decay; and it is these ancient bulwarks,
which the innovating passions of Mahmoud
have now destroyed.
1. The first circumstance which upheld,
amidst its numerous defects, the Ottoman em-
pire, was the rights conceded on the first con-
quest of the country by Mahomet to the dere
beys or ancient nobles of Asia Minor, and
which the succeeding sultans have been care-
ful to maintain inviolate. These dere beys all
capitulated with the conqueror, and obtained
the important privileges of retaining their
lands in perpetuity for their descendants, and
of paying a fixed tribute in money and men to
the sultan. In other words, they were a here-
ditary noblesse ; and as they constituted the
great strength of the empire in its Asiatic pro-
vinces, they have preserved their privilege
through all succeeding reigns. The following
is the description given of them by the intelli-
gent traveller whose work is prefixed to this
article:
" The dere beys," says Mr. Slade, literally
lords of the valleys, an expression peculiarly
adapted to the country, which presents a series
of oval valleys, surrounded by ramparts of
hills, were the original possessors of those parts
THE FALL OF TURKEY.
269
of Asia Minor, which submitted, under feudal
conditions, to the Ottomans. Between the
conquest of Brussa and the conquest of Con-
stantinople, a lapse of more than a century,
chequered by the episode of Tamerlane, their
faith was precarious ; but after the latter event,
Mahomet II. bound their submission, and
finally settled the terms of their existence. He
confirmed them in their lands, subject, how
ever, to tribute, and to quotas of troops in war;
and he absolved the head of each family for
ever from personal service. The last clause
was the most important, as thereby the sultan
had no power over their lives, nor consequent-
ly, could be their heirs, that despotic power
being lawful over those only in the actual ser-
vice of the Porte. The families of the dere
beys, therefore, became neither impoverished
nor extinct. It would be dealing in truisms to
enumerate the advantages enjoyed by the dis-
tricts of these noblemen over the rest of the
empire; they were oases in the desert: their
owners had more than a life-interest in the
soil, they were born and lived among the peo-
ple, and, being hereditarily rich, had no occa-
sion to create a private fortune, each year,
after the tribute due was levied. Whereas, in
a pashalic the people are strained every year
to double or treble the amount of the impost,
since the pasha, who pays for his situation,
must also be enriched. The devotion of the
dependents of the dere beys was great: at a
whistle, the Car'osman-Oglous, the Tchapan-
Oglous, the Ellezar-Oglous, (the principal
Asiatic families that survive,) could raise,
each, from ten thousand to twenty thousand
horsemen, and equip them. Hence the facility
with which the sultans, up to the present cen-
tury, drew such large bodies of cavalry into
the field. The dere beys have always fur-
nished, and maintained, the greatest part; and
there is not one instance, since the conquest
of Constantinople, of one of these great fami-
lies raising the standard of revolt. The pashas
invariably have. The reasons, respectively,
are obvious. The dere bey was sure of keep-
ing his possessions by right: the pasha of
losing his by custom, unless he had money to
bribe the Porte, or force to intimidate it.
"These provincial nobles, whose rights had
been respected during four centuries, by a
series of twenty-four sovereigns, had two
crimes in the eyes of Mahmoud II.; they held
their properly from their ancestors, and they
had riches. To alter the tenure of the former,
the destination of the latter, was his object.
The dere beys unlike the seraglio dependents,
brought up to distrust their own shadows had
no causes for suspicion, and therefore became
easy dupes of the grossest treachery. The
unbending spirits were removed -to another
world, the flexible were despoiled of their
wealth. Some few await their turn, or, their
eyes opened,, prepare to resist oppression.
C.ir'osman O^lou, for example, was summon-
ed to Constantinople, where expensive em-
ployments, forced on him during several years,
reduced his ready cash ; while a follower of
the seraglio resided at his city of Magnesia, to
collect his reve-iues. His peasants, in conse-
queuce, ceased to cultivate their lands, from
whence they no longer hoped to reap profit;
and his once flourishing possessions soon be-
came as desolate as any which had always
been under the gripe of pashas."
This passage throws the strongest light on
the former condition of the Turkish empire
They possessed an hereditary noblesse in their
Asiatic provinces ; a body of men whose in-
terests were permanent; who enjoyed their
rights by succession, and, therefore, were per-
manently interested in preserving their pos-
sessions from spoliation. It was rheir feudal
tenantry who flocked in such multitudes to the
standard of Mohammed when any great crisis
occurred, and formed those vast armies who
so often astonished the European powers, and
struck terror into the boldest hearts in Christ-
endom. These hereditary nobles, however,
the bones of the empire, whose estates were
exempt from the tyranny of the pashas, have
been destroyed by Mahmoud. Hence the dis-
affection of the Asiatic provinces, and the rea-
diness with which they opened their arms to
the liberating standards of Mehemet All. It is
the nature of innovation, whether enforced by
the despotism of a sultan or a democracy, to
destroy in its fervour the institutions on which
public freedom is founded.
2. The next circumstance which contributed
to mitigate the severity of Ottoman oppression
was the privileges of the provincial cities,
chiefly in Europe, which consisted in being
governed by magistrates elected by the people
themselves from among their chief citizens.
This privilege, a relic of the rights of the
Muniripea over the whole Roman empire, was
established in all the great towns ; and its im-
portance in moderating the otherwise intoler-
able weight of Ottoman oppression was incal-
culable. The pashas, or temporary rulers
appointed by the sultan, had no authority, or
only a partial one in these free cities, and
hence they formed nearly as complete an
asylum for industry in Europe as the estates
of the dere beys did in Asia. This important
right, however, could not escape the reforming
passion of Mahmoud ; and it was accordingly
overturned.
"In conjunction with subverting the dere
beys, Mahmoud attacked the privileges of the
great provincial cities, (principally in Europe,)
which consisted in the election of ayans (ma-
gistrate's) by the people, from among the nota-
bles. Some cities were solely governed by
them, and in those ruled by pashas, they had,
in most cases, sufficient influence to restrain
somewhat the full career of despotism. They
were the protectors of rayas, as well as of
Mussulmans, and, for their own sakes, resist-
ed exorbitant imposts. The change in the
cities where their authority has been abolished
(Adrianople, e. .) is deplorable; trade has
since languished, and population has diminish-
ed. They were instituted by Solymnn. (the
lawgiver,) and the protection which they have
invariably afforded the Christian subjects of
the Porte, entitles them to a Christi m's good
word. Their crime, that of the dere beys, was
being possessed of authority not emanating
from the sultan.
'Had Mahmoud II. intrusted, the govern-
270
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
ment of the provinces to the dere beys, and
strengthened the authority of the ayans, he
would have truly reformed his empire, by
restoring it to its brightest state, have gained
the love of his subjects, and the applauses of
humanity. By the contrary proceeding, sub-
verting two bulwarks (though dilapidated) of
national prosperity a provincial nobility and
magistracy he has shown himself a selfish
tyrant."
3. In addition to an hereditary nobility in
the dere beys, and the privileges of corpora-
tions in the right of electing their ayans, the
Mussulmans possessed a powerful hierarchy
in the ulema; a most important body in the
Ottoman dominions, and whose privileges
have gone far to limit the extent of its des-
potic government. This important institution
has been little understood hitherto in Europe ;
but they have contributed in a most important
manner to mitigate the severity of the sultan
in those classes who enjoyed no special pro-
tection.
" In each of the Turkish cities," says Mr.
Slade, " reside a muphti and a rnollah. A
knowledge of Arabic, so as to be able to read
the Koran in the original, is considered suffi-
cient for the former, but the latter must have
run a legal career in one of the medressehs,
(universities of Constantinople.) After thirty
years' probation in a medresseh, the student
becomes of the class of muderis, (doctors at
law,) from which are chosen the mollahs,
comprehended under the name of ulema.
Students who accept the inferior judicial ap-
pointments can never become of the ulema.
"The ulema is divided into three classes,
according to a scale of the cities of the empire.
The first class consists of the cazi-askers,
(chief judges of Europe and Asia;) the Stam-
boul effendisi, (mayor of Constantinople ;) the
mollahs qualified to act at Mecca, at Medina,
at Jerusalem, at Bagdat, at Salon ica, at Alep-
po, at Damascus, at Brussa, at Cairo, at Smyr-
na, at Cogni, at Galata, at Scutari. The se-
cond class consists of the mollahs qualified to
act at the twelve cities of next importance.
The third class at ten inferior cities. The
administration of minor towns is intrusted to
cadis, who are nominated by the cazi-askers in
their respective jurisdictions, a patronage
which produces great wealth to these two
officers.
" In consequence of these powers the mollah
of a city may prove as great a pest as a needy
pasha; but as the mollahs are hereditarily
wealthy, they are generally moderate in their
perquisitions, and often protect the people
against the extortions of the pasha. The
cadis, however, of the minor towns, who have
not the advantage of being privately rich, sel-
dom fail to join with the aga to skin the ' ser-
pent that crawls in the dust.'
"The mollahs, dating from the reign of So-
lyman zenith of Ottoman prosperity were
not slow in discovering the value of their
situations, or in taking advantage of them ;
and as their sanctity protected them from spo-
liation, they were enabled to leave their riches
to their children, who were brought up to the
same career, and were, by privilege, allowed
to finish their studies at the medresseh in eight
years less time than the prescribed number of
years, the private tuition which they were sup-
posed to receive from their fathers making up
for the deficiency. Thus, besides the influence
of birth and wealth, they had a direct facility
in attaining the degree of muderi, which their
fellow-citizens and rivals had not, and who
were obliged in consequence to accept inferior
judicial appointments. In process of time the
whole monopoly of the ulema centred in a
certain number of families, and their constant
residence at the capital, to which they return
at the expiration of their term of office, has
maintained their power to the present day.
Nevertheless, it is true that if a student of a
medresseh, not of the privileged order, pos-
sess extraordinary merit, the ulema has gene-
rally the tact to admit him of the body : wo to
the cities to which he goes as mollah, since
he has to create a private fortune for his family.
Thus arose that body the peerage of Turkey
known by the name of ulema, a body uniting
the high attributes of law and religion ; dis-
tinct from the clergy, yet enjoying all the ad-
vantages connected with a church paramount;
free from its shackles, yet retaining the perfect
odour of sanctity. Its combination has given
it a greater hold in the state than the dere beys,
though possessed individually of more power,
founded too on original charters, sunk from a
want of union."
The great effect of the ulema has arisen
from this, that its lands are safe from confis-
cation or arbitrary taxation. To power of
every sort, excepting that of a triumphant de-
mocracy, there must be some limits; and great
as the authority of the sultan is, he is too de-
pendent on the religious feelings of his subjects
to be able to overturn the church. The conse-
quence is that the vacouf or church lands have
been always free both from arbitrary taxation
and confiscation ; and hence they have formed
a species of mortmain or entailed lands in the
Ottoman dominions, enjoying privileges to
which the other parts of the empire, excepting
the estates of the dere beys, are entire strangers.
Great part of the lands of Turkey, in many
places amounting to one-third of the whole,
were held by this religious tenure; and the
device was frequently adopted of leaving pro-
perty to the ulema in trust for particular fami-
lies, whereby the benefits of secure hereditary
descent were obtained. The practical advan-
tages of this ecclesiastical property are thus
enumerated by Mr. Slade.
"The vacouf (mosque lands) have been
among the best cultivated in Turkey, by being
free from arbitrary taxation. The mektebs (pub-
lic schools) in all the great cities, where the ru-
diments of the Turkish language and the Koran
are taught, and where poor scholars receive
food gratis, are supported by the ulema. The
medressehs, imarets, (hospitals,) fountains,
&c., are all maintained by the ulema ; add to
these the magnificence of the mosques, their
number, the royal sepultures, and it will be
seen that Turkey owes much to the existence
of this body, which has been enabled, by its
power and its union, to resist royal cupidity.
Without it, where would be the establishments
THE FALL OF TURKEY.
271
above mentioned? Religious property has
been an object of attack in every country. At
one period, by the sovereign, to increase his
power; at another, by the people, to build for-
tunes on its downfall. Mahomet IV., after the
disastrous retreat of his grand vizir, CaraMus-
tapha, from before Vienna, 1683, seized on the
riches of the principal mosques, which arbi-
trary act led to his deposition. The ulema
would have shown a noble patriotism in giv-
ing its wealth for the service of the state, but
it was right in resenting the extortion, which
would have served as a precedent for succeed-
ing sultans. In fine, rapid as has been the
decline of the Ottoman empire since victory
ceased to attend its arms, I venture to assert,
that it would have been tenfold more rapid but
for the privileged orders the dere beys and the
ulema. Without their powerful weight and
influence effect of hereditary wealth and
sanctity the Janissaries would long since have
cut Turkey in slices, and have ruled it as the
Mamelukes ruled Egypt.
"Suppose, now, the influence of the ulema
to be overturned, what would be the conse-
quence! The mollaships, like the pashalics,
would then be sold to the highest bidders, or
given to the needy followers of the seraglio.
These must borrow money of the bankers for
their outfit, which must be repaid, and their
own purses lined, by their talents at extor-
tion."
It is one of the most singular proofs of the
tendency of innovation to blind its votaries to
the effects of the measures it advocates, that
the ulema has long been singled out for de-
struction by the reforming sultan, and the
change is warmly supported by many of the
inconsiderate Franks who dwell in the east.
Such is the aversion of men of every faith to
the vesting of property or influence in the
church, that they would willingly see this one
of the last barriers which exist against arbi-
trary power done away. The power of the
sultan, great as it is, has not yet ventured on
this great innovation ; but it is well known
that he meditates it, and it is the knowledge
of this circumstance which is one great cause
of the extreme unpopularity which has ren-
dered his government unable to obtain any
considerable resources from his immense do-
minions.
4. In every part of the empire, the superior
felicity and well-being of the peasantry in the
mountains is conspicuous, and has long at-
tracted the attention of travellers. Clarke
observed it in the mountains of Greece, Ma-
riti, and others in Syria and Asia Minor, and
Mr. Slade and Mr. Walch in the Balkan, and
the hilly country of Bulgaria. "No peasantry
in the world," says the former, "are so well
off as that of Bulgaria. The lowest of them
has abundance of every thing meat, poultry,
eggs, milk, rice, cheese, wine, bread, good
clothing, a warm dwelling, and a horse to ride.
It is true he has no newspaper to kindle his
passions, nor a knife and fork to eat with, nor
a bedstead to lie on ; but these are the customs
of the country, and a pasha is equally unhappy.
Where, then, is the tyranny under which the
Christian subjects of the Porte are generally
supposed to groan 1 Not among the Bulga-
rians certainly. I wish that in every country
a traveller could pass from one end to the
other, and find a good supper and a warm fire
in every cottage, as he can in this part of
European Turkey."* This description applies
generally to almost all the mountainous pro-
vinces of the Ottoman empire, and in an espe-
cial manner to the peasants of Parnassus and
Olympia, as described by Clarke. As a con-
trast to this delightful state of society, we may
quote the same traveller's account of the plains
of Romelia. " Romelia, if cultivated, would
become the granary of the East, whereas'Con-
stantinople depends on Odessa for daily bread.
The burial-grounds, choked with weeds and
underwood, constantly occurring in every tra-
veller's route, far remote from habitations, are
eloquent testimonials of continued depopula-
tion. The living too are far apart; a town
every fifty miles, and a village every ten miles,
is close, and horsemen meeting on the high-
way regard each other as objects of curiosity.
The cause of this depopulation is to be found
in the pernicious government of the Otto-
mans."! The cause of this remarkable dif-
ference lies in the fact, that the Ottoman op-
pression has never yet fully extended into the
mountainous parts of its dominions ; and,
consequently, they remained like permanent
veins of prosperity, intersecting the country
in every direction, amidst the desolation which
generally prevailed in the pashalics of the
plain.
5. The Janissaries were another institution
which upheld the Turkish empire. They
formed a regular standing army, who, although
at times extremely formidable to the sultan,
and exercising their influence with all the
haughtiness of Prnctorian guards, were yet of
essential service in repelling the invasion of
the Christian powers. The strength of the
Ottoman armies consisted in the Janissaries,
and the Delhis and Spahis ; the former be-
ing the regular force, the latter the contingents
of the dere beys. Every battle-field, from
Constantinople to Vienna, can tell of the va-
lour of the Janissaries, long and justly re-
garded as the bulwark of the empire; and the
Russian battalions, with all their firmness,
were frequently broken, even in the last war,
by the desperate charge of the Delhis. Now,
however, both are destroyed; the vigorous
severity of the sultan has annihilated the
dreaded battalions of the former the ruin of
the dere beys has closed the supply of the
latter, In these violent and impolitic reforms
is to be found the immediate cause of the de-
struction of the Turkish empire.
Of the revolt which led to the destruction of
this great body, and the policy which led to it,
the following striking account is given by Mr.
Slade:
" Every campaign during the Greek war a
body was embarked on board the fleet, and
landed in small parties, purposely unsupported,
on the theatre of war: none returned, so that
only a few thousand remained at Constanti-
nople, when, May 30, 1826, the Sultan issued a
* Slade, it 97.
f Ibid. 15.
272
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
hatti scheriff concerning the formation of a
new victorious army.' This was a flash of
lightning in the eyes of the Janissaries. They
saw why their companions did not return from
Greece; they saw that the old, hitherto abor-
tive, policy, dormant since eighteen years, was
revived ; they saw that their existence was
threatened; and they resolved to resist, con-
fiding in the prestige of their name. June 15,
following, they reversed their soup-kettles,
(signal of revolt,) demanded the heads of the
ministers, and the revocation of the said fir-
man. But Mahmoud was prepared for them.
Husseyin, the aga of the Janissaries, was in
his interests, and with him the yamaks, (gar-
risons of the castles of the Bosphorus,) the
Galiondgis, and the Topchis. Collecting, there-
fore, on the following morning, his forces in
the Atmeidan, the sand-jack scheriff was dis-
played, and the ulema seconded him by calling
on the people to support their sovereign against
the rebels. Still, noways daunted, the Janis-
saries advanced, and summoned their aga, of
whom they had no suspicion, to repeat their
demands to the sultan, threatening, in case of
non-compliance, to force the seraglio gates.
Husseyin, who had acted his part admirably,
and with consummate duplicity, brought them
to the desired point open rebellion flattering
them with success, now threw aside the mask.
He stigmatized them as infidels, and called on
them, in the name of the prophet, to submit to
the sultan's clemency. At this defection of
their trusted favourite chief, their smothered
rage burst out; they rushed to his house, razed
it in a moment, did the same by the houses of
the other ministers, applied torches, and in
half an hour Constantinople streamed with
blood beneath the glare of flames. Mahmoud
hesitated, and was about to conciliate ; but
Husseyin repulsed the idea with firmness,
knowing that to effect conciliation, his head
must be the first offering. Now or never,' he
replied to the sultan, 'is the time ! Think not
that a few heads will appease this sedition,
which has been too carefully fomented by me,
the wrongs of the Janissaries too closely
dwelt on, thy character too blackly stained, thy
treachery too minutely dissected, to be easily
laid. Remember that this is the second time
that thy arm has been raised against them, and
they will not trust thee again. Remember, too.
that thou hast now a son, that son not in thy
power, whom they will elevate on thy down-
fall. Now is the time! This evening's sun
must set for the last time on them or us. Re-
tire from the city, that thy sacred person may
be safe, and leave the rest to me.' Mahmoud
consented, and went to Dolma Bachtche, (a
palace one mile up the Bosphorus,) to await
the result. Husseyin, then free to act without
fear of interruption, headed his yamaks, and
vigorously attacked the rebels, who. cowardly
as they were insolent, offered a feeble resist-
ance, when they found themselves unsupported
by the mob, retreated from street to street, and
finally took refuge in the Atmeidan. Here
their career ended. A masked battery on the
hill beyond opened on them, troops enclosed
them in, and fire was applied to the wooden
buildings. Desperation then gave them the
courage that might have saved them at first,
and they strove with madness to force a pas-
sage from the burning pile; part were con-
sumed, part cut down; a few only got out,
among them five colonels, who threw them-
selves at the aga's feet, and implored grace.
They spoke their last."
Five thousand fell under this grand blow in
the capital alone ; twenty-five thousand perish-
ed throughout the whole empire. The next
day a hatti scheriff was read in the mosques,
declaring the Janissaries infamous, the order
abolished, and the name an anathema.
This great stroke made a prodigious sensa-
tion in Europe, and even the best informed
were deceived as to its effects on the future
prospects of the Ottoman empire. By many
it was compared to the destruction of the
Strelitzes by Peter the Great, and the resurrec-
tion of Turkey anticipated from the great
reform of Mahmoud, as Moscovy arose from
the vigorous measures of the czar. But the
cases and the men were totally different. Peter,
though a despot, was practically acquainted
with his country. He had voluntarily descend-
ed to the humblest rank, to make himself mas-
ter of the arts of life. When he had destroyed
the Proetorian guards of Moscow, he built up
the new military force of the empire, in strict
accordance with its national and religious
feelings, and the victory of Pultowa was the
consequence. But what did Sultan Mah-
moud ? Having destroyed the old military
force of Turkey, he subjected the new levies
which were to replace it to such absurd regula-
tions, and so thoroughly violated the political
and religious feelings of the country, that none
of the Osmanleys who could possibly avoid it
would enter his ranks, and he was obliged to
fill them up with mere boys, who had not yet
acquired any determinate feelings a wretched
substitute for the old military force of the em-
pire, and which proved totally unequal to the
task of facing the veteran troops of Russia.
The impolicy of his conduct in destroying and
re-building, is more clearly evinced by nothing
than the contrast it affords to the conduct of
Sultan Amurath, in originally forming these
guards.
" Strikingly," says Mr. Slade, " does the con-
duct of Mahmoud, ifi forming the new levies,
contrast with that of Amurath in the formation
of the Janissaries ; the measures being parallel,
inasmuch as each was a mighty innovation,
no less than the establishment of an entire new
military force, on the institutions of the coun-
try. But Amurath had a master mind. Instead
of keeping his new army distinct from the na-
tion, he incorporated it with it, made it conform
in all respects to national usages; and the suc-
cess was soon apparent by its spreading into
a vast national guard, of which, in later times,
some thousands usurped the permanence of
enrolment, in which the remainder, through
indolence, acquiesced. Having destroyed these
self-constituted battalions, Mahmoud should
have made the others available, instead of out-
lawing them, as it were; and, by respecting
their traditionary whims and social rights, he
would easily have given his subjects a taste
i for European discipline. They never objected
THE FALL OF TURKEY.
273
to it in principle, but their untutored minds
could not understand why, in order to use the
musket and bayonet, and manoeuvre together
it was necessary to leave off wearing beards
and turbans.
" But Mahmoud, in his hatred, wished to
condemn them to oblivion, to eradicate every
token of their pre-existence, not knowing tha
trampling on a grovelling party is the sures
way of giving it fresh spirit; and trampling
on the principles of the party in question, was
trampling on the principles of the whole na-
tion. In his ideas, the Oriental usages in
eating, dressing, &c., were connected with the
Janissaries, had been invented by them, and
therefore he proscribed them, prescribing new
modes. He changed the costume of his court
from Asiatic to European ; he ordered his
soldiers to shave their beards, recommending
his courtiers to follow the same example, and
he forbade the turban, that valued, darling,
beautiful head-dress, at once national and reli
gious. His folly therein cannot be sufficiently
reprobated: had he reflected that Janissarism
was only a branch grafted on a wide-spreading
tree, that it sprung from the Turkish nation,
not the Turkish nation from it, he would have
seen how impossible was the more than Her
culean task he assumed, of suddenly transform-
ing national manners consecrated by centuries,
a task from which his prophet would have
shrunk. The disgust excited by these sump-
tuary laws may be conceived. Good Mussul-
mans declared them unholy and scandalous,
and the Asiatics, to a man, refused obedience ;
but as Mahmoud's horizon was confined to his
court, he did not know but what his edicts
were received with veneration.
" If Mahmoud had stopped at these follies in
the exercise of his newly-acquired despotic
power, it would have been well. His next
step was to increase the duty on all provisions
in Constantinople, and in the great provincial
cities, to the great discontent of the lower
classes, which was expressed by firing the
city to such an extent that in the first three
months six thousand houses were consumed.
The end of October, 1826, was also marked by
a genera] opposition to the new imposts ; but
repeated executions at length brought the
people to their senses, and made them regret
the loss of the Janissaries, who had been their
protectors as well as tormentors, inasmuch as
they had never allowed the price of provisions
to be raised. These disturbances exasperated
the sultan. He did not attribute them to the
right cause, distress, but to a perverse spirit
of Janissarism, a suspicion: of harbouring
which was death to any one. He farther ex-
tended his financial operations by raising the
miri (land tax) all over the empire, arid, in
ensuing years, by granting monopolies on all
articles of commerce to the highest bidder.
In consequence, lands, which had produced
abundance, in 1830 lay waste. Articles of
export, as opium, silk, &c., gave the growers a
handsome revenue when they could sell them
to the Frank merchants, but at the low prices
fixed by the monopolists they lose, and the
cultivation languishes. Sultan Mahmoud kills
the goose for the eggs. la a word, he adopted
35
in full the policy of Mehemet AH, which sup-
posed the essence of civilization and of politi-
cal science to be contained in the word taxa-
tion ; and having driven his chariot over the
necks of the dere beys, and of the Janissaries,
he resolved to tie his subjects to its wheels,
and to keep them in dire slavery. Hence a
mute struggle began throughout the empire
between the sultan and the Turks, the former
trying to reduce the latter to the condition of
the Egyptian fellahs, the latter unwilling to
imitate the fellahs in patient submission. The
sultan flatters himself (1830) that he is suc-
ceeding, because the taxes he imposed, and
the monopolies he has granted, produce him
more revenue than he had formerly. The
people, although hitherto they have been able
to answer the additional demands by opening
their hoards, evince a sullen determination not
to continue doing so, by seceding gradually
from their occupations, and barely existing.
The result must be, if the sultan cannot com-
pel them to work, as the Egyptians, under the
lashes of task-masters, either a complete slag-
nation of agriculture and trade, ever at a low
ebb in Turkey, or a general rebellion, produced
by misery."
The result of these precipitate and monstrous
innovations strikingly appeared in the next war
with Russia. The Janissaries and dere beys
were destroyed the Mussulmans everywhere
disgusted; the turban, the national dress the
scimitar, the national weapon, were laid aside
in the army; and instead, of the fierce and va-
liant Janissaries wielding that dreaded wea-
pon, there was to be found only in the army
boys of sixteen, wearing caps in the European
style, and looked upon as little better than he-
retics by all true believers.
" Instead of the Janissaries," says Mr. Slade,
the sultan reviewed for our amusement, on
the plains of Ram is Tchiftlik, his regular
troops, which were quartered in and about
Constantinople, amounting to about four thou-
sand five hundred foot, and six hundred horse ;
though beyond being dressed and armed uni-
formly, scarcely meriting the name of soldiers.
What a sight for Count OrlofF, then ambassa-
dor-extraordinary, filling the streets of Pera
with his Cossacks and Circassians ! The
2ount, whom the sultan often amused with a
similar exhibition of his weakness, used to
say, in reference to the movements of these
successors of the Janissaries, that the cavalry
Here employed in holding on, the infantry knew a
'it tie, and- the artillery galloped about as though be-
'onging to no party. Yet over such troops do
he Russians boast of having gained victories !
'n no one thing did Sultan Mahmoud make a
greater mistake, than in changing the mode of
mounting the Turkish cavalry, which before
iad perfect seats, with perfect command over
heir horses, and only required a little order to
ransform the best irregular horse in the world
nto the best regular horse. But Mahmoud, in
ill his changes, took the mask for the man, (he
rind for the fruit. European cavalry rode flat
iaddles with long stirrups ; therefore he thought
t necessary that his cavalry should do the same.
European infantry wore tight jackets and close
japs; therefore the same. Were this blind
274
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
adoption of forms only useless, or productive
only of physical inconvenience, patience; but
it proved a moral evil, creating unbounded dis-
gust. The privation of the turban particularly
affected the soldiers; first, on account of the
feeling of insecurity about the head with a fez
on ; secondly, as being opposed to the love of
dress, which a military life, more than any
other, engenders."
" Mahmoud," says the same author, " will
learn that in having attacked the customs of
his nation customs descended to it from
Abraham, and respected by Mohammed he
has directly undermined the divine right of his
family, that right being only so considered by
custom by its harmonizing with all other che-
rished usages. He will learn, that in having
wantonly trampled on the unwritten laws of
the land, those traditionary rights which were
as universal household gods, he has put arms
in the hands of the disaffected, which no rebel
has hitherto had. Neither Ali Pasha nor Pass-
wan Oglou could have appealed to the fanati-
cism of the Turks to oppose the sultan. Me-
hemet Ali can and will. Ten years ago, the
idea even of another than the house of Othman
reigning over Turkey would, have been heresy:
the question is now openly broached, simply
because the house of Othman is separating it-
self from the nation which raised and support-
ed it. Reason may change the established ha-
bits of an old people ; despotism rarely can."
How completely has the event, both in the
Russian and Egyptian wars, demonstrated the
truth of these principles ! In the contest in
Asia Minor, Paskewitch hardly encountered
any opposition. Rage at the destruction of the
Janissaries among their numerous adherents
indignation among the old population, in
consequence of the ruin of the dere beys, and
the suppression of the lights of the cities
lukewarmness in the church, from the antici-
pated innovations in its constitution general
dissatisfaction among all classes of Mohamme-
dans, in consequence of the change in the na-
tional dress and customs, had so completely
weakened the feeling of patriotism, and the
sultan's authority, that the elements of resist-
ance did not exist. The battles were mere pa-
rades the sieges little more than the summon-
ing of fortresses to surrender. In Europe, the
ruinous effects of the innovations were also
painfully apparent. Though the Russians had
to cross, in a dry and parched season, the path-
less and waterless plains of Bulgaria; and
though, in consequence of the unhealthiness
of the climate, and the wretched arrangements
of their commissariat, they lost two hundred
thousand men by sickness and famine in the
first campaign, yet the Ottomans, though
fighting in their own country, and for their
hearths, were unable to gain any decisive ad-
vantage. And in the next campaign, when
they were conducted with more skill, and the
possession of Varna gave them the advantage
of a seaport for their supplies, the weakness of
the Turks wis at once apparent. In the bittle
of the llth June, the loss of the Turks did not
exceed 4000 men, the forces on neither side
amounted to forty thousand combatants, and
yet this defeat proved fatal to the empire. Of
this battle, our author gives the following cha-
racteristic and graphic account:
" In this position, on the west side of the
Koulevscha hills, Diebitsch found himself at
daylight, June llth, with thirty-six thousand
men, and one hundred pieces of cannon. He
disposed them so as to deceive the enemy.
He posted a division in the valley, its right
leaning on the cliff, its left supported by re-
doubts; the remainder of his troops he drew
up behind the hills, so as to be unseen from
the ravine ; and then with a well-grounded
hope that not a Turk would escape him, wait-
ed the grand vizir, who was advancing up the
defile, totally unconscious that Diebitsch was
in any other place than before Silistria. He
had broke up from Pravodi the day before, on
the receipt of his despatch from Schumla, and
was followed by the Russian garrison, which
had been reinforced by a regiment of hussars ;
but the general commanding it, instead of
obeying Diebitsch's orders, and quietly track-
ing him until the battle should have com-
menced, harassed his rear. To halt and drive
him back to Pravodi, caused the vizir a delay
of four hours, without which he would have
emerged from the defile the same evening, and
have gained Schumla before Diebitsch got into
position.
" In the course of the night the vizir was in-
formed that the enemy had taken post between
him and Schumla, and threatened his retreat.
He might still have avoided the issue of a bat-
tle, by making his way transversely across the
defiles to the Kamptchik, sacrificing his bag-
gage and cannon; but deeming that he had
only Roth to deal with, he, as in that case was
his duty, prepared to force a passage; and the
few troops that he saw drawn up in the valley,
on gaining the little wood fringing it, in the
morning, confirmed his opinion. He counted
on success, yet, to make more sure, halted to
let his artillery take up a flanking position on
the north side of the valley. The circuitous
and bad route, however, delaying this ma-
noeuvre, he could not restrain the impatience of
the delhis. Towards noon, 'Allah, Allah her/
they made a splendid charge; they repeated it,
broke two squares, and amused themselves
nearly two hours in carving the Russian in-
fantry, their own infantry, the while, admiring
them from the skirts of the wood. Diebitsch,
expecting every moment that the vizir would
advance to complete the success of his cavalry
thereby sealing his own destruction or-
dered Count Pah'en, whose division was in the
valley, and who demanded reinforcements, to
maintain his ground to the last man. The
Count obeyed, though suffering cruelly; but
the vizir, fortunately, instead of seconding his
adversary's intentions, quietly remained on the
eminence, enjoying the gallantry of his delhis,
and waiting till his artillery should be able to
open, when he might descend and claim the
victory with ease. Another ten minutes would
have sufficed to envelope him; but Diebitsch.
ignorant of the cause of his backwardness, and
supposing that he intended amusing him till
night, whereby to effect a retreat, and unwilling
to lose more men, suddenly displayed his
1 whole force, and opened a tremendous fire on
THE FALL OF TURKEY.
275
the astonished Turks. In an instant the rout
was general, horse and foot; the latter threw
away their arms, and many of the nizam dge-
ditt were seen clinging to the tails of the del-
hi's horses as they clambered over the hills.
So complete and instantaneous was the flight,
that scarcely a prisoner was made. Redschid
strove to check the panic by personal valour,
but in vain. He was compelled to draw his
sabre in self-defence : he fled to the Kamp-
tchik, accompanied by a score of personal re-
tainers, crossed the mountains, and on the
fourth day re-entered Schumla.
" This eventful battle, fought by the cavalry
on one side, and a few thousand infantry on
the other, decided the fate of Turkey im-
mense in its consequences, compared with the
trifling loss sustained, amounting, on the side
of the Russians, to three thousand killed and
wounded ; on that of the Turks, killed, wound-
ed, and prisoners, to about four thousand. Its
effect, however, was the same as if the whole
Turkish army had been slain."
We have given at large the striking account
of this battle, because it exhibits in the clearest
point of view the extraordinary weakness to
which a power was suddenly reduced which
once kept all Christendom in awe. Thirty-six
thousand men and a hundred pieces of cannon
decided the fate of Turkey; and an army of
Ottomans, forty thousand strong, after sustain-
ing a loss of four thousand men, was literally
annihilated. The thing almost exceeds belief.
To such a state of weakness had the reforms
of Sultan Mahmoud so soon reduced the Otto-
man power. Such was the prostration, through
innovation, of an empire, which, only twenty
years before, had waged a bloody and doubtful
war with Russia, and maintained for four cam-
paigns one hundred and fifty thousand men on
the Danube.
8. Among the immediate and most power-
ful causes of the rapid fall of the Ottoman em-
pire, unquestionably, must be reckoned the
Greek Revolution, and the extraordinary part
which Great Britain took in destroying the
Turkish navy at Navarino.
On this subject we wish to speak with
caution. We have the most heartfelt wish for
the triumph of the Cross over the Crescent,
and the liberation of the cradle of civilization
from Asiatic bondage. But with every desire
for the real welfare of the Greeks, we must be
permitted to doubt whether the Revolution was
the way to effect it, or the cause of humanity
has not been retarded by the premature effort
for its independence.
Since the wars of the French Revolution
began, the condition and resources of the
Greeks had improved in as rapid a progression
as those of the Turks have declined. Various
causes have contributed to this.
The islanders," says Mr. Slade, it may be
said, have always been independent, and in
possession of the coasting trade of the empire.
The wars attendant on the French Revolution
gave them the carrying trade of the Mediterra-
nean ; on the Euxine alone they had above two
hundred sail under the Russian flag. Their
vessels even navigated as far as Eng'and.
Mercantile houses were established in the
principal ports of the continent of Europe ; the
only duty on their commerce was five per
cent, ad valorem, to the sultan's custom-houses.
The great demand of the English merchants
for Turkish silk, when Italian silk, to which it
is superior, was difficult to procure, enriched
the Greeks of the interior, who engrossed the
entire culture. The continental system obliged
us to turn to Turkey for corn, large quantities
of which were exported from Macedonia, from
Smyrna, and from Tarsus, to the equal profit
of the Grecian and Turkish agriculturists.
The same system also rendered it incumbent
on Germany to cultivate commercial relations
with Turkey, to the great advantage of the
Greeks, who were to be seen, in consequence,
numerously frequenting the fairs at Leipsic.
Colleges were established over Greece and the
islands, by leave obtained from Selim III.;
principally at Smyrna, Scio, Salonica, Yanina,
and Hydra; and the wealthy sent their children
to civilized Europe for education, without op-
position from the Porte, which did not foresee
the mischief that it would thereby gather.
" In short, the position of the Greeks, in 1810,
was such as would have been considered
visionary twenty years previous, and would,
if then offered to them, have been hailed as the
completion of their desires. But the general
rule, applicable to nations as well as to indi-
viduals, that an object, however ardently
aspired after, when attained, is chiefly valued
as a stepping-stone to higher objects, naturally
affected them: the possession of unexpected
prosperity and knowledge opened to them
further prospects, gave them hopes of realizing
golden dreams, of revenging treasured wrongs
showed them, in a word, the vista of inde-
pendence."
These causes fostered the Greek Insur-
rection, which was secretly organized for
years before it broke out in 1821, and was then
spread universally and rendered unquenchable
by the barbarous murder of the Greek patri-
arch, and a large proportion of the clergy at
Constantinople, on Easter Day of that year.
The result has been, that Greece, after seven
years of the ordeal of fire and sword, has ob-
tained its independence ; and by the destruction
of her navy at Navarino, Turkey has lost the
means of making any effectual resistance on
the Black Sea to Russia. Whether Greece has
been benefited by the change, time alone can
show. But it is certain that such have been
the distractions, jealousies, and robberies of
the Greeks upon each other since that time,
that numbers of them have regretted that the
dominion of their country has passed from the
infidels.
But whatever may be thought on this sub-
ject, nothing can be more obvious than that
the Greek Revolution was utterly fatal to the
naval power of Turkey; because it deprived
them at once of the class from which alone
sailors could be obtained. The whole com-
merce of the Ottomans was carried on by the
Greeks, and their sailors constituted the entire
seamen of their fleet. Nothing, accordingly,
can be more lamentable than the condition of
the Turkish fleet since that time. The catas-
trophe of Navarino deprived ilicm of their
276
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
best ships and bravest sailors ; the Greek revolt
drained off the whole population who were
wont to man their fleets. Mr. Slade informs
us that when he navigated on board the Capi-
tan Pasha's ship with the Turkish fleet in
1829, the crews were composed almost entirely
of landsmen, who were forced on board with-
out the slightest knowledge of nautical affairs ;
and that such was their timidity from inex-
perience of that element, that a few English
frigates would have sent the whole squadron,
containing six ships of the line, to the bottom.
The Russian fleet also evinced a degree of
ignorance and timidity in the Euxine, which
could hardly have been expected, from their
natural hardihood and resolution. Yet, the
Moscovite fleet, upon the whole, rode triumph-
ant ; by their capture of Anapa, they struck at
the great market from whence Constantinople
is supplied, while, by the storming of Sizepolis,
they gave a point d'appui to Diebitsch on the
coast within the Balkan, without which he
could never have ventured to cross that formi-
dable range. This ruin of the Turkish marine
by the Greek Revolution and the battle of Na-
varino, was therefore the immediate cause of
the disastrous issue of the second Russian cam-
paign ; and the scale might have been turned,
and it made to terminate in equal disasters to
the invaders, if live English ships of the line
had been added to the Turkish force ; an
addition, Mr. Slade tells us, which would have
enabled the Turks to burn the Russian arsenals
and fleet at Swartopol, and postponed for half
a century the fall of the Ottoman empire.
Nothing, therefore, can be more instructive
than the rapid fall of the Turkish power ; nor
more curious than the coincidence between the
despotic acts of the reforming eastern sultan
and of the innovating European democracies.
The measures of both have been the same ;
both have been actuated by the same principles,
and both yielded to the same ungovernable
ambition. The sultan commenced his reforms
by destroying the old territorial noblesse, ruin-
ing the privileges of corporations, and subvert-
ing the old military force of the kingdom; and
he is known to meditate the destruction of the
Mohammedan hierarchy, and the confiscation
of the property of the church to the service of the
public treasury. The Constituent Assembly,
before they had sat six months, had annihilated
the feudal nobility, extinguished th^privileges
of corporations, uprooted the military force of
the monarchy, and confiscated the whole pro-
perty of the church. The work of destruction
went on far more smoothly and rapidly in the
hands of the great despotic democracy, than
of the eastern sultan ; by the whole forces of
the state drawing in one direction, the old
machine was pulled to pieces with a rapidity
to which there is nothing comparable in the
annals even of Oriental potentates. The rude
hand even of Sultan Mahmoud took a lifetime
to accomplish that which the French demo-
cracy effected in a few months ; and even his
ruthless power paused at devastations, which
they unhesitatingly adopted amidst the applause
of the nation. Despotism, absolute despotism,
was the ruling passion of both ; the sultan pro-
claimed the principle that all authority flows
! from the throne, and that every influence must
, be destroyed which does not emanate from that
I source ; " The Rights of Man" publicly an-
nounced the sovereignty of the people, and
made every appointment, civil and military,
flow from their assemblies. So true it is that
despotism is actuated by the same jealousies,
and leads to the same measures on the part of
the sovereign as the multitude ; and so just is the
observation of Aristotle: "The character of
democracy and despotism is the same. Both
exercise a despotic authority over the better
class of citizens ; decrees are in the first, what
ordinances and arrests are in the last. Though
placed in different ages or countries, the court
favourite and democrat are in reality the same
characters, or at least they always bear a close
analogy to each other; they have the principal
authority in their respective forms of govern-
ment; favourites with the absolute monarch,
demagogues with the sovereign multitude."*
The immediate effect of the great despotic
acts in the two countries, however, was widely
different The innovations of Sultan Mah-
moud being directed against the wishes of the
majority of the nation, prostrated the strength
of the Ottomans, and brought the Russian bat-
talions in fearful strength over the Balkan.
The innovations of the Constituent Assembly
being done in obedience to the dictates of the
people, produced for a lime a portentous union
of revolutionary passions, and carried the Re-
publican standards in triumph to every capital
of Europe. It is one thing to force reform
upon an unwilling people; it is another and a
very different thing to yield to their wishes in
imposing it upon a reluctant minority in the
state.
But the ultimate effect of violent innova-
tions, whether proceeding from the despotism
of the sultan or the multitude, is the same.
In both cases they totally destroy the frame of
society, and prevent the possibility of freedom
being permanently erected, by destroying the
classes whose intermixture is essential to its
existence. The consequences of destroying
the dere beys, the ayams, the Janissaries, and
ulema in Turkey, will, in the end, be the same
as ruining the church, the nobility, the corpo-
rations, and landed proprietors in France.
The tendency of both is identical, to destroy
all authority but that emanating from a single
power in the state, and of course to render that
power despotic. It is immaterial whether that
single power is the primary assemblies of the
people, or the divan of the sultan ; whether the
influence to be destroyed is that of the church
or the ulema, the dere beys or the nobility. In
either case there is no counterpoise to its au-
hority, and of course no limit to its oppres-
;ion. As it is impossible, in the nature of
things, that power should long be exercised by
great bodies, as they necessarily and rapidly
"all under despots of their own creation, so it
s evident that the path is cleared, not only for
despotism, but absolute despotism, as com-
pletely by the innovating democracy as the
resistless sultan. There never was such a
pioneer for tyranny as the Constituent As-
* Arist. de Pol. iv. c. 4.
THE FALL OF TURKEY.
277
sembly, they outstripped Sultan Mahmoud
himself.
It is melancholy to reflect on the deplorable
state of weakness to which England has been
reduced since revolutionary passions seized
upon her people. Three years ago, the British
name was universally respected ; the Portu-
guese pointed with gratitude to the well-fought
fields, where English blood was poured forth
like water in behalf of their independence ; the
Dutch turned with exultation to the Lion of
Waterloo, the proud and unequalled monu-
ment of English fidelity; the Poles acknow-
ledged with gratitude, that, amidst all their
sorrows, England alone had stood their friend,
and exerted its influence at the Congress of
Vienna to procure for them constitutional
freedom; even the Turks, though mourning
the catastrophe of Navarino, acknowledged
that British diplomacy had at length interfered
and turned aside from Constantinople the
sword of Russia, after the barrier of the Bal-
kan had been broke through. Now, how wo-
ful is the change! The Portuguese recount,
with undisguised indignation, the spoliation
of their navy by the tricolour fleet, then in
close alliance with England; and the fostering
by British blood and treasure, of a cruel and
insidious civil war in their bosom, in aid of
the principle of revolutionary propagandism.
The Dutch, with indignant rage, tell the tale
of the desertion by England of the allies and
principles for which she had fought for a hun-
dred and fifty years, and .the shameful union
of the Leopard and the Eagle, to crush the
independence and partition the territories of
Holland. The Polish exiles in foreign lands
dwell on the heart-rending story of their
wrongs, and narrate how they were led: on-by
deceitful promises from France and England
to resist, till the period of capitulation had
gone by; the eastern nations deplore the occu-
pation of Constantinople by the Russians, and
hold up their hands in astonishment at the in-
fatuation which has led the mistress of the
seas to permit the keys of the Dardanelles to
be placed in the grasp of Moscovite ambition.
It is in vain to conceal the fact, that by a mere
change of ministry, by simply letting loose
revolutionary passions, England has descended
to the rank of a third-rate power. She has
sunk at once, without any external disasters,
from the triumphs of Trafalgar and Waterloo,
to the disgrace and the humiliation of Charles
II. It is hard to say whether she is most
despised or insulted by her ancient allies or
enemies ; whether contempt and hatred are
strongest among those she aided or resisted
in the late struggle. Russia defies her in the
east, and, secure in the revolutionary pas-
sions by which her people are distracted, pur-
sues with now undisguised anxiety her long-
cherished aud stubbornly-resisted schemes of
ambition in the Dardanelles. France drags
her a willing captive at her chariot-wheels,
and compels the arms which once struck down
Napoleon to aid her in all the mean revolu-
tionary aggressions she is pursuing on the
surrounding states. Portugal and Holland,
smarting under the wounds received from
their oldest ally, wait for the moment of British
weakness to wreak vengeance for the wrongs
inflicted under the infatuated guidance of the
whig democracy. Louis XIV., humbled by
the defeats of Blenheim and Ramillies, yet
spurned with indignation at the proposal that
he should join his arms to those of his ene-
mies, to dispossess his ally, the King of
Spain; but England, in the hour of her great-
est triumph, has submitted to a greater degra-
dation. She has deserted and insulted the
nation which stood by her side in the field of
Vittoria; she has joined in hostility against
the power which bled with her at Waterloo,
and deserted in its last extremity the ally
whose standards waved triumphant with her
on the sands of Egypt.
The supineness and weakness of ministers
in the last agony of Turkey have been such as
would have exceeded belief, if woful experi-
ence had not taught us to be surprised at no-
thing which they can do. France acted with
becoming foresight and spirit; they had an
admiral, with four ships of the line, to watch
Russia in the Dardanelles, when the crisis ap-
proached. What had England? One ship of the
line on the way from Malta, and a few frigates
in the Archipelago, were all that the mistress
of the waves could afford, to support the hon-
our and interests of England, in an emergency
more pressing than any which has occurred
since the battle of Trafalgar. Was the crisis
not foreseen? Everyman in the country of
any intelligence foresaw it, from the moment
that Ibrahim besieged Acre. Can England
only fit out one ship of the line to save the
Dardanelles from Russia? Is this the fore-
sight of the Whigs, or the effect of the dock-
yard reductions? Or has the reform act
utterly annihilated our strength, and sunk o*r
name?
It is evident that in the pitiable shifts to
which government is now reduced, foreign
events, even of the greatest magnitude, have
no sort of weight in its deliberations. Resting
on the quicksands of popular favour; intent
only on winning the applause or resisting the
indignation of the rabble ; dreading the strokes
of their old allies among the political unions;
awakened, when too late, to a sense of the
dreadful danger arising from the infatuated
course they have pursued ; hesitating between
losing the support of the revolutionists and
pursuing the a.narchical projects which they
avow ; unable to command the strength of the
nation for any foreign policy; having sown
the seeds of interminable dissension between
the different classes of society, and spread far
and wide the modern passion for innovation
in lieu of the ancient patriotism of England ;
they have sunk it at once into the gulf of de-
gradation. By the passions they have excited
in the empire, its strength is utterly destroyed,
and well do foreign nations perceive its weak-
ness. They know that Ireland is on the verge
of rebellion ; that the West Indies, with the
torch and the tomahawk at their throats, are
waiting only for the first national reverse to
throw off their allegiance; that the splendid
empire of India is shaking under the demo-
cratic rule to which it is about to be subjected
on the expiry of the charter ; that the dock-
2 A
278
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
yards, stripped of their stores to make a show
of economy, and conceal a sinking revenue,
could no longer fit out those mighty fleets
which so recently went forth from their gates,
conquering and to conquer. The foreign his-
torians of the French revolutionary war de-
plored the final seal it had put upon the
maritime superiority of England, and declared
that human sagacity could foresee no possible
extrication of the seas from her resistless do-
minion: but how vain are the anticipations
of human wisdom! The fickle change of
popular opinion subverted the mighty fabric;
a Whig ministry succeeded to the helm, and
before men had ceased to tremble at the thun-
der of Trafalgar, England had become con-
temptible on the waves !
From this sad scene of national degradation
and decay, from the melancholy spectacle of
the breaking up, from revolutionary passion
and innovation, of the greatest and most bene-
ficent empire that ever existed upon earth, we
turn to a more cheering prospect, and joyfully
inhale from the prospects of the species those
hopes which we can no longer venture to
cherish for our own country.
The attention of all classes in this country
has been so completely absorbed of late years
by the progress of domestic changes, and the
march of revolution, that little notice has been
bestowed on the events we have been consider-
ing ; yet they are more important to the future
fate of the species, than even the approaching
dismemberment of the British empire. We
are about to witness the overthrow of the Mo-
hammedan religion ; the emancipation of the
cradle of civilization from Asiatic bondage ;
the accomplishment of that deliverance of the
Hly Sepulchre, for which the Crusaders toiled
and bled in vain ; the elevation of the cross on
the Dome of St. Sophia and the walls of Je-
rusalem.
That this great event was approaching has
been long foreseen by the thoughtful and the
philanthropic. The terrors of the Crescent
have long since ceased: it first paled in the
Gulf of Lepanto : it waned before the star of
Sobieski under the Avails of Vienna, and set in
flames in the Bay of Navarino. The power
which once made all Christendom tremble,
which shook the imperial throne, and pene-
trated from the sands of Arabia to the banks
of the Loire, is now in the agonies of dissolu-
tion ; and that great deliverance for which the
banded chivalry of Europe fought for cen-
turies, and to attain which millions of Chris-
tian bones whitened the fields of Asia, is now
about to be effected through the vacillation and
indifference of their descendants. That which
the courage of Richard Ccsur de Lion, and the
enthusiasm of Godfrey of Bouillon, could not
achieve ; which resisted the arms of the Tem-
plars and the Hospitallers, and rolled back from
Asia the tide of European invasion, is now in
the act of being accomplished. A more me-
morable instance was never afforded of the
manner in which the passions and vices of
men are made to work out the intentions of
an overruling Providence, and of the vanity
of all human attempts to prevent that cease-
less spread of religion which has been decreed
by the Almighty.
That Russia is the power by whom this
great change was to be effected, by whose arm
the tribes of Asia were to be reduced to sub-
jection, and the triumph of civilization over
barbaric sway effected, has long been appa-
rent. The gradual but unceasing pressure
of the hardy races of mankind upon the effe-
minate, of the energy of northern poverty on
the corruption of southern opulence, rendered
it evident that this change must ultimately be
effected. The final triumph of the Cross over
the Crescent was secure from the moment that
the Turcoman descended to the plains of Asia
Minor, and the sway of the Czar was estab-
lished in the deserts of Scythia. As certainly
as water will ever descend from the mountains
to the plain, so surely will the stream of per-
manent conquest, in every age, flow from the
northern to the southern races of mankind.
But although the continued operation of
these causes was evident, and the ultimate as-
cendent of the religion of Christ, and the insti-
tutions of civilization, over the tenets of
Mohammed, and the customs of barbarism,
certain ; yet many different causes, till within
these few years, contributed to check their ef-
fects, and to postpone, apparently, for an in-
definite period, the final liberation of the
eastern world. But the weakness, insanity,
and vacillation of England and France, while
they will prove fatal to them, seem destined to
subject the east to the sway of Russia, and re-
new, in the plains of Asia, those institutions
of which Europe has become unworthy. The
cause of religion, the spread of the Christian
faith, has received an impulse from the vices
and follies, which she never received from the
sword of western Europe. The infidelity and
irreligion of the French philosophers have
done that for the downfall -of Islamism which
all the enthusiasm of the Crusaders could not
accomplish. Their first effect was to light up
a deadly war in Europe, and array the civilized
powers of the world in mortal strife against
each other; but this was neither their only nor
their final effect. In this contest, the arms of
civilization acquired an unparalleled ascend-
ency over those of barbarism; and at its close,
the power of Russia was magnified fourfold.
Turkey and Persia were unable to withstand the
empire from which the arms of Napoleon rolled
back. The overthrow of Mohammedanism,
the liberation of the finest provinces of Europe
from Turkish sway, flowed at last, directly and
evidently, from the rise of the spirit which at
first closed all the churches of France, and
erected the altar of reason in the choir of Notre
Dame. We are now witnessing the conclu-
sion of the drama. When England descended
from her high station, and gave way to revo-
lutionary passions ; when irreligion tainted her
people, and respect for the institutions of their
fathers no longer influenced her government,
she, too, was abandoned to the consequences
of her vices; and from her apostasy, fresh
support derived to the cause of Christianity.
French irreligion had quadrupled the military
strength of Russia : but the English navy still
THE SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1820.
279
existed to uphold the tottering edifice of Turk-
ish power. English irreligion and infidelity
overturned her constitution, and the barrier
was swept away.
The British navy, paralysed by democracy
and divisions in the British islands, can no
longer resist Moscovite ambition, and the pros-
tration of Turkey is in consequence complete.
The effects will in the end be fatal to England;
but they may raise up in distant lands other
empires, which may one day rival even the
glories of the British name. The cross may
cease to be venerated at Paris, but it will be
elevated at St. Sophia: it may be ridiculed in
London, but it will resume its sway at Antioch.
Considerations of this kind are fitted, if any
can, to console us for the degradation and ca-
lamities of our own country : they show, that
if one nation becomes corrupted, Providence
can derive, even from its vices and ingrati-
tude, the means 'of raising up other states to
the glory of which it has become unworthy:
and that from the decay of civilization in its
present seats, the eye of hope may anticipate its
future resurrection in the cradle from whence
it originally spread its blessings throughout
! the world.
THE SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1820.*
THERE is no subject with which we are more
completely unacquainted, or which has been
more perverted by artful deception on the part
of the revolutionary press throughout Europe,
than the convulsions, which, since the general j
peace, have distracted the Spanish Peninsula.
Circumstances have been singularly favour-
able to the universal diffusion of erroneous
views on this subject. The revolutionary
party had a fair field for the adoption of every
kind of extravagance, and the propagation of
every species of falsehood, in a country where
the ruling class, who opposed the movement,
had committed great errors, been guilty of
black ingratitude, and were totally incapable
of counteracting, by means of the press, those
erroneous misrepresentations, with which the
indefatigable activity of the revolutionary
party overwhelmed the public mind in every
part of the world. Their exertions, and the
success which they have met with, in this re-
spect, have accordingly been unprecedented ;
and there is no subject on which historic truth
will be found to be so different from journal
misrepresentation, as the transactions of the
Peninsula during the last fifteen years.
That Ferdinand VII. is a weak man ; that,
under the government of the priests, he has
violated his promises, behaved cruelly towards
his deliverers, and been guilty of black ingrati-
tude towards the heroic defenders of his throne
during his exile, may be considered as histori-
cally certain. How', then, has it happened that
the Revolution has retrograded in a country
where so much was required to be done in the
way of real amelioration, and the wishes of so
large a portion of its inhabitants were unani-
mous in favour of practical improvement 1 ?
How can we explain the fact, that the French,
in 1823, led by the Duke d'Angouleme, under
the weak and vacillating direction of the Bour-
bons, traversed the Peninsula from end to end,
without even the shadow of resistance, and es-
tablished Iheir standard on the walls of Cadi/,
after the heroic resistance which the peasantry
of the Peninsula made to Gallic aggression
* Essai Histori(|iic sur la Revolution crKsp.-iL'iir. p-ir
le Vicomte de Martitrnnc. Paris, Pinard, 1832. Black-
wood's Magazine, September, 1832.
under Napoleon, and the universal hatred
which their presence had excited in every part
of that desolated and blood-stained country?
Immense must have been the injustice, enor-
mous the folly, ruinous the sway of the revolu-
tionary party, when it so soon cured a whole
nation of a desire for change, which all at first
felt to be necessary, which so many were
throughout interested in promoting, and which
was begun with such unanimous support from
all classes.
The Revolutionists explain this extraordi-
nary fact, by saying that it was entirely owing
to the influence of the priests, who, seeing that
their power and possessions were threatened
by the proposed innovations, set themselves
vigorously and successfully to oppose them.
But here again historical facts disprove party
misrepresentations. It will be found, upon,
examination, that the priests at the outset made
no resistance whatever to the establishment of
the constitution on the most democratic basis ;
that the experiment of a highly popular form
of government was tried with the unanimous
approbation of all classes; and that the subse-
quent general horror at the constitutionalists,
and the easy overthrow of their government,
was owing to the madness of the popular rulers
themselves, to the enormous injustice which
they committed, the insane projects of innova-
tion in which they indulged, and the weighty
interests in all ranks, on which, in the prose-
cution of their frantic career, they were com-
pelled to trench. Spain, when the veil is
drawn aside which party delusions has so long
spread before its transactions, will be found to
add another confirmation to the eternal truths,
that the career of innovation necessarily and
rapidly destroys itself; that the misery it im-
mediately produces renders the great body of
men at length deaf to the delusive promises by
which its promoters never fail to bolster up its
fortunes, and that there is no such fatal enemy
to real freedom as the noisy supporters of de-
mocratic ambition.
The work, whose title is prefixed to this ar-
ticle, is well calculated to disabuse the public
mind in regard to these important transactions.
The author is one of the liberal party in France,
280
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
and bestows liberal and unqualified abuse
upon all the really objectionable parts of Fer-
dinand's conduct. At the same time, he un-
folds, in clear and graphic colours, the ruinous
precipitance and fatal innovations of the Re-
volutionists, and distinctly demonstrates that
it was not the priests nor the nobles, but their
own injustice, and the wide-spread ruin pro-
duced by their own measures, which occa-
sioned the speedy downfall of the absurd con-
stitution which they had established.
We all recollect that the new constitution
of Spain was framed in the Isle of Leon, in
1812, when the greater part of the Peninsula
was overrun by the French troops. M. Mar-
tignac gives the following account of the origi-
nal formation of the Cortes in that island, to
whom the important task of framing a consti-
tution was devolved:
" The greater part of the Spanish territory
was at this period overrun by the French ;
Cadiz, Gallicia, Murcia, and the Belearic Isles,
alone elected their representatives : No condi-
tion was imposed on the electors, but every one tvho
presented himself iv as allowed to vote. The depu-
ties from the other provinces were elected by
an equally universal suffrage of all their inhabi-
tants who had taken refuge in the Isle of Leon ;
and thus the Cortes was at length assembled.
Such was the origin of the assembly which
gave to Spain its democratic constitution.
"We cannot now read without surprise,
mingled with pity, the annals of that assembly,
and the monuments it has left for the instruc-
tion of all nations, a prey to the same passions,
and the victims of the same fury. The bloody
annals of our Convention can alone give an
idea of it ; but to the revolutionary fanaticism
which they shared with us, we must add, the
influence of a burning sun over their heads,
and the force of implacable animosities, nou-
rished by the Moorish blood which flowed in
theiK veins. All the recollections of our dis-
asters were there cited, not as beacons to be
avoided, but examples to be followed: all the
men whose names are never pronounced
amongst us but with an involuntary feeling of
horror, were there cited as heroes, and pro-
posed as models; all the measures of proscrip-
tion and destruction which vengeance, inspir-
ed by hatred, could suggest, were there pro-
posed and supported. One declared that in his
eyes the hatchet of the executioner was the
sole argument which he would deign to propose
to the logic of his adversaries ; another, and
that was a priest, offered to take the axe into
his own hands; a third, indignant at the scan-
dal which Spain had so long exhibited, ex-
claimed, 'We have been assembled for six
months, and not one head has as yet fallen.'
" In the midst of these manifestations of a
furious delirium, some prudent and sagacious
voices were heard, and united among each
other to moderate the popular effervescence,
which such pains had been taken to excite.
Among those who executed with most success
this honourable task, the voice of Arguelles
was especially distinguished ; of that Arguel-
les, whose mind, chastened by reflection, and
enlightened by study, had subdued these ex-
travagant ideas ; whose eloquence at once cap-
tivated and entranced his auditors ; and who,
in a time and a place where any thing ap-
proaching to moderation was stigmatized as
blasphemy, had obtained the extraordinary
surname of the Divine.
" Nothing, however, could arrest the torrent
of democracy which had now broken through
all its bounds. The Cortes had been convoked
to overturn the foundations of the Spanish
monarchy, and consummate the work of the
Revolution, and nothing could prevent the
task being accomplished. From the day of
their first meeting, they had proclaimed the
principle, that sovereignty resides in the na-
tion ; and all their acts were the consequences
of that principle. The national and rational
party, whose conviction and good sense it out-
raged, were far from adopting so extravagant
a proposition, and in ordinary circumstances
they would have rejected it; but all their pro-
testations and remonstrances were overturned,
by pointing to their young king, a captive in
a foreign land, and incessantly invoking the
principle of popular sovereignty, as the sole
method of awakening that general enthusiasm,
which might ultimately deliver him from his
fetters. The peril of foreign subjugation was
such, that nothing tending to calm the public
effervescence could be admitted; and the firm-
est royalists were, by an unhappy fatality, com-
pelled to embrace principles subversive of the
throne.
"The Cortes, therefore, was compelled to
advance in the career on which it had entered,
deliberating on the great interests of Spain
under the irresistible influence of a furiou,s and
democratic press, and under the pressure of po-
pular speeches delivered by the visionary and
enthusiastic from all the provinces, who soon
made Cadiz their common centre.
"It was in the midst of that fiery furnace
that the constitution of Spain was forged : in
the bosom of that crisis, the centre of that fer-
mentation, in the absence of all liberty of thought
and action, from the vehemence of the popular party,
that the solemn act was adopted which was to
resruiate the destiny of a great people." I.
9497.
A constitution struck out in such a period
of foreign -danger and domestic deliverance,
under the dread of French bayonets and the
pressure of revolutionary fury, could hardly
be expected to be either rational or stable, or
adapted to the character and wants of the peo-
ple. It was accordingly in the highest degree
democratical; not only infinitely more so than
Spain could bear, but more so than any state
in Europe, not excepting England or France,
could adopt with the slightest chance of safety.
Its leading articles were as follows :
" 1. The sovereignty resides in the nation.
" 2. The Cortes is to be elected by the uni-
versal suffrage of the whole inhabitants.
" 3. It possesses alone the legislative power,
which comprises the sole power of proposing
laws. It votes the taxes and the levies for the
army; lays down all the regulations for the
armed force; names the supreme judges;
creates and institutes a regent, in case of mi-
nority or incapacity, of which last it alone
is the judge, and exercises a direct control
THE SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1820.
281
over the ministers and all other functionaries,
whose responsibility it alone regulates. Dur-
ing the intervals of its sessions, it is repre-
sented by a. permanent deputation, charged with
the execution of the laws, and the power of
convoking it, in case of necessity.
"4. The king is inviolable. He sanctions
the laws ; but he can only refuse his assent
twice, and to different legislatures. On the
third bill being presented, he must give his con-
sent. He has the right of pardon ; but that
right is circumscribed within certain limits
fixed by law.
"5. The king names the public functiona-
ries, butyVom a list presented to him by the council
of state. The whole functionaries are subject
to a supreme tribunal, the members of which
are all appointed by the Cortes.
"6. The king cannot leave the kingdom
without the leave of the Cortes ; and if he mar-
ries without their consent, he is held by that
act alone to have abdicated the throne.
"7. There is to be constantly attached to |
the king's person a council of forty members.
Three counsellors are for life, named by the
king, but from a list furnished by the Cortes,
in which there can only be four of the great
nobles, and four ecclesiastics. It is this coun-
cil which presents the lists for all employments
in church and state to the king, for his selec-
tion.
"8. No part of the new constitution is to be
revised in any of its parts, but by the votes of
three successive legislatures, and by a decree
of the Cortes, not subject to the royal sanction."
I. 9799.
Such was the Spanish constitution of 18V2,
to the restoration of which, all the subsequent
convulsions of the Revolutionary party have
been directed. It was evidently in the highest
degree democratical : so much so, indeed, that the
President of the American Congress has fully
as much real power. The Cortes was elected
by universal suffrage : there was no upper cham-
ber or House of Peers to restrain its excesses;
it was alone invested with the right of voting
the taxes, raising the army, and establishing its
regulations; it controlled and directed all the
public functionaries, and its powers were en-
joyed, during the periods of its prorogation,
by a. permanent committee, which had the power
at any time, of its own authority, to reassemble
the whole body. By means of the Council of
State substantially elected by the Cortes, and
the lists which it presented to the king for the
choice of all public functionaries, it was in- j
vested with the power of naming all officers,
civil, military, ecclesiastical, and judicial; and, ;
to complete this mass of democratic absurdity, ,
this constitution could not be altered in any
of its parts but by the concurring act of three
successive legislatures, and a decree of the
Cortes, not subject to the royal sanction. It is
needless to say any thing of this constitution ;
it was much more democratical than the con-
stitution of France in 1790, which was so soon
overturned by the Revolutionists of that coun-
try, and Avas of such a kind as could not, by
possibility, have failed to precipitate the Pe-
ninsula into all the horrors of anarchy.
The ultimate fate of such a mass of revolu-
tionary madness, in a country so little accus-
tomed to bear the excitement, and so little
aware of the duties of freedom as Spain, might
easily have been anticipated. Its early recep-
tion in the different classes of the community
is thus described by our author:
"To those who are aware of the true spirit
of that grave and constant nation, and who
were not blinded by the passions or the excita-
tion of political fanaticism, it was easy to fore-
see the reception which a constitution would
receive, by which all the habits of the nation
were violated, and all their affections wounded.
" At Cadiz, Barcelona, and, in general, in all
the great commercial towns, the party who
had urged forward the Revolution readily pre-
vailed over the adherents of old institutions,
and these towns expressed their adhesion with
enthusiasm ; but in the smaller boroughs in
the country, and, above all, in the provinces
of the interior, where the new ideas had not
yet made any progress, this total prostration
of the Royalty this substitution of a new
power instead of that which had been the
object of ancient veneration, was received
with a coldness which soon degenerated into
discontent and open complaints.
" In vain the innovators sought to persuade
the people, whose dissatisfaction could no lon-
ger be concealed, that the new constitution
was but a restoration of the ancient principles of
the monarchy, adapted to the new wants and
exigencies of society; in vain had they taken
care, in destroying things, to preserve names ;
this deceitful address deceived no one, and
abated nothing of the public discontent.
"The clergy, discontented and disquieted at
the prospect of a future which it was now easy
to foresee the great proprietors, who were
subjected to new burdens, at the same time
that they were deprived of their ancient rights
the members of all the provincial councils
which were despoiled of their ancient juris-
dictions, added to the public discontent. The
creation of a direct tax, unknown till that day,
appeared to the inhabitants of the country an
intolerable burden a sacrifice without any
compensation; and as the burden of the war
became more heavy as it continued in dura-
tion, these two causes of suffering worked the
discontent of the people up to perfect fury."
100, 101.
The universal discontent at the new consti-
tution broke out into open expressions of de-
testation, when the king, liberated from the
grasp of Napoleon, entered Spain in 1814.
" The king entered Spain in the midst of the
transports of public joy at his deliverance, and
advanced to Valencia, where he was pro-
claimed by the army under General Elio.
" From the frontiers to Valencia, Ferdinand
heard nothing but one continued anathema and
malediction against the constitution. From
all sides he received petitions, memorials, ad-
dresses, in which he was besought to annul
what had been done during his captivity, and
to reign over Spain as his fathers had reigned.
There was not a village through which he
passed which did not express a similar wish,
subscribed by men of all ranks, and even by
the members of the municipalities created by
2A2
282
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
the constitution. The army held the same
language ; and those who had shed their blood
for the defence of the throne, demanded, with
loud cries, ' that the throne should be pre-
served pure, and without spot; and that, as
formerly, it should be powerful, firm, and ho-
noured.'
" The minority of the Cortes joined their
voice to the many others which met the king's
ears, and presented the same wishes and peti-
tions. These members with that view signed
a petition, since well known under the name
of the Protestation of the Fathers. Sixty-nine
deputies, named by the constitution, suppli-
cated the king to destroy the act to which all
classes had so recently been bound by a so-
lemn oath." I. 107109.
The result of this unanimous feeling was
the famous decree of Valencia of May 6, 1814,
by which the monarch annulled the constitu-
tion which he had recently accepted in exile.
The Cortes made several efforts to resist the
change, but the public indignation over-
whelmed them all.
" Resistance to the royal edict was speedily
found to be a chimera. The torrent accumu-
lated as it advanced, and no person in the
state was able to stand against it. After the
publication of the Edict of Valencia, the king
marched to Madrid ; and he found, wherever
he went, the people in a state of insurrection
against the constitutional authorities, the pil-
lars of the constitution overturned and broken,
and the absolute king proclaimed. Everywhere
the soldiers, sent, by the Cortes to restrain the
transports of the people, joined their acclama-
tions to theirs. It was in the midst of that
cortege, which was swelled by the population
of every village through which he passed, that
Ferdinand traversed the space between Va-
lencia and Madrid ; and it was surrounded by
a population more ardent and impassioned
even than that of the 13th May, that he made
one of those memorable entries into his capi-
tal which seemed to promise a long and tran-
quil futurity.
"Thus fell this imprudent and ephemeral
constitution, cradled amidst troubles and war,
prepared without reflection, discussed without
freedom, founded on opinions and sentiments
which were strangers to the soil, applied to a
people for whom it was neither made nor
adapted, and which could not survive the cri-
sis in which it had been conceived." I. 120,
121.
Thus terminated the first act of this unhap-
py drama. From the rash and absurd inno-
vations, the democratic invasions and total
destruction of the old form of government, by
the revolutionary party, the maintenance even
of moderate and regulated freedom had become
impossible. In two years the usual career of
revolution had been run ; liberty had perished
under the frantic innovations of its own sup-
porters ; its excesses were felt to be more
formidable than the despotism of absolute
power, and for shelter from a host of vulgar
tyrants, the people ran to the shadow of the
throne.
The cruel and unjustifiable use which the
absolute monarch made of this violent reac-
tion in favour of monarchical institutions, the
base ingratitude which he evinced to the popu-
lar supporters of his throne during his exile,
and the enormous iniquities which were prac-
tised upon the fallen party of the liberals, are
universally known. These excesses gave the
revolutionary party too good reason to com-
plain ; they pointed out in clear colours the
perils of unfettered power; they awakened the
sympathies of the young and the generous in
every part of the world, in favour of the un-
happy victims of regal vengeance, whose
blood was shed on the scaffold, or who were
languishing in captivity ; and therefore, if any
events could do so, they left a fair field for the
efforts of the constitutional party. Yet, even
with such advantages, and the immense addi-
tion of power consequent on the defection of
the army, the revolutionary party, after being
again called to the helm of affairs, again pe-
rished under the weight of their own revolu-
tionary passions and absurd innovations.
The events which soon followed ; the insur-
rection of Riego, the revolt of the troops as-
sembled in the Island of Leon for the South
American expedition in 1820, and the compul-
sory acceptance of the democratic constitution
of 1812 by the absolute king, are familiar to
all our readers. The effects of this complete
and bloodless triumph of democracy are what
chiefly concern the people of this country, and
they are painted in lucid colours by our author.
" As soon as the constitution had been ac-
cepted of by the king, its establishment expe-
rienced no serious resistance in the kingdom.
The great nobles, accustomed to follow the or-
ders of a master, hesitated not to follow his
example. In the principal towns, all those en-
gaged in commerce, industry, and the liberal
professions, testified their adherence with the
most lively satisfaction. The army expressed
its devotion to the constitutional standard
which it had erected, and evinced its determi-
nation to support it by the formidable weapons
of force. The needy and idle ; all who were
bankrupt, in labouring circumstances, or des-
titute of the industrious habits necessary to
secure a subsistence, flew with avidity to the
support of a system, which promised them the
spoils of the state. The dignified clergy and
the monks beheld with grief the triumph of the
theories which they condemned; but neverthe-
less they obeyed in silence. The magistracy
followed their example. As to the people pro-
perly so called, that is to say, the industrious
inhabitants of the towns, the peaceable culti-
vators of the fields, they regarded the change
with disquietude and distrust, took no active
share in promoting it, and awaited the course
of events to decide their judgment." I. 203.
The usual effects of democratic ascendency
were not long in proclaiming themselves.
" The sixty-nine deputies of the old Cortes,
who had signed the address to the king recom-
mending the overthrow of the constitution,
were everywhere arrested and thrown into
prison. This was the first indication of what
the constitutionalists understood by the am-
nesty which they had proclaimed.
" Whilst at Madrid, the royal government, de-
prived of all moral force, feebly struggled
THE SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1320.
against the popular power, which had arisen
by its side ; whilst the patriotic societies over-
turned or displaced the local authorities, in-
sulted the majesty of the throne and the royal
authority,, preached license and proclaimed
disorder; whilst violence was organized, and
anarchy systematically constituted, the pro-
vinces did not afford a more cheering ex-
ample, and in that circle of fire into which
Spain was now resolved, the extremities show-
ed themselves not less inflamed than the centre.
There could be discerned, by the prophetic eyes
of wisdom, the black speck which was soon to
enlarge and overwhelm the kingdom with the
horrors of civil war.
"In a great proportion of the provinces,
separate juntas were formed, while some dis-
regarded alike the authority of government
and that of the supreme assembly. Each of
these assemblies deliberated, interpreted, acted
according to the disposition of the majority of
its members, and no central authority felt it-
self sufficiently strong to venture to subject to
any common yoke the local parliaments, each
of which, in its own little sphere, had more
influence than the central alone possessed."
I. 211.
Amidst the general transports of the revolu-
tionary party at this unexpected change, the
usual and invariable attendant or revolution-
ary convulsions, embarrassments of finance, were
soon experienced. The way in which this un-
dying load precipitated the usual consequences
of revolutionary triumph, national bankrupt-
cy, and a confiscation of the properly of the
church, is thus detailed:
"No sooner was the new Cortes installed,
than numerous and important cares occupied
their attention. Of these, the most pressing
was the state of the finances. Disinterestedness
is not in general the distinctive character of
the leaders of party, and the countries deliv-
ered by revolutions usually are not long of
discovering what it has cost them. In vain
the ministry, in vain the Cortes, terrified aU/ie
daily inn-easing deficit in the public treasury, and
the absence of all resources to supply it,
sought to reduce, by economical reductions,
those charges which the state could evidently
no longer support. While reductions were
effected in one quarter, additional charges
multiplied in another. All those who could
make out the shadow of a claim of loss arising
from the arbitrary government ; all those whose
hands had touched, to raise it up, the pillar of
the constitution, had restitutions or indemnities
to claim, without prejudice to arrears, and new
places to demand. Refusal was out of the
question ; for it would have been considered as
a denial of justice, an act of ingratitude, a
proof of servility. Jltnidst the public transports
the revenue was incessantly going down"
It became absolutely indispensable, there-
fore, to provide new resources ; but where was
a government to find them, destitute of credit,
in a country without industry and without com-
merce ? The expedient of a patriotic loan was
tried, but that immediately and totally failed.
The patriots all expected to receive, not to be
called upon to give money to government. Re-
course was then, from sheer necessity, had to
283
the most fatal of all
which at once ruin the present, anmvmgg^jl.
prospects for the future. They made a separa-
tion between all arrears, or existing debt, and
the current expenses of the year, and appro-
priated to this taut t/ic u'iiuU- rrrntiu' of the state,
that is to say, they proclaimed public bank-
ruptcy as to the national debt, and thus inflicted
on public and private credit one of those mor-
tal stabs from which they never recover.
"Having thus got quit of the debt, the next
object was to bring up the income to the ex-
penditure of the year. For this purpose, they
re-established the direct and burdensome land-tax,
which had been abandoned on the restoration
of royalty, in 1814, and created various new
I taxes, most of which, from their extreme unpo-
pularity, they were soon compelled to abandon.
" They next established on the frontier a line
of custom-houses, with^a rigour of prohibition
which could hardly be Conceived in an indus-
trious country, which was unintelligible in
! Spain, and was speedily followed by the esta-
blishment, on the frontier, of a system of
smuggling, the most vast and organized that
ever existed.
" Finally, they abolished the tithes and feudal
tenths, but established the half of them for the
service of the state. This was immediately at-
tended with the worst effects. The ecclesias-
tical tithe was the burden, of all others, which
was most regularly and cheerfully paid in
Spain, because the people were accustomed to
it, and they conceived that, in paying it, they
discharged at once a legal obligation and a
debt of conscience ; but when it was converted
into a burden merely available to the ordinary
wants of the state, it was no longer regarded
in that light, but as an odious charge, and its
collection was instantly exposed to the increas-
ing embarrassments of the other imposts.
"At the time that they voted these different
financial expedients, their total inadequacy
was obvious to the most inconsiderate; and it
soon became evident that additional resources
were unavoidable." I. 230, 231.
Thus the first effect of the triumph of revo-
lution in Spain, was the imposition of a heavy
income-tax, the destruction of tlie public debt, and
the confiscation of tithes, and a large portion of the
land rights of tlie kingdom, to the service of the
treasury. One simple and irresistible cause
produced these effects, the failure of the re-
venue, invariably consequent on the suspen-
sion of industry, the failure of credit, and con-
traction of expenditure, which result from
popular triumph.
The rapid progress of innovation in every
other department, in consequence of the re-es-
tablishment of the democratic constitution,
speedily unhinged all the institutions of society.
Its effect is thus detailed by our author:
"Independent of the financial measures of
which I have given an account, and which
were attended with so little good effect, the
Cortes were occupied with innumerable pro-
jects of reform in legislation, administration,
and police, so numerous, that it is impossible
to give any account of them. Devoured with
the passion for destruction, and but little so-
licitous about restoring with prudence, the
284
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
ardent friends of reform did not allow a single
day to pass without denouncing some abuse,
declaiming against some remnants of despo-
tism and arbitrary power. Projects of laws
succeeded each other without interruption ;
and as every one of these projects was held to
be an incontcstible and urgent necessity, and to
hesitate as to it would have been apparently to
call in question the principles of the Revolu-
tion, and evince a certain mark of aversion
for the supremacy of the people, not one of
them was either adjourned or rejected. Innu-
merable commissions were established to ex-
amine the projects of innovation ; reports
made ; laws discussed and voted ; and the old
legislation of the kingdom daily crumbled into
dust, without a single individual in the country
having either the time to read, or an opportu-
nity to consider the innumerable institutions
which were daily substituted, instead of those
which had formerly existed." I. 235.
All these projects of reform, however, and
all this vast confiscation of property, both
ecclesiastical and civil, could not supply the
continually increasing deficit of the treasury.
Another, and still greater revolutionary con-
fiscation awaited the state, and to this, invin-
cible necessity speedily led.
" From the commencement of the next ses-
sion of the Cortes, measures had been taken to
facilitate the secularization of the religious
orders of both sexes ; and many of them had
already left their retreats, and rejoined their
friends in the world.
" At length matters came to a crisis. On
the proposition of Colonel Sancho, a law was
passed, which confiscated the whole property of the
regular clergy to the service of the state. This law,
adopted by the Cortes, was submitted to the
royal sanction. The king evinced the utmost
repugnance to a measure so directly subversive
of all the religious opinions in which he had
been educated. Terrified at this resistance,
with which they had not laid their account, the
revolutionary party had recourse to one of
those methods which nothing can either au-
thorize or justify, and for which success can
offer no excuse.
" Convinced that they could obtain only by
terror what was refused to solicitation, they
took the resolution to excite a popular sedition,
organize a revolt, and excite a tumult to over-
come the firmness of the king. For this pur-
pose, they entered into communication with the
runners of the revolutionary party, took into
their confidence the leading orators of the
clubs, and concerted measures in particular
with the banker, Bertrand du Lys, who had
always at his command a band of adventurers,
ready to go wherever disorder was to be com-
mitted.
" The signal was given. The mobs assem-
bled : Bands of vociferating wretches traversed
the public streets, uttering frightful cries, and
directing their steps to the arsenal. A slight
demonstration of resistance was made ; but the
report was speedily spread that the troops
were unable to make head against the contin-
ually increasing mass of the insurgents, and
that the life of the king was seriously menaced.
The ministers presented themselves in that cri-
tical moment; they renewed their instances,
spoke of the public peace, order, and the life of
the king, for which they declared they could not
answer, if the public demands were refused;
and finally drew from him a reluctant consent
to the measure of spoliation.
"This success, so dearly bought, was by no
means attended with the good effects which had
been anticipated from it. The people would
have seen, without dissatisfaction, a share of
the public burdens borne by the ecclesiastical
body; but a total abolition, an entire extinction
of their property, appeared to them a cruel
persecution, a work of heresy and impiety, the
horror of which reacted on all the measures
which had the same origin.
"The revolutionary party might have borne
all the unpopularity which that exorbitant
measure occasioned, if it had been attended
with the immense consequences which had
been anticipated in relieving the finances ; but
in that particular also, all their hopes proved
fallacious. The property of the clergy, when
exposed to sale, found few purchasers. The
known opposition of the Holy See, the exas-
peration of the people, the dread of a revolu-
tion : all these circumstances rendered the
measure perfectly abortive, and caused it to
add nothing to the resources of the treasury."
I. 247249.
This is the usual progress of revolutionary
movements. Terror! terror! terror! That is
the engine which they unceasingly put in force:
Insurrections, mobs, tumults, the means of
obtaining their demands, which they never fail
to adopt. Demonstrations of physical strength,
public meetings, processions, and all the other
methods of displaying their numbers, are no-
thing but the means of showing the opponents
of their measures the fate which awaits them,
if they protract their resistance beyond a cer-
tain point. Force is their continual argument;
the logic of brickbats and stones ; the perspec-
tive of scaffolds and guillotines, their never-
failing resource. Confiscation of the property
of others, the expedients to which they always
have recourse to supply the chasms which the
disorganization of society and the dread of
spoliation have occasioned in the public
revenue.
The usual leprosy of revolutionary convul-
sions, Jacobin societies, and democratic clubs,
were not long of manifesting themselves in
this unhappy country.
" On all sides, secret societies were formed,
whose statutes and oaths evinced but too
clearly the objects which they had in view.
\ Besides the freemasons, who had long been
established, a club was formed which took the
title of Confederation of Common Chevaliers,
and declared themselves the champions of the
perfect equality of the human race, and eman-
cipated themselves in the very outset from all
the restraints of philanthropy and moderation.
To judge, to condemn, and to execute every in-
dividual whatsoever, without excepting the
king and his successors, if they abused their
authority, was one of the engagements, a part
of the oath which they took on entering into
| the society."
i " On the side of these secret societies clubs
THE SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1820.
285
rapidly arose, which soon became powerful
and active auxiliaries of anarchy, wherever it
appeared. The most tumultuous and danger-
ous of these was the Coffee-house of the Cross
of Malta. There, and for long, the king was
daily exposed to insult and derision, without //<.s
ministers crrr taking the smallest s'cp to put an end
to a scene of scandal, with which all loyal sub-
jects in the realm were horrorstruck. They
hoped by thus abandoning the royal prey to
his pursuers, to escape themselves from the
fury of party; but their expectations 1 were
cruelly deceived. Public indignation speedily
assailed them ; the bitterest reproaches were
daily addressed to them. All their disgraceful
transactions, all the revolts they had prepared
to overawe the sovereign, were recounted and
exaggerated. The transports of indignation
were so violent, that soon they were compelled
to close this club, to save themselves. from in-
stant destruction." I. 261, 262.
The Spanish Revolution was fast hastening
to that deplorable result, a Reign of Terror, the
natural consequence of democratic ascendency,
when its course was cut short by the French
invasion, under the Duke d'Angouleme. The
details on this subject are perfectly new, and
in the highest degree instructive to the British
public.
" For long the revolutionary party had borne
with manifest repugnance the system of mo-
deration which the government had adopted,
and the majority of the Cortes had supported,
during the last session. That party proceeded
on the principle, that terror alone could over-
awe the enemies of the Revolution, and that
nothing was to be gained with them by mo-
deration in language or indulgence in action.
It saw no chance of safety, but in a sys/pra of
terror powerfully organized. The catastrophe
of Naples, the submission of Piedmont, the re-
pression of the insurrection attempted in
France, furnished them with a favourable op-
portunity to renew their efforts ; and from the
reception which it then met with, it was evi-
dent that the taste for blood was beginning to
manifest itself among the people.
" While things were taking this direction at
Madrid, and the people were awaiting with a
sombre disquietude the measures which were
in preparation, the Reign of Terror and Vio-
lence had already commenced in the provinces,
by the effects of the supreme popular will, and
the progress of anarchy in every part of the
kingdom.
"Individuals of every age and sex were
arrested and imprisoned, without the warrant
of any of the constituted authorities, by men
without a public character, on the mere orders
of the chiefs of the revolutionary party, who
thus usurped the most important functions of
government. They threw the individuals thus
collected together into the first vessels which
were at hand, or could be found in any of the
ports of the kingdom, and transported them, some
to the Balearic, others to the Canary Islands,
according to the caprice of the revolutionary
rulers.
" This is perhaps the event of all others in
the history of modern revolutions, so fertile in
crimes, which excites, if not the greatest hor-
ror, at least the greatest surprise : nothing can.
give a better idea of the true spirit of anarchy.
Nothing was here done in disorder, or in one
of those moments when the exaltation or de-
lirium of the moment has become impossible
to repress. It was calmly, with reflection, at
leisure, and with the aid of numbers, who were
ignorant of the spirit which ruled the move-
ment, that they imprisoned, led forth from
prison, thrust on board vessels, and despatched
for a distant destination, a multitude of citi-
zens, proprietors, fathers of families, whom no
law had condemned, no trial proved guilty ;
and all this by the means, and under the orders
of a body of men who had no pretensions to
any legal authority.
" These acts were committed in open day,
at the same time at Barcelona, at Valencia, at
Corunna, and Carthagena. This was anarchy
in unbridled sovereignty ; and let us see what
the legal authorities did to punish a series of
acts so fatal to their influence, and of such
ruinous example in a country already devour-
ed by revolutionary passions.
"The government was informed of all that
passed; the facts were public and incontest-
able; they were acted in the face of day, in
the face of the entire population of cities. No
prosecution was directed against the crimi-
nals; no punishment was pronounced; no
example was given. A few inferior function-
aries, who had aided in the atrocious acts,
were deprived of their situations, and orders
secretly despatched for the clandestine recall
of the exiles. Such was the sole reparation
made for an injury which shook the social
edifice to its foundation, and trampled under
foot all the rights and liberties of the citizens."
I. 287290.
The famous massacres in the prison on
September 2, 1792, did not fail to find their
imitators among the Spanish revolutionists.
The following anecdote shows how precisely-
similar the democratic spirit is in its tendency
and effects in all ages and parts of the world.
" A priest, a chaplain of the king, Don Ma-
thias Vinuesa, was accused of having formed
the plan of a counter-revolution. This absurd
design, which he had had the imprudence to
publish, was easily discovered, and Vinuesa
was arrested and brought to trial. The law
punished every attempt of this description
which had not yet been put into execution,
with the galleys, and Vinuesa was, in virtue
of this statute, condemned to ten years of hard
labour in those dreary abodes. This sentence,
of a kind to satisfy the most ardent passions,
was the highest which the law would author-
ize ; but it was very far indeed from coming
up to the wishes of the revolutionary clubs.
" On the 4th May, two days after the con-
demnation of the prisoner, a crowded meeting
took place at the gate of the Sun, in open day,
when a mock trial took place, and the priest
was by the club legislators condemned to
death. It was agreed that the judges should
themselves execute the sentence, and that
measure was resolved on amidst loud accla-
mations. Having resolved on this, they quiet-
ly took their siesta, and at the appointed hour
proceeded to carry it into execution, without
286
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
the legal authorities taking the slightest step
to prevent the outrage.
"At four o'clock the mob reassembled, and
proceeded straight to the prison doors. No
one opposed their tumultuous array ; they pre-
sented themselves at the gate, and announced
their mission. Ten soldiers, who formed the
ordinary guard of the prison, made, for a few
minutes, a shadow of resistance, which gave
no sort of trouble to the assailants. The bar-
riers were speedily broken ; the conquerors
inundated the prison ; with hurried steps they
sought the cell where the condemned priest
was confined, and instantly broke open the
door. The priest appeared with a crucifix in
his hand; he fell at their feet, and in the name
of the God of mercy, whose image he present-
ed, besought them to spare his life. Vain at-
tempt ! to breasts which acknowledged no
religion, felt no pity, what availed the image
of God who died to save us. One of the judges
of the gate of the Sun advanced. He was
armed with a large hammer, and struck a
severe blow at the head bowed at his feet.
The victim fell, and a thousand strokes soon
completed the work of death. Blood has
flowed, the victim is no more.
" But the head which that hammer had slain,
could not suffice for the murderers. Besides
the criminal there remained the judge. He
also was condemned to die, for having only
applied the existing law, and not foreseen the
judgment which the tribunal of the Sun was
to pass on the criminal. The assassins made
straight to his house, amidst cries of ' Death
to the traitors, Long live the constitution!'
They traversed the town, and arrived at the
house of the judge ; five men with drawn
swords entered the house, after placing senti-
nels around it, to prevent the possibility of
escape. But Heaven did not permit that new
murder to be committed. The judge, informed
of what was going forward, had fled, in the
interval between the first judgment and execu-
tion, and the murderers, after covering him
with execrations, dispersed themselves through
the town to recount their exploits, and dwell
with exultation on the commencement of the
reign of terror.
"In the evening, the clubs resounded with
acclamations, and the expressions of the most
intoxicating joy; and popular songs were
composed and published, celebrating the first
triumph of popular justice. No one ventured
to hint at punishing the criminals. A few in-
sulated individuals ventured to condemn them ;
a thousand voices rose to applaud and defend
them. The press joined its powerful efforts
to celebrate that memorable day; and, in fine,
to commemorate the public exultation, a sort
of monument was erected to perpetuate its re-
collection. Vinuesa had fallen under the blows
of a hammer; his murderers, and their pro-
tectors, created a decoration, and instituted a
sort of order, called the order of the hammer.
The ensigns of this new honour were speedily
fabricated; they consisted in a little hammer
of iron, made in imitation of that which had
struck the fatal blow. The new chevaliers
proudly decorated their bosoms with the in-
signia. It bore an inscription, which, when
divested of revolutionary jargon, amounted to
this : ' On the 4th May, 1321, four or five hun-
Ired men murdered in prison an old priest,
who implored their pity. Behold and honour
one of the assassins.' "I. 297 299.
The gradual decline of the moderate party
under the increasing fervour of the times, and
their final extinction in the Cortes, under the
ncessant attacks, and irresistible majorities
of the revolutionists, is thus narrated:
"In the second session, it was no longer
possible to recognize the Cortes of the first.
They were the same individuals, but not the
same legislators, or the same citizens. Worn
out by a continual struggle with men whom
nothing could either arrest or discourage; dis-
gusted with discussions, in which they \vere
always interrupted by the hisses or groans of
the galleries ; irritated by the attempts at civil
war which were daily renewed in the pro-
vinces ; heated by the burning political at-
mosphere in which they found themselves
immovably enclosed; the moderate deputies,
who, in the preceding year, had formed the
majority of the Cortes to combat the forces of
anarchy, gave up the contest, and yielded unlhout
opposition to whatever was demanded of them.
'' The most dangerous enemies of the public
peace, beyond all question, were the Patriotic
Societies. There it was that all heads were
exalted that all principles were lost amidst
the extravagancies of a furious democracy
that all sinister projects were formed, and all
criminal designs entertained. A wise law, the
work of the first Cortes, had armed govern-
ment with the power to close these turbulent
assemblies, when they threatened the public
tranquillity. But this feeble barrier could not
long resist the increasing vehemence of the
revolutionists. A law was proposed, and
speedily passed, which divested government
of all control over these popular societies. It
placed these agglomerations of fire beyond the
reach of the police forbid the magistrates to
be present at their debates substituted inter-
nal regulations for external control and, in-
stead of any real check, recognised only the
'elusory responsibility of the presidents.'
"Never, perhaps, did human folly to such a
degree favour the spirit of disorder, or so
weakly deliver over society to the passions
which devoured it. Hardly was the law
passed, when numbers who had been carried
away by the public outcry, were terrified at
the work of their own hands, and looked back
with horror on the path on which they had ad-
vanced, and the vantage ground which they
had for ever abandoned." I. 302, 303.
"The clubs were not slow in taking advan-
tage of the uncontrolled power thus conceded
<o them. The most violent of their organs,
which was at once the most dangerous and
the most influential, because he incessantly
espoused the cause of spoliation, Romero Al-
fuente, published a pamphlet full of the most
furious ebullitions of revolutionary zeal, in
which he divulged a pretended conspiracy
against the constitutional system, whose rami-
fications, diverging from Madrid, extended into
the remotest provinces and foreign states.
The plans, the resources, the names, of the
THE SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1820.
287
conspirators, were given with affected accu-
racy ; nothing was omitted which could give
to the discovery the air of truth. The electric
spark is not more rapid in communicating its
shock, than was that infamous libel. Never
had the tribune of the Club of the Golden
Fountain resounded with such menacing and
sanguinary acclamations. They went even so
far as to say that the political atmosphere could not
be purified but by the blood of fourteen or fifteen
thousand inhabitants of Madrid." I. 351, 352.
"In the midst of these ebullitions of revolu-
tionary fury, the provinces were subjected to
the most cruel excesses of anarchy. At Cadiz,
Seville, and Murcia, the people broke out into
open revolt ; the authorities imposed by the
Cortes were all overthrown, and the leaders of
the insurrection installed in their stead. All
the vigour and reputation of Mina could not
prevent the. same catastrophe at Corunna. He
resigned his command, and Latre, the insurrec-
tionary leader, stepped into his place. Every-
where the authority 'of government, and of the
Central Cortes, was disregarded ; the most vio-
lent revolutionists got the ascendant, and so-
ciety was fast descending towards a state of
utter dissolution.
"j$ll these disorders, all these excesses, found in the
capital numerous and ardent defenders. The press,
in particular, everywhere applauded and encou-
raged the anarchists; it incessantly exalted the
demagogues, for whom it proudly accepted the
title of Descamisados, (shirtless,) and for whose
excesses it found ample precedents among our
Sans Culottes. It condemned to contempt, or
marked out for proscription, all the wise men
who yet strove to uphold the remnants of the
Spanish monarchy. Occupied without inter-
mission in detracting from all the attributes of
the monarchical power ; in dragging in the gut-
ter the robe of royalty, in order to hold it up to
the people covered with mire ; it invented for
all the monarchs of Europe the most calum-
nious epithets and ridiculous comparisons, and
offered to the factious of every state in Europe,
whatever their designs were, the succours of
their devouring influence." I. 357, 358.
"Three evils, in an especial manner, spread
the seeds of dissolution over this agitated
country, and spread their ramifications with
the most frightful rapidity. These were the
press, with its inexpressible violence, and its
complete impunity; the petitions which ren-
dered the tribune of the Cortes the centre of
denunciations, the focus of calumny, and the
arena where all the furious passions contended
with each other; in fine, the licentiousness of
the patriotic societies, where the public peace
was every day, or rather every night, delivered
up to the fury of an unbridled democracy. The
Cortes were perfectly aware of these causes of
anarchy ; they had openly denounced them,
and declared their intention of applying a
prompt remedy. Still nothing was done, and
the Assembly was dissolved without having
done any thing to close so many fountains of
anarchy!" I. 377.
One would imagine that the accumulation of
so many evils would have produced a reaction
in the public mind ; that the universal anxiety,
distress, and suffering, would have opened the
eyes of the people to their real interests, and
the pernicious tendency of the course into
which they had been precipitated by their de-
magogues; and that the new elections would
have produced a majority in favour of the pru-
dent and restraining measures, from which
alone public safety could be expected. The
case, however, was just the reverse: the revo-
lutionary party, by violence and intimidation,
almost everywhere gained the ascendency;
and the fatal truth soon became apparent, that
democratic ambition is insatiable ; that it is
blind to all the lessons of experience, and deaf
to all the cries of suffering; that like a mad-
dened horse, it rushes headlong down the pre-
cipice, and never halts in its furious career
till it has involved itself and public freedom in
one common ruin.
"The new Cortes commenced its labours
under the most sinister auspices ; the circum-
stances under which the elections had taken
place were sufficient to justify the most serious
apprehensions.
"The elections in the south had taken place
under the immediate influence and actual pre-
sence of open rebellion. At Grenada, the peo-
ple by force intruded into the electoral college,
and openly overwhelmed the election ; in all
the provinces of the north, the proprietors had
absented themselves from the elections, from
hatred at the Revolution, and a sense of inabil-
ity to restrain its excesses. At Madrid, even,
all the partisans of the old regime had been
constrained to abstain from taking any part in
the vote, notwithstanding the undoubted right
which the amnesty gave them. In many
places, actual violence ; in all, menaces were
employed, with too powerful effect, to keep
from the poll all persons suspected of modera-
tion in their principles.
" In the whole new Cortes not one great pro-
prietor nor one bishop was to be found. The
whole body of the noblesse was represented
only by two or three titled but unknown men;
the clergy by a few curates and canons, well
known for the lightness with which the re-
straints of faith sat upon them. Only one
grandee of Spain was to be found there, the
Duke del Parque, who had abandoned the pa-
lace of the Escurial for the Club of the Foun-
tain of Gold; and had left the halls of his king
to become the flatterer of the people.
"Among the new deputies great numbers
were to be found who had signalized them-
selves by the violence of their opinions, and
the spirit of vengeance against all moderate
men, by which they were animated. The first
measure of the Cortes was to elect Riego for
president, a nomination which confirmed the
hopes of the anarchist party, and excited every-
where the most extravagant joy among the par-
tisans of the Revolution." I. 383, 384.
As the other insanities and atrocities of the
French Revolution had found their admirers
and imitators in Spain, so the overthrow of the
constitutional throne of Louis XVI., on the 10th
August, 1792, was followed by too close a pa-
rallel in the Spanish monarchy.
The public distress, and the violence of the
revolutionary faction in every part of the king-
dom, at length produced a reaction. Civil
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
war commenced in Aragon, Catalonia, and An-
dalusia, and Spanish blood soon dyed every
part of the Peninsula. The crisis which this
induced at Madrid, which finally laid the
throne prostrate at the feet of the Revolution-
ists, is thus described:
" The session was about to finish, the clos-
ing was fixed for the 30th June, 1822. Great
fermentation reigned at Madrid, and every one,
without being able to account for it, was aware
that a crisis was approaching.
" The king seated himself in his carriage, af-
ter closing ihe session. Cries of 'Long live
the constitutional king,' were heard on all
sides, mingled, in feebler notes, with the cry of
' Long live the absolute king.' The guards re-
pulsed with violence those who raised inflam-
matory or seditious cries, and blood already
began to flow. The tumult redoubled at the
moment that the king descended from his car-
riage. The guard wished to disperse it ; they
experienced resistance, and had recourse to
their arms. The exasperation was extreme
among the soldiers ; one of their officers,
named Landaburo, desirous of restraining
them, was insulted by his own men. He drew
his sabre, but speedily fell, shot dead by a mus-
ket from the ranks.
"Landaburo was the son of a merchant at
Cadiz, and well known for his liberal opinions.
His death became instantly a party affair, and
excited to the last degree the fury of all those
who professed the same principles. The mi-
litia were soon under arms; the troops of the
garrison and the artillery united themselves to
their colours; the' whole officers and non-
commissioned officers, who were at Madrid
detached from their regiments, joined their
ranks. The artillery put their pieces in posi-
tion; the municipal body declared its sittings
permanent; and every thing announced the
speedy approach of hostilities between the
court and the people.
"Had they possessed an able chief and a de-
termined will, the guards might have made
themselves masters of Madrid. They were
more numerous, better armed, more inured to
war, than the constitutional bands which com-
posed the garrison. They occupied the bar-
riers and principal posts. Nothing was easier
for them than to have made themselves mas-
ters of the park of artillery, and the possession
of the park would have rendered all resistance
impossible. Nothing, however, was attempt-
ed nothing was thought of.
"Of the six battalions of which it was com-
posed, two remained to protect the king ; the
four others, afraid of being shut up in their
barracks, clandestinely left the town during
the obscurity of the night; but this movement
was executed with such confusion, that the
first battalion, when they arrived at the ren-
dezvous, opened a fire upon the others which
were approaching.
"On the other side, the constitutionalists of
all descriptions united to resist the common
enemy. The militia night and day blockaded
the palace ; the regular soldiers soon obtained
a formidable auxiliary; this was a band com-
posed of men without name, without charac-
ter; adventurers and enthusiasts, who were
organized under the name of the Sacred Sand.
Many generals presented themselves, also
offering their services and their swords;
among this number were Ballasteros and
Riego.
" Negotiations and indecision continued for
six days, during which the two parties .re-
mained constantly encamped, notwithstanding
the tropical sun of the dogdays, venting re-
proaches at each other sabre in hand, the
torches lighted awaiting only the signal of the
combat. At intervals single muskets were
discharged, which sounded like the distant
peals of thunder, which announced the ap-
proach of a frightful tempest.
"At length the attack commenced. The
divisions of the guard at a distance from Mad-
rid, marched upon the capital, but they were
met and defeated at all points by the constitu-
tional forces, and the fugitives in great num-
bers fled for refuge to the palace. The militia
were everywhere victorious ; triumphant and
victorious, they surrounded the royal abode,
while Te Dcum was celebrated on the Place of
the Constitution, and the walls of the palace
resounded with menaces against the king. A
capitulation was proposed ; but nothing but
an unconditional surrender would satisfy the
conquerors. Two battalions agreed to it ; the
others, conceiving that a snare was laid for
them, fired a volley upon the militia, aban-
doned the palace, and rushed out of the city,
where they were soon cut to pieces by the
popular dragoons and the incessant discharge
of grape-shot. This victory was decisive ;
the violent party now reigned in uncontrolled
supremacy, and nothing remained to oppose
even the shadow of resistance to their domi-
nation." I. 420 424.
Such was the state of the Revolution, and
the prostration of the throne, when the inva-
sion of the Duke d'Angouleme dissipated the
fumes of the Revolutionists, and re-established
the absolute throne.
Several reflections arise upon the events, of
which a sketch has been here given.
In the first place, they show how precisely
similar the march of revolution is in all ages
and countries ; and how little national charac-
ter is to be relied on to arrest or prevent its
fatal progress. The horrors of the French
Revolution, it was said, were owing to their
volatile and unstable character, and the pecu-
liar combination of events which preceded its
breaking out. The Spanish Revolution, not-
withstanding their grave and thoughtful na-
tional character, and a totally different chain
of previous events, exhibited, till it was cut
short by French bayonets, exactly the same
features and progress. Recent experience
leaves it but too doubtful, whether, in the
sober and calculating realm of England, simi-
lar passions are not in the end destined to pro-
duce similar effects.
In the next place, the historical facts now
brought forward demonstrate how enormous
is the delusion which the revolutionary party
by means of a false and deceitful press, spreac
over the world in regard to all the transactions
in which their projects are concerned. We
put it to the candour of every one of our read-
PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS.
289
ers, whether the facts now detailed do not put
in an entirely different point of view from any
in which they had yet considered it, the Spa-
nish Revolution] Certainly these facts were
utterly unknown to us, not the least vigilant
observers of continental transactions, and the
march of revolution in the adjoining states.
The truth is, that what Jefferson long ago said
of the American, has become true of the Euro-
pean press ; events are so utterly distorted,
falsehoods are so unblushingly put forth, hos-
tile facts are so sedulously suppressed, that it
is utterly impossible from the public journals
to gather the least idea of what they really are,
if they have the slightest connection with re-
volutionary ambition. Till the false light of
newspapers has ceased, and the steady light
of history begins, no reliance whatever can
be placed on the public accounts, even of the
most notorious transactions.
Lastly, we now see how inconceivably the
British people were deceived in regard to these
transactions, and how narrowly we escaped at
that juncture being plunged into a war, to up-
hold what is now proved to have been, not the
cause of freedom and independence, but of
anarchy, democracy, and revolution. We all re-
collect the vigorous efforts which the Move-
ment party in this country made to engage us
in a war with France, in support of the Spa-
nish Revolution ; the speech of Mr. Brougham,
on the opening of the session of Parliament
in February, 1823, still resounds in our ears.
We were told, and we believed, that the Spa-
nish constitution conferred upon the people of
the Peninsula moderated freedom; that the
cause of liberty was at stake : and that unless
we interfered, it would be trampled down un-
der the bayonets of the Holy Alliance. And
what is the fact as now proved by historical
documents'? Why, that it was the cause of
Pure Democracy which we were thus called on
to support; of universal suffrage, Jacobin
clubs, and a furious press ; of revolutionary
confiscation, democratic anarchy, and unbri-
dled injustice; of the most desolating of tyran-
nies, the most ruinous of despotisms. Such
is the darkness, the thick and impenetrable
darkness, in which we are kept in regard to
passing events by the revolutionary press of
Europe ; and when historic truth comes to
illuminate the transactions of our times, the
Revolution of July, the Belgian Insurrection,
it will be found that we have been equally de-
ceived; and that, by the use of heart-stirring
recollections, and heart-rending fabrications,
we have been stimulated to engage in war, to
support a similar system of revolutionary cu-
pidity and democratic ambition.
PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE
NETHERLANDS.*
IT is related by Bourrienne, that it was dur-
ing the visit of Napoleon to the shores of the
ocean, by order of the Directory, in February,
1798, to prepare for the invasion of England,
that he first was struck with the vast import-
ance of Antwerp as a naval station to effect
that great object of Gallic ambition. The im-
pression then made was never afterwards
effaced; his eagle eye at once discerned, that
it was from that point, that the army destined
to conquer England was to sail. Its secure
and protected situation, guarded alike by pow-
erful fortresses and an intricate and dangerous
inland navigation; its position at the mouth
of the Scheldt, the great artery of the Flemish
provinces of the empire; its proximity on the
one hand to the military resources of France,
and on the other to the naval arsenals of the
United Provinces; its near neighbourhood to
the Thames and the Medway, the centre of the
power of England, and the most vulnerable
point of its empire, all pointed it out as the
great central depot where the armament for
the subjugation of this country was to be as-
sembled, as the advanced work of French
ambition against English independence. No
sooner had he seized the reins of power than
he turned his attention to the strengthening
* Blackwood'a Magazine, Dec. 1832. Written at the
time wh n the French army, aided by the English fleet,
were besieging Antwerp.
of this important station: all the resources of
art, all the wealth of the imperial treasury,
were lavished upon its fortification ; ramparts
after ramparts, bastion after bastion, surround-
ed its ample harbour; docks capable of hold-
ing the whole navy of France were excavated,
and the greatest fleet which ever menaced
England assembled within its walls. Before
the fall of his power, thirty-five ships of the
line were safely moored under its cannon ; he
held to it with tenacious grasp under all the
vicissitudes of his fortune, and when the Allies
approached its walls, he sent the ablest and
firmest of the republicans, Carnot, to prolong
even to the last extremity its means of defence.
"If the allies were encamped," said he in the
Legislative Body, on the 31st March, 1813,
"on the heights of Montmartre, I would not
surrender one village in the thirty-second
military division." Though hard pressed in
the centre of his dominions, he still clung to
this important bulwark. When the Old
Guard was maintaining a desperate struggle
in the plains of Champagne, he drafted not a
man from the fortifications of the Scheldt; and
when the conqueror was struck to the earth,
his right hand still held the citadel of Ant-
werp.
In all former times, and centuries before the
labour of Napoleon had added so immensely
to its importance, the Scheldt had been the
IB
290
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
centre of the most important preparations for
the invasion of England, and the spot on
which military genius always fixed from
whence to prepare a descent on this island.
An immense expedition, rendered futile by the
weakness and vacillation of the French mo-
narch, was assembled in it in the fourteenth
century; and sixty thousand men on the shore
of the Scheldt awaited only the signal of
Charles VI.* to set sail for the shore of Kent.
The greatest naval victory ever gained by the
English arms was that at Sluys, in 1340, when
Philip of France lost thirty thousand men and
two hundred and thirty ships of war, in an en-
gagement off the Flemish coast with Edward
111.,-f- a triumph greater, though less noticed in
history, than either that of Cressy or Poictiers.
When the great Duke of Parma was commis-
sioned by Philip II. of Spain to take steps for
the invasion of England, he assembled the
forces of the Low Countries at Antwerp ; and
the Spanish armada, had it proved successful,
was to have wafted over that great commander
from the banks of the Scheldt to the opposite
shore of Essex, at the head of the veterans
who had been trained in the Dutch war. In
an evil hour, Charles II., bought by French
gold and seduced by French mistresses, enter-
ed into alliance with Louis XIV. for the co-
ercion of Holland ; the Lilies and the Leopards,
the navies of France and England, assembled
together at Spithead, and made sail for the
French coast, while the armies ~of the Grande
Monarque advanced across the Rhine into the
heart of the United Provinces. The conse-
quence was, such a prodigious addition to the
power of France, as it took all the blood and
treasure expended in the war of the Succession
and all the victories of Marlbo rough, to reduce
to a scale at all commensurate with the inde-
pendence of the other European states. Mr.
Pitt, how adverse soever to engage in a war
with republican France, was driven to it by
the advance of the tricolour standard to the
Scheldt, and the evident danger which threat-
ened English independence from the posses-
sion of its fortresses by the French armies;
and the event soon proved the wisdom of his
foresight. The surrender of the Low Coun-
tries, arising from the insane demolition of its
fortresses by the Emperor Joseph, soon brought
the French armies to Amsterdam; twenty
years of bloody and destructive war; the
slaughter of millions, and the contraction of
eight hundred millions of debt by this country,
followed the victorious march of the French
armies to the banks of the Scheldt ; while
seventeen years of unbroken rest, a glorious
peace, and the establishment of the liberties
of Europe upon a firm basis, immediately suc-
ceeded their expulsion from them by the arms
of Wellington.
Before these sheets issue from the press, an
English and French fleet will have sailed from
the British shores to co-operate with a French
army IN RESTORING ANTWERP TO FRANCE.
The tricolour flag has floated alongside of the
British pendant ; the shores of Spithead, which
* Sismondi, Hist, de France, xi. 387.
+ Hume, ii. 230.
never saw a French fleet but as prizes, have
witnessed the infamous coalition, and the un-
conquered citadels of England thundered with
salutes to the enemies who fled before them
at Trafalgar ! Antwerp, with its dockyards
and its arsenals; Antwerp, with its citadel
and its fortifications ; Antwerp, the outpost and
stronghold of France against English inde-
pendence, is to be purchased by British blood
for French ambition ! Holland, the old and
faithful ally of England ; Holland, which has
stood by us in good and evil fortune for one
hundred and fifty years ; Holland, the bulwark
of Europe, in every age, against Gallic ag-
gression, is to be partitioned, and sacrificed in
order to plant the standards of a revolutionary
power on th.e shores of the Scheldt ! Deeply
has England already drunk, deeper still is she
destined to drink of the cup of national hu-
miliation, for the madness of the last two
years.
Disgraceful as these proceedings are to the
national honour and integrity of England;
far as they have lowered its ancient flag be-
neath the degradation it ever reached in the
darkest days of national disaster, their impolicy
is, if possible, still more conspicuous. Flan-
ders, originally the instructor, has in every age
been the rival of England in manufactures ;
Holland, being entirely a commercial state,
and depending for its existence upon the car-
rying trade, has in every age been her friend.
The interest of these different states has led to
this opposite policy, and must continue to do
so, until a total revolution in the channels of
commerce takes place. Flanders, abounding
with coal, with capital, with great cities, and
a numerous and skilful body of artisans, has
from the earliest dawn of European history,
been conspicuous for her manufactures; Hol-
land, without any advantages for the fabricat-
ing of articles, but immense for their trans-
port, has, from the establishment of Dutch
independence, been the great carrier of Eu-
rope. She feels no jealousy of English ma-
nufactures, because she has none to compete
with them; she feels the greatest disposition
to receive the English goods, because all
those which are sent to her add to the riches
of the United Provinces. Belgium, on the
other hand, is governed by a body of manu-
facturers, who are imbued with a full propor-
tion of that jealousy of foreign competition
which is so characteristic in all countries of
that profession. Hence, the Flemish ports
have always been as rigorously closed as the
Dutch were liberally opened to British manu-
factures ; and at this moment, not only are the
duties on the importation of British goods
greatly higher in Flanders than they are in
Holland, but the recent policy of the former
country has been as much to increase as that
of the other has been to lower its import bur-
dens. Since the Belgian revolution, the duties
on all the staple commodities of England, coal,
woollens, and cotton cloths, have been lowered
by the Dutch government ; but the fervour of
their revolutionary gratitude has led to no such
measure on the part of the Belgians.
This difference in the policy of the two
states being founded on their habits, interests,
PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS.
291
and physical situation, must continue perma-
nently to distinguish them. Dynasties may
rise or foil : but as long as Flanders, with its
great coal mines and iron founderies, is the
rival of England in those departments of in-
dustry in which she most excels, it is in vain
to expect that any cordial reception of British
manufactures is to take place within her pro-
vinces. The iron forgers of Liege, the wool-
len manufacturers or cotton operatives of
Ghent or Bruges, will never consent to the free
importation of the cutlery of Birmingham, the
woollen cloths of Yorkshire, the muslins of
Glasgow, or the cotton goods of Manchester.
But no such jealousy is, or ever will be, felt
by the merchants of Amsterdam, the carriers
of Rotterdam, or the shipmasters of Flushing.
Flanders always has been, and always will
desire to be, incorporated with France, in or-
der that her manufactures may feel the vivify-
ing influence of the great home market of that
populous country ; Holland always has been,
and always will desire to be, in alliance with
England, in order that her commerce may ex-
perience the benefit of a close connection
with the great centre of the foreign trade of
the world.
Every one practically acquainted with these
matters, knows that Holland is at this moment
almost the only inlet which continental jea-
lousy will admit for British manufactures to
the continent of Europe. The merchants of
London know whether they can obtain a ready
vent for their manufactures in the ports of
France or the harbours of Flanders. The ex-
port trade to France is inconsiderable; that to
Flanders trifling: but that to Holland is im-
mense. It takes off 2,000,000/. worth of our
exports, and employs 350,000 tons of shipping,
about a seventh of the whole shipping of Great
Britain. Were it not for the facilities to Bri-
tish importation, afforded by the commercial
interests of the Dutch, our manufactures would
be well nigh excluded from the continent of
Europe. The Scheldt, when guarded by
French batteries, and studded with republican
sails, may become the great artery of Euro-
pean, but unquestionably it will not be of Eng-
lish commerce. The great docks of Antwerp
may be amply filled with the tricolour flag;
but they will see but few of the British pen-
dants. In allying ourselves with the Belgians,
we are seeking to gain the friendship of our
natural rivals, and to strengthen what will
soon become a province of our hereditary
enemies; in alienating the Dutch, we are
losing our long-established customers, and
weakening the state, which, in every age, has
been felt to be the outwork of British inde-
pendence.
But it is not the ruinous consequences of
this monstrous coalition of the two great re-
volutionary powers of Europe against the
liberty and independence of the smaller states
which are chiefly to be deplored. It is the
shameful injustice of the proceeding, the pro-
fligate disregard of treaties which it involves,
the open abandonment of national honour
which it proclaims, which constitute its worst
features. We have not yet lived so long un-
der democratic rule as to have become habitu-
ated to the principles of iniquity, to have been,
accustomed, as in revolutionary France, to
have spoliation palliated on the footing of ex-
pedience, and robbery justified by the weak-
ness of its victim. We have not yet learned
to measure political actions by their success;
to praise conquest to the skies when it is on
the side of revolution, and load patriotism
with obloquy when it is exerted in defence of
regulated freedom. We are confident that the
British seamen under any circumstances will
do their duty, and we do not see how Holland
can resist the fearful odds which are brought
against her; but recollecting that there is a
moral government of nations, that there is a
God who governs the world, and that the sins
of the fathers, in nations as well as individuals,
will be visited upon the children, we tremble
to think of its consequences, and conscien-
tiously believe that such a triumph may ulti-
mately prove a blacker day for England, than
if the army of Wellington had been dispersed
in the forest of Soignies, or the fleet of Nelson
swallowed up in the waves of Trafalgar.
What is chiefly astonishing, and renders it
painfully apparent that revolutionary ambition
has produced its usual effect in confounding
and undermining all the moral feelings of man-
kind in this country, is the perfect indifference
with which the partition of Holland is regarded
by all the Movement party, as contrasted with
the unmeasured lamentations with which they
have made the world resound for the partition
of Poland. Yet if the matter be impartially
considered, it will be found that our conduct
in leaguing with France for the partition of
the Netherlands, has been much more infamous
than that of the eastern potentates was 'in the
subjugation of Poland. The slightest historical
retrospect must place this in the clearest light.
Poland was of old, and for centuries before
her fall, the standing enemy of Russia. Twice
the Polish armies penetrated to the heart of her
empire, and the march of Napoleon to the
Kremlin had been anticipated five centuries
before by the arms of the Jagellons. Austria
had been delivered from Turkish invasion by
John Sobieski, but neither that power nor
Prussia were bound to guaranty the integrity
of the Polish dominions, nor had they ever
been in alliance with it for any length of time.
The instability of Polish policy, arising from
the democratic state of its government, the
perpetual vacillation of its councils, and the
weakness and inefficiency of its external con-
duct, had for centuries been such that no
lengthened or sustained operation could be ex-
pected from its forces. It remained in the
midst of the military monarchies a monument
of democratic madness, a prey to the most
frightful internal anarchy, and unable to resist
the most inconsiderable external aggression.
Its situation and discord rendered it the natural
prey of its more vigorous and efficient military
neighbours. In combining for its partition,
they effected what was on their part an
atrocious act of injustice; but will ultimately
prove, as Lord Brougham long ago observed,*
the most beneficial change for the ultimate
* Colonial Policy.
292
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
happiness of its people, by forcibly repressing
their democratical passions, and turning its
wild but heroic spirit into the channels of
regulated and useful patriotism. In dividing
Poland, the three powers incurred the guilt of
robbers who plunder a caravan, which, from
internal divisions, is unable to defend itself;
Austria was guilty of black ingratitude in j
assailing her former deliverer ; but Russia I
violated no oaths, broke no engagements, be-
trayed no treachery she never owed any thing
to Poland she was her enemy from first to
last, and conquered her as such. We attempt
no vindication of this aggression ; it was the
work of ruthless violence, alike to be stigma-
tized in a monarchical as a republican power.
We observe only how Providence overrules
even human iniquity to purposes finally bene-
ficent.
But what shall we say to the partition of the
Netherlands, effected by France and England
in a moment of profound peace, when its do-
minions were guarantied by both these powers,
and it had done nothing to provoke the hostility
of either! Can it be denied that we, in com-
mon with all the allied powers, guarantied to
the King of the Netherlands his newly created
dominions 1 The treaty of 1815 exists to dis-
prove the assertion. Has Holland done any
injury to Great Britain or France to justify
their hostility 1 Has she laid an embargo on
their ships, imprisoned their subjects, or con-
fiscated their property? Confessedly she has
done none of these things. Has she abandoned
us in distress, or failed to succour us, as by
treaty bound, in danger ? History proves the
reverse : for one hundred and fifty years she
has fought by our side against our common
enemies ; she has shared alike in the disaster
of Lafelt and Fontenoy, and the triumphs of
Ramillies and Oudenarde, of Malplaquet and
Waterloo. Has she injured the private or
public interests of either of the powers who
now assail her] Has she invaded their pro-
vinces, or laid siege to their fortresses, or
blockaded their harbours? The idea of HoU
land, with her 2,500,000 souls, attempting any
of these things against two nations who count
above fifty millions of inhabitants in their
dominions, is as ridiculous as it would be to
suppose an infant in its nurse's arms to make
war on a mounted dragoon of five-and-twenty.
What then has she done to provoke the par-
tition of the lords of the earth and the ocean ?
She has resisted the march of revolution, and
refused to surrender her fortresses 'to revo-
lutionary robbery, and therein, and therein alone,
she has offended.
But this is not all. Unprincipled as such
conduct would have been, if it had been the
whole for which this country had to blush, it
is but a port of the share which England and
France have taken in this deplorable trans-
action. These powers were not only allies of
the King of the Netherlands ; they had not only
solemnly guarantied the integrity of his domi-
nions, but they had accepted, with the other
allied powers, the office of mediators and arbiters
between him and his revolted subjects; and
they have now united to spoliate the party who
made the reference. To the violence of an ordi-
nary robber, they have superadded the abandon-
ment of a friend and the partiality of a judge.
It is this lamentable combination of unprincipled
qualities, which makes our conduct in this
transaction the darkest blot on our annals, and
will ultimately render the present era one for
which posterity will have more cause to blush
than for that when John surrendered his do-
minions to the Papal legate, or Charles gifted
away to French mistresses the honour and the
integrity of England.
The Revolution of the Three Glorious Days,
which has, for the last two years, steeped
France in misery and Paris in blood, having
excited the revolutionary party in every part
of Europe to unheard-of transports, Brussels,
in order not to be behind the great centre of
democracy, rose in revolt against its sove-
reign, and the King of Belgium was expelled
from its walls. An attack of the Dutch troops,
ill planned and worse executed, having been
defeated, the King of the Netherlands applied
to England to restore him by force to the throne
which she had guarantied. This took place
in October, 1830, when the Duke of Wellington
was still in power.
To have interfered with the land and sea
forces of England to restore the Dutch king to
the throne of Belgium, would, at that juncture,
have been highly perilous. It was doubtful
whether we were bound to have afforded such
aid, the guarantee contained in the treaty of
1815 being rather intended to secure the do-
minions of the Netherlands against foreign
aggression, than to bind the contracting parties
to aid him in stifling domestic revolt. At all
events it was certain that such a proceeding
would at once have roused the revolutionary
party throughout Europe, and would have
afforded France a pretext, of which she would
instantly and gladly have availed herself, for
interfering with her powerful armies, in favour
of her friends, among .the Belgian Jacobins.
The Duke of Wellington, therefore, judged
wisely, and with the prudence of a practised
statesman, when he declined to lend such aid
to the dispossessed monarch, and tendered the
good offices of the allied powers to mediate in
an amicable way between the contending parties.
The proffered mediation coming from such
powers as Russia, Austria, Prussia, France,
and England, could not possibly have been re-
sisted by the Dutch States ; and the offer of
their good offices was too valuable to be de-
clined. They agreed to the offer, and on this
basis the London Conference assembled. This
was the whole length that matters had gone,
when the Duke of Wellington resigned in No-
vember, 1830; and most unquestionably no-
thing was farther from the intentions of the
British ministry at that period, as the Duke of
Wellington has repeatedly declared in Parlia-
ment, than to have acted in any respect with-
out the concurrence of the other powers, or to
have made this mediation a pretext for the
forcible partition of the Dutch dominions.
But with the accession of the Whigs to
power commenced a different system. They
at once showed, from their conduct, that they
were actuated by that unaccountable partiality
for French democracy, which has ever since
PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS.
293
1789 distinguished their party, and for which
the great writers of its Revolution have them-
selves not scrupled to censure Mr. Fox and all
his adherents. " The opposition in England,"
says Madame de Stael, " with Mr. Fox at their
head, were entirely wrong in the opinion they
formed regarding Bonaparte ; and in conse-
quence that party, formerly so much esteemed,
entirely lost its ascendency in Great Britain.
It was going far enough to have defended the French
Revolution through the Reign of Terror; but no
fault could be greater than to consider Bona-
parte as holding to the principles of the Revo-
lution, of which he was the ablest destroyer."*
The same blind admiration for revolutionary
France, which Lord Grey had manifested from
the outset of his career, was imbibed with in-
creased ardour by his whole administration,
upon the breaking out of the Three Glorious
Days; and the King of the Netherlands soon
found, to his cost, that instead of an equitable
and impartial arbitrator, he had got a ruthless
and partial enemy at the Conference, in Great
Britain.
The first measure in which this altered tem-
per was publicly manifested, was by the per-
mission of England to Leopold to accept the
crown of Belgium. This at once dissevered,
and rendered irretrievable, without a general
war, the separation of that country from Hol-
land, because it established a revolutionary inte-
rest, and that too of the strongest kind, dependent
on the maintenance of that separation. This
step was a clear departure from the equity of
an arbitrator and a judge, because it rendered
final and irrevocable the separation which it
was the object of the mediation to heal, and
which, but for the establishment of that revo-
lutionary interest, would speedily have been
closed. In truth, the Belgians were, after a
year's experience, so thoroughly disgusted
with their revolution ; they had suffered so
dreadfully under the tyrants of their own
choosing; starvation and misery had stalked
in so frightful a manner through their popu-
lous and once happy streets, that they were
rapidly becoming prepared to have returned
under the mild government of the House of
Orange, when this decisive step, by establish-
ing a revolutionary interest on the throne, for
ever blighted these opening prospects of re-
turning tranquillity and peace.
But the matter did not rest here. France
and England concluded a treaty in July, 1831,
eight months after the accession of the Whigs
to office , a treaty by which they guarantied to
Leopold his revolutionary dominions^ including
that part of territory which included Maes-
tricht, the frontier fortress of 'the old United Pro-
vinces, with the noble fortress of Luxemburg;
and the free navigation of the Scheldt. This
outrageous step was ruinous to Holland. The
terms which it imposed on the King of the
Netherlands, especially the surrender of Maes-
tricht and Luxemburg, and the navigation of
Dutch waters by the Belgians^ were utterly
destructive of that country. It was the same
thing as if the free navigation of the Mersey
and the Thames had been guarantied to the
* Rev. Franc, ii. 270.
manufacturers of France and Belgium. The
guarantee of Limburg and Luxemburg, includ-
ing Maestricht, to Belgium, was still more un-
pardonable, because Luxemburg was part of
the old patrimony of the Hmixe of Nassau, and
Limburg, with its barrier fortress Maestricht,
was no part of Belgium, but of Holland, proper-
ly so called. Holland could not part with them,
if she had the slightest regard to her future
safety. After Maestricht, its old bulwark on the
side of France, and Antwerp, its new bulwark
on the side of Flanders, were lost, its inde-
pendence was an empty name.
Determined to perish rather than yield to
such ruinous conditions, the King of the Ne-
therlands declared war against the new King
of Belgium, and then was seen what a slight
hold the revolutionary party possessed of the
Flemish people. The revolutionary rabble
were defeated in two pitched battles ; the
fumes of the Belgian revolt were dissipated";
counter movements were beginning in Ghent
and the principal towns in the Netherlands,
and Brussels was within half an hour of fall-
ing into the hands of its lawful monarch,
when the armies of France and the fleet of
England, yielding to the demand of Leopold,
and bound by the guarantee contained in the
revolutionary treaty, advanced to support the
cause of revolution. The consequences might
easily have been foreseen. The armies of
Holland were checked in the mid-career of
victory, Brussels preserved for its cowardly
revolutionary tyrants, and the ulcer of the
Belgian revolts, when on the point of being
closed, preserved open in the centre of Eu-
rope.
The King of the Netherlands gained some-
thing by this vigorous step ; the French saw
the utter worthlessness of their revolutionary
allies; the crying injustice of demanding the
cession of Maestricht and Luxemburg became
too great even for the governments of the me-
diating powers, and the protocols took a new
direction. Antwerp, and a free navigation of
the Dutch waters, became now the great ob-
ject on which France and England insisted,
though it involved, by transferring the trade
of the United Provinces to the Belgian territo-
ry, the most serious injury of Holland. That
is the point which has since been insisted on ;
that is the object for which we are now to
plunge into an iniquitous and oppressive war.
Shortly afterwards, an event took place,
which, by drawing still closer the revolution-
ary bonds between France and Belgium, de-
veloped still farther the system of aggression
to which England had in an evil hour lent the
weight of her once venerated authority. Leo-
pold married the daughter of Louis Philippe,
and Flanders became in effect, as well as in
form, a French province. This event might
have been foreseen, and teas foreseen, from the
moment that he ascended" the throne of that
country. It was well known in the higher
classes in London, that Leopold had more than
once proposed to his present queen, before the Bel-
gian revolt; that it was her disinclination to
go to Greece which made him refuse the
crown of that country; and that the moment
he mounted the throne of Belgium, he would
2n2
294
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
become the son-in-law of the King of France.
All this was distinctly known ; it was well un-
derstood, that if Antwerp was demanded for
Belgium, it was in effect demanded for France,
and that the establishment of the tricolour flag
on the great arsenals and dockyards of that
city, was the necessary result of making it a
sine qua non of the pacification of the Nether-
lands. All this, we repeat, was thoroughly
known before Leopold was counselled by our
administration to accept the throne of Bel-
gium, or Antwerp was seriously insisted upon
at the Conference ; and it was in the full
knowledge of that consequence that he was
placed on that throne, and the cession of that
great outwork of revolutionary France impe-
riously demanded by the French and English
plenipotentiaries. And it is in the full know-
ledge that this effect must follow, that a war is
now undertaken by England, the effect of
which may be to throw Europe into confla-
gration, and the consequences of which no
man can foresee.
And what is the present state of the Belgian
question ? The King of the Netherlands, like
a worthy descendant of the House of Nassau,
refuses to surrender Antwerp to the single de-
mand of France and England, but agrees to
submit all disputes regarding it to the joint
arbitration of the five allied powers. The five
powers were the umpires originally chosen ;
and the Jive alone have any legal or equitable
title to interfere in the matter. But how stands
the fact now 1 Have the five powers, whose
united and balanced judgment was relied on
by the parties to the arbitration have they all
combined in the measures of violence against
Holland ? Quite the reverse : Austria, Rus-
sia, and Prussia, a majority of the arbiters,
have solemnly protested against such a mea-
sure, and its prosecution is likely to involve
France and England in a desperate contest
with these Northern potentates. Who then
insists on the spoliation ? A minority of the
arbiters ; revolutionary France and revolu-
tionary England : revolutionary France, pant-
ing to regain the frontier of the Rhine, and
secure the great fortified harbour of Antwerp,
as an advanced post from whence to menace
our independence ; and revolutionary England
following with submissive steps, like the Cisal-
pine or Batavian republic, in the wake of the
great parent democracy. . And this is the first
fruits of the government of the Whigs.
This puts, in the clearest point of view, the
extravagant injustice of our present attack on
Dutch independence. The mediation of the
five powers was accepted; the five, taken
jointly, have alone the power of fixing the
award. Three hold out, and refuse to accede
to the violent measures which are now pro-
posed ; but two, carried away by an adverse
interest, and having formed a marriage con-
nection with one of the submitting parties, in-
sist upon instantaneous measures of spoliation.
What title have the. tiro to drop the pen and take
up the sword, in order to enforce measures
which the other three refuse to sanction 1 Who
gave France and England, taken singly, any
rights to act as arbiters between Belgium and
Holland ] Who authorized the fleets and ar-
I mies of the great democratic powers to parti-
tion the dominions of the King of the Nether-
lands, and force him to give up what his re-
volted subjects have not been able to wrest
from him 1 It won't do to say, they derived
the power from the acquiescence of the King
of the Netherlands, in the forcible mediation of
the Allied Powers ; for what he acquiesced in
was the pacific arbitration of the five, and not
the hostile intervention of the two. From what
then do they derive their right? From the
same title which Russia has to the partition of
Poland ; the right of the strongest ; the title of
a revolutionary state to extend and strengthen
all the subordinate revolutionary dynasties with
which in terror at a righteous retribution it
has strengthened its sides.
Setting aside, therefore, altogether the obvi-
ous and crying inexpedience of this war,
which is to restore to France that important
naval station so threatening to England, which
it took us so much blood and treasure to wrest
from her in the last war; setting aside the ex-
treme impolicy of irritating and spoliating our
best customers and oldest allies, in the hope-
less idea of winning the favour of a fickle and
jealous manufacturing rabble ; what we chiefly
view with alarm is, the monstrous injustice
and gross partiality of our conduct; the total
disregard of the faith of treaties, and the obli-
gations of centuries which it involves, and the
deplorable degradation to which it reduces
England, in compelling her, instead of stand-
ing forward in the vanguard of freedom, to
follow an obsequious vassal in the train of
Gallic usurpation. Not if her fleets were sunk,
or her armies defeated, not if Portsmouth
was in ashes or Woolwich in flames, not if
the Tower of London bore the flag of an ene-
my and the tombs of Westminster Abbey were
rifled by foreign bands, in defence of our liber-
ties in a just cause, would we think so de-
spondingly of our destinies, would we feel so
humbled in our national feelings, as we do at
thus witnessing the English pendant following
the tricolour flag in a crusade against the
liberty of nations. We have descended at
once from the pinnacle of glory to the depths
of humiliation; from being the foremost in the
bands of freedom, to being last in the train of ty-
ranny ; from leading the world against a despot
in arms, to crouching at the feet of our van-
quished enemy. That which an hundred de-
feats could not have done, a disgrace which
the loss of an hundred sail of the line, or the
storming of an hundred fortresses could not
have induced upon Old England, has been vo-
luntarily incurred by New England, to obtain
the smiles of a revolutionary throne. Well
and justly has Providence punished the people
of this country for the democratic madness of
the last two years. That which all the might
of Napoleon could not effect, the insanity of
her own rulers has produced ; and the nation
which bade defiance to Europe in arms, has
sunk down before the idol of revolutionary
ambition. "Ephraim," says the Scripture,
" has gone to his idols ; let him alone."
Suppose that La Vendee, which is not im-
possible, were to revolt against Louis Philippe,
and by a sudden effort expel the troops of the
PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS.
295
French monarch from the west of France
that the Allied Powers of Russia, Austria, and
Prussia, were then to interfere, and declare
that the first shot fired by the Citizen King at
his revolted subjects, would be considered by
them as a declaration of war against the Holy
Alliance; that, intimidated by such formidable
neighbours, France was to agree to their medi-
ation ; that immediately a monarch of the le-
gitimate race were to be placed by the Allies,
without the concurrence of Louis Philippe,
on the throne of Western France, and he were
to be married with all due expedition to an
archduchess of Austria; and that shortly after,
a decree should be issued by the impartial me-
diators, declaring that Lyons was to be an-
nexed to the newly erected dynasty, and that
in exchange Tours should be surrendered to
the republican party ; and that upon the French
king refusing to accede to such iniquitous
terms, the armies of the Holy Alliance were to
march to the Rhine. How would Europe be
made to ring from side to side, by the revolu-
tionary press, at such a partition ; and how
loudly would they applaud the Citizen King
for having the firmness to resist the attempt?
And yet this is what France and England are
now doing, with the applause of all the liberal
press of Europe; and it is for such intrepid
conduct on the part of the King of the Nether-
lands, that he is now the object of their oblo-
quy and derision.
Ireland, which is perhaps as likely to happen,
revolts against England. She shows her
gratitude for the important concessions of the
last fifty years, by throwing off the yoke of
her benefactor, and proclaims a republican
form of government. The Allied Powers, with
France at their head, instantly interfere de-
clare that the first shot fired by England at her
revolted subjects, will be considered as a de-
claration of war against all Europe, but offer,
at the same time, their good offices and media-
tion to effect a settlement of the differences be-
tween Great Britain and the Emerald Isle.
Weakened by so great a defection, and over-
awed by so formidable a coalition, England re-
luctantly consents to the arbitration, and a
truce is proclaimed between the adverse par-
ties. Immediately the Allies declare, that the
separation must be permanent ; that " it is evi-
dent" that England's means of regaining her
lost dominions are at an end, and that the
peace of Europe must be no longer compro-
mised by the disputes between the Irish and
English people. Suiting the action to the word,
they forthwith put a foreign prince, without the
consent of England, on the Irish throne, and,
to secure his independence of Great Britain,
marry him to the daughter of the King of,
France. Immediately after, the Allied Powers
make a treaty, by which Ireland is guarantied
to the revolutionary king; and it is declared
that the new kingdom is to embrace Plymouth,
and have right to the free navigation of the
Mersey. Upon England's resisting the ini-
quitous partition, a French and Russian army,
a hundred and fifty thousand strong, prepare
for a descent on the shores of Kent. What
would the English people, and the friends of
freedom throughout the world, say to such a
proceeding? Yet this is precisely what the
English people have been led, blindfold, by
their Whig rulers, and the revolutionary press,
to do ! If his character is not totally destroyed,
terrible will be the wakening of the Lion when
he is roused from his slumber.
The hired journals of government, sensible
that the conduct of their rulers on this vital
question will not bear examination, endeavour
to lay it upon the shoulders of the Allied Powers,
and affect to lament the meshes in which
they were left by the foreign policy of Lord
Aberdeen. Of all absurdities, this is the great-
est; Russia, Prussia, and Austria, are so far
from sanctioning the attack on the King of
the Netherlands, that they have solemnly pro-
tested against it- and Prussia, preparing to
second her words by blows, has concentrated
her armies on the Meuse. The King of the Ne-
therlands professes his willingness still to sub-
mit the question of Antwerp and the Scheldt to
the five Allied Powers, though he refuse to
yield them up to the imperious demand of two
of them. How, then, is it possible to involve
the other Allied Powers in an iniquity of which
they positively disapprove, and for which they
are preparing to make war ? True, they signed
the treaty which gave Antwerp to Belgium,
and their reasons for doing so, and the grounds
on which they are to justify it, we leave it to
them and their paid journalists to unfold. But
they have positively refused to sanction the
employment offeree to coerce the Dutch; and
without that, the revolutionary rabble of Bel-
gium may thunder for ever against the citadel
of Antwerp.
But because the three powers who signed
the treaty for the partition of Poland, have also
signed the treaty for the partition of the Nether-
lands, is that any vindication for our joining
in the spoliation ? When two robbers unite to
waylay a traveller, is it any excuse for them
that three others have agreed to the conspiracy?
We were told that arbitrary despotic govern-
ments alone commit injustice, and that with
the triumph of the people, and the extension
of democracy, the rule of justice and equity
was to commence. How then are revolu-
tionary France and revolutionary England the
foremost in the work of partition, when the
other powers, ashamed of their signature at
the disgraceful treaty, hang back, and refuse
to put it in force? Is this the commencement
of the fair rule of democratic justice? A
treaty, which the three absolute powers, the par-
titioners of Poland, arc ashamed of, the revolu-
tionary powers have no scruple in enforcing
an iniquity which Russia and Austria refuse
to commit, France and England are ready to
perpetrate!
The pretence that we are involved in all this
through the diplomacy of the Tories, is such a
monstrous perversion of truth as cannot blind
any but the most ignorant readers. When
was the treaty which guarantied Leopold's
dominions signed by France and England? in
July, 1831; eight months after the accession
of the Whigs to office.' When was the treaty,
giving Antwerp to Belgium, signed by the five
powers ? In November, 1831, a year after the
retirement of the Duke of Wellington from
296
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
power. What treaty did the Duke of Welling-
ton leave binding on his successors, in regard
to Belgium'? The treaty of 1815, which gua-
rantied to the King of the Netherlands his
whole dominions. What incipient mediation
did he leave them to complete? That of the
five Allied Powers, for the pacific settlement of
the Belgian question. And yet we are told he
involved Great Britain in a hostile aggression
on Holland, and was the author of a measure
of robbery by two of the mediating powers !
To give a show of equity to their spoliation,
the revolutionary powers have summoned
Leopold to surrender Venloo, and declare that
Holland is to retain Luxemburg and Lim-
burg. This is a mere colourable pretext, desti-
tute of the least weigh't, and too flimsy to de-
ceive any one acquainted with the facts. Lux-
emburg always was in the hands of the
Dutch ; it formed part of the old patrimony of
the house of Nassau, and the Belgians have
no more right to that great fortress, or its ter-
ritory, than they have to Magdebourg or Lisle.
Venloo is a fortress of third-rate importance,
about as fair an equivalent for Antwerp as
Conway would be for Liverpool. Who ever
heard of any works of Napoleon on Venloo, or
any effort on his part to retain it as part of the
outworks of his conquering dominions ? Ven-
loo is situated on the right or German bank
of the Meuse, and never belonged to Belgium ;
so that to consider it as a compensation for the
great and magnificent fortress of Antwerp, the
key of the Scheldt, is as absurd as it would be
to speak of Harwich as a compensation for
London.
Hitherto we have argued the question on the
footing of the real merits of the points at issue,
and not the subordinate question on which the
negotiations finally broke off. But here, too,
the injustice of the proceeding is not less
manifest than in the general nature of the
transaction.
It was stipulated by the treaty of 15th No-
vember, 1821, signed by all the Allied Powers,
that the evacuation of the provinces to be mu-
tually ceded on both sides, should take place
after the exchange of the ratification of a final
peace. Of course, Antwerp was held by Hol-
land, and Venloo by Belgium, until that event;
and on that footing they have been held for the
last twelve months.
But what do France and England now require ?
Why, that Antwerp should be ceded by Hol-
land before the treaty is either signed or agreed
to, and when weighty matters are still in de-
pendence between the contracting parties.
The advantages which the King of the Ne-
therlands holds, the security he possesses by
holding that great fortress, is to be instantly
abandoned, and he is to be left, without any se-
curity, to the tender mercies of the father-in-law
of his enemy, and the friendly sympathy of
their democratic allies in this island. Is this
just] Is it consistent with the treaty of No-
vember, 1831, on which England and France
justify their armed interference ? Is it not
evidently a violation of both] and does not it
leave the revolutionary states as much in the
wrong on the last disputed point of the Con-
ference as on its general spirit]
The answer of the King of the Netherlands
to the summons of France and England to
surrender the citadel of Antwerp, is so deci-
sive of the justice of his cause on this point,
that we cannot refrain from quoting it:
" Holland having acceded, not to the treaty
of the 15th of November, 1831, but to the
greater part of its arrangements, must found
its proceedings on the stipulations which it
has accepted. Among the articles agreed to in
concert with the Conference of London, is in-
cluded the evacuation, in a fixed time after the
exchange of the ratifications of the territories
which were respectively to change hands,
which point was regulated by the last of the
24 articles of 15th October, 1831, by the treaty
of 15th November, and in the projects of con-
vention which have followed it. If, on the
llth June, the Conference proposed the 20th
July, for the evacuation of the respective ter-
ritories, it declared, by its note of 20th July,
that in making this proposal, it had thought
that the treaty between Holland and Belgium
would be ratified. To effect the evacuation at
a time anterior to the exchange of the ratifica-
tions, would be acting in opposition both to
the formally announced intentions of the Con-
ference, and to the assent which has been
given to them by the government of the Ne-
therlands."
"It is true," says the Times, "that the terri-
tories were not to be evacuated on each side
till the ratifications of a general peace are ex-
changed." This puts an end to the argument :
we have not a shadow of justice for our de-
mand of the immediate evacuation of Antwerp,
any more than for the preceding treaty, which
assigned it to Belgium.
The war in which, to serve their new and
dearly-beloved revolutionary allies, and enable
them to regain their menacing point 1o our
shores, we are now about to be involved, may
last ten days or ten years : it may cost 500,000/.
or 500,000,000*.: all that is in the womb of
fate, and of that we know nothing; but the
justice of the case in either event remains the
same. That which is done is done, and can-
not be undone: the signature of England has
been affixed to the treaty with revolutionary
France for the partition of our allies, and there
it will remain for ever, to call down the judg-
ment of Heaven upon the guilty nation which
permitted, and the execrations of posterity on
the insane administration which effected it.
In this war, our rulers have contrived to get
us into such a situation, that by no possibility
can we derive either honour, advantage, or se-
curity, from the consequences to which it may
lead. If the French and English are victorious,
and we succeed in storming the citadel of
Antwerp for the tricolour flag, will England be
a gainer by the victory will our commerce
be improved by surrendering the navigation
of the Scheldt into the hands of the jealous
manufacturers of France and Belgium, and
for ever alienating our old and willing custom-
ers in the United Provinces] Will our na-
tional security be materially improved by
placing the magnificent dockyards, and spa-
cious arsenals, and impregnable fortifications,
which Napoleon erected for our subjugation,
PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS.
297
in the hands of a revolutionary King of France
and his warlike and able prime minister? If
we are defeated, is the honour of England, the
conqueror of France, likely to be upheld, or its
influence increased, by our inability to bully a
fifth-rate power, even with the aid of our Jaco-
bin allies? Whatever occurs, whether Hol-
land submits in five days, or holds out bravely
and nobly for five years ;, whether the united
tricolour and the leopard are victorious or are
vanquished, we can derive nothing but humili-
ation, danger, and disgrace from the event.
We shall certainly incur all the losses and bur
dens of war: we can never obtain either its
advantages or its glories.
Everyman in England may possibly soon
be compelled to ten pounds in the hundred to
undo the whole fruits of our former victories,
and give back Antwerp to France ! ! ! And give
back Antwerp to France!! ! This is the first
fruits of our Whig diplomacy, and our new
revolutionary alliance. Will the surrender of
Portsmouth or Plymouth, or of an hundred
ships of the line, be the second?*
In making these observations, we disclaim
all idea of imputing to ministers any inten-
tional or wilful abandonment of the interests
and honour of England. We believe that as
Englishmen and gentlemen, they are incapa-
ble of such baseness. What we assert is, that
the passion for innovation, and their long-esta-
blished admiration of France, have blinded
their eyes ; that they are as incapable of see-
ing the real consequences of their actions, as
a young man is in the first fervour of love, or
an inmate of bedlam in a paroxysm of insanity.
From this sickening scene of aggression,
spoliation, and robbery, we turn with pride and
admiration to the firm and dignified, yet mild
and moderate language of the Dutch govern-
ment. There was a time, when their conduct
in resisting the partition of their country by
two powerful and overbearing revolutionary
neighbours, would have called forth the unani-
mous sympathy and admiration of the British
people : when they would have compared it to
the long glories of the House of Nassau, and
the indomitable courage of that illustrious
* chief, who, when the armies of Louis XIV.
were at the gates of Amsterdam, declared that
he knew one way to avoid seeing the disgrace
of his country, and that was to die in the last
ditch. We cannot believe that revolutionary
passions should have so completely changed
the nature of a whole people in so short a time,
as to render them insensible to such heroic
conduct: at all events, for the honour of hu-
man nature, we cannot forbear the gratifica-
tion of adorning our pages by the following
quotation from the last reply of the States-
General of Holland to the speech of the King
of the Netherlands, announcing the approach-
ing attack of France and England.
" Never did the States-General approach the
throne with feelings similar to those of the
present moment. They had fostered the well-
* Of course the surrender of Antwerp to revolutionary
HP! pium, governed by the son-in-law of France, is, in
other words, a surrender to the great parent democracy
itself.
grounded hope that equitable arrangements
would have put a period to the pressure on the
country, but this just expectation has been dis-
appointed. The States-General are grieved at
the course of the negotiations. Whilst we are
moderate and indulgent, demands are made on
us which are in opposition to the honour and
the independence of the nation; a small but
glorious state is sacrificed to a presumed gene-
ral interest. It makes a deep impression to
see that foreign powers entertain a feeling in
favour of a people torn from us by violence
and perfidy a feeling leading to our destruc-
tion instead of experiencing from the great
powers aid in upholding our rights. The
clouds that darken the horizon might lead to
discouragement, were it not for the conviction
of the nation that she does not deserve this
treatment, and that the moral energy which en-
abled her to make the sacrifices already ren-
dered, remains in undiminished strength to
support her in the further sacrifices necessary
for the conservation of the national indepen-
dence; that energy ever shone most brilliant
when the country was most in danger, and had
to resist the superior forces of united enemies ;
that energy enabled her to re-establish her po-
litical edifice which had been demolished by
the usurper; and the same energy mast, under
our king, maintain that edifice against the
usurpatory demands or attacks of an unjust
defection.
" The result is anticipated with confidence.
The nation glories in her powerful means of
defence, and in her sea and land forces, which
are in arms to obtain equitable terms of the
peace that is still so anxiously solicited.
" The charges are heavy, but the circum-
stances that render them necessary are unex-
ampled; and there is no native of the country
who would not cheerfully make the utmost
sacrifices when the honour and independence
of the nation are endangered. Much may be
conceded for the sake of the peace of Europe,
but self-preservation puts a limit to conces-
sions when they have approached to the ut-
most boundary. The Netherlands have ever
made, willingly, great sacrifices for the defence
of their rights ; but never have they volunta-
rily relinquished their national existence, and
many times they have defended them with
small numerical forces against far superior
numbers. This same feeling now glows in
every heart ; and still there is the God of our
forefathers, who has preserved us in times of
:he most imminent peril. In unison with their
dng, the States-General put their confidence
'n God; and, strong as they are in their unani-
mity of sentiments, and in the justice of their
cause, they confidently look forward to the re-
ward of a noble and magnanimous perseve-
**ance."
The revolutionary journals of England call
his the obstinacy of the king of Holland. It
s obstinacy. It is the same obstinacy as Le-
onidas showed at Thermopylae, and Themisto-
jles at Salamis, and the Roman senate after
he battle of Cannee, and the Swiss at Morgar-
en, and the Dutch at Haarlem ; the obstinacy
which commands the admiration of men
through every succeeding age, and, even
298
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
amidst the injustice of this world, secures the
blessing of Heaven.
The Dutch may have Antwerp wrested from
them; they may be compelled, from inability
to resist, to surrender it to the Allies. All that
will not alter the case; it will not ultimately
avert an European war; it will not the less
prove fatal to the progress of freedom. The
Allies, and above all, England, allow the key to
the Scheldt, and the advanced post of France
against Britain, to remain in the hands of the
French, or, what is the same thing, their sub-
sidiary ally, the Belgians. In every age the
establishment of the French power in Flan-
ders has led to an European war; that in
which a revolutionary force is intrenched
there, is not destined to form an exception.
A war of opinion must ensue sooner or later,
when the tricolour standard is brought down
to the Scheldt, and the eagle of Prussia floats
on the Meuse. When that event comes, as
come it will, then will England, whether re-
publican or monarchical, be compelled to exert
her force to drive back the French to their old
frontier. A second war must be undertaken to
regain what a moment of weakness and infatu-
ation has lost in the first.
But what will be the result of such a war,
provoked by the revolutionary ambition of
France, and the tame subservience of England,
on the interests of freedom 1 If revolutionary
ambition prevails, what chance has liberty of
surviving amidst the tyranny of democratic
power 1 If legitimate authority conquers, how
can it exist amidst the Russian and Austrian
bayonets ? When will real freedom again be
restored as it existed in France under the mild
sway of the Bourbons ; or as prosperous a
period be regained for that distracted country,
as that which elapsed from 1815 to 1830 1 ? It
is evident, that freedom must perish in the
fierce contest between democratic and regal
tyranny: it is hard to say, whether it has most
to fear from the triumph of the French or the
Russian bayonets. To their other claims to
the abhorrence of mankind, the liberals of
England, like the Jacobins of France, will add
that of being the assassins of real liberty
throughout the world.
It is sometimes advantageous to see the light
in which the conduct of Great Britain is view-
ed in foreign states. The following article is
from the Manheim Gazette of the 8th inst.:
" The French ministry and the English Whigs
have in vain asserted that they do not mean to
rule by the principle of propagandism ; these
assurances are no guarantee, since propagand-
ism subsists in the system they have establish-
ed, and cannot cease till that system is at an
end. The delegates of the people, for in this
light must be viewed all governments founded
upon the principle of popular sovereignty,
must of necessity seek their allies among
other delegates of the same character; and to
endeavour to find friends among their neigh-
bours, is to act as if they sought to revolution-
ize such states as profess the monarchical
principle. In this respect the influence of the
Grey ministry is more pernicious than that of
the French ministry. The former having com-
menced by revolutionizing England, and feel-
ing itself closely pressed by a reaction at
home, feels a greater desire to form alliances
with other nations ; and consequently it is less
solicitous about treaties and rights than France,
who would unite herself more readily with
monarchical states, if she were not restrained
by the alliance with England. It is evident
that England now occupies the place which
was occupied by France after the revolution.
Already the Grey ministry finds itself com-
pelled to repair one extreme resolution by an-
other ; and in a very short time, repose, order,
and peace, will become impossible. We re-
peat, therefore, that it is the Grey ministry
which threatens the peace of Europe." Such
is the light in which our government is viewed
by the continental powers, and such the alarm
which they feel at the threatened attack on
Holland by the two revolutionary states ; and
j yet we are told by the partisans of administra-
tion, that they are going to attack Antwerp " to
preserve the peace of Europe"
The ministerial journals have at length let
out the real motive of our conduct; the Times
tells us that it is useless to blink the question,
for if the French and English do not attack
Antwerp together, France will attack it alone,
and that this would infallibly bring on a gene-
ral war. That is to say, we have got into the
company of a robber who is bent upon assail-
ing a passenger upon the highway, and to pre-
vent murder we join the robber in the attack. Did
it never occur to our rulers, that there was a
more effectual way to prevent the iniquity?
and that is to get out of such bad company,
and defend the traveller. Would France ever
venture to attack Antwerp if she were not
supported by England 1 Would she ever do
so if England, Austria, Russia, and Prussia,
were leagued together to prevent the march of
revolutionary ambition'? On whom then do
the consequences of the aggression clearly
rest 1 On the English government, who,
against the interests and honour of England,
join in the attack, when they hold the balance
in their hands, and by a word could prevent it.
It is evident that it is this portentous alliance
of France and England which really threatens
the peace of Europe, and must ultimately lead
to a universal war. The Manheim Gazette
is perfectly right; it is the Grey administration
who head the revolutionary crusade. Holding
the balance in our hands, we voluntarily throw
our decisive weight into the scales of aggres-
sion, and the other powers must unite to restore
the beam.
The years of prosperity will not endure for
ever to England, any more than to any earthly
thing. The evil days will come when the
grandeur of an old and venerated name will
sink amidst the storms of adversity; when her
vast and unwieldy empire will be dismember-
ed, and province after province fall away from
her mighty dominions. When these days
come, as come they will, then will she feel
what it was to have betrayed and insulted her
allies in the plenitude of her power. When
Ireland rises in open rebellion against her do-
minion ; when the West Indies are lost, and
with them the right arm of her naval strength;
when the armies of the continent crowd the
KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA.
299
coasts of Flanders, and the navies of Europe
are assembled in the Scheldt, to humble the
mistress of the waves, then will she feel how
deeply, how irreparably, her character has
suffered from the infatuation of the last two
years. In vain will she call on her once faith-
ful friends in Holland or Portugal to uphold
the cause of freedom ; in vain will she appeal
to the world against the violence with which
she is menaced ; her desertion of her allies in
the hour of their adversity, her atrocious alli-
ance with revolutionary violence, will rise up
in judgment against her. When called on for
aid, they will answer, did you aid us in the day
of trial ? when reminded of the alliance of an
hundred and fifty years, they will point to the
partition of 1832. England may expiate by
suffering the disgrace of her present defec-
tion ; efface it from the minds of men she
never will.
The conservative administration of England
have had many eulogists, but they have had
none who have established their reputation
so effectually as their successors : Mr. Pitt's
glory might have been doubtful in the eyes of
posterity, had he not been succeeded by Lord
Grey. The contrast between the firmness, in-
tegrity, and good faith of the one, and the
vacillation, defection, and weakness of the
other, will leave an impression on the minds
of men which will never be effaced. The mag-
nitude of the perils from which we were saved
by the first, have been proved by the dangers
we have incurred under the second ; the lustre
of the intrepidity of the former, by the disgrace
and humiliation of the latter. To the bright
evening of England's glory, has succeeded the
darkness of revolutionary night: may it be as
brief as it has been gloomy, and be followed
by the rise of the same luminary in a brighter
morning, gilded by colours of undecaying
beauty !
KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA.'
NEVER was there a more just observation,
than that there is no end to authentic history.
We shall take the most learned and enthusi-
astic student of history in the country; one
who has spent half his life in reading the an-
nals of human events, and still we are confi-
dent that much of what is about to be stated in
this article will be new to him. Yet it relates
to no inconsiderable state, and is to be found
in no obscure writer. It relates to the history
of Russia, the greatest and most powerful em-
pire, if we except Great Britain, which exists
upon the earth, and with which, sometimes
in alliance, sometimes in jealousy, we have
been almost continually brought in contact
during the last half century. It is to be found
in the history of Karamsin, the greatest his-
torian of Russia, who has justly acquired an
European reputation ; but whose great work,
though relating to so interesting a subject, has
hitherto, in an unaccountable manner, been
neglected in this country.
We complain that there is nothing new in
literature, that old ideas are perpetually re-
curring, and worn-out topics again dressed up
in a new garb, that sameness and imitation
seem to be irrevocably stamped upon, our
literature, and the age of original thought, of
fresh ideas, and creative genius, has passed
away ! Rely upon it, the fault is not in the
nature of things, but in ourselves. The stock
of original ideas, of new thoughts, of fresh
images, is not worn out; on the contrary.it
has hardly been seriously worked upon by
all the previous efforts of mankind. We may
say of it, as Newton did of his discoveries
in physical science, that " all that he had done
seemed like a boy playing on the sea-shore,
finding sometimes a brighter pebble or a
* Karamsin, Histoire de Russie, 11 vols. Paris, 1819
1828. Foreign and Colonial Review, No. VII. July.
1844.
smoother shell than ordinary, while the great
ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before
him." We complain of sameness of thought,
of want of originality in topics, and yet we live
in the midst of a boundless profusion of new
facts and virgin images, for the first time
brought forward by our extended intercourse
with all parts of the world, and the heart-stir-
ring events of our political history. There
never was a period in the annals of mankind,
if we except that of the discovery of America,
in which new facts and novel images, and the
materials for original thought, were brought
with such profusion to the hand of genius ; and
there never was one in which, in this country
at least, so little use was made of them, or in
which the public mind seems to revolve so
exclusively round one centre, and in one beaten
and wellnigh worn-out orbit.
Whence has arisen this strange discrepancy
between the profusion with which new mate-
rials and fresh objects are brought to hand,
and the scanty proportion in which original
thought is poured out to the world 1 ? The
cause is to be found in the impossibility of
getting the great majority of men to make the
" past or the future predominant over the pre-
sent." If we add " the absent" to the famous
apothegm of Johnson, we shall have a sum-
mary of the principal causes which in ordinary
times chain mankind to the concentric circles
of established ideas. Amidst common events,
and under the influence of no peculiar excite-
ment, men are incapable of extricating them-
selves from the ocean of habitual thought with
which they are surrounded. A few great men
may do so, but their ideas produce no impres-
sion on the age, and lie wellnigh dormant till
they are brought to fructify and spread amidst
the turbulence or sufferings of another. Thence
the use of periods of suffering or intense ex-
citement to the growth of intellect, and the
300
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
development of truth. The past and the future i
are then made the present ; ages of experience,
volumes of speculation, are then concentrated !
into the passing results of a few years, and j
thus spread generally throughout mankind, i
What original thought was evolved in England
during the fervour of the Reformation ! in i
France, during the agonies of the Revolution ! '
Subsequent centuries of ease and peace to '
each were but periods of transfer and amplifi- 1
cation, of studied imitation and laboured |
commentary. There has been, there still is,
original thought in our age; but it is confined
to those whom the agitation of reform roused
from the intellectual lethargy with which they
were surrounded, and their opinions have not
yet come to influence general thought. They
will do so in the next generation, and direct
the course of legislation in the third. Public
opinion, of which so much is said, is nothing
but the re-echo of the opinions of the great
among our fathers, legislation among -our
grandfathers ; so slowly, under the wise sys-
tem of providence, is truth and improvement
let down to a benighted world !
We have been forcibly led to these observa-
tions by the study of Karamsin's History of
Russia, and the immense stores of new facts
and novel ideas which are to be found in a
work long accessible in its French translation
to all, hardly as yet approached by any. We
are accustomed to consider Russia as a country
which has only been extricated by the genius
of Peter the Great, little more than a century
and a half ago, from a state of barbarism, and
the annals of which have been lost amidst
general ignorance, or are worthy of no regard
till they were brought into light by the in-
creasing intercourse with the powers of west-
ern Europe. Such, we are persuaded, is the
belief of ninety-nine out of an hundred, even
among learned readers, in every European
state; yet we perceive from Karamsin, that
Russia is a power which has existed, though
with great vicissitudes of fortune, for a thou-
sand years ; that Rurick, its founder, was con-
temporary with Alfred; and that it assailed
the Bosphorus and Constantinople in the ninth
century, with a force greater than that with
which William the Conqueror subverted the
Saxon monarchy at Hastings, and more pow-
erful than were led against it in after times by
the ambition of Catherine or the generals of
Nicholas ! What is still more remarkable, the
mode of attack adopted by these rude invaders
of the Byzantine empire was precisely that
which long and dear-bought experience, aided
by military science, subsequently taught to the
Russian generals. Avoiding the waterless and
unhealthy plains of Bessarabia and Walachia,
they committed themselves in fearful multi-
tudes to boats, which were wafted down the
stream of the Dnieper to the Black Sea; and
when the future conqueror of the east ap-
proaches to place the cross on the minarets
of St. Sophia, he has only to follow the track
of the canoes, which a thousand years ago
brought the hordes of Rurick to the entrance
of the Bosphorus.
Complicated, and to appearance inextricable
as the transactions of the Slavonic race seem
at first sight, the history of Russia is yet
singularly susceptible of simplification. It
embraces four great periods, each of which
have stamped their own peculiar impress upon
the character of the people, and which have
combined to produce that mighty empire which
now numbers 60,000,000 of men among its
subjects, and a seventh of the surface of the
globe beneath its dominion.
The first of these periods is that which com-
mences with the foundation of the Russian
empire by Rurick, in 862, and terminates with
the commencement of the unhappy division
of the empire into apanages, or provisions for
younger children, the source of innumerable
evils both to the monarchy and its subjects, in
1054. The extent to which the empire had
spread, and the power it had acquired before
this ruinous system of division commenced,
is extraordinary. In the 10th century, Russia
was as prominent, comparatively speaking,
among the powers of Europe, in point of
territory, population, resources, and achieve-
ments, as she is at this moment. The con-
quests of Oleg, of Sviatoslof, and of Vladimir,
to whom the sceptre of Rurick had descended,
extended the frontiers of the Russian territory
from Novogorod and Kieff its original cradle
on the banks of the Dnieper to the Baltic, the
Dwina, and the Bug, on the west; on the
south, to the cataracts of the Dnieper and the
Cimmerian Bosphorus ; in the north, to. Arch-
angel, the White Sea, and Finland; on the
east, to the Ural Mountains and shores of the
Caspian. All the territory which now con-
stitutes the strength of Russia, and has enabled
it to extend its dominion and influence so far
over Asia and Europe, was already ranged
under the sceptre of its monarchs before the
time of Edward the Confessor.
The second period comprehends the in-
numerable intestine wars, and progressive
decline of the strength and consideration of
the empire, which resulted from the adoption
of the fatal system of apanages. This method
of providing for the younger children of suc-
cessive monarchs, so natural to parental affec-
tion, so just with reference to the distribution
of possessions among successive royal fami-
lies, so ruinous to the ultimate interests of the
state, was commenced by the Grand Prince
Dmitri, in 1054, and afforded too ready a means
of providing for the succeeding generation of
princes to be soon abandoned. The effects of
such a system may without difficulty be con-
ceived. It reduced a solid compact monarchy
at once to the distracted state of the Saxon
heptarchy, and soon introduced into its vitals
those fierce internal wars which exhaust the
strength of a nation without either augmenting
its resources, or adding to its reputation. It is
justly remarked accordingly, by Karamsin, that
for the next three hundred years after this fatal
change in the system of government, Russia
incessantly declined ; and after having attained,
at a very early period, the highest pitch of
power and grandeur, she sunk to such a depth
of weakness as to be incapable of opposing
any effectual resistance to a foreign invader.
The third period of Russian history, and not
the least in the formation of its national cha-
KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA.
301
racter, commenced with the Tartar invasion,
and terminated with the final emancipation of
the Moscovite dominions. In 1224, the first
intelligence of a strange, uncouth, and savage
enemy having appeared on the eastern frontier,
was received at Kieff, then the capital of the
Muscovite confederacy, for it no longer de-
served the name of an empire; and two hun-
dred and fifty years had elapsed before the
nation was finally emancipated from their
dreadful yoke. This was accomplished by the
abilities and perseverance of John III., the
true restorer, and, in some degree, the second
founder of the empire, in 1480, in which year
the last invasion of the Tartar was repulsed,
and the disgraceful tribute so long paid to the
great khan was discontinued. During this
melancholy interval, Russia underwent the last
atrocities of savage cruelty and barbaric des-
potism. Moscow, then become the capital, was
sacked and burnt by the Tartars, in 1387, with
more devastation than afterwards during the
invasion of Napoleon ; every province of the
empire was repeatedly overrun by these ruth-
less invaders, who, equally incapable of giving
or receiving quarter, seemed, wherever they
went, to have declared a war of extermination
against the human race, which their prodi-
gious numbers and infernal energy in war gen-
erally enabled them to carry on with success.
Nor was their pacific rule, where they had
thoroughly subjugated a country, less degrad-
ing than their inroad was frightful and de-
vastating. Oppression, long continued and
systematic, constituted their only system of
government; and the Russians owe to these
terrible tyrants the use of the knout, and of the
other cruel punishments, which, from their
long retention in the empire of the czars, when
generally disused elsewhere, have so long ex-
cited the horror of Western Europe.
The fourth period commences with the aboli-
tion of the ruinous system of apanages by the
mingled firmness and cunning, wisdom and
fortune, of John III., about the year 1480 ; and
continued till the genius of Peter the Great
gave the country its great impetus two hun-
dred years after. This period was a chequered
one to the fortunes of Moscovy, but, on the
whole, of general progressive advancement.
Under Vassili, the successor of John III.,
the Russians made themselves masters of
Smolensko, and extended their frontiers on the
east to the Dwina. Under John the Terrible,
who succeeded him, they carried by assault,
after a terrible struggle, Kazan, in the south
of Moscovy, where the Tartars had established
themselves in a solid manner and formed the
capital of a powerful state, which had more
than once inflicted, in conjunction with the
Lithuanians, the most dreadful wounds on the
vitals of the empire. Disasters great and re-
peated still marked this period, as wave after
wave break on the shore after the fury of the
tempest has been stilled. Moscow was asrain
reduced to ashes during the minority of John
the Terrible; it was again burnt by the Tar-
tars ; and a third time, by accident; the vic-
torious Poles advanced their standards to its
gates, and so low were his fortunes reduced,
that that heroic but bloody monarch had at
one period serious thoughts of deserting his
country, and seeking refuge in England from,
his numerous enemies. Yet, Russia, thanks
to the patriotism of her children and the in-
domitable firmness of her character, survived
all these disasters ; in the succeeding reign
her arms were extended across the Ural moun-
tains over Siberia, though her dominion over
its immense wilds was for long little more
than nominal, and a fortress was erected at
Archangel, which secured to her the command
of the White Sea.
The last period commences with the taking
of Azoph, by Peter the Great, in 1696, which
first opened to the youthful czar the dominion
of the Black Sea, and terminates with the pro-
digious extension of the empire, consequent on
the defeat of Napoleon's invasion. Europe
has had too much reason to be acquainted
with the details of Russian victories during
this period. Her wars were no longer with
the Tartars or Lithuanians: she no longer
fought for life or death with the khan of Sam-
arcand, the hordes of Bati, or the czar of Ka-
zan. Emerging with the strength of a giant
from the obscure cloud in which she had
hitherto been involved, she took an active, and
at length a fearful part, in the transactions of
Western Europe. The conquest of Azoph,
which opened to them the command of the
Black Sea the fierce contest with Sweden,
and ultimate overthrow of its heroic monarch
at Pultowa the bloody wars with Turkey,
commencing with the disasters of the Pruth,
and leading on to the triumphs of Ockzakow,
of Ismael, and Adrianople the conquest of
Georgia, and passage of the Russian arms
over the coast of the Caucasus and to the
waters of the Araser the acquisition of Wal-
achia and Moldavia, and extension of their
southern frontier to the Danube the partition
of Poland, and entire subjugation of their old
enemies, the Lithuanians the seizure of Fin-
land by Alexander in fine, the overthrow of
Napoleon, capture of Paris, and virtual sub-
jugation of Turkey by the treaty of Adrianople,
have marked this period in indelible charac-
ters on the tablets of the world's history.
Above Alexander's tomb are now hung the
keys of Paris and Adrianople: those of War-
saw will be suspended over that of his suc-
cessor! The ancient and long dreaded rivals
of the empire, the Tartars, the Poles, the
French, and the Turks, have been successive-
ly vanquished. Every war for two centuries
past has led to an accession to the Moscovite
territory ; and no human foresight can predict
the period when the god Terminus is to recede.
There is enough here to arrest the attention
of the most inconsiderate ; to occupy the
thoughts of the most contemplative.
History exhibits numerous instances of
empires which have been suddenly elevated
to greatness by the genius or fortune of a
single man ; but in all such cases the dominion
has been as short-lived in its endurance as it
was rapid in its growth. The successive em-
pires of Alexander, Genghis Khan, Tamer-
lane, Nadir Shah, Charlemagne, and Napo-
leon, attest this truth. But there is no example
of a nation having risen to durable greatness,
2C
302
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
or attained a lasting dominion over the bodies
and minds of men, but by long previous efforts,
and the struggles and sufferings of many suc-
cessive centuries. It would appear to be a
general law of nature, alike in the material and
the moral world, that nothing permanent is
erected but by slow degrees, and that hardship
and suffering constitute the severe but neces- j
sary school of ultimate greatness. In this
point of view, there is a remarkable analogy
between the history, from the earliest periods, !
of England, France, and Russia, the three
powers which stood forth so prominent in the j
great fight of the 19th century. Their periods
of greatness, of suffering, and of probation,
from their infancy have been the same ; and
during the long training of a thousand years,
each has at the same time, and in a similar
manner, been undergoing the moral discipline
requisite for ultimate greatness, and the effects
of which now appear in the lasting impression
they have made upon the world. We do not
recollect to have ever seen this remarkable
analogy in the annals of three first-born of
European states ; but it is so striking, that we
must request our reader's attention for a few
minutes to its consideration.
The Russian empire, as already mentioned,
was founded by Rurick, a hero and a wise
monarch, about the year 860; and ere long its
forces were so powerful, that eighty thousand
Russians attacked the Bosphorus, and threaten-
ed Constantinople in a more serious manner
than it has since been, even by the victorious
arms of Catherine or Nicholas. This first and
great era in Russian story this sudden burst
into existence, was contemporary with that of
Alfred in England, who began to reign in 871,
and nearly so with Charlemagne in France,
who died at Aix-la-Chapelle, in 814, leaving
an empire co-extensive with that which was
exactly a thousand years afterwards lost by
Napoleon.
The two centuries and a half of weakness,
civil dissension, and external decline, which in
Russia commenced with the system of divid-
ing the empire into apanages in 1060, were
contemporary with a similar period of distrac-
tion and debility, both to the English and
French monarchies. To the former by the
Norman conquests, which took place in that
very year, and was followed by continual op-
pression of the people, and domestic warfare
among the barons, till they were repressed by
the firm hand of Edward I., who first rallied
the native English population to the support
of the crown, and by his vigour and abilities
overawed the Norman nobility in the end of
the 13th century. To the latter, by the mise-
rable weakness which overtook the empire of
Charlemagne under the rule of his degenerate
successor; until at length its frontiers were
contracted from the Elbe and the Pyrenees to
the Aisne and the Loire, till all the great
feudatories in the monarchy had become inde-
pendent princes, and the decrees of the king
of France were not obeyed farther than twenty
miles around Paris.
The woful period of Moscovite oppression,
when ravaged by the successful armies of
Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and Bati, and
when the people for two centuries drank the
cup of humiliation from Tartar conquests, or
purchased a precarious respite by the igno-
miny of Tartar tribute, was contemporary with
the disastrous English wars in France. The
battle of Cressy was fought in 1314; that of
Azincour in 1415; and it was not till 1448,
that these hated invaders were at length
finally expelled from the Gallic shores, by the
effects of the heroism of the Maid of Orleans,
and the jealousies of the English nobility in
the time of Henry VI. If these wars were dis-
astrous to France, if they induced the hor-
rors of famine, pestilence, and Jacquerie,
which ere long reduced its inhabitants a-half,
not less ruinous were their consequences to
England, exhausting, as they did, the strength
of the monarchy in unprofitable foreign wars,
and leaving the nation a prey, at their termi-
nation, to the furious civil contests of York
and Lancaster, which for above twenty years
drenched their fields with blood, almost de-
stroyed the old nobility, and left the weak and
disjointed people an easy prey to the tyrannic
rule of Henry VIII., who put 72,000 persons to
death by the hand of the executioner in his
single reign. It is hard to say whether Rus-
sia, when emerging from the severities of
Tartar bondage or France, when freed from
the scourge of English invasions or England,
when decimated by the frightful carnage of
York and Lancaster, were in the more deplor-
able condition.
From this pitiable state of weakness and
suffering all the three monarchies were raised
about, the same period by three monarchs, who
succeeded* in each, partly by wisdom, partly
by good fortune, partly by fraud, in re-con-
structing the disjointed members of the state,
and giving to the central government the
vigour and unity which had been lost amidst
the distractions and sufferings of former times,
but was essential to the tranquillity and well-
being of society. John III., who achieved this
great work in Russia, was the counterpart of
Louis XL, who at the same time accomplished
it in France. John III. ascended the throne in
1462, and reigned till 1505. Louis XI. in 1461,
and reigned till 1483. Both were cautious in
design, and persevering in execution; both
were bold in council rather than daring in the
field ; both prevailed in a barbarous age, rather
by their superior cunning and dissimulation
than the wisdom or justice of their measures.
Both had implicitly adopted the Machiavelian
maxim, that the end will in all cases justify
the means, and employed without scruple fraud
and perfidy, as well as wisdom and persever-
ance to accomplish their grand object, the re-
storation of the throne, and abasement of the
great feudatories. Both were equally success-
ful. The reunion of the apanages to the crown
of the Russian Grand Prince, the subjugation
of the ancient republic of Novogorod, the an-
nexation of that of Pfosk by his successors,
were steps extremely analogous to the defeat
of Charles the Bold, and the acquisition of
Normandy and Acquitaine by Louis XL, and
the happy marriage of Anne of Britanny to his
royal successor. Nor was the coincidence of
a similar monarch on the throne, and a similar
KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA.
303
revolution in society in England at the same
period, less remarkable. Henry VII. won the
crown of England on the field of Bosworth in
1483, and reigned till 1509. By uniting the
rival pretensions of the Houses of York and
Lancaster to the throne, through his marriage
with the heiress of the former house, he re-
constructed the English monarchy ; his avarice
left a vast treasure which rendered the crown
independent to his vehement successor; his
cautious policy broke down the little power
which the fierce contests of former times had
left to the Norman nobility. John III., Louis
XL, and Henry VII. were the real restorers of
the monarchy in their respective kingdoms of
Russia, France, and England ; and they were
men of the same character, and flourished very
nearly at the same time.
The next epoch in the history of Russia was
that of Peter the Great, whose genius overcame
the obstacles consequent on the remoteness of
its situation, and opened to its people the ca-
reer of European industry, arts, and arms.
Russia had now gone through the ordeal of
greatness and of suffering; it had come pow-
erful, energetic, and valiant, out of the school
of suffering. But the remoteness of its situa-
tion, the want of water communication with its
principal provinces, the barbarous Turks who
held the key to its richest realms in the south,
and the Frozen Ocean, which for half the year
barricaded its harbours in the north, had
hitherto prevented the industry and civilization
of its inhabitants from keeping pace with their
martial prowess and great aspirations. At
this period Peter arose, who, uniting the wis-
dom of a philosopher and the genius of a law-
giver, to the zeal of an enthusiast and the fero-
city of a despot, forcibly drove his subjects in-
to the new career, and forced them, in spite of
themselves, to engage in the arts and labours
of peace. Contemporary with this vast heave
of the Moscovite empire, was a similar growth
of the power and energy of France and Eng-
land ; but the different characters of the Asiatic
and European monarchy and of the free com-
munity, were now conspicuous. The age of
Peter the Great, in Russia, was that of Louis
XIV. in France; of the Revolution of 1688,
and of Marlborough, in England. The same
age saw the victories of Pultowa and Blen-
heim ; the overthrow of Charles XII. and hum-
bling of the Grand Monarque. But great was
now the difference in the character of the na-
tions by whom these achievements were effect-
ed. Peter, by the force of Asiatic power, drove
an ignorant and brutish race into industry and
art; Louis led a chivalrous and gallant nation
to the highest pitch of splendour and great-
ness ; William III. was impelled by the free
spirit of an energetic and religious community,
into the assertion of Protestant independence,
and the maintenance of European freedom.
But this great step in all the three nations took
place at the same time, and under sovereigns
severally adapted to the people they were
called to rule, and the part they were destined
to play on the theatre of the world.
The last great step in the history of Russia
has been that of Alexander an era signalized
beyond all others by the splendour and magni-
tude of military success. It witnessed the con-
quest of Finland and Georgia, of Walacliia,
Moldavia, the acquisition of Poland, and the
extension of the empire to the Araxes. Need
we say with what events this period was con-
temporary in France and England? that the
age which witnessed the burning of Moscow,
saw also the taking of Paris that Pitt and
Wellington were contemporary with Alexan-
der and Barclay that but a year separated
Leipsic and Waterloo? Coming, as it did, at
the close of this long period of parallel ad-
vance and similar vicissitudes, during a thou-
sand years, there is something inexpressibly
impressive in this contemporaneous rise of the
three great powers of Europe to the highest
pinnacle of worldly grandeur this simulta-
neous efflorescence of empires, which during
so long a period had advanced parallel to each
other in the painful approach to worldly great-
ness. Nor let the intellectual pride of western.
Europe despise the simple and comparatively
untutored race, which has only within the last
century and a half taken a prominent part in
the affairs of Europe. The virtues, whether of
nations or individuals, are not the least im-
portant which are nursed in solitude ; the cha-
racter not the least commanding, which, chas-
tened by suffering, is based on a sense of reli-
gious duty. The nation is not to be despised
which overthrew Napoleon; the moral train-
ing not forgotten which fired the torches of
Moscow. European liberalism and infidelity
will acquire a right to ridicule Moscovite igno-
rance and barbarity, when it has produced
equal achievements, but not till then.
All the recent events in history, as well as
the tendency of opinion in all the enlightened
men in all countries who have been bred up
under their influence, point to the conclusion
that there is an original and indelible differ-
ence in the character of the different races of
men, and that each will best find its highest
point of Social advancement by institutions
which have grown out of its ruling disposi-
tions. This is but an exemplification of the
profound observation long ago made by Mon-
tesquieu, that no nation ever rose to durable
greatness but by institutions in harmony with
its spirit. Perhaps no national calamities
have been so great, because none so lasting
and irremediable, as those which have arisen
from the attempt to transfer the institutions of
our race and stage of political advancement
to another family of men and another era of
social progress. Recollecting what great things
the Slavonic race has done both in former and
present times, it is curious to see the character
which Karamsin gives of them in the first vo-
lume of his great work:
"Like all other people the Slavonians, at
the commencement of their political exist-
ence, were ignorant of the advantages of a re-
gular government; they would neither tolerate
masters nor slaves among them, holding the
fruit of blessings to consist in the enjoyment
of unbounded freedom. The father of a family
commanded his children, the husband his wife,
the master his household, the brother his sis-
ters; every one constructed his hut in a place
apart from the rest, in order that he might live
304
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
more at ease, and according to his own incli
nations. A wood, a stream, a field, constitutec
the dominion of a Slavonian; and no unarmec
person ventured to violate the sanctity of hi
domain each family formed a little independ-
ent republic ; and the ancient customs, com-
mon to the whole nation, served them instead
of laws. On important occasions the different
tribes assembled to deliberate on their common
concerns ; they consulted the old men, those
living repositories of ancient usages, and they
evinced the utmost deference to their advice.
The same system was adopted when they re-
quired to elect a chief for one of their warlike
expeditions ; but such was their excessive love
of freedom, and repugnance towards any kind
of constraint, that they imposed various limi-
tations on the authority of their chiefs, whom
they often disobeyed, even in the heat of bat-
tle : after having terminated their expedition,
every one returned to his home, and resumed
the command of his children and household.
"That savage simplicity that rudeness of
manners could not long endure. The pillage
of the empire of the east, the centre of luxury
and riches, made the Slavonians acquainted
with new pleasures and hitherto unfelt wants.
These wants, by putting an end to their soli-
tary independence, drew closer the bonds of
social dependence: they daily felt more
strongly the necessity cf mutual support;
they placed their homes nearer each other;
they began to build towns. Others, who had
seen in foreign countries magnificent cities
and flourishing villages, lost all taste for the
obscurity of the forests, once endeared to their
hearts by the love of independence; they
passed into the provinces of Greece; they
consented to range themselves under the rule
of the emperor. The fate of war placed, for a
brief season, a large part of the German Sla-
vonians under the government of Charlemagne
and his successors; but an unconquerable
love of freedom was ever the basis of their
character. On the first favourable opportunity
they threw off the yoke, and avenged them-
selves cruelly on their rulers for their transient
subjection: they were never finally reduced
to order but by the influences of the Christian
religion." Vol. i. p. 68, 69.
How strongly does this picture of the Sla-
vonic race, a thousand years ago, recall the
traces of the Poles of the present time! The
same love of solitary and isolated freedom,
the same passion for independence, the same
fretting under the restraints of civilization and
the curb of authority, the source at once of
their strength and their weakness their glo-
ries and their ruin !
If it be true, as Shakspeare has told us, that
the ruling passion is strong in death ; no slight
interest will attach to Karamsin's graphic pic-
ture of the character evinced in the supreme
hour by the three races which have so long
contended for the mastery of the east, viz., the
Tartars, the Russians or Slavonians, and the
Turks.
" Cannons for a long time were not regarded
by the Russians as a necessary part of the
implements of war. Invented as they con-
ceived by the Italian artists for the defence of
fortresses, they allowed them to remain mo-
tionless on their carriages on the ramparts of
the Kremlin. In the moment of combat the
Russians trusted more to their number than to
the skill of their manoeuvres; they endea-
voured in general to attack the enemy in rear,
and surround him. Like all Asiatic nations,
they looked rather to their movements at a
distance than in close fight ; but when they did
charge, their attacks were impetuous and ter-
rible, but of short duration. 'In their vehe-
ment shock,' says Herberstain, ' they seemed
to say to their enemy, Fly, or we will fly our-
selves !' In war as in pacific life, the people
of different races differ to an astonishing de-
gree from each other. Thrown down from his
horse, disarmed, and covered with blood, the
Tartar never thinks of surrender: he shakes
his arms, repels the enemy with his foot, and
with dying fury bites him. No sooner is the
Turk sensible he is overthrown, than he throws
aside his scimitar, and implores the gene-
rosity of his conqueror. Pursue a Russian,
he makes no attempt to defend himself in his
flight, but never does he ask for quarter. Is
he pierced by lances or swords, he is silent, and
die?." Vol. vii. p. 252.
These are the men of whom Frederick the
Great said, you might kill them where they
stood, but never make them fly. "They were
motionless, fell, and died !"
'Then shrieked the timid, and stood still the brave."
A devout sense of religion, a warm and con-
stant sense of Divine superintendence, has in
every age, from the days of Rurick to those
of Alexander, formed the ruling principle and
grand characteristic of the Russians, and has
of all nations which have ever risen to durable
greatness. Karamsin tells us that from the
remotest period this has been the unvarying
characteristic of the Slavonic race:
"In the 6th century, the Slavonians adored
he Creator of Thunder, the God of the uni-
verse. The majestic spectacle of storms, at
the moment when an invisible hand appears
rom the height of the burning heavens to
dart its lightnings upon the earth, must ever
make a deep impression alike on civilized
and savage man. The Slavonians and Antes,
is Procopius observes, did not believe in des-
iny; but, according to them, all events depend-
d on the mil of a Ruler of the world. On the
field of battle, in the midst of perils, in sick-
ness, in calamity, they sought to bind the Su-
preme Being, by vows, by the sacrifice of
bulls and goats, to appease his wrath. On the
same principle, they adored the rivers and
mountains, whom they peopled with nymphs
and genii, by whose aid they sought to pene-
trate the depths of futurity. In later times,
the Slavonians had abundance of idols; per-
suaded that true wisdom consisted in knowing
the name and qualities of each god, in order to
be able to propitiate his favour. They were
true polytheists, considering their statues not
as images of the gods, but as inspired by their
spirit, and wielding their power.
" Nevertheless, in the midst of these absurd
superstitions, the Slavonians had an idea of a
supreme and all-powerful Being, to whom the
KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA.
305
immensity of the heavens, dazzling with thou
sands of stars, formed a worthy temple ; but
who was occupied only, with celestial objects,
while he had intrusted to subaltern deities, or
to his children, the government of the world.
They called him ' Bilibos,' or ' the White God,'
while the spirit of evil was named 'Teherm-
bog,' or ' the Black God.' They sought to ap-
pease the lash by sacrifices: he was represented
under the image of a lion ; and to his malig-
nant influences they ascribed all their misfor-
tunes and miseries of life. The beneficent
Deity they considered too elevated to be
swayed by prayers, or approached by mortals:
it was the inferior executors of his will who
alone were to be propitiated." Vol. i. p. 99
102.
It has been already mentioned, that the Rus-
sian empire was founded by Rurick, in 862.
And it is very remarkable that supreme power
was obtained by that great warrior, not by the
sword of conquest, but by the voluntary and
unanimous will of the people.
" In Russia," says Karamsin, " sovereign
power was established with the unanimous
consent of the inhabitants ; and the Slavonic
tribes concurred in forming an empire which
has for its limits now the Danube, America,
Sweden and China. The origin of the govern-
ment was as follows : the Slavonians of No-
vogorod and the central districts around Mos-
cow, sent an embassy to the Varegue-Russians,
who were established on the other side of the
Baltic, with these words ' Our country is
great and fertile, but under the rule of disor-
der : come and take, it.' Three brothers named
RCTRICK, Sincori, and Trouver, illustrious alike
by their birth and their great actions, escorted
by a numerous body of Slavonians, accepted
the perilous invitation, and fixed their abode,
and began to assume the government in Rus-
sia, Rurick at Novogorod, Sincori at Bich
Ozero, near the Fins, and Trouver at Izborsk.
Within less than two years, Sincori and
Trouver both died, and Rurick obtained the
government of the whole provinces which
had invited them over; and which embraced
all the central provinces of Russia; and the
feudal system was established over their whole
extent." Vol. i. p. 143, 144.
The Dnieper was the great artery of this
infant dominion; at once their watery high
road, and no inconsiderable source of subsist-
ence. It was on its bosom that the innumera-
ble canoes were launched, which, filled with
yellow-haired and ferocious warriors, descend-
ed to the Sea of Azoph, penetrated into the
Black Sea, forced the passage of the Bospho-
rus, and often besieged Constantinople itself.
In less than a century after its first origin, the
Russian empire was already a preponderating
power in the east of Europe. Before the year
950 the conquests of Oleg, Sviatoslof, and Vla-
dimir, the successors of Rurick, had advanced
its frontiers, on the west, to the Baltic, the
Dwina, the Bug, and the Carpathian moun-
tains; on the south, to the cataracts of the
Dnieper, and the Cimmerian Bo.sphorus ; (in
the east and north to Finland and the Ural
mountains, and on the south-east nearly to the
Caspian Sea; corresponding nearly to the
39
boundaries of Russia in Europe at this time.
The words of the Novogorodians, their allies,
which the old annalist of Russia, Nestor, has
transmitted, expressed the principle of the go-
vernment of this vast empire, at this early pe-
riod : " We wish a prince who will command
and govern us according to the laws ;" that is
to say, as a limited monarchy.
Kieff was for centuries the capital of this
rising dominion, its situation on the bank of
the Dnieper being singularly favourable for
the development of the resources of the em-
pire. Of its strength and formidable charac-
ter from the earliest times, decisive evidence
is afforded by the three great expeditions which
they fitted out against Constantinople, and
which are recorded alike by the Greek and
early religious annalists. Of the first of these,
in 905, Karamsin has given us the following
animated account:
"In 905, Oleg, in order to find employment
for his restless and rapacious subjects, de-
clared war against the empire. No sooner
was this determination known, than all the
warlike tribes from the shores of Finland to
those of the Vistula, crowded to the Dniester,
and were ranged under the standard of Oleg.
Speedily the Dniester was covered by 2,000
light barks, each of which carried forty com-
batants. Thus 80,000 armed men descended
the river, flushed with victory, and eager for
the spoils of the imperial city. The cavalry
marched along the banks, and soon the mighty
host approached the cataracts of the Dnieper,
which were of a much more formidable cha-
racter than they are now, when so many sub-
sequent centuries, and no small efforts of
human industry, have bean at work in clearing
away the obstacles of true navigation. The
Varagues of Kieff had first ventured with two
hundred barks to enter into the perilous ra-
pids, and through pointed rocks, and amidst
foaming whirlpools, had safely reached the
bottom. On this occasion Oieg passed with a
fleet and army ten times as numerous. The
Russians threw themselves into the water,
and conducted the barks by the strength of
the swimmers down the rapids. In many
places they were obliged to clamber up on the
banks, and seeking a precarious footing on
the sharp ridges of rocks and precipices, often
bore the barks aloft on their shoulders. After
incredible efforts they reached the mouth of
the river, where they repaired their masts,
sails, and rudders ; and boldly putting to sea,
which most of them had never seen before,
spread forth on the unknown waters of the
Euxine. The cavalry marched by land, and
though grievously weakened in number by
the extraordinary length of the land journey,
joined their fleet at the mouth of the Bospho-
rus ; and the united force, 60,000 strong, ap-
proached Constantinople.
'Leon, surnamed the philosopher, reigned
there ; and incapable of any warlike effort he
contented himself with closing the mouth of
the Golden Horn, or harbour of Constanti-
nople; and secure behind its formidable ram-
parts, beheld with indifference the villages
around in flames, their churches pillaged and
destroyed, and the wretched inhabitants driven
2c2
306
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
by the swords and lances of the Russians into
the capital. Nestor, the Russian annalist, has
left the most frightful account of the cruel bar-
barities committed on these defenceless in-
habitants by the victorious warriors, who put
their prisoners to death by the cruelest tortures,
and hurled the living promiscuously with the
dead into the sea. Meanwhile the Greeks,
albeit numerous and admirably armed, re-
mained shut up in Constantinople ; but soon
the Russian standards approached the walls,
and they began to tremble behind their im-
pregnable ramparts. Oleg drew up his boats
on the shore, and putting them, as at the cata-
racts of the Dnieper, on the shoulders of his
men, reached the harbour on the land side;
and after launching them on its upper extremi-
ty, appeared with spreading sails, as Mahomet
II. afterwards did, ready to land his troops
behind the chain, and escalade the walls, on
the side where they were weakest. Terrified
at this audacious enterprise, the Emperor
Leon hastened to sue for peace, offering to
send provisions and equipments for the fleet,
and to pay an annual tribute ; and a treaty was
at length concluded, on the condition that each
Russian in the armament should receive
twelve grionas, and heavy contributions should
be levied on the empire for the towns of Kieff,
Tchernigof, Polteck, Lubetch, and other de-
pendencies of Russia." Vol. i. p. 162 165.
When the imperial city in the commence-
ment of the 10th century was assailed by such
formidable bodies of these northern invaders,
and its emperors were so little in a condition
to resist the attack, it is not surprising that it
should have been prophesied in that city 900
years ago, that in its last days Constantinople
should be taken by the Russians. The sur-
prising thing rather is, that in consequence of
the lateral irruption of the Turks, and the sub-
sequent jealousies of other European powers,
this consummation should have been so long
delayed as it actually has.
Passing by the two centuries and a half of
weakness, civil warfare, and decline, which
followed the disastrous system of apanages,
which are uninteresting to general history, we
hasten to lay before our readers a specimen
of the description Karamsin has given of the
terrible effects produced by the Tartar inva-
sions, which commenced in 1223. The de-
vastation of that flourishing part of Asia which
formerly bore the name of Bactriana and
Sogdiana, is thus described:
" Bokhara in vain attempted a defence
against Genghis Khan. The elders of the town
came out to leave the keys of the city at the
feet of the conqueror, but to no purpose.
Genghis Khan appeared on horseback, and
entered the principal mosque; no sooner did
he see the Alcoran there, than he seized it, and
threw it with fury to the ground. That capital
was reduced to ashes. Samarcand, fortified
with care, contained 100,000 soldiers, and a
great number of elephants, which constituted
at that period the principal strength of the
Asiatic armies. Distrusting even these power-
ful means of defence, the inhabitants threw
themselves on the mercy of the conqueror, but
met with a fate as cruel as if they had stood
an assault. Thirty thousand were put to death
in cold blood, a like number condemned to
perpetual slavery, and a contribution of 200,000
pieces of gold levied on the town. Khiva
Tirmel, and Balkh, in the last of which were
1200 mosques, and 200 baths for strangers
alone, experienced the same fate. During two
or three years the ferocious wars of Genghis
Khan ravaged to such a degree the wide coun-
tries stretching from the sea of Aral to the
Indus, that during the six centuries which
have since elapsed, they have never recovered
their former flourishing condition." Vol. iii.
p. 281, 282.
At length this terrible tempest approached
the Moscovite plains. The first great battle
between the Moguls and the Russians took
place in 1226.
"Encouraged by a trifling success they had
gained over the advanced guard of the enemy,
the Russians drew up their army on the left
bank of the Kalka, and calmly awaited the ap-
proach of the enemy. Soon the innumerable
squadrons of the Tartars appeared, and the in-
trepid Daniel, overflowing with courage, bore
down upon the vanguard, broke it, and had
well-nigh gained a glorious victory; but the
cowardly Polontsks could not stand the shock
of the Moguls, and speedily turned their backs
and fled. In the delirium of terror, they pre-
cipitated themselves on the Russians, penetra-
ted their ranks, and carried the most frightful
disorder into their camp, where the princes of
KiefF and Tchernigof had made no prepara-
tions for battle, as Moteslaf, their general, who
commanded the leading column, wishing to
engross the whole honours of victory, had
given them no warning of the approaching
fight. Once broken, the Russians made but a
feeble resistance; even the young Daniel was
swept away by the torrent, and it was not till
his horse stopped on the brink of a stream
which it could not pass, that he felt a deep
wound which he had received in the com-
mencement of the action. The Tartars, in
continuing the pursuit to the banks of the
Dnieper, made a prodigious slaughter of the
flying Muscovites; among others, six princes
and seventy nobles were put to death. Never
did Russia experience a more stunning ca-
lamity. A superb army, numerous, valiant,
animated with the highest spirit, almost en-
tirely disappeared; hardly a tenth part of its
numbers escaped. The base Polontsks, our
pretended allies, joined in the massacre of the
Russians, when victory had decidedly declared
in favour of the Moguls. In the consternation
which followed, the few Russian generals
who survived threw themselves into the
Dnieper, and destroyed all the boats on the
river, to prevent the enemy from following
after them. All but Moteslaf Romanevich, of
Kieff, passed over: but that chief, who was
left in a fortified camp on the summit of a hill,
disdained to abandon his post, and actually
awaited the whole fury of the Mogul onset.
Daring three days, at the head of his heroic
band, he repulsed all their efforts, and at length
wearied with a resistance which they saw no
means of surmounting, the Mogul leaders pro-
posed to allow him to retire with his troops,
KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA.
307
provided a ransom was agreed to, which ca-
pitulation was agreed to and sworn on both
sides. No sooner, however, had the perfidious
Tartars by this device wiled the Russians out
of their stronghold, than they fell upon them
and massacred the whole, and concluded their
triumph, by making a horrid feast of their
bloody remains." Vol. iii. p. 289 291.
The immediate subjugation of Russia seemed
presaged by this dreadful defeat; but the dan-
ger at the moment was averted by orders from
Genghis Khan, who withdrew his forces to the
south for an expedition against Persia. But
the breathing-time was not of long duration.
Before many years had elapsed, the Tartars
returned flushed with fresh conquest under the
redoubtable Bati. That terrible conqueror,
the scourge of Russia, took and burnt Moscow,
where the prince, who commanded, and the
whole of the inhabitants, were put to the
sword, without distinction of age or sex. City
after city, province after province, fell before
the dreadful invaders, who seemed as irresisti-
ble as they were savage and pitiless. Broken
down into numerous little apanages, or separate
principalities, the once powerful Russian em-
pire was incapable of making any effectual
resistance. Yet were examples not wanting
of the most heroic and touching devotion,
worthy to be placed beside the names of Asta-
pa and Numantium.
"Bati sent a part of his troops against Souz-
del, which made no resistance. As soon as
they had entered it, the Tartars, according to
their usual custom, put to death the whole
population, with the exception of the young
monks at Nuni, who were reserved for sla-
very. On the 6th of February, 1238, the in-
habitants of Vladimir beheld the dark squad-
rons of the Tartars, like a black torrent, sur-
round their walls; and soon the preparation
of scaling ladders and palisades indicated an
immediate assault. Unable to resist this in-
numerable army, and yet sensible that it was
in vain, as the Moguls would massacre, or sell
them all for slaves, the boyards, and nobles,
inspired with a sublime spirit, resolved to die
as became them. The most heart-rending
spectacle followed. Vsevold, his wife and
children, and a great number of illustrious
nobles assembled in the church of Notre Dame,
where they supplicated the Bishop Metrophene,
to give them the ' tonsure monacale,' which se-
vered them from the world. That solemnity
took place in profound silence. Those heroic
citizens had bid adieu to the world and to life;
but at the moment of quitting it, they did not
pray the less fervently for the existence of
their beloved Russia. On the 7th of February,
being the Sunday of the Carnival, the assault
commenced, the Tartars broke into the city
by the Golden Gate, by that of Brass and that
of Saint Irene. Vsevold and Moteslaf retired
with their guards into the old town, while
Agatha, the wife of Georges, the general-in-
chief, his daughters, nieces, grand-daughters,
and a crowd of citizens of the highest rank,
flocked to the cathedral, where they were soon
surrounded by the ferocious Moguls, who set
fire to the building. No sooner did he per-
ceive the flames, than the bishop exclaimed,
' Oh, Lord ! stretch out your invisible arms,
and receive your servants in peace,' and gave
his benediction to all around him. In fervent
devotion they fell on their faces, awaiting death,
which speedily overtook them. Some were
suffocated by the volumes of smoke which
rushed in on all sides, others perished in the
flames or sank beneath the sword of the Tar-
tars. The blood-thirstiness of the Moguls
could not await the advance of the conflagra-
tion ; with hatchets they burst open the gates and
rushed in, eager for the treasures which they
thought were hid in the interior. The cruel
warriors of Bati made scarce any prisoners :
all perished by the sword or the flames. The
Prince Vsevold and Moteslaf, finding them-
selves unable to repel the enemy, strove to
cut their way through their dense battalions,
and both perished in the attempt." Vol. iii. p.
344, 345.
Another instance of sublime devotion will
close our extracts from the scenes of car-
nage :
" After the destruction of Vladimir, the nu-
merous Tartar bands advanced towards Ko-
zilsk, in the government of Kalonga. Vassili
commanded in that town, and with his guards
and his people deliberated on the part which
they should adopt. 'Our prince is still young,'
exclaimed those faithful Russians: 'It is our
duty to die for him, in order to leave a glorious
name, and to find beyond the tomb the crown
of immortality.' All united in this generous
determination, resolving at the same time to
retard the enemy as much as possible by the
most heroic resistance. During more than a
month the Tartars besieged the fortress with-
out being able to make any sensible progress
in its reduction. At length a part of the walls,
having fallen down, under their strokes, the
Tartars escaladed the ramparts ; but at their
summit, they were met by a determined band
of Russians, who with knives and swords, dis-
puted every inch of ground, and slew 4,000
Tartars before they sank under the innumer-
able multitude of their enemies. Not one of
that heroic band survived ; the whole inhabit-
ants, men, women, and children, were put to
death, and Bati, astonished at so vehement a
resistance, called the town, ' the wicked city ;'
a glorious appellation when coming from
a Tartar chief. Vassili perished, literally
drowned in the blood of his followers." Vol.
iii. p. 549, 550.
And it is at the time when these heroic
deeds are for the first time brought under the
notice of the people of this country, that we
are told that every thing is worn out, and that
nothing new or interesting is to be found in
human affairs.
But all these efforts, how heroic soever,
could not ayert the stroke of fate. Russia was
subdued less by the superior skill or valour,
than the enormous numbers of the enemy, who
at length poured into the country 400,000
strong. For above two hundred and fifty years
they were tributary to the Tartars, and the
grand princes of Russia were confirmed in
their government by the Great Khan. The
first great effort to shake off that odious yoke,
was made in 1378, wheu Dmitri collected tbestii]
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
scattered forces of the apanages to make head
against the common enemy. The two armies,
each 150,000 strong, met at Koulikoff, on the
7th September, 1378, on which day, four hun-
dred and thirty-four years afterwards, Napoleon
and Kutasoff commenced the dreadful strug-
gle at Borodino.
" On the 6th September, the army approached
the Don, and the princes and boyards delib-
erated whether they should retire across the
river, so as to place it between them and the
enemy, or await them where they stood, in
order to cut off all retreat from the cowardly,
and compel them to conquer or die. Dmitri
then ascended a mound, from which he could
survey his vast army. 'The hour of God,'
said he, 'has sounded.' In truth no one could
contemplate that prodigious multitude of men
and horses; those innumerable battalions
ranged in the finest order; the thousands of
banners, and tens of thousands of arms glitter-
ing in the sun, and hear the cry repeated by a
hundred and fifty thousand voices, 'Great
God, give us the victory over our enemies,'
without having some confidence in the result.
Such was the emotion of the prince, that his
eyes filled with tears; and dismounting, he
knelt down, and stretching out his arm to the
black standard, on which was represented our
Saviour's figure, he prayed fervently for the
salvation of Russia. Then mounting his horse,
he said to those around, ' My well-beloved
brothers and companions in arms, it is by
your exploits this day, that you will live in
the memory of man, or obtain the crown of
immortality.'
"Soon the Tartar squadrons were seen
slowly advancing, and ere long they covered
the whole country to the eastward, as far as
the eye could reach. Great as was the host
of the Russians, they were outnumbered con-
siderably by the Moguls. His generals be-
sought Dmitri to retire, alleging the duty of a
commander-in-chief to direct the movements,
not hazard his person like a private soldier;
but he replied, 'No, you will suffer wherever
you are: if I live, follow me, if I die avenge
me.' Shortly after the battle commenced, and
was the most desperate ever fought between
the Russians and the Tartars. Over an ex-
tent of ten wersls, (seven miles,) the earth was
stained with the blood of the Christians and
Infidels. In some quarters the Russians
broke the Moguls ; in others they yielded to
their redoubtable antagonists. In the centre
some young battalions gave way, and spread
the cry that all was lost : the enemy rushed in
at the opening this afforded, and forced their
way nearly to the standard of the Grand
Prince, which was only preserved by the de-
voted heroism of his guard. Meanwhile
Prince Vladimir Andreiwitch, who was placed
with a chosen body of troops in ambuscade,
was furious at being the passive spectator of
so desperate a conflict in which he was not
permitted to bear a part. At length, at eight
at night, the Prince of Volhynia, who observed
with an experienced eye the movements of the
two armies, exclaimed, 'My friends, our time
has come !' and let the whole loose upon the
enemy, now somewhat disordered by success.
Instantly they emerged from the forest which
had concealed them from the enemy, and fell
with the utmost fury on the Moguls. The
effect of this unforeseen attack was decisive.
Astonished at the vehement onset, by troops
fresh and in the best order, the Tartars fled,
and their chief, Mamia, who, from an elevated
spot beheld the rout of his host, exclaimed,
'The God of the Christian is powerful!' and
joined in the general flight. The Russians
pursued the Moguls to the Metcha, in endea-
vouring to cross which vast numbers were
slain or drowned, and the camp, with an im-
mense booty, fell into the hands of the vic-
tors." Vol." v. pp. 7982.
This great victory, however, did not decide
the contest, and nearly a hundred years
?lapsed before the independence of Russia
Vom the Tartars was finally established. Not
ong after this triumph, as after Boradino,
Moscow was taken and burnt by the Moguls;
the account of which must, for the present,
close our extracts.
' No sooner were the walls of Moscow es-
caladed by the Tartars, than the whole inha-
bitants, men, women, and children, became
he prey of the cruel conquerors. Knowing
that great numbers had taken refuge in the
stone churches, which would not burn, they
ut down the gates with hatchets, and found
immense treasures, brought into these asy-
lums from the adjoining country. Satiated
with carnage and spoil, the Tartars next set
fire to the town, and drove a weeping crowd
of captives, whom they had selected for slaves,
from the massacre into the fields around.
' What terms,' say the contemporary annalists,
' can paint the deplorable state in which Mos-
cow was then left? That populous capital,
resplendent with riches and glory, was de-
stroyed in a single day!' Nothing remained
but a mass of ruins and ashes ; the earth
covered with burning remains and drenched
with blood, corpses half burnt, and churches
wrapt in flames. The awful silence was
interrupted only by the groans of the unhappy
wretches, who, crushed beneath the falling
houses, called aloud for some one to put a
period to their sufferings." Vol. v. p. 101.
Such was Russia at its lowest point of de-
pression in 1378. The steps by which it
regained its independence and became again
great and powerful, will furnish abundant
subject for another article on Karamsin's Mo-
dern History.
We know not what impression those ex-
tracts may have made on our readers, but on
ourselves they have produced one of the most
profound description. Nothing can be so
interesting as to trace the infancy and pro-
gressive growth of a great nation as of a
great individual. In both we can discover the
slow and gradual training of the mind to its
ultimate destiny, and the salutary influence of
adversity upon both in strengthening the
character, and calling forth the energies. It
is by the slowest possible degrees that nations
are trained to the heroic character, the patri-
otic spirit, the sustained effort, which is ne-
cessary to durable elevation. Extraordinary
but fleeting enthusiasm, the genius of a sin-
EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.
gle man, the conquests of a single nation, may
often elevate a power like that of Alexander.
in ancient, or Napoleon in modern times, to
the very highest pitch of worldly greatness.
But no reliance can be placed on the stability
of such empires; they invariably sink as fast
as they had risen, and leave behind them no-
thing but a brilliant, and, generally, awful
impression on the minds of succeeding ages.
If we would seek for the only sure foundations
of lasting greatness, we shall find them in the
persevering energy of national character; in
the industry with which wealth has been ac-
cumulated, and the fortitude with which suf-
fering has been endured through a long course
of ages ; and, above all, in the steady and con-
tinued influence of strong religious impres-
sions, which, by influencing men in every
important crisis by a sense of duty, has ren-
dered them superior to all the storms of for-
tune. And the influence of these principles is
nowhere more clearly to be traced than in the
steady progress and present exalted position
of the Russian empire.
Of Karamsin's merits as an author, a con-
ception may be formed from the extracts we
have already given. We must not expect in
the historian of a despotic empire, even when
recording the most distant events, the just dis-
crimination, the enlightened views, the fearless
opinions, which arise, or can be hazarded only
in a free country. The philosophy of history
is the slow growth of the opinions of all differ-
ent classes of men, each directed by their \
ablest leaders, acting and receding upon each
other through a long course of ages. It was
almost wholly unknown to the ancient Greeks;
it was first struck out, at a period when the
recollections of past freedom contrasted with
the realities of present servitude, by the
mighty -genius of Tacitus, and the sagacity of
Machiavelli, the depth of Bacon, the philoso-
phy of Hume, the glance of Robertson, and
the wisdom of Guizot, have been necessary to
bring the science even to the degree of matu-
rity which it has as yet attained. But in
brilliancy of description, animation of style,
and fervour of eloquence. Karamsin is not ex-
ceeded by any historian in modern times. The
pictures he has given of the successive
changes in Russian manners, institutions, and
government, though hardly so frequent as
could have been wished, prove that he has in
him the spirit of philosophy; while in the
animation of his descriptions of every impor-
tant event, is to be seen the clearest indication
that he is gifted with the eye of poetic genius.
Russia may well be proud of such a work,
and it is disgraceful to the literature of this
country that no English translation of it has
yet appeared. We must, in conclusion, add,
that the elevated sentiments with which it
abounds, as well as the spirit of manly piety
and fervent patriotism in which it is con-
ceived, diminish our surprise at the continued
progress of an empire which was capable of
producing such a writer.
EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.*
EVER since the late French Revolution hroke !
out, and at a time when it carried with it the I
wishes, and deluded the judgment, of a large I
and respectable portion of the British public, J
we have never ceased to combat the then pre- 1
vailing opinion on the subject. We asserted !
from the very outset that it was calculated to I
do incredible mischief to the cause of real j
freedom ; that it would throw back for a very
long period the march of tranquil liberty; that
it restored at once the rale of the strongest;
and, breaking down the superiority of intellect
and knowledge by the mere force of numbers,
would inevitably and rapidly lead, through a
bitter period of suffering, to the despotism of
the sword.
We founded our opinion upon the obvious
facts, that the Revolution was effected by the
populace of Paris, by the treachery of the
army, and the force of the barricades, without
any appeal to the judgment or wishes of the
remainder of France ; that a constitution was
framed, a king chosen, and a government esta-
blished at the Hotel de Ville, by a junto of en-
thusiastic heads, without either deliberation,
* Seize Mois, on La Revolution et La Revolutionaires,
par N. A. Salvandy, auteur de 1'Histoire de la Pologne.
Paris, 1831. Blackwood's Magazine, June, 1832.
time, or foresight; that this new constitution
was announced to the provinces by the tele-
graph, before they were even aware that a
civil war had broken out; that the Citizen
King was thus not elected by France, but im-
posed upon its inhabitants by the mob of Paris;
that this convulsion prostrated the few remain-
ing bulwarks of order and liberty which the
prior revolution had left standing, and nothing
remained to oppose the march of revolution,
and the devouring spirit of Jacobinism, but
the force of military despotism. That in this
way no chance existed of liberty being ulti-
mately established in France, because that in-
estimable blessing depended on the fusion of
all the interests of society in the fabric of go-
vernment, and the prevention of the encroach-
ments of each class by the influence of the
others ; and such mutual balancing was im-
possible in a country where the whole middling
ranks were destroyed, and nothing remained
but tumultuous masses of mankind on the one
hand, and an indignant soldiery on the other.
We maintained that the convulsion at Paris
was a deplorable catastrophe for the cause of
freedom in all other countries; that by preci-
pitating the democratic party everywhere into
revolutionary measures or revolutionary ex-
310
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
cesses, it would inevitably rouse the conserva- ' revolt? Who has spread famine and desola-
tive interests to defend themselves; that in the tion through its beautiful provinces, and
struggle, real liberty would be equally endan- 1 withered its industry with a blast worse than
gered by the fury of its insane friends and the the simoom of the desert; and sown on the
hostility of its aroused enemies; and that the ! theatre of British glory those poisoned teeth,
tranquil spread of freedom, which had been so i which must spring up in armed battalions, and
conspicuous since the fall of Napoleon, would again in the end involve Europe in the whirl-
be exchanged for the rude conflicts of military j wind of Avar 1 The revolutionary leaders ; the
power with popular ambition. revolutionary press of France and England;
Few, we believe, comparatively speaking, I the government of Louis Philippe, and the re-
of our readers, fully went along with these' forming ministers of this country; those who
views when they were first brought forward;! betrayed the interests of their country in the
but how completely have subsequent events j pursuit of democratic support ; who dismem-
demonstrated their justice; and how entirely | bered the dominions of a faithful ally, and
has the public mind in both countries changed drove him back at the cannon mouth, when on
as to the character of this convulsion since it the point of regaining his own capital ; who
took place ! Freedom has been unknown in ; surrendered the barrier of Marlborough and
France since the days of the Barricades ; be- j Wellington, and threw open the gates of Eu-
tween the dread of popular excess on the one ! rope to republican ambition after they had been
hand, and the force of military power on the closed by British heroism. Who are answer-
other, the independence of the citizens has i able to God and man for the present distracted
been completely overthrown; Paris has been state of the British empire? Who have sus-
periodically the scene of confusion, riot, and [ pended its industry, and shaken its credit, and
anarchy; the revolt of Lyons has only been i withered its resources? Who have spread
extinguished by Marshal Soult at the head of j bitterness and distrust through its immense
as large an army as fought the Duke of Wei- ! population, and filled its poor with expectations
lington at Toulouse, and at as great an expense ' that can never be realized, and its rich with
of human life as the revolt of the Barricades ; j terrors that can never be allayed V Who have
the army, increased from 200,000 to 600,000 ! thrown the torch of discord into the bosom of
men, has been found barely adequate to the ' an united people ; and habituated the lower
maintenance of the public tranquillity; 40,000 | orders to license, and inflated them with arro-
men, incessantly stationed round the capital, ' gance, and subjugated thought and wisdom by
t -t .1 I' ,1 ^ n n 1 i A 1
have, almost every month, answered the cries
of the people for bread by charges of caval-
ry, and all the severity of military execution;
the force of numbers, and arrayed against the
concentrated education and wealth of the na-
tion the masses of its ignorant and deluded
the annual expenditure has increased from ! inhabitants ? The reforming ministers; the
40,000,0007. to 60,000,000/. ; fifty millions ster- j revolutionary press of England; those who
ling of debt has been incurred in eighteen | ascended to power amidst the transports of the
months; notwithstanding a great increase of j Barricades; who incessantly agitated the peo-
taxation, the revenue has declined a fourth in pie to uphold their falling administration, and
its amount, with the universal suffering of the
have incurred the lasting execration of man-
people; and a pestilential disorder following kind, by -striving to array the numbers of the
as usual in the train of human violence and nation against its intelligence, and subjugate,
misery, has fastened with unerring certainty \ the powers of the understanding by the fury
on the wasted scene of political agitation, and I of the passions,
swept off twice as many men in a few weeks
in Paris alone, as fell under the Russian can-
non on the field of Borodino.
Externally, have the effects of the three glo-
To demonstrate that these statements are not
overcharged as to the present condition of
France, and the practical consequence of the
Revolution of the Barricades, we subjoin the
rious days been less deplorable? Let Poland ! following extract from an able and independ-
answer ; let Belgium answer; let the British ! ent reforming journal.
empire answer. Who precipitated a gallant
nation on a gigantic foe ; and roused their hot
blood by the promises of sympathy and sup-
If a government is to be judged of by the
condition of the people, as a tree by its fruits,
the present government of France must be
port, and stirred up by their emissaries the re- j deemed to be extremely deficient in those qua-
volutionary spirit in the walls of Warsaw? j lities of statesmanship which are calculated to
Who is answerable to God and man for having
occasioned its fatal revolt, and buoyed its
chiefs up with hopes of assistance, and stimu-
lated them to refuse all offers of accommoda-
inspire public confidence and make a people
happy for public discontent, misery, commotion,
mid bloodshed, have been the melancholy cha-
racteristics of its sway. If the ministry of
tion, and delivered them up, unaided, unbe- Louis Philippe were positively devoted to the
friended, to an infuriated conqueror? The | interests of the ex-royal family, they could not
revolutionary leaders; the revolutionary press take more effective steps than they have hitherto
of France and England ; the government of j done to make the vices of the family be for-
Louis Philippe, and the reforming ministers gotten, and to reinforce the ranks of the party
of England; those, who, knowing that they
could render them no assistance, allowed their
journals, uncontradicted, to stimulate them to
resistance, and delude them to the last with
which labours incessantly for their recall.
"With short intervals of repose, Paris has
been a scene of emeutes and disturbances which
would disgrace a semi-civilized country, and
the hopes of foreign intervention. Who is ' to this sort of intermittent turbulence it has
answerable to God and man for the Belgian ; been doomed ever since Louis Philippe ascended the
EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.
311
throne, but more especially since Casimir Perier
was intrusted with the reins of responsible go-
vernment. It is a melancholy fact that, under
the revolutionized government of France, more
blood has been shed in conflicts between the
people and the military, than during the fifteen
years of the Restoration, if we except the three
days of resistance to the ordinances in Paris,
which ended in the dethronement of Charles
the Tenth.
" Yet we do not know if we ought to except
the carnage of those three days, for we recol-
lect having seen a communication from Lyons,
soon after the commotions in that city, in
which it was stated that a greater number of
persons, both citizens and soldiers, fell in the
conflict between the workmen and the military,
than were slain during the memorable three
days of Paris. Let us add to this the slaughter
at Grenoble, where the people were again
victorious, and the sabrings and shootings
which have taken place in minor conflicts in
several towns and departments, and it will be
found that the present, government maintains
its power at a greater cost of French blood
than that which it has superseded." Morning
Herald.
We have long and anxiously looked for some
publication from a man of character and lite-
rary celebrity of the liberal party in France,
which might throw the same light on the con-
sequences of its late revolution as the work of
M. Dumont has done on the proceedings of the
Constituent Assembly. Such a work is now
before us, from the able and eloquent pen of
M. Salvandy, to whose striking history of Po-
land we have in a recent number requested
the attention of our readers. He has always
been a liberal; opposed in the Chamber of De-
puties all the arbitrary acts of the late govern-
ment, and is a decided defender of the Revolu-
tion of July. From such a character the tes-
timony borne to its practical effects is of the
highest value.
" The Restoration," says he, "bore in its bo-
som an enemy, from whose attacks France
required incessant protection. That enemy
was the counter revolutionary spirit ; in other
words, the passion to deduce without reserve
all its consequences from the principle of legi-
timacy; the desire to overturn, for the sake of
the ancient interests, the political system esta-
blished by the Revolution, and consecrated by
the Charter and a thousand oaths. It was the
cancer which consumed it; the danger was
pointed out for fifteen years, and at length it
devoured it.
" The Revolution of July also bore in its
entrails another curse : this was the revolu-
tionary spirit, evoked from the bloody chaos
of our first Revolution, by the sound of the
rapid victory of the people over the royalty.
That fatal spirit has weighed upon the desti-
nies of France, since the Revolution of 183.0,
like its evil genius. I write to illustrate its
effects; and I feel I should ill accomplish my
task if I did not at the same time combat its
doctrines.
" The counter-revolution was no ways for-
midable, but in consequence of the inevitable
understanding which existed between its sup-
porters and the crown, who, although it long
refused them its arms, often lent them its
shield. The revolutionary spirit has also a
powerful ally, which communicates to it force
from its inherent energy. This ally is the de-
mocracy which now reigns as a despot over France;
that is, without moderation, without wisdom,
without perceiving that it reigns only for the
behoof of the spirit of disorder that terrible
ally which causes it to increase its own power,
and will terminate by destroying it. It is time
to speak to -the one and the other a firm lan-
guage ; to recall to both principles as old as
the world, which have never yet been violated
with impunity by nations, and which succes-
sively disappear from the midst of us, stifled
under the instinct of gross desires, rash pas-
sions, pusillanimous concessions, and subver-
sive laws. Matters are come 16 such a point,
that no small courage is now required to un-
fold these sacred principles ; and yet all the
objects of the social union, the bare progress
of nations, the dignity of the human race, the
cause of freedom itself, is at stake. That
liberty is to be seen engraven at the gate of all
our cities, emblazoned on all our monuments,
floating on all our standards; but, alas! it
will float there in vain if the air which we
breathe is charged with anarchy, as with a
mortal contagion, and if that scourge marks
daily with its black mark some of our maxims,
of our laws, of our powers, while it is inces-
santly advancing to the destruction of society
itself."
" What power required the sacrifice of the
peerage ? Let the minister answer it, he said
it again and again with candour and courage.
It is to popular prejudice, democratic passion, the
intoxication of demagogues, the blind hatred of every
species of superiority, that this immense sacrifice has
been offered. I do not fear to assert, that a na-
tion which has enforced such a sacrifice, on
such altars; a. nation which could demand or
consent to such a sacrifice, has declared itself
in the face of the world ignorant of freedom,
and perhaps incapable of enjoying it.
" That was the great battle of our revolu-
tionary party. It has gained it. It is no longer
by our institutions that we can be defended
from its enterprises and its folly. The good
sense of the public is now our last safeguard.
But let us not deceive ourselves. Should the
public spirit become deranged, we are undone.
It depends in future on a breath of opinion,
whether anarchy should not rise triumphant
in the midst of the powers of government.
Mistress of the ministry by the elections, it
would speedily become so of the Upper House,
by the new creations which it -would force upon the
crown. The Upper House will run the risk, at
every quinquennial renewal of its numbers, of
becoming a mere party assemblage: an as-
sembly elected at second hand by the Chamber of
Deputies .and the electoral colleges. The ruling
party henceforth, instead of coming to a com-
promise with it, which constitutes the balance
of the three powers, and the basis of a constitu-
tional monarchy, will only require to incorporate.
itscjfwith '. At the first shock of parties, the
revolutionary faction will gain this immense
advantage ; it will emerge from the bosom of
312
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
our institutions as from its eyrie, and reign
over France with the wings of terror.
" In vain do the opposing parties repeat that
the Revolution of 1830 does not resemble that
of 1789. That is the very point at issue ; and
I will indulge in all your hopes, if you are not
as rash as your predecessors, as ready to de-
stroy, as much disposed to yield to popular
wishes, that is, to the desire of the demagogues who
direct them. But can I indulge the hope, that a
people will not twice in forty years commence
the same career of faults and' misfortunes,
when you who have the reins of power, are
already beginning the same errors'? I must
say, the Revolution of 1830 runs the same risk
as its predecessor, if it precipitates its chariot
to the edge of the same precipices. Every-
where the spirit of 1791 will bear the same
fruits. In heaven as in earth, it can engender
only the demon of anarchy.
" The monarchy of the Constituent Assem-
bly, that monarchy which fell almost as soon
as it arose, did not perish, as is generally sup-
posed, from an imperfect equilibrium of power,
a bad definition of the royal prerogative, or the
weakness of the throne. No the vice lay
deeper; it was in its entrails. The old crown
of England was not adorned with more jewels
than that ephemeral crown of the King of the
French. But the crown of England possesses
in the social, not less than the political state
of England, powerful support, of which France
is totally destitute. A constitution without
guarantees there reposed on a society which
was equally destitute of them, which was as
movable as the sands of Africa, as easily
raised by the breaths of whirlwinds. The Re-
volution which founded that stormy society,
founded it on false and destructive principles.
Not content with levelling to the dust the an-
cient hierarchy, the old privileges of the orders,
the corporate rights of towns, which time had
doomed to destruction, it levelled with the same
stroke the most legitimate guarantees as the
most artificial distinctions. It called the masses
of mankind not to equality, but to supremacy.
"The constitution was established on the
same principles. In defiance of the whole ex-
perience of ages, the Assembly disdained every
intermediate or powerful institution which was
founded on those conservative principles, without
attention to which no state on earth has ever yet
flourished. In a word, it called the masses not
to liberty, but to power.
"After having done this, no method re-
mained to form a counterpoise to this terrible
power. A torrent had been created without
bounds an ocean without a shore. By the
eternal laws of nature, it was furious, indomi-
table, destructive, changeable ; leaving nothing
standing but the scaffolds on which royalty
and rank, and all that was illustrious in talent
and virtue, speedily fell ; until the people, dis-
abused by suffering, and worn out by passion,
resigned their fatal sovereignty into the hands
of a great man. Such it was, such it will be,
to the end of time. The same vices, the same
scourges, the same punishments.
" When you do not wish to fall into an abyss,
you must avoid the path which leads to it.
When you condemn a principle, you must
have the courage to condemn its premises, or
to resign yourself to see the terrible logic of
party, the austere arms of fortune, deduce its
consequences ; otherwise, you plant a tree, and
refuse to eat its fruits ; you form a volcano,
and expect to sleep in peace by its side.
" With the exception of the Constituent As-
sembly, where all understandings were fasci-
nated, where there reigned a sort of sublime
delirium, all the subsequent legislatures dur-
ing the Revolution did evil, intending to do
good. The abolition of the monarchy was a
concession of the Legislative Assembly ; the
head of the king an offering of the Convention.
The Girondists in the Legislative Body, in sur-
rendering the monarchy, thought they were
doing the only thing which could save order.
Such was their blindness, that they could not see
that their own acts had destroyed order, and its
last shadow vanished with the fall of the throne.
The Plain, or middle party in the Convention, by
surrendering Louis to the executioner, thought
to satiate the people with that noble blood ; and
they were punished for it, by being compelled
to give their own, and that of all France. It
was on the same principle that in our times
the peerage has fallen the victim of deplorable con-
cessions. May that great concession, which
embraces more interests, and destroys more
conservative principles than are generally sup-
posed, which shakes at once all the pillars of
the social order, not prepare for those who
have occasioned it unavailing regret and de-
served punishment!
"The divine justice has a sure means of
punishing the exactions, the passions, and the
weakness which subvert society. It consists in
allowing the parties who urge on the torrent, to reap
the consequences of their actions. Thus they go
on, without disquieting themselves as to the
career on which they have entered; without
once looking behind them ; thinking only on
the next step they have to make in the revolu-
tionary progress, and always believing that it
will be the last. But the weight of committed
faults drags them on, and they perish under the
rock of Sisyphus.
"I will not attempt to conceal my senti-
ments ; the political and moral state of my
country fills me with consternation. When
you contemplate its population in general, so
| calm, so laborious, so desirous to enjoy in
peace the blessings which the hand of God has
poured so liberally into the bosom of our beau-
tiful France, you are filled with hope, and con-
template with the eye of hope the future state
j of our country. But if you direct your look to
the region where party strife combats ; if you
I contemplate the incessant efforts to excite in
the masses of the population all the bad pas-
i sinns of the social order; to rouse them afresh
I when they are becoming dormant; to enrol
them in regular array when they are floating;
to make, for the sake of contending interests,
! one body, and march together to one prey,
| which they will dispute in blood ; how is it
possible to mistake, in that delirium of pas-
| sion, in that oblivion of the principles of order,
in that forgetfulness of the conditions on which
it depends, the fatal signs which precede the
most violent convulsions ! A people in whose
EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.
313
bosom, for sixteen months, disorder has marched
untk i's head erect, and its destroying axe in
hand, has not yet settled its accounts with the
wrath of Heaven.
" While I am yet correcting these lines;
while I am considering if they do not make too
strong a contrast to the public security if
they do not too strongly express my profound
conviction of the dangers of my country the
wrath of Heaven has burst upon that France,
half blinded, half insane. Fortune has too
cruelly justified my sinister presages. Revolt,
assassination, civil war, have deluged with
blood a great city ; and it would be absurd to
of anarchy with liberal hands ; it is a crop
which never fails to yield a plentiful harvest.
" It is to the men of property, of whatever |
mate effort for liberation by the crown, the
flood of revolution has been at least delayed ;
and if the constitution is doomed to destruc-
tion, the friends of freedom have at least the
consolation of having struggled to the last to
avert it.*
Salvandy gives the basis on which alone, in
his opinion, the social edifice can with safety
be reconstructed. His observations are sin-
gularly applicable to the future balance which
must obtain in the British empire:
" The more democratic the French popula-
tion becomes from its manners and its laws,
the more material it is that its government
be astonished at it. We have sown the seeds should incline in the opposite direction, to be
able to withstand that flux and reflux of free
and equal citizens. The day of old aristocra-
cies, of immovable and exclusive aristocra-
party, that I now address myself: to those who j cies, is past. Our social, our political condi-
have no inclination for anarchy, whatever may I tion, will only permit of such as are accessible
be its promises or its menaces ; to those who ! to all. But all may arrive at distinction, for
would fear, by running before it, to surrender
the empire to its ravages, and to have to an-
the paths to eminence are open to all ; all may
acquire property, for it is an acquisition which
swer to God and man for the disastrous days, j order and talent may always command. In
the dark futurity of France. I address myself such a state of society, is it a crime to insist
to them, resolved to unfold to the eyes of my that power shall not be devolved but to such
country all our wounds ; to follow out, even to | as have availed themselves of these universal
its inmost recesses, the malady which is de- capabilities, and have arrived either at emi-
vouring us. It will be found, that, in the last \ nence or property ; to those who have reached
result, they all centre in one ; and that is the ! the summit of the ladder in relation to the corn-
same which has already cleft in two this great j mune, the department, or the state, to which
body, and brought the country to the brink of
ruin. We speak of liberty, and it is the govern-
ment of the masses of -men ivhich ire labour'to cxta-
they belong? No, it is no crime ; for if you
cast your eyes over the history of the world,
you will find that freedom was never yet ac-
blish. Equality is the object of our passionate ; quired but at that price,
desires, and we confound it with levelling. I j "It is the law of nature that societies and
know not what destiny Providence has in re- nations should move like individuals; that the
serve for France ; but I do not hesitate to as- head should direct the whole. Then only it is
sert, that, so long as that double prejudice shall that the power of intelligence, the moral force,
subsist amongst us, we will A find no order but is enabled to govern ; and the perfection of
under the shadow of despotism, and may bid a
final adieu to liberty." Pp. 2036.
There is hardly a sentence in this long quo-
such moral and intellectual combinations is
freedom. The party in France who support
a republic, do so because they consider it
tation, that is not precisely applicable to this | as synonymous with democracy. They are in
country, and the revolutionary party so vehe- j the right. Democracy, without the most power-
mently at work amongst ourselves. How ful counterpoises, leads necessarily to popular
strikingly applicable are his observations on > anarchy. It has but one way to avoid that des-
the destruction of the hereditary peerage, and j tiny, and that is despotism; and thence it is that
the periodical creations which will prostrate the | it invariably terminates, weary and bloody, by
upper house before the power of the demo- ! reposing beneath its shades." Pp. 44, 45.
craey, to the similar attempt made by the revo- | Numerous as have been the errors, and cul-
lutionary party in this country ! But how dif- J pable the recklessness, of the Reform rulers of
ferent has been the resistance made to the at- ' England ; their constant appeal to the masses
ternpt to overthrow this last bulwark of order ! of mankind; their attempt to trample down
in the two states! In France, the Citizen intelligence, education, and property by the
King, urged on by the movement party, ere- j force of numbers; their ceaseless endeavours
to sway the popular elections, in every part of
the country, by brutal violence and rabble in-
timidation, is the most crying sin which besets
them. It will hang like a dead weight about
their necks in the page of history; it will blast
for ever their characters in the eyes of pos-
terity; it will stamp them as men who sought
to subvert all the necessary and eternal rela-
tions of nature ; to introduce a social, far worse
than a political revolution ; and subject Eng-
land to that rule of the multitude, which must
engender a Reign of Terror and a British Na-
poleon.
* Written shortly after the rejection of the Reform
ated thirty Peers to subdue that assembly, and bv
their aid destroyed the hereditary peerage, and
knocked from under the throne the last sup-
ports of order and freedom. In Great Britain,
the same course was urged by an insane popu-
lace, and a reckless administration, on the
crown ; and an effort, noble indeed, but, it is
to be feared, too late, was made by the crown
to resist the sacrifice. The " Masses" of man-
kind, those immense bodies whom it is the
policy of the revolutionary party in every
country to enlist on their side, are still agitated
and discontented. But, thanks to the generous
efforts of the Conservative party, the noble re-
sistance of the House of Peers, and the ulti-
46
BUI by the House of Peers
2D
314
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
Our author gives the following graphic pic-
ture of the state of France for a year and a
half after the Revolution of July. How exactly
does it depict the state of the British islands
after eighteen months of popular domination !
" For eighteen months the greatest political
lessons have been taught to France. On the
one hand, we have seen what it has cost its
rulers to have attempted to subvert the laws ;
on the other what such a catastrophe costs a
nation, even when it is most innocently in-
volved in it. The state, shaken to its centre, |
does not settle down without long efforts. The !
farther the imagination of the people has been
carried, the more extravagant the expectations \
they have been permitted to form, the more j
difficulty have the unchained passions to sub- j
mit to the yoke of constituted authority, or le-
gal freedom. Real liberty, patient, wise, and j
regular, irritates as a fetter those who, having j
conquered by the sword, cannot conceive any j
better arbiter for human affairs. To insurrec- !
lion for the laws, succeeds everywhere, and
without intermission, insurrection against the ;
laws. From all quarters, the desire is mani- j
fested for new conquests, a new futurity ; and
that devouring disquietude knows no barrier,
before which the ambitions, the hatreds, the
theories, the destruction of men, may be ar-
rested. It appears to the reformers, that all
rights should perish, because one has fallen.
There is no longer an institution which they do not
attack, nor an interest which does not feet itself com-
promised. The disorder of ideas becomes uni-
versal ; the anxiety of minds irresistible. A
city, with 100,000 armed men in the streets, no
longer feels itself in safety. Should the public
spirit arouse itself, it is only to fall under the
weight of popular excesses, and still more dis-
quieting apprehension. For long will prevail
that universal and irresistible languor ; hardly
in a generation will the political body regain
its life, its security, its confidence in itself.
What has occasioned this calamitous state of
things? Simply this. Force popular force,
has usurped a place in the destinies of the na-
tion, and its appearance necessarily inflicts a j
fatal wound on the regular order of human j
society. Every existence has been endanger- 1
ed when that principle was proclaimed." i
Pp. 50, 51.
" England has done the same to its sovereign \
as the legislators of July; and God has since j
granted to that nation one hundred and forty j
years of prosperity and glory. But let it be
observed, that when it abandoned the principle
of legitimacy, England made no change in its
social institutions. The Aristocracy still retained
their ascendency : though the keystone of the i
arch was thrown down, they removed none of
its foundations. But suppose that the English \
people had proceeded, at the same time that |
they overthrew the Stuarts, to overturn their j
civil laws and hereditary peerage. to force
through Parliamentary Reform, remodel juries, |
bind all authorities beneath the yoke of the po- I
pulace, extended fundamental changes into the
state, the church, and the army : had it tole-
rated a doctrine which is anarchy itself, the doctrine
of universal suffrage : suppose, in fine, that it had
been in the first fervour of the revolutionary ,
intoxication, that parliament had laid the axe
to all subsisting institutions : then, I say, that
the Revolution of 1688 would most certainly
have led the English people to their ruin ; that
it would have brought forth nothing but
tyranny, or been stifled in blood and tears."
Pp. 59, 60.
The real state of France, under the Restora-
tion, has been the subject of gross misrepre-
sentation from all the liberal writers in Europe.
Let us hear the testimony of this supporter of
the Revolution of July, to its practical opera-
tion.
" The government of the Restoration was a
constitutional, an aristocratic, and a free mon-
archy. It was monarchical in its essence, and
in the prerogatives which it reserved to the
crown. It was free, that is no longer contested. In-
violability of persons and property; personal
freedom ; the liberty of the press ; equality in
the eye of law ; the institution of juries ; in-
dependence in the judiciary body; responsi-
bility in the agents of power ; comprised every
thing that was ever known of freedom in the
universe. Public freedom consisted in the
division of the legislative authority between
the king and the people the independence of
both Chambers the annual voting of supplies
the freedom of the periodical press the es-
tablishment of a representative government.
" Democracy, in that regime, was, God knows,
neither unknown nor disarmed. For in a coun-
try where the aristocracy is an hotel, open to
whoever can afford to enter it, it as necessarily
forms part of the democracy as the head does
of the body. The whole body of society has
gained the universal admissibility, and the real
admission of all to every species of public
employment; the complete equality of taxa-
tion ; the eligibility of all to the electoral body ;
the inevitable preponderance of the middling
orders in the elections ; in fine, the entire com-
mand of the periodical press.
" At the time of the promulgation of the
Charter, France had not the least idea of what
freedom was. That Revolution of 40 years'
duration, which had rolled over us, incessantly
resounding with the name of liberty, had passed
away without leaving a conception of what it really
u-as. Coups d'etat that is, strokes by the
force of the popular party composed all its
annals, equally with all that was to be learn-
ed from it; and these violent measures never
revolted the opinion of the public, as being
contrary to true freedom, \vhich 'ever rejects
force, and reposes only on justice, but merely
spread dismay and horror through the ranks
of the opposite party. The only struggle was,
who should get the command of these terrible
arms. On the one hand, these triumphs were
called order; on the other, liberty. No one
gave them their true appellation, which was a
return to the state of barbarous ages, a resto-
ration of the rule of the strongest." Pp. 115,
116.
These observations are worthy of the most
profound meditation. Historical truth is be-
ginning to emerge from the fury of party am-
bition. Here we have it admitted by a liberal
historian, that throughout the whole course of
the French revolution, that, is, of the resurrec-
EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.
tion and rule of the masses, there was not only
no trace of liberty established, but no idea of liberty
acquired. Successive coups d'etat, perpetual
insurrection ; a continued struggle for the
rule of these formidable bodies of the citizens,
constituted its whole history. They fell at last
under the yoke of Napoleon, easily and will-
ingly, because they had never tasted of real
freedom. That blessing was given to them,
for the first time, under a constitutional mon-
archy and a hereditary peerage ; in a word, in
a mixed government. How instructive the
lesson to those who have made such strenuous
endeavours to overturn the mixed government of
Britain ; to establish here the ruinous prepon-
derance of numbers, and beat down the free-
dom of thought, by the brutal violence of the
multitude.
The following observations are singularly
striking. Their application need not be point-
ed out; one would imagine they were written
to depict the course to which the reforming
administration is rapidly approaching.
" There is in the world but two courses of
policy : the one is regular, legitimate, cautious :
it leans for support, not on the physical
strength, but the moral intelligence of man-
kind, and concedes influence less to the num-
bers than the lights, the stability, the services,
the love of order, of the superior class of citizens.
" This lofty and even policy respects within
the laws, and without the rights of nations,
which constitutes the moral law of the uni-
verse. It conducts mankind slowly and gradu-
ally to those ameliorations which God has
made as the end of our efforts, and the com-
pensation of our miseries ; but it knows that
Providence has prescribed two conditions to
this progress, patience and justice.
"The other policy has totally different rules,
and an entirely different method of procedure.
Force, brutal force, constitutes at once its prin-
ciple and its law. You will ever distinguish
it by these symptoms. In all contests between
citizens, parties, or kingdoms, in every time
and in every place, it discards the authority of
justice, which is called the safety of the peo-
ple ; that is to say, the prevailing object of popular
ambition, or, in other ivords, mere force, comes in its
stead. Would you know its internal policy :
difference of opinion is considered as a crime ;
suspicion is arrest ; punishment, death : it
knows no law but force to govern mankind.
Regard its external policy. It regards neither
the sanction of treaties nor the rights of neu-
trals, nor the inviolability of their territories,
nor the conditions of their capitulations : its
diplomacy is nothing else but war; that is to
say, force, its last resource in all emergencies.
In its internal government it has recourse to
no lengthened discussion, to no delays, no slow delib-
erations ; caprice, anger, murder, cut short all
questions, without permitting the other side to
be heard. In a word, in that system, force
thinks, deliberates, wishes, and executes. It
rejects all the authority of time and the lessons
of experience ; the past it destroys, the future
it devours. It must invade every thing, over-
come every thing, in a single day. Marching
at the head of menacing masses, it compels all wishes,
all resistance, all genius, all grandeur, all virtue, to
1c wires, where there is
"fcerli'd, -not- worthy
Vcalls
bend before those t
thing enlightened
ivhich is not buried
liberty consists in the
to the rest of mankind; to f/iT^THPfWPFTJw; seat of
justice, to the citizen at his fireside, to the legislator
in his curule chair, to the king on his throne. Thus
it advances, overturning, destroying. But do
not speak to it of building ; that is beyond its
power. It is the monster of Asia, which can
extinguish but not produce existence." Pp.
230, 231.
At the moment that we are translating this
terrible picture, meetings of the masses of man-
kind have been convened, by the reforming
agents, in every part of the country, where by
possibility they could be got together, to control
and overturn the decisions of parliament.
Fifty, sixty, and seventy thousand men, are
stated to have been assembled at Manchester,
Birmingham, Glasgow, and Edinburgh : their
numbers are grossly exaggerated ; disorders
wilfully ascribed to them; menacing language
falsely put into their mouth in order to intimi-
date the more sober and virtuous class of citi-
zens. The brickbat and bludgeon system is
invoked to cover the freedom of the next, as it
did of the last general election, and obtain that
triumph from the force of brutal violence,
which it despairs of effecting by the sober in-
fluence of reason or justice. Who is so blind
as not to see in this ostentatious parade of
numbers, as opposed to knowledge; in this ap-
peal to violence, in default of argument; in
this recourse to the force of masses, to over-
come the energy of patriotism, the same revo-
lutionary spirit which Salvandy has so well
described as forming the scourge of modern
France, and which never yet became predomi-
nant in a country, without involving high and
low in one promiscuous ruin?
"England," says the same eloquent writer,
" has two edifices standing near to each other :
in the one, assemble from generation to gene-
ration, to defend the ancient liberties of their
country, all that the three kingdoms can as-
semble that is illustrious or respectable : it is
the chapel of St. Stephens. There have com-
bated Pitt and Fox: there we have seen
Brougham, Peel, and Canning, engaged in
those noble strifes which elevate the dignity of
human nature, and the very sight of which is
enough to attach the mind to freedom for the
rest of its life. At a few paces distance you
find another arena, other combats, other cham-
pions : physical force contending with its like ;
man struggling with his fellow-creature for a
miserable prize, and exerting no ray of intelli-
gence, but to plant his blows with more accu-
racy in the body of his antagonist. From that
spectacle to the glorious one exhibited in par-
liament, the distance is not greater than from
revolutionary liberty to constitutional free-
dom." P. 233.
To what does the atrocious system of popu-
lar intimidation, so long encouraged or taken
advantage of by the reforming party, necessa-
rily lead but to such a species of revolutionary
liberty; in other words, to the unrestrained ty-
ranny of the mob, over all that is dignified, or
virtuous, or praiseworthy, in society ? It will
316
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
be the eternal disgrace of tj^t party; it will be
rhe damning record of the*reforming adminis-
tration, that in the struggle for power, in the
pursuit of chimerical and perilous changes,
they invoked the aid of these detestable allies,
and periled the very existence of society upon
a struggle in which they could not be success-
ful but by the aid of powers which never yet
were let loose without devastating the world
with their fury.
" In vain," continues our author, " the Move-
ment party protest against such a result, and
strive to support their opinions by the strange
paradox, that the anarchy, towards which all
their efforts are urging us, will this time be gen-
tle, pacific, beneficent; that it will bring back
the days of legitimacy, and bring them back by
flowery paths. This brilliant colouring to the
horrors of anarchy is one of the most deplora-
ble productions of the spirit of party. For my
part, I see it in colours of blood; and that not
merely from historic recollection, but the na-
ture of things. Doubtless we will not see the
Reign of Terror under the same aspect: we
will not see a Committee of Public Safety
holding France enchained with a hand of iron :
we will not see that abominable centralization
of power : but what we will see is a domici-
liary terror, more rapid and more atrocious ;
more destructive than on the first occasion, be-
cause it will be more nearly allied to the pas-
sion for gain and plunder. What will ulti-
mately come out of it, God only knows ; but
this we may well affirm, that when the revolu-
tionary party shall become master of France,
it will slay and spoil as it has slain and
spoiled ; that it will decimate the higher classes
as it has decimated them. I assert, that those
of the present leaders of the party who shall
oppose themselves to this horrible result, and
assuredly the greater number will do so, will
be crushed under the wheels of the chariot
which they have so insanely put in motion. I
maintain that this is a principle of its existence
a law of nature; in fine, the means destined
by Providence for its extinction. Existing solely
on the support of the masses of mankind : having
no support but in their aid, it can admit of no
genius to rule its destinies but their genius.
Thenceforward it is condemned, for its existence and
its power, to model itself on the multitude : to live
and reign according to its dictation. And the
multitude, to use the nervous words of Odillon
Barrot, is ' characterized by barbarity through-
out all the earth.'
"Thence it is that every state, which has
once opened the door to democratic doctrines,
totters under the draught, and falls, if it is not
speedily disgorged. Thence it is that every
society which has received, which has become
intoxicated with them, abjures the force of rea-
son, devotes itself to the convulsions of anar-
chy, and bids at once a long adieu to civiliza-
tion and to freedom. For the revolutionary
party, while they are incessantly speaking of
ameliorations and of perfection, is a thousand
times more adverse to the progress of the so-
cial order and of the human mind, than the party
of the ancient regime, which at least had its prin-
cipal seat in the higher regions of society ; a
region cultivated, fruitful in intelligence, and
| where the progress of improvement, however
| suspended for a time by the spirit of party, can-
I not fail speedily to regain its course. But our
Revolutionists do more ; they bring us back to
the barbarous ages, and do so at one bound.
All their policy may be reduced to two points :
within, Revolution ; without, War. Every-
where it is the same an appeal to the law of
the strongest ; a return to the ages of barba-
rism." P. 248.
Salvandy paints the classes whose incessant
agitation is producing these disastrous effects.
They are not peculiar to France, but will be
j found in equal strength on this side of the
I Channel.
" Would you know who are the men, and
what are the passions, which thus nourish the
flame of Revolution ; which stain with blood,
or shake with terror the world; which sadden
the people, extinguish industry, disturb repose,
and suspend the progress of nations 1 Behold
that crowd of young men, fierce republicans,
barristers without briefs, physicians without
patients, who make a Revolution to fill up their
vacant hours ambitious equally to have their
names insc-ribed in the roll of indictments for
the courts of assizes, as in the records of fame.
And it is for such ambitions that blood has
flowed in Poland, Italy, and Lyons ! The ri-
valry of kings never occasioned more disas-
ters." P. 270.
One of the most interesting parts of this va-
luable work, is the clear and luminous account
which the author gives of the practical changes
in the constitution, ideas, and morals, of
France, by the late Revolution. Every word
of it may be applied to the perils which this
country runs from the Reform Bill. It is evi-
dent that France has irrecoverably plunged in-
to the revolutionary stream, and that it will
swallow up its liberties, its morals, in the end,
its existence.
"The constitution of the National Guard,"
says our author, " is monstrous from beginning
to end. There has sprung from it hitherto
j more good than evil, because the spirit of the
! people is still better than the institutions which
the revolutionary party have given it; and that
they have not hitherto used the arms so insane-
ly given them, without any consideration. But
this cannot continue ; the election of officers
by the privates is subversive of all the princi-
ples of government. The right of election has
I been given to them ivithout reserve, in direct vio-
j lation of the Charter, on the precedent of 1791,
I and in conformity to the wishes of M. Lafayette.
" In this National Guard, this first of political
powers, since the maintenance of the Charter
is directly intrusted to it in that power, the
most democratic that ever existed upon earth,
since it consists of six million of citizens, equal
among each other, and possessing equally the
right of suffrage, which consists in a bayonet
and ball-cartridges, we have not established for
any ranks any condition, either of election or
of eligibility. It is almost miraculous that the
anarchists have not more generally succeeded
in seizing that terrible arm. The}'- have done
so, however, in many places. Thence has
come that scandal, that terrible calamity of
j the National Guards taking part in the insur-
EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.
317
rections, and marching in the ranks of anar-
chy with drums beating and colours flying.
The sword is now our only refuge, and the
sword is turned against us! While I am yet
writing these convictions, in the silence of me-
ditation and grief, a voice stronger than mine
proclaims them in accents of thunder. Lyons
has shown them written in blood. It is the
handwriting on the wall which appeared to
Belshazzar." P. 391.
Of the changes in the electoral body, and the
power of parliament, effected since the Revolu-
tion of July, he gives the following account:
" The power of parliament has been strength-
ened by all which the royal authority has lost.
It has gained in addition the power of propos-
ing laws in either chamber. The elective
power, above all, has been immensely extend-
ed; for of the two chambers, that which was
esteemed the most durable, and was intended
to give stability to our institutions, has been so
cruelly mutilated by the exclusions following
the Revolution of July, and the subsequent crea-
tions to serve a particular purpose, that it is no
longer of any weight in the state. The whole
powers of government have centred in the
Chamber of Deputies."
The right of election has been extended to
300,000 Frenchmen; the great colleges have
been abolished ; the qualification for eligibility
has been lowered one half as the qualification
for electing ; and the farmers have been sub-
stituted for the great proprietors in the power
of a double vote. The power of regulating the
affairs of departments has been devolved to
800,000 citizens ; that of regulating the com-
munes to 2,500,000. The power of arms has
been surrendered to all; and the power of
electing its leaders given to the whole armed
force without distinction.
" In this way property is entirely excluded
from all influence in the election of magis-
trates ; it has but one privilege left, that of
bearing the largest part of the burdens, and
every species of outrage, vexation, and abuse.
As a natural consequence, the communes have
been ill administered, and nothing but the
worst passions regulate the election of their
officers. The municipal councils are com-
posed of infinitely worse members than they
were before the portentous addition made to
the number of their electors. To secure the
triumph of having a bad mayor, a mayor suited
to their base and ignorant jealousies, they are
constrained to elect bad magistrates. JLbyssus
abyssum vocal.
" In the political class of electors, the effects
of the democratic changes have been still
worse. The poivtr of mobs has become irresistible.
The electoral body, which for fifteen years has
struggled for the liberties of France, has been
dispossessed 'by a body possessing less inde-
pendence, less intelligence, which understands
less the duties to which it is called. Every-
where the respectable classes, sure of being out-
voted, have stayed away from the elections. In the
department in which I write, an hundred
voices have carried the election, because 300
respectable electors have not made their ap-
pearance. In all parts of the kingdom, the
same melancholy spectacle presents itself.
The law has made a class arbiters of the af-
fairs of the kingdom, which has the good sense
to perceive its utter unfitness for the task, or
its inability to contend with the furious torrent
with which it is surrounded; and the conse-
quence everywhere has been, that intrigue,
and every unworthy passion, govern the elec-
tions, and a set of miserable low intriguers
rule France with a rod of iron. In the state,
the department, the communes, the National
Guard, the prospect is the same. The same
principle governs the organization, or rather
disorganization, throughout the whole of so-
ciety. Universally it is the lower part of the
electoral body, which, being the most numerous, the
most reckless, and the most compact, casts the ba-
lance ; in short, it is the tail which governs
the head. There is the profound grievance
which endangers all our liberties. On such con-
ditions, no social union is possible among men.
"Recently our electors have made a dis-
covery, which fixes in these inferior regions,
not merely the power of election, but the whole
political authority in the state ; it is the prac-
tice of exacting from their representatives,
before they are elected, pledges as to every mea-
sure of importance which is to come before them.
By that single expedient, the representative
system, with all its guarantees and blessings,
has crumbled into dust. Its fundamental prin-
ciple is, that the three great powers form the
head of the state ; that all three discuss, de-
liberate, decide, with equal freedom on the
affairs of the state. The guarantee of this
freedom consists in the composition of these
powers, the slow method of their procedure,
the length of previous debates, and the control
of each branch of the legislature by the others.
But the exacting of pledges from members of
parliament destroys all this. Deliberation and
choice are placed at the very bottom of the
political ladder, and there alone. What do I
say? Deliberation! the thing is unknown
even there. A hair-brained student seizes at
the gate of a city a peasant, asks him if he is
desirous to see feudality with all its seig-
neurial rights re-established, puts into his
hands a name to vote for, which will preserve
him from all these calamities, and having thus
sent him totally deluded into the election hall,
returns to his companions, and laughs with
them at having thus secured a vote for the
abolition of the peerage.
" As little is the inclination of the electors
consulted in their preliminary resolutions. It
is in the wine-shops, amidst the fumes of intoxi-
cation, that the greatest questions are decided;
without hearing the other side, without any
knowledge on the subject; without the small-
est information as to the matter on which an
irrevocable decision is thus taken. This is
what is called the liberty of democracy; a
brutal, ignorant, reckless liberty, which cuts
short all discussion, and decides every ques-
tion without knowledge, without discussion,
without examination, from the mere force of
passion."
Of the present state of the French press, we
have the following emphatic account. De-
mocracy, it will be seen, produces everywhere
the same effects.
318
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
"At the spectacle of the press of France, I
experienced the grief of an old soldier, who
sees his arms profaned. The press is no
longer that sure ally of freedom, which follows,
step by step, the depositories of power, but
without contesting with them their necessary
prerogatives, or striving to sap the foundations
of the state. It is an Eumenides, a Bacchante,
which agitates a torch, a hatchet, or a poniard;
which insults and strikes without intermis-
sion ; which applies itself incessantly, in its
lucid intervals, to demolish, stone by stone,
the whole social edifice ; which seems tor-
mented by a devouring fever ; which requires
to revenge itself for the sufferings of a consum-
ing pride, by the unceasing work of destruc-
tion. In other states, it has been found that
calumny penetrates into the field of polemical
contest. But France has gone a step farther;
it possesses whole workshops of calumny.
Insult possesses its seats of manufacture. We
have numerous journals, which live by attack-
ing every reputation, every talent, every spe-
cies of superiority. It is an artillery incessantly
directed to level every thing which is elevated, or
serves or honours its country. It is no wonder
that the observation should be so common,
that society is undergoing an incessant degra-
dation. A society in the midst of which a
disorder so frightful is daily appearing, with-
out exciting either attention or animadversion,
is on the high road to ruin. It is condemned
to the chastisement of heaven." Pp. 394 399.
One would imagine that the following pas-
sage was written expressly for the state of the
British revolutionary press, during the discus-
sion of the Reform Bill.
"The more that the progress of the Revolu-
tion produced of inevitable concessions to the
passion for democracy, the more indispen-
sable it was, that the press should have taken
an elevated ground, to withstand the torrent.
The reverse has been the case. Thence have
flowed that perpetual degradation of its ten-
dency, that emulation in calumny and detrac-
tion, that obstinate support of doctrines subver-
sive of society, those appeals to the passions of
the multitude, that ostentatious display of the logic
of brickbats, that indignation at every historic
name, those assaults on every thing that is
dignified or hereditary, on the throne, the peer-
age, property itself. Deplorable corruption !
permanent corruption of talent, virtue, and
genius ! total abandonment of its glorious mis-
sion to enlighten, glorify, and defend its coun-
try." P. 402.
"The radical vice in the social system of
France, our author considers as consisting in
the overwhelming influence given to that class
a little above the lowest, in other words, the 10/.
householders, in whom, with unerring accu-
racy, the Revolutionists of England persuaded
an ignorant and reckless administration to
centre all the political power of this country.
Listen to its practical working in France, as
detailed by this liberal constitutional writer:
"The direct tendency of all our laws, is to
deliver over the empire to one single class in society :
that class, elevated just above the lowest,
which has enough of independence and edu-
cation to be inspired with the desire to centre
in itself all the powers of the state, but too
little to wield them with advantage. This
class forms the link between the upper ranks of
the Tiers Etat and the decided anarchists ; and it
is actuated by passion, the reverse of those of
both the regions on which it borders. Suffi-
ciently near to the latter to be not more dis-
turbed than it at the work of destruction, it is
sufficiently close to the former to be filled with
animosity at its prosperity : it participates in
the envy of the one, and the pride of the other
in fatal union, which corrupts the mediocrity
of their intelligence, their ignorance of the af-
fairs of state, the narrow and partial view they
take of every subject. Thence has sprung
that jealous and turbulent spirit which can do
nothing but destroy: which assails with its
wrath every thing which society respects, the
throne equally with the altar, power equally
with distinction : a spirit equally fatal to all
above and all below itself, which dries up all
the sources of prosperity, by overturning the
principles, the feelings, which form the counter-
poise of society ; and which a divine legislator
has implanted on the most ancient tables of
the law, the human conscience.
"Thus have we gone on for eighteen months,
accumulating the principles of destruction :
the more that we have need of public wisdom
for support, the more have we receded from
it. The evil will become irreparable, if the
spirit of disorder, which has overthrown our
authorities, and passed from the authorities
into the laws, should find a general entrance
into the minds of the people. There lies the
incurable wound of France." P. 405.
It was in the face of such testimony to the
tremendous effect of rousing democratic am-
bition in the lowest of the middling class of
society ; it was within sight of an empire
wasting away under their withering influence,
that the Reformers roused them to a state of
perfect fury, by the prospect of acquiring,
through the 10J. clause, an irresistible pre-
ponderance in the state. We doubt if the his-
tory of the world exhibits another instance of
such complete infatuation.
Is the literature of France in such a state
as to justify a hope, that a better day is likely
to dawn on its democratic society ? Let us
hear what the friend of constitutional freedom
says on that vital subject
"There is a moral anarchy far worse than
that of society, which saps even the founda-
tion of order, which renders it hardly consist-
ent even with despotism : utterly inconsistent
with freedom. We have seen political princi-
ples and belief often sustain the state, in de-
fault of laws and institutions ; but to what are
we to look for a remedy to the disorder which
has its seat in the heart?
" Were literature to be regarded as the ex-
pression of thought, there is not a hope left
for France. Literary talent now shows itself
stained with every kind of corruption. It
makes it a rule and a sport to attack every
sentiment and interest of which society is
composed. One would imagine that its object
is to restore to French literature all the vices
with which it was disgraced in the last cen-
tury. If, on the faith of daily eulogiums, you
EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830.
319
go into a theatre, you see scenes represented
where the dignity of our sex is as much out-
raged as the modesty of the other. Everywhere
the same spectacles await you. Obscene ro-
mances are the model on which they are all
formed. The muse now labours at what is
indecent, as formerly it did at what would
melt the heart. How unhappy the young
men, who think they ape the elegance of
riches by adopting its vices, who deem them-
selves original, merely because they are re-
trograding, and who mistake the novels of
Crebillon and Voltaire for original genius !
It would seem that these shameful excesses
are the inevitable attendant of ancient civil-
ization. How often have I myself written,
that that degrading literature of the last cen-
tury flowed from the corruptions of an abso-
lute monarchy ! And now Liberty, as if to
turn into derision my worship at its altars, has
taken for its model the school of Louis XV.,
and improved upon its infamous inspirations."
Pp. 408, 409.
This revolutionary torrent has broken into
every department; it has invaded the opinions
of the thoughtful, the manners of the active,
the morals of the young, and the sanctity of
families. The fatal doctrine of a general di-
vision of property, is spreading to an extent
hardly conceivable in a state possessing much
property, and great individual ability.
"When the spirit of disorder has thus taken
possession of all imaginations, when the revolu-
tionary herald knocks with redoubled strokes,
not only at all the institutions, but at all the
doctrines and opinions which hold together
the fabric of society, can property, the corner-
stone of the edifice, be respected] Let us not
flatter ourselves with the hope that it can.
" Property has already ceased to be the main
pillar of the social constitution. It is treated
as conquered by the laws, as an enemy by the
politicians. Should the present system con-
tinue, it will soon become a slave." P. 416.
"The proof that the revolutionary torrent
has overwhelmed us, and that we are about to
retrograde for several centuries, is, that the
principle of confiscation is maintained without
intermission, without exciting any horror. An
able young man, M. Lherminier, has lately ad-
vanced the doctrine, that society is entitled to
dispossess the minority, to make way for the
majority. Well, a learned professor of the
law has advanced this doctrine, and France
hears it without surprise. Nay, farther, we
have a public worship, an hierarchy, mission-
aries in fine, a whole corps of militia, who
go from town to town, incessantly preaching
to the people the necessity of overturning the
hereditary descent of property ; and that scan-
dalous offence is openly tolerated. The state
permits a furious association to be formed in
its very bosom, to divide the property of
others ! Yet more the French society as-
sists at that systematic destruction of its last
pillar, as it would at a public game. Lyons
even cannot rouse them to their danger, the
conflagration of the second city in the empire
fails to illuminate the public thought."
Pp. 419, 419.
In the midst of this universal fusion of pub-
lic thought in the revolutionary crucible, the
sway of religion, of private morality, and pa-
rental authority, could not long be expected to
urvive. They have all accordingly given
way.
"Possibly the revolutionary worship has
come in place of the service of the altar,
which has been destroyed. Every religious tie
has long been extinguished amongst us. JJut now,
even its semblance has been abandoned. A Cham-
ber which boasts of having established free-
dom, has seriously entertained a project for
the abolition of the Sunday, and all religious
festivals. That would be the most complete
of all reactions, for it would at once confound
all ages, and exterminate every chance of sal-
vation.
" Such is the estimation in which religion is
now held, that every one hastens to clear him-
self from the odious aspersion of being in the least
degree attached to it. The representatives in
parliament, if by any chance an allusion is
made to the clergy, burst out into laughter or
sneer; they think they can govern a people,
while they are incessantly outraging their
worship that cradle of modern civilization.
If a journal accidentally mentions that a regi-
ment has attended mass, all the generals in.
the kingdom hasten to repel the calumny, to
protest by all that is sacred their entire inno-
cence, to swear that the barricades have taught
them to forget the lessons of Napoleon, to bow
the knee at the name of God." P. 420.
" In this universal struggle for disorganiza-
tion, the fatal ardour gains every character.
The contest is, who shall demolish most effec-
tually, and give the most vehement strokes to
society. M. de Schonen sees well that less
good was done by his courage in resisting the
attacks on the temples of religion, than evil
by the weight lent by the proposition for di-
vorce, to the last establishment which was yet
untouched, the sanctity of private life. To
defend our public monuments, and overturn
marriage, is a proceeding wholly for the bene-
fit of anarchy; I say overturn it; for in the
corrupted state of society where we live, to
dissolve its imlissolubility, is to strike it in its
very essence." Pp. 412, 413.
" The recent Revolution has exhibited a
spectacle which was wanting in that of 1789.
Robespierre, in the Constituent Assembly, pro-
posed the abolition of the punishment of death :
no one then thought of death, none dreamed
of bathing themselves in blood. Now, the
case is widely different we have arrived at
terror at one leap. It is while knowing it,
while viewing it full in the face, that it is se-
riously recommended. We have, or we affect,
the unhappy passion for blood. The speeches
of Robespierre and St. Just are printed and
sold for a few sous, leaving out only his speech in.
fivour of the Supreme Pcing. All this goes on
in peaceable times, when we are all as yet in
cold blood, without the double excuse of terror
and passion which palliated their enormities.
Poetry has taken the same line. The Consti-
tutinncl, while publishing their revolting pane-
gyrics on blood, expresses no horror at this
tendency. Incessantly we are told the reign
of blood cannot be renewed ; but our days
320
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
have done more, they have removed all horror
at it." P. 421.
On the dissolution of the hereditary peerage,
the great conquest of the Revolution, the fol-
lowing striking observations are made.
" The democrats, in speaking of the destruc-
tion of the hereditary peerage, imagine that
they have only sacrificed an institution.
There never was a more grievous mistake ;
they have destroyed a principle. They have
thrown into the gulf the sole conservative
principle that the Revolution had left; the
sole stone in the edifice which recalls the
past; the sole force in the constitution which
subsists of itself. By that great stroke, France
has violently detached itself from the Euro-
pean continent, violently thrown itself beyond
the Atlantic, violently married itself to the
virgin soil of Pennsylvania, whither we bring
an ancient, discontented, and divided society;
a population overflowing, which, having no
deserts to expand over, must recoil upon it-
self, and tear out its own entrails ; in fine, the
tastes of servitude, the appetite for domina-
tion and anarchy, anti-religious doctrines, anti-
social passions, at which that young state,
which bore Washington, nourished freedom,
and believes in God, would stand aghast.
" The middling rank has this evil inherent
in its composition ; placed on the confines of
physical struggle, the intervention of force
does not surprise it; it submits to its tyranny
without revolt. Has it defended France, for
the last sixteen months, from the leaden scep-
tre which has so cruelly weighed upon her
destinies ? What a spectacle was exhibited
when the Chamber of Peers, resplendent with
talent, with virtues, with recollections dear to
France, by its conscientious votes for so many
years, was forced to vote against its conviction
forced, I say, to bend its powerful head before a
brutal, jealous, and ignorant multitude. The class
which could command such a sacrifice, en-
force such a national humiliation, is incapable
of governing France ; and will never preserve
the empire, but suffer it to fall into the jaws
of the pitiless enemy, who is ever ready to
devour it." P. 487.
"No government is possible, where the mor-
tal antipathy exists, which in France alienates
the lower classes in possession of power from
the ascendant of education or fortune. Can
any one believe that power will ultimately re-
main in the hands of that intermediate class
which is detached from the interests of pro-
perty, without being allied to the multitude?
Is it not evident, that its natural tendency is to
separate itself daily more and more from the
first class, to unite itself to the second 1 Com-
munity of hatred will occasion unity of exer-
tion; and the more that the abyss is enlarged
which separates the present depositaries of
power from its natural possessors, the more
will the masses enter into a share, and finally
the exclusive possession, of power. Thence
it will proceed from demolition to demolition,
from disorder to disorder, by an inevitable pro-
gress, and must at length end in the anti-social
state, the rule of the multitude.
"The moment that the opinion of the domi-
nant classes disregards established interests, that
it takes a pleasure in violating those august
principles which constitute ^the soul of society,
we see an abyss begin to open ; the earth
quakes beneath our feet the community is
shaken to its very entrails. Then begins a pro-
found and universal soise of suffering. Capital
disappears: talents retreat become irritated
or corrupted. The national genius becomes
intoxicated precipitates itself into every
species of disorder, and bears aloft, not as a
light, but a torch of conflagration, its useless
flame. The whole nation is seized with dis-
quietude and sickness, as on the eve of those
convulsions which shake the earth, and trouble
at once the air, the earth, and the sea. Every
one seeks the causes of this extraordinaiy
state; it is to be found in one alone the social
state is trembling to its foundations.
" This is precisely the state we have been in
for sixteen months. To conceal it is impossi-
ble. What is required is to endeavour to
remedy its disorders. France is well aware
that it would be happy if it had only lost a fifth
of its immense capital during that period. Every
individual in the kingdom has lost a large portion
of his income. And yet the Revolution of 1830
was the most rapid and the least bloody re-
corded in history. If we look nearer, we shall
discover that every one of us is less secure of
his property than he was before that moral
earthquake. Every one is less secure of his
head, though the reign of death has not yet
commenced; and in that universal feeling of
insecurity is to be found the source of the uni-
versal suffering." II. 491.
But we must conclude, however reluctantly,
these copious extracts. Were we to translate
every passage which is striking in itself,
which bears in the most extraordinary way on
the present crisis in this country, we should
transcribe the whole of this eloquent and pro-
found disquisition. If it had been written in
this country, it would have been set down as
the work of some furious anti-reformer; of
some violent Tory, blind to the progress of
events, insensible to the change of society. It
is the work, however, of no anti-reformer, but
of a liberal Parisian historian, a decided sup-
porter at the time of the Revolution of July ; a
powerful opponent of the Bourbons for fifteen
years in the Chamber of Deputies. He is
commended in the highest terms by Lady
Morgan, as one of the rising lights of the
age ;* and that stamps his character as a
leader of the liberal party. But he has become
enlightened, as all the world will be, to the
real tendency of the revolutionary spirit, by
that most certain of all preceptors, the suffer-
ing it has occasioned.
Salvandy, like all the liberal party in France,
while he clearly perceives the deplorable state
to which their Revolution has brought them,
and the fatal tendency of the democratic spirit
which the triumph of July has so strongly de-
veloped, is unable to discover the remote
cause of the disasters which overwhelm them.
At this distance from the scene of action, we
can clearly discern it. "Ephraim," says the
Scripture, "has gone to his idols; let him
* France, ii. 342.
DESERTION OF PORTUGAL.
321
alone." In these words is to be found the
secret of the universal suffering, the deplora-
ble condition, the merciless tyranny, which
prevails in France. It is labouring under the
chastisement of Heaven. An offended Deity
has rained down upon it a worse scourge than
the brimstone which destroyed the cities of the
Jordan the scourge of its own passions and
vices. The terrible cruelty of the Reign of Ter-
ror the enormous injustice of the revolution-
ary rule, is registered in the book of fate ; the
universal abandonment of religion by all the
influential classes, has led to the extirpation
of all the barriers against anarchy which are
fitted to secure the well-being of society. Its
fate is sealed; its glories are gone; the un-
fettered march of passion will overthrow
every public and private virtue ; and national
ruin will be the consequence. We are follow-
ing in the same course, and will most certainly
share in the same punishment.
In this melancholy prospect let us be thank-
ful that the conservative party have nothing
with which to reproach themselves ; that
though doomed to share in the punishment,
they are entirely guiltless of the crime. Noble
indeed as was the conduct of the Duke of
Wellington, in coming forward at the eleventh
hour, to extricate the crown from the perilous
situation in which it was placed, and the de-
grading thraldom to which it was subjected,
we rejoice, from the bottom of our hearts, that
the attempt was frustrated. Had he gone on
with the bill as it stood, from a sense of
overwhelming necessity, all its consequences
would have been laid on its opponents. The
Whigs brought in the Reform Bill let them
have the dreadful celebrity of carrying it
through. Let them inscribe on their banners
the overthrow of the constitution; let them go
down to posterity as the destroyers of a cen-
tury and a half of glory; let them be stigma-
tized in the page of history as the men who
overthrew the liberties of England. Never
despairing of their country, let the great and
noble Conservative party stand aloof from the
fatal career of revolution ; let them remain for
ever excluded from power, rather than gain it
by the sacrifice of one iota of principle ; and
steadily resisting the march of wickedness, and
all the allurements of ambition, take for their
motto the words of ancient duty, **Fais ce que
dois : advienne ce que pourra."
DESERTION OF PORTUGAL*
LIGHTLY as in a moment of political frenzy,
and under the influence of the passion for
innovation, we may speak of the wisdom of
our ancestors, their measures were founded on
considerations which will survive the tempest
of the present times. They arose not from any
sagacity in them superior to what we possess,
but from experience having forced upon them
prudent measures from the pressure of ne-
cessity. As France is the power which had
been found by experience to be most formida-
ble to the liberties of Europe, and in an espe-
cial manner perilous to the independence of
England, our policy for two hundred years has
been founded upon the principle, that Holland
on the one side, and Portugal on the other,
should be supported against it. By a close
alliance with these two powers, we extended
our arms, as it were, around our powerful
neighbour; she could not go far in any direc-
tion without encountering either the one or the
other. So strongly was the necessity of this
felt, that so far back as 1663, in the treaty
concluded with Portugal, it was stipulated
" that England should resent any insult or ag-
gression offered to Portugal in the same way,
and with the same power as if its own domi-
nions were invaded."
The result has proved the wisdom of their
stipulations. In the two greatest wars which
have distracted Europe for the last two centu-
ries, the Netherlands and the Peninsula have
been the theatre where the armies of France
and England have encountered each other.
___
* Blackwood's Magazine, December, 1831.
'
France has never been effectually checked but
when assailed in Spain and Flanders. Five-
and-twenty years' peace followed the treaty of
Utrecht, and sixteen have already followed the
peace of Paris. All other treaties for the last
hundred and fifty years can only be considered
as truces in comparison. Such is the import-
ance of the Peninsula, that a considerable
success there is almost sufficient to neutralize
the greatest advantages in the central parts of
Europe ; the victory of Almanza had well nigh
neutralized the triumphs of Oudenarde, Ra-
millies, and Malplaquet, and the cannon of
Salamanca startled Napoleon even on the eve
of the carnage of Borodino, and when almost
within sight of the Kremlin.
" The sea," says General Jomini, " which is
the worst possible base to every power, is
the best to England. That which is but a
sterile and inhospitable desert to a military
power, conveys to the menaced point the
fleets and the forces of Albion." It is on this
principle, that the strict alliance and close
connection with Portugal was formed. Its ex-
tensive sea-coast, mountainous ridges, and
numerous harbours, afforded the utmost faci-
lities for pouring into its bosom the resources
and armies of England, while its own force
was not so considerable as to render its people
jealous of the protection, or averse to the
generals, of England. The result proved the
wisdom of the choice made of Portugal as the
fulcrum on which the military power of Eng-
land, when engaged in continental war, should
be rested. It is there alone that an uncon-
querable stand was made against the forces of
322
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
Napoleon. That which neither the firmness
of Austria, nor the valour of Prussia, nor the
power of Russia could accomplish, has been
achieved by this little state, backed by the
might and the energy of England. Austria
has to lament the defects of Ulm and Wagram ;
Prussia the overthrow of Jena; Russia the
catastrophes of Austerlitz and Friedland ;
but the career of Portugal, in the same terrible
strife, was one of uninterrupted success ; be-
fore the rocks of Torres Vedras, the waves of
Gallic aggression first permanently receded ;
and from the strongholds of the Tagus, the
British standards advanced to a career of glory
greater than ever graced the days of her Hen-
rys and her Edwards.
It is a point on which military men are at
variance, whether fortresses are of more value
on the frontier or in the centre of a menaced
state. Perhaps the question may be solved by
a distinction : where the state assailed is one
of firstrate importance, as France or Austria,
fortified towns on its frontier are of incalcula-
ble importance, because, if the invading army
stops to invest them, it gives time for great
armaments in the interior; if it pushes on and
neglects them, it necessarily becomes so weak-
ened by the detachments made for the purpose
of maintaining their blockade, that it is inca-
pable of achieving any considerable success.
Two memorable examples of this occurred in
French Flanders in 1793, when the invading
army, an hundred and twenty thousand strong,
was so long delayed by besieging the frontier
fortresses of Valenciennes, Conde, Maubeuge,
and Landrecy, that time was given for the
Convention to organize and equip the great
armaments in the interior, which finally re-
pelled the invasion ; and in Lombardy, in 1796,
when the single fortress of Mantua arrested
the career of Napoleon for six months, and
gave time for Austria to assemble no less than
four successive and powerful armies for its
relief. On the other hand, the extraordinary
advantage attending the great central fortifica-
tions of Wellington at Torres Vedras, and the
corresponding successes gained by Skrzynecki,
from the possession of Warsaw, Zamosc, and
Modlin, during the late Polish war, and by
Napoleon, from the fortresses of Dresden,
Torgau, and Wittemberg, on the Elbe, in 1813,
demonstrate, that where the state assailed is
more inconsiderable when compared to the
attacking force, fortifications are of more avail
when placed in the centre of the threatened
state, and when its armies, retiring upon their
central strongholds, find both a point d'appui in
case of disaster, and an interior line of com-
munication, which compensates inferiority of
forces, and affords an opportunity for accumu-
lating masses on detached bodies of the
enemy.
But his majesty's present government have
solved the question in a totally different man-
ner. They have relinquished both the frontier
and the central fortresses which bridled
France ; both those which checked its irrup-y
tion into the centre of Europe, and those which
afforded a secure and central position on which
the armies of England could combat when
matters became more serious. We have lost
| both the frontier barrier of Marlborough in
I Flanders, and the interior barrier of Welling-
| ton in Portugal ; with one hand we have aban-
I doned the safeguard of northern, with the other
the citadel of southern Europe.
Deviating for the first time from the policy
of two hundred years, we have not only loaded
Portugal with injuries and indignities our-
selves, but we have permitted her to be the
victim of revolutionary violence and rapine
on the part of France. The Portuguese
wines, long the favoured object of British
protection, have been abandoned; the duties
of French and Oporto wines have been equal-
ized, and our ancient and irreconcilable ene-
my placed on the footing of the most favoured
nation !
The consequence of this must in time be
the destruction or serious injury of the im-
mense capital invested in the raising of port
wine on the banks of the Douro. The cultiva-
tion of wine there has been nursed up by a
century's protection, and brought to its pre-
sent flourishing state by the fostering influence
of the British market. But how is that exces-
sive and exotic state of cultivation to continue,
when the duties on Portuguese and French
wines are equalized, and the merchants of
Bordeaux can, from a shorter distance, send
wines adapted to the English taste from the
mouth of the Garonne ? Two shillings a gal-
lon has been taken off French, and as much
laid on Portuguese wines; the Portuguese
grower, therefore, in competition with the
French, finds himself saddled with a difference
of duty amounting to four shillings a gallon.
It requires no argument to show that such a
difference of taxation deprives the Portuguese
of all their former advantages, and must in
the end extinguish the extraordinary growth
of vines in the province of Entre Douro
Minho.
What are the advantages which ministers
propose to themselves from this abandonment
of their ancient ally ? Is it that the English
commerce with France is so much more con-
siderable than that of Portugal, that it is worth
while to lose the one in order to gain the
other? The reverse is the fact the British
exports to France are only 700,000/. a year,
while those to Portugal amount to 2,000,000/.
Is it that France has done so much more for
British commerce than Portugal 1 The re-
verse is the fact France has, by the most
rigid system of prohibitions, excluded all Bri-
tish manufactures from its shores ; while Por-
tugal has, by a series of the most favourable
treaties, given them the greatest possible en-
couragement. Is it because a more extend-
ed commerce with France may in future be
anticipated from the friendly intercourse be-
tween the two countries, and a spirit of rising
liberality has manifested itself on the part of
its manufacturers and merchants? The re-
verse is the fact. France, so nearly in its
northern parts in the same latitude with Eng-
land, has the same coal, the same steam-en-
gines, the same manufactures, whereas Portu-
gal, exposed to the influence of a vertical sun,
without coal or manufacturing capital, is
unable to compete with any of the produc-
DESERTION OF PORTUGAL.
323
tions of British industry. The consequence
is, that the utmost possible jealousy has al-
ways, and especially of late years, existed on
the part of the French against the British
manufactures ; and that all our measures for
their encouragement have been met by in-
creased duties, and more rigid prohibitions of
the produce of our industry. Is it because
France has been so much more friendly, of
late years, to Britain than Portugal 1 The
reverse is the fact. France has, for three
centuries, done every thing she possibly
could to destroy our industry and our inde-
pendence, while Portugal has done every
thing in her power to support the one and
the other.
The reason of this difference in the con-
duct of the two states, is founded in the dif-
ference of the physical situation of the two
countries, and of their climate and produce.
Portugal, the country of the vine and the
olive, without coal, wood, or fabrics of any
sort, destitute of canals or carriage-roads,
intersected by immense mountain ridges, is
as incapable of competing with the fabrics
or manufactures of England, as England is
of emulating their oil, fruit, and wines. The
case might have been the same with France,
if it had been possessed merely by its south-
ern provinces; but the northern lying nearly
in the same latitude as England, with their
coal mines, cotton and iron manufactories,
are in exactly the same line of industry as
the British counties, and their jealousy in
consequence of our manufactures is exces-
sive. The manufacturers of Rouen and Ly-
ons, being a much more opulent and united
body than the peasant vine-growers of the
south, have got the entire control of govern-
ment, and hence the extraordinary rigour
with which they exclude our manufactures,
and the inconsiderable amount of the trade
which we carry on with that populous king-
dom. This jealousy, being founded on simi-
larity of industry, and the rivalry of the same
kind of manufactures, will continue to the end
of time. By encouraging the wines of France,
therefore, we are favouring the industry of a
country which has not only always been our
enemy, hut never will make any return in
facilitating the consumption of our manufac-
tures ! By encouraging the wines of Portugal,
we are fostering the industry of a country
which has always been our friend ; and, from
the absence of all manufacturing jealousy,
may be relied upon as likely to continue per-
manently to take off the greatest possible
amount of our manufactures.
But this is not all. Not content with in-
flicting this severe blow upon the industry of
an allied state, which takes of 2,000,000/. a
year of our produce, and is so likely to con-
tinue to do so, we have insulted and injured
Portugal in the tenderest point, and allowed
our new ally, revolutionary France, to destroy
her national independence, and extinguish all
recollection of the protection and the guardian-
ship of England.
Don Miguel, as everybody knows, is dc
facto, if not de jure, king of Portugal. He is
not a legitimate monarch ; he stands upon the
people's choice. We do not pretend to vindi-
cate either his character or his system of go-
vernment. They are both said to be bad,
though, from trie falsehood on this subject
which evidently pervades the English press,
and the firm support which the Portuguese
have given him when under the ban of all
Europe, there is every reason to believe that
the accounts we receive are grossly exagge-
rated: but of that we have no authentic ac-
counts. Suffice it to say, the Portuguese have
chosen him for their sovereign, and, after the
experience of both, prefer an absolute monar-
chy to the democratic constitution with which
they were visited from this country. Now,
our government is avowedly founded on the
system of non-intervention ; and when the
French and Belgians made choice of a revo-
lutionary monarch, we were not slow in snap-
ping asunder all treaties with the expelled
dynasty, and recognising the new monarch
whom they placed on the throne. Don Miguel
has now held for four years the Portuguese
sceptre ; his throne is more firmly established
than that of either Louis Philippe or Leopold.
He has received neither countenance nor aid
from any foreign power; and if he had not
been agreeable to the great bulk of the Portu-
guese, he must, long ere this, have ceased to
reign. On what ground, then, is the recogni-
tion of Don Miguel so long delayed 1 Why is
he driven into a course of irregular and des-
perate conduct, from the refusal of the Eu-
ropean powers to admit his title 1 If they
acted on the principle of never recognising
any one but the legitimate monarch, we could
understand the consistency of their conduct;
but after having made such haste to recognise
the revolutionary monarchs, it is utterly im-
possible to discover any ground on which we
can withhold the same homage to the absolute
one, or refuse the same liberty of election to
the Portuguese which we have given to the
French and Belgian people.
But this is not all France has committed
an act of the most lawless and violent kind
to the Portuguese government; and we have
not only done nothing to check, but every thing
to encourage it
Two Frenchmen were arrested, it is said, for
political offences in Portugal, and sentenced to
pay a heavy fine by the courts there. What they
had done we know not. The Portuguese say
they were endeavouring to effect a revolution,
in that country the French deny the fact, and
assert that they were unjustly condemned.
However that may be, the French fleet sailed
to the Tagus, forced the passage of the forts,
and took possession of the fleet without any
declaration of war. They required the re-
versal of the sentence against their condemned
countrymen, the payment of a large sum in
name of damages to them, and a public apo-
logy ; and having gained all these objects, they
carried off the Portuguese fleet along with them to
France, while their ambassador still remained
on a pacific footing at the court of Lisbon !
Now, this was plainly an act of rapine and
piracy. Without entering into the justice or
injustice of the proceedings against the ac-
cused in the Portuguese courts, supposing that
324
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
they were as unjustifiable as possible, is that
any ground for seizing the whole navy of Por-
tugal, after the sentence complained of had
been reversed, ample satisfaction made to the
injured party, and a public apology placarded
on the streets of Lisbon by the Portuguese
government 1
Against this flagrant kind of revolutionary
violence, England has neither protested nor
demonstrated: we have witnessed in silence
the spoliation of the Portuguese fleet, as the
partition of the Dutch territory, and France
can boast of greater naval trophies obtained
from the allies of England in peace, than she
ever obtained during the twenty years of the
revolutionary war. Injuries are often com-
plained of by the subjects of one country
against the government of another ; satisfac-
tion is often demanded and obtained, and da-
mages awarded to the aggrieved party. But
was it ever heard of before, that after such
satisfaction had been obtained, the whole fleet
of the power from whom it was demanded
should be seized hold of, and carried off as in
open war 1 ? If this is a specimen of revolu-
tionary justice, and of the new eras of liberty
and equality, certainly Astrsea in leaving the
world has not left her last footsteps among
them.
In this iniquitous and violent proceeding
towards our old and faithful ally, let it always
be recollected, the English government has
tamely acquiesced. Well might the Duke of
Wellington declare in the House of Lords,
that nothing in life had ever given him so
much pain, and that his cheeks were filled
with blushes, when he thought of the conduct
of our government towards its ancient ally.
Would the government of Louis Philippe, we
ask, have ventured upon such a step, if the
Duke of Wellington had been at the head of
our administration ? Would they have ven-
tured on it, if they had not been aware that no
violence of theirs towards the Portuguese go-
vernment was likely to be resented by our re-
forming government 1 ? In what light are we
likely to be viewed by posterity, when, after
having made such heroic efforts to save the
Portuguese from the yoke of France, for eight
years during the reign of Napoleon, we suffer
them to become the victims of such revolu-
tionary violence, the moment that a new ad-
ministration is called to the helm of affairs ]
How can we expect that our allies are to
stand by us in periods of peril, when we de-
sert them in so extraordinary a manner the
moment that a new administration succeeds
to our guidance ? Have we arrived at that
state of vacillation and instability, so well
known as the symptom of weak and demo-
cratic societies, that there is nothing stable
or fixed either in foreign or domestic policy,
but government is tossed about by every wind
of doctrine, and at the mercy of every agita-
tion raised from the lowest classes of the peo-
ple ? Have the reformers brought this country,
whose firmness and stability in time past had
rivalled that of the Roman senate, to such a
state of weakness in so short a time, that the
British alliance forms no security against ex-
ternal violence, and every stats that wishes to
avoid plunder and devastation, must range it-
self under the banners of our enemies 1 What
the motive for such conduct may have been,
it is diflicult to divine; but the fact is certain,
that we have done so, and every Englishman
must bear the humiliation which it has brought
upon his country.
" The meanest Englishman," said Mr. Can-
ning, "shall not walk the streets of Paris with-
out being considered as the compatriot of
Wellington; as a member of that community
which has humbled France and rescued Eu-
rope." The noblest Englishman shall not now
walk the streets of any European capital, with-
out being considered as the compatriot of Grey;
the member of that community which has par-
titioned Holland and deserted Portugal. With
truth it may now be said, that the indignities
and contempt which now await a traveller
among all our former allies, are equalled only
by the respect which h formerly experienced.
Ask any traveller who has lately returned from
Vienne, Berlin, the Hague, or Lisbon, in what
light he is now regarded ; whether he has ex-
perienced the same kindness or respect which
so lately attended the English character? He
will answer that they consider the English as
absolutely insane, and that the ancient respect
for our people is not quite extinguished, only
because they look upon our delirium as tran-
sient, and trust to the restoration of the ancient
spirit of the nation.
It is impossible it can be otherwise. To see
a people suddenly relinquish all their former
allies, and connect themselves with their an-
cient enemies abandon at one blow the ob-
jects of two hundred years' contest, and forget
in one year the gratitude and the obligations
of centuries is so extraordinary, that to those
at a distance from the innovating passions
with which we have been assailed, it must ap-
pear like the proceedings of men who had lost
their reason. Such a proceeding might be in-
telligible, if experience had proved that this
former policy had been ruinous ; that these
ancient allies had proved unfaithful ; that these
hereditary obligations had been a source of
humiliation. But what is to be said when the
reverse of all this is the fact ? when this policy
had been attended with unprecedented tri-
umphs, these allies having stood by us in the
extremity of disaster, and these obligations
having brought with them a weight of national
gratitude? when the Dutch remind England
that it was not till Pichegru had conquered
Amsterdam that they withdrew unwillingly
from their alliance; and the Portuguese re-
count that they remained faithful to their en-
gagements, when the spoiler was ravaging their
land ; when the army of England had fled from
Corunna ; when Oporto was in the hands of
Soult; when a devouring flame ravaged their
central provinces, and the leopards of England
were driven to their last defences on the rocks
of Mafral
The French accuse their government of
yielding too much to British ascendency; and
it may be judged from the preceding state-
ments whether we are not too obsequious to
their revolutionary rulers. The truth is, that
both charges are well founded. The govern-
CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN.
ments of both countries appear to play into
each other's hands, to an extent inconsistent
with the honour or the welfare of either. When
the revolutionary dynasty of France deem an
advance into Belgium, or an assault on Por-
tugal, requisite to give an impulse to their de-
clining popularity, the reforming ministers of
England offer no opposition to the spoliation
of their allies. If the reforming ministers
here deem their situation critical, by a formi-
dable opposition to the projected change in the
constitution, the French troops are directed to
withdraw from Belgium to encamp on the
frontier and preserve their advanced guard,
consisting of the Belgian army, led by French j
officers alone, in the fortresses of Flanders, j
We ascribe no bad motives to our rulers ; we
have no doubt that they think they are per- '
forming the part of true patriots : we mention
only the facts which have occurred, and pos-
terity will judge of these facts with inflexible
justice nor excuse weakness of conduct, be-
| cause it is founded on goodness of inten-
tion.
There can be no doubt that the conduct we
j have explained on the part of our present
rulers towards Flanders and Portugal, would
have been sufficient to have overturned any
former administration and that at any other
time, the press of England would have rung
from shore to shore with indignant declama-
tion at the inconsistency and imbecility of our
present foreign policy. How, then, has it
happened, that this important matter is com-
paratively forgotten, and that we hear so little
of a course of conduct which future ages will
class with the fatal aberration from British
policy by Charles II. ? The reason is, that we
are overwhelmed with domestic disasters,
that revolution and anarchy are staring us in
the face at home, and that seeing the danger
at our own throats, we have neither leisure
nor inclination to attend to the circumstances
or disasters of our allies.
CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN.*
AMIDST all our declarations in favour of the
lights of the age, the influence of the press,
and the extension of journals in diffusing
correct ideas on every subject of policy, fo-
reign and domestic, it may be doubted, whether
there is to be found in the whole history of
human delusion, not even excepting the be-
nighted ages of papal despotism, or the equally
dark era of Napoleon's tyranny, an example
of ignorance so complete and general, as has
prevailed in this country, for the last seven
years, as to the affairs of Spain. While a
contest has been going on there during all that
period between constitutional right and revolu-
tionary spoliation; while the Peninsula has
been convulsed by the long protracted con-
flict between legal government and democratic
despotism ; while the same cause which has
been supported since 1830 in Great Britain by
the arms of reasoning, eloquence, or influence,
has there been carried on with the edge of the
sword ; while for the last four years a struggle
has been maintained by the Basque moun-
taineers for their rights and their liberties,
their hearths and their religion, which history
will place beside the glories of Marathon and
Salamis, of Naefels and Morgarten ; while an
heroic prince and his heroic brothers have
borne up against a load of oppression, foreign
and domestic, in defence of legal righl and con-
stitutional freedom, with a courage and a skill
rarely paralleled in the annals of military
achievement, the great bulk of the English
nation have looked with supineness or indiffer-
ence on the glorious spectacle. They have
been deceived, and willingly deceived, by the
endless falsehoods which the revolutionary
*Blackwood's Mairazine, May, 1837. Written during the
heroic contest of the Basque provinces for their liberty
and independence.
press and the holders of Spanish bonds spread
abroad on this subject; they have been carried
away by the false and slanderous appellations
bestowed on Don Carlos ; they have been
mystified by a denial of his clear and irresisti-
ble title to the throne; they have not duly con-
sidered the stern and inexorable necessity which
compelled him to abandon the humane system
of warfare which he at first adopted, and re-
taliate upon his enemies the atrocious and
murderous rule of war which they had so long
practised against him and his followers; and
by their supineness permitted the royal arms
of England to be implicated in the most savage
crusade ever undertaken in modern times
against the liberty of mankind, and a band of
brave but deluded mercenaries, to prolong to
their own and their country's eternal disgrace
a frightful conflict between sordid democratic
despotism, striving to elevate itself on the ruins
of its country, and the free-born bravery of un-
conquerable patriots.
We take blame to ourselves on this subject;
we confess ourselves implicated in the charge
which, through all the succeeding ages of the
world, will attach to the name of England, for
its deplorable concern in this heroic conflict,
which will go far to obliterate the recollection
of all its memorable exertions in the cause of
freedom. The calamity is not the defeat sus-
tained at St. Sebastian or Hernani : not the
disgrace of English regiments being routed
and driven back at the point of the bayonet in
shameful confusion; these stains are easily
wiped out : the national courage, when brought
into the field in a just cause, will soon obliter-
ate the recollection of the defeat which was
sustained in supporting that of cruelty and in-
justice. The real disgrace the calamity which
England has indeed to mourn, is that of having
2E
326
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
joined in an alliance to beat down the liberties
of mankind; in having aided a selfish, execra-
ble band of Peninsula murderers and plunderers
to oppress and massacre our faithful allies ; in
having combined with France, in defiance
alike of the faith of treaties and the rules of
international law, to deprive a gallant prince
of his rightful inheritance; in having sent out
the royal forces of England, under the old flag
of Wellington, to aid a set of Spanish cut-
throats and assassins, of robbers and plun
derers, in carrying fire and sword, mourning
and despair through the valleys of a simple
and virtuous people, combined in no other
cause but that for which Hampden bled on
the field and Sidney on the scaffold.
"Wo unto thosej" says the Scripture, "who
call evil good and good evil ; for theirs is the
greater damnation/' It is in this fatal delusion
in the confusion of ideas produced by trans-
posing the names of things, and calling the cause
of despotism that of freedom, merely because
it is supported by urban despots and that of
freedom slavery, because it is upheld by rural
patriots, that the true cause of this hideous
perversion, not merely of national character,
but even of party consistency, is to be found.
We are perfectly persuaded that, if the people
of England were aware of the real nature of
the cause in which they embarked a gallant
but unfortunate band of adventurers; if the
government were aware of the real tendency
of the quasi-intervention which they have
carried on, both the one and the other would
recoil with horror from the measures which
they have so long sanctioned. But both were
deluded by the name of freedom; both were
carried away by the absurd mania for the ex-
tension of democratic institutions into coun-
tries wholly unprepared for them ; and both
thought they were upholding the cause of
liberty and the ultimate interests of Great
Britain, by supporting a band of Spanish Re-
volutionists who have proved themselves to
be the most selfish, corrupt, and despotic tyrants
who ever yet rose to transient greatness .upon
the misery and degradation of their country.
But, while we thus absolve the government
and the country from intentional abuse of
power in the deplorable transactions which
both have sanctioned, there is a limit beyond
which this forbearance cannot be extended.
This result of our shameful intervention to
oppress the free, and aid the murderers in
massacring the innocent, is now fixed and un-
alterable, and in no degree dependent on the
future issue of the contest. What that may
finally be, God only knows. It is possible,
doubtless, that the weight of the Quadruple
Alliance the direct intervention of France
the insidious support of England the exhaus-
tion of a protracted contest and the extirpa-
tion of the population capable of bearing arms
in the Basque provinces, may beat down these
heroic mountaineers, and establish amidst
blood and ashes, anguish and mourning, the
cruel oppression of the Madrid democrats in
the lovely valleys of Navarre : " Quum soli-
tudinem fecerunt, pacem appellant." In that
case, the interest of the struggle will be en-
hanced by its tragic termination; the sympa-
thies, the indignant sympathies of mankind in
every future age, will be with the unfortunate
brave ; like the Poles or the Girondists, the
errors of their former conduct will all be for-
gotten in the Roman heroism of their fall.
They will take their place in history, beside
their ancestors in Numantia and Saguntum,
who preferred throwing themselves into the
flames, to the hated dominion of. the stranger;
and the Saragossans or Geronists in later days,
who perished in combating the formidable
legions of Napoleon, or the gallant patriots,
who, with Kosciusko, shed .their last blood,
when the grenadiers of Suwarrow were storm-
ing the entrenchments of Prague, and the Vis-
tula ran red with Polish blood. Or it may be,
that Providence has reserved a different destiny
for these gallant patriots, and that on this, as
on so many previous occasions, the God of
battles will bless the righteous side. In that
case, their struggle will form one of the most
animating periods in the page of history one
of the bright and consoling spots in the annals
of human suffering, to which the patriot will
point in every succeeding age as the animat-
ing example of successful virtue, at the recital
of which the hearts of the generous will throb,
so long as valour and constancy shall be ap-
preciated upon earth.
We speak thus warmly, because we feel
strongly because we sympathize from the
bottom of our hearts with the cause of free-
dom all over the world. But we are not de-
luded, as so many of our countrymen are, who
never look beyond the surface of things, by the
mere assumption of false names. We have
learned from our own experience, as well as
the annals of history, that tyranny, plunder,
and oppression can stalk in the rear of the
tricolour flag, and urban multitudes be roused
by a ruthless band of sordid revolutionists, to
their own and their country's ultimate ruin.
We have learned also from the same sources
of information, that hearts can beat as warmly
for the cause of freedom, and arms combat as
bravely in its defence on the mountain as on
the plain, in the sequestered valley as in the
crowded city, under the banners of religion
and loyalty, as under the standard of treason
and perfidy. We yield to none in the ardent
love of liberty ; but what we call liberty is the
lasting protection of the rights and privileges
of all classes of the people, not the trampling
them under foot, to suit the fanciful theories
of visionary enthusiasts, or the sordid specu-
lations of stock exchange revolutionists. We
look around us, and behold liberty still flour-
ishing in the British isles, after a hundred and
fifty years' duration, under the banner of reli-
gion and loyalty, despite all the efforts of infi-
del democracy for its destruction. We cast
our eyes to the other side of the channel, and
we see freedom perishing, both in France and
Spain, after unheard-of calamities, under the
ascendant of a revolutionary and freethinking
generation. Taught by these great examples,
we have learned to cling the more closely to
the faith and the maxims of our fathers, to see
in the principles of religion and loyalty the
only secure foundation for real freedom; and
to expect the ultimate triumph of constitu-
CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN.
327
tional principles, not from the sudden irrup-
tion of blood-thirsty fanatics, or the selfish
ambition of rapacious democrats, but the gra-
dual and pacific growth of a middling class in
society, under the protecting influence of a
durable government.
We make these remarks, too, in the full
knowledge of the hideous massacres which
have so long disfigured this unhappy war
having before our eyes the Durango decree,
and the Carlist executions ; and yielding to
none in horror at these sanguinary atrocities,
and the most ardent wish for their termination.
We make them also, agreeing with the Stand-
ard, that if this frightful system had begun with
the Carlists, or had even been adopted by them
under the influence of any other cause than the
sense of unbearable executions of a similar
kind previously suffered by them, and begun by
the Revolutionists, and the overwhelming ne-
cessity of mournful retaliation, not only would
their cause be unworthy of the sympathy of
any brave or good man, but that Don Carlos
himself would "be a monster unfit to live."
But admitting all this, we see it as clearly
proved as any proposition in geometry, that
this execrable system began ivith the Spanish
democrats, and them alone, and was never resort-
ed to by the Carlists, till years after they had
suffered under its atrocious execution by their ene-
mies ; and the Carlist valleys were filled with
mourning from the death of old men, women
and children, murdered in cold blood by the
democratic tyrants who sought to plunder and
enslave them. And in such circumstances,
we know that retaliation, however dreadful and
mournful an extremity, is unavoidable, and that
brave and humane men are forced, like Zuma-
lacarregui, to sentence prisoners to be shot,
even when the order, as it did from him, draws
tears like rain from their eyes. Unquestion-
ably none can admire more than we do the
noble proclamation of the Duke of York in
1793, in answer to the savage orders of the
Directory to the Revolutionary armies of
France to give no quarter. None can feel
greater exultation at the humane conduct of
the Vendeans, who, in reply to a similar order
from their inhuman oppressors, sent eleven
thousand prisoners back, with their heads
merely shaved, to the republican lines. But it
belongs to the prosperous and the secure to
act upon such generous and noble principles ;
the endurance of cold-blooded cruelty, the
pangs of murdered innocence, the sight of pa-
rents and children slaughtered, will drive, and
in every age have driven, the most mild and
humane to the dreadful but unavoidable sys-
tem of retaliation.
We know that the Vendeans themselves,
despite all the heroic humanity of their chiefs,
were forced in the end to retaliate upon their
enemies the system of giving no quarter. We
know that Charette, the most humane of men
in the outset of his heroic career, for the two
last years of his career, found it impossible to
act on any other principle. We go back to
the annals of our own country, and we see in
them too melancholy proof, that even in the
sober-minded, or, it may be, right thinking in-
habitanls of the British isles, a certain endur-
ance of suffering, and the commencement of a
cruel system of war by one party, will at all
times drive their antagonists into a hideous
course of reprisals. Have we forgotten, that
in the wars of the Roses, quarter was refused
on both sides by the contending armies, for
nine long years; and that eighty princes of the
blood, and almost all the nobility of England
were put to death, and most of them in cold
blood, by the ruthless cruelty of English
armies! Have we forgotten, that utter de-
struction was vowed by the Scottish Cove-
nanters against the Irish auxiliaries in Mon-
trose's army; and that they carried their ven-
geance so far, as to massacre all their prison-
ers in cold blood, and drown at the bridge of
Linlithgow even their innocent babes? Have
we forgotten the cruel atrocities of the Irish
Rebellion, or the fierce retaliation of the indig-
nant Orangemen 1 Seeing then that a certain
extremity of suffering, and the endurance of
a certain amount of cruelty by intestine oppo-
nents, will, in all ages, and in all nations, even
the most moderate and humane, induce the
dreadful necessity of retaliation, we look with
pity, though with poignant grief, on the stern
reprisals to which Don Carlos has been driven,
and earnestly pray that similar civil discord
may long be averted from the British isles ;
and that we may not be doomed by a righteous
Providence, as we perhaps deserve, to undergo
the unutterable wretchedness, which our un-
called for and unjust support of those who
began the execrable system of murder, has so
long produced in the Spanish peninsula.
In attempting to make amends for our hith-
erto apparent neglect of this interesting sub-
ject, we rejoice to think that the materials by
which we can now vindicate the righteous
cause, and explain to our deluded countrymen
the gross injustice of which they have been
rendered the unconscious instruments, have,
within these last few months, been signally en-
larged. First, Captain Henningsen's animated
and graphic narrative enlisted our sympa-
thies in favour of the gallant mountaineers,
beside whom he drew the sword of freedom.
Next, Mr. Honan's able and well-informed
work unfolded still more fully the nature of
the contest, and the resources from which the
Basque peasantry have maintained so long
and surprising a struggle in defence of their
privileges against all the forces which have
been arrayed against them. Then Lord Caernar-
von's admirable disquisition on the war, an-
nexed to his highly interesting tour in the Por-
tuguese provinces, gave to the statements of
his excellent predecessors the weight of his
authority, the aid of his learning, and the sup-
port of his eloquence. Though last, not least,
Mr. Walton has taken the field with two octavo
volumes, which throw a flood of light on the
real nature of the contest now raging in the
Peninsula, the objects of the parties en-
gaged, the claims of the competitors to the
throne, the consequence of the triumph of
the one or the other on the future interests of
religion and freedom, the cruel severities to
which the Carlists were subjected by their
blood-thirsty enemies before they were reluc-
tantly driven to retaliation, and the frightful
328
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
consequences which have resulted, and must
continue to result while it endures, from our
iniquitous co-operation with the cause of op-
pression. All these momentous topics are
treated in the volumes before us with a clear-
ness, temper, moderation, and ability which
leave nothing to be desired, and render them |
by far the most important work on the affairs
of the Peninsula which has yet issued from the
European press. When we see the ability
and candour, the courage and energy, the learn-
ing and eloquence, which, unbought by the
gold of the stock exchange, uninfluenced by
speculations in Spanish bonds, unsolicited by
the rewards of a deceived democratic and com-
mission-granting administration, is thus gene-
rously and gratuitously coming forward from
so many quarters at once in defence of the
cause of religious truth and independence, we
recognise the revival of the spirit of old Eng-
land; we indulge a hope that the press, like I
the Thames water, may yet work off its own I
impurities; and we are ready to take our |
humble part in so good a cause, and bear with
equanimity the torrent of abuse with which the
servile writers of the Treasury, or the hireling
scribes of the stock exchange, will assail our
endeavours to give greater publicity than, in a
selfish and engrossed age, they might otherwise
obtain to their all-important disclosures.
From the statements proved, and documents
brought forward, in Mr. Walton's work, it is
manifest,
1. That the constitution of 1812, so long the
darling object of democratic contention in the
Peninsula, and now the avowed basis of its
government, is an ultra-republican system,
which never obtained the legal consent of the
nation, but was merely imposed on their
countrymen for their own selfish ends by a
knot of urban democrats at Cadiz, who at that
unhappy period, when four-fifths of the country
was occupied by the French armies, had con-
trived to usurp the powers, not only of sove-
reignty, but of remodelling the state.
2. That it is not only utterly unsuitable to
the Spanish people, and necessarily produc-
tive of (as it ever has produced) nothing but
plunder, massacre, and democratic oppression ;
but is of so absurd and ill-considered a cha-
racter as even, if established in England, amidst
a people habituated for centuries to the exer-
cise of freedom, would tear society to atoms
in six months.
3. That, from experience of the devastating
effects of this ultra-radical constitution, and
the sordid cupidity of the democratic agents
whom it instantly brings to the head of affairs,
the great majority of the Spanish nation, almost
all who are distinguished by their patriotism,
principle, or good sense, are decidedly opposed
to its continuance ; that though often established
by military violence or democratic intrigue, it
has ever fallen to the ground by its own weight
when not upheld, as it now is, by powerful fo-
reign co-operation; and that at this moment,
if this co-operation were really withdrawn, it
would sink to the dust in three months, with all
its accessaries of democratic spoliation, royal-
ist blood, and universal suffering, never more
to rise.
4. That the democratic party, since the time
that nine-tenths of the nation had become the
decided enemies of their usurpation, fell upon
the expedient of engrafting the maintenance
of their cause upon a disputed succession to
the throne, prevailed on Ferdinand VII., when
in a state of dotage, to alter the law of royal
succession in favour of his infant daughter,
got together the farce of a Cortes, to give their
sanction to the illegal act, and have since
contrived to keep her on the throne, as a mere
puppet, to serve as a cover to their revolution-
ary designs, despite the clearly proved voice
of the nation, by filling the army and all civil
offices with their own creatures, and maintain-
ing an usurped and hateful usurpation by the
aid of urban democracy, foreign co-operation,
and stock-jobbing assistance.
5. That the title of Don Carlos to the throne
is clear, not less on the legitimate principle of
legal succession, which we were bound, in
the most solemn manner, by the treaty of
Utrecht, to guaranty, than on the liberal prin-
ciple of a violation of the social contract, and
a trampling under foot all the rights and pri-
vileges of the people, dissolving the title of a
sovereign, how well-founded soever in itself,
to the supreme direction of affairs.
6. That the frightful system of murdering
the prisoners was first introduced by the Revo-
lutionists; that it was carried on with ruthless
severity and heartless rigour by them for years
before it was imitated by the Royalists ; that they
have repeatedly made endeavours, both pub-
licly and privately, to put a stop to its con-
tinuance, but always been foiled by the refusal
of their savage antagonists.
7. That the English auxiliaries, both under
General Evans and Lord John Hay, lent their
powerful aid to the Revolutionary party, not
only without the English government having
made any effectual stipulation in favour of Ihe
abandoning that atrocious system of warfare,
but at a time when, without such aid, the war
was on the point of being brought to a' glorious
termination by the freeborn mountaineers of
Biscay and Navarre, and have thus become
implicated, through the fault or neglect of
their government:, in all the woful conse-
quences of a continuance of the struggle.
8. That the stand made by the Basque pro-
vinces is for their rights and their liberties,
their privileges and their immunities, enjoyed
by their ancestors for five hundred years,
asserted by them in every age with a con-
stancy and spirit exceeding even the far-famed
resolution of the Swiss Cantons, but which
were all reft from them at one fell swoop by the
ruthless tyranny of a democratic despotism.
It is impossible, in the limits of an article in
a periodical, to quote all the documents, or de-
tail all the facts, which Mr. Walton has accu-
mulated, with irresistible force, to prove every
one of these propositions. If any one doubts
them, we earnestly recommend him to study
his work; and if he is not convinced, we say,
without hesitation, neither would he be per-
suaded though one rose from the dead. But even
in this cursory notice a few leading facts may
be brought forward, which cannot fail to throw
a clear light on this important subject, and
CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN.
329
may tend to aid the efforts of those brave and !
enlightened men who are now striving to pre- !
vent British blood from being any longer shed !
in the most unjust of causes, and hinder the j
British standards from being any longer un-
furled, in the name of freedom and liberty, to
uphold the cause of infidelity, rapine, and op-
pression.
Of the manner in which the Constitution of
1812 was fabricated by a clique of urban agita-
tors in Cadiz, when blockaded by the French
forces in 1810, and thrust, amidst the agonies
of the war with Napoleon, on an unconscious
or unwilling nation, the following account is
given by our author:
"In the decrees and other preparations made
by the central junta, in anticipation of the
meeting of Cortes, the old mode of convening
the national assembly had been abandoned, the
illuminati congregated at Seville being of
opinion 'that the ancient usages were more a
matter of historical research than of practical
importance.' It was therefore agreed, that in
their stead a new electoral law should be
framed, more congenial to the general princi-
ple of representation ; the result of which was,
that those cities which had deputies in the
Cortes last assembled were to have a voice, as
well as the superior juntas, and that one deputy
should besides be elected for every fifty thou-
sand souls. It was also settled that the South
American provinces, at the time actually in a
state of insurrection, should, for the present,
have substitutes chosen for them, until they
sent over delegates duly elected. It is a cu-
rious fact, that on the 18th of the previous
April, Joseph Bonaparte had convened the
Cortes, and it was at the time thought that this
example served to stimulate the central junto
to perform their long forgotten promise.
"The new fashioned Cortes opened on the
24th of September, consisting only of popular
deputies, or one estate, the other two being
excluded. When the inaugural ceremonies were
over, the members assembled declared them-
selves legally constituted in 'general and extra-
ordinary Cortes,' in whom the national sove-
reignty resided ; or, in other words, they at once
declared themselves a constituent assembly.
" In one respect, the assembly of the Spanish
Cortes of 1810, resembled that of the French
States-general in 1791, the members being
mostly new men whose names had scarcely
been heard of before. In another sense, the
disparity between the two assemblies was
great. The States-general opened their sit-
tings under legal forms, with the three orders,
and, after stormy debates, one estate ejected or a6-
sorbed the other two, when the triumphant party,
declaring themselves a constituent assembly,
proceeded to enact laws and frame a constitu-
tion ; in the end, rendering themselves superior
to the authority which had convened them, and
no longer responsible to those whom they were
intended to represent. The Cadiz Cortes
adopted a readier and less complicated plan.
In utter defiance of legal forms and ancient
usages, the Spanish Commons before hand excluded
the two privileged estates; and assembling entirely
on their own account, at once voted themselves to
be a constituent assembly, possessing all the es-
42
sential attributes of sovereignty, and deliber-
ately proceeded to imitate the example of their
Parisian prototypes.
"The examples given in our early pages
show the little analogy between the ancient
and new Cortes. The latter did not meet to
supply the want of a regal power, to provide
means of defence, obtain the redress of griev-
ances, or reconcile opposite and jarring inte-
rests. Their object was not to heal the wounds
in the state, to introduce order and concert, or
remove those obstacles which had hitherto im-
peded the progress of the national cause. As
the genuine offspring of the central junta, they
rather thought of seizing uponpotver, enjoying its
siveets, and carrying into effect those theories
with a fondness for which an admiration of the
French Revolution had infected many leading
members, some of whom were anxious to shine
after the manner of Mirabeau, whilst others
thought they could emulate the example of
Abbe Sieves, or took Brissot as their model.
In a word, wholly unpractised in the science
of legislation, and unmindful that the enemy
was at their gates, they set to work with a full
determination to tread in the footsteps of the
French Constituent Assembly, and began by a
vote similar to that passed by our House of
Commons in 1648, whereby they declared that
the sovereign pouvr exclusively resided in them, and,
consequently, that whatever they enacted was
law, without the consent of either king, peers,
or clergy."
The ruinous step by which, to the exclusion
of the real representatives of the nation, a
band of urban Revolutionists contrived to
thrust themselves into the supreme direction
of the Constituent Assembly in the Isle of Le-
on, is thus explained.
"On the 10th September, 1810, a fortnight
before the opening of the Cortes, the regents
issued an edict, accompanied by a decree, in
which the impossibility of obtaining proper re-
presentatives from the. ultra-marine provinces
and those occupied by the enemy, is lamented,
and a plan devised to remedy the defect, by
means of substitutes chosen upon the spot. It
was accordingly ordained that twenty-three
persons should be picked out to represent the places
held by the French, and thirty for the Indies,'
which number of substitutes, incorporated
with the real delegates, already arrived or about
to arrive, it was thought would compose a re-
spectable congress, sufficient, under existing
circumstances, to open the house and carry on
business, even although others should unfortu-
nately not arrive."*
From the official records of the Cortes, it ap-
pears that its numbers stood thus :
Members returned by provinces of Spain
unoccupied by the French, . . 127
Substitutes provided at Cadiz, for the
others, 45
" It would be almost insulting to the judg-
ment of the reader to offer any remarks upon
either the illegality or the incongruity of a le-
gislature composed of such elements as the
preceding sketch presents. Independently of
* " For the electors and the elected the only qualifica-
tions required were to be a householder and twenty-five
years of age."
2 E2
330
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
a total abandonment of ancient usages, and an
utter disregard of the elective franchise prac-
tised in former times; besides the exclusion
of two estates, and the enlargement of the third
on a basis not only impracticable but also ri-
diculous ; substitutes are put in to represent an
infinitely larger proportion of territory in both
hemispheres than that which, with the free
agency of the inhabitants, is enabled to return
representatives, elected according to the scale
proposed by the conveners of the Cortes them- j
selves, founded on rules of their own framing.
The representative principle was thus entirely lout :
and how a party of politicians and philoso-
phers, circumscribed to a small spot of ground,
and protected only by the naval force of an
ally, could, during eighteen months, sit quietly j
down and frame a constitution for the accept-
ance of nearly thirty millions of people, sit-u-
ated in three quarters of the globe, and opposed
in interests as well as in habits, on a plan so
defective in all its parts, is the most extraordi-
nary of the many singularities which marked
the Spanish contest.
" In the new representative plan, neither po-
pulation nor wealth was taken as a basis.
Valencia, with 1,040,740 souls, was allowed
nineteen deputies; whilst Granada, including
Malaga, and containing 1,100,640, had only
two. The ancient kingdom of Navarre, with
271,285 souls ; Biscay, with 130,000; Guipus-
coa, with 126,789; and Alava, with 85,139, are
rated at one each ; whereas the mountains of
Ronda had two. Spain, with fourteen millions
of souls, is set down at one hundred and fifty-
four deputies ; when the South American and
Asiatic provinces, by the central junta declared
integral and equal parts of the monarchy, and
containing a population of more than seven-
teen millions, were represented by fifty-four.
Never was any thing more monstrous than the
organization of the Cadiz legislature more
opposed to the practice in ancient times, or
more at variance with the objects for which
the Cortes were to meet. It was not even in
accordance with the wild theories of the day.
The absence of opposition was the only sanc-
tion given to their labours ; a circumstance
which may be easily accounted for in the ex-
isting state of the Peninsula."
These Revolutionists were not long in invok-
ing the aid of the same principles which, ema-
nating from the Jacobins of Paris, had con-
signed France to slavery and Europe to blood.
"Eight or nine journals were immediately
established in Cadiz, of which one was called
' The Robespierre' "
"The principles proclaimed by the constitu-
tion, if possible, are more monstrous than the
manner in which it was constructed. It be-
gins by declaring that the legislature is com-
posed of the general and extraordinary Cortes
of the Spanish nations, represented by deputies
from Spain, America, and Asia; that the na-
tional sovereignty resides in the Cortes, and
that the power of making laws belongs to them,
jointly with the king; that the population is to be
taken as a basis for the new electoral law, without
any defined qualification for eligibility : that the
Cortes were to meet every year, and, on closing,
leave a permanent deputation sitting, to watch
over the observance of the constitution, report
infractions, and convene the legislature in ex-
traordinary cases, and that the king should be
at the head of the executive, and sanction the
laws. A new plan was also formed for the
government of the provinces, the election of
municipalities, the assessment of taxes, and a
variety of other purposes. In a word, the Ca-
diz code deprived the king of the power of dissolving
or proroguing the Cortes, and in other respects
destroyed the royal prerogative, as well as feudal
tenures and the rights of property. It con-
founded the various classes, reduced the power
of the clergy, extinguished the civil rights of a
whole community, cancelled all previous com-
pacts made between the sovereign and the peo-
ple, broke the bond of union, tore asunder the
charters, confiscated the privileges and fran-
chises so highly valued by the inhabitants, and,
in a word, obliterated every line and feature of the
ancient institutions, by transforming Spain into
the reverse of what she had been. It was a
sweeping proscription of every privileged and
corporate body in the country, annihilating the
whole, and leaving neither wreck nor vestige
behind."
Of this constitution, which is now the con-
stitution of Spain, which the arms, ay, the
royal arms of England are employed to uphold,
it is sufficient to say that it establishes
1, UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE; 2, OXE LEGISLATIVE
CHAMBER ; 3, AITKUAI. PARLIAMENTS ; 4, It an-
nihilates all the power of the nobles and cler-
gy ; 5, Sweeps away all corporate rights and
feudal privileges; 6, Exterminates the whole
royal prerogative. How long would the British
empire withstand the shock of such a constitu-
tion ? Not one week.
Even before it was brought into operation,
or the French armies had been driven by Bri-
tish valour from the soil of Spain, the ruinous
effect of this monstrous constitution was so
clearly perceived, that the democratic despots
were fearful of its overthrow.
" Such a transition as that which this code
was calculated to effect, was too sudden and
too violent not to meet with decided opposition.
Its levelling principles and subversive doc-
trines were accordingly denounced from the
pulpit and by the press. Every epithet of
odium and contempt was applied to its of-
ficious framers ; and so great was the appre-
hension of disturbances entertained by the go-
vernment itself, that within a month after its
promulgation, they prevented arms from being
intrusted to the Galician peasantry. Indivi-
duals of rank and 'influence were banished for
merely expressing their disapprobation of its
provisions, or their dread of the calamities
which it was likely to produce."
The fate of this monstrous democratic abor-
tion is well known. On Ferdinand's accession
it fell to the ground from its own weight ; not
a sword required to be drawn, or a shot fired, to
dissolve the destructive fabric. His famous
decree from Valencia, on May 4, 1814, at once
extinguished the Cadiz constitution. In that
instrument, Ferdinand justly said:
" To this Cortes, in 1810, convened in a man-
ner never practised in Spain, even in the most
arduous cases, and in the turbulent times of
CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN.
331
minorities, when the meeting of deputies has
been more numerous than in usual and ordi-
nary Cortes, the estates of the nobility and cler-
gy were not called, notwithstanding the central
junta ordered this to be done by a decree, art-
fully concealed from the council of regency,
who were equally unaware that to them the
junta had assigned the presidency of the Cortes ;
a prerogative which otherwise never would
have been left at the will of the Congress.
Every thing was thus placed at the disposal of
the Cortes, who on the very day of their instal-
lation, and as a commencement of their acts,
stripped me of the sovereignty which the depu-
ties themselves had just before acknowledged,
nominally attributing it to the nation, in order
to appropriate it to themselves, and by this
usurpation enact such laws as they deemed fit,
imposing on the people the obligation of forci-
bly receiving them in the form of a new con-
stitution, which the deputies established, and
afterwards sanctioned and published in 1812,
without powers from either provinces, towns,
or juntas, and without even the knowledge of
those said to be represented by the substitutes
of Spain and the Indies.
"This first outrage against the royal prero-
gative was, as it were, a basis for the many
others which followed; and notwithstanding
the repugnance of many deputies, laws were
enacted, adopted, and called fundamental ones,
amidst the cries, threats, and violence of those
who frequented the Cortes galleries ; whereby
to that which was only the work of a faction
the specious colouring of the general will was
given, and for such made to pass among a few
seditious persons at Cadiz, and afterwards at
Madrid. These are notorious facts, and thus
were those good laws altered which once con-
stituted the felicity of our nation. The ancient
form of the monarchy was changed, and by
copying the revolutionary and democratic
principles of the French constitution of 1791,
were sanctioned, not the fundamental laws of
a moderate monarchy, but rather those of a
popular government, with a chief magistrate
at its head a mere delegated executive, and
not a king, notwithstanding the introduction of
the name as a deception to the incautious."
The joy of the nation at this specific libera-
tion from their revolutionary tyrants knew no
bounds. It was like that of the English on
the Restoration. The journey of the king from
Valencia to the capital was a continued tri-
umph.
"Some members and other flaming patriots
proposed open resistance, but soon found that
they possessed neither physical nor moral
power. As far as outward appearances went,
they preserved their consistency, or rather
their delirium, till the close. Some of the most
vociferous were however seized ; and this put
an end to the show of opposition. Ferdinand
VII. entered the capital on the 14th, amidst ge-
neral acclamations and other demonstrations
of joy- Persons present attest that never did
Madrid witness such a scene of general exulta-
tion. When the king alighted, the people took
him up in their arms, and triumphantly showed
him to the immense concourse assembled in
front of the palace, and in their arms conveyed
him to his apartment. From Aranjuez to Ma-
drid, his carriage had been previously drawn
by the people. In the afternoon of the 16th,
he waiked through several parts of the town,
the streets thronged with spectators; but not
a single constitutionalist ventured to show his
face."
We have dwelt the longer on the original
illegal formation, and revolutionary principles
of the constitution, because it lies in truth at
the bottom of the whole question. The Cadiz
democrats, like all other reckless revolu-
tionists, bestowed on the nation at once, without
either preparation or reason, the prodigal gift
of unbounded political influence. The whole
powers of government were by them vested
in one Chamber: the Cortes combined the
powers of the executive and legislature in
England, being vested at once with the exclu-
sive right of imposing taxes, passing laws,
declaring war and peace. These vast powers
were vested in one single assembly, unfettered by
any separate House of Peers, or the repre-
sentation of the clergy in any shape. And
how was this omnipotent assembly chosen?
By universal suffrage ; by the votes of every
man in Spain who had a house and was twen-
ty-five years of age. No qualification was re-
quired either in the electors or representatives.
A majority of beggars might rule the state,
and dispose at will of all the property it con-
tained!!!
The urban revolutionists of Spain, an ar-
dent, energetic, insolvent class, instantly per-
ceived the enormous advantages which this
extravagant constitution gave them. They
saw clearly that under this radical constitu-
tion, they would in fact be the rulers of the
state; that its whole offices, emoluments, in-
fluence, and property would ere long be at their
disposal ; and that by simply sticking to that
one point, "The constitution of 1812," they
would soon, and without bloodshed as they
hoped, and by the mere force of legislative
enactment, strip all the holders of property,
not only of their influence, but their posses-
sions. In the few great towns, accordingly,
which the Peninsula contains, in Madrid, Ca-
diz, Seville, Barcelona, Valentia, Bilboa, and
Malaga, a cliqiw of agitators was immediately
formed, who, destitute of property, education,
or character, were yet formidable to the hold-
ers of property over the kingdom by their in-
fluence over the population in these great
centres of profligacy, pauperism, and ambition.
They were closely held together by the hellish
bond of anticipated plunder. Freedom, liberty,
and independence were ever in their mouths ;
tyranny, plunder, massacre unceasingly in
their hearts. But though a miserable minority,
not amounting to a fiftieth part of the whole
nation, they had great advantages in the poli-
tical strife in which they were engaged, from
their position in the great fortified towns of the
kingdom, from their sway over the depraved
and deluded populace, from the rapid commu-
nication which they maintained with each
other, from the want of union, organization,
or intelligence among their rural antagonists,
from the possession of a plausible cri de guerre,
"The constitution of 1812," which was sup-
332
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
posed to oe a sovereign charm by its support-
ers for every evil ; and from the union, energy,
and resolution which present insolvency and
the prospect of future plunder had diffused
universally through their ranks.
It is the more material to attend to these
considerations, because it is the struggle to re-
establish this radical constitution which is the
real matter that has ever since been at issue
between the two parties in the Peninsula. The
Queen at Madrid was from the first a mere
puppet; the Estatuto Real a. mere instalment;
the revolt of La Gran j a brought to light their
real projects, and revealed, in its pristine na-
kedness, the violence and iniquity of the de-
mocratic faction. By it the constitution of
1812 has again become the basis of the con-
stitution : a nocturnal revolt, an irruption into
the bed-chamber of the queen, a drunken ser-
geant and ten treasonable grenadiers were suf-
ficient to knock down the phantom of a con-
stitutional monarchy, which, as a mask to
their ulterior designs, the revolutionists had
set up. And it is to support such a cause, to
establish such a revolutionary regime, that Gene-
ral Evans and his unhappy band have been
exposed to defeat and dishonour, and 500,000/.
worth of arms and ammunition sent to the de-
mocratics of the Peninsula, and the royal flag
of England displayed beside the abettors of
spoliation, robbery, and murder!
The evils experienced and anticipated from
this radical constitution, however, were so
powerful, that it probably never again would
have reared its hated head in Spain, were it
not that in an evil hour Ferdinand VII. resolved
upon an expedition to South America in 1821,
to subdue the revolted provinces, and assem-
bled 20,000 men in the Isle of Leon for that
purpose. This distant service was to the last
degree unpopular in the Spanish army; its
inglorious dangers, its certain hardships, its
boundless fatigues, its remote situation, its
probable disastrous termination, were present
to every mind, and filled both officers and men
with the most gloomy presentiments, and left
them in that state of moody despair when the
most desperate and flagitious projects are most
likely to be embraced with alacrity. The
presence of 20,000 men close to Cadiz or with-
in its walls, influenced by these feelings, was
too favourable an opportunity for the revolu-
tionists in that great centre of democracy to
let slip for re-establishing their hated do-
minion. While the troops were waiting for
the transports to convey them across the At-
lantic, which, with the usual want of foresight
in the Spanish character, were very long of
being prepared, intrigues were actively set on
foot by the Cadiz clique; and in the subaltern
officers of the army, which in Spain is almost
wholly destitute of men of property, and filled
with mere adventurers, they found the most
ready reception. Soldiers, unless restrained
by preponderance of property and education
in their officers, are never averse to playing
the part of praetorians ; they are seldom disin-
clined to setting an empire up to sale. The
glittering prospect, on the one hand, of escaping
a perilous, hateful, and inglorious foreign ser-
vice, and on the other, disposing of the whole
emoluments and advantages of government
for themselves or their connections, was more
than the military adventurers of the Isle of
Leon could withstand ; they revolted ; raised
the cry of " The constitution of 1812," amidst
the transports of the democratic party over all
Spain ; and the king, destitute of any military
force to withstand so formidable an insurrec-
tion, was, after a trifling attempt at resistance,
forced into submission. The promised boon
was not withheld from the traitor soldiers, who
j had, by violating their oaths, brought about
the revolution ; they were retained at home ;
the expedition against South America was laid
aside, and the crown of the Indies for ever lost
to the throne of Castile. But what was that
to the Spanish democrats 1 What did it sig-
nify that the empire was dismembered, and the
transatlantic colonies consigned to an anarchy,
despotism, and suffering, unparalleled in mo-
dern times ] They had got to the head of af-
fairs ; the pillar of the constitution was raised
in every considerable town of Spain ; the Ca-
diz clique had become prime ministers ; and
every province of the Peninsula was placed
under the rule of a set of low rapacious revo-
lutionary employes, who made use of all their
authority to promote the election of such ex-
treme deputies for the Cortes as might insure
the total revolutionizing of the state.
Even while the Liberals lay at Cadiz, they
had begun their system of rapacious ini-
quity :
" M. Alcala Galiano," says Walton, " assisted
in a civil capacity, and when the mutineers
were shut up in La Isla, wrote the principal
proclamations and addresses which served to
extend the insurrection. On reaching Madrid,
this civilian became one of the leading speak-
ers at the debating society of the Fontana tie
Oro, and was afterwards named Intendant of
Cordova. In 1822 he was elected to the Cor-
tes, from which period he is classed among
the leaders of the exaltados. His speeches
were marked with impetuosity and extreme
liberalism ; but his ideas were not always re-
gular, or his conduct consistent. He was among
the emigrants in this country, and a warm ad-
mirer of radicalism, a blessing of which the
last importation into Spain has been pretty ex-
tensive. The latter part of his political career
was the most successful, his labours having
been crowned with the appointment of Minis-
ter of Marine. Whilst the army remained at
La Isla, the naval arsenals were completely gutted.
The copper, brass cannon, rigging, and other valu-
ables, were sold to the Gibraltar Jews, who ascended
the river of Santi Petri and fetched their pur-
chases away."
The worshippers of the constitution of 1812
were not slow in beginning with the first and
greatest of all revolutionary projects, the con-
fiscation of the property of the church.
" Various reports," says Mr. Walton, "on the
poverty of the treasury, the annual deficit, the
arrears of pay, and a variety of other finan-
cial matters, had been submitted to the cham-
ber, and produced no small degree of embar-
| rassment. The expedient of a foreign loan was
! adopted ; and it being no longer necessary to
I temporize with the clergy, a plan was formed
CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN
for the appropriation of church properly, which it
was supposed would yield an abundant har-
vest. By a decree passed October 1st, the
monasteries were suppressed, excepting a cer-
tain number, and also several of the military
orders, the revenues of which, it was agreed,
should be set apart for the payment of the na-
tional debt, after pensions had been secured to
Riega, Quiroga, and the other leaders of the
La Isla mutiny. The inmates of the sup-
pressed convents were to receive stipends
from the government; but it was clear that
the exigencies of the state, if no other reasons
existed, would prevent the performance of this
promise. Hitherto the king had remained
passive, and sanctioned, certainly against his
will, yet without any remonstrance, the various
acts tending to destroy the little authority left
to him; but when called upon for his assent to
the suppression of the regular orders, he hesi-
tated. At the end of a month his signature
was reluctantly affixed, and the next day he
departed for the Escurial."
Nor were tyrannic measures to enforce the
authority of these popular despots wanting.
" Among the new measures was a decree
awarding the penalty of banishment for eight
years against any one endeavouring to dis-
suade the people from the observance of the
constitution, and imprisonment for that period
if an ecclesiastic."
This violent spoliation, however, excited at
the time a general feeling of indignation.
"This precipitate if not unjust measure on
the part of the Cortes, could not fail to rouse
public indignation and prepare the way for their
own dowrifal. Besides the nature of the act,
which general opinion regarded as a profana-
tion, numbers of persons venerable in the eyes
of the people were sent forth from their seclu-
sion to beg their bread. The project, there-
fore, came before the public stamped with a
double title to reprobation. It was pronounced
a violent spoliation, as well as a revolting act
of irreligion ; and it appears strange that the
patriotic senators of 1820, after clashing with
the nobles and depriving so many public func-
tionaries of their places, should have thus
braved the anger of so powerful a body as the
clergy.
" Having obtained possession of the political
stage, they formed a confederacy to keep it ex-
clusively to themselves ; and if any thing was
wanting to complete their usurpation, it was
to vote their own perpetuity, as the long par-
liament did in 1642, and by means of intimi-
dation obtain the king's consent. They had
an army at their disposal, and, as was done in
the time of Charles I., some of the king's advi-
sers were denounced as enemies of the state.
The indignity offered to him previously to his
abrupt departure for the Escurial, called into
action all the elements of collision. The re-
duction of the monastic orders might be
deemed advisable nay, necessary, so it had
been thought before ; but the constitutionalists
having resolved upon that important measure,
contrived to render it doubly dangerous by the
manner and degree in which it was to be exe-
cuted, and the time chosen for carrying it into
eifect. Religious establishments of this kind
333
had been interwd^in jjfrh the frame of society
in Spain they weWRifcfieias a principal
appendage of the region of the Mate, had
been formed by the collective ftmdb of private
individuals, were associated with proud recol-
lections of the past, and still held in veneration.
by all excepting the liberal party. When,
therefore, the people saw these establishments
suppressed, the aged, who had spent their little
all to procure an asylum for life, cast upon the
world, and their substance bestowed upon per-
sons who had set the worst possible example
by heading a military rebellion their resent-
ment passed all bounds."*
The first commencement of the civil war of
1822 and of that atrocious system of massacre,
which has ever since disgraced the Peninsula,
is then given by our author; and as murder
was their grand weapon, so they were so dead
to all sense of justice or shame, that they ac-
tually HAD ITS EMBLEM ENGRAVED ON THEIR
SKALS. It was in the massacre of a man who
had merely counselled "a free and national
government."
"A paper of a mixed character made its
appearance in the capital, tending to excite a
counter-revolutionary movement. It preached
' No despotism and no anarchy no camarilla
and no factious Cortes but a free and national
government founded on the ancient institutions.'
The author being discovered, was thrown into
prison, and his name ascertained to be Vinu-
esa, formerly the curate of Tamajon, a small
town in the province of Gaudalajara, seven
leagues from the capital, and lately one of the
king's honorary chaplains. At a moment of
public excitement an incident of this kind was
likely to produce much noise in a place where
idlers and politicians abound. A surmise got
abroad that the prisoner, in consequence of his
high connections, would be protected, and an
evasion of justice was apprehended. This
sufficed to rouse the ardent spirits frequenting
the Puerta del Sol, and in the true sense of the
sovereignty of the people, they rushed in a
crowd to the prison, forced open the door, en-
tered the curate's cell, and with a blacksmith's
hammer beat out his brains.f
"This murder was a signal for general agi-
tation. The nobles, royalist officers, and ex-
functionaries, held up to contempt and derision
the conduct of those who were unable to pre-
vent the commission of such an atrocity. The
ejected monks called the peasants to arms, by
invoking the altar and the throne, or appealing
to their own wrongs.
* "Quiroga, for example, had capitalized his pension,
and thus obtained possession of the Granja de Oernadas,
a valuable estate near Betan/.os, in Galida, belonging to
the monastery of San Martin, at Santiago, of the Hene-
dictine order, upon which he cut a large quantity of tim-
ber. Others had obtained estates, the property of the
suppressed orders, in a similar manner."
f "This deed was celebrated in son 1 .'*, sun'.' about the
streets and in the guard-houses. In its commemoration,
seals were worn with a crest representing a brawny and
naked arm holding a hammer in the hand. 7V/ w .--e/jZ be-
came, fatihio-nable among the. martillo or hammer faction,
and letters at that time, received in England, frequently
had that impression upon them. The mob were also in
the habit of expressing tbeir displeasure at the conduct
of an individual by beating hammers on the pavement
under his windows ; a pretty significant indication of the
fate which awaited him if he sinned against the sove-
reign people."
334
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
" The large cities were, in a contrary sense,
agitated by clubs and debating societies. At
first these clubs had been the organs of go-
vernment; now they wished to dictate the
means by which the commonwealth was to be
saved. They publicly reproached the minis-
ters for their apathy, almost accused them of
being leagued with the king, whom they de-
nounced as the chief plotter, and his palace as
a ready receptacle for the Serviles."
And now we come to a most important sub-
ject one to which we earnestly request the
serious attention of our countrymen. It is the
COMMENCEMENT of that war of extermination,
which, as Mr. Walton justly observes, has ever
since raged in the Peninsula. Let us see with
whom the responsibility of its introduction
rests :
" Catalonia was the cause of great disquie-
tude to the constitutionalists; and in order to
put down the Army of the Faith, and dislodge
the regency from the Seo de Urgel, Mina was
appointed early in September to command that
principality, and entered on his duties at Le-
rida. As he himself states, he found 'the
factious, to the number of thirty-three thousand,
masters of almost all the country, in posses-
sion of various strong places and fortresses,
protected by a great part of the towns, and,
what was of still greater importance, they had
a centre of union and government, viz., the
titular Regency of Spain, established in Urgel ;'
adding, 'these were the elements which pre-
sented themselves in Catalonia.' After notic-
ing his preparations, he proceeds thus: 'I
commenced operations on the 13th; and a
month and a half sufficed me to organize a
small army, to raise the siege of Cervera, and
take possession of Castell-fullit. I ordered the
total destruction of this last mentioned town, as a
punishment for the obstinacy of its rebellious
inhabitants and defenders ; and by way of re-
torting the contempt with which they replied
to the repeated messages I sent them, as well
as for a warning to the rest, upon its ruins I
ordered the following inscription to be placed :
'Here stood Castell-fullit Towns, take warning-
shelter not the enemies of your country.'
" Thus spoke and acted the hero of Cata-
lonia at the close of 1822 ! After enumerating
a variety of other exploits, the captain-general
comes to his attack upon the fortress of Urgel,
where he experienced difficulties, and exulting-
ly adds, 'that in the end constancy and hero-
ism were victorious, and six hundred profligates
and robbers, taken out of the prisons, who form-
ed the greater part of the faction of the ring-
leader Romagosa, the defender of the fortress
of Urgel, expiated their crimes on the morning of
the evacuation by their death upon the field.' The
men thus barbarously butchered were royalists,
the countrymen of this savage pacificator:
their only crime was that of having embraced
a cause opposed to his own.
"As a proof of the spirit with which the
constitutionalists were then actuated, subjoined
is an extract from a proclamation, issued by
Mina a few days before the Duke d'Angou-
leme entered Madrid : ' Art. 1. All persons
who may have been members of a junta, so-
ciety, or corporation opposed to the present
system of government, as well as those who
may have enlisted men or conspired against
the constitution, shall be irrevocably shot the in-
stant they are taken. Art. 2. Any town in which
the inhabitants are called out against the con-
stitutional troops shall be burned to ashes, and
till one stone is not left upon another.' At the
same time that the governor of Catalonia pub-
lished this proclamation, General Villacampa
at Seville issued a similar edict, in which he
declared that ' every one who by word or deed
co-operates in the rebellion shall be held to be
a traitor and punished as sitch : further, that any
one knowing the situation of the factions and
concealing it shall be held to be a traitor, and
as such treated.' This edict closes with the
following: 'The members of the municipali-
ties of towns situated at the distance of six
leagues from a constitutional column, who may
fail hourly to send in a report of the move-
ments of the factious in their vicinity, shall
pay out of their own property a fine of ten
thousand rials; and if any injury arise out of
the omission, he shall be judged in a military
manner.'"
It was, therefore, not without reason, that,
on the 20th November, 1822, Count Nessel-
rode declared, in a public state paper, expres-
sive of the feelings and resolutions of the Allied
Powers regarding Spain
"Anarchy appeared in the train of revolu-
tion disorder in that of anarchy. Long years
of tranquil possession ceased to be a sufficient
title to property ; the most sacred rights were
disputed; ruinous loans and contributions un-
ceasingly renewed, destructive of public wealth
and ruinous to private fortunes. Religion was
despoiled of her patrimony, and the throne of
popular respect. The royal dignity was out-
raged, the supreme authority having passed
over to assemblies influenced by the blind pas-
sions of the multitude. To complete these
calamities, on the 7th July, blood was seen to
flow in the palace, whilst civil war raged
throughout the Peninsula."
The armed intervention to which these events
in the Peninsula gave rise on the part of France
in 1823, is well known, and when put to the
proof, it speedily appeared on how hollow a
foundation the whole fabric of revolutionary
power in the Peninsula, with its whole adjuncts
of church spoliation, democratic plunder, and
royalist massacre, really rested. The French
troops marched without opposition from the
Bidassoa to Cadiz ; hardly a shot was fired in
defence of the constitution of 1812; even the
armed intervention of a stranger, and the hate-
ful presence of French soldiers, ever so obnox-
ious in Spain, could not rouse any resistance
to the invaders. The recollection of the le-
gions of Napoleon, and the terrible hardships
of the Peninsular war, were forgotten in the
more recent horrors of democratic ascenden-
cy. But an event happened at Corunna which
made a profound impression, and powerfully
contributed to stamp on the future progress of
the contest that savage character, by which it
is still unhappily distinguished.
" At Corunna the most barbarous occurrence
of the many which sullied the annals of the
constitutional contest took place. The French
CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN.
335
guns commanded the bay, in consequence of
which a number of royalists confined in a pon-
toon rose upon their guards, cut the cables,
and drifted out with the tide. Fearful that the
other prisoners in the Castle of San Anton
might equally escape, the military governor
on the 22d ordered fifty-two of them to be
brought to the town, and in the afternoon they
were lodged in the prison; but the civil au-
thorities objecting to this step, in consequence
of the crowded state of the prisons, as well as
of the convents, the unhappy men were put
into a small vessel and conveyed down the bay.
After doubling the point on which the castle
stands, and in front of the light-house, called
the Tower of Hercules, they were brought up in
pairs from under the hatches, and bound together
back to back and thrown into the sea. One of the
victims, seeing the fate which awaited him,
jumped into the water before his hands were
tied, and endeavoured to escape by swimming ;
but, being pursued by some of his execution-
ers in a boat, they beat out his brains with their
oars. The tide cast the bodies of these unfor-
tunate creatures ashore, where they were the
next morning found by the French soldiers on
guard. General Bourke sent in a flag of truce,
complaining of this atrocious act; but the
monster in command, who had given orders
for its perpetration, had, in the mean time, to-
gether with several other patriots, made off in
a British steamer, and eventually found his
way to England, where he shared that hospitali-
ty which was experienced by the other refu-
gees. On the 12th August, Corunna capitu-
lated."
Nor were these atrocities confined to the
north of the Peninsula. At Granada and Mala-
ga, the same scenes were enacted with even
deeper circumstances of horror.
"So insolent had the nationals become at
Granada, that royalists and persons of mode-
rate politics could no longer live in the place.
Of these a party of about fifteen resolved to
withdraw into the country ; but no sooner had
they left the suburbs than they were denounced
as having gone out to form a guerilla. The
nationals instantly pursued them, and at the
distance of two leagues succeeded in captur-
ing seven, the rest escaping. Among the party
seized was Father Osuna, an old and venera-
ble professor in the convent of San Antonio
Abad ; the rest, customhouse guards and officers
on half-pay. All, including the friar, were
bound to the tails of horses, in this manner
led into the city and paraded through the
streets ; after which, to add to the indignity,
they were cast into the dungeons of what is
called the lower or common prison, and herd-
ed with felons. Learning some days after-
wards where the few who escaped had retired
to, the eager nationals again sallied forth, and
succeeded in surprising five at the little town
of Colomera, situated in the mountains, four
leagues from Granada. Their hands being
bound behind them, they were brutally assassi-
nated on a small ridge of hills overlooking the
bridge Cubillas. So ferociously did the nation-
als wreak their vengeance upon these victims
of their licentious fury, that their mangled
bodies could not be recognised by their friends,
who the next day went out to bury them.
Among the victims were two officers of the
guards, the handsomest youths in the province.
" The seven confined in prison demanded an
inquiry into the causes of their arrest and de-
tention ; but nothing appearing against them
beyond their being reputed royalists, which did
not exactly warrant the penalty of death, the
nationals felt afraid that their victims would
escape. In the afternoon of the 4th February
they therefore got up a commotion in the usual
way, and heated with wine, groups passed
along the streets, demanding the heads of
Father Osuna and his companions. Reaching
the front of the prison, they set up yells, to be
heard by the inmates, reiterating their demand,
and endeavouring to force a passage through
the gate, where a sergeant and a few soldiers
were generally posted ; but when the uproar
commenced, General Villacampa, the governor,
doubled the guard, and stationed a lieutenant
there. The mob being disappointed, went away.
" In the evening the lieutenant was changed,
and an officer in the confidence of the nation-
als was placed at the prison-gate. The com-
motion was now renewed, and the leaders of
the mob assembling at a noted coffee-house in
the Plaza Nueva, their usual resort, the death
of the prisoners was at once decreed. Sure of
their game, the brave nationals hurried off to
the prison, where they were received with a
volley of musketry, pointed so high that the
balls struck midway up the wall of the cathe-
dral, fronting the prison-gate, where the marks
are still seen. This saved appearances, and
the commanding officer thought his responsi-
bility sufficiently covered. The blood-thirsty
mob now rushed into the prison, the leaders
with their faces blackened and their persons
disguised. Five inmates in separate cells were
soon laid prostrate upon the ground covered with
stabs. One of them, posted in a corner, man-
fully defended himself with a pillow, which
dropped from his hands after they had literally
been cut to pieces.
" Father Osuna was now led forth, as the
old man supposed, that his life might be saved;
but no sooner had he gone fifteen paces be-
yond the prison-gate and turned the corner of
a narrow street, than he received a sabre-cut
on the top of his bald head. He lifted up his
hand to the streaming wound, and at the same
moment a blow knocked him against the wall,
upon which the bloody imprint of his hand
was left as he endeavoured to save himself
from falling. Dropping to the ground, he was
beaten with sticks and cut with knives. Sup-
posing him dead, the mob dispersed ; when
the jailer, hearing his moans, conveyed him
back to prison, where his wounds were dress-
ed. The next day, the heroic nationals, hearing
that Father Osuna still survived, flew to the
prison ; when one of them, after insulting and
upbraiding him for his royalist principles, put
a pistol to his right ear, and blew his brains upon
the opposite wall, where the bloody traces were
seen till within the two last years, and till the
interior of the prison was repaired. The se-
venth victim, who had been conveyed to the
upper prison, was murdered under similar cir-
cumstances. These scenes ended in a drunken
336
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
frolic; and if they occurred in 1823, can
any one be astonished that they should now be
repeated 1"
Our heart sickens at these atrocities ; but
the exhibition of them at this crisis is an in-
dispensable duty on the part of every lover of
truth and justice. It is now the game of the
English liberals to withdraw all sympathy
from Don Carlos and his heroic followers, by
constantly representing him as a blood-thirsty
tyrant, a monster unfit to live, with whom the
infamous system of giving no quarter origin-
ated. The documents and historical facts now
quoted may show how totally unfounded is this
assertion. Here we have the liberals of
Spain, the humane, philanthropic revolution-
ists of the Peninsula, committing these atroci-
ties when at the helm of affairs, not only before
the royalists, but ten years before the death of
Ferdinand, and when Don Carlos was still liv-
ing secluded in private life. These massacres
were commenced by the liberals when in pos-
session of the government, the fortresses, the
treasury, the army. When such frightful deeds
of blood stained their first successes over their
helpless royalist antagonists, it is not surpris-
ing that a profound feeling of indignation was
roused through the whole Peninsula, which has
rendered it the most difficult of tasks to mode-
rate the sanguinary character of the conflict in
subsequent times. Hitherto, be it observed,
the massacres had been all on our side ; not
one act of retaliation had taken place on the
parts of their opponents.
With truth it may be said, that the revolu-
tionary party are ever the same ; they learn
nothing, they forget nothing. Mr. Walton thus
sums up, in a few words, the series of crimes
and follies which had thus twice precipitated
the democrats of the Peninsula from the pos-
session of absolute authority.
"The follies and illegalities committed by
the Cortes from the moment of their assem-
bling at Cadiz may be easily traced in the
pages of this narrative ; and yet the same follies
and illegalities were at Madrid and Cadiz re-
peated in 1820, '21, '22, and '23. The Cortes
first became the legislators of the land by
means of a flagrant act of usurpation, which,
under the pretence of being legally constituted,
they sustained at all hazards; the second time
they rose into power by the aid of a military
mutiny, and were not prudent enough to steer
clear of the very shoals upon which they had
previously been stranded. The first time, they
had a fair opportunity of judging the evils of
precipitate and ill-considered legislation: they
then beheld events pregnant with lessons of
political wisdom, and still had not the sense
or the courage to correct old mistakes when
chance again placed the helm of state within
their grasp. On both occasions they fell from
the same causes. Public indignation hurled
them from their seats in 1814; and in 1823
they were overpowered, not by the arms of
France, but by the displeasure of their own
countrymen, disgusted and wearied out with
the turmoils in which they had been kept, as
well as by the many atrocities which they had
witnessed. Their army of 96,750 men was
gradually frittered away; and while in fortified
towns they were vainly denouncing vengeance,
in the interior the lips of thousands greeted
the Duke d'Angouleme, and welcomed him as
the liberator of their king and country."
The situation of Ferdinand VII., when thus
a second time restored to his throne, was sur-
rounded with difficulties. Not only had the
most furious passions been awakened in the
royalists by the savage and uncalled-for mas-
sacres of their opponents, but the public inte-
rests in every department had suffered to a
degree hardly conceivable in so short a period
as that of the revolutionary domination.
"The new ministers," says Walton, "who
were the best men the country could produce,
found every thing unhinged and in disorder.
The misfortunes of which the Cadiz code was
so lamentable a memorial, daily showed them-
selves in some new shape. The more the
state of the country was inquired into, the more
flagrant the errors, if not the guilt, of the fallen
party appeared. The reports from the pro-
vinces were appalling the treasury empty,
and foreign credit destroyed. On isolated
points the shades of opinion might have varied ;
but in the condemnation of the acts of the
liberals, the public voice was unanimous.
Then only was ascertained in. its full extent
the galling nature of their yoke." '
An amnesty was immediately published by
the king. The exceptions were numerous,
amounting to nearly two thousand persons ;
but " they were chiefly assassins men whom
no amnesty could reach." The means of
being reinstated in favour were amply afforded
to those who were not actually stained with
blood; and great numbers were immediately
reinstated in their employments. The rest, for
the most part, withdrew to France and Eng-
land where they lived for many years, main-
tained by public or private charity, and an ob-
ject of mistaken interest to the English peo-
ple, who believed that the selfish projects of
aggrandisement from which they had been
dashed were those of freedom and public hap-
piness.
The repeated and ludicrous attempts which
the Spanish Revolutionists at this period made
to regain their footing in the Peninsula since
1823 to 1830, and the instant and total failure
of them all, demonstrated in the clearest man-
ner the slender hold they had of the public
mind, and the strong sense of the horrors of
revolutionary sway which the experience of
their government had generally produced.
Doubtless the government of the Royalists
during the period of their ascendency, from
1824 10 the death of Ferdinand in 1833, was
not perfect. The ministers of the king must
have been more than human if, in a country
in which such a revolutionary party had
obtained for so ever short a time an ascend-
ency, they could at once have closed the foun-
tains of evil.
"More," says Mr. Walton, "perhaps might
have been done many abuses were left un-
touched; still commerce and agriculture con-
tinued in a progressive state of improvement.
The public burdens had also greatly dimin-
ished. Under the administration of the Cortes,
the general taxes levied were equal to 100 mil-
CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN.
337
lions of rials, afterwards they were reduced to
40, and the provincial rents from 295 millions
lowered to 130. The best test is perhaps that
of the finances ; an idea of which may be
formed from the subjoined approximate state-
ments, founded upon correct data.
The foreign debt created by the
Cortes from September, 1820
to October, 1823, . . 19,000,000
Ditto, by the king, from October,
1823, to September, 1830, . 5,000,000
Foreign debt cancelled by the
Cortes, None!
Ditto by the king, .... 1,000,000
Interest paid on domestic debt
by the Cortes, .... None !
Since the restoration, . Paid regularly.
Public expenditure under the
Cortes, 6,648,133
Ditto since the restoration, . 4,197,772"
Thus it appears that the Liberal Govern-
ment, during their short reign, from October,
1820, to October, 1823, that is, in two years, had
contracted, in spite of all the produce of the
confiscated church lands, NINETEEX MILIIOXB
STERLING of debt ; and that, in the next seven,
the king's government had only contracted
FIVE : that the Cortes paid no interest on the
national debt, and the king paid it regularly.
Finally, that the annual expenditure of the
Cortes was a half greater, besides their enor-
mous loans, than that of the king. So much
for the realization of the blessings of cheap
and good government by the Spanish Revolu-
tionists !
But the time was now approaching when the
cast down and despairing Democrats of Spain
were again to be elevated to supreme power,
and, by the aid of liberal governments in
France and England, a civil war lighted up in
the Peninsula, unexampled in modern times
for constancy and courage on the one side, and
cruelty and incapacity on the other.
Ferdinand VII., in his latter years, had mar-
ried a fourth wife, by whom he had no son, but
one daughter. By the Spanish law, which, in
this particular, is an adoption, under certain
modifications, of the famous Salic law, females
were excluded from the succession to the
throne; and this order of succession to the
Spanish Crown had been guarantied by all the
powers of Europe, and especially England, by
the treaty of Utrecht. It had regulated the
succession to the throne for an hundred and
thirty years. Ferdinand, however, was de-
clining both in years and mental vigour. The
queen was naturally desirous of securing the^
succession to her own offspring, and she was a
woman of capacity and intrigue well fitted for
such an enterprise. Upon this state of matters,
the Liberals immediately fixed all their hopes,
and artfully succeeded, by implicating the king
and queen in an alteration of the order of suc-
cession in favour of their daughter, both to
divide the Royalist party, distracted between
the pretensions of the royal competitors, to
conceal their own selfish projects of aggran-
disement under a pretended zeal for the main-
tenance of the new order of descent, and to
engraft the interest of a disputed succession on
43
the native deformity of a merely sordid revolu-
tionary movement.
The magnitude and importance of the vast
change on which the Liberal party had now
adventured is thus ably stated by Mr. Wal-
ton:
"The law which excluded females when
there was male issue was precise and pe-
remptory. It had been enacted with the due
concurrence of the Cortes, and formed part of
a general settlement of the peace of Europe,
at Utrecht, guarantied by England and France.
This law was besides recorded in the statute-
book, and for one hundred and twenty years
had been held as the only rule of succession.
Its abrogation, therefore, was a matter of the
most serious consideration, affecting not only
the prospective claims of the king's brother,
strengthened as they were by his popularity
and the royalist interest which he represented,
but also those of other members of the Bour-
bon family who came after him in the line of
succession. The undertaking was indeed ar-
duous and awful, in consequence of the exten-
sive changes which it was likely to introduce.
" It was not a matter of mere family aggran-
disement upon which the queen had set her
heart. The proposed measure arose out of no
wish to revive a principle successfully main-
tained in former times. It was part of a sys-
tem of which there was a further action in
reserve. More and deeper mischief was con-
templated than that of depriving one branch
of its hereditary rights. The alteration in the
established rule was intended as a seal to a revolu-
tion. This was the light in which Ferdinand
himself viewed the proposal when first made
to him ; and although his scruples gradually
gave way when he found himself beset by the
creatures and puppets of the queen, there was
no other period of his life in which his resolu-
tion on this point could have been shaken.
Even then the whole scheme would have
failed, if a clever and fascinating woman had
not been the principal agent. Her great aim
was to raise up a barrier between the Infante
Don Carlos and the throne, and the king's jea-
lousy of his brother's popularity was the chord
touched with most effect. The queen also
knew that this feeling chiefly led to her own
marriage, and it was agreed that the most pro-
pitious moment for the development of the
plan would be the termination of the rejoic-
ings to which the announcement of her preg-
nancy had given rise."
The way in which this extraordinary change
in the Constitution was introduced is thus de-
tailed :
"In the Gazette of the 6th April, 1830, to
the astonishment of every one, an edict,
dated March 29th, appeared with the follow-
ing remarkable heading: 'Pragmatic Sanc-
tion, having the force of law, decreed by King
Charles IV. on the petition of the Cortes for
1789, and ordered to be published by his
reigning majesty for the perpetual observance
of law 2, title 15, partida 2, establishing the
regular succession to the crown of Spain;'
alleged to have been in force for seven hun-
dred years.
"The publication was also carried into
2F
338
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
effect with the usual solemnities. The rain
fell in torrents ; nevertheless the magistrates
and heralds proceeded to do their duty by
reading the decree aloud and posting it up in
the public places. The streets of Madrid were
thronged with an anxious and inquiring mul-
titude, who did not hesitate, in no measured
terms, to express their surprise and disgust at
this glaring imposture. Nobody could under-
stand how the reigning sovereign, of his own
will and accord, could venture to sanction a
law alleged to have been passed by his father
forty-one years before, and which, even if it
had then been perfected, (and the reverse was
the case,) could not be held valid for obvious
reasons."
It is not our intention to follow Mr. Walton
through his able argument against the legality
of the change thus unceremoniously intro-
duced of the king's own authority, without any
recourse whatever to a Cortes or any other
national authority. It was not even attempted
to get any such authority ; but it was pretend-
ed that it had been granted when the altera-
tion on the law of succession had been made
by Charles IV. in 1789. The absurdity of
supposing that so important a matter as the
descent of the crown could be legally altered
by a pretended act of a king on the petition
of the Cortes, without its even being known, or
even heard of, for forty years after its alleged
enactment, is too obvious to require illustra-
tion. Add to this, that the pretended altera-
ion by Charles IV. has never yet been produced,
v seen by any one ; and that the fact of its
existence rests on the assertion of a bed-ridden
doting king in favour of his own daughter.
And even if such a deed did exist, it would,
by the fundamental laws of Spain, be utterly
null in a question with Don Carlos, or the
princes born before its promulgation, as not
having been published to the magistrates of
the provinces in the way required by the Con-
stitution. The more defective the title of the
queen to the crown, however, the better for
the Liberals : they had now a revolutionary dy-
nasty implicated in their struggle for supreme
power.
Upon the publication of this decree, Don
Carlos, the next male in succession, and di-
rectly struck at by the ordinance, was solicit-
ed by the chief nobles of Spain instantly to
assume the government.
" Several grandees," says Mr. Walton, "now
leagued with the opposite party, together with
generals and other influential persons, urged
the Infante Don Carlos to come forward and
accept the crown, not only as his right, but
also as the only means of preserving public
tranquillity. The conscientious prince reject-
ed their offer, though well aware of the extent
of his popularity in every part of the king-
dom ; alleging that so long as the king lived,
he would never do an act derogatory to his character,
either as a brother or a subject. He was then in-
vited to take the regency upon himself, which,
it was argued, could be done without any vio-
lation of his principles, on the plea of the
king's illness, and to rescue the country from
a dreadful crisis ; but again the prince de-
clined to interfere, observing, that his rights
and those of his family were clear and still
well protected; protesting that he would not
take any step that might hereafter render his
conduct liable to misrepresentation. Had the
prince then lifted up his hand, the regency,
and eventually the crown, would have been
his own : Spain would have been saved from
the horrors of a long and sanguinary civil war.
But where is the man who does not respect
the prince's motives of action who does not
admire the disinterestedness with which he
refused a sceptre already within his grasp 1"
The Cortes never was assembled to deliberate
on the alteration of the order of succession, or
consent to it; but a limited number of crea-
tures of the court (seventy-six in number)
were convoked in June 20, 1833, to swear alle-
giance to the king's daughter, as a princess
whose title to the throne was unquestionable.
A protest was on that occasion taken by the
Neapolitan and Sardinian ambassadors against
the change, on grounds apparently unanswer-
able.* And even all the efforts and influence
of the court could not give a national charac-
ter to the ceremony, or dispel the gloomy pre-
sentiments with which even the humblest of
the spectators were inspired.
"Seventy-six popular delegates had been
summoned," says Walton, " to take part in a
dumb show, at a moment when two of the
most important questions which ever present-
ed themselves to public consideration agitated
the country. The legality of the alteration in
the law of succession, and the appointment of
a regent in case of the king's death, were
points which, everybody thought, ought to
have been submitted to the Cortes, if such was
the character of the meeting just dissolved.
The world had been ostentatiously informed
that, when those of 1789 met for the purpose
of acknowledging the Prince of Asturias, the
question of succession was introduced, and
this circumstance, after the lapse of nearly
half a century, made a plea for the establish-
ment of a new rule : why then all this silence
now, in defiance of public opinion? The
queen, at the moment, was supreme, and her
rival a voluntary exile in a foreign land.
Every precaution had also been adopted to se-
cure the return of deputies, if not favourable
to her views, at least belonging to the Move-
ment party ; and the capital was besides
crowded with troops. And yet the queen and
her advisers had not the courage to trust the ded-
* "The law of 1713 was enacted by the chief of a new
dynasty, with all the formalities that were requisite and
indispensable to its validity, and at a time when a con-
currence of extraordinary and distressing circumstances
justified the propriety of a new law of succession ; that
it i* a law consecrated by more than a century of unin-
terrupted existence; that it was the necessary conse-
quence of the stipulations which secured the throne of
Spain to the grandson of Louis XIV., and to his male
descendants, and that the weighty reasons in which it
originated continue to subsist.
"We have further considered, that an order of suc-
cession established as this was, by the consent and
under the guarantee of the principal powers of Europe,
and recognised successively in various treaties con-
cluded with those powers, hag become obligatory and
unalterable, and has transmitted to all the descendants
of Philip V. rights which, as they were obtained by the
sacrifice of other rights, they cannot relinquish without
material injury to themselves, and without failing in
the consideration due to the illustrious head and found-
er of their dynasty."
CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN.
339
sion of two plain questions to a meeting of their
own calling; fearful that among its members
some lurking royalist might be found to ex-
pose their injustice, and argue the illegality
of their acts. Any sympathies then excited in
favour of the Infante, might have been ruinous
to a cause only half consolidated. It therefore
became necessary to carry on the delusion, by
again resorting to sophistry, tergiversation,
and calumny."
Meanwhile, however, every effort was made
to fill all offices of trust in the army and civil
department with liberals of known resolution
and determined character, who then found
themselves, to their infinite joy, in conse-
quence of the disputed succession they had
contrived to get up to the throne, reinstated a
third time in the possession of that authority
from which they had been twice chased by the
experienced evils of their sway, and the gene-
ral indignation of the people. In a few months
their preparations were complete. Such had
been their activity, that all the offices in the
state ; all the fortresses in the country ; all
the commands in the army, were in their
hands. At the same time Don Carlos was
banished; his adherents discouraged; his
cause to all appearance desperate. Suddenly
reinforced, through the intrigues of the queen
for her daughter, by the whole weight of Go-
vernment, the Revolutionists had completely
regained their ascendant. Yet, even in these
circumstances, such was their unpopularity
in consequence of the numberless corrupt and
atrocious acts of which they had been guilty,
that all these preparations would have been
unavailing to force an unpopular and revolu-
tionary change of government on the country,
had it not been for the instant and powerful
support which the Liberals in Spain received
on the death of Ferdinand from the democratic
government of France and England.
" Ferdinand died," says Walton, " on 29th
September, 1833. The account of his decease
was transmitted to Paris* by telegraph, and the
next day a courier departed with orders to M.
de Rayneval to declare that the French govern-
ment was disposed to acknowledge the young
princess as soon as the official notification of
the demise of the crown arrived. This step had
doubtless been agreed upon with the British
government, in anticipation of an event long ex-
pected ; and to this joint determination, and the
immediate announcement of it in the Madrid
Gazette, it was that the queen chiefly owed the
ascendency which she gained in the first period
of her regency. At that time the eyes of all
Spain were upon England and France. They,
as it were, held the balance in their own hands ;
for the numerous and influential Spaniards,
who were disposed to assert the rights of the
lawful heir, intimidated by the extensive pre-
parations of the government, and discouraged
by the absence of their natural leader, held
back from any attempt against the usurped
power of the regent, through fear that for the
moment opposition would be fruitless. Many
colonels of regiments intrusted with command
even some liberals of the old school, sensible
that the country was on the eve of a civil war,
hesitated, and only joined the queen's cause
when they saw it pompously proclaimed that
England and France had declared in her favour
and thrown their powerful aid into her scale."
"The British and French governments may
be said to have then assumed the right to
dictate to Spain who should reign over her ; and, as
if it was not enough to have appointed to the
throne, to have taken upon themselves to name
a regent; for it is impossible to believe that
the governments of the two countries which
most contributed to the settlement effected by
Philip V. were really convinced of the legality
of the last measures of Ferdinand VII. to annul
that settlement; or that, with their boasted
attachment to the principles of a limited mo-
narchy, they could be sincere in professing a
belief that the mere testamentary provision of
an uxorious and enfeebled king could disin-
herit the rightful heir to the throne, and sub-
vert the fundamental laws of his country."
The result of this possession of the treasury,
the seat of government, the army, with their
powerful foreign support, is well known. The
queen was proclaimed throughout the king-
dom, and although partial risings in favour of
Don Carlos took place in almost every pro-
vince, yet as that prince was in exile, and his
adherents unarmed and scattered, they were
without difficulty suppressed by the military
force, 100,000 strong, now at the disposal of
the Liberals. But as Mr. Walton justly ob-
serves,
"The Spaniards in the end will redress their
own wrongs. They will not submit to insult
and proscription ; the popular thunder will
never cease to roll until the confederacy formed
between the Spanish liberals and their foreign
allies is dissolved for ever. Already, indeed,
are the oppressors of 1823 and 1833, treading
on a terrible volcano, surrounded by every
sign of past ravage and impending explosion.
Neither the queen, nor the party by which she
is upheld, has any hold upon the confidence
or affections of the Spanish people : the views
of the one, in endeavouring to secure the
throne to her daughter by an outrage upon her
late husband's memory, are too unjust and too
revolting to prosper ; whilst the object of the
others, in seizing upon power for a third time,
is as apparent now as it was before. Were
the liberals really friends of constitutional
order known for their adherence to settled
systems of reform disposed to admit changes
founded upon principles of tried merit taught
by experience and adversity to prefer plans
of a practical character and easy results to
dangerous theories and extravagant notions
in a word, were they prepared to sacrifice
their party prejudices to the general wants
and wishes of the country, they might still
have repaired their former errors and spared
the effusion of blood.
" So far, their cry for freedom has only been
another name for social disorganization,
their return to power the commencement of an
uncontrolled career of outrage and murder. Their
official existence seems to depend on the
repetition of previous follies and crimes.
Place and pelf in their opinion cannot be
secured unless the Revolution is completed by
j the utter extermination of the royalists : they
340
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
equally disregard the laws and the public
voice. The Spaniards have always evinced a
scrupulous respect for ancient forms, as well
as an aversion to changes to their institutions ;
and now they are told that they must have
nothing that does not bear a modern stamp.
They have been distinguished beyond other
nations by a jealous love of their country and
a horror of foreign dictation ; but they are
now informed that they must be satisfied with
such rulers, and such a form of government, as
the liberals of London and Paris may be graciously
pleased to bestow on them. In one breath they
are branded as ignorant and prejudiced bigots,
and in the next called upon to admit changes
of a refined kind long before society is in a
state to receive them."
The civil war soon after commenced in
Navarre, and we again pray the particular
attention of our readers to the mingled perfidy
and cruelty by which, from the very first, it was
distinguished by the queen's forces : a cruelty
so atrocious, and uniformly adhered to, as to
have rendered altogether unavoidable the
frightful reprisals which have ever since pre-
vailed in the Peninsula. Lorenzo was the
Christino general in Navarre Santos Ladron
the popular leader. The former, fearful of the
issue of the contest, privately conveyed a
message to Don Santos, signifying his wish
to have a conference to prevent the effusion of
blood.
" This message was cordially received, and
in an unguarded moment Don Santos agreed
to meet his adversary, judging by this step that
he was promoting the interests of humanity
and the advancement of the cause which he
had so fervently embraced. Without a written
engagement or previous formality, a private
meeting was agreed upon, and the two gene-
rals, with their respective staffs and a few at-
tendants, proceeded to the appointed spot, a
short distance beyond Los Arcos.
" Santos Ladron endeavoured to persuade
Lorenzo that he was wrong in supporting the
queen's cause; and in the most feeling man-
ner pointed out the calamities in which the
country was about to be involved, it being
evident that the laws and the great majority
of the people were in favour of Charles V. He
alluded to the unfortunate contest of 1820,
which, he said, was about to be renewed. He
appealed to Lorenzo's patriotism and religion,
and, as one older in rank and more experi-
enced, implored him to spare the effusion of
blood. Finding that he could make no im-
pression upon the queen's representative,
Santos Ladron reined his horse and was about
to withdraw, when Lorenzo's people fired upon
him. His horse fell, and as he was extricat-
ing himself from his stirrup, the flaps of his
frock-coat flew open, and underneath dis-
covered the general's sash. The sight of the
insignia of his rank inflamed the rapacity of
the Christinos, and they rushed upon the dis-
mounted chieftain, eager to gain so valuable a
prize and the corresponding reward. Santos
Ladron, who had been already wounded by
the treacherous fire of the Christinos, was
conveyed to Pamplona, and, without being ad-
mitted to a hearing, was, with thirty-two of
his companions, subjected to the mockery of
a court-martial and condemned to death. In
vain the provincial deputation and the Bishop
of Pamplona implored the viceroy and the
military governor to suspend the execution
till the matter could be referred to Madrid;
all intercession was vain. It was answered
that the formalities of a court-martial had been
fully observed, and it was now impossible to
alter the sentence. In reality, the authorities
were eager to recommend themselves to the
Madrid government by executing with pre-
cipitate activity the orders of a remorseless
policy, and they were xvell aware that nothing
could be more distasteful to their employers than
any hesitation in discharging the bloody service that
was required at their hands. On the 15th of
October the wounded general, with his thirty-two
companions, was led into the ditch of the fortress,
and there privately shot."
The effect of this atrocity may be easily
conceived.
" The perfidious massacre of thirty-three
persons at once proclaimed to Spain and Eu-
rope the faithless and remorseless character
of the government that sanctioned and re-
warded the horrid deed ; as a measure of inti-
midation it utterly failed, nay, rather fanned
the flame which it was intended to extinguish.
The very night after the execution five hun-
dred persons, mostly youths of the best fami-
lies in Pamplona, quitted the place, and joined
the Carlists of Roncesvalles. The next day
Colonel Benito Eraso, who had raised the val-
ley of Roncesvalles, issued a proclamation to
the inhabitants and an address to the soldiers.
In the former, after begging those whom he
addressed not to be discouraged by the misfor-
tune of Santos Ladron, he added, 'No ven-
geance ! oblivion of the past, and a religious
observance of the decree of Jimnesty ! Let
order, union, and valour be your motto, and
triumph is certain.' A noble contrast to the
barbarous atrocities which his enemies had
not only the heart to perpetrate, but the shame-
lessness to avow."
Saarsfield, another of the queen's generals,
though of a more mild and pacific character,
was nevertheless constrained, by his orders
from Madrid, to begin the war with the same
system of reckless butchery.
" It was well known," says Walton, " that he
did not belong to the revolutionary school,
and the very names of many of those who,
fresh from the exile to which Ferdinand had
consigned them, were now employed to second
his own operations, must have enabled him,
long before he crossed the Ebro, to judge of
the probable course of impending changes,
and have filled him with mingled feelings of
discontent and apprehension. He was, how-
ever, carried away by events; and the ease
with which his advantages were gained, did
not restrain his troops from marking their pro-
gress by acts of violence, and the wanton effu-
sion of blood. His orders, doubtless, were
severe, and too peremptory to be trifled with;
while the more active and ambitious of his
officers must have been allured by the rewards
bestowed on the bloody deed of Lorenzo, to
imitate his barbarous example, and to adapt
CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN.
341
their mode of warfare to the taste prevailing
in the capital. Every Cat-list chieftain, taken in
arms, was accordingly shot without mercy : the
same severity was extended to the less respon-
sible peasantry, and the most unsparing efforts
were made to extinguish the hopes of Charles
V. in the blood of every class of his adherents;
a merciless, and at the same time impolitic
rigour, by which fuel was added to a half-
extinguished flame, and the discontent of a
bold and warlike population converted into
the most bitter and desperate hostility."
These inhuman massacres, however, did not
intimidate the Carlists : but wherever they
rose in arms, the same execrable system of
murder was pursued by the queen's generals.
"The Carlists," says our author, " one and
all, felt that faith had not been kept with them;
that the proclamations of the queen's officers
were only intended to entrap the unwary, and
that their real aim was extermination.
"The cries of fresh victims constantly re-
sounded in their ears, and they continued to
shudder at the remembrance of the butcheries
which they had already witnessed. Brigadier
Tina, who had been captured and his band
dispersed, was on the 26th November shot-
near Alcaniz. At Calatayud twenty-one Carlists
had previously met with the same fate, and
among them two ecclesiastics, a fact sufficient
to show the brutalizing effects of the new sys-
tem. Morella was entered on the 13th Decem-
ber, after a close investment by General Bu-
tron, the governor of Tortosa, but the Carlist
garrison escaped, and were afterwards over-
taken at Calanda, near Alcaniz, when their
commander, Baron Herves, his wife and three
children, fell into the hands of the queen's
troops. Agreeably to an order of the day,
published by Viceroy Espeleta, the comman-
der of the royalist volunteers of Torreblanca,
D. Cristoval Fuste, and D. Pedro Torre, were
shot at Zaragoza; in the morning of the 23d
December; and on the 27th, Baron Herves,
and D. Vicente Gil, commander of the royalist
volunteers, shared the same fate. At Vitoria,
the son of a rich merchant, for whose ransom
five thousand dollars were offered, was also
shot by the orders of Valdes, at a moment
when a courier from Madrid could not pass
without a large escort."
And now the queen's government, embol-
dened by the success with which they had
hitherto butchered and massacred whoever
appeared in arms against them, resolved on a
still more sweeping and unjustifiable act of
democratic despotism. This was the destruc-
tion of the liberties and rights of the ichole Basque
provinces, and the extinction of the freedom
which had prevailed in the mountains of Na-
varre and Biscay for six hundred years. It is
unnecessary to say what these privileges were.
All the world knows that these provinces were
in truth a free constitutional monarchy, in-
serted into the despotic realm of Spain ; that
their popular rights were more extensive than
those of England under the Reform Bill ; that
they exceeded even the far-famed democratic
privileges of the Swiss Cantons. For that very
reason they were odious to the democratic
despots at Madrid, who could tolerate no re-
straint whatever on their authority, and least
of all from freeborn mountaineers, who had
inherited their privileges from their fathers,
and not derived them from their usurpation.
Like their predecessors in the French Direc-
tory with the Swiss Cantons, they had accord-
ingly from the very first devoted these liberties
to destruction, and they seized the first oppor-
tunity of success to carry their tyrannical
determination into execution.
"As soon," says Walton, "as the queen's
military commanders had established their
authority, they declared the Ji<nuji>.e fueros provi-
sionally suspended. For some time past the
Madrid government had wished to place these
provinces under the Castilian law, by carrying
the line of customs to their extreme frontiers,
and the present opportunity was thought fa-
vourable. On the 3d December, Castanon
issued a proclamation from his head-quarters
at Tolosa, of which the following are the prin-
cipal clauses : ' If, after a lapse of eight days,
arms are found in any house, the master shall
be subject to a fine and other penalties ; and
should he have no means of payment, con-
demned to two years' hard labour at the hulks
any individual concealing ammunition, mo-
ney, or other effects belonging to an insurgent,
shall be sho! the house of any person who may
have fired upon the queen's troops shall be
burnt every peasant forming one of an as-
semblage of less than fifty men, and taken in
arms at a quarter of a league from the high-
road, shall be considered as a brigand and shot
any one intercepting a government courier
shall be shot every village that shall, without
opposition, suffer the insurgents to obtain re-
cruits, shall be punished with a heavy contri-
bution all the property of absentees shall be
confiscated every peasant refusing to convey
information from the municipalities to head-
quarters shall be put in irons, and condemned
to two years' imprisonment, or hard labour, in
the fortress of St. Sebastian all women who,
by word or deed, favour the rebellion, shall be
closely confined a court-martial shall be
formed to take cognisance of all causes
brought before them, and every movable
column shall have with it one member of this
court for the purpose of carrying into effect
the provisions of this proclamation.'
" The brutal edict was read with horror and
disgust. Such of the natives as had embraced
the queen's cause now bitterly repented of
their error when they saw their privileges
trampled under foot by a military despot, and
found themselves obliged to receive into their
houses, and furnish with every necessary, the
soldiers who protected him in his outrageous
exercise of illegal power. The mere mention
of their fueros being suspended, produced a
magical effect, and the Basques now consider-
ed their cause more than ever sanctified.
Many who before had remained neutral flew
to arms, and the war-cry resounded along the
mountain ranges. Surrounded by rocks and
precipices, the Basque patriots assembled to
consider their prospects, and devise revenue
for their wrongs. The hardy peasantry re-
solved to suffer the last extremities of war
rather than submit to the yoke with which
2*2
342
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
they were threatened. They required no oath
of secrecy, no pledges for each other's fidelity.
They called to mind the heroic efforts of their
ancestors to resist oppression ; and holding up
the printed paper circulated among them, in
scorn and in abhorrence, they swore to defend
their freedom, and mutually bound each othe"r,
as the sword was already unsheathed, never to
return it to the scabbard till their fueros were
acknowledged and secured."
Human cruelty, it might have been thought,
could hardly have gone beyond the atrocities
already committed by the revolutionary gene-
rals; but they were exceeded by that perpe-
trated in the endeavour to crush this gallant
effort of the Basque peasants to rescue from
destruction Biscayan freedom.
" Zavala (a Biscay chief) having seized
five noted Christines, took them to his head-
quarters at Ganteguiz de Arteaga, a small
town on the east of the river Mundaca, where i
he treated them with respect. In retaliation, i
the enemy sent a detachment of six hundred
men from Bilboa to Murguia, to seize his
family; after which the same corps advanced
upon his position with his children placed in their
foremost rank. Zavala was struck with horror
at this revolting expedient, and hesitated be-
tween his duty as a soldier and paternal ten-
derness. If an engagement ensued, his own
children would inevitably fall before their
father's musketry. In this dreadful dilemma,
and hoping still to defeat the enemy without
submitting to the cruel necessity of destroying
the dearest portion of himself, Zavala with-
drew to Guernica. Here he was attacked the
next day by the same troops, who again ad-
vanced with his children in front of their co-
lumn. The same torture awaited the distract-
ed parent. He placed his troops in an advan-
tageous position, and the fire commenced
under the tree of Guernica, that glorious sign
of proud recollections to the sons of Biscay
the tree under which they swear fidelity to
their liege lord, and where he binds himself
in turn to keep their privileges inviolate.
Victory crowned the efforts of the Biscayan
royalists, and scarcely more than a third of
the queen's troops escaped. The devoted vic-
tims of the atrocious assailants were saved,
and restored to the arms of an agonized
father."
The extent to which these early massacres
by the revolutionists was carried, was very
great.
" It was about this time estimated," says our
author, " that not less than twelve hundred persons
had been put to the sicord or executed in the Basque
provinces and Navarre alone, besides the many
victims sacrificed in other parts of the king-
dom. For three months the queen's agents
had been playing a deceitful and desperate
game. They respected no laws, and even
broke the promises contained in their own
proclamations. Hence numbers who had laid
down their arms, and returned to their homes,
again banded together, filled with the most
exasperated and vindictive feelings; and if in
this state of mind they resorted to acts of re-
taliation, those whose previous cruelties pro-
voked such severities are justly answerable i
for the excesses of the Carlists as well as for
their own. The horrible atrocities of the
queen's partisans gave the contest a deadly
and ferocious character; and, as if the former
severities had 'not been sufficient, fuel was
added to the flame by a decree issued by the
queen-regent, and bearing date the 21st of
January, in which it was ordered, that all pri-
vates, belonging to the several factions, who
might not have been shot, should be employed
in the condemned regiments of Ceuta, Cuba,
Porto Rico, and the Philippine Islands, at the
same time that the officers w r ere to be punished
with the utmost severity of the law."
Nay, so resolute were the revolutionists on
carrying on the war on no other principle than
that of indiscriminate massacre, that it was
repeatedly announced in official proclamations
as the rule of war by the queen's generals.
." On the 5th August, 1834, Rodil issued a
proclamation," in which he said, " ' that after
employing all possible means of clemency, he
is convinced that severe chastisement alone
can put an end to the rebel faction ; wherefore
he decrees, 1st, that every one found in the ranks
of the rebels shall be shot as soon as taken ; 2d, those
who supply arms, favour their attempts, or
obey their summons, shall be equally shot,' &c.
This edict is dated Pamplona, and the strictest
orders were circulated to carry it into full
effect."
All attempts on the part of the Carlists to
establish a more humane system of warfare
were in vain. One in particular deserves to
be mentioned. In one of Zumalacarregui's
victories, a Spanish nobleman of high rank
was made prisoner.
" On the first leisure moment, Zumalacar-
regui examined his prisoners, and more espe-
cially the count. The Carlist chieftain was
pleased with his manly behaviour; and, after
several inquiries as to the state of affairs at
Madrid, promised to propose an exchange of
prisoners, in which the count's rank was to be
waived. In the mean while the count was
invited to Zumalacarregui's table, and treated
with every consideration. A few days after-
wards, whilst at dinner, Rodil's answer to the
proposed cartel arrived, in which he stated
that the prisoners for whom it was wished to
make an exchange had been already shot. ' Here,
count,' said the Carlist leader, ' take the letter
of your queen's commander : read it yourself,
and then judge the situation in which I am
placed.'
" The unfortunate count turned pale, and
with a start pushed his plate almost to the
middle of the table. The repast was at once
at an end. After a pause, during which a dead
silence prevailed, Zumalacarregui, addressing
the weeping count, added, ' I wished to spare
you, and such also I know would be my sove-
reign's wish ; but with such enemies forbear-
ance is impossible. From the first I looked
upon you as a deluded youth, of an ardent
mind, and I should have rejoiced in being the
instrument of royal mercy; but Rodil's out-
rages are beyond endurance, they must and
shall be checked. Were I considerate towards
you, our enemies, as they have done before,
would attribute my conduct to weakness. This
CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN.
343
triumph they shall not obtain. The widows'
weeds worn in these provinces will tell you the state
of the war better than all you heard in Madrid' "
Not content with the wholesale murders thus
carried into execution on women and children
of the adverse party, the democrats in the
Spanish great towns resolved to take the work
of the butcher in their own hands, and enjoy
in their own persons the exquisite pleasure of
putting to death their captive enemies. At
Zaragoza, thirteen monks were murdered; at
Cordova, several convents burnt : at Valencia
the mob were only appeased by the sacrifice
of six Carlists, who were massacred in cold
blood. At Barcelona, the atrocities were still
more frightful.
"On the afternoon of the 25th July, 1835, a
mob, arrayed in various bands, each headed
by a leader in disguise, paraded the streets
with cries of ' Away to the Convents !' and
' Death to the friars !' and forthwith proceeded
from words to deeds. Six convents (namely,
those of the Augustins, of the Trinitarians, of
the two orders of Carmelites, of the Minims,
and of the Dominicans) were blazing at once,
and soon were reduced to heaps of smoking
ruins ; while eighty of their unfortunate inmates
perished, some burned in the buildings, others
poniarded, and others again beaten to death
with clubs and stones. Some escaped through
the exertions of the artillery corps, and a few
by mingling in disguise with the crowd. Three
hundred friars and clergymen took refuge in
the castle of Monjuich, and as many more in
the citadel and fort Atarzanzas. The military
meanwhile paraded the streets, but remained
perfectly passive, having received orders not to
fire on the populace. Llauder, the captain-
general, fled into France, and left the city vir-
tually in the power of the rabble."
Subsequently the savage temper of the Bar-
celona liberals was evinced in a still more
memorable manner:
"On the 4th of January, 1836, a crowd
assembled in the main square, and, with loud
imprecations and yells of revenge, demanded
the lives of the Carlist prisoners confined in
the citadel. Thither they immediately re-
paired, and, not meeting with the slightest re-
sistance from the garrison, scaled the walls,
lowered the draw-bridge, and entered the
fortress; their leaders holding in their hands
lists of those whom they had predetermined to
massacre. When the place was completely
in their possession, the leaders of the mob
began to read over their lists of proscription,
and, with as much deliberation as if they had
been butchers selecting sheep for the knife,
had their miserable victims dragged forward,
and shot one after another, in the order of their
names. The brave Colonel O'Donnt-1 was the
first that perished. His body, and that of
another prisoner, were dragged through the
streets, with shouts of 'Liberty!' The heads
and hands were cut off, and the mutilated
trunks, after having been exposed to every
indignity, were cast upon a burning pile. The
head of O'Donnel, after having been kicked
about the streets as a foot-ball by wretches
who mingled mirth with murder, was at last
stuck up in front of a fountain ; and pieces of
\flesh were cut from his mangled and palpitating
body, and eagerly devoured by the vilest and most
<!t///-(ivt:<l of women. From the citadel the mob
proceeded to the hospital, where three of the
inmates were butchered; and from the hospital
to the fort of Atanzares, where fifteen Carlist
peasants shared the same fate. In all, eighty-
eight persons perished.
" This deliberate massacre of defenceless
prisoners, arid the worse than fiendish excesses
committed on their remains, satisfied the
rioters for the first day ; but, on the next, they
presumed to proclaim that fruitful parent of
innumerable murders the constitution of
1812. This was too much to be borne. Even
then, however, two hours elapsed before a
dissenting voice was heard; when a note
arrived from Captain Hyde Parker, of the
Rodney, who not long before, in obedience to
the orders of a peaceful administration, had
landed fifteen thousand muskets in the city. His
offer to support the authorities against the
friends of the obnoxious constitution was not
without effect. The leaders of the political
movement were allowed to embark on board
the Rodney, and the tumult subsided, rather
from being lulled than suppressed. No pun-
ishment whatever was inflicted on the murder-
ers and cannibals of the first day; their con-
duct, perhaps, was not considered to deserve
any.
" It was expected that when the riots of Bar-
kelona were known at Zaragoza, the rabble of
the latter city would have broken out into
similar excesses ; but the authorities had re-
course to the same disgraceful expedient to
appease them which had proved successful
before. They ordered four officers, a priest,
and two peasants, reputed Carlists, to be
strangled, and thus prevented the populace
from becoming murderers, by assuming that
character themselves."
The humane philanthropists of the capital
were not behind their provincial brethren in
similar exploits.
" The first victim was a Franciscan friar
who happened to be on the street. A report
was then spread that the Jesuits had advised
the deed ; and the senseless mob, frantic for
revenge, rushed to the college. The gate hav-
ing been forced open, the first person who
entered was one dressed in the uniform of the
urban-militia, who told the students to quit the
house, as it was not in search of them that
they came.
"Instantly the college was filled with an
armed mob, thirsting for blood, and the mas-
sacre began. Professor Bastan was bayoneted,
I and Father Ruedas stabbed to death. The
I professor of history and geography, Father
Saun, was next murdered, and his head beat
to pieces with clubs and hammers. The pro-
fessor of rhetoric was dragged from his hiding-
place, and that he might be the sooner de-
j spatched, knives were added to the murderous
I weapons which had been before employed.
Another master, endeavouring to escape, was
1 fired upon by an urbano ; and as the shot
1 mi.ssed, he was bayoneted in the back. Three
I in disguise escaped into the streets, hoping by
i this means to save their lives ; but they were
344
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
murdered by the mob, to whom regular com-
munications were made of what was passing
inside the building. On every side were
heard the groans of the dying, the screams of
those who were vainly endeavouring to es-
cape, the discharge of muskets, and the ex-
ulting shouts of the murderers. The students
had been driven from these scenes of horror ;
but several returned, in the hope of befriending
their masters. One child threw his slender
form over the prostrate body of his preceptor,
and shared in the wounds under which he
breathed his last.
" In one house perished fifteen individuals,
assassinated in the most barbarous manner by
those actually employed and armed to keep
the public peace, some in regimentals and
others in disguise. The provincial regiment
of Granada then formed part of the Madrid
garrison ; and the officers and men belonging
to it, who were not passive spectators, appeared
among the murderers. The death of their
victims was not sufficient to satiate the fury
of the rioters : some had their entrails torn out,
others were dragged through the streets with
ropes round their necks, and acts of cannibal-
ism were perpetrated so abominable and dis-
gusting that it is impossible to enter into their
loathsome details. The Franciscan convent
and other places were the scenes of similar
atrocities. These unhappy victims of ruthless
liberalism perverting to its own ends the blind-
ness of the multitude, had taken no part in 1
politics ; their only crime was that they were
clergymen and instructors of youth."
Amidst these hideous atrocities, the Madrid
liberals, and the Cadiz and Barcelona cliques,
have steadily, and amidst the loud applause of
their hungry dependents, pursued the usual
selfish objects of democratic ambition. All
useful establishments, all which relieved or
blessed the poor were rooted out, new offices
and jurisdictions were created in every di-
rection, numberless commissions were issued ;
and the well-paid liberals began to roll in their
carriages, and keep their boxes at the opera.
The property of the Church, which in Spain is
literally the endowment at once of education
and the poor, was the first to be rooted out.
Its character and usefulness is thus described
by our author :
" The convents in Spain are not like those
which we had among us in Catholic times;
and their suppression will necessarily excite
indignation, besides giving rise to great abuses.
They mostly partook of the character of the
hospice, particularly in the northern provinces.
To the peasants they often served as banking
establishments, and greatly favoured agricul-
tural improvements. The friars acted as
schoolmasters, advocates, physicians, and
apothecaries. Besides feeding and clothing
the poor, and visiting the sick, they afforded
spiritual consolation. They were considerate
landlords and indulgent masters. They were
peace-makers in domestic broils ; and if a
harvest failed, they supplied the seed that was
to be confided to the earth the next year. They
also provided periodical amusements and fes-
tivities, which the peasant will see abandoned
with regret. Most of the convents had fivnda-
ciones, or endowments, for professors who
taught rhetoric, philosophy, &c., besides keep-
ing schools open for the poor. They also
supplied curates when wanted, and their
preachers are considered the best in Spain.
" Without entering into the question of the
legality of these suppressions, or pointing out
the folly of a government proceeding to such
extremes that is not sure of its own existence
for half a year, it may be stated, that all the
expedients resorted to in our Henry VIII.'s time
to bring the monastic orders into disrepute,
have been practised by the Spanish liberals,
and have failed. On the 19th January, 1836,
the monks in Madrid were driven out of their
convents at two o'clock in the morning, with-
out the slightest regard to age or infirmity.
After being grossly insulted and reviled,
several were waylaid in the streets by the rayo,
or thunderbolt party, and cudgelled in the most
unmerciful manner. The measure of eject-
ment was simultaneously carried into exe-
cution wherever the government could enforce
its commands ; the great object in view being
to seize on money, plate, and valuables.
" The liberals have appointed commissions to
receive the confiscated property, and the same
abuses occur as in 1822. One instance will
suffice in the way of illustration. The convent
of St. John of God, at Cadiz, well known to
many of our countrymen, formerly fed and
clothed a large number of poor; and its mem-
bers, being mostly medical men, attended the
sick and administered medicine gratis. The
relief afforded by this institution was incalcu-
lable; and yet its funds, economically adminis-
tered, and added only by voluntary donations,
were sufficient to satisfy every claim. The
liberals took its administration upon them-
selves ; and the persons intrusted with it soon
grew rich and had their boxes at the theatre. They
had profits on the contracts for provisions,
medicine, and other supplies. The amount of
relief afforded was also diminished; and yet,
at the end of the first year, the ordinary funds
were exhausted, and the new administrators
obliged to make public appeals to the hu-
mane."
The destitution thus inflicted on the clergy,
and misery on the poor, has been unbounded.
" The suppression lately ordained by the
Christino government may be called a general
one, and the number of establishments to which
it had extended at the end of last September,
was estimated at 1937, leaving 23,699 ejected
inmates, whose annual maintenance, if paid at
the promised rate, would not be less than
400.000/."
The creation of new jurisdictions, and the
extirpation of all the ancient landmarks, was
as favourite an object with the Spanish as it
had been with the French, or now is with the
English revolutionists.
"The plan for the territorial divisions was
also put forward. It may be here proper to
to observe, that formerly Spain was divided
; into fourteen sections, unequal in extent and
| population. It was now proposed to divide the
I territory, including the adjacent islands, into
i forty-nine provinces, or districts, taking the
1 names of their respective capitals, except Na-
CARLIST STRUGGLE IN SPAIN.
345
varre, Biscay, Guipuscoa, and Alava, which I
were to preserve their ancient denominations.
The principality of Asturias was to become
the province of Oviedo. Andalusia was to be
parcelled out into seven provinces ; Aragon,
into three ; New Castile, into five; Old Castile,
into eight; Catalonia, into four; Estremadura,
into two; Galicia, into four; Leon, into three;
Murcia, into two; and Valencia, into three.
To each it was wished to give as near as pos-
sible a population of 250,000 persons ; and the
census taken in 1833, amounting to 12,280,000
voluntarily joined their standards to those of a
power which had begun the infamous system
of giving no quarter, and despite all the efforts
of the Duke of Wellington's mission, had re-
sumed it, and was prosecuting it with relent-
less rigour. They marched along with those
exterminating bands, into valleys where they
had burned every house, and slaughtered every
second inhabitant, and clothed in weeds every
mother and sister that survived. They march-
ed along with these execrable bands, without
any condition, without either proclaiming for
may have been on the Biscayan shore, they
have prolonged for two years, beyond the pe-
riod when it would otherwise have terminated,
souls, was taken for a standard. A new j themselves, or exacting from their allies any
magistrate, called sub-delegate, was to be j other and more humane system of warfare,
appointed to each province, and act under By their presence, however inefficient they
the immediate orders of the minister Del Fo-
ment o."
And it is to support SUCH A CAUSE that the
Quadruple Alliance was formed, and Lord the heart-rending civil war of Spain. If the
John Hay, and the gallant marines of England 20,000 English and French auxiliaries, who
sent out, and 500,000^. worth of arms and i retained an equal force of Carlists inactive in
ammunition furnished to the revolutionary j their front had been removed, can there be a
government ! Lord Palmerston says all this ! doubt Don Carlos would have been on the
was done, because it is for the interest of Enu, land j throne, and peace established in Spain two
to promote the establishment of liberal insti- 1 years ago 1 How many thousand of Spanish
tutions in all the adjoining states. Is it, then, j old men and women have been slaughtered,
for the "interest of England" to establish uni- j while Evans virtually held the hands of their
versal suffrage, a single chamber, and a power- 1 avenging heroes 1 We have thus voluntarily
less throne, in the adjoining countries, in order j ranged ourselves beside a frightful exterminat-
that the reflection of their lustre there may i ing power; can we be surprised if we are met
tend to their successful introduction into this ! by the severities which his atrocities have
realm? Is it for the interest, any more than ' rendered unavoidable ? We have joined hands
the honour of England, to ally itself with a set i with the murderer; though we may not have
of desperadoes, assassins, and murderers, and j ourselves lifted the dagger, we have held the
to promote, by all the means in its power, the ; victim while our confederates plunged it in
extinction of liberty in those seats of virtuous j his heart, and can we be surprised if we are
institutions the Basque provinces ? What
has been the return which the liberals of Lis-
bon have made for the aid which placed their
puppet on the throne, and gave them the com-
mand of the whole kingdom 1 To issue a
decree raising threefold the duties on every,
species of British manufacture. A similar
result may with certainty be anticipated, after
all the blood and treasure we have wasted, and
deemed fit objects of the terrible law of retri-
bution?
Do we then counsel aid to Don Carlos, or
any assistance to the cause he supports ? Far
from it : we .would not that one Englishman
should be exposed to the contagion of the hide-
ous atrocities which the revolutionists have
committed, and to which the Carlists, in self-
defence, have been driven in every part of
more than all the character we have lost, from \ Spain. What we counsel is, what we have
Evans's co-operation, if he shall succeed in j never ceased to urge ever since this hideous
beating down the Carlist cause; because the | strife began in the Peninsula: Withdraw alto-
urban democracy, which will then be estab- 1 gethcr from it : Bring home the marines, the
lished in uncontrolled power, will be neces- ! auxiliaries, the steamboats; send no more arms
sarily actuated by the commercial passions or ammunition from the Tower ; declare to the
and jealousy of that class in society. j Christines, that till they return to the usages
One word more in regard to the Durango j of civilized war we will not send them another
decree, on which such vehement efforts have | gun under the quadruple treaty. It is a woful
been made to rouse the sympathy and excite ! reflection, that our vast influence with the re-
the indignation of the British people. None j volutionary government, after the quadruple
can deplore that decree more than we do ; none I alliance, was perfectly adequate, if properly
can more earnestly desire its repeal ; and if ! exerted, to have entirely stopt this exterminat-
our humble efforts can be of any avail, we im- i ing warfare. But what must be our reflection,
plore the counsellors of Don Carlos, for the i when we recollect that we have actually sup-
sake of humanity, to stop its execution ; to ob-
tain its repeal. But when it is said that it is
such a stain upon the cause of the Spanish
ported it! And if hereafter a band of Cos-
sacks or Pandours shall land on the coast of
Kent, to perpetuate a bloody strife in the realms
Conservatives, as renders their cause unworthy j of England, to support the savage excesses of
of the support of any good man, we are prompt- | an Irish civil war, and spread mourning weeds
ed to ask what cause did the English merce- i and wo through every cottage in England, it
naries go out to support? Was it the cause is no more than we have done to the Biscay
of civilized, humane, legalized warfare ? No !
it was that of murder, robbery, and plunder, of
massacred babes and weltering valleys, of
conflagration, rapine, and extermination. They
.44
mountaineers, and no more than what, under
a just retribution, we may expect to endure
from some equally unjust and uncalled-for ag-
gression.
346
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
WELLINGTON.*
MY Lord Provost, and gentlemen, I am
not sorry this meeting is not unanimous
truth is, in the end, always best elicited by
the conflict of opposite opinions, and those
who came here to record their sentiments of
the merits of the Duke of Wellington need
never fear the freest discussion or the most
searching inquiry. (Applause.) The gen-
tlemen who are of an opposite way of think-
ing were entitled to express their opinions. I
have done my utmost to obtain for them a fair
hearing they have received it their motion
has been put and seconded it has been carried
against them by a large majority and I now
expect from the fair dealing of the opponents
of the Duke of Wellington, the same patient
hearing which we have given to them. (Loud
cheers.) Gentlemen, I agree with part of
what has been said by the mover of the coun-
ter resolution proposed at this meeting. I ad-
mit that war is a calamity, I deplore the fright-
ful miseries which in every age have attended
its footsteps, and I ardently wish from the bot-
tom of my soul that the progress of religion
and knowledge may eventually extinguish its
horrors, that social conflicts may be carried
on with the weapons of truth and argument,
and not by fields of slaughter, and that the
blood-stained glory of the conqueror may here-
after be a tale only of the olden time. (Loud
cheers from the Chartists.) But, gentlemen,
you are to recollect that these blessings are
only the hope of the philanthropist those
times have not yet arrived these blessings are
only yet in prospect, even to the most enthu-
siastic friends of human improvement, and far
less had these principles emerged in the days
of Napoleon. It was neither by the school-
master nor the press ; neither by education
nor knowledge, that the legions of "that mighty
conqueror were to be withstood. (Loud ap-
plause.) A tyranny, compared with which all
that is now experienced or shared by men was
as dust in the balance, then pressed upon the
world, crushing nations by its weight enslav-
ing mankind by its chains. Against this tre-
mendous power, reason, religion, compassion,
and humanity, were alike impotent, the cries
of humanity were answered by discharges of
artillery the groans of the innocent by charges
of cuirassiers. Are we to blame Wellington
then 1 Is it a stigma on his name, because
thrown into an age of Iron, he combated op-
* Speech delivered at Glasgow, February, 1840. when
proposing the erection of a monument to the I>nke of
Wellington in that city, in a public meeting called for
that purpose. The cheers and interruptions are given
as they appeared in the report of it next day, as the
meeting was very stormy, from a strone body of Chart-
ists who had taken possession of the centre of the room
and endeavoured to drown the speaker's voice, which
they had done with the two immediately preceding
speakers ; and a great part of the speech bore refer-
ence to or was occasioned by these interruptions.
pression by its own weapons because, the
destined champion of freedom, he conquered
it by the forces with which itself was assailed 1
(Enthusiastic cheering.) Gentlemen, I thank
you for the patience with which you have
heard me it was what I expected from the
fair dealings of Britons; and in what I have
to say on the character of the Duke of Wel-
lington, I hope I shall not utter a sentiment
which will not find a responsive echo in every
British heart. (Loud cheering.) My lord, it
is difficult to say any thing original on a topic
on which national gratitude has long since
poured forth its encomium, and genius every
where exhausted its eloquence, and regarding
which, so marvellous in the glory it has to re-
count, even the words of truth may seem to be
gilded by the colours of panegyric. (Loud
cheers.) Gentlemen, if I were inclined to do
so, I have been anticipated both in prose and
verse, and I gladly avail myself of the words
of a noble lord, whose heart I know is with
this meeting, and which proves that he has in-
herited from his long line of ancestors not only
a taste for the splendour but the real spirit of
the days of chivalry.* (Loud cheers.) " A
Caesar without his ambition a Pompey with-
out his pride a Marlborough without his
avarice a Frederick without his infidelity, he
approaches nearer to the model of a Christian
hero than any commander who has yet appear-
ed among men." (Loud cheers.) Gentlemen,
I will not speak of his exploits, I will not
speak of Asia entranced by his valour, nor
Europe delivered by his arm. I will recount
his career in the lines of the poet, to which I
am sure all present will listen with delight, if
not from their concurrence in the sentiments,
at least from their admiration of the language.
" Victor on Assaye's esistern plain,
Victor on all the fields of Spain !
Welcome ! thy work of glory done,
Welcome! from dangers greatly dared,
From nations vanquished, nations spared,
Unconquered Wellington."
(Loud cheers.)
But, my lord, it is not the military glories of
Wellington, on which I wish to dwell. They
| have become as household words amongst us,
and will thrill the British heart in every quar-
ter of the globe as long as a drop of British
blood remains in the world. It is the moral
character of the conflict which I chiefly wish
to illustrate, and it is that which I trust will
secure the unanimous applause of even this
varied assembly. (Loud cheers.) He was
| assailed by numbers he met them by skill ;
he was assailed by rapine he encountered it
| by discipline ; he was assailed by cruelty he
vanquished it by humanity; he was assailed
by the powers of wickedness he conquered
Lord Eglinton.
WELLINGTON.
347
them by the constancy of virtue. (Immense
applause, mingled with cries of" No, no," from
the Chartists.) Some of you, I perceive, deny
the reality of these moral qualities; but have
you forgot the contemporaneous testimony of
those who had received his protection, and ex-
perienced his hostility ? Have you forgot that
that hero who had driven Massena at the head
of an hundred thousand men with disgrace out
of the war-wasted and desolate realm of Por-
tugal, was hailed as a deliverer by millions
whom he protected and saved, when he led his
triumphant armies into the valleys of France 1
(Enthusiastic cheering.) If his career was
attended with bloodshed, it was only because
such a calamity is inseparable from the path
alike of the patriot-hero, as of the ravaging
conqueror ; the slaughter of the unresisting
never stained his triumphs ; the pillage of the
innocent never sullied his career. Prodigal of
his own labour, careless of his own life, he
was avaricious only of the blood of his soldiers ;
he won the wealth of empires with his own
good sword, but he retained none but what he
received from the gratitude of the king he had
served and the nation he had saved. (Loud
cheers.) My lord, the glory of the conqueror
is nothing new; other ages have been dazzled
with the phantom of military renown ; other
nations have bent beneath the yoke of foreign
oppression, and other ages have seen the ener-
gies of mankind wither before the march of
victorious power. It has been reserved for our
age alone to witness it has been the high pre-
rogative of Wellington alone to exhibit a more
animating spectacle ; to behold power applied
only to the purposes of beneficence ; victory
made the means of moral renovation, conquest
become the instrument of national resurrec-
tion. (Cheers.) Before the march of his vic-
torious power we have seen the energies of the
world revive; we have heard his triumphant
voice awaken a fallen race to noble duties,
and recall the remembrance of their .pristine
glory; we have seen his banners waving over
the infant armies of a renovated people, and
the track of his chariot-wheels followed, not
by the sighs of a captive, but the blessings of
a liberated world. (Enthusiastic cheers,
mingled with cries of " No, no," from the Chart-
ists.) My lord, we may well say a liberated
world; for it was his firmness which first op-
posed a barrier to the hitherto irresistible
waves of Gallic ambition ; it was his counsel
which traced out the path of European deliver-
ance, and his victories which reanimated the
all but extinguished spirit of European resist-
ance. (Cheers.) My lord, it was from the
rocks of Tores Vedras that the waves of French
conquest first permanently receded; it was
from Wellington's example that Russia was
taught the means of resisting when the day of her
trial arose ; it was from his counsels that there
was traced out to the cabinet of St. Petersburgh
the design of the Moscow campaign (cheers) ;
and it was the contemporaneous victories of
the Duke of Wellington that sustained the
struggle of European freedom in that awful
conflict. When the French legions, in apparently j
invincible strength, were preparing for the fight |
of Borodino, they were startled by the salvos \
from the Russian lines, which announced the
victory of Salamanca. (Cheers.) And when
the Russian army were marching in mournful
silence round their burning capital, and the
midnight sky was illuminated by the flames of
Moscow, a breathless messenger brought the
news of the fall of Madrid (cheers) and the
revived multitude beheld in the triumph of
Wellington, and the capture of the Spanish
capital, an omen of their own deliverance and
the rescue of their own metropolis. (Enthu-
siastic cheers.) Nor were the services of the
Duke of Wellington of less vital consequence
in later times. When the tide of victory had
ebbed on the plains of Saxony, and European
freedom quivered in the balance, at the Con-
gress of Prague, it was Wellington that threw
his sword into the beam by the victory of Vit-
toria, it was the shout of the world at the de-
livered Peninsula which terminated the indeci-
sion of the cabinet of Vienna. (Great ap-
plause.) Vain would have been all the sub-
sequent triumphs of the allies vain the
thunder of Leipsic and the capture of Pans,
if Wellington had not opposed an irrepressible
barrier to the revived power of France on the
plains of Flanders. For what said Napoleon,
when calmly revolving his eventful career in,
the solitude of St. Helena 1 "If Wellington
and the English army had been defeated at
Waterloo, what would have availed all the
myriads of Russians, Austrians, Germans, and
Spaniards, who were crowding to the Rhine,
the Alps, and the Pyrenees?" (Enthusiastic
cheers.)
My lord, I have spoken now only to the
moral effects of the military career of Welling-
ton. I will not speak of his political career.
A quarter of a century has elapsed since his
warlike career terminated, and we now only
feel its benefits. (Loud groans from the Chart-
ists.) A quarter of a century hence, it will be
time enough for the world to decide upon his
civil career. (Cheers intermixed with loud
groans from the Chartists.) Gentlemen, (turn-
ing to the Chartists,) I well know what those
marks of disapprobation mean you mean we
feel the effects of Wellington's career in the
weight of the public debt. (Yes, yes, and loud
cheers from the Chartists.) What! did the
duke create the national debt ? Was there
none of it in existence when he began his
career 1 ? It was made to his hand it was
fixed upon us by Napoleon's powers, and in
what state would you now have been, if, when
you had the national debt on your backs, you
had had the chains of France about your necks?
(Rapturous applause, and the whole meeting
standing up vociferously cheering, with the ex-
ception of the Chartists.) Gentlemen, I have
seen what a commercial city suffers from the
ambition of Napoleon. I have seen a city once
greater and richer than Glasgow, when it had
emerged from twenty years of republican con-
quest. I saw Venice in 1815, and I saw there
a hundred thousand artisans begging their
bread in the streets. (Renewed and long-con-
tinued cheering.) Gentlemen, there is not a
hammer that now falls, nor a wheel revolves,
nor a shuttle that is put in motion, in Glas-
gow, that its power of doing so is not owing
348
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
to the Duke of Wellington ; and you who now
strive to stifle the voice of national gratitude,
owe to him the bread of yourselves and your
children. (Enthusiastic cheering.) And I tell
you, whatever you may now think, so your
own children, and your children's children
will declare. (Immense applause.) Gentle-
men, I have now done with any topics on
which division of opinion can arise. I am
now to speak on a subject, on which, I trust, we
are all agreed, for it relates to the embellish-
ment of Glasgow. It is proposed to refer at
once to a committee full power to carry into
effect the resolutions of this meeting, (cheers.)
and I trust that before a year has elapsed, we
shall see a noble monument, testifying our
gratitude, erected in the heart of this great
city. We have seen what has been lost in
other places, by not at once coming to a deter-
mination, in the outset, on the design. We
have seen the subscription for Sir Walter
Scott's monument at Edinburgh still unproduc-
tive, though seven years have elapsed since
the national gratitude had decreed a monument.
Gentlemen, while Edinburgh deliberates, let
Glasgow act (cheers) ; and let ours be the
first monument erected to the Duke of Wel-
lington in Scotland. (Loud cheers.) Gentle-
men, you will hear the list of the subscriptions
already obtained read out, and a noble monu-
ment it already is, for the west of Scotland,
embracing as it does splendid donations from
the highest rank and greatest in fortune, from
the first peer of the realm, to those princely
merchants who are raising up a fresh aristo-
cracy in the land. (Cheers.) But, gentlemen,
it is not by such testimonies alone that the
public gratitude is to be expressed ; it is the
multitude who must show "the electric shock
of a nation's gratitude." (Cheers.) And grate-
ful to the Duke of Wellington as will be the
magnificent donations of the leaders of the
land, he will be still more gratified by th,e
guineas of the citizens, and the half crowns of
the artisans. Gentlemen, I am sure that the
gratifying result will be witnessed in this great
city, and that the monument which will be
reared amongst us, will remain through many
ages a durable record of the magnificence and
gratitude of the west of Scotland. (Loud ap-
plause.) And there is a peculiar propriety in
erecting in our city a statue to the Duke of
Wellington. Glasgow already has a statue
to her brave townsman, Sir John Moore, the
hero who first boldly fronted the terrors of the
Gallic legions. She has a statue to Watts,
that matchless sage, whose genius has added
a new power to the forces of nature, and who
created the wealth which sustained the con-
test with Napoleon's power. And now you
will have a statue to Wellington, who brought
the conquest to a triumphant conclusion; and
has bequeathed to his country peace to create,
and liberty to enjoy, the splendour which we be-
hold around us. (Loud cheers.) I have the ho-
nour to move " that a committee be now appoint-
ed for the purpose of procuring subscriptions,
with full power to name sub-committees, and
take all other measures necessary for carrying
into effect these resolutions." (Loud cheers.)
THE AFFGHANISTAUN EXPEDITION.*
" ITS the light of precaution," says Gibbon,
" all conquest must be ineffectual unless it
could be universal; for, if successful, it only
involves the belligerent power in additional
difficulties and a wider sphere of hostility." All
ages have demonstrated the truth of this pro-
found observation. The Romans conquered
the neighbouring states of Italy and Gaul, only
to be brought into collision with the fiercer and
more formidable nations of Germany and Par-
thia. Alexander overran Media and Persia,
only to see his armies rolled back before the
arms of the Scythians, or the innumerable le-
gions of India, and the empire of Napoleon,
victorious over the states of Germany and Italy,
recoiled at length before the aroused indigna-
tion of the Northern powers. The British em-
pire in India, the most extraordinary work of
conquest which modern times have exhibited,
forms no exception to the truth of this general
principle. The storming of Seringapatam, and
the overthrow of the house of Tippoo, only ex-
posed us to the incursions of the Mahratta
horse. The subjugation of the Mahrattas in-
volved us in a desperate and doubtful conflict
* Blackwood's Magazine, February, 1840.
I with the power of Holkar. His subjugation
j brought us in contact with the independent
and brave mountaineers of Nepaul ; and even
their conquest, and the establishment of the
British frontier on the summit of the Hima-
layan snows, have not given that security to
our Eastern possessions for which its rulers
have so long and strenuously contended ; and
beyond the stream of the Indus, beyond the
mountains of Cashmere, it has been deemed
necessary to establish the terror of the British
arms, and the influence of the British name.
That such an incursion into Central Asia
has vastly extended the sphere both of our di-
plomatic and hostile relations; that it has
brought us in contact with the fierce and bar-
barous northern tribes, and erected our out-
posts almost within sight of the Russian vi-
dettes, is no impeachment whatever of the wis-
dom and expediency of the measure, if it has
been conducted with due regard to prudence
and the rules of art in its -execution. It is the
destiny of all conquering powers to be exposed
to this necessity of advancing in their course.
Napoleon constantly said, and he said with jus-
tice, that he was not to blame for the conquests
he undertook ; that he was forced on by invin-
THE AFFGHANISTAUN EXPEDITION.
349
cible necessity; that he was the head merely
of a military republic, to whom exertion was
existence; and that the first pause in his ad-
vance was the commencement of his fall. No
one can have studied the eventful history of
his times, without being satisfied of the jus-
tice of these observations. The British empire
in the east is not, indeed, like his in Europe,
one based on injustice and supported by pil-
lage. Protection and improvement, not spo-
liation and misery, have followed in the rear
of the English flag ; and the sable multitudes
of Hindostan now permanently enjoy that pro-
tection and security which heretofore they had
only tasted under the transient reigns of Baber
and Aurungzebe. But still, notwithstanding
all its experienced benefits, the British sway
in Hindostan is essentially that of opinion ; it
is the working and middle classes who are
benefitted by their sway. The interest and
passions of too many of the rajahs and inferior
nobility are injured by its continuance, to ren-
der it a matter of doubt that a large and formi-
dable body of malcontents are to be found
within the bosom of their territories, who
would take advantage of the first external dis-
aster to raise again the long-forgotten standard
of independence; and that, equally with the
empire of Napoleon in Europe, our first move-
ment of serious retreat would be the com-
mencement of our fall. Nor would soldiers be
wanting to aid the dispossessed nobles in the
recovery of their pernicious auihority. Who-
ever raises the standard of even probable war-
fare is sure of followers in India ; the war
castes throughout Hindostan, the Rajpoots of
the northern provinces, are panting for the sig-
nal of hostilities, and the moment the standard
of native independence is raised, hundreds of
thousands of the Mahratta horse would cluster
around it, ardent to carry the spear and the
torch into peaceful villages, and renew the glo-
rious days of pillage and conflagration.
But it is not only within our natural fron-
tier of the Indus and the Himalaya that the ne-
cessity of continually advancing, if we would
exist in safety, is felt in the British empire in
the east. The same necessity is imposed upon
it by its external relations with foreign powers.
It is too powerful to be disregarded in the
balance of Asiatic politics ; its fame has ex-
tended far into the regions of China and Tar-
tary ; its name must be respected or despised
on the banks of the Oxus and the shores of the
Araxes. The vast powers which lie between
the British and Russian frontiers cannot re-
main neutral ; they must be influenced by the
one or the other power. " As little," said Alex-
ander the Great, " as the heavens can admit
of two suns, can the earth admit of two rulers
of the East"
Strongly as all nations, in all ages, have
been impressed with military success as the
mainspring of diplomatic advances, there is no
part of the world in which it is so essential to
political influence as in the east. Less in-
formed than those of Europe in regard to the
real strength of their opponents, and far less
prospective in their principles of policy, the
nations of Asia are almost entirely governed
by present success in their diplomatic con-
duct. Remote or contingent danger produces
little impression upon them ; present peril is
only looked at. They never negotiate till the
dagger is at their throat; but when it is there,
they speedily acquiesce in whatever is exacted
of them. Regarding the success of their oppo-
nents as the indication of the will of destiny,
they bow, not only with submission, but with
cheerfulness to it. All our diplomatic advances
in the east, accordingly, have followed in the
train of military success ; all our failures have
been consequent on the neglect to assert with
due spirit the rights and dignity of the British
empire. The celebrated Roman maxim, par-
cere subjectis ct debdlare superbos, is not there a
principle of policy ; it is a rule of necessity
It is the condition of existence to every power
ful state.
The court of Persia is, in an especial man-
ner, subject to the influence of these external
considerations. Weakened by long-continued
and apparently interminable domestic feuds ;
scarce capable of mustering round the stand-
ards of Cyrus and Darius twenty thousand
soldiers ; destitute alike of wealth, military or-
ganization, or central powers, the kings of
Tehran are yet obliged to maintain a doubtful
existence in the midst of neighbouring and
powerful states. The Ottoman empire has
long from the west assailed them, and trans-
mitted, since the era when the religion of Mo-
hammed was in its cradle, the indelible hatred
of the successors of Othman against the fol-
lowers of Ali. In later times, and since the
Cross has become triumphant over the Cres-
cent, the Russian empire has pressed upon them
with ceaseless ambition from the north. More
permanently formidable than the standards of
either Timour or Genghis Khan, her disciplined
battalions have crossed the Caucasus, spread
over the descending hills of Georgia, and
brought the armies of Christ to the, foot of
Mount Ararat and the shores of the Araxes.
Even the south has not been freed from omi-
nous signs and heart-stirring events ; the fame
of the British arms, the justice of the British
rule, have spread far into the regions of Cen-
tral Asia; the storming of Seringapatam, the
fall of Scindiah, the conquest of Holkar, have
resounded among the mountains of Affghanis-
taun, and awakened in the breasts of the Per-
sians the pleasing hope, that from those dis-
tant regions the arms of the avenger are des-
tined to come; and that, amidst the conten-
tions of England and Russia, Persia may again
emerge to her ancient supremacy among the
nations of the earth.
The existence of Persia is so obviously
threatened by the aggressions of Russia, the
peril in that quarter is so instant and apparent,
that the Persian government have never failed
to take advantage of every successive impulse
communicated to British influence, by their
victories in Hindostan, to cement their alliance
and dnw closer their relation with this coun-
try. The storming of Seringapatam was im-
mediately followed by a defensive treaty be-
tween Persia and Great Britain, in 1800, by
which it was stipulated, that the English mer-
chant should be placed on the footing of the
most favoured nation, and that no hostile
20
350
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
European force should be permitted to pass
through the Persian territories towards Hin-
dostan. Every successive addition made to
our Indian empire; every triumph of our In-
dian arms, drew closer the relations between
Great Britain and the court of Tehran ; and it
was not till the wretched days of economy and
retrenchment began, till the honour of 'Eng-
land was forgotten in the subservience to popu-
lar clamour, and her ultimate interests over-
looked in the thirst for immediate popularity,
that any decay in our influence with the court
of Persia was perceptible. In those disas-
trous days, however, when the strong founda-
tions of the British empire were loosened, in
obedience to the loud democratic clamour for
retrenchment, the advantages we had gained
in Central Asia were entirely thrown away.
With an infatuation which now appears al-
most incredible, but which was then lauded by
the whole Liberal party as the very height of
economic wisdom, we destroyed our navy at
Bombay, thereby surrendering the Red Sea
and the Persian Gulf to any hostile power that
chose to occupy them ; we reduced our Indian
army from two hundred and eighty, to one
hundred and sixty thousand men, thereby ex-
posing ourselves to the contempt of the native
powers, by whom respect is never paid but to
strength, and weakening the attachment of the
native population, who found themselves in
great part shut out from the dazzling career of
British conquest; and we suffered Persia to
combat, single-handed, the dreadful power of
Russia in 1827, and never sent either a guinea
or a bayonet to save the barrier of Hindostan
from Muscovite dismemberment. These dis-
graceful deeds took place during the halcyon
days of Liberal administration ; when the
Tories nominally held the reins, but the Whigs
really possessed the power of government ;
when that infallible criterion of right and
wrong, popular opinion, was implicitly obey-
ed ; when the democratic cry for retrenchment
pervaded, penetrated, and paralyzed every de-
partment of the state ; and when, amidst the
mutual and loud compliments of the ministe-
rial and opposition benches, the foundations
of the British empire were loosened, and the
strength of the British arms withered in the
hands of conceding administrations. The
consequences might easily have been fore-
seen ; province after province was reft by the
Muscovite invaders from the Persian empire ;
fortress after fortress yielded to the terrible
powers of their artillery; the torrent of the
Araxes was bestrode by their battalions ; the
bastions of Erivan yielded to their cannon ;
and Persia avoided total conquest only by
yielding up its whole northern barrier and
most warlike provinces to the power of Rus-
sia. It is immaterial to us whether these con-
sequences took place under the nominal rule of
Lord Liverpool, Mr. Canning, or the Duke of
Wellington ; suffice it to say, that they all took
place during the government of the masses ;
and that the principles on which they were
founded were those which had been advocated
for half a century by the whole Whig party,
and which were -then, as they still are, praised
and lauded to the skies by the whole Liberal
leaders of every denomination.
The consequences of this total dereliction
of national character and interests, in order to
gratify the short-sighted passions of an illibe-
ral democracy, rapidly developed themselves.
Russia, encouraged by the success with which
she had broken the barrier of Hindostan in
Central Asia, continued her aggressions on
the Ottoman power in Europe. The Turkish
fleet was destroyed by the assistance of a Bri-
tish force at Navarino ; the Russian arms were
carried across the Balkan by British suffer-
ance to Adrianople ; and the Ottoman empire,
trembling for its existence, was glad to sub-
scribe a treaty which virtually surrendered the
Danube and its whole northern defences to the
Russian power. Not content with this, the
rulers of England, during the halcyon days of
the Reform mania, descended to still lower de-
gradation and unparalleled acts of infatuation.
When the Pasha of Egypt revolted against
the Ottoman power, which seemed thus alike
deserted by its allies and crushed by its ene-
mies, and the disastrous battle of Koniah
threatened to bring the Egyptian legions to the
shores of Scutari, we turned a deaf ear to the
earnest prayer of the distressed sultan for aid.
Engrossed in striving to conquer Antwerp in
northern, and Lisbon in southern Europe, for
the advantage of revolutionary France, we
had not a guinea nor a gun to spare to pre-
serve the interests, or uphold the honour of
England in the Dardanelles, and we threw
Turkey, as the price of existence, into the
arms of Russia. The rest is well known. The
Muscovite battalions gave the requisite aid;
the domes of Constantinople reflected the
lights of their bivouacs on the mountain of the
giant; the arms of Ibrahim recoiled before
this new and unexpected antagonist, and the
treaty of Unkiar Skelessi delivered Turkey,
bound hand and foot, into the hands of Russia,
rendered the Euxine a Muscovite lake, and for
ever shut out the British flag from the naviga-
tion of its waters, or the defence of the Turk-
ish metropolis.
The natural results of this timorous and va-
cillating policy, coupled with the well-known
and fearful reduction of our naval and military
force in India, were not slow in developing
themselves. It soon appeared that the British
name had ceased to be regarded with any re-
spect in the east; and that all the influence
derived from our victories and diplomacy in
Central Asia had been lost. It is needless to
go into details, the results of which are well
known to the public, though the diplomatic
secrets connected with them have not yet been
revealed. Suffice it to say, that Persia, which
for a quarter of a century had been the firm
ally, and in fact the advanced post of the Bri-
tish power in India, deserted by us, and sub-
dued by Russia, was constrained to throw her-
self into the arms of the latter. The Persian
army was speedily organized on a better and
more effective footing, under direction of Rus-
sian officers ; and several thousand Russian
troops, disguised under the name of deserters,
were incorporated with, arid gave consistency
THE AFFGHANISTAUN EXPEDITION.
351
to, the Persian army. The British officers,
who had hitherto had the direction of that
force, were obliged to retire; insult, the inva-
riable precursor in the east of injury, was
heaped upon the British subjects ; redress was
demanded in vain by the British ambassador ;
and Sir John M'Neill himself was at length
obliged to leave the court of Tehran, from the
numerous crosses and vexations to which he
was exposed. Having thus got quit of the
shadow even of British influence throughout
the whole of Persia, the Russians were not
long following out the now smoothed high-
way towards Hindostan : the siege of Herat,
the head of the defile which leads to the Indus,
was undertaken by the Persian troops, under
Russian guidance; and Russian emissaries
and diplomacy, ever preceding their arms, had
already crossed the Himalaya snows, and were
stirring up the seeds of subdued but unex-
tinguished hostility in the Birman empire,
among the Nepaulese mountaineers, and the
discontented rajahs of Hindostan.
There is but one road by which any hostile
army ever has, or ever can, approach India from
the northward. Alexander the Great, Timour,
Gengis Khan, Nadir-Shah, have all penetrated
Hindostan by the same route. That road has, for
three thousand years, been the beaten and well-
known track by which the mercantile commu-
nication has been kept up between the plains of
the Ganges and the steppes of Upper Asia. He-
rat stands at the head of this defile. Its popula-
tion, which amounts to one hundred thousand
souls, and wealth which renders it by far the
most important city in the heart of Asia, have
been entirely formed by the caravan trade,which,
from time immemorial, has passed through its
walls, going and returning from Persia to
Hindostan. When Napoleon, in conjunction
with the Emperor Paul, projected the invasion
of our Indian possessions by a joint army of
French infantry and Russian Cossacks, the
route marked out was Astrakan, Astrabad, He-
rat, Candahar, the Bolan pass, and the Indus,
to Delhi. There never can be any other road
overland to India, but that or the one from Ca-
bool, through the Kybor pass to the Indus,
for, to the eastward of it, inaccessible snowy
ranges of mountains preclude the possibility
of an army getting through ; while to the west,
parched and impassable deserts afford obsta-
cles still more formidable, which the returning
soldiers of Alexander overcame only with the
loss of half their numbers. It is quite clear,
therefore, that Herat is the vital point of com-
munication between Russia and Hindostan ;
and that whoever is in possession of it, either
actually or by the intervention of a subsidiary
or allied force, need never disquiet himself
about apprehensions that an enemy will pene-
trate through the long and difficult defiles
which lead in its rear to Hindostan.
Since our empire in India had waxed so
powerful as to attract the envy of the Asiatic
tramontane nations, it became, therefore, a
matter of necessity to maintain our influence
among the nations who held the keys of this
pass. Affghanistaun was to India what Pied-
mont has long been to Italy; even a second
Hannibal or Napoleon might be stopped in its
long mountain passes and interminable barren
hills. If, indeed, the politics of India could be
confined only to its native powers, it might be
wise to consider the Indus and the Himalaya
as our frontier, and to disregard entirely the
distant hostility or complicated diplomacy of
the northern Asiatic states. But as long as
India, like Italy, possesses the fatal gift of beau-
ty ; as long as its harvests are coveted by
northern sterility, and its riches by barbarian
poverty; so long must the ruler of the land
preserve with jealous care the entrance into
its bosom, and sit with frowning majesty at
the entrance of the pass by which " the blue-
eyed myriads of the Baltic coast" may find ?
way into its fabled plains.
There was a time when British influence
might with ease, and at little cost, have been
established in the Affghanistaun passes. Dost
Mohammed was a usurper, and his legal claims
to the throne could not bear a comparison with
those of Shah Shoojah. But he was a usurper
who had conciliated and won the affections of
the people, and his vigour and success had
given a degree of prosperity to Affghanistaun
which it had not for centuries experienced.
Kamram, the sultan of Herat, was connected
with him by blood and allied by inclination,
and both were animated by hereditary and in-
veterate hatred of the Persian power. They
would willingly, therefore, have united them-
selves with Great Britain to secure a barrier
against northern invasion ; and such an al-
liance would have been founded on the only
durable bond of connection among nations
mutual advantage, and the sense of a formi-
dable impending common danger. The states
of Candahar and Cabool were in the front of
the danger; the Russian and Persian arms
could never have approached the Indus until
they were subdued ; and consequently their
adhesion to our cause, if we would only give
them effectual support, might be relied upon
as certain. It is well known that Dost Mo-
hammed might have been firmly attached to
the British alliance within these few years by the
expenditure of a hundred or even fifty thousand
pounds, and the aid of a few British officers to
organize his forces. And when it is recol-
lected that the Sultan of Herat, alone and un-
aided by us, held out against the whole power
of Persia, directed by Russian officers, for one
year and nine months, it is evident both with
what a strong spirit of resistance to northern
aggression the Affghanistaun states are ani-
mated, and what elements of resistance they
possess among themselves, even when un-
aided, against northern ambition.
The immense advantage of gaining the sup-
port of the tribes inhabiting the valley of
AfTghan, thus holding in their hands the keys
of Hindostan, was forgone by the British
power in India, partly from the dilapidated
state to which the army had been reduced by
the miserable retrenchment forced upon the
government by the democratic cry for econo-
my at home, and partly from the dread of in-
volvingourselves in hostility with Runjeet Sing,
the formidable chief of Lahore, whose hostility
to the Affghanistauns was hereditary and in-
veterate. There can be little doubt that the
352
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
conclusion of a treaty, offensive and defensive,
with the powers of Cabool, would have ex-
cited great discontent, if not provoked open
hostility, at the court of Lahore. In relinquish-
ing their hold of the Affghanistaun states, from
the dread of compromising their relations with
the wily potentate of the Indus, the British
government in India were only acting upon
that system of temporizing, conceding, and '
shunning present danger, which has charac-
terized all their public acts ever since the in-
fluence of the urban masses became predomi-
nant in the British councils. But it is now j
apparent, that in breaking with the Affghans i
to conciliate the rajah, the British incurred the j
greater ultimate, to avoid the present lesser J
danger. Runjeet Sing, indeed, was a formi- 1
dable power, with seventy thousand men, and
one hundred and fifty pieces of cannon under
his command. But his situation, between the
British territory on the one side, and the Aff-
ghans on the other, rendered him incapable of
making any effectual resistance. His military
force was by no means equal to what had been
wielded by Tippoo or the Mahrattas, and his
rear was exposed to the incursions of his he-
reditary and inveterate enemies in the Affghan-
istaun mountains. Still, more than all, his
territories were pierced by the great and navi-
gable river of the Indus the best possible
base for British operations, capable of con-
veying both the muniments of war and the
provisions for an army into the heart of his
dominions. In these circumstances, it is evi-
dent that the submission of Runjeet Sing must
soon have become a matter of necessity ; or,
at all events, even if we had been compelled
to commence hostilities with him, it would
have been a far less formidable contest than
that into which we have been driven, by aban-
doning the Affghans in the late expedition to
Cabool. The one would have been what the
subjugation and conquest of Prussia was to
Napoleon, the other was an expedition fraught
with all the cost and perils of the advance to
Moscow.
Notwithstanding these perils and this cost,
however, we have no doubt that, at the time it
was undertaken, the expedition to Affghan-
istaun had become a matter of necessity. We
had been reduced to such a pass by the eco-
nomy, concession, and pusillanimity of former
governments, that we had no alternative but
either to see the whole of Central Asia and
Northern Hindostan arrayed in one formidable
league, under Russian guidance, against us, or
to make a desperate and hazardous attempt to
regain our lost character. We have preferred
the latter alternative; and the expedition of
Lord Auckland, boldly conceived and vigorous-
ly executed, has hitherto, at least, been crowned
with the most signal success. That it was
also attended with great and imminent hazard
is equally certain ; but the existence of that
peril, imposed upon us by the short-sighted
parsimonious spirit of the mercantile demo-
cratic communities which for fifteen years
past have swayed the British empire, is no
impeachment whatever, either of the wisdom
or necessity of the adventurous step which
was at last resolved on. It only shows the
straits to which a great nation must speedily
be reduced when its government, in an evil
hour, yields to the insidious cry for democra-
tic retrenchment.
Already the beneficial effects of this bold
policy have become apparent. The crossing
of the Indus by a powerful British army; the
surmounting of the hills of Cashmere; the
passage of the Bolan defile; the storming of
Ghuznee; the fall of Candahar and Cabool,
and the restoration of Shah Shoojah to the
throne of his ancestors; have resounded
through the whole of Asia, and restored, after
its eclipse of fifteen years, the honour of the
British name. The doubtful fidelity of the
Rajah of Lahore has been overawed into sub-
mission ; the undisguised hostility of the court
of Persia has terminated, and friendly rela-
tions are on the eve of being re-established ;
and the indecision of the Sultan of Herat and
his brave followers has been decided by the
terror of the British arms, and the arrival of
a train of artillery within its ruined bastions.
As Britons, we rejoice from the bottom of our
hearts at these glorious successes; and we
care not who were the ministry at the head of
affairs when they were achieved. They were
undertaken in a truly British spirit executed
by whom they may, they emanated from con-
servative principles. As much as the ruinous
reductions and parsimonious spirit of Lord
William Bentinck's administration bespoke
the poisonous influence of democratic re-
trenchment in the great council of the empire,
so much does the expedition to Affghanistaun
bespeak the felicitous revival of the true English
spirit in the same assembly. At both periods
it is easy to see, that, though not nominally
possessed of the reins of power, her majesty's
opposition really ruled the state. In the Aff-
ghanistaun expedition there was very little of
the economy which cut in twain the Indian
army, but very much of the spirit which ani-
mated the British troops at Assaye and Las-
warree ; there was very little of the truckling
which brought the Russians to Constantinople,
but a great deal of the energy which carried
the English to Paris.
In a military point of view, the expedition
to Affghanistaun is one of the most memorable
events of modern times. For the first time since
the days of Alexander the Great, a. civilized arrny
has penetrated the mighty barrier of deserts
and mountains which separates Persia from
Hindostan ; and the prodigy has been exhi-
bited to an astonished world, of a remote is-
land in the European seas pushing forward its
mighty arms into the heart of Asia, and carry-
ing its victorious standards into the strongholds
of Mohammedan faith and the cradle of the
Mogul empire. Neither the intricate streams
of the Punjab, nor the rapid flow of the Indus,
nor the waterless mountains of Affghanistaun,
nor the far-famed bastions of Ghuznee, have
been able to arrest our course. For the first
time in the history of the world, the tide of
conquest has flowed up from Hindostan into
Central j^sia; the European race has asserted
its wonted superiority over the Asiatic; re-
versing the march of Timour and Alexander,
the sable battalions of the Ganges have ap-
,
THE AFFGHANISTAUN EXPEDITION.
353
peared as conquerors on the frontiers of Persia
and on the confines of the steppes of Samar-
cand. So marvellous and unprecedented an
event is indeed fitted to awaken the contempla-
tion of every thoughtful mind. It speaks vo-
lumes as to the mighty step made by the human
race in the last five hundred years, and indi-
cates the vast agency and unbounded effects
of that free spirit, of which Britain is the cen
tre, which has thus, for a season at least, in
verted the heretofore order of nature, made
the natives of Hindostan appear as victors in
the country of Gengis Khan, and brought the
standards of civilized Europe, though in the
inverse order, into the footsteps of the phalanx
of Alexander.
Though such, however, have been the mar-
vels of the British expedition to Central Asia,
yet it is not to be disguised that it was attend-
ed by at least equal perils; and never, per-
haps, since the British standard appeared on
the plains of Hindostan, was their empire in
such danger as during the dependence of this
glorious but hazardous expedition. It was,
literally speaking, to our Indian empire what
the expedition to Moscow was to the European
dominion of Napoleon. Hitherto, indeed, the
result has been different, and we devoutly hope
that, in that respect, the dissimilarity will con-
tinue. But in both cases the danger was the
same. It was the moving forward a large
force so far from its resources and the base
of its operations, which in both cases consti-
tuted the danger. If any serious check had
been sustained by our troops in that distant
enterprise ; if Runjeet Sing had proved openly
treacherous, and assailed our rear and cut off
our supplies when the bulk of our force was
far advanced in the Affghanistaun denies ; if
the Bolan pass had been defended with a cou-
rage equal to its physical strength ; if the
powder-bags which blew open the gates of
Ghuznee had missed fire, or the courage of
those who bore them had quailed under the
extraordinary perils of their mission ; the fate
of the expedition would in all probability have
been changed, and a disaster as great as the
cutting off of Crassus and his legions in Meso-
potamia, would have resounded like a clap of
thunder through the whole of Asia. Few if
any of the brave men who had penetrated into
Affghanistaun would ever have returned ; the
Burmese, the Nepaulese would immediately
have appeared in arms ; the Mahratta and
Pindaree horse would have re-assembled round
their predatory standards; and, while the Bri-
tish empire in Hindostan rocked to its foun-
dation, an Affghanistaun army, directed by
Russian officers, and swelled by the predatory
tribes of Central Asia, would have poured
down, thirsting for plunder and panting for
blood,* on the devoted plains of Hindostan.
Subsequent events have already revealed,
in the clearest manner, the imminent danger
in which the English empire in the East was
placed at the period of the Affghanistaun ex-
pedition. So low had the reputation, of the
* IIpw completely have the subsequent disasters of
AflTghanistaun and the massacre of the Coord Cabul Pass
proved the truth of those presentiments !
45
British name sunk in the east, that even the
Chinese, the most unwarlike and least preci-
pitate of the Asiatic empires, had ventured to
offer a signal injury to the British interests,
and insult to the British name; and so mise-
rably deficient were government in any pre-
vious preparation for the danger, that it was
only twelve months afler the insult was of-
fered, that ships of war could be fitted out in
the British harbours to attempt to seek for re-
dress. It is now ascertained that a vast con-
spiracy had been long on foot in the Indian
peninsula to overturn our power; in the
strongholds of some of the lesser rajahs in the
southern part of the peninsula, enormous mi-
litary stores have been found accumulated ;
and not a doubt can remain, that, if any seri-
ous disaster had happened to our army in
Central Asia, not only would the Burmese
and Nepaulese have instantly commenced hos-
tilities, but a formidable insurrection would
have broken out among the semi-independent
rajahs, in the very vitals of our power. And
yet it was while resting on the smouldering
fires of such a volcano, that Lord William
Bentinck and the Liberal Administration of
India thought fit to reduce our military force
to one-half, and shake the fidelity of the native
troops by the reduction in many important
particulars of their pay and allowances.
But this proved hostility of so large a por-
tion of the -native powers, suggests matter for
further and most serious consideration. It is
clear, that although the British government
has, to an immense degree, benefited India,
yet it has done so chiefly by the preservation
of peace, and the suppression of robbery,
throughout its vast dominions ; and it is pain-
fully evident, that hardly any steps have yet
been taken to reconcile the natives to our do-
minion, by the extended market which we
have opened to their industry. The startling
fact which Mr. Montgomery Martin* has
clearly established, that notwithstanding all
that was prophesied of, the trade to India has
been, including exports and imports, less for
the lust twenty years than for the tiventy years pre-
reding, clearly demonstrates some vital defect
in our colonial policy. Nor is it difficult to
see where that error is to be found. We have
:>aded the produce of India sugar, indigo.
&c. with duties of nearly a hundred per cent.,
while we have deluged them with our own
manufactures at an import duty of tioo or three
per cent. In our anxiety to find a vent for our
own manufactures on the continent of Hin-
lostan, we seem to have entirely forgotten
:hat there was another requisite indispensably
necessary towards the success of fcur projects
even for our own interests, to give them the
means of paying for them. Our conduct to-
wards our colonies, equally with that to foreign
states, has exhibited reciprocity all on one side
with this material difference, that we have,
n our blind anxiety to conciliate foreign
states, allowed the whole benefits of the reci-
* See Colonial Magazine, No. I., article "Foreign
Trade to India," a newly established miscellany, full
f valuable Information, and which, if conducted on
ijrht principles, will prove of the very highest import-
rtcei
2o2
354
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
procity treaties to rest with them ; while, in
our selfish legislation towards our colonial
subjects, we have taken the whole to our-
selves.
So vast is the importance of our Indian pos-
sessions to the British empire, and so bound-
less the market for her manufactures which
might be opened if a truly wise and liberal
policy were pursued towards our Indian pos-
sessions, that there is nothing more to be re-
gretted than that there has not hitherto issued
from the press a popular and readable history
of our Indian possessions. Auber has, indeed,
with great industry, narrated the leading facts,
and supported them by a variety of interesting
official documents. But it is in vain to con-
ceal, that his book possesses no attractions to
the general reader ; and accordingly, although
it will always be a standard book of reference
to persons studying Indian affairs, it has not
and will not produce any impression upon
public thought. It was, therefore, with pecu-
liar pleasure that we recently opened the
Chapters on Indian History, just published by
Mr. Thornton, already so favourably known
to the eastern world by his work on India, and
its State and Prospects. From the cursory ex-
amination we have been able to give to this
very interesting work, we have only reason to
regret that the author has not been more com-
prehensive in his plan, and that, instead of
chapters on British India since the adminis-
tration of Marquis Wellesley, in one volume,
he has not given to the world a full history
of the period in three. The work is distin-
guished by judgment, candour, and research,
and is, beyond all doubt, the most valuable
that has yet appeared on the recent history of
India. We would beg leave only to suggest
to the able author, that his next edition should
extend to two volumes, and should embrace
the whole events of the period of which he
treats ; in particular, that Lord Hastings' war
in 1817 should be more fully enlarged upon;
and that greater exertions should be made, by
the introduction of picturesque incidents and
vivid descriptions, to interest the mass of the
nation in a subject daily rising in importance,
and on which they must soon be called upon
to exercise the functions of direct legislation.
To have engaged in and successfully ac-
complished such an undertaking ; to have
overcome so many and such formidable inter-
vening obstacles, and planted the British guns
in triumph on the walls of Herat, is one of the
most glorious exploits which have ever graced
the long annals of British military prowess.
That our ^oldiers were undaunted in battle
and irresistible in the breach has been often
proved, in the fields alike of Asiatic and Euro-
pean fame. But here they have exhibited
qualities of a totally different kind, and in
which hitherto they were not supposed to
have been equal to the troops of other states.
They have successfully accomplished marches,
unparalleled in modern times for their length
and hardship ; surmounted mountain ranges,
compared to which the passage of the St.
Bernard by Napoleon must sink into insig-
nificance ; and solved the great problem, so
much debated, and hitherto unascertained in
military science, as to the practicability of an
European force, with the implements and in-
cumbrances of modern warfare"" surmounting
the desert and mountain tracts which separate
Persia from Hindostan. Involved as we are
in the pressing interests of domestic politics,
and in the never-ending agitation of domestic
concerns, the attention of the British public
has been little attracted by this stupendous
event; but it is one evidently calculated to fix
the attention of the great military nations on
the continent, and which will stand forth in
imperishable lustre in the annals of history.
There is one result which may and should
follow from our undertakings in Affghanistaun,
which, if properly improved, may render it the
means of strengthening, in the most essential
manner, our possessions in the east. The In-
dus and the Himalaya are the natural frontier
of our dominions ; they are what the Danube
and the Rhine were to the Romans, and the
former of these streams to Napoleon's empire.
The Indus is navigable for twelve hundred
miles, and for nine hundred by steamers of
war and mercantile vessels of heavy burden.
It descends nearly in a straight line from the
impassable barrier of the Himalaya to the
Indian ocean; its stream is so rapid, and its
surface so broad, that no hostile force can pos-
sibly cross it in the face of a powerful defen-
sive marine. Never was an empire which had
such a frontier for its protection ; never was
such abase afforded for military operations as
on both its banks. Provisions for any num-
ber of soldiers ; warlike stores to any amount ;
cannon sufficient for a hundred thousand men,
can with ease ascend its waves. Vain is the
rapidity of its current ; the power of steam
has given to civilized man the means of over-
coming it ; and before many years are expired,
British vessels, from every harbour in the
United Kingdom, may ascend that mighty
stream, and open fresh and hitherto unheard-
of markets for British industry in the bound-
less regions of Central Asia. Now, then, is
the time to secure the advantages, and gain
the mastery of this mercantile artery and fron-
tier stream ; and, by means of fortified stations
on its banks, and a powerful fleet of armed
steamers in its bosom, to gain that impregna-
ble barrier to our Indian possessions, against
which, if duly supported by manly vigour at
home, and wise administration in our Indian
provinces, all the efforts of Northern ambition
will beat in vain.
But there is one consideration deserving of
especial notice which necessarily follows from
this successful irruption. The problem of
marching overland to India is now solved ; the
Russian guns have come down from Peters-
burg to Herat, and the British have come up
from Delhi to Cabool. English cannon are
now planted in the embrasures, against which,
twelve months ago, the Russian shot were di-
rected ; and if twenty thousand British could
march from Delhi to Candahar and Cabool,
forty thousand Russians may march from Jlstraka.il
to the Ganges and Calcutta. Our success has
opened the path in the East to Russian ambi-
tion ; the stages of our ascending army point
out the stations for their descending host ; and
THE AFFGHANISTAUN EXPEDITION.
355
the ease with which our triumph has been
effected, will dispel any doubts which they
may have entertained as to the practicability
of ultimately accomplishing the long-cherish-
ed object of their ambition, and conquering in
Calcutta the empire of the east. This is the
inevitable result of our success : but it is one
which should excite no desponding feeling in
any British bosom ; and we allude to it, not
with the selfish, unpatriotic design of chilling
the national ardour at our success, but in
order, if possible, to arouse the British people
to a sense of the new and more extended duties
to which they are called, and the wider sphere
of danger and hostility in which they are in-
volved.
It is no longer possible to disguise that the
sphere of hostility and diplomatic exertion has
been immensely extended by our success in
Affghanistaun. Hitherto the politics of India
have formed, as it were, a world to themselves ;
a dark range of intervening mountains or arid
deserts were supposed to separate Hindostan
from Central Asia; and however much we
might be disquieted at home by the progress
of Russian or French ambition, no serious
fears were entertained that either would be
able to accomplish the Quixotic exploit of
passing the western range of the Himalaya
mountains. Now, however, this veil has been
rent asunder this mountain screen has been
penetrated. The Russian power in Persia,
and the British in India, now stand face to
face: the advanced posts of both have touched
Herat; the high-road from St. Petersburg to
Calcutta has been laid open by British hands.
The advanced position we have gained must
now be maintained ; if we retire, even from
tributary or allied states, the charm of our in-
vincibility is gone ; the day when the god Ter-
minus recoils before a foreign enemy, is the
commencement of decline. We do not bring
forward this consideration in order to blame
the expedition; but in order to show into what
a contest, and with what a power, it has neces-
sarily brought us. Affghanistaun is the out-
post of Russia; Dost Mohammed, now exiled
from his throne, was a vassal of the Czar ; and
we must now contend for the empire of the
east, not with the rajahs of India^ but the
Moscovite battalions.
The reality of these anticipations as to the
increased amount of the danger of a collision
with Russia, which has arisen from the great
approximation of our outposts to theirs, which
the Affghanistaun ,expedition has occasioned,
is apparent. Already Russia has taken the
alarm, and the expedition against Khiva shows
that she has not less the inclination, than she
unquestionably has the power, of amply pro-
viding for herself against what she deems the
impending danger. No one can for a moment
suppose that that expedition is really intended
to chastise the rebellious Khan. Thirty thou-
sand men, and a large train of artillery, are
not sent against an obscure chieftain in Tar-
tary, whom a few regiments of Cossacks
would soon reduce to obedience. A glance at
the map will at once show what was the real
object in view. Khiva is situated on the Oxus,
and the Oxus flows to the north-west from the
mountains which take their rise from the north-
ern boundary of Cabool. Its stream is navi-
gable to the foot of the Affghanistaun moun-
tains, and from the point where water commu-
nication ceases, it is a passage of only five or
six days to the valley of Cabool. If, therefore,
the Russians once establish themselves at
Cabool, they will have no difficulty in reach-
ing the possessions of Shah Shoojah ; and
their establishment will go far to outweigh
the influence established by the British, by the
j Affghanistaun expedition, among the Affghan-
istaun tribes. Already, if recent accounts can
I be relied on, this effect has become apparent.
Dost Mohammed, expelled from his kingdom,
has found support among the Tartar tribes ;
backed by their support, he has already re-ap-
peared over the hills, and regained part of his
dominions, and the British troops, on their re-
turn to Affghanistaun, have already received
orders to halt. Let us hope that it is not in
our case, as it was in that of the French at
Moscow, that when they thought the campaign
over it was only going to commence.*
Regarding, then, our success in Affghanis-
taun as having accelerated by several years
the approach of this great contest, it becomes
the British nation well to consider what pre-
parations they have made at home to maintain
it. Have we equipped and manned a fleet
capable of withstanding the formidable arma-
ment which Nicholas has always ready for im-
mediate operations in the Baltic 1 Have we
five-and-twenty ships of the line and thirty
frigates ready to meet the thirty .ships of the
line and eighteen frigates which Nicholas has
always equipped for sea at Cronstadt 1 ? Have
we thirty thousand men in London ready to
meet the thirty thousand veterans whom the
Czar has constantly prepared to step on board
his fleet on the shores of the Baltic? Alas!
we have none of these things. We could not,
to save London from destruction or the British
empire from conquest, fit out three ships of the
line to protect the mouth of the Thames, or
assemble ten thousand men to save Woolwich
or Portsmouth from conflagration. What be-
tween Radical economy in our army estimates,
Whig parsimony in our naval preparations,
and Chartist violence in our manufacturing
cities, we have neither a naval nor a military
force to protect ourselves from destruction.
All that Sir Charles Adam, one of the lords
of the admiralty, could say on this subject last
session of parliament was, that we had three
ships of the line and three guard-skips to protect the
shores of England. Never was such a proof
afforded that we had sunk down from the days
of giants into those of pigmies, than the use
of such an argument by a lord of the British
admiralty. Why, thirty years ago, we sent
thirty-nine ships of the line to attack the
enemy's naval station at Antwerp, without
raising the blockade of one of his harbours,
from Gibraltar to the North Cape. Herein,
then, lies the monstrous absurdity, the unpa-
ralleled danger of our present national policy,
that we are vigorous even to temerity in the
* How fatally was this sinister presentiment realized
in consequence of incredible incapacity on the part of
the British authorities in poeaession of Cabool.
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
east, and parsimonious even to pusillanimity
in the west; and that while we give Russia a
fair pretext for hostility, and perhaps some
ground for complaint in the centre of Asia,
we make no preparation whatever to resist her
hostility on the shores of England.
The contrast between the marvellous vigour
of our Indian government and the niggardly
spirit with which all our establishments are
starved down at home, would be inconceivable
if we did not recollect by what opposite mo-
tives our government is regulated in Hindos-
tan and in the British islands. Taxation in
India falls upon the inhabitants, who are unre-
presented; taxation at home falls upon the ten-
pounders, who have a numerical majority in
parliament. We never doubted the inclination
of a democracy to dip their hands in other
people's pockets ; what we doubted was their in-
clination, save 'in the last extremity, to put
them in their own.
Disregard of the future, devotion to present
objects, has, in all ages, been the characteris-
tic of the masses of mankind. We need not
wonder that the British populace are distin-
guished by the well-known limited vision of
their class, when all the eloquence of Demos-
thenes failed in inducing the most enlightened
republic of antiquity to take any measures to
ward off the danger arising from the ambition
of Philip of Macedon; and all the wisdom of
Washington was unable to communicate to
the greatest republic of modern times, strength
or foresight sufficient to prevent its capitol
from being taken, and its arsenals pillaged by
a British division not three thousand strong.
Unless, however, the Conservative press can
succeed in rousing the British public to a sense
of their danger on this subject, and the Con-
servative leaders in Parliament take up the
matter earnestly and vigorously, it may safely
be pronounced that the days of the British em-
pire are numbered.
No empire can possibly exist for any length
of time which provokes hostility in its distant
possessions, while it neglects preparation in
the heart of its power; which buckles on its
gloves and puts on the helmet, but leaves the
breastplate and the cuirass behind. If a Rus-
sian fleet of thirty ships of the line appears
off the Nore, it will not be by deriding their
prowess, or calling them a " pasteboard fleet,"
that the danger will be averted from the arse-
nals and the treasures of England. The Rus-
sian sailors do not possess any thing like the
nautical skill or naval habits of the British;
but they are admirably trained to baH practice,
they possess the native courage of their race,
and will stand to their guns with any sailors in
Europe. Remember the words of Nelson, " Lay
yourself alongside of a Frenchman, but out-
mano3uvre a Russian."
The manifest and not yet terminated dan-
gers with which the Affghanistaun expedition
was attended, should operate as a warning, and
they will be cheaply purchased if they prove a
timely one, to the British people, of the enor-
mous dangers, not merely to the national ho-
nour and independence, but to the vital pecu-
niary interests of every individual in the state,
of continuing any longer the pernicious sys-
tem of present economy, and total disregard
of future danger, which for twenty years has
characterized every department of our gov-
ernment. Why is it that England has now
been compelled in the east, for the first time,
to incur the enormous perils of the Affghan-
istaun expedition to hazard, as it were, the
very existence of our eastern empire upon a
single throw ; and adventure a large propor-
tion of the British army, and the magic charm
of British invincibility, upon a perilous ad-
vance, far beyond the utmost frontiers of Hin-
dostan, into the heart of Asia"? Simply be-
cause previous preparation had been abandon-
ed, ultimate danger disregarded; because re-
trenchment was the order of the day, and go-
vernment yielded to the ever popular cry of
present economy ; because the noble naval and
military establishment of former times was
reduced one-half, or allowed to expire, in the
childish belief that it never again would be re-
quired. Rely upon it, a similar conduct will
one day produce a similar necessity to the
British empire. It will be found, and that too
ere many years have passed over, that the
Duke of Wellington was right when he said,
that a great empire cannot with safety wage a
little war; and that nothing but present dan-
ger and future disaster can result from a sys-
tem which blindly shuts its eyes to the future,
and never looks beyond the conciliating the
masses by a show of economy at the moment.
An Affghanistaun expedition a Moscow cam-
paign will be necessary to ward off impend-
ing danger, or restore the sunk credit of the
British name : happy if the contest can thus be
averted from our own shores, and by incur-
ring distant dangers we can escape domestic
subjugation.
But let not foreign nations imagine, from all
that has been said or may be said by the Con-
servatives on this vital subject, that Great Bri-
tain has now lost her means of defence, or
that, if a serious insult or injury is offered to
her, she may not soon be brought into a condi-
tion to take a fearful vengeance upon her ene-
mies. The same page of history which tells
us that while democratic states never can be
brought to foresee remote dangers, or incur
present burdens to guard against it; yet when
the danger is present, and strikes the senses of
the multitude, they are capable of the most
stupendous exertions. That England, in the
event of a war breaking out in her present
supine, unprepared state, would sustain in the
outset very great disasters, is clear; but it is
not by any ordinary calamities that a power of
such slow growth and present magnitude as
England is to be subdued. She now possesses
2,800,000 tonnage, numbers an 'hundred and
sixty thousand seamen in her commercial na-
vy, and a fleet of seven hundred steam-boats,
more than all Europe possesses, daily prowl
along her shores. Here are all the elements
of a powerful marine; at no period could
Great Britain command such a foundation for
naval strength within her bosom. What is
wanting, is not the elements of an irresistible
naval force, but the sagacity in the people to
foresee the approaching necessity for its es-
tablishment, and the virtue in the government
THE FUTURE.
357
to propose the burdens indispensable for its re- 1
storation. In the experienced difficulty of |
either communicating this foresight to the one, i
or imparting this virtue to the other, may be i
traced the well-known and often-predicted ef-
fects of democratic ascendency. But that
same ascendency, if the spirit of the people is
roused by experienced disgrace, or their inte-
rests affected by present calamity, would infal-
libly make the most incredible exertions ; and
a navy, greater than any which ever yet issued
from the British harbours, might sally forth
from our sea-girt isle, to carry, like the French
Revolutionary armies, devastation and ruin
into all the naval establishments of Europe.
No such career of naval conquest, however, is
either needed for the glory, or suited for the in-
terests of England ; and it is as much ft urn a
desire to avert that ultimate forcible and most
painful conversion of all the national energies
to warlike objects, as to prevent the immediate
calamities which it would occasion, that we
earnestly press upon the country the immediate
adoption, at any cost, of that great increase to
our naval and military establishments which
can alone avert one or both of these calamities.
THE FUTURE.*
THAT human affairs are now undergoing a
great and durable alteration ; that we are in a
transition state of society, when new settlements
are taking place, and the old levels are heaved
up, or displaced by expansive force from be-
neath, is universally admitted; but the world
is as yet in the dark as to the ultimate results,
whether for good or evil, of these vast and or-
ganic changes. While the popular advocates
look upon them as the commencement of a new
era in social existence as the opening of a
period of knowledge, freedom, and general
happiness, in which the human race, freed
from the fetters of feudal tyranny, is to arrive
at an unprecedented state of social felicity
the Conservative party everywhere regard
them as fraught with the worst possible effects
to all classes in society, and to none more im-
mediately than those by whom they are so
blindly urged forward as conducing to the
destruction of all the bulwarks both of property
and freedom. While these opposite and irre-
concilable opinions are honestly arid firmly
maintained by millions on either side of this
great controversy, and victory inclines some-
times to one side and sometimes to another in
the course of the contests, civil and military,
which it engenders, " Time rolls on his cease-
less course ;" the actors and the spectators in
the world's debate are alike hurried to the grave,
and new generations succeed, who are borne
along by the same mighty stream, and inherit
from their parents the passions and prejudices
inseparable from a question in which such
boundless expectations have been excited on
the one side, and such vital interests are at
stake on the other.
The symptoms of this transition state dis-
tinctly appear, not merely in the increase of
political power on the part of the lower classes
in almost every state of western Europe, but
the general formation of warm hopes and an-
ticipations on their parts inconsistent with
their present condition, and the universal adap-
tation of science, literature, arts, and manufac-
tures to their wants. Supposing the most
*T
1635,
rocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. Paris,
, &. London, 1835. Blackwood's Magazine, Jan. 1836.
decided re-action to take place in public feel-
ing in the British dominions, and the most
Conservative administration to be placed at
the helm, still the state is essentially revolu-
tionized. The great organic change has been
made, and cannot be undone. Government is
no longer, and never again will be, as long as
a mixed constitution lasts, a free agent. It is
impelled by the inclinations of the majority of
nine hundred thousand electors, in whom su-
preme power is substantially vested. At one
time it may be too revolutionary, at another
too monarchical, but in either it can only be
the reflecting mirror of public opinion, and
must receive, not communicate, the impulse
of general thought. France is irrecoverably
and thoroughly revolutionized. All the checks,
either on arbitrary or popular power, have been
completely destroyed by the insane ambition of
its populace; and, its capital has been trans-
formed into a vast arena, where two savage
wild beasts, equally fatal to mankind despo-
tic power and democratic ambition fiercely
contend for the mastery, but where the fair
form of freedom is never again destined to ap-
pear. Spain and Portugal are torn by the
same furious passions a Vendean struggle is
maintained with heroic constancy in the north
a Jacobin revolution is rapidly spreading in
the southland amidst a deadly civil war, and
the confiscation of church and funded property,
the democratic and despotic principles are
rapidly coming into collision, and threaten
speedily there, as elsewhere, to extinguish all
the securities of real freedom in the shock.
It is not merely, however, in the political
world that the symptoms of a vast organic
change in western Europe are to be dis-
cerned. Manners and habits evince a,s clearly
the prodigious, and, as we fear, degrading tran-
sition, which is going on amongst us. We are
not blindly attached to the customs of former
times, and willingly admit, that, in some re-
spects, a change for the better has taken place;
but in others how wofully for the worse ; and
how prodigious, at all events, is the alteration,
whether for better or worse, which is in pro-
gress ! With the feeling of chivalry still giv-
358
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
ing dignity to the higher ranks, and a sense of
loyalty yet elevating the lower ; with religion
paramount in all the influential classes, and
subordination as yet unshaken among the in-
dustrious poor, a state of manners ensued, a
degree of felicity was attained, a height of na-
tional glory was reached, to which the future
generations of Europe will look back with the
more regret, that, once lost, it is altogether ir-
revocable. We do not despair of the fortunes I
of our country, still less of the human race ; i
but we have no hope that those bright and !
glorious days can ever return. Vigour, in-'
deed, is not a wan ting; activity, restless, in-
satiable activity, is in profusion ; talent is as
yet undecayed ; but where are the elevated
feelings, the high resolves, the enduring con-
stancy, the religious inspiration, the moral
resolution, the disinterested loyalty, the un-
shaken patriotism, which gave dignity and
grandeur to the past age ? These qualities,
doubtless, are still found in many individuals ;
but we speak of the general tendency of things,
not the character of particular men. Even
where they do occur, are they not chiefly to be
discerned in those of a certain standing in life;
and are they not remarked by the rising ge-
neration as remnants of the former age, who
are fast disappearing, and will soon be totally
extinct ?
Look at education, above all, the education
of the middle and working classes, and say
whether a vast and degrading change is not
there rapidly taking place ? It is there more
than anywhere else that "coming events cast
their shadows before." Elevating or ennobling
knowledge; moral and religious instruction;
purifying and entrancing compositions are
discarded ; the arts, the mechanical or manu-
facturing arts, alone are looked to. Nothing
is thought of but what can immediately be
turned into money. The church, and all the
institutions connected with it, are considered
as not destined to any lengthened endurance,
and, therefore, classical learning is scouted
and abandoned. The philosopher's stone is
alone sought after by the alchymists of mo-
dern days; nothing is studied "but what will
render the human mind prolific of dollars.
To purify the heart, and humanize the aflecr
tions ; to elevate the understanding and dig-
nify the manners; to provide not the means
of elevation in life, but the power of bearing
elevation with propriety; to confer not the
power of subduing others, but the means of
conquering one's self; to impress love to God
and good-will towards men, are deemed the
useless and antiquated pursuits of the monks
of former days. Practical chemistry and sul-
phuric acid; decrepitating salts and hydraulic
engines; algebraic equations and commercial
academies ; mercantile navigation and double
and single book-keeping, have fairly, in the
seminaries of the* middle ranks, driven Cicero
and Virgil off the field. The vast extension
of education, the prodigious present activity
and energy of the human mind, the incessant
efforts of the middle ranks to elevate and im-
prove their worldly situation, afford, we fear,
no reasonable grounds for hoping that this de-
grading change can be arrested ; on the con-
trary, they are the very circumstances which
afford a moral certainty that it will continue
and increase. That the energy, expectations,
and discontent now generally prevalent among
the labouring^ classes, and appearing in the
feverish desire for social amelioration and the
ready reception of any projects, how vain so-
ever, which promise to promote it, will lead to
great and important changes in the condition
both of government, society, and manners, is
too obvious to require illustration. The in-
tense and feverish attention to worldly objects
which these changes at once imply and pro-
duce ; the undue extension of artificial wants
among the labouring poor which they ge-
nerate; the severe competition to which all
classes are in consequence exposed; the
minute subdivision of labour which such a
high and increasing state of manufacturing
skill occasions ; the experienced impossibility
of rising in any department without a thorough
and exclusive attention to its details, are the
very circumstances of all others the most fatal
to the improvement of the understanding, or
the regulation of the heart. Amidst the shock
of so many contending interests, the calm pur-
suits of science, which lead not to wealth, will
be abandoned ; the institutions which as yet
maintain it will be sacrificed to the increasing
clamour of democratic jealousy; literature will
become a mere stimulant to the passions, or
amusement of an hour; religion, separated
from its property, will become a trade in which
the prejudices and passions of the congrega-
tions of each minister will be inflamed instead
of being subdued; every generous or enno-
bling study will be discarded for the mere pur-
suits of sordid wealth, or animal enjoyment ;
excitement in all its forms will become the
universal object ; and in the highest state of
manufacturing skill, and in the latest stages
of social regeneration, our descendants may
sink irrecoverably into the degeneracy of Ro-
man or Italian manners.
The extension and improvement of the me-
chanical arts the multiplication of rail-roads,
canals, and harbours extraordinary rapidity
of internal communication increasing crav-
ing for newspapers, and excitement in all its
forms the general spread of comfort, and
universal passion of luxury, afford no antidote
whatever against the native corruption of the
human heart. We may go to Paris from Lon-
don in three hours, and to Constantinople in
twelve ; we may communicate with India, by
the telegraph, in a forenoon, and make an au-
tumnal excursion to the Pyramids orPersepo-
lis in a fortnight, by steam-boats, and yet,
amidst all our improvements, be the most de-
graded and corrupt of the human race. Inter-
nal communication was brought to perfection
in the Roman empire, but did that revive the
spirit of the legions, or avert the arms of the
barbarians 1 Did it restore the age of Virgil
and Cicero 1 Because all the citizens gazed
daily on the most sumptuous edifices, and lived
amidst a forest of the noblest statues, did that
hinder the rapid corruption of manners, the
irretrievable degeneracy of character, the total
extinction of genius'? Did their proud and
ignorant contempt of the barbarous nations
THE FUTURE.
359
save either the Greeks or the Romans from
subjugation by a ruder and more savage, but a
fresher and a nobler race] Were they not
prating about the lights of the age, and the un-
paralleled state of social refinement, when the
swords of Alaric and Attila were already
drawn? In the midst of all our excursions,
have we yet penetrated that deepest of all mys-
teries, the human heart 1 ? With all our im-
provements, have we eradicated one evil pas-
sion or extinguished one guilty propensity in
that dark fountain of evil? Alas! facts, clear
undeniable facts, prove the reverse with the
spread of knowledge, and the growth of every
species of social improvement, general depra-
vity has gone on increasing with an accele-
rated pace, both in France and England, and
every increase of knowledge seems but an ad-
dition to the length of the lever by which vice
dissolves the fabric of society.*
It is not simple knowledge, it is knowledge
detached from religion, that produces this fatal
result, and unhappily that is precisely the spe-
cies of knowledge which is the present object
of fervent popular desire. The reason of its
corrupting tendency on morals is evident
when so detached, it multiplies the desires and
passions of the heart, without any increase to
its regulating principles; it augments the at-
tacking without strengthening the resisting
powers, and thence the disorder and license it
spreads through society. The invariable cha-
racteristic of a declining and corrupt state of
society, is a progressive increase in the force
of passion, and a progressive decline in the
influence of duty, and this tendency, so con-
spicuous in France, so evidently beginning
amongst ourselves, is increased by nothing so
much as that spread of education without reli-
gion, which is the manifest tendency of the
present times.
What renders it painfully clear that this
corruption has not only begun, but has far ad-
vanced amidst a large proportion of our peo-
ple, is the evident decline in the effect of moral
character upon political influence. It used to
be the boast, and the deserved boast, of Eng-
land, that talents the most commanding, de-
scent the most noble, achievements the most
illustrious, could not secure power without the
aid of private virtue. These times are gone
past. Depravity of character, sordidness of
disposition, recklessness of conduct, are now
no security whatever against political dema-
gogues, wielding the very greatest political
influence, nay, to their being held up as the
object of public admiration, and possibly
forced upon the government of the country.
What has the boasted spread of education
done to exclude such characters from political
weight? Nothing it is, on the contrjny, the
very thing which gives them their ascendency.
The time has evidently arrived when the com-
mission of political crimes, the stain of guilt,
the opprobrium of disgrace, is no objection
whatever with a large and influential party to
* The curious tables of M Ouerrin proVe that in every
department of France, without exception, general rl< pri-
vity is jnpt in proportion to tli<- cMm-inn of knoulod :<-.
"At one throw," says the candid Mr. Bulwer, "he has
howled down all our preconceived ideas on this vital
subject." See BULWEH'B France, vol. i, Appendix.
political leaders, provided they possess the qua-
lities likely to insure success in their designs.
" It is the fatal effect," says Madame de Stae'l,
"of revolutions to obliterate altogether our
ideas of right and wrong, and instead of the
eternal distinctions of morality and religion,
apply no other test, in general estimation, to
political actions but success." This affords a
melancholy presage of what may be expected
when the same vicious and degrading princi-
ples are still more generally embraced and ap-
plied to the ordinary transactions, characters,
and business, of life.
" If absolute power," says M. de Tocqueville,
"were re-established amongst the democratic
nations of Europe, I am persuaded that it
would assume a new form, and appear under
features unknown to our forefathers. There
was a time in Europe, when the laws and the
consent of the people had invested princes
with 'almost unlimited authority; but they
scarcely ever availed themselves of it. I do
not speak of the prerogatives of the nobility,
of the authority of supreme courts of justice,
of corporations and their chartered rights, or
of provincial privileges, which served to break
the blows of the sovereign authority, and to
maintain a spirit of resistance in the nation.
Independently of these political institutions
which, however opposed they might be to per-
sonal liberty, served to keep alive the love of
freedom in the mind of the public, and which
may be esteemed to have been useful in this
respect the manners and opinions of the na-
tion confined the royal authority within bar-
riers which were not less powerful, although
they were less conspicuous. Religion, the af-
fections of the people, the benevolence of the
prince, the sense of honour, family pride, pro-
vincial prejudices, custom, and public opinion,
limited the power of kings, and restrained their
authority within an invisible circle. The con-
stitution of nations was despotic at that time,
but their manners were free. Princes had the
| right, but they had neither the means nor the
j desire, of doing whatever they pleased.
"But what now remains of those barriers
| which formerly arrested the aggressions of
j tyranny? Since religion has lost its empire
j over the souls of men, the most prominent
j boundary which divided good from evil is
j overthrown ; the very elements of the moral
world are indeterminate ; the princes and the
people of the earth are guided by chance ; and
none can define the natural limits of despotism
and the bounds of license. Long revolutions
have forever destroyed the respect which sur-
rounded the rulers of the state ; and since they
have been relieved from the burden of public
esteem, princes may henceforward surrender
themselves without fear to the seductions of
arbitrary pcnver.
" When kings find that the hearts of their
subjects are turned towards them, they are
clement, because they are conscious of their
'strength; and they are chary of the affections
of their people, because the affection of their
people is the bulwark of the throne. A mutual
interchange of good-will then takes place be-
tween the prince and the people, which re-
i sembles the gracious intercourse of domestic
360
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
society. The subjects may murmur at the |
sovereign's decree, but they are grieved to dis-
please him ; and the sovereign chastises his sub-
jects with the light hand of parental affection.
"But when once the spell of royalty is broken
in the tumult of revolution; when successive !
monarchs have crossed the throne, so as alter-
nately to display to the people the weakness of
their right and the harshness of their power,
the sovereign is no longer regarded by any as
the father' of the state, and he is feared by all
as its master. If he be weak, he is depised ;
if he be strong, he is detested. He is himself
full of animosity and alarm; he finds that he
is as a stranger in his own country, and he
treats his subjects like conquered enemies.
" When the provinces and the towns formed
so many different nations in the midst of their
common country, each of them had a will of j
his own, which was opposed to the general
spirit of subjection ; but now that all the parts
of the same empire, after having lost their im-
munities, their customs, their prejudices, their
traditions, and their names, are subjected and
accustomed to the same laws, it is not more
difficult to oppress them collectively, than it
was formerly to oppress them singly.
" Whilst the nobles enjoyed their power, and
indeed long after that power was lost, the
honour of aristocracy conferred an extraordi-
nary degree of force upon their personal oppo-
sition. They afforded instances of men who,
notwithstanding their weakness, still enter-
tained a high opinion of their personal value,
and dared to cope single-handed with the efforts
of the public authority. But at the present
day, when all ranks are more and more con-
founded, when the individual disappears in
the throng, and is easily lost in the midst of a
common obscurity, when the honour of mo-
narchy has almost lost its empire without
being succeeded by public virtue, and when
nothing can enable man to rise above himself,
who shall say at what point the exigencies of
power and the servility of weakness will stop?
" As long as family feeling was kept alive,
the antagonist of oppression was never alone;
he looked about him, and found his clients,
his hereditary friends and his kinsfolk. If this
support was wanting, he was sustained by his f
ancestors and animated by his posterity. But I
when patrimonial estates are divided, and when j
a few years suffice to confound the distinctions |
of a race, where can family feeling be found 1
What force can there be in the customs of a
country which has changed, and is still perpetu-
ally changing its aspect ; in which every act of
tyranny has a precedent, and every crime an ex-
ample ; in which there is nothing so old that its
antiquity can save it from destruction, and no-
thing so unparalleled that its novelty can pre-
vent it from being done ? What resistance
can be offered by manners of so pliant a make, j
that they have already often yielded? What;
strength can even public opinion have re- j
tained, when no twenty persons are connected \
by a common tie ; when not a man, nor a fa- '
rally, nor chartered corporation, nor class, nor !
free institution, has the power of representing '
or exerting that opinion ; and when every citi-
zen being equally weak, equally poor, and ,
equally dependent has only his personal im-
potence to oppose to the organized force of the
government?
"The annals of France furnish nothing
analogous to the- condition in which that coun-
try might then be thrown. But it may be more
aptly assimilated to the times of old, and to
those hideous eras of Roman oppression, when
the manners of the people were corrupted,
their traditions obliterated, their habits de-
stroyed, their opinions shaken, and freedom ex-
pelled from the laws, could find no refuge in
the land; when nothing protected the citizens,
and the citizens no longer protected themselves ;
when human nature was the sport of man, and
princes wearied out the clemency of Heaven
before they exhausted the patience of their
subjects. Those who hope to revive the mo-
narchy of Henry IV. or of Louis XIV., appear
to me to be afflicted with mental blindness ;
and when I consider the present condition of
several European nations a condition to
which all the others tend I am led to believe
that they will soon be left with no other alter-
native than democratic liberty, or the tyranny
of the Caesars." Tocqueville, ii. 247.
We shall not stop to show how precisely
those views of Tocqueville coincide with what
we have invariably advanced in this miscel-
lany, or to express the gratification we experi-
ence at finding these principles now embraced
by the ablest of the French Democratic party,
after the most enlightened view of American
institutions. We hasten, therefore, to show
that these results of the French Revolution,
melancholy and depressing as they are, are
nothing more than the accomplishment of
what, forty-five years ago, Mr. Burke prophe-
sied of its ultimate effects.
" The policy of such barbarous victors,"
says Mr. Burke, "who contemn a subdued
people, and insult their inhabitants, ever has
been to destroy all vestiges of the ancient
country in religion, policy, laws, and manners,
to confound all territorial limits, produce a
general poverty, crush their nobles, princes,
and pontiffs, to lay low every thing which
lifted its head above the level, or which could
'serve to combine or rally, in their distresses,
the disbanded people under the standard of old
opinion. They have made France free in the
manner in which their ancient friends to the
rights of mankind freed Greece, Macedon,
Gaul, and other nations. If their present pro-
ject of a Republic should fail, all securities to
a moderate freedom fail along with it; they
have levelled and crushed together all the or-
ders which they found under the monarchy;
all the indirect restraints which mitigate des-
potism are removed, insomuch that if mo-
narchy should ever again obtain an entire as-
cendency in France, under this or any other
dynasty, it will probably be, if not voluntarily
tempered at setting out by the wise and virtu-
ous counsels of the prince, the most completely
arbitrary power that ever appeared on earth."
Purke, v. 328 333.
Similar results must ultimately attend the
triumph of the democratic principle in Great
Britain and Ireland. The progress may, and
we trust will, be different ; less bloodshed and
THE FUTURE.
suffering will attend its course; more vigor- 1 pet the slopes of the Alps, and the industry
ous and manly resistance will evidently be op- j which bridled the stormy seas of the German
posed to the evil; the growth of corruption will, I ocean the burning passions which carried
.A. i '^^:_*A i , . ! *. ,1 * u A J 4.1 171 ~i_ i _ * L_ /^ j :_ i ^i \7~ i:_
we trust, be infinitely more slow, and the de
cline of the empire more dignified and becom
ing. But the final result, if the democratic
principle maintains its present ascendency
will be the same.
If we examine the history of the world with
attention, we shall find, that amidst great occa-
sional variations produced by secondary anc
inferior causes, two great powers have been
at work from the earliest times ; and, like the
antagonist expansive and compressing force
in physical nature, have, by their mutual and
counteracting influence, produced the greatest
revolutions and settlements in human affairs.
These opposing forces are tfOHTHKRy COXQ.UEST
and CIVILIZED DEMOCRACY. Their agency ap-
pears clear and forcible at the present times,
and the spheres of their action are different ;
but mighty ultimate results are to attend their
irresistible operation in the theatres destined
by nature for their respective operation.
We, who have, for eighteen years, so inva-
riably and resolutely opposed the advances of
democracy, and that equally when it raised its
voice aloft on the seat of government, as when
it lurked under the specious guise of free trade
or liberality, will not be accused of being
blinded in favour of its effects. We claim,
therefore, full credit for sincerity, and deem
some weight due to our opinion, when we as-
sert that it is the great waving pmver in human
affairs, the source of the greatest efforts of
human genius, and, when duly restrained from
running into excess, the grand instrument of
human advancement. It is not from ignorance
of, or insensibility to, its prodigious effects,
that we have proved ourselves so resolute in
resisting its undue expansion : it is, on the con-
trary, from a full appreciation of them, from a
thorough knowledge of the vast results, whether
for good or evil, which it invariably produces.
It is the nature of the democratic passion to
produce an inextinguishable degree of vigour
and activity among the middling classes of
society to develope an unknown energy
among their wide-spread ranks to fill their
bosoms with insatiable and often visionary
projects of advancement and amelioration, and
inspire them with an ardent desire to raise
themselves individually and collectively in the
world. Thence the astonishing results some-
times for good, sometimes for evil which it
produces. Its grand characteristic is an-risy,
and energy not rousing the exertions merely
of a portion of society, Mt awakening the dor-
mant strength of millions; not producing mere-
ly the chivalrous valour of the high-bred cava-
lier, but drawing forth the might that slum-
bers in a peasant's arm." The greatest
achievements of genius, the noblest efforts of
heroism, that have illustrated the history of
the species, have arisen from the efforts of this
principle. Thence the fight of Marathon and
the glories of Salamis the genius of Greece
and the conquests of Rome the heroism of
Sempach and the devotion of Haarlem the
the French legions to Cadiz and the Kremlin,
and the sustained fortitude which gave to Bri-
tain the dominion of the waves. Thence, too,
in its wider and unrestrained excesses, the
greatest crimes which have disfigured the dark
annals of human wickedness the massacres
of Athens and the banishments of Florence
the carnage of Marius and the proscriptions
pf the Triumvirate the murders of Cromwell
and the bloodshed of Robespierre.
As the democratic passion is thus a princi-
ple of such vital and searching energy, so it is
from it, when acting under due regulation and
control, that the greatest and most durable ad-
vances in social existence have sprung. Why
are the shores of the Mediterranean the scene
to which the pilgrim from every quarter of
the globe journeys to visit at once the cradles
of civilization, the birthplace of arts, of arms,
of philosophy, of poetry, and the scenes of
their highest and most glorious achievements ?
Because freedom spread along its smiling
shores; because the ruins of Athens and
Sparta, of Rome and Carthage, of Tyre and
Syracuse, lie on its margin ; because civiliza-
tion, advancing with the white sails which
glittered on its blue expanse, pierced, as if
mpelled by central heat, through the dark
and barbarous regions of the Celtic race who
peopled its shores. What gave Rome the
empire of the world, and brought the vener-
able ensigns bearing the words, "Senatus
populusque Romanus," to the wall of Antoni-
nus and the foot of the Atlas, the waters of.
the Euphrates and the Atlantic Ocean ? Demo-
cratic vigour. Democratic vigour, be it ob-
served, duly coerced by Patrician power ; the in-
satiable ambition of successive consuls, guided
by the wisdom of the senate ; the unconquer-
able and inexhaustible bands which, for cen-
uries, issued from the Roman Forum. What
has spread the British dominions over the
labitable globe, and converted the ocean into
a peaceful lake for its internal carriage, and
made the winds the instruments of its blessings
o mankind ; and spread its race in vast and
nextinguishable multitudes through the new
vorldl Democratic ambition; democratic am-
bition, restrained and regulated at home by an
adequate weight of aristocratic power; a go-
vernment which, guided by the stability of the
)atrician, but invigorated by the activity of
he plebeian race, steadily advanced in con-
quest, renown, and moral ascendency, till its
fleets overspread the sea, and it has become a
natter of certainty, that half the globe must
e peopled by its descendants.
The continued operation of this undying
igour and energy is still more clearly evinced
in the Anglo-American race, which originally
sprung from the stern Puritans of Charles I.'s
age. which have developed all the peculiarities
of the democratic character in unrestrained
profusion amidst the boundless wastes which
lie open to their enterprise. M. Tocqueville
has described, with equal justice and eloquence
paintings of Raphael and the poetry of Tasso the extraordinary activity of these principles
the energy which covered with a velvet car- , in the United Slates.
46 2H
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
" The inhabitants of the United States are i assemblies, the citizens salute the authorities
never fettered by the axioms of their profes- j of the day as the fathers of their country,
they escape from all the prejudices of Societies are formed which regard drunken-
ness as the principal cause of the evils under
all
their present station ; they are "not more at-
tached to one line of operation than to another ;
they are not more prone to employ an old
method than a new one ; they have no rooted
habits, and they easily shake off the influence
which the habits of other nations might ex-
ercise upon their minds, from a conviction
which the state labours, and which solemnly
bind themselves to give a constant example of
temperance.
The great political agitation of the Ameri-
can legislative bodies, which is the only kind
of excitement that attracts the attention of fo-
that their country is unlike any other, and that j reign countries, is a mere episode or a sort of
its situation is without a precedent in the ' continuation of that universal movement which
world. America is a land of wonders, in which \ originates in the lowest classes of the people,
every thing is in constant motion, and every and extends successively to all the ranks of
movement seems an improvement. The idea I society. It is impossible to spend more efforts
of novelty is there iridissolubly connected with j in the pursuit of enjoyment."
the idea of amelioration. No natural boundary j The great system of nature thus expands to
Seems to be set to the efforts of man ; and what! our view. The democratic principle is the
is not yet done is only what he has not yet great moving power which expels from the
attempted to do. j old established centres of civilization the race
"This perpetual change which goes on in of men to distant and unpeopled regions ; which
the United States, these frequent vicissitudes in the ancient world spread it with the Athe-
of fortune, accompanied by such unforeseen nian galleys along the shores of the Mediter-
fluctuations in private and in public wealth, ranean, and with the Roman legions penetrated
serve to keep the minds of the citizens in aj the dark and savage forests of central Europe;
perpetual state of feverish agitation, which which laid the foundation, in the kingdoms
admirably invigorates their exertions, and formed out of its provinces, of the supremacy
keeps them in a state of excitement above the ; of modern Europe, and is now with the British
ordinary level of mankind. The whole life of j navy extending as far as the waters of the
an American is passed like a game of chance, ' ocean roll ; peopling at once the new continent
a revolutionary crisis, or a battle. As the same | of Australasia, and supplanting the sable mil-
causes are continually in operation through- j lions of Africa ; piercing the primeval forests
out the country, they ultimately impart an
irresistible impulse to the national character.
The American, taken as a chance specimen
of his countrymen, must then be a man of
singular warmth in his desires, enterprising,
fond of adventure, and above all of innovation.
The same bent is manifest in all that he does ;
he introduces it into his political laws, his re-
ligious doctrines, his theories of social eco-
of Canada, and advancing with unceasing
velocity towards the rocky mountains of
America. Nor is it only by the subjects of
Britain that this impelling force is felt. It
exists in equal force among their descendants ;
and from the seats where the Puritan con-
temporaries of Cromwell first sought an asy-
lum from English oppression, an incessant
craving, an unseen power, is for ever impel-
nomy, and his domestic occupations; he bears ling multitudes to the yet untrodden forests of
it with him in the depth of the back-woods, as the west.
; It cannot be denied that the British race
well as in the business of the city. It is this
same passion, applied to maritime commerce,
which makes him the cheapest and the quick-
est trader in the world.
"It is not impossible to conceive the sur-
passing liberty which the Americans enjoy;
has acquired an amazing preponderance over
all the other European races in the New
World; and that it is very superior to them in
civilization, in industry, and in power. As
long as it is only surrounded by desert or
some idea may likewise be formed of the ex- thinly-peopled countries, as long as it en-
treme equality which subsists amongst them, \ counters no dense population upon its route,
but the political activity which pervades the ! through which it cannot work its way, it will
United States must be seen in order to be
understood. No sooner do you set foot upon
the American soil than you are stunned by a
kind of tumult; a confused clamour is heard
on every side ; and a thousand simultaneous
voices demand the immediate satisfaction of
their social wants. Every thing is in motion
around you : here, the people of one quarter
assuredly continue to spread. The lines
marked out by treaties will not stop it ; but it
will everywhere transgress these imaginary
barriers.
" The geographical position of the British
race in the New World is peculiarly favoura-
ble to its rapid increase. Above its northern
frontiers the icy regions of the Pole extend ;
of a town are met to decide upon the building | and a few degrees below its southern confines
of a church; there, the election of a repre- lies the burning climate of the Equator. The
sentative is going on; a little further, the I Anglo-Americans are therefore placed in the
delegates of district are posting to the town in most temperate and habitable zone of the
order to consult upon some local improve- continent."
ments ; or in another place the labourers of a
village quit their ploughs to deliberate upon
" The distance from Lake Superior to the
Gulf of Mexico extends from the 47lh to the
the project of a road or a public school. Meet- ! 30th degree of latitude, a distance of more than
ings are called for the sole purpose of declar- twelve hundred miles, as the bird flies. The
ing their disapprobation of the line of conduct frontier of the United States winds along the
pursued by the government; whilst, in other i whole of this immense line; sometimes falling
THE FUTURE.
l^rH^e. Wha,ca
from havr
within its limits, but more frequently extending ] inhabitants to
far beyond it into the waste. It has been cal- can prevent th
culated that the whites advance every year a numerous a pt
mean distance of seventeen miles along the "The time will
whole of this vast boundary. Obstacles, such hundred and fifty million?
as an unproductive district, a lake, or an In- ing in North America, equal in condition, the
dian nation unexpectedly encountered, are | progeny of one race, owing their origin to the
sometimes met with. The advancing column | same cause, and preserving the same civiliza-
then halts for a while; its two extremities fall tion, the same language, the same religion, the
back upon themselves, and as soon t
are re-united they proceed onwards.
they
This
gradual and continuous progress of the Eu-
ropean race towards the Rocky Mountains has
the solemnity of a providential event; it is
like a deluge of men rising unabatedly, and
daily driven onwards by the hand of God.
Within this first line of conquering settlers,
same habits, the same manners, and imbued
with the same opinions, propagated under the
same forms. The rest is uncertain, but this is
certain; and it is a fact new to tl>e world, a
fact fraught with such portentous consequences
as to baffle the efforts even of the imagina-
tion."
It is not without reason, therefore, that we
towns are built, and vast states founded. In set out in this speculation, with the observa-
1790 there were only a few thousand pioneers
sprinkled along the valleys of the Mississippi ;
and at the present day these valleys contain
as many inhabitants as were to be found in
the whole Union in 1790. Their population
amounts to nearly four millions. The city of
Washington was founded in 1800, in the very
centre of the Union; but such are the changes
which have taken place, that it now stands at
one of the extremities; and the delegates of the
most remote Western States are already obliged
to perform a journey as long as that from
Vienna to Paris.
" It must not, then, be imagined that the im-
pulse of the British race in the New World
can be arrested. The dismemberment of the
Union, and the hostilities which might ensue,
the abolition of republican institutions, and the
tyrannical government which might succeed
it, may retard this impulse, but they cannot
prevent it from ultimately fulfilling the desti-
nies to which that race is reserved. No power
upon earth can close upon the emigrants that
fertile wilderness, which offers resources to all
industry and a refuge from all want. Future
events, of whatever nature they may be, will
not deprive the Americans of their climate or
of their inland seas, of their great rivers or of
their exuberant soil. Nor will bad laws, revo-
lutions, and anarchy, be able to obliterate that
love of prosperity and that spirit of enterprise
which seem to be the distinctive characteristics
of their race, or to extinguish that knowledge
which guides them on their way.
" Thus, in the midst of the uncertain future,
one event at least is sure. At a period which
may be said to be near, (for we are speaking
of the life of a nation,) the Anglo-Americans
will alone cover the immense space contained
between the polar regions and the tropics, ex-
tending from the coast of the Atlantic to the
shores of the Pacific Ocean ; the territory which
will probably be occupied by the Anglo-Ameri-
cans at some future time, may be computed to
equal three quarters of Europe in extent. The
climate of the Union is upon the whole prefer-
able to that of Europe, and its natural advan-
tages are not less great ; it is therefore evident
that its population will at some future time be
proportionate to our own. Europe, divided as
it is between so many different nations, and
torn as it has been by incessant wars and the
barbarous manners of the Middle Ages, has
notwithstanding attained a population of 410
tion, that great and durable effects on human
affairs are destined by Providence for the Bri-
tish race. And it is too obvious to admit of
dispute, that the democratic principle amongst
us is the great moving power which thus im-
pels multitudes of civilized beings into the
wilderness of nature. Nothing but that prin-
ciple could effect such a change. Civilized
man rarely emigrates; under a despotic go-
vernment never. What colonies has China
sent forth to people the wastes of Asia? Are
the Hindoos to be found spread over the vast
archipelago of the Indian Ocean ? Republican.
Rome colonized the world; Republican Greece
spread the light of civilization along the shores
of the Mediterranean ; but Imperial Rome could
never maintain the numbers of its own pro-
vinces, and the Grecian empire slumbered on
with a declining population for eleven hundred
years. Is Italy, with its old civilized millions,
or France, with its ardent and redundant pea-
santry, the storehouse of nations from whence
the European race is to be diffused over the
world ? The colonies of Spain, torn by inter-
nal factions, and a prey to furious passions,
are in the most miserable state, and constantly
declining in numbers!* The tendency of
nations in a high state of civilization ever is to
remain at home ; to become wedded to the
luxuries and enjoyments, the habits and refine-
ments of an artificial state of existence, and
regard all other people as rude and barbarous,
unfit for the society, unequal to the reception
of civilized existence, to slumber on for ages
with a population, poor, redundant, and declin-
ing. Such has for ages been the condition of
the Chinese and the Hindoos, the Turks and
the Persians, the Spaniards and the Italians ;
and hence no great settlements of mankind
have proceeded from their loins.
What, then, is the centrifugal force which
counteracts this inert tendency, and impels
man from the heart of wealth, from the bosom
of refinement, from the luxuries of civilization,
to the forests and the wilderness? What sends
him forth into the desert, impelled by the
energy of the savage character, but yet with
all the powers and acquisitions of civilization
at his command; with the axe in his hand,
but the Bible in his pocket, and the rifle by
his side ? It is democracy which effects this
prodigy; it is that insatiable passion which
*TocquevUle, ii. 439.
364
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
overcomes alike the habits and affections of
society, and sends forth the civilized pilgrim
far from his kindred, far from his home, far
from the bones of his fathers, to seek amidst
Transatlantic wilds that freedom and inde-
pendence which his native country can no
longer afford. It is in the restless activity
which it engenders, the feverish desire of ele-
vation which it awakens in all classes, the
longing after a state of existence unattainable
in long established states which it produces,
that the centrifugal force of civilized man is to
be found. Above an hundred thousand emi-
grants from Great Britain, in the year 1833,
settled in the British colonies ; nearly two
hundred thousand annually pass over to the
whole of North America from the British isles;
and amidst the strife of parties, the collision
of interest, the ardent hopes and chimerical
anticipations incident to these days of transi-
tion, the English race is profusely and indeli-
bly transplanted into the boundless wastes
prepared for its reception in the New World.
As the democratic passion, however, is thus
evidently the great moving power which is
transferring the civilized European race to the
remote corners of the earth, and the British
navy, the vast vehicle raised up to supreme
dominion, for its conveyance ; so it is of the
utmost importance to observe, that if undue
power is given to this impelling force, the ma-
chine which is performing these prodigies may
be destroyed, and the central force, instead of
operating with a steady and salutary pressure
upon mankind, suddenly burst its barriers, and i
for ever cease to affect their fortunes. A
spring acts upon a machine only as long as it
is loaded or restrained; remove the pressure,
and its strength ceases to exist This powerful
and astonishing agency of the Anglo-Saxon race
upon the fortunes of mankind, would be totally
destroyed by the triumph of democracy in the
British islands. Multitudes, indeed, during the
convulsions consequent on so calamitous an
event, would fly for refuge to the American
shores, but in the grinding and irreversible
despotism which would necessarily and speed-
ily follow its occurrence, the vital energy would
become extinct, which is now impelling the
British race into every corner of the habitable
earth. The stillness ,of despotism would suc-
ceed the agitation of passion ; the inertness of
aged civilization at once fall upon the bounded
state. From the moment that British freedom
is extinguished by the overthrow of aristocratic
influence, and the erection of the Commons
into despotic power, the sacred fire which now
animates the vast fabric of its dominion will
become extinct, and England will cease to
direct the destinies of half the globe. The
Conservative party in this country, therefore,
are not merely charged with the preservation
of its own freedom they are intrusted with
the destinies of mankind, and on the success
of their exertions it depends whether the demo-
cratic spirit in these islands is to be pre-
served, as heretofore, in that subdued form
which has directed its energy to the civiliza-
tion of mankind, or to burst forth in those
wild excesses which turn only to its own ruin,
and the desolation of the world.
While the naval strength and colonial domi-
nions of England have steadily and unceas-
ingly advanced in Western Europe, and its
influence is in consequence spread over all the
maritime regions of the globe, another, and an
equally irresistible power, has risen up in the
eastern hemisphere. If all the contests of
centuries have turned to the advantage of the
English navy, all the continental strifes have
as unceasingly augmented the strength of RUS-
SIA. From the time of the Czar Peter, when
it first emerged from obscurity to take a leading
part in continental affairs, to the present mo-
ment, its progress has been unbroken. Alone,
of all other states, during that long period it
has experienced no reverses, but constantly
advanced in power, territory, and resources ;
for even the peace of Tilsit, which followed
the disasters of Austerlitz and Friedland, was
attended with an accession of territory. Dur-
ing that period it has successively swallowed
up Courland and Livonia, Poland, Finland, the
Crimea, the Ukraine, Wallachia, and Molda-
via. Its southern frontier is now washed by
the Danube ; its eastern is within fifty leagues
of Berlin and Vienna; its advanced ports in
the Baltic are almost within sight of Stock-
holm ; its south-eastern boundary, stretching
far over the Caucasus, sweeps down to Erivan
and the foot of Mount Arrarat Persia and
Turkey are irrevocably subjected to its influ-
ence; a solemn treaty has given it the com-
mand of the Dardanelles ; a subsidiary Mus-
covite force has visited Scutari, and rescued
the Osmanlis from destruction ; and the Sultan
Mahmoud retains Constantinople only as the
viceroy of the northern autocrat.
The politicians of the day assert that Russia
will fall to pieces, and its power cease to be
formidable to Western Europe or Central Asia.
They never were more completely mistaken.
Did Macedonia fall to pieces before it had sub-
dued the Grecian commonwealths; or Persia
before it had conquered the Assyrian mon-
archy ; or the Goths and Vandals before they
had subverted the Roman empire 1 It is the
general pressure of the north upon the south,
not the force of any single state, which is the
weight that is to be apprehended ; that pres-
sure will not be lessened, but on the contrary
greatly increased, if the vast Scythian tribes
I should separate into different empires. Though
one Moscovite throne were to be established at
j St. Petersburg, a second at Moscow, and a
| third at Constantinople, the general pressure
j of the Russian race, upon the southern states
! of Europe and Asia, would not be one whit
diminished. Still the delight of a warmer cli-
mate, the riches of long established civiliza-
tion, the fruits and wines of the south, the
! women of Italy or Circassia, would attract the
I brood of winter to the regions of the sun. The
! various tribes of ths German race, the Gothic
I and Vandal swarms, the Huns and the Ostro-
; goths, were engaged in fierce and constant
hostility with each other; and it was generally
defeat and pressure from behind which im-
pelled them upon their southern neighbours;
but that did not prevent them from bursting
the barriers of the Danube and the Rhine, and
i overwhelming the civilization, and wealth, and
THE FUTURE.
365
discipline of the Roman empire. Such inter-
nal divisions only magnify the strength of the
northern race by training them to the use of
arms, and augmenting their military skill by
constant exercise against each other; just as
the long continued internal wars of the Euro-
pean nations have established an irresistible
superiority of their forces over those of the
other quarters of the globe. In the end, the
weight of the north thus matured, drawn forth
and disciplined, will ever be turned to the
fields of southern conquest.
The moving power with these vast bodies
of men is the lust of conquest, and a passion
for southern enjoyment. Democracy is un-
heeded or unknown amongst them ; if im-
ported from foreign lands it languishes and
expires amidst the rigours of the climate. The
energy and aspirations of men are concen-
trated on conquest; a passion more natural,
more durable, more universal than the demo-
cratic vigour of advanced civilization. It
speaks a language intelligible to the rudest of
men; and rouses the passions of universal
vehemence. Great changes may take place
in human affairs ; but the time will never
come when northern valour will not press on
southern wealth; or refined corruption not
require the renovating influence of indigent
regeneration.
This then is the other great moving power
which in these days of transition is changing
the destinies of mankind. Rapid as is the
growth of the British race in America, it is
not more rapid than that of the Russian in
Europe and Asia. Fifty millions of men now
furnish recruits to the Moscovite standards ;
but their race doubles in every half century ;
and before the year 1900, one hundred millions
of men will be ready to pour from the frozen
plains of Scythia on the plains of Central Asia
and southern Europe. Occasional events may
check or for a while turn aside the wave ; but
its ultimate progress in these directions is cer-
tain and irresistible. Before two centuries are
over, Mohammedanism will be banished from
Turkey, Asia Minor, and Persia, and a hundred
millions of Christians will be settled in the
regions now desolated by the standards of the
Prophet. Their advance is as swift, as un-
ceasing as that of the British race to the rocky
belt of western America.
" There are, at the present time, two great
nations in the world, which seem to tend to-
wards the same end, although they started
from different points : I allude to th Russians
and the Americans. Both of them have grown
up unnoticed: and whilst the attention of
mankind was directed elsewhere, they have
suddenly assumed a most prominent place
amongst the nations ; and the world learned
their existence and their greatness at almost
the same time.
"All other nations seem to have nearly
reached their natural limits, and only to be
charged with the maintenance of their power;
but these are still in the act of growth, all the
others are stopped, or continue to advance
with extreme difficulty; these are proceeding
with ease and with celerity along a path to
which the human eye can assign no term.
The American struggles against the natural
obstacles which oppose him ; the adversaries
of the Russian are men : the former combats
the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civi-
lization with all its weapons and its arts ; the
conquests of the one are therefore gained by
the plough-share; those of the other by the
sword. The Anglo-American relies upon per-
sonal interest to accomplish his ends, and
gives free scope to the unguided exertions and
common sense of the citizens ; the Russian
centres all the authority of society in a single
arm; the principal instrument of the former
is freedom ; of the latter, servitude. Their
starting-point is different, and their courses
are not the same ; yet each of them seems to
be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway
the destinies of half the globe."
There is something solemn and evidently
providential in this ceaseless advance of the
lords of the earth and the sea, into the deserted
regions of the earth. The hand of Almighty
power is distinctly visible, not only in the un-
broken advance of both on their respective
elements, but in the evident adaptation of the
passions, habits, and government of each to
the ends for which they were severally des-
tined in the designs of nature. Would Rus-
sian conquest have ever peopled the dark and
untrodden forests of North America, or the
deserted Savannahs of Australasia? Would
the passions and the desires of the north have
ever led them into the abode of the beaver and
the buffalo ? Never ; for aught that their pas-
sions could have done these regions must have
remained in primeval solitude and silence to
the end of time. Could English democracy
ever have penetrated the half-peopled, half-
desert regions of Asia, and Christian civiliza-
tion, spreading in peaceful activity, have sup-
planted the Crescent in the original seats of the
human race 7 Never; the isolated colonist,
with his axe and his Bible, would have been
swept away by the Mameluke or the Spahi,
and civilization, in its peaceful guise, would
have perished under the squadrons of the
Crescent. For aught that democracy could
have done for Central Asia it must have re-
mained the abode of anarchy and misrule to
the end of human existence. But peaceful
Christianity, urged on by democratic passions,
pierced the primeval solitude of the American
forests; and warlike Christianity, stimulated
by northern conquest, was fitted to subdue
Central Asia and Eastern Europe. The Bible
and the printing press converted the wilder-
ness of North America into the abode of
Christian millions; the Moscovite battalions,
marching under the standard of the Cross,
subjugated the already peopled regions of the
Mussulman faith. Not without reason then
did the British navy and the Russian army
emerge triumphant from the desperate strife
of the French Revolution ; for on the victory of
each depended the destinies of half the globe.
Democratic institutions will not and cannot
exist permanently in North America. The
frightful anarchy which has prevailed in the
southern states, since the great interests de-
pendent on slave emancipation were brought
into jeopardy the irresistible sway of the
2 a 2
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
majority, and the rapid tendency of that ma-
jority to deeds of atrocity and blood the in-
creasing jealousy, on mercantile grounds, of
the northern and southern slates, all demon-
strate that the Union cannot permanently hold
together, and that the innumerable millions of
the Anglo-American race must be divided into
separate states, like the descendants of the
Gothic conquerors of Europe. Out of this
second great settlement of mankind will arise
separate kingdoms, and interests, and passions
as out of the first. But democratic habits and
desires will still prevail, and long after neces-
sity and the passions of an advanced stage of
civilization have established firm and aristo-
cratic governments, founded on the sway of
property in the old states, republican ambition
and jealousy will not cease to impel millions
to the great wave that approaches the Rocky
Mountains. Democratic ideas will not be mo-
derated in the New World, till they have per-
formed their destined end, and brought the
Christian race to the shores of the Pacific.
Arbitrary institutions will not for ever pre-
vail in the Russian empire. As successive
provinces and kingdoms are added to their vast
dominions as their sway extends over the
regions of the south, the abode of wealth and
long-established civilization, the passion for
conquest will expire. Satiety will extinguish
this as it does all other desires. With the ac-
quisition of wealth, and the settlement in fixed
abodes, the desire of protection from arbitrary
power will spring up, and the passion of free-
dom will arise as it did in Greece, Italy, and
modern Europe. Free institutions will ulti-
mately appear in the realms conquered by Mos-
covite, as they did in those won by Gothic va-
lour. But the passions and desires of an
earlier stage of existence will long agitate the
millions of the Russo-Asiatic race ; and after
democratic desires have arisen, and free in-
stitutions exist in its oldest provinces, the
wave of northern conquest will still be pressed
on by semi-barbarous hordes from its remoter
dominions. Freedom will gradually arise out
of security and repose ; but the fever of con-
quest will not be finally extinguished till it has
performed its destined mission, and the stand-
ards of the Cross are brought down to the In-
dian Ocean.
The French Revolution was the greatest and
the most stupendous event of modern times ;
it is from the throes consequent on its explo-
sion that all the subsequent changes in human
affairs have arisen. It sprung up in the spirit
of infidelity ; it was early steeped in crime ; it
reached the unparalleled height of general
atheism, and shook all the thrones of the world
by the fiery passions which it awakened. What
was the final result of this second revolt of
Lucifer, the Prince of the Morning? Was it
that a great and durable impression on human
affairs was made by the infidel race? Was
St. Michael at last chained by the demon ?
No ! it was overruled by Almighty Power; on
either side it found the brazen walls which it
could not pass ; it sunk in the conflict, and
ceased to have any farther direct influence on
human affairs. In defiance of all its efforts
the British navy and the Russian army rose
invincible above its arms ; the champions of
Christianity in the east and the leaders of re-
ligious freedom in the west, came forth, like
giants refreshed with wine, from the termina-
| tion of the fight. The infidel race which
I aimed at the dominion of the world, served
! only by their efforts to increase the strength
1 of its destined rulers ; and from amidst the
ruins of its power emerged the ark, which was
to carry the tidings of salvation to the west-
ern, and the invincible host which was to
spread the glad tidings of the gospel through
the eastern world.
Great, however, as were the powers thus let
into human affairs, their operation must have
been comparatively slow, and their influence
inconsiderable, but for another circumstance
which at the same time came into action. But
a survey of human affairs leads to the conclu-
sion, that when important changes in the social
world are about to take place, a lever is not
long of being supplied to work out the prodigy.
With the great religious change of the sixteenth
century arose the art of printing; with the
vast revolutions of the nineteenth, an agent of
equal efficacy was provided. At the time, when
the fleets of England were riding omnipotent
on the ocean, at the very moment when the
gigantic hosts of infidel and revolutionary
power were scattered by the icy breath of
winter, STEAM NAVIGATION was brought into
action, and an agent appeared upon the theatre
of the universe, destined to break through the
most formidable barriers of nature. In Janu-
ary, 1812, not one steam vessel existed in the
world; now, on the. Mississippi alone, there
afe a hundred and sixty. Vain' hereafter are
the waterless deserts of Persia, or the snowy
ridges of the Himalaya vain the impenetra-
ble forests of America, or the deadly jungles
of Asia. Even the death bestrodden gales of
the Niger must yield to the force of scientific
enterprise, and the fountains of the Nile
themselves emerge from the awful obscurity
of six thousand years. The great rivers of
the world are now the highways of civilization
and religion. The Russian battalions will
securely commit themselves to the waves of
the Euphrates, and waft again to the plains of
Shinar the blessings of regular government
and a beneficent faith ; remounting the St.
Lawrence and the Missouri, the British emi-
grants will carry into the solitudes of the far
west the Bible, and the wonders of English
genius. Spectators of, or actors in, so mar-
vellous a progress, let us act as becomes men
called to such mighty destinies in human
affairs ; let us never forget that it is to regulated
freedom alone that these wonders are to be as-
cribed ; and contemplate in the degraded and
impotent condition of France, when placed
beside these giants of the earth, the natural
and deserved result of the revolutionary pas-
sions and unbridled ambition which extin-
guished prospects once as fair, and destroyed
nergies once as powerful, as that which now
directs the destinies of half the globe.*
* Some of the preceding paragraphs have been trans-
ferred into fhe last chapter of the History of Europe
during the French Revolution : but they are retained
here, where they originally appeared, as essentially con-
nected with the subject treated of and speculations
hazarded in this volume.
GUIZOT.
GUIZOT.*
MACHIAVEL was the first historian who seems
to have formed a conception of the philosophy
of history. Before his time, the narrative of
human events was little more than a series of
biographies, imperfectly connected together by
a few slight sketches of the empires on which
the actions of their heroes were exerted. In
this style of history, the ancient writers were,
and to the end of time probably will continue
to be, altogether inimitable. Their skill in
narrating a story, in developing the events of
a life, in tracing the fortunes of a city or a
state, as they were raised by a succession of
illustrious patriots, or sunk by a series of op-
pressive tyrants, has never been approached in
modern times. The histories of Xenophon and
Thucydides, of Livy and Sallust, of Caesar and
Tacitus, are all more or Jess formed on this
model ; and the more extended view of history,
as embracing an account of the countries the
transactions of which were narrated, originally
formed, and to a great part executed by the
father of history, Herodotus, appears to have
been, in an unaccountable manner, lost by his
successors.
In these immortal works, however, human
transactions are uniformly regarded as they
have been affected by, or called forth the
agency of, individual men. We are never
presented with the view of society in a mass;
as influenced by a series of causes and effects
independent of the agency of individual man
or, to speak more correctly, in the development
of which the agency is an unconscious, and
often almost a passive, instrument. Constantly
regarding history as an extensive species of
biography, they not only did not withdraw the
eye to the distance necessary to obtain such a
general view of the progress of things, but they
did the reverse. Their great object was to
bring the eye so close as to see the whole vir-
tues or vices of the principal figures which
they exhibited on their moving panorama; and
in so doing, they rendered it incapable of per-
ceiving, at the same time, the movement of the
whole social body of which they formed a part.
Even Livy, in his pictured narrative of Roman
victories, is essentially biographical. His
inimitable work owes its enduring celebrity to
the charming episodes of individuals, or gra-
phic pictures of particular events, with which
it abounds ; scarce any general views on the
progress of society, or the causes to which its
astonishing progress in the Roman state was
owing, are to be found. In the introduction to
the life of Catiline, Sallust has given, with
unequalled power, a sketch of the causes which
corrupted the republic ; and if his work had
been pursued in the same style, it would indeed
have been a philosophical history. But neither
the Catiline nor the Jugurthine war are histo-
ries ; they are chapters of history, containing
two interesting biographies. Scattered through
* Blackwood's Magazine, Dec. 1844.
the writings of Tacitus are to be found nume-
rous caustic and profound observations on
human nature, and the increasing vices and
selfishness of a corrupted age; but like the
maxims of Rochefoucault, it is to individual,
not general, humanity that they refer; and
they strike us as so admirably just, because
they do not describe general causes operating
upon society as a body which often make
little impression, save on a few reflecting
minds but strike direct to the human heart,
in a way which comes home to the breast of
every individual who reads them.
Never was a juster observation than that the
human mind is never quiescent; it may not
give the external symptoms of action, but it
does not cease to have the internal movement:
it sleeps, but even then it dreams. Writers
innumerable have declaimed on the night of
the Middle Ages on the deluge of barbarism
which, under the Goths, flooded the world on
the torpor of the human intellect, under the
combined pressure of savage violence and
priestly superstition ; yet this was precisely
the period when the minds of men, deprived of
external vent, turned inwards on themselves;
and that the learned and thoughtful, shut out
from any active part in society by the general
prevalence of military violence, sought, in the
solitude of the cloister, employment in reflect-
ing on the mind itself, and the general causes
which, under its guidance, operated upon so-
ciety. The influence of this great change in
the direction of thought, at once appeared
when knowledge, liberated from the monastery
and the university, again took its place among
the affairs of men. Machiavel in Italy, and
Bacon in England, for the first time in the an-
nals of knowledge, reasoned upon human
affairs as a science. They spoke of the minds
of men as permanently governed by certain
causes, and of known principles always lead-
ing to the same results ; they treated of politics
as a science in which certain known laws ex-
isted, and could be discovered, as in mechanics
and hydraulics. This was a great step in ad-
vance, and demonstrated that the superior age
of the world, and the wider sphere to which
political observation had now been applied,
had permitted the accumulation of such an in-
creased store of facts, as permitted deductions,
founded on experience, to be formed in regard
to the affairs of nations. Still more, it showed
that the attention of writers had been drawn to
the general causes of human progress ; that
they reasoned on the actions of men as a sub-
ject of abstract thought; regarded effects for-
merly produced as likely to recur from a similar
combination of circumstances; and formed
conclusions for the regulation of future con-
duct, from the results of past experience.
This tendency is, in an especial manner, con-
spicuous in the Discorsi of Machiavel, where
certain general propositions are stated, de-
duced, indeed, from the events of Roman story,
368
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
but announced as lasting truths, applicable to
every future generation and circumstances of
men. In depth of view and justness of obser-
vation, these views of the Florentine statesman
never were surpassed. Bacon's essays relate,
for the most part, to subjects of morals, or do-
mestic and private life ; but not unfrequently
he touches on the general concerns of nations,
and with the same profound observation of the
past, and philosophic anticipation of the future.
Voltaire professed to elevate history in France
from the jejune and trifling details of genealogy,
courts, wars, and negotiations, in which it
had, hitherto, in his country, been involved, to
the more general contemplation of arts and
philosophy, and the progress of human affairs ;
and, in some respects, he certainly effected a
great reformation on the ponderous annalists
who had preceded him. But the foundation
of his history was still biography ; he regarded
human events only as they were grouped round
two or three great men, or as they were influ-
enced by the speculations of men of letters and
science. The history of France he stigmatized
as savage and worthless till the reign of Louis
XIV.; the Russians he looked upon as no bet-
ter than barbarians till the time of Peter the
Great. He thought the philosophers alone all
in all ; till they arose, and a sovereign ap-
peared who collected them round his throne,
and shed on them the rays of royal favour,
human events were not worth narrating ; they
were merely the contests of one set of savages
plundering another. Religion, in his eyes, was
a mere priestly delusion, to enslave and be-
nighten mankind ; from its oppression the
greatest miseries of modern times had flowed;
the first step in the emancipation of the human
mind was to chase for ever from the earth
those sacerdotal tyrants. The most free-
thinking historian will now admit, that these
views are essentially erroneous ; he will allow
that, viewing Christianity merely as a human
institution, its effect in restraining the violence
of feudal anarchy was incalculable ; long ante-
rior to the date of the philosophers, he will look
for the broad foundation on which national
character and institutions, for good or for evil,
have been formed. Voltaire was of great ser-
vice to history, by turning it from courts and
camps to the progress of literature, science,
and the arts to the delineation of manners,
and the preparation of anecdotes descriptive
of character; but notwithstanding all his talent,
he never got a glimpse of the general causes
which influence society. He gave us the his-
tory of philosophy, but not the philosophy of
history.
The ardent genius and pictorial eye of Gib-
bon rendered him an incomparable delineator
of events; and his powerful mind made him
seize the general and characteristic features of
society and manners, as they appear in dif-
ferent parts of the world, as well as the traits
of individual greatness. His descriptions of
the Roman Empire, in the zenith of its power,
as it existed in the time of Augustus of its de-
cline and long-protracted old age, under Con-
stantine and his successors on the Byzantine
throne of the manners of the pastoral nations,
who, under different names, and for a succes-
sion of ages, pressed upon and at last over-
turned the empire of the Saracens, who,
issuing from the sands of Arabia, with the
Koran in one hand and the cirneter in the
other, urged on their resistless course, till they
were arrested by the Atlantic on the one side
and the Indian ocean on the other of the stern
crusaders, who, nursed amid the cloistered
shades and castellated realms of Europe, strug-
gled with that devastating horde " when 'twas
strongest, and ruled it when 'twas wildest"
of the long agony, silent decay, and ultimate
resurrection of the Eternal City are so many
immortal pictures, which, to the end of the
world, will fascinate every ardent and imagin-
ative mind. But, notwithstanding this incom-
parable talent for general and characteristic
description, he had not the mind necessary for
ical analysis of the series of causes
a philosoph
which infl
religion with a jaundiced and prejudiced eye
the fatal bequest of his age and French educa-
tion, unworthy alike of his native candour and
inherent strength of understanding. He had
profound philosophic ideas, and occasionally
let them out with admirable effect ; but the turn
of his mind was essentially descriptive, and
his powers were such in that brilliant depart-
ment, that they wiled him from the less inviting
contemplation of general causes. We turn
over his fascinating pages without wearying;
but without ever discovering the general pro-
gress or apparent tendency of human affairs.
We look in vain for the profound reflections
of Machiavel on the permanent results of cer-
tain political combinations or experiments.
He has led us through a " mighty maze," but
he has made no attempt to show it "not without
a plan."
Hume is commonly called a philosophical
historian, and so he is ; but he has even less
than Gibbon the power of unfolding the gene-
ral causes which influence the progress of
human events. He was not, properly speak-
ing, a philosophic historian, but a philosopher
writing history and these are very different
things. The experienced statesman will often
make a better delineator of the progress of
human affairs than the philosophic recluse ;
for he is more practically acquainted with
their secret springs: it was not in the schools,
but the forum or the palace, that Sallust, Ta-
citus, and Burke acquired their deep insight
into the human heart. Hume was gifted with
admirable sagacity in political economy; and
it is the good sense and depth of his views on
that important subject, then for the first time
brought to bear on the annals of man, that has
chiefly gained for him, and with justice, the
character of a philosophic historian. To this
may be added the inimitable clearness and
rhetorical powers with which he has stated
the principal arguments for and against the
great changes in the English institutions
which it fell to his lot to recount arguments
far abler than were either used by, or occurred
to, the actors by whom they were brought
about ; for it is seldom that a Hume is found
in the councils of men. With equal ability,
too, he has given periodical sketches of man-
ners, customs, and habits, mingled with valu-
GUIZOT.
369
able details on finance, commerce, and prices
all elements, and most important ones, in
the formation of philosophical history. We
owe a deep debt of gratitude to the man who
has rescued these valuable facts from the
ponderous folios where they were slumbering
in forgotten obscurity, and brought them into
the broad light of philosophic observation and
popular narrative. But, notwithstanding all
this, Hume is far from being gifted with the
philosophy of history. He has collected or
prepared many of the facts necessary for the
science, but he has made little progress in it
himself. He was essentially a skeptic. He
aimed rather at spreading doubts than shed-
ding light. Like Voltaire and Gibbon, he was
scandalously prejudiced and unjust on the
subject of religion ; and to write modern his-
tory without correct views on that subject, is
like playing Hamlet without the character of
the Prince of Denmark. He was too indolent
to acquire the vast store of facts indispensable
for correct generalization on the varied theatre
of human affairs, and often drew hasty and
incorrect conclusions from the events which
particularly came under his observation. Thus
the repeated indecisive battles between the
fleets of Charles II. and the Dutch, drew from
him the observation, apparently justified by
their results, that sea-fights are seldom so im-
portant or decisive as those at land. The fact
is just the reverse. Witness the battle of Sa-
lamis, which repelled from Europe the tide of
Persian invasion; that of Actium, which gave
a master to the Roman world; that of Sluys,
which exposed France to the dreadful English
invasions, begun under Edward III.; that of
Lepanto, which rolled back from Christendom
the wave of Mohammedan conquest ; the defeat
of the Armada, which permanently established
the Reformation in Northern Europe; that of
La Hogue, which broke the maritime strength
of Louis XIV.; that of Trafalgar, which for
ever took " ships, colonies, and commerce"
from Napoleon, and spread them with the
British colonial empire over half the globe.
Montesquieu owes his colossal reputation
chiefly to his Esprit des Loix ; but the Grandeur
et Decadence des Remains is by much the greater
work. It has never attained nearly the repu-
tation in this country which it deserves, either
in consequence of the English mind being less
partial than the French to the philosophy of
human affairs, or, as is more probable, from
the system of education at our universities
being so exclusively devoted to the study of
words, that our scholars seldom arrive at the
knowledge of things. It is impossible to ima-
gine a work in which the philosophy of his-
tory is more ably condensed, or where there
is exhibited, in a short space, a more profound
view of the general causes to which the long-
continued greatness and ultimate decline of that
celebrated people were owing. It is to be re-
gretted only that he did not come to modern
times and other ages with the same masterly
survey; the information collected in the Esprit
des Loix would have furnished him with ample
materials for such a work. In that noble trea-
tise, the same philosophic and generalizing
spirit is conspicuous ; but there is too great a
love of system, an obvious partiality for fan-
ciful analogies, and, not unfrequently, conclu-
sions hastily deduced from insufficient data.
These errors, the natural result of a philoso-
phic and profound mind wandering without a
guide in the mighty maze of human transac-
tions, are entirely avoided in the Grandeur et
Decadence des R&rnains, where he was retained
by authentic history to a known train of
events, and where his imaginative spirit and
marked turn for generalization found suffi-
cient scope, and no more, to produce the
most perfect commentary on the annals of a
single people of which the human mind can
boast.
Bossuet, in his Universal History, aimed at a
higher object; he professed to give nothing
less than a development of the plan of Provi-
dence, in the government of human affairs,
during the whole of antiquity, and down to
the reign of Charlemagne. The idea was
magnificent, and the mental powers, as well
as eloquence, of the Bishop of Meaux pro-
mised the greatest results from such an under-
taking. But the execution has by no means
corresponded to the conception. Voltaire has
said, that he professed to give a view of uni-
versal history, and he has only given the his-
tory of the Jews ; and there is too much truth
in the observation. He never got out of the
fetters of his ecclesiastical education ; the
Jews were the centre round which he sup-
posed all other nations revolved. His mind
was polemical, not philosophic; a great theo-
logian, he was but an indifferent historian.
In one particular, indeed, his observations are
admirable, and, at times, in the highest degree
impressive. He never loses sight of the di-
vine superintendence of human affairs ; he
sees in all the revolutions of empires the
progress of a mighty plan for the ultimate
redemption of mankind; and he traces the
workings of this superintending power in all
the transactions of man. But it may be doubt-
ed whether he took the correct view of this
sublime but mysterious subject. He supposes
the divine agency to influence directly the af-
fairs of men not through the medium of ge-
neral laws, or the adaptation of our active
propensities to the varying circumstances of
our condition. Hence his views strike at the
freedom of human actions; he makes men
and nations little more than the puppets by
which the Deity works out the great drama
of human affairs. Without disputing the re-
ality of such immediate agency in some par-
ticular cases, it may safely be affirmed, that
by far the greater part of the affairs of men
are left entirely to their own guidance, and
that their actions are overruled, not directed,
by Almighty power to work out the purposes
oif Divine beneficence.
That which Bossuet left undone, Robertson
did. The first volume of his Char es V. may
justly be regarded as the greatest step which
the human mind had yet made in the philoso-
phy of history. Extending his views beyond
the admirable survey which Montesquieu had
given of the rise and decline of the Roman
empire, he aimed at giving a view of the pro-
gress of society in modern times. This matter,
370
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
of the progress of society, was a favourite
subject at that period with political philoso-
phers; and by combining the speculations of
these ingenious men with the solid basis of
facts which his erudition and industry had
worked out, Robertson succeeded in produc-
ing the most luminous, and at the same time
just, view of the progress of nations that had
yet been exhibited among mankind. The phi-
losophy of history here appeared in its full
lustre. Men and nations were exhibited in
their just proportions. Society was viewed,
not only in its details, but its masses; the
general causes which influence its progress,
running into or mutually affecting each other,
and yet all conspiring with more or less effi-
cacy to bring about a general result, were ex-
hibited in the most lucid and masterly manner.
The great causes which have contributed to
form the elements of modern society the de-
caying civilization of Rome the irruption of
the northern nations the prostration and de-
gradation of the conquered people the revival
of the military spirit with the private wars of
the nobles the feudal system and institution
of chivalry the crusades, and revival of let-
ters following the capture of Constantinople
by the Turks the invention of printing, and
consequent extension of knowledge to the
great body of the people the discovery of the
compass, and, with it, of America, by Colum-
bus, and doubling of the Cape of Good Hope
by Vasco de Gama the invention of gunpow-
der, and prodigious change thereby effected in
the implements of human destruction are all
there treated in the most luminous manner,
and, in general, with the justest discrimina-
tion. The vast agency of general causes upon
the progress of mankind now became appa-
rent : unseen powers, like the deities of Homer
in the war of Troy, were seen to mingle at
every step with the tide of sublunary affairs ;
and so powerful and irresistible does their
agency, when once revealed, appear, that we
are perhaps now likely to fall into the oppo-
site extreme, and to ascribe too little to indi-
vidual effort or character. Men and nations
seem to be alike borne forward on the surface
of a mighty stream, which they are equally in-
capable of arresting or directing; and, after
surveying the vain and impotent attempts of
individuals to extricate themselves from the
current, we are apt to exclaim with the philo-
sopher,* "He has dashed with his oar to
hasten the cataract; he has waved with his
fan to give speed to the winds."
A nearer examination, however, will con-
vince every candid inquirer, that individual
character exercises, if not a paramount, yet a
very powerful influence on human affairs.
Whoever investigates minutely any period of
history will find, on the one hand, that general
causes affecting the whole of society are in
constant operation ; and on the other, that
these general causes themselves are often set
in motion, or directed in their effects, by par-
ticular men. Thus, of what efficacy were the
constancy of Pitt, the foresight of Burke, the
arm of Nelson, the wisdom of Wellington, the
* Ferguson.
genius of Wellesley, in bringing to maturity
the British empire, and spreading the Anglo-
Saxon race, in pursuance of its appointed
mission, over half the globe ! What marvel-
lous effect had the heroism and skill of Robert
Bruce upon the subsequent history of Scot-
land, and, through it, on the fortunes of the
British race ! Thus biography, or the deeds
or thoughts of illustrious men, still forms a
most important, and certainly the most inte-
resting, part even of general history; and the
perfection of that noble art consists, not in the
exclusive delineation of individual achieve-
ment, or the concentration of attention on ge-
neral causes, but in the union of the two in
due proportions, as they really exist in nature,
and determine, by their combined operation,
the direction of human affairs. The talent
now required in the historian partakes, ac-
cordingly, of this two-fold character. He is
expected to write at once philosophy and bio-
graphy: to unite skill in drawing individual
character, the power of describing individual
achievements, with a clear perception of gene-
ral causes, and the generalizing faculty of en-
larged philosophy. He must combine* in his
mind the powers of the microscope and the
telescope ; be ready, like the steam-engine, at
one time to twist a fibre, at another to propel
an hundred-gun ship. Hence the rarity of
eminence in this branch of knowledge ; and
if we could conceive writer who, to the ar-
dent genius and descriptive powers of Gibbon,
should unite the lucid glance and just discri-
mination of Robertson, and the calm sense
and reasoning powers of Hume, he would
form a more perfect historian than ever has,
or probably ever will appear upon earth.
With all his generalizing powers, however,
Robertson fell into one defect or rather, he
was unable, in one respect, to extricate him-
self from the prejudices of his age and profes-
sion. He was not a freethinker on the con-
trary, he was a sincere and pious divine ; but
he lived in an age of freethinkers they had
the chief influence in the formation of a wri-
ter's fame ; and he was too desirous of literary
reputation to incur the hazard of ridicule or
contempt, by assigning too prominent a place
to the obnoxious topic. Thence he has as-
cribed far too little influence to Christianity, in
restraining the ferocity of savage manners,
preserving alive the remains of ancient know-
ledge, and laying in general freedom the broad
and deep foundations of European society.
He has not overlooked these topics, but he has
not given them their due place, nor assigned
them their proper weight. He lived and died
in comparative retirement; and he was never
able to shake himself free from the prejudices
of his country and education, on the subject
of Romish religion. Not that he exaggerated
the abuses and enormities of the Roman Ca-
tholic superstition which brought about the
Reformation, nor the vast benefits which Lu-
ther conferred upon mankind by bringing them
to light ; both were so great, that they hardly
admitted of exaggeration. His error and, in
the delineation of the progress of society in
modern Europe, it was a very great one con-
sisted in overlooking the beneficial effect of
GUIZOT.
371
that very superstition, then so pernicious, in a
prior age of the world, when violence was uni-
versal, crime prevalent alike in high and low
places, and government impotent to check
either the tyranny of the great or the madness
of the people. Then it was that superstition
was the greatest blessing which Providence,
in mercy, could bestow on mankind; for it ef-
fected what the wisdom of the learned or the
efforts of the active were alike unable to effect;
it restrained the violence by imaginary, which
was inaccessible to the force of real, terrors ;
and spread that protection under the shadow
of the Cross, which could never have been ob-
tained by the power of the sword. Robertson
was wholly insensible to these early and in-
estimable blessings of the Christian faith ; he
has admirably delineated the beneficial influ-
ence of the Crusades upon subsequent society,
but on this all-important topic he is silent.
Yet, whoever has studied the condition of
European society in the ninth, tenth, and ele-
venth centuries, as it has since been developed
in the admirable works of Sismondi, Thierry,
Michelet, and Guizot, must be aware that the
services, not merely of Christianity, but of the
superstitions which had usurped its place,
were, during that long period, incalculable;
and that, but for them, European society would
infallibly have sunk, as Asiatic in every age
has done, beneath the desolating sword of bar-
barian power.
Sismondi if the magnitude, and in many
respects the merit, of his works be considered
must be regarded as one of the greatest
historians of modern times. His "History of
the Italian Republics" in sixteen, of the " Mo-
narchy of France" in thirty volumes, attest the
variety and extent of his antiquarian researches,
as well as the indefatigable industry of his
pen: his "Literature of the South of Europe"
in four, and "Miscellaneous Essays," in three
volumes, show how happily he has blended
thesje weighty investigations with the lighter
topics of literature and poetry, and the politi-
cal philosophy which, in recent times, has
come to occupy so large a place in the study
of all who have turned their mind to the pro-
gress of human affairs. Nor is the least part
of his merit to be found in the admirable skill
with which he has condensed, each in two
volumes, his great histories, for the benefit of
that numerous class of readers, who unable or
unwilling to face the formidable undertaking
of going through his massy works, are de-
sirous of obtaining such a brief summary of
their leading events as may suffice for persons
of ordinary perseverance or education. His
mind was essentially philosophical ; and it is
the philosophy of modern history, accordingly,
which he has exerted himself so strenuously
to unfold. He views society at a distance, and
exhibits its great changes in their just propor-
tions, and, in general, with their true effects.
His success in this arduous undertaking has
been great indeed. He has completed the pic-
ture of which Robertson had only formed the
sketch and completed it with such a prodigi-
ous collection of materials, and so lucid an ar-
rangement of them in their appropriate places,
as to have left future ages little to do but draw
the just conclusions from the results of his
labours.
With all these merits, and they are great,
and with this rare combination of antiquarian
industry with philosophic generalization, Sis-
mondi is far from being a perfect historian.
He did well to abridge his great works ; for he
will find few readers who will have persever-
ance enough to go through them. An abridg-
ment was tried of Gibbon; but it had little
success, and has never since been attempted.
You might as well publish an abridgment of
Waverley or Ivanhoe. Every reader of the
Decline and Fall must feel that condensation is
impossible, without an omission of interest or
a curtailment of beauty. Sismondi, with all
his admirable qualities as a general and philo-
sophic historian, wants the one thing needful
in exciting interest descriptive and dramatic
power. He was a man of great vigour of
thought and clearness of observation, but little
genius at least of that kind of genius which
is necessary to move the feelings or warm the
imagination. That was his principal defect;
and it will prevent his great works from ever
commanding the attention of a numerous body
of general readers, however much they may
be esteemed by the learned and studious.
Conscious of this deficiency, he makes scarce
any attempt to make his narrative interesting;
but, reserving his whole strength for general
views on the progress of society, or philo-
sophic observations on its most important
changes, he fills up the intermediate space
with long quotations from chronicles, me-
moirs, and state papers a sure way, if the
selection is not made with great judgment, of
rendering the whole insupportably tedious.
Every narrative, to be interesting, should be
given in the writer's own words, unless on those
occasions, by no means frequent, when some
striking or remarkable expressions of a speak-
er, or contemporary writer, are to be preserved.
Unity of style and expression is as indispen-
sable in a history which is to move the heart,
or fascinate the imagination, as in a tragedy,
a painting, or an epic poem.
But, in addition to this, Sismondi's general
views, though ordinarily just, and always ex-
pressed with clearness and precision, are not
always to be taken without examination. Like
Robertson, he was never able to extricate him-
self entirely from the early prejudices of his
country and education ; hardly any of the Ge-
neva school of philosophers have been able to
do so. Brought up in that learned and able,
but narrow, and in some respects bigoted com-
munity, he was early engaged in the vast
undertaking of the History of the Italian Re-
publics. Thus, before he was well aware of
it, and at a time of life, when the opinions are
flexible, and easily moulded by external im-
pressions, he became irrevocably enamoured
of such little communities as he had lived in,
or was describing, and imbibed all the preju-
dices against the Church of Rome, which have
naturally, from close proximity, and the en-
durance of unutterable evils at its hands, been
ever prevalent among the Calvinists of Ge-
neva. These causes have tinged his otherwise
impartial views with two signal prejudices,
372
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
which appear in all his writings where these
subjects are even remotely alluded to. His
partiality for municipal institutions, and the
social system depending on them, is as extra-
vagant, as his aversion to the Church of Rome
is conspicuous and intemperate. His idea of
a perfect society would be a confederacy of
little republics, governed by popularly elected
magistrates, holding the scarlet old lady of
Rome in utter abomination, and governed
in matters of religion by the Presbyterian
forms, and the tenets of Calvin. It is not to
be wondered at, that the annalist of the coun-
tries of Tasso and Dante, of Titian and Ma-
chiavel, of Petrarch and Leonardo da Vinci,
of Galileo and Michael Angelo, should con-
ceive, that in no other state of society is such
scope afforded for mental cultivation and the
development of the highest efforts of genius.
Still less is it surprising, that the historian of
the crusades against the Albigenses, of the un-
heard of atrocities of Simon de Montfort, of
the wholesale massacres, burnings, and tortur-
ings, which have brought such indelible dis-
grace on the Roman priesthood, should feel
deeply interested in a faith which has extri-
cated his own country from the abominable
persecution. But still, this indulgence of these
natural, and in some respects praiseworthy,
feelings, has blinded Sismondi to the insur-
mountable evils of a confederacy of small
republics at this time, amidst surrounding,
powerful, and monarchical states ; and to the
inappreciable blessings of the Christian faith,
and even of the Romish superstition, before
the period when these infamous cruelties be-
gan, when their warfare was only with the op-
pressor, their struggles with the destroyers of
the human race.
But truth is great, and will prevail. Those
just views of modern society, which neither
the luminous eye of Robertson, nor the learned
research and philosophic mind of Sismondi
could reach, have been brought forward by a
writer of surpassing ability, whose fame as
an historian and a philosopher is for the time
overshadowed by the more fleeting celebrity
of the statesman and the politician. We will
not speak of M. GUIZOT in the latter character,
much as we are tempted to do so, by the high
and honourable part which he has long borne
in European diplomacy, and the signal ability
with which, in the midst of a short-sighted and
rebellious generation, clamouring, as the Ro-
mans of old, for the multis utile beUvm, he has
sustained his sovereign's wise and magnani-
mous resolution to maintain peace. We are
too near the time to appreciate the magnitude
of these blessings ; men would not now be-
lieve through what a crisis the British empire,
unconscious of its danger, passed, when M.
Thiers was dismissed, three years and a half
ago, by Louis Philippe, and M. Guizot called
to the helm. But when the time arrives, as
arrive it will, that the diplomatic secrets of that
period are brought to light; when the instruc-
tions of the revolutionary minister to the ad-
miral of the Toulon fleet are made known, and
the marvellous chance which prevented their
being acted upon by him, has become matter
of history ; it will be admitted, that the civilized
world have good cause to thank M. Guizot for
saving it from a contest as vehement, as perilous,
and probably as disastrous to all concerned, as
that which followed the French Revolution.
Our present business is with M. Guizot as an
historian and a philosopher; a character in
which he will be remembered, long after his
services to humanity as a statesman and a
minister have ceased to attract the attention
of men. In those respects, we place him in
the very highest rank among the writers of
modern Europe. It must be understood, how-
ever, in what his greatness consists, lest the
readers, expecting what they will not find, ex-
perience disappointment, when they begin the
study of his works. He is neither imaginative
nor pictorial; he seldom aims at the pathetic,
and has little eloquence. He is not a Livy nor
a Gibbon. Nature has not given him either
dramatic or descriptive powers. He is a man
of the highest genius; but it consists not in
narrating particular events, or describing in-
dividual achievement. It is in the discovery
of general causes; in tracing the operation
of changes in society, which escape ordinary
observation ; in seeing whence man has come,
and whither he is going, that his greatness
consists ; and in that loftiest of the regions
of history, he is unrivalled. We know of
no author who has traced the changes of
society, and the general causes which de-
termine the fate of nations, with such just
views and so much sagacious discrimination.
He is not, properly speaking, an historian ; his
vocation and object were different. He is a
great discourser on history. If ever the philo-
sophy of history was imbodied in a human
being, it is in M. Guizot.
The style of this great author is, in every
respect, suited to his subject. He does not
aim at the highest flights of fancy ; makes no
attempt to warm the soul or melt the feelings;
is seldom imaginative, and never descriptive.
But he is uniformly lucid, sagacious, and dis-
criminating ; deduces his conclusions with
admirable clearness from his premises, and
occasionally warms from the innate grandeur
of his subject into a glow of fervent eloquence.
He seems to treat of human affairs, as if he
viewed them from a loftier sphere than other
men; as if he were elevated above the usual
struggles and contests of humanity; and a su-
perior power had withdrawn the veil which
shrouds their secret causes and course from
the gaze of sublunary beings. He cares not
to dive into the secrets of cabinets ; attaches
little, perhaps too little, importance to indivi-
dual character ; but fixes his steady gaze on
the great and lasting causes which, in a dur-
able manner, influence human affairs. He
vieAvs them not from year to year but from
century to century; and, when considered in
that view, it is astonishing how much the
importance of individual agency disappears.
Important in their generation sometimes al-
most omnipotent for good or for evil Avhile
they live particular men, how great soever,
rarely leave any very important consequences
behind them ; or at least rarely do what other
men might not have done as effectually as
them, and which was not already determined
GUIZOT.
373
by the tendency of the human mind, and the
tide, either of flow or ebb, by which human
affairs were at the time wafted to and fro. The
desperate struggles of war or of ambition in
which they were engaged, and in which so
much genius and capacity were exerted, are
swept over by the flood of time, and seldom
leave any lasting trace behind. It is the men
who determine the direction of this tide, who
imprint their character on general thought,
who are the real directors of human affairs; it
is the giants of thought who, in the end, go-
vern the world. Kings and ministers, princes
and generals, warriors and legislators, are but
the ministers of their blessings or their curses
to mankind. But their dominion seldom begins
till themselves are mouldering in their graves.
Guizot's largest work, in point of size, is
his translation of Gibbon's Rome ; and the just
and philosophic spirit in which he viewed the
course of human affairs, was admirably cal-
culated to provide an antidote to the skeptical
sneers which, in a writer of such genius and
strength of understanding, are at once the
marvel and the disgrace of that immortal
work. He has begun also a history of the
English Revolution, to which he was led by
having been the editor of a valuable collec-
tion of Memoirs relating to the great Rebellion,
translated into French, in twenty-five volumes.
But this work only got the length of two vo-
lumes, and came no further down than the
death of Charles I., an epoch no further on in
the English than the execution of Louis in the
French Revolution. This history is clear,
lucid, and valuable ; but it is written with
little eloquence, and has met with no great
success : the author's powers were not of the
dramatic or pictorial kind necessary to paint
that dreadful story. These were editorial or
industrial labours unworthy of Guizot's mind ;
it was when he delivered lectures from the
chair of history in Paris, that his genius shone
forth in its proper sphere and its true lustre.
His Civilisation en France, in five volumes,
Civilisation Europeenne, and Essais sur VHistoire
de France, each in one volume, are the fruits
of these professional labours. The same pro-
found thought, sagacious discrimination, and
lucid view, are conspicuous in them all ; but
they possess different degrees of interest to the
English reader. The Civilisation en France is
the groundwork of the whole, and it enters at
large into the whole details, historical, legal,
and antiquarian, essential for its illustration,
and the proof of the various propositions
which it contains. In the Civilisation Euro-
peenne and Essays on the History of France, how-
ever, the general results are given with equal
clearness and greater brevity. We do not
hesitate to say, that they appear to us to throw
more light on the history of society in modern
Europe, and the general progress of mankind,
from the exertions of its inhabitants, than any
other works in existence ; and it is of them,
especially the first, that we propose to give our
readers some account.
The most important event which ever oc-
curred in the history of mankind, is the one
concerning which contemporary writers have
given us the least satisfactory accounts. Be-
yond all doubt the overthrow of Rome by the
Goths was the most momentous catastrophe
I which has occurred on the earth since the de-
luge ; yet, if we examine either the historians
of antiquity or the earliest of modern times,
we find it wholly impossible to understand to
what cause so great a catastrophe had been
owing. What gave, in the third and fourth
centuries, so prodigious an impulse to the
northern nations, and enabled them, after be-
ing so long repelled by the arms of Rome,
finally to prevail over it 1 What, still more,
so completely paralyzed the strength of the
empire during that period, and produced that
astonishing weakness in the ancient conque-
rors of the world, which rendered them the
easy prey of those whom they had so often
subdued ? The ancient writers content them-
selves with saying, that the people became
corrupted ; that they lost their military cou-
rage ; that the recruiting of the legions, in the
free inhabitants of the empire, became im-
possible; and that the semi-barbarous tribes
on the frontier could not be relied on to up-
hold its fortunes. But a very little reflection,
must be sufficient to show that there must
have been much more in it than this, before a
race of conquerors was converted into one of
slaves ; before the legions fled before the bar-
barians, and the strength of the civilized was
overthrown by the energy of the savage world.
For what prevented a revenue from being
raised in the third or fourth, as well as the
first or second centuries 1 Corruption in its
worst form had doubtless pervaded the higher
ranks in Rome from the emperor downward;
but these vices are the faults of the exalted
and the affluent only; they never have, and
never will, extend generally to the great body
of the community; for this plain reason, that
they are not rich enough to purchase them.
But the remarkable thing is, that in the decline
of the empire, it was in the lower ranks that
the greatest and most fatal weakness first ap-
peared. Long before the race of the Patri-
cians had become extinct, the free cultivators
had disappeared from the fields. Leaders and
generals of the most consummate abilities, of
the greatest daring, frequently arose ; but their
efforts proved in the end ineffectual, from the
impossibility of finding a sturdy race of fol-
lowers to fill their ranks. The legionary Italian
soldier was awanting his place was imper-
fectly supplied by the rude Dacian, the hardy
German, the faithless Goth. So completely
were the inhabitants of the provinces within
the Rhine and the Danube paralyzed, that they
ceased to make any resistance to the hordes
of invaders ; and the fortunes of the empire
were, for several generations, sustained volely
by the heroic efforts of individual leaders
Belisarius, Narses, Julian, Aurelian, Constan-
tine, and many others whose renown, though
it could not rouse the pacific inhabitants to
warlike efforts, yet attracted military adven-
turers from all parts of the world to their
standard. Now, what weakened and destroyed
the rural population 1 ? It could not be luxury;
on the contrary, they were suffering under
excess of poverty, and bent down beneath a
load of taxes, which, in Gaul, in the time of
21
374
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
Constantine, amounted, as Gibbon tells us, to
nine pounds sterling on every freeman 1 What
was it, then, which occasioned the depopula-
tion and weakness 1 This is what behoves us
to know this it is which ancient history has
left unknown.
It is here that the vast step in the philosophy
of history made from ancient to modern times
is apparent. From a few detached hints and
insulated facts, left by the ancient annalists,
apparently ignorant of their value, and care-
less of their preservation, modern industry,
guided by the light of philosophy, has reared
up the true solution of the difficulty, and re-
vealed the real causes, hidden from the ordi-
nary gaze, which, even in the midst of its
greatest prosperity, gradually, but certainly,
undermined the strength of the empire. Miche-
let, in his Gaule sous les Romains, a most able
and interesting work Thierry, in his Domina-
tion Romaine en Gaule, and his Hist owe des Rois
Merovingians Sismondi, in the three first vo-
lumes of his Histoire des Frangais and Guizot,
in his Civilisation Europeenne, and the first vo-
lumes of his Essais sur F Histoire de France
have applied their great powers to this most in-
teresting subject. It may safely be affirmed that
they have got to the bottom of the subject, and
lifted up the veil from one of the darkest, and
yet most momentous, changes in the history of
mankind. Guizot gives the following account
of the principal causes which silently under-
mined the strength of the empire, flowing from
the peculiar organization of ancient society:
"When Rome extended, what did it do 1 ?
Follow its history, and you will find that it
was everlastingly engaged in conquering or
founding cities. It was with cities that it
fought with cities that it contracted into
cities that it sent colonies. The history of the
conquest of the world by Rome, is nothing but
the history of the conquest and foundation of
a great number of cities. In the east, the
expansion of the Roman power assumed, from
the very outset, a somewhat dissimilar cha-
racter; the population was differently distri-
buted from the west, and much less concen-
trated in cities; but in the European world,
the foundation or conquest of towns was the
uniform result of Roman conquest. In Gaul
and Spain, in Italy, it was constantly towns
which opposed the barrier to Roman domi-
nation, and towns which were founded or
garrisoned by the legions, or strengthened by
colonies, to retain them when vanquished in
a state of subjection. Great roads stretched
from one town to another ; the multitude of
cross roads which now intersect each other in
every direction, was unknown. They had no-
thing in common with that multitude of little
monuments, villages, churches, castles, villas,
and cottages, which now cover our provinces.
Rome has bequeathed to us nothing, either in
its capital or its provinces, but the municipal
character, which produced immense monuments
on certain points, destined for the use of the
vast population which was there assembled
together.
" From this peculiar conformation of society
in Europe, under the Roman dominion, con-
sisting of a vast conglomeration of cities, with
each a dependent territory, all independent of
each other, arose the absolute necessity for a
entral and absolute government. One muni-
cipality in Rome might conquer the world :
but to retain it in subjection, and provide for
the government of all its multifarious parts,
was a very different matter. This was one of
the chief causes of the general adoption of a
strong concentrated government under the em-
pire. Such a centralized despotism not only
succeeded in restraining and regulating all the
incoherent members of the vast dominion, but
the idea of a central irresistible authority in-
sinuated itself into men's minds everywhere,
at the same time, with wonderful facility. At
first sight, one is astonished to see, in that
prodigious and ill-united aggregate of little
republics, in that accumulation of separate
municipalities, spring up so suddenly an un-
bounded respect for the sacred authority of
the empire. But the truth is, it had become a
matter of absolute necessity, that the bond
which held together the different parts of this
heterogeneous dominion should be very power-
ful; and this it was which gave it so ready a
eception in the minds of men.
" But when the vigour of the central power
declined during a course of ages, from the pres-
sure of external warfare, and the weakness of
internal corruption, this necessity was no
longer felt. The capital ceased to be able to
provide for the provinces ; it rather sought pro-
tection from them. During four centuries, the
central power of the emperors incessantly
struggled against this increasing debility ; but
the moment at length arrived, when all the
practised skill of despotism, over the long in-
souciance of servitude, could no longer keep
together the huge and unwieldy body. In the
fourth century, we see it at once break up and
disunite; the barbarians entered on all sides
from without, the provinces ceased to oppose
any resistance from within ; the cities to evince
any regard for the general welfare ; and, as in
the disaster of a shipwreck, every one looked
out for his individual safety. Thus, on the
dissolution of the empire, the same general
state of society presented itself as in its cradle.
The imperial authority sunk into the dust, and
municipal institutions alone survived the dis-
aster. This, then, was the chief .legacy which
the ancient bequeathed to the modern world
for it alone survived the storm by which the
former had been destroyed cities and a mu-
nicipal organization everywhere established.
But it was not the only legacy. Beside it, there
was the recollection at least of the awful ma-
jesty of the emperor of a distant, unseen, but
sacred and irresistible power. These are the
two ideas which antiquity bequeathed to mo-
dern times. On the one hand, the municipal
regime, its rules, customs, and principles of
liberty: on the other, a common, general, civil
legislation ; and the idea of absolute power, of
a sacred majesty, the principle of order and
servitude." Civilisation Europeenne, 20, 23.
The causes which produced the extraordi-
nary, and at first sight unaccountable, depopu-
lation of the country districts, not only in Italy,
but in Gaul, Spain, and all the European pro-
vinces of the Roman empire, are explained by
GUIZOT.
375
Guizot in his Essays on the History of France,
and have been fully demonstrated by Sismondi,
Thierry, and Michelet. They were a natural
consequence of the municipal system, then
universally established as the very basis of
civilization in the whole Roman empire, and
may be seen urging, from a similar cause, the
Turkish empire to dissolution at this day.
This was the imposition of a certain fixed
duty, as a burden on each municipality, to be
raised, indeed, by its own members, but admit-
ting of no diminution, save under the most
special circumstances, and on an express ex-
emption by the emperor. Had the great bulk
of the people been free, and the empire pros-
perous, this fixity of impost would have been
the greatest of all blessings. It is the precise
boon so frequently and earnestly implored by
our ryots in India, and indeed by the cultiva-
tors all over the east. But when the empire
was beset on all sides with enemies only the
more rapacious and pressing, that the might
of the legions had so long confined them within
the comparatively narrow limits of their own
sterile territories and disasters, frequent and
serious, were laying waste the frontier pro-
vinces, it became the most dreadful of all
scourges; because, as the assessment on each
district was fixed, and scarcely ever suffered
any abatement, every disaster experienced
increased the burden on the survivors who
had escaped it ; until they became bent down
under such a weight of taxation, as, coupled
with the small number of freemen on whom it
exclusively fell, crushed every attempt at pro-
ductive industry. It was the same thing as if
all the farmers on each estate were to be bound
to make up, annually, the same amount of rent
to their landlord, no matter how many of them
had become insolvent. We know how Ion
the agriculture of Britain, in a period of de-
clining prices and frequent disaster, would
exist under such a system.
Add to this the necessary effect which the
free circulation of grain throughout the whole
Roman world had in depressing the agricul-
ture of Italy, Gaul, and Greece. They were
unable to withstand the competition of Egypt
Lybia. and Sicily the store-houses of the
world ; where the benignity of the climate, anc
the riches of the soil, rewarded seventy or an
hundred-fold the labours of the husbandman
Ga.ul, where the increase was only seven-fold
Italy, where it seldom exceeded twelve
Spain, where it was never so high, were
crushed in the struggle. The mistress of the
world, as Tacitus bewails, had come to depenc
for her subsistence on the floods of the Nile
Unable to compete with the cheap grain raiser
in the more favoured regions of the south, th<
cultivators of Italy and Gaul gradually retiree
from the contest. They devoted their exten
sive estates to pasturage, because live cattle o
dairy produce could not bear the expense of
being shipped from Africa; and the race of
agriculturists, the strength of the legions, dis
appeared in the fields, and was lost in th<
needy and indolent crowd of urban citizens, in
part maintained by tributes in corn brough
from Egypt and Lybia. This augmented th
burdens upon those who remained in the rura
istricts ; for, as the taxes of each municipality
emained the same, every one that withdrew
nto the towns left an additional burden on the
houlders of his brethren who remained behind.
>o powerful was the operation of these two
auses the fixity in the state burdens payable
y each municipality, and the constantly de-
lining prices, owing to the vast import from
.gricultural regions more favoured by nature
that it fully equalled the effect of the ravages
)f the barbarians in the frontier provinces
xposed to their incursions ; and the depopula-
ion of the rural districts was as complete in
taly and Gaul, before a barbarian had passed
he Alps or set his foot across the Rhine, as in
he plains between the Alps or the Adriatic and
he Danube, which had for long been ravaged
>y their arms.
Domestic slavery conspired with these evils
o prevent the healing power of nature from
losing these yawning wounds. Gibbon esti-
mates the number of slaves throughout the
empire, in its latter days, at a number equal to
hat of the freemen ; in other words, one half
of the whole inhabitants were in a state of
servitude ;* and as there were 120,000,000 souls
under the Roman sway, sixty millions were in
hat degraded condition. There is reason to
jelieve that the number of slaves was still
greater than this estimate, and at least double
hat of the freemen ; for it is known by an
authentic enumeration, that, in the time of the
Emperor Claudius, the number of citizens in
the empire was only 6,945,000 men, who, with
their families, might amount to twenty millions
of souls ; and the total number of freemen was
about double that of the citizens.f In one
family alone, in the time of Pliny, there were
4116 slaves4 But take the number of slaves
according to Gibbon's computation, at only
half the entire population, what a prodigious
abstraction must this multitude of slaves have
made from the physical and moral strength of
the empire! Half the people requiring food,
needing restraint, incapable of trust, and yet
adding nothing to the muster-roll of the legions,
or the persons by whom the fixed and immov-
able annual taxes were to be made good ! In
what state would the British empire now be,
if we were subjected to the action of similar
causes of ruin? A vast and unwieldy domi-
nion, exposed on every side to the incursions
of barbarous and hostile nations, daily increas-
ing in numbers, and augmenting in military
skill; a fixed taxation, for which the whole
free inhabitants of every municipality were
jointly and severally responsible, to meet the
increasing military establishment required by
these perils ; a declining, and at length extinct,
agriculture in the central provinces of the em-
pire, owing to the deluge of cheap grain from
its fertile extremities wafted over the waters
of the Mediterranean; multitudes of turbulent
freemen in cities, kept quiet by daily distribu-
tion of provisions at the public expense, from
the imperial granaries; and a half, or two-
thirds of the whole population in a state of
slavery neither bearing any share of the pub-
lic burdens, nor adding to the strength of the
* Gibbon. f Ibid. * PHn. Hist. Nat. ixxiii. 47.
376
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
military array of the empire. Such are the
discoveries of modern philosophy, as to the
causes of the decline and ultimate fall of the
Roman empire, Cleaned from a few facts, acci-
dentally preserved by the ancient writers, ap-
parently unconscious of their value ! It is a
noble science which, in so short a time, has
presented such a gift to mankind.
Guizot has announced, and ably illustrated,
a great truth, which, when traced to its legiti-
mate consequences, will be found to go far
towards dispelling many of the pernicious in-
novating dogmas which have so long been
afloat in the world. It is this, that whenever
an institution, though apparently pernicious in
our eyes, has long existed, and under a great
variety of circumstances, we may rest assured
that it in reality has been attended with some
advantages which counterbalance its evils, and
that upon the whole it is beneficial in its
tendency. This important principle is thus
stated :
" Independent of the efforts of man, there is
established by a law of providence, which it is
impossible to mistake, and which is analogous
to what we witness in the natural world, a
certain measure of order, reason, and justice,
without which society cannot exist. From the
single fact of its endurance we may conclude,
with certainty, that a society is not completely
absurd, insensate, or iniquitous; that it is not
destitute of the elements of reason, truth, and
justice which alone can give life to society.
If the more that society developes itself, the
stronger does this principle become if it is
daily accepted by a greater number of men, it
is a certain proof that in the lapse of time
there has been progressively introduced into
it more reason, more justice, more right It is
thus that the idea of political legitimacy has
arisen.
" This principle has for its foundation, in
the first instance, at least in a certain degree
the great principles of moral legitimacy
justice, reason, truth. Then came the sanction
of time, which always begets the presumption
of reason having directed arrangements which
have long endured. In the early periods of
society, we too often find force and falsehooc
ruling the cradles of royalty, aristocracy, de
mocracy, and even the church; but ever
where yon will see this force and falsehoo
yielding to the reforming hand of time, am
right and truth taking their place in the ruler
of civilization. It is this progressive infusion
of right and truth which has by degrees de
veloped the idea of political legitimacy; it i
thus that it has become established in moden
civilization. At different times, indeed, a
tempts have been made to substitute for thi
idea the banner of despotic power; but, i:
doing so, they have turned it aside from its
true origin. It is so little the banner of des
potic power, that it is in the name of righ
and justice that it has overspread the worl
As little is it exclusive: it belongs neither t
persons, classes, nor sects; it arises whereve
the idea of right has developed itself. W
shall meet with this principle in systems th
most opposite: in the feudal system, in. th
municipalities of Flanders and Germany, i
he republics of Italy, as well as in simple
nonarchies. It is a character diffused through
he various elements of modern civilization,
nd the perception of which is indispensable
the right understanding of its history."
jecture iii. 9, 11 ; Civilisation Europeenne.
No principle ever was announced of more
radical importance in legislating for man-
ind, than is contained in this passage. The
octrine is somewhat obscurely stated, and
ot with the precision which in general dis-
nguishes the French writers; but the import
fit seems to be this That no system of go-
ernment can long exist among men, unless it
s substantially, and in the majority of cases,
ounded in reason and justice, and sanctioned
y experienced utility for the people among
rhom it exists; and therefore, that we may
redicate with perfect certainty of any institu-
lon which has been generally extended and
ong established, that it has been upon the
whole beneficial, and should be modified or
Itered with a very cautious hand. That this
reposition is true, will probably be disputed
y none who have thought much and dis-
lassionately on human affairs; for all human
nstitutions are formed and supported by men,
ind unless men had some reason for support-
ng them, they would speedily sink to the
ground. It is in vain to say a privileged class
iave got possession of the power, and they
make use of it to perpetuate these abuses.
doubtless, they are always sufficiently inclined
o do so ; but a privileged class, or a despot, is
always a mere handful against the great body
of the people; and unless their power is sup-
jorted by the force of general opinion, founded
>n experienced utility upon the whole, it could
not maintain its ground a single week. And
his explains a fact observed by an able and
ngenious writer of the present day,* that if
almost all the great convulsions recorded in.
listory are attentively considered, it will be
found, that after a brief period of strenuous,
and often almost super-human effort, on the
part of the people, they have terminated in the
establishment of a government and institutions
differing scarcely, except in name, from that
which had preceded the struggle. It is hardly
necessary to remark how striking a confirma-
tion the English revolution of 1688, and the
French of 1830, afford of this truth.
And this explains what is the true meaning
of, and solid foundation for, that reverence for
antiquity which is so strongly implanted in hu-
man nature, and is never forgotten for any con-
siderable time without inducing the most dread-
ful disasters upon society. It means that those
institutions which have descended to us in actual
practice from our ancestors, come sanctioned
by the experience of ages ; and that they could
not have stood so long a test unless they had
been recommended, in some degree at least,
by their utility. It is not that our ancestors
were wiser than we are ; they were certainly
less informed, and probably were, on that ac-
count, in the general case, less judicious. But
time has swept away their fo'lies, which were
doubtless great enough, as it has done the
* Mr. JAMES'S Preface to Mary of Burgundy.
GUIZOT.
377
worthless ephemeral literature with which they,
as we, were overwhelmed; and nothing has
stood the test of ages, and come down to us
through a series of generations, of their ideas
or institutions, but what had some utility in
human feelings and necessities, and was on
the whole expedient at the time when it arose.
Its utility may have ceased by the change of
manners or of the circumstances of society
that may be a good reason for cautiously
modifying or altering it but rely upon it, it
was once useful, if it has existed long; and
the presumption of present and continuing
utility requires to be strongly outweighed by
forcible considerations before it is abandoned.
Lord Bacon has told us, in words which can
never become trite, so profound is their wis-
dom, that our changes, to be beneficial, should
resemble those of time, which, though the
greatest of all innovators, works out its altera-
tions so gradually that they are never per-
ceived. Guizot makes, in the same spirit, the
following fine observation on the slow march
of Supreme wisdom in the government of the
world :
" If we turn our eyes to history, we shall
find that all the great developments of the hu-
man mind have turned to the advantage of
society all the great struggles of humanity
to the good of mankind. It is not, ind-eed, im-
mediately that these efforts take place; ages
often elapse, a thousand obstacles intervene,
before they are fully developed ; but when we
survey a long course of ages, we see that all
has been accomplished. The march of Provi-
dence is not subjected to narrow limits ; it
cares not to develope to-day the consequences
of a principle which it has established yester-
day ; it will bring them forth in ages, when the
appointed hour has arrived ; and its course is
not the less sure that it is slow. The throne of
the Almighty rests on time it marches through
its boundless expanse as the gods of Homer
through space it makes a step, and ages have
passed away. How many centuries elapsed,
how many changes ensued, before the regenera-
tion of the inner man, by means of Christianity,
exercised on the social state its great and
salutary influence ! Nevertheless, it has at
length succeeded. No one can mistake its
effects at this time." Lecture i. 24.
In surveying the progress of civilization in
modern, as compared with ancient times, two
features stand prominent as distinguishing the
one from the other. These are the church and
the feudal system. They were precisely the cir-
cumstances Which gave umbrage to the phi-
losophers of the eighteenth century, and which
awakened the greatest transports of indigna-
tion among the ardent multitudes who, at its
close, brought about the French Revolution.
Very different is the light in which the eye of
true philosophy, enlightened by the experi-
ence of their abolition, views these great dis-
tinctive features of modern society.
" Immense," says Guizot, " was the influence
which the Christian church exercised over the
civilization of modern Europe. In the outset,
it was an incalculable advantage to have a
moral power, a power destitute of physical
force, which reposed only on mental convic-
48
tions and moral feelings, established amidst
that deluge of physical force and selfish vio-
lence which overwhelmed society at that pe-
riod. Had the Christian church not existed,
the world would have been delivered over to
the influence of physical strength, in its
coarsest and most revolting form. It alone
exercised a moral power. It did more; it
spread abroad the idea of a rule of obedience,
a heavenly power, to which all human beings,
how great soever, were subjected, and which
was above all human laws. That of itself was
a safeguard against the greatest evils of society ;
for it affected the minds of those by whom
they were brought about; it professed that be-
lief the foundation of the salvation of hu-
manity that there is above all existing insti-
tutions, superior to all human laws, a perma-
nent and divine law, sometimes called Reason,
sometimes Divine Command, but which, under
whatever name it goes, is for ever the same.
" Then the church commenced a great work
the separation of the spiritual and temporal
power. That separation is the origin of li-
berty of conscience ; it rests on no other prin-
ciple than that which lies at the bottom of the
widest and most extended toleration. The se-
paration of the spiritual and temporal power
rests on the principle, that physical force is
neither entitled to act, nor can ever have any
lasting influence, on thoughts, conviction, truth ;
it flows from the eternal distinction between
the world of thought and the world of action,
the world of interior conviction and that of
external facts. In truth that principle of the
liberty of conscience, for which Europe has
combated and suffered so much, which has so
slowly triumphed, and often against the ut-
most efforts of the clergy themselves, was first
founded by the doctrine of the separation of
the temporal and spiritual power, in the cradle
of European civilization. It is the Christian
church which, by the necessities of its situa-
tion to defend itself against the assaults of bar-
barism, introduced and maintained it. The
presence of a moral influence, the mainte-
nance of a Divine law, the separation of the
temporal and spiritual power, are the three
great blessings which the Christian church has
diffused in the dark ages over European so-
ciety.
" The influence of the Christian church was
great and beneficent for another reason. The
bishop and clergy ere long became the princi-
pal municipal magistrates : they were the
chancellors and ministers of kings the rulers,
except in the camp and the field, of mankind.
When the Roman empire crumbled into dust,
when the 1 central power of the emperors and
the legions disappeared, there remained, we
have seen, no other authority in the state but
the municipal functionaries. But they them-
selves had fallen into a state of apathy and
despair; the heavy burdens of despotism, the
oppressive taxes of the municipalities, the in-
cursions of the fierce barbarians, had reduced
them to despair. No protection to society, no
revival of industry, no shielding of innocence,
could be expected from their exertions. The
clergy, again, formed a society within itself;
fresh, young, vigorous, sheltered by the pr&-
SiS
378
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
railing faith, which speedily drew to itself all
the learning and intellectual strength that re-
mained in the state. The bishops and priests,
full of life and of zeal, naturally were recurred
to in order to fill all civil situations requiring
thought or information. It is wrong to re-
proach their exercise of these powers as an
usurpation ; they alone were capable of exer-
cising them. Thus has the natural course of
things prescribed for all ages and countries.
The clergy alone were mentally strong and
morally zealous : they became all-powerful.
It is the law of the universe." Lecture iii. 27,
31 ; Civilisation Europeenne.
Nothing can be more just or important than
these observations ; and they throw a new and
consoling light on the progress and ultimate
destiny of European society. They are as
original as they are momentous. Robertson,
with his honest horror of the innumerable cor-
ruptions which, in the time of Leo X. and Lu-
ther, brought about the Reformation Sismon-
di, with his natural detestation of a faith which
had urged on the dreadful cruelties of the cru-
sade of the Albigenses, and which produced
the revocation of the edict of Nantes have
alike overlooked those important truths, so es-
sential to a right understanding of the history
of modern society. They saw that the arro-
gance and cruelty of the Roman clergy had
produced innumerable evils in later times ;
that their venality in regard to indulgences
and abuse of absolution had brought religion
itself into discredit; that the absurd and in-
credible tenets which they still attempted to
force on mankind, had gone far to alienate the
intellectual strength of modern Europe, during
the last century, from their support. Seeing
this, they condemned it absolutely, for all times
and in all places. They fell into the usual
error of men in reasoning on former from their
own times. They could not make " the past
and the future predominate over the present."
They felt the absurdity of many of the legends
which the devout Catholics received as un-
doubted truths, and they saw no use in per-
petuating the belief in them; and thence they
conceived that they must always have been
equally unserviceable, forgetting that the eigh-
teenth was not the eighth century; and that,
during the dark ages, violence would have
rioted without control, if, when reason was in
abeyance, knowledge scanty, and military
strength alone in estimation, superstition had
not thrown its unseen fetters over the bar-
barian's arms. They saw that the Romish
clergy, during five centuries, had laboured
strenuously, and often with the most frightful
cruelty, to crush independence of thought in
matters of faith, and chain the human mind to
the tenets, often absurd and erroneous, of her
Papal creed; and they forgot that, during five
preceding centuries, the Christian church had
laboured as assiduously to establish the inde-
pendence of thought from physical coercion,
and had alone kept alive, during the interreg-
num of reason, the sparks of knowledge and
the principles of freedom.
In the same liberal and enlightened spirit
Guizot views the feudal system, the next grand
characteristic of modern times.
"A decisive proof that, in the tenth century,
the feudal system had become necessary, and
was, in truth, the only social state possible, is
to be found in the universality of its adoption.
Universally, upon the cessation of barbarism,
the feudal forms were adopted. At the first
moment of barbarian conquest, men saw only
the triumph of chaos. All unity, all general
civilization disappeared; on all sides was seen
society falling into dissolution ; and, in its
stead, arising a multitude of little, obscure,
isolated communities. This appeared to all
the contemporaries nothing short of universal
anarchy. The poets, the chroniclers of the
time, viewed it as the approach of the end of
the world. It was, in truth, the end of the
ancient world ; but the commencement of a
new one, placed on a broad basis, and with
large means of social improvement and indi-
vidual happiness.
" Then it was that the feudal system became
necessary, inevitable. It was the only possi-
ble means of emerging from the general chaos.
The whole of Europe, accordingly, at the same
time adopted it. Even those portions of so-
ciety which were most strangers, apparently,
to that system, entered warmly into its spirit,
and were fain to share in its protection. The
crown, the church, the communities, were con-
strained to accommodate themselves to it.
The churches became suzerain or vassal ; the
burghs had their lords and their feuars; the
monasteries and abbeys had their feudal re-
tainers, as well as the temporal barons. Roy-
alty itself was disguised under the name of a
feudal superior. Every thing was given in
fief; not only lands, but certain rights flowing
from them, as that of cutting wood, fisheries,
or the like. The church made subinfeuda-
tions of their casual revenues, as the dues on
marriages, funerals, and baptisms."
The establishment of the feudal system
thus universally in Europe, produced one
effect, the importance of which can hardly be
exaggerated. Hitherto the mass of mankind
had been collected under the municipal insti-
tutions which had been universal in antiquity,
in cities, or wandered in vagabond hordes
through the country. Under the feudal system
these men lived isolated, each in his own ha-
bitation, at a great distance from each other.
A glance will show that this single circum-
stance must have exercised on the character
of society, and the course of civilization,
the social preponderance; the government of
society passed at once from the towns to the
country private took the lead of public pro-
perty private prevailed over public life. Such
was the first effect, and it was an effect purely
material, of the establishment of the feudal
system. But other effects, still more material,
followed, of a moral kind, which have exer-
cised the most important effects on the Eu-
ropean manners and mind.
"The feudal proprietor established himself
in an isolated place, which, for his own pro-
tection, he rendered secure. He lived there,
with his wife, his children, and a few faithful
friends, who shared his hospitality, and con-
tributed to his defence. Around the castle, in
its vicinity, were established the farmers and
GUIZOT.
379
serfs who cultivated his domain. In the midst
of that inferior, but yet allied and protected
population, religion planted a church, and in-
troduced a priest. He was usually the chap-
lain of the castle, and at the same time the
curate of the village ; in subsequent ages these
two characters were separated ; the village
pastor resided beside his church. This was
the primitive feudal society the cradle, as it
were, of the European and Christian world.
" From this state of things necessarily arose
a prodigious superiority on the part of the pos-
sessor of the fief, alike in his own eyes, and in
the eyes of those who surrounded him. The
feeling of individual importance, of personal
freedom, was the ruling principle of savage
life ; but here a new feeling was introduced
the importance of a proprietor, of the chief
of a family, of a master, predominated over
that of an individual. From this situation
arose an immense feeling of superiority a
superiority peculiar to the feudal ages, and
entirely different from any thing which had yet
been experienced in the world. Like the feudal
lord, the Roman patrician was the head of a
family, a master, a landlord. He was, at the
same time, a religious magistrate, a pontiff in
the interior of his family. He was, moreover,
a member of the municipality in which his
property was situated, and perhaps one of
the august senate, which, in name at least, still
ruled the empire. But all this importance and
dignity was derived from without the patri-
cian shared it with the other members of his
municipality with the corporation of which
he formed a part. The importance of the
feudal lord, again, was purely individual he
owed nothing to another; all the power he
enjoyed emanated from himself alone. What
a feeling of individual consequence must such
a situation have inspired what pride, what
insolence, must it have engendered in his
mind! Above him was no superior, of whose
orders he was to be the mere interpreter or
organ around him were no equals. No all-
powerful municipality made his wishes bend
to its own no superior authority exercised a
control over his wishes ; he knew no bridle on
his inclinations, but the limits of his power, or
the presence of danger.
"Another consequence, hitherto not suffi-
ciently attended to, but of vast importance,
flowed from this society.
"The patriarchal society, of which the Bible
and the Oriental monuments offer the model,
was the first combination of men. The chief
of a tribe lived with his children, his relations,
the different generations who have assembled
around him. This was the situation of Abra-
ham of the patriarchs : it is still that of the
Arab tribes which perpetuate their manners.
The dan, of which remains still exist in the
mountains of Scotland, and the sept of Ireland,
is a modification of the patriarchal society: it
is the family of the chief, expanded during a
succession of generations, and forming a little
aggregation of dependents, still influenced by
the same attachments, and subjected to the
same authority. But the feudal community
was very different. Allied at first to the clan,
it was yet in many essential particulars dissi-
milar. There did not exist between its mem-
bers the bond of relationship ; they were not
of the same blood ; they often did not speak
the same language. The feudal lord belonged
to a foreign and conquering, his serfs to a do-
mestic and vanquished race. Their employ-
ments were as various as their feelings and
their traditions. The lord lived in his castle,
with his wife, his children, and relations : the
serfs on the estate, of a different race, of dif-
ferent names, toiled in the cottages around.
This difference was prodigious it exercised
a most powerful effect on the domestic habits
of modern Europe. It engendered the attach-
ments of home : it brought women into their
proper sphere in domestic life. The little so-
ciety of freemen, who lived in the midst of an
alien race in the castle, were all in all to each
other. No forum or theatres were at hand,
with their cares or their pleasures ; no city
enjoyments were a counterpoise to the plea-
sures of country life. War and the chase
broke in, it is true, grievously at times, upon
this scene of domestic peace. But war and
the chase could not last for ever; and, in the
long intervals of undisturbed repose, family
attachments formed the chief solace of life.
Thus it was that WOUTEX acquired their par-
amount influence thence the manners of chi-
valry, and the gallantry of modern times ; they
were but an extension of the courtesy and
habits of the castle. The word courtesy shows
it it was in the court of the castle that the
habits it denotes were learned." Lecture iv.
13. 17; Civilisation Europcenne.
We have exhausted, perhaps, exceeded, our
limits ; and we have only extracted a few of
I the most striking ideas from the first hundred
pages of one of Guizot's works ex uno disce
, omncs. The translation of them has been an
agreeable occupation for a few evenings ; but
they awake one mournful impression the
voice which uttered so many noble and en-
lightened sentiments is now silent; the genius
which once cast abroad light on the history of
man, is lost in the vortex of present politics.
The philosopher, the historian, are merged in
the statesman the instructor of all in the go-
vernor of one generation. Great as have been
his services, brilliant his course in the new
career into which he has been launched, it is
as nothing compared to that which he has left;
for the one confers present distinction, the
other immortal fame.
41
380
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO.*
THERE is something inexpressibly striking,
it may almost be said awful, in the fame of
HOMER. Three thousand years have elapsed
since the bard of Chios began to pour forth his
strains ; and their reputation, so far from de-
clining, is on the increase. Successive na-
tions are employed in celebrating his works ;
generation after generation of men are fasci-
nated by his imagination. Discrepancies of
race, of character, of institutions, of religion,
of age, of the world, are forgotten in the com-
mon worship of his genius. In this universal
tribute of gratitude, modern Europe vies with
remote antiquity, the light Frenchman with the
volatile Greek, the impassioned Italian with the
enthusiastic German, the sturdy Englishman
with the unconquerable Roman, the aspiring
Russian with the proud American. Seven
cities, in ancient times, competed for the hon-
our of having given him birth, but seventy na-
tions have since been moulded by his produc-
tions. He gave a mythology to the ancients ;
he has given the fine arts to the modern world.
Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Juno, are still house-
hold words in every tongue ; Vulcan is yet the
god of fire, Neptune of the ocean, Venus of
love. When Michael Angelo and Canova
strove to irnbody their conceptions of heroism
or beauty, they portrayed the heroes of the
Iliad. Flaxman's genius was elevated to the
highest point in imbodying its events. Epic
poets, in subsequent times, have done little
more than imitate his machinery, copy his
characters, adopt his similes, and, in a few in-
stances, improve upon his descriptions. Paint-
ing and statuary, for two thousand years, have
been employed in striving to portray, by the
pencil or the chisel, his yet breathing concep-
tions. Language and thought itself have been
moulded by the influence of his poetry. Images
of wrath are still taken from Achilles, of pride
from Agamemnon, of astuteness from Ulysses,
of patriotism from Hector, of tenderness from
Andromache, of age from Nestor. The gal-
leys of Rome were, the line-of-battle ships of
France and England still are, called after his
heroes. The Agamemnon long bore the flag
of Nelson; the Ajax perished by the flames
within sight of the tomb of the Telamonian
hero, on the shores of the Hellespont ; the
Achilles was blown up at the battle of Trafal-
gar. Alexander the Great ran round the tomb
of Achilles before undertaking the conquest of
Asia. It was the boast of Napoleon that his
mother reclined on tapestry representing the
heroes of the Iliad, when he was brought into
the world. The greatest poets of ancient and
modern times have spent their lives in the study
of his genius or the imitation of his works.
Withdraw from subsequent poetry the images,
mythology, and characters of the Iliad, and
*Blackwood's Magazine, January, 1845.
what would remain 7 Petrarch spent his best
years in restoring his verses. Tasso portrayed
the siege of Jerusalem, and the shock of Eu-
rope and Asia, almost exactly as Homer had
done the contest of the same forces, on the
same shores, two thousand five hundred years
before. Milton's old age, when blind and poor,
was solaced by hearing the verses recited of
the poet, to whose conceptions his own mighty
spirit had been so much indebted; and Pope
deemed himself fortunate in devoting his life
to the translation of the Ilia.fi.
No writer in modern times has equalled the
wide-spread fame of the Grecian bard; but it
may be doubted whether, in the realms of
thought, and in sway over the reflecting world,
the influence of DAXTE has not been almost
as considerable. Little more than five hundred
years, indeed, have elapsed not a sixth of the
thirty centuries. which have tested the strength
of the Grecian patriarch since the immortal
Florentine poured forth his divine conceptions;
but yet there is scarcely a writer of eminence
since that time, in works even bordering on
imagination, in which traces of his genius are
not to be found. The Inferno has penetrated
the world. If images of horror are sought
after, it is to his works that all the subsequent
i ages have turned ; if those of love and divine
[ felicity are desired, all turn to the Paradise and
the Spirit of Beatrice. When the historians of
the French Revolution wished to convey an
idea of the utmost agonies they were called on
to portray, they contented themselves with say-
ing it equalled all that the imagination of Dante
had conceived of the terrible. Sir Joshua Rey-
nolds has exerted his highest genius in depict-
ing the frightful scene described by him, when
Ugolino perished of hunger in the tower of
Pisa. Alfieri, Metastasio, Corneille, Lope de
Vega, and all the great masters of the tragic
muse, have sought in his works the germs of
their finest conceptions. The first of these
tragedians marked two-thirds of the Inferno and
Paradiso as worthy of being committed to me-
mory. Modern novelists have found in his
prolific mind the storehouse from which they
have drawn their noblest imagery, the chord by
which to strike the profoundest feelings of the
human heart. Eighty editions of his poems
have been published in Europe within the last
half century ; and the public admiration, so
far from being satiated, is augmenting. Every
scholar knows how largely Milton was indebted
to his poems for many of his most powerful
i images. Byron inherited, though often at
j second hand, his mantle, in many of his most
moving conceptions. Schiller has imbodied
them in a noble historic mirror ; and the dreams
j of Goethe reveal the secret influence of the
terrible imagination which portrayed the deep
remorse and hopeless agonies of Malebolge.
MICHAEL ANGELO has exercised an influence
HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO.
381
on modern art, little, if at all, inferior to that
produced on the realms of thought by Homel-
and Dante. The father of Italian painting, the
author of the frescoes on the Sistine Chapel,
he was, at the same time, the restorer of an-
cient sculpture, and the intrepid architect who
placed the Pantheon in the air. Raphael con-
fessed, that he owed to the contemplation of
his works his most elevated conceptions of
their divine art. Sculpture, under his original
hand, started from the slumber of a thousand
years, in all the freshness of youthful vigour;
architecture, in subsequent times, has sought
in vain to equal, and can never hope to sur-
pass, his immortal monument in the matchless
dome of St. Peter's. He found painting in its
infancy he left it arrived at absolute perfec-
tion. He first demonstrated of what that no-
ble art is capable. In the Last Judgment he
revealed its wonderful powers, exhibiting, as it
were, at one view, the whole circles of Dante's
Inferno portraying with terrible fidelity the
agonies of the wicked, when the last trumpet
shall tear the veil from their faces, and exhibit
in undisguised truth that most fearful of spec-
tacles a naked human heart. Casting aside,
perhaps with undue contempt, the adventitious
aid derived from finishing, colouring, and exe-
cution, he threw the whole force of his genius
into the design, the expression of the features,
the drawing of the figures. There never was
such a delineator of bone and muscle as
Michael Angelo. His frescoes stand out in
bold relief from the walls of the Vatican, like
the sculptures of Phidias from the pediment
of the Parthenon. He was the founder of the
school of painting both at Rome and Florence j
that great school which, disdaining the re-
presentation of still life, and all the subordinate
appliances of the art, devoted itself to the re- j
presentation of the grand and the beautiful ; to j
the expression of passion in all its vehemence !
of emotion in all its intensity. His incom-
parable delineation of bones and muscles was
but a means to an end ; it was the human
heart, the throes of human passion, that his I
master-hand laid bare. Raphael congratulated
himself, and thanked God that he had given
him life in the same age with that painter ; and
Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his last address to the
Academy, " reflected, not without vanity, that
his Discourses bore testimony to his admira-
tion of that truly divine man, and desired that
the last words he pronounced in that academy,
and from that chair, might be the name of
Michael Angelo."*
The fame of these illustrious men has long
been placed beyond the reach of cavil. Criti-
cism cannot reach, envy cannot detract from, \
emulation cannot equal them. Great present
celebrity, indeed, is no guarantee for future
and enduring fame; in many cases, it is the
reverse ; but there is a wide difference between
the judgment of the present and that of future
ages. The favour of the great, the passions
of the multitude, the efforts of reviewers, the
interest of booksellers, a clique of authors, a
coterie of ladies, accidental events, degrading
propensities, often enter largely into the com-
* Reynolds's Discourses, No. 16, adfinem.
position of present reputation. But opinion is
freed from all these disturbing influences by
the lapse of time. The grave is the greatest
of all purifiers. Literary jealousy, interested
partiality, vulgar applause, exclusive favour,
alike disappear before the hand of death. We
never can be sufficiently distrustful of present
opinion, so largely is it directed by passion or
interest. But we may rely with confidence on
the judgment of successive generations on de-
parted eminence ; for it is detached from the
chief cause of present aberration. So various
are the prejudices, so contradictory the par-
tialities and predilections of men, in different
countries and ages of the world, that they
never can concur through a course of cen-
turies in one opinion, if it is not founded in
truth and justice. The vox populi is often little
more than the vox diaboli ; but the voice of
ages is the voice of God.
It is of more moment to consider in what
the greatness of these illustrious men really
consists to what it. has probably been owing
and in what particulars they bear an an-
alogy to each other.
They are all three distinguished by one pe-
culiarity, which doubtless entered largely into
their transcendent merit they wrote in the
infancy of civilization. Homer, as all the
world knows, is the oldest profane author in
existence. Dante flourished about the year
1300: he lived at a time when the English
barons lived in rooms strewed with rushes, and
few of them' could sign their names. The
long life of Michajel Angelo, extending from
1474 to 1564, over ninety years, if not passed
in the infancy of civilization, was at least
passed in the childhood of the arts : before his
time, painting was in its cradle. Cimabue had
merely unfolded the first dawn of beauty at
Florence; and the stiff figures of Pietro Peru-
gin o, which may be traced in the first works
of his pupil Raphael, still attest the backward
state of the arts at Rome. This peculiarity,
applicable alike to all these three great men,
is very remarkable, and beyond all question
had a powerful influence, both in forming their
peculiar character, and elevating them to the
astonishing greatness which they speedily at-
tained.
It gave them what Johnson has justly
termed the first requisite to human greatness
self-confidence. They were the first at least
the first known to themselves and their con-
temporaries who adventured on their several
arts ; and thus they proceeded fearlessly in their
great career. They had neither critics to fear,
nor lords to flatter, nor former excellence to
imitate. They portrayed with the pencil, or
in verse, what they severally felt, undisturbed
by fear, unswayed by example, unsolicitous
about fame, unconscious of excellence. They
did so for the first time. Thence the freshness
and originality, the vigour and truth, the sim-
plicity and raciness by which they are dis-
tinguished. Shakspeare owed much of his
greatness to the same cause ; and thence his
similarity, in many respects, to these great
masters of his own or the sister arts. When
Pope asked Bentley what he thought of his
translation of the Iliad, the scholar replied.
382
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
" You have written a pretty book, Mr. Pope ;
but you must not call it Homer." Bentley was
right. With all its pomp of language and
melody of versification, its richness of imagery
and magnificence of diction, Pope's Homer is
widely different from the original. He could
not avoid it. Your " awful simplicity of the
Grecian bard, his artless grandeur and unaf-
fected majesty," will be sought for in vain in
the translation ; but if they had appeared there,
it would have been unreadable in that age.
Michael Angelo, in his bold conceptions, ener-
getic will, and rapid execution, bears a close
resemblance to the father of poetry. In both,
the same faults, as we esteem them, are con-
spicuous, arising from a too close imitation
of nature, and a carelessness in rejecting im-
ages or objects which are of an ordinary or
homely description. Dante was incomparably
more learned than either: he followed Virgil
in his descent to the infernal regions ; and ex-
hibits an intimate acquaintance with ancient
history, as well as that of the modern Italian
states, in the account of the characters he
meets in that scene of torment. But in his
own line he was entirely original. Homer and
Virgil had, in episodes of their poems, intro-
duced a picture of the infernal regions ; but
nothing on the plan of Dante's Inferno had be-
fore been thought of in the world. With much
of the machinery of the ancients, it bears the
stamp of the spiritual faith of modern times.
It lays bare the heart in a way unknown even
to Homer and Euripides. It reveals the in-
most man in a way which bespeaks the centu-
ries of self-reflection in the cloister which had
preceded it. It is the basis of all the spiritual
poetry of modern, as the Iliad is of all the ex-
ternal imagery of ancient, times.
In this respect there is a most grievous im-
pediment to genius in later, or, as we term
them, more civilized times, from which, in
earlier ages, it is wholly exempt. Criticism,
public opinion, the dread of ridicule then too
often crush the strongest minds. The weight
of former examples, the influence of early
habits, the halo of long-established reputation,
force original genius from the untrodden path
of invention into the beaten one of imitation.
Early talent feels itself overawed by the colos-
sus which all the world adores ; it falls down
and worships, instead of conceiving. The dread
of ridicule extinguishes originality in its birth.
Immense is the incubus thus laid upon the
efforts of genius. It is the chief cause of the
degradation of taste, the artificial style, the
want of original conception, by which the
literature of old nations is invariably dis-
tinguished. The early poet or painter who
portrays what he feels or has seen, with no
anxiety but to do so powerfully and truly, is
relieved of a load which crushes his subse-
quent compeers to the earth. Mediocrity is
ever envious of genius ordinary capacity of
original thought. Such envy in early times is
innocuous or does not exist, at least to the ex-
tent which is felt as so baneful in subsequent
periods. But in a refined and enlightened
age, its influence becomes incalculable. Who-
ever strikes out a new region of thought or
composition, whoever opens a fresh vein of im-
agery or excellence, is persecuted by the cri-
tics. He disturbs settled ideas, endangers es-
tablished reputation, brings forward rivals to
dominant fame. That is sufficient to render
him the enemy of all the existing rulers in the
world of taste. Even Jeffrey seriously la-
mented, in one of his first reviews of Scott's
poems, that he should have identified himself
with the unpicturesque and expiring images of
feudality, which no effort could render poeti-
cal. Racine's tragedies were received with
such a storm of criticism as well nigh cost the
sensitive author his life ; and Rousseau was
so rudely handled by contemporary writers on
his first appearance, that it confirmed him in
his morbid hatred of civilization. The vigour
of these great men, indeed, overcame the ob-
stacles created by contemporary envy; but
how seldom, especially in a refined age, can
genius effect such a prodigy "? how often is it
crushed in the outset of its career, or turned
aside into the humble and unobtrusive path of
imitation, to shun the danger with which that
of originality is beset !
Milton's Paradise Lost contains many more
lines of poetic beauty than Homer's Iliad; and
there is nothing in the latter poem of equal
length, which will bear any comparison with
the exquisite picture of the primeval innocence
of our First Parents in his fourth book. Never-
theless, the Iliad is a more interesting poem
than the Paradise Lost ; and has produced and
will produce a much more extensive impres-
sion on mankind. The reason is, that it is
much fuller of event, is more varied, is more
filled with images familiar to all mankind, and
is less lost in metaphysical or philosophical
abstractions. Homer, though the father of
poets, was essentially dramatic ; he was an
incomparable painter ; and it is his dramatic
scenes, the moving panorama of his pictures,
which fascinates the world. He often speaks
to the heart, and is admirable in the delinea-
tion of character ; but he is so, not by convey-
ing the inward feeling, but by painting with
matchless fidelity its external symptoms, or
putting into the mouths of his characters the
precise words they would have used in similar
circumstances in real life. Even his immortal
parting of Hector and Andromache is no ex-
ception to this remark; he paints the scene at
the Scsean gate exactly as it would have oc-
curred in nature, and moves us as if we had
seen the Trojan hero taking off his helmet to
assuage the terrors of his infant son, and heard
the lamentations of his mother at parting with
her husband. But he does not lay bare the
heart, with the terrible force of Dante, by a line
or a word. There is nothing in Homer which
conveys so piercing an idea of misery as the
line in the Inferno, where the Florentine bard
assigns the reason of the lamentations of the
spirits in Malebolge
" Questi non hanno speranza di morte."
"These have not the hope of death." There
speaks the spiritual poet; he does not paint
to the eye, he does not even convey character
by the words he makes them utter; he pierces,
by a single expression, at once to the heart.
Milton strove to raise earth to heaven ; Ho-
mer brought down heaven to earth. The latter
HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO.
383
attempt was a much easier one than the for-
mer; it was more consonant to human frailty;
and, therefore, it has met with more success.
The gods and goddesses in the Iliad are men
and women, endowed with human passions,
affections, and desires, and distinguished only
from sublunary beings by superior power and
the gift of immortality. We are interested in
them as we are in the genii or magicians of
an eastern romance. There is a sort of aerial
epic poem going on between earth and heaven.
They take sides in the terrestrial combat, and
engage in the actual strife with the heroes en-
gaged in it. Mars and Venus were wounded
by Diomede when combatting in the Trojan
ranks : their blood, or rather the
"Ichor which blest immortals shed,"
flowed profusely; they fled howling to the pa-
laces of heaven. Enlightened by a spiritual
faith, fraught with sublime ideas of the divine
nature and government, Milton was incompa-
rably more just in his descriptions of the Su-
preme Being, and more elevated in his picture
of the angels and archangels who carried on
the strife in heaven ; but he frequently falls
into metaphysical abstractions or theological
controversies, which detract from the interest
of his poem.
Despite Milton's own opinion, the concurring
voice of all subsequent ages and countries
has assigned to the Paradise Regained a much
lower place than to the Paradise Lost. The
reason is, that it is less dramatic it has less
incident and action. Great part of the poem
is but an abstract theological debate between
our Saviour and Satan. The speeches he
makes them utter are admirable, the reasoning
is close, the arguments cogent, the sentiments
elevated in the speakers, but dialectic too. In
many of the speeches of the angel Raphael,
and in the council of heaven, in the Paradise
Lost, there is too much of that species of dis-
cussion for a poem which is to interest the
generality of men. Dryden says, that Satan is
Milton's real hero ; and every reader of the
Paradise Lost must have felt, that in the Prince
of Darkness and Adam and Eve, the interest
of the poem consists. The reason is, that the
vices of the first, and the weakness of the two
last, bring them nearer than any other charac-
ters in the poem to the standard of mortality ;
and we are so constituted, that we cannot take
any great interest but in persons who share in
our failings.
Perhaps the greatest cause of the sustained
interest of the Iliad is the continued and vehe-
ment action which is maintained. The atten-
tion is seldom allowed to flag. Either in the
council of the gods, the assembly of the Gre-
cian or Trojan chiefs, or the contest of the
leaders on the field of battle, an incessant in-
terest is maintained. Great events are always
on the wing; the issue of the contest is per-
petually hanging, often almost even, in the
balance. It is the art with which this is done,
and a state of anxious suspense, like the crisis
of a great battle, kept up, that the great art of
the poet consists. It is done by making the
whole dramatic bringing the characters for-
ward constantly to speak for themselves, mak-
ing the events succeed each other with almost
breathless rapidity, and balancing success al-
ternately from one side to the other, without let-
ting it ever incline decisively to either. Tasso
has adopted the same plan in his Jerusalem
Delivered, and the contests of the Christian
knights and Saracen leaders with the lance
and the sword, closely resemble those of the
Grecian and Trojan chiefs on the plain of
Troy. Ariosto has carried it still further.
The exploits of his Paladins their adventures
on earth, in air, and water; their loves, their
sufferings, their victories, their dangers keep
the reader in a continual state of suspense. It is
this sustained and varied interest which makes
so many readers prefer the Orlando Furioso to
the Jerusalem Delivered. But Ariosto has pushed
it too far. In the search of variety, he has
lost sight of unity. His heroes are not con-
gregated round the banners of two rival po-
tentates : there is no one object or interest in
his poem. No narrow plain, like that watered
by the Scamander, is the theatre of their ex-
ploits. Jupiter, from the summit of Garga-
rus, could not have beheld the contending
armies. The most ardent imagination, indeed,
is satiated with his adventures, but the closest
attention can hardly follow their thread. Story
after story is told, the exploits of knight after
knight are recounted, till the mind is fatigued,
the memory perplexed, and all general interest
in the poem lost.
Milton has admirably preserved the unity of
his poem ; the grand and all-important object
of the fall of man could hardly admit of subor-
dinate or rival interests. But the great defect
in the Paradise Lost, arising from that very
unity, is want of variety. It is strong through-
out on too lofty a key; it does not come down
sufficiently to the wants and cravings of mor-
tality. The mind is awe-struck by the de-
scription of Satan careering through the im-
mensity of space, of the battle of the angels,
of the fall of Lucifer, of the suffering, and yet
unsubdued spirit of his fellow rebels, of the
adamantine gates, and pitchy darkness, and
burning lake of hell. But after the first feel-
ing of surprise and admiration is over, it is
felt by all, that these lofty contemplations are
not interesting to mortals like ourselves. They
are too much above real life too much out of
the sphere of ordinary event and interest.
The fourth book is the real scene of interest
in the Paradise Lost; it is its ravishing scenes
of primeval innocence and bliss which have
given it immortality. We are never tired of
recurring to the bower of Eve, to her devotion
to Adam, to the exquisite scenes of Paradise,
its woods, its waters, its flowers, its enchant-
ments. We are so, because we feel that it
paints the Elysium to which all aspire, which
all have for a brief period felt, but which none
in this world can durably enjoy.
No one can doubt that Homer was endowed
with the true poetic spirit, and yet there is
very little of what we now call poetry in his
writings. There is neither sentiment nor de-
clamation painting nor reflection. He is
neither descriptive nor didactic. With great
powers for portraying nature, as the exquisite
choice of his epithets, and the occasional force
of his similes prove, he never makes any la-
384
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
boured attempt to delineate her features. He
had the eye of a great painter ; but his pictorial
talents are employed, almost unconsciously,
in the fervour of narrating events, or the ani-
mation of giving utterance to thoughts. He
painted by an epithet or a line. Even the
celebrated description of the fires in the plain
of Troy, likened to the moon in a serene night,
is contained in seven lines. His rosy-fingered
morn cloud-compelling Jupiter Neptune,
stiller of the waves Aurora rising from her
crocus-bed Night drawing her veil over the
heavens the black keel careering through the
lashing waves the shout of the far-sounding
sea and the like, from which subsequent poets
and dramatists have borrowed so largely, are
all brief allusions, or epithets, which evidently
did not form the main object of his strains.
He was a close observer of nature its lights,
its shades, its storms and calms, its animals,
their migrations, their cries and habits; but he
never suspends his narrative to describe them.
We shall look in vain in the Iliad, and even
the Odyssey, for the lengthened pictures of
scenery which are so frequent in Virgil and
Tasso, and appear in such rich profusion in
Milton. He describes storms only as objects
of terror, not to paint them to the eye. Such
things are to be found in the book of Job and
in the Psalms, but with the same brevity and
magical force of emphatic expression. There
never was a greater painter of nature than Ho-
mer ; there never was a man who aimed less
at being so.
The portraying of character and event was
the great and evident object of the Grecian
bard; and there his powers may almost be
pronounced unrivalled. He never tells you,
unless it is sometimes to be inferred from an
epithet, what the man's character that he in-
troduces is. He trusts to the character to
delineate itself. He lets us get acquainted
with his heroes, as we do with persons around
us, by hearing them speak, and seeing them
act. In preserving character, in this dramatic
way of representing it, he is unrivalled. He
does not tell you that Nestor had the garrulity
of age, and loved to recur to the events of his
youth; but he never makes him open his.
mouth without descanting on the adventures of
his early years, and the degenerate race of
mortals who have succeeded the paladins of
former days. He does not tell us that Achilles
was wrathful and impetuous; but every time
he speaks, the anger of the son of Peleus
comes boiling over his lips. He does not
describe Agamemnon as overbearing and
haughty; but the pride of the king of men is
continually appearing in his words and actions,
and it is the evident moral of the Iliad to rep-
resent its pernicious effects on the affairs of
the Helenic confederacy. Ulysses never utters
a word in which the cautious and prudent
counsellor, sagacious in design but prompt in
execution, wary in the council but decided in
the field, far-seeing but yet persevering, is not
apparent. Diomede never falters; alike in the
field and the council he is indomitable. When
Hector was careering in his chariot round
their fortifications, and the king of men coun-
selled retreat, he declared he would remain, were
it only with Sthenelus and his friends. So
completely marked, so well defined are his
characters, though they were all rapacious
chiefs at first sight, little differing from each
other, that it has been observed with truth, that
one well acquainted with the Iliad could tell,
upon hearing one of the speeches read out
without a name, who was the chief who
uttered it.
The two authors, since his time, who have
most nearly approached him in this respect,
are Shakspeare and Scott. Both seem to have
received the pencil which paints the human
heart from nature herself. Both had a keen
and searching eye for character in all grades
and walks of life ; and what is a general ac-
companiment of such a disposition, a strong
sense of the ridiculous. Both seized the salient
points in mental disposition, and perceived at
a glance, as it were, the ruling propensity.
Both impressed this character so strongly on
their minds, that they threw themselves, as it
were, into the very souls of the persons whom
they delineated, and made them speak and act
like nature herself. It is this extraordinary
faculty of identifying themselves with their
characters, and bringing out of their mouth the
very words which, in real life, would have
come, which constitutes the chief and perma-
nent attraction of these wonderful masters of
the human heart. Cervantes had it in an
equal degree ; and thence it is that Homer,
Shakspeare, Cervantes, and Scott, have made
so great, and to all appearance, durable im-
pression on mankind. The human heart is,
at bottom, everywhere the same. There is
infinite diversity in the dress he wears, but the
naked human figure of one country scarcely
differs from another. The writers who have
succeeded in reaching this deep substratum,
this far-hidden but common source of human
action, are understood and admired over all the
world. It is the same on the banks of the
Simoi's as on those of the Avon on the Sierra
Morena as the Scottish hills. They are under-
stood alike in Europe as Asia in antiquity as
modern times; one unanimous burst of admi-
ration salutes them from the North Cape to
Cape Horn from the age of Pisistratus to that
of Napoleon.
Strange as it may appear to superficial ob-
servers, Cervantes bears a close analogy, in
many particulars, to Homer. Circumstances,
and an inherent turn for humour, made him
throw his genius into an exquisite ridicule of
the manners of chivalry; but the author of
Don Quixote had in him the spirit of a great
epic poet His lesser pieces prove it; une-
quivocal traces of it are to be found in the
adventures of the Knight of La Mancha him-
self. The elevation of mind which, amidst all
his aberrations, appears in that erratic cha-
racter; the incomparable traits of nature with
which the work abounds; the faculty of de-
scribing events in the most striking way; of
painting scenes in a few words; of delineating
characters with graphic fidelity, and keeping
them up with perfect consistency, which are
so conspicuous in Don Quixote, are so many
of the most essential qualities of an epic poet.
Nor was the ardour of imagination, the
HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO.
385
romantic disposition, the brilliancy of fancy,
the lofty aspirations, the tender heart, which
form the more elevated and not less essential
part of such a character, wanting in the Span-
ish novelist.
Sir Walter Scott more nearly resembles
Homer than any poet who has sung since the
siege of Troy. Not that he has produced any
poem which will for a moment bear a com-
parison with the Iliad fine as the Lady of the
Lake and Marniion are, it would be the height
of national partiality to make any such com-
parison. But, nevertheless, Sir Walter's mind
is of the same dimensions as that of Homer.
We see in him the same combination of
natural sagacity with acquired information;
of pictorial eye with dramatic effect; of observa-
tion of character with reflection and feeling;
of graphic power with poetic fervour; of
ardour of imagination with rectitude of prin-
ciple; of warlike enthusiasm with pacific ten-
derness, which have rendered the Grecian bard
immortal. It is in his novels, however, more
than his poetry, that this resemblance appears ;
the author of Waverley more nearly approaches
the blind bard than the author of the Lay. His
Romances in verse contain some passages
which are sublime, many which are beautiful,
some pathetic. They are all interesting, and
written in the same easy, careless style, inter-
spersed with the most homely and grotesque
expressions, which is so well known to all the
readers of the Iliad. The battle in Marmion is
beyond all question, as Jeffrey long ago
remarked, the most Homeric strife which has
been sung since the days of Homer. But these
passages are few and far between; his poems
are filled with numerous and long interludes,
written with little art, and apparently no other
object but to fill up the pages or eke out the
story. It is in prose that the robust strength,
the powerful arm, the profound knowledge of
the heart, appear; and it is there, accordingly,
that he approaches at times so closely to
Homer. If we could conceive a poem in
which the storming of Front-de-Boeuf's castle
in Ivanhoe the death of Fergus in Waverley
the storm on the coast, and death-scene in the
fisher's hut, in the Antiquary the devoted love
in the Bride of Lammermoor the fervour of the
Covenanters in Old Mortality, and the combats
of Richard and Saladin in the Talisman, were
united together and intermingled with the in-
comparable characters, descriptions, and inci-
dents with which these novels abound, they
would form an epic poem.
Doubts have sometimes been expressed, as
to whether the Iliad and Odyssey are all the
production of one man. Never, perhaps, was
doubt not merely so ill-founded, but so decisive-
ly disproved by internal evidence. If ever in
human composition the traces of one mind are
conspicuous, they are in Homer. His beauties
equally with his defects, his variety and uni-
formity attest this. Never was an author who
had so fertile an imagination for varying of in-
cidents; never was one who expressed them
in language in which the same words so con-
stantly recur. This is the invariable charac-
teristic of a great and powerful, but at the
same time self-confident but careless mind.
49
It is to be seen in the most remarkable manner
in Bacon and Machiavel, and not a little of it
may be traced both in the prose and poetical
works of Scott. The reason is, that the strength,
of the mind is thrown into the thought as the
main object; the language, as a subordinate
matter, is little considered. Expressions ca-
pable of energetically expressing the prevail-
ing ideas of imagination are early formed;
but, when this is done, the powerful, careless
mind, readily adopts them on all future occa-
sions where they are at all applicable. There
is scarcely a great and original thinker in
whose writings the same expressions do not
very frequently recur, often in exactly the same
words. How much this is the case with Homer
with how much discrimination and genius
his epithets and expressions were first chosen,
and how frequently he repeats them, almost in
every page, need be told to none who are ac-
quainted with his writings. That is the most
decisive mark at once of genius and identity.
Original thinkers fall into repetition of expres-
sion, because they are always speaking from
one model their own thoughts. Subordinate
writers avoid this fault, because they are
speaking from the thoughts of others, and
share their variety. It requires as great an
effort for the first to introduce difference of ex-
pression as for the last to reach diversity of
thought.
The reader of Dante must not look for the
heart-stirring and animated narrative the con-
stant interest the breathless suspense, which
hurries us along the rapid current of the Iliad.
There are no councils of the gods ; no messen-
gers winging their way through the clouds ; no
combats of chiefs ; no cities to storm ; no fields
to win. It is the infernal regions which the
poet, under the guidance of his great leader,
Virgil, visits; it is the scene of righteous re-
tribution through which he is led : it is the ap-
portionment of punishment and reward to
crime or virtue, in this upper world, that he is
doomed to witness. We enter the city of la-
mentation we look down the depths of the
bottomless pit we stand at the edge of the
burning lake. His survey is not the mere tran-
sient visit like that of Ulysses in Homer, or of
JEneas in Virgil. He is taken slowly and de-
liberately through every successive circle of
Malebolge; descending down which, like the
visitor of the tiers of vaults, one beneath
another, in a feudal castle, he finds every spe-
cies of malefactors, from the chiefs and kings
whose heroic lives were stained only by a few
deeds of cruelty, to the depraved malefactors
whose base course was unrelieved by one ray
of virtue. In the very conception of such a
poem, is to be found decisive evidence of
the mighty change which the human mind had
undergone since the expiring lays of poetry
were last heard in the ancient world; of the
vast revolution of thought and inward convic-
tion which, during a thousand years, in the
solitude of the monastery, and under the sway
of a spiritual faith, had taken place in the
human heart. A gay and poetic mythology
no longer amazed the world by its fictions,
or charmed it by its imagery. Religion no
longer basked in the sunshine of imagination.
2K
386
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
The awful words of judgment to come had
been spoken ; and, like Felix, mankind had
trembled. Ridiculous legends had ceased to
be associated with the shades below their
place had been taken by images of horror
Conscience had resumed its place in the direc-
tion of thought. Superstition had lent its awful
power to the sanctions of religion. Terror ol
future punishment had subdued the fiercest
passions internal agony tamed the proudes
spirits. It was the picture of a future world
of a world of retribution conceived under such
impressions, that Dante proposed to give; it is
that which he has given with such terrible fidelity
Melancholy was the prevailing characteris-
tic of the great Italian's mind. It was so pro-
found that it penetrated all his thoughts ; so
intense that it pervaded all his conceptions
Occasionally bright and beautiful ideas flitted
across his imagination ; visions of bliss, ex-
perienced for a moment, and then lost for ever
as if to render more profound the darkness by
which they are surrounded. They are given
with exquisite beauty; but they shine amidst
the gloom like sunbeams struggling through
the clouds. He inherited from the dark ages
the austerity of the cloister; but he inherited
with it the deep feelings and sublime concep-
tions which its seclusion had generated. His
mind was a world within itself. He drew all
his conceptions from that inexhaustible source;
but he drew them forth so clear and lucid, that
they emerged, imbodied as it were, in living
images. His characters are emblematic of
the various passions and views for which dif-
ferent degrees of punishment were reserved
in the world to come ; but his conception of
them was so distinct, his description so vivid,
that they stand forth to our gaze in all the agony
of their sufferings, like real flesh and blood.
We see them we feel them we hear their
cries our very flesh creeps at the perception
of their sufferings. We stand on the edge of
the lake of boiling pitch we feel the weight
of the leaden mantles we see the snow-like
flakes of burning sand we hear the cries of
those who had lost the last earthly consolations,
the hope of death :
" Quivi sospiri, pianti ed alti gnai
Risonayan per 1' aer scnza stelle,
Perch' io al cominciar ne lacrimai.
Diverse lingue, orrhili favelle,
Parole di dolore, accenti d' ira,
Voci alte e fioche, e suon di man con elle,
Facevano un tumuUo, il qual s' aggira
Sempre 'n quell' aria senza tempo tinta
Come la rena quando '1 turbo spira.
* * * *
Ed io : maestro, che e tanto greve
A lor che lamentar li fa si forte ?
Kispose : dicerolti molto breve.
Questi non hanno speranza di morte."
Inferno, c. iii.
"Here sighs, with lamentntions and loud moans,
Resounded through the air pierced by no star.
That e'en I wept at entering. Various tongues,
Horrible languages, outcries of wo,
Accents of anger, voices deep and hoarse,
With hands together smote that swell'd the sounds,
Made up a tumult, that for ever whirls
Round through that air with solid darkness stained,
Like to the sand that in the whirlwind flies.
* * * * *
I then : Master ! What doth aggrieve them thus,
That they lament so loud ? H< j straight replied :
That will I tell thee briefly. These of death
No hope may entertain."
GARY'S Dante, Inferno, c. iii.
Here is Dante portrayed to the life in the
very outset. What a collection of awful images
in a few lines ! Loud lamentations, hideous
cries, mingled with the sound of clasped hands,
beneath a starless sky ; and the terrible an-
swer, as the cause of this suffering, " These
have not the hope of death."
The very first lines of the Inferno, when the
gates of Hell were approached, and the in-
scription over them appeared, paint the dis-
mal character of the poem, and yet mingled
with the sense of divine love and justice with
which the author was penetrated.
"Per me si va nella citta dolente ;
Per me si va nell' eterno dolore ;
Per me si va tra la perduta gente :
Giustizia mosse '1 mio alto Fattore ;
Fecemi la divina Potestate,
La soinma Sapienza e '1 primo Amore.
Dinanzi a me non fur cose create,
Se non eterne ; ed io eterno duro :
Lasciate ogni speranza voi che 'ntrate."
Inferno, c. iii.
"Through me you pass into the city of wo;
Through me you pass into eternal pain :
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved :
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here."
GARY'S Dante, Inferno, c. iii.
Dante had much more profound feelings
than Homer, and therefore he has painted deep
mysteries of the human heart with greater
force and fidelity. The more advanced age of
the world, the influence of a spiritual faith, the
awful anticipation of judgment to come, the
inmost feelings which, during long centuries
of seclusion, had been drawn forth in the
cloister, the protracted sufferings of the dark
ages, had laid bare the human heart. Its suf-
ferings, its terrors, its hopes, its joys, had be-
come as household words. The Italian poet
shared, as all do, in the ideas and images of his
age, and to these he added many which were
entirely his own. He painted the inward man,
and painted him from his own feelings, not the
observation of others. That is the grand dis-
tinction between him and Homer; and that it
is which has given him, in the delineation of
mind, his great superiority. The Grecian bard
was an incomparable observer; he had an in-
exhaustible imagination for fiction, as well as
a graphic eye for the delineation of real life ;
but he had not a deep or feeling heart. He did
not know it, like Dante and Shakspeare, from
his own suffering. He painted the external
symptoms of passion and emotion with the
hand of a master ; but he did not reach the
inward spring of feeling. He lets us into his
characters by their speeches, their gestures,
their actions, and keeps up their consistency
with admirable fidelity; but he does not, by a
word, an expression, or an epithet, admit us
into the inmost folds of the heart. None can
do so but such as themselves feel warmly and
profoundly, and paint passion, emotion, or
suffering, from their own experience, not the
observation of others. Dante has acquired
his colossal fame from the matchless force with
which he has portrayed the wildest passions,
the deepest feelings, the most intense suffer-
ings of the heart. He is the refuge of all
HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO.
387
those who labour and are heavy laden of all
who feel profoundly or have suffered deeply.
His verses are in the mouth of all who are
torn by passion, gnawed by remorse, or tor
mented by apprehension; and how many are
they in this scene of wo !
A distinguished modern critic* has said,
that he who would now become a great poet
must first become a little child. There is no
doubt he is right. The seen and unseen fetters
of civilization ; the multitude of old ideas afloat
in the world; the innumerable worn out chan-
nels into which new ones are ever apt to flow ;
the general clamour with which critics, nursed
amidst such fetters, receive any attempts at
breaking them; the prevalence, in a wealthy
and highly civilized age, of worldly or selfish
ideas ; the common approximation of charac-
ters by perpetual intercourse, as of coins, by
continual rubbing in passing from man to man,
have taken away all freshness and originality
from ideas. The learned, the polished, the
highly educated, can hardly escape the fetters
which former greatness throws over the soul.
Milton could not avoid them ; half the images
in his poems are taken from Homer, Virgil,
and Dante ; and who dare hope for emancipa-
tion when Milton was enthralled] The me-
chanical arts increase in perfection as society
advances. Science ever takes its renewed
flights from the platform which former efforts
have erected. Industry, guided by experience,
in successive ages, brings to the highest point
all the contrivances and inventions which mi-
nister to the comfort or elegancies of life. But
it is otherwise with genius. It sinks in the
progress of society, as much as science and
the arts rise. The country of Homer and
^Eschylus sank for a thousand years into the
torpor of the Byzantine empire. Originality
perishes amidst acquisition. Freshness of
conception is its life : like the flame, it burns
fierce and clear in the first gales of a pure
atmosphere; but languishes and dies in that
polluted by many breaths.
It was the resurrection of the human mind,
after the seclusion and solitary reflection of
the middle ages, which gave this vein of ori-
ginal ideas to Dante, as their first wakening
had given to Homer. Thought was not ex-
tinct ; the human mind was not dormant dur-
ing the dark ages; far from it it never, in
some respects, was more active. It was the
first collision of their deep and lonely medita-
tions with the works of the great ancient
poets, which occasioned the prodigy. Uni-
versally it will be found to be the same. After
the first flights of genius have been taken, it is
by the collision of subsequent thought with it
that the divine spark is again elicited. The
meeting of two great minds is necessary to
beget fresh ideas, as that of two clouds is to
bring forth lightning, or the collision of flint
and steel to produce fire. Johnson said he
could not get new ideas till he had read. He
was right; though it is not one in a thousand
who strikes out original thoughts from study-
ing the works of others. The great sage did
not read to imbibe the opinion of others, but
* Macaulay.
to engender new ones for himself; he did not
study to imitate, but to create. It was the
same with Dante; it is the same with every
really great man. His was the first powerful
and original mind which, fraught with the
profound and gloomy ideas nourished in seclu-
sion during the middle ages, came into contact
with the brilliant imagery, touching pathos,
and harmonious language of the ancients.
Hence his astonishing greatness. He almost
worshipped Virgil, he speaks of him as a spe-
cies of god ; he mentions Homer as the first
of poets. But he did not copy either the one
or the other ; he scarcely imitated them. He
strove to rival their brevity and beauty of ex-
pression ; but he did so in giving vent to new
ideas, in painting new images, in awakening
new emotions. The Inferno is as original as
the Iliad; incomparably more so than the
JE-neid. The offspring of originality with ori-
ginality is a new and noble creation ; of origi-
nality with mediocrity, a spurious and degraded
imitation.
Dante paints the spirit of all the generations
of men, each in their circle undergoing their
allotted punishment; expiating by suffering
the sins of an upper world. Virgil gave a
glimpse, as it were, into that scene of retribu-
tion ; Minos and Rhadamanthus passing judg-
ment on the successive spirits brought before
them ; the flames of Tartarus, the rock of Si-
syphus, the wheel of Ixion, the vulture gnaw-
ing Prometheus. But with Homer and Virgil,
the descent into the infernal regions was a
brief episode; with Dante it was the whole
poem. Immense was the effort of imagina-
tion requisite to give variety to such a subject,
to prevent the mind from experiencing weari-
ness amidst the eternal recurrence of crime
and punishment. But the genius of Dante
was equal to the task. His fancy was prodi-
gious ; his invention boundless ; his imagina-
tion inexhaustible. Fenced in, as he was,
within narrow and gloomy limits by the nature
of his subject, his creative spirit equals that
of Homer himself. He has given birth to as
many new ideas in the Inferno and the Paradiso,
as the Grecian bard in the Iliad and Odyssey.
Though he had reflected so much and so
deeply on the human heart, and was so perfect
a master of all the anatomy of mental suffer-
ing, Dante's mind was essentially descriptive.
He was a great painter as well as a profound
thinker; he clothed deep feeling in the garb
of the senses; he conceived a vast brood of
new ideas, he arrayed them in a surprising
manner in flesh and blood. He is ever clear
and definite, at least in the Inferno. He ex-
hibits in every canto of that wonderful poem a
fresh image, but it is a clear one, of horror or
anguish, which leaves nothing to the imagina-
tion to add or conceive. His ideal characters
are real 'persons; they are present to our
senses ; we feel their flesh, see the quivering
of their limbs, hear their lamentations, and
feel a thrill of joy at their felicity. In the
Paradiso he is more vague and general, and
thence its acknowledged inferiority to the
Infemo. But the images of horror are much
more powerful than those of happiness, and it
is they which have entranced the world. "It
388
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
is easier," says Madame de Stael, "to convey
ideas of suffering than those of happiness ; for
the former are too well known to every heart,
the latter only to a few."
The melancholy tone which pervades Dante's
writings was doubtless, in a great measure,
owing to the misfortunes of his life ; and to
them we are also indebted for many of the
most caustic and powerful of his verses per-
haps for the design of the Inferno itself. He
took vengeance on the generation which had
persecuted and exiled him, by exhibiting its
leaders suffering in the torments of hell. In
his long seclusion, chiefly in the monastery
of Santa Croce di Fonte Avellana, a wild and
solitary retreat in the territory of Gubbio, and
in a tower belonging to the Conte Falcucci, in
the same district, his immortal work was writ-
ten. The mortifications he underwent during
this long and dismal exile are thus described
by himself : " Wandering over almost every
part in which our language extends, I have
gone about like a mendicant ; showing against
my will the wound with which fortune has
smitten me, and which is often falsely imputed
to the demerit of him by whom it is endured.
I have been, indeed, a vessel without sail or
steerage, carried about to divers ports, and
roads, and shores, by the dry wind that springs
out of sad poverty."
In the third circle of hell, Dante sees those
who are punished by the plague of burning
sand falling perpetually on them. Their tor-
ments are thus described
" Supin giaceva in terra alcuna gente ;
Alcuna si sedea tutta raccolta ;
Ed altra ajidava continuamente.
Quella che giva intorno era piu molta;
E quella meifche giaceva al tormento ;
Ma piii al duolo avea la lingua sciolta.
Sovra tutto '1 sabbion d'un cader lento
Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde,
Come di neve in alpe senza vento.
Quail Alessandro in quelle parti calde
D' India vide sovra lo suo stuolo
Fiamme cadere infino a terra salde."
Inferno, c. xiv.
"Of naked spirits many a flock I saw,
All weeping piteously, to different laws
Subjected : for on earth some lay supine,
Some crouching close were seated, others paced
Incessantly around ; the latter tribe
More numerous, those fewer who beneath
The torment lay, but louder in their grief.
O'er all the sand fell slowly wafting down
Dilated flakes of fire, as flakes of snow
On Alpine summit, when the wind is hush'd.
As, in the torrid Indian clime, the son
Of Ammon saw, upon his warrior band
Descending, solid flames, that to the ground
Came down."
GARY'S Dante, c. xiv.
The first appearance of Malebolge is de-
scribed in these striking lines
"Luogo 6 in Inferno, detto Malebolge,
Tutto di pietra e di color ferrisrno,
Come le cerchia che d' intorno il volge.
Nel dritto mezzo del campo maligno
Vaneggia un pozzo assai \-irso e profondo,
Di cui suo luogo contera 1* ordigno.
Q,uel cinghio che rimane adunque e tondo
Tra '1 pozzo e '1 pie dell' alta ripa dura,
E ha distinto in died valli al fondo."
Inferno, c. xviii.
"There ia a place within the depths of hell
Call'd Malebolge, all of rock dark-stained
With hue ferruginous, e'en as the steep
That round it circling winds Right in the midst .
Of that abominable region yawns
A spacious gulf profound, whereof toe frame
Due time shall tell. The circle, that remains,
Throughout its round, between the gulf and base
Of the high craggy banks, successive forms
Ten bastions, in its hollow bottom raised."
CARY'S Dante, c. xviii.
This is the outward appearance of Malebolge,
the worst place of punishment in hell. It had
many frightful abysses ; what follows is the
picture of the first :
"Ristemmo per veder 1'altra fessura
Di Malebolge e gli altri pianti vani :
E vidila mirabilmente oscura.
Quale nelF arzana de' Veneziani
Bolle F inverno la tenace pece,
A rimpalmar li legni lor non sani
* * * *
Tal non per fuoco ma per divina arte,
Bollia laggiuso una pegola spessa,
Che 'nviscava la ripa d'ogni parte.
I' vedea lei, ma non vedeva in essa
Ma che le Iiolle che '1 bollor levava,
E gonfiar tutta e riseder compressa.
* * * *
E vidi dietro a noi un diavol nero
Correndo su per lo scoglio venire.
Ahi quant' egli era nelF aspetto fiero!
E quanto mi parea nelF atto acerbo,
Con F ali aperte e sovre i pie leggiero !
L' omero suo ch' era acuto e superbo
Carcava un peccator con ambo Fanche,
Ed ei tenea de' pie ghermito il nerbo.
* * * *
Lasr<riu il buttb e per lo scoglio duro
Si volse, e mai non fu mastino sciolto
Co tanta fretta a semiitar lo furo.
Quei s' attulit) e tornb su convolto ;
Ma i demon che del ponte avean coverchio
Gridar : qui non ha luogo il Santo Volto.
Q,ui si nuota altramenti che nel Serchio
Per6 se tu non vuoi de' nostri grafli,
Non far sovra le pegola soverchio.
Poi F addentar con piu di cento rafti,
Disser: coverto convien che qui balli,
Si che se puoi nascosamente accaffi."
Inferno, c. xxi.
" To the summit reaching, stood
To view another gap, within the round
Of Malebolge, other bootless pangs.
Marvellous darkness shadow'd o'er the place.
In the Venetians' arsenal as boils
Through wintry months tenacious pitch, to smear
Their unsound vessels in the wintry clime.
* * * *
So, not by force of fire but art divine,
Boil'd here a glutinous thick mass, that round
Lined all the shore beneath. I that beheld,
But therein not distinguish'd, save the bubbles
Raised by the boiling, and one mighty swell
Heave, and by turns subsiding fall.
* * * *
Behind me I beheld a devil black,
That running up, advanced along the rock.
Ah! what fierce cruelty his look bespake.
In act how bitter did he seem, with wings
Buoyant outstretch'd, and feet of nimblest tread.
Hia shoulder, proudly eminent and sharp,
Was with a sinner charged ; by either haunch
He held him, the foot's sinew g'riping fast.
* * * *
Him dashing down, o'er the rough rock he turn'd;
Nor ever after thief a mastiff" loosed
Sped with like eager haste. That other sank,
And forthwith writhing to the surface rose.
Hut those dark demons, shrouded by the bridge,
Cried Here the hallow'd visaee saves not : here
Is other swimming than in Serchio's wave,
Wherefore, if thou desire we rend thee not,
Take heed thou mount not o'er the pitch. This said,
They grappled him with more than hundred hooks,
And shouted Cover'd thou must sport thee here ;
So, if thou canst, in secret mayst thou filch."
CARY'S Dante, c. xxi.
Fraught as his imagination was with gloomy
ideas, with images of horror, it is the fidelity
of his descriptions, the minute reality of his
pictures, which gives them their terrible power.
He knew well what it is that penetrates the
soul. His images of horror in the infernal
regions were all founded on those familiar to
HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO.
389
every one in the upper world ; it was from
the caldron of boiling pitch in the arsenal of
Venice that he took his idea of one of the pits
of Malebolge. But what a picture does he
there exhibit ! The writhing sinner plunged
headlong into the boiling waves, rising to the
surface, and a hundred demons, mocking his
sufferings, and with outstretched hooks tear-
ing his flesh till he dived again beneath the
liquid fire! It is the reality of the scene, the
images familiar yet magnified in horror, which
constitutes its power: we stand by; our flesh
creeps as it would at witnessing an auto-da-fe
of Castile, or on beholding a victim perishing
under the knout in Russia.
Michael Angelo was, in one sense, the
painter of the Old Testament, as his bold and
aspiring genius aimed rather at delineating
the events of warfare, passion, or suffering,
chronicled in the records of the Jews, than
the scenes of love, affection, and benevolence,
depicted in the gospels. But his mind was
not formed merely on the events recorded in
antiquity: it is no world doubtful of the im-
mortality of the soul which he depicts. He is
rather the personification in painting of the
soul of Dante. His imagination was evident-
ly fraught with the conceptions of the Inferno.
The expression of mind beams forth in all his
works. Vehement passion, stern resolve, un-
daunted valour, sainted devotion, infant inno-
cence, alternately occupied his pencil. It is
hard to say in which he was greatest. In all
his works we see marks of the genius of an-
tiquity meeting the might of modern times:
the imagery of mythology blended with the
aspirations of Christianity. We see it in the
dome of St. Peter's, we see it in the statue of
Moses. Grecian sculpture was the realization
in form of the conceptions of Homer; Italian
painting the representation on canvas of the
revelations of the gospel, which Dante clothed
in the garb of poetry. Future ages should
ever strive to equal, but can never hope to
excel them.
Never did artist work with more persever-
ing vigour than Michael Angelo. He himself
said that he laboured harder for fame, than
ever poor artist did for bread. Born of a no-
ble family, the heir to considerable posses-
sions, he took to the arts from his earliest
years from enthusiastic passion and conscious
power. During a long life of ninety years, he
prosecuted them with the ardent zeal of youth.
He was consumed by the thirst for fame, the
desire of great achievements, the invariable
mark of heroic minds ; and which, as it is
altogether beyond the reach of the great bulk
of mankind, so is the feeling of all others
which to them is most incomprehensible.
Nor was that noble enthusiasm without its
reward. It was his extraordinary good for-
tune to be called to form, at the same time,
the Last Judgment on the wall of the Sistine
Chapel, the glorious dome of St. Peter's, and
the group of Notre Dame de Pitie", which now
adorns the chapel of the Crucifix, under the
roof of that august edifice. The " Holy Fami-
ly" in the Palazzo Pitti at Florence, and the
" Three Fates" in the same collection, give an
idea of his powers in oil-painting: thus he
carried to the highest perfection, at the same
time, the rival arts of architecture, sculpture,
fresco and oil painting.* He may truly be
called the founder of Italian painting, as
Homer was of the ancient epic, and Dante
of the great style in modern poetry. None
but a colossal mind could have done such
things. Raphael took lessons from him in
painting, and professed through life the most
unbounded respect for his great preceptor.
None have attempted to approach him in
architecture; the cupola of St. Peter's stands
alone in the world.
But notwithstanding' all this, Michael An-
gelo had some defects. He created the great
style in painting, a style which has made mo-
dern Italy as immortal as the arms of the le-
gions did the ancient. But the very grandeur
of his conceptions, the vigour of his drawing,
his incomparable command of bone and mus-
cle, his lofty expression and impassioned mind,
made him neglect, and perhaps despise, the
lesser details of his art. Ardent in the pursuit
of expression, he often overlooked execution.
When he painted the Last Judgment or the
Fall of the Titans in fresco, on the ceiling and
walls of the Sistine Chapel, he was incom-
parable ; but that gigantic style was unsuita-
ble for lesser pictures or rooms of ordinary
proportions. By the study of his masterpieces,
subsequent painters have often been led astray;
they have aimed at force of expression to the
neglect of delicacy in execution. This defect
is, in an especial manner, conspicuous in Sir
Joshua Reynolds, who worshipped Michael
Angelo with the most devoted fervour ; and
through him it has descended to Lawrence,
and nearly the whole modern school of Eng-
land. When we see Sir Joshua's noble glass
window in Magdalen College, Oxford, we be-
hold the work of a worthy pupil of Michael
Angelo; we see the great style of painting in
its proper place, and applied to its appropriate
object. But when we compare his portraits,
or imaginary pieces, in oil, with those of Ti-
tian, Velasquez, or Vandyke, the inferiority is
manifest. It is not in the design but the
finishing ; not in the conception but the exe-
cution. The colours are frequently raw and
harsh ; the details or distant parts of the piece
ill-finished or neglected. The bold neglect of
Michael Angelo is very apparent. Raphael,
with less original genius than his immortal
master, had more taste and much greater deli-
cacy of pencil ; his conceptions, less extensive
and varied, are more perfect; his finishing is
always exquisite. Unity of emotion was his
reat object in design ; equal delicacy of
finishing in execution. Thence he has at-
ained by universal consent the highest place
in painting.
" Nothing," says Sir Joshua Reynolds, "is
denied to well-directed labour; nothing is to
be attained without it." " Excellence in any
* The finest design ever conceived by Michael Angelo
was a cartoon representing warriors bathing, and some
biicklinson their armour at the sound of the trumpet,
whirh summoned them to their standards in the war
between Pisa and Florence. It perished, however, in
he troubles of the latter city ; but an engraved copy
remains of part, which justifies the eulogiums bestowed
upon it.
2x3
390
ALISON'S MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.
department," says Johnson, "can now be at-
tained only by the labour of a lifetime ; it is
not to be purchased at a lesser price." These
words should ever be present to the minds of
all who aspire to rival the great of former daj^s ;
who feel in their bosoms a spark of the spirit
which led Homer, Dante, and Michael Angelo
to immortality. In a luxurious age, comfort or
station is deemed the chief good of life ; in a
commercial community, money becomes the
universal object of ambition. Thence our ac-
knowledged deficiency in the fine arts ; thence
our growing weakness in the higher branches
of literature. Talent looks for its reward too
s-oon. Genius seeks an immediate recom-
pense: long protracted exertions are never
attempted : great things are not done, because
great efforts are not made.
None will work now without the prospect
of an immediate return. Very possibly it is
so ; but then let us not hope or wish for immor-
tality. "Present time and future," says Sir
Joshua Reynolds, "are rivals ; he who solicits
the one, must expect to be discountenanced by
the other." It is not that we want genius ;
what we want is the great and heroic spirit
which will devote itself, by strenuous efforts,
to great things, without seeking any reward
but their accomplishment.
I Nor let it be said that great subjects for the
I painter's pencil, the poet's muse, are not to be
j found that they are exhausted by former ef-
] forts, and nothing remains to us but imitation.
Nature is inexhaustible ; the events of men are
unceasing, their variety is endless. Philoso-
phers were mourning the monotony of time,
historians were deploring the sameness of
! events, in the years preceding the French Re-
volution on the eve of the Reign of Terror,
the flames of Moscow, the retreat from Russia.
What was the strife around Troy to the battle
of Leipsic ? the contests of Florence and Pisa
to the revolutionary war 1 What ancient naval
victory to that of Trafalgar 1 ? Rely upon it,
subjects for genius are not wanting ; genius
itself, steadily and perseveringly directed, is
the thing required. But genius and energy
alone are not sufficient; COURAGE and disin-
terestedness are needed more than all. Cou-
rage to withstand the assaults of envy, to
despise the ridicule of mediocrity disinterest-
edness to trample under foot the seductions of
ease, and disregard the attractions of opulence.
An heroic mind is more wanted in the library
or the studio, than in the field. It is wealth
and cowardice which extinguish the light of
genius, and dig the grave of literature as of
nations.
THE END.
VC 29504
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY