GIFT OF Gladys Isaacson MICHEL EYQUEM DE MONTAIGNE From an engraving by Augustin de St. Aubin Great Essays J By Montaigne, Sidney, Milton, Cowley, Disraeli, Lamb, Irving, Lowell, Jefferies, and Others With Biographical Notes and a Critical Introduction by Helen Kendrick Johnson Illustrated New York D. Appleton and Company 1904 9/7 6-78 G COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. GIFT OF . * ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS EVERY fctm of literature has its appropriate time and use, and -1 philosophical study appears to show that each form reaches a culmination at some stage of a nation's history or in the history of the world. When the stage of progress which called it forth is gone by it is hardly possible for future writers to surpass that form of literature in which a nation or an era found its true ex- pression. There is much of falsehood in the apparent truism " history repeats itself," for there are senses in which the world's history is a series of completions. The truth of this may be best realized in regard to other forms of art than the literary, because the spoken and written lan- guage which is its medium is more evidently a living growth. The twentieth century will turn back beyond the pres- ent era for its greatest models in sculpture; to the four- teenth century for its models in architecture; to the fif- teenth for painting; and to the eighteenth for music. Each of these arts has a variety of forms, and each form has its own completion. Egypt and the Orient possessed the greatest temples, the noblest palaces, and the grandest tombs; but whether the expression was that of pre-Chris- tian or Christian civilization, when the culmination of the ideal toward which each was tending was reached, progress in that special path was ended. There was no beyond iii iv ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS for the art that wrought the Venus of Milo, or for that which erected the European cathedrals; for that which gave us " The Last Supper " and " The Last Judgment," or for that which found utterance in " The Messiah " and the great symphonies. Henceforth we are imitators and combiners in all these matters. The question arises, Are any of the great forms of liter- ary art finished ? Have poetry and the drama reached their culmination? Must the twentieth century look back upon thought temples and statues and pictures that can never be surpassed in their own order? It is not well to dog- matize. We must remember with Montesquieu, that the success of the greater part of things depends upon know- ing how long it takes to succeed. Especially is this warn- ing to be observed in regard to such literature as is the expression of a living language and a living people. But there are facts which indicate that this art is subject to the same conditions that are more evident in the others. Poetry belongs to youth to the youth of a writer, of a nation, of the world. We should therefore expect to find, as is the case, that the earlier literature of the race and of nations contains its perfected poems. In the Old Testament are to be found the grandest models for all poetic thought. Hope and trust are the gift of childhood, and they are the purest inspirers of imagination and of spiritual insight. Poetic prophecy reached its culmination with the ancient Hebrews, and lyric poetry found its perfect ex- pression in the Psalms. The highest reach of pathos and triumph, both of feeling and imagery, is embodied in the work of an unknown time and author; dramatic and epic poetry are combined in the sublimity of the book of Job. The " Iliad," the " Vedas," and the " Eddas " also belong to the times of earliest inspiration. The opening century may reveal marvels of achieve- ment in many fields of thought; but in the work of Shakes- ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS V peare the English-speaking peoples have given the world another evidence of climax. The future is not likely to show a repetition of " Hamlet " or of " Lear." Prose has many subdivisions. The oration appears to be one of the earliest as well as one of the most lasting forms. It is a direct address on a subject of commanding interest; and such writings as our Declaration of Inde- pendence belong to this field. The oration lends itself to great occasions when mind must act quickly upon mind and when feeling is to be stirred to action. The essay is addressed to the eye rather than to the ear. It asks for time. It presents a silent appeal from the printed page. Like the oration, it should possess a single purpose, should be forcible in statement, and should demand attention from both the reason and the feeling. The essay implies leisurely thought on the part of the reader, and it belongs to the fireside and the study. The essay should be more philosophical than the oration. The style may be simple or ornate, but its theme must be elab- orated in order to be seen in its full bearing. The essay is speculative and questioning, and sometimes apparently inconclusive. Its mission may be either persuasion or entertainment. The essay that proclaims its own infallible- ness fails at the outset. Firm conviction on the writer's part is generally essential, but it should unfold itself grad- ually. The essay must beguile and invite discussion and pursuit. It is a roamer and a gleaner in the fields of thought, and the result it brings must be so presented to the reader that his own mind shall roam and glean. Part of the pleasure given will be the pleasure of comparing his own reflections and adjusting his own beliefs. The ideal essay must be imaginative, sympathetic, and instructive. It naturally follows that the essay is more widely adapt- ive than any other form of writing. It grows with a na- tion's life, and changes with its varying pulsations. It vi ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS never has reached the commanding place attained by the oration, but, on the other hand, it never has been lost sight of as a valuable form of literature. It is perhaps less easy to make a collection of essays that would be agreed upon as among the world's greatest than of any other kind of composition. The nature of the essay itself suggests an illusive quality of opinion concerning it. English literature is deeply indebted to Montaigne. Shakespeare, Bacon, Swift, Pope, and Sterne were directly influenced by him. Among modern writers, Emerson loved him, and Stevenson speaks of the spell thrown from his pages. In Florio's translation we have a classic that seems to make of Montaigne an English writer of singular purity and beauty. He is winning and ingenuous. In the preface to his volume of essays he says : " Had my inten- tions been to forestall and purchase the world's opinion and favour, I would surely have adorned myself more quaintly or kept a more grave and solemn march. I desire therein to be delineated in mine own genuine and simple fashion, without contention, art, or study; for it is myself I portray. My imperfections shall therein be read to the life, and my natural form discerned, so far forth as public reverence hath permitted me." Again he says: " I erect not here a statue to be set up in the market-place of a town, or in a church, or in any other public place. It is for the corner of a library, or to amuse a neighbour, a kinsman, or a friend of mine withal, who by this image may happily take pleasure to renew acquaintance and to reconverse with me. And if it happen no man read me, have I lost my time to have entertained myself so many idle hours about so pleasing and profitable thoughts? " Of that desultoriness to which the essay naturally lends itself, and which, rightly used, may prove to be the truest method for absorbing a theme, Montaigne says in his essay on books: '* If in reading I fortune to meet with any dif- ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS vii ficult points, I do not fret myself about them, but after I have given them a charge or two I leave them as I found them. Should I earnestly plod upon them I should lose both time and myself, for I have a skipping wit. What I see not at the first view I shall less see it if I opinionate myself upon it. I do nothing without blitheness; and an over-obstinate continuation and plodding contention doth dazzle, dull, and weary the same: my sight is thereby con- founded and diminished. I must therefore withdraw it, and at fits go at it again. If one look seems tedious to me, I take another. I am not greatly affected to new books, because ancient authors, in my judgment, are more full and pithy." Surely this is the spirit and the work of a prince of essay writing and essay reading a man who takes his learning lightly, and can presume upon that friendship with knowledge that has stood the test of years. Sir Philip Sidney is always pictured as grave and dig- nified beyond his years and his time, but in his " Defence of Poesy " there is a " blitheness " that Montaigne did not possess. Sidney had nothing of that irony which Mon- taigne had carried into retirement from the court of France. Both men were the favourites of the highest cir- cles of their time; but while Montaigne contented himself with the sobriety of a man who had drunk deep of folly's cup and found it bitter, Sidney preserved a lofty purity and reverence where so much was vile. Both were learned, but Sidney's learning became wisdom. All these qualities appear in his famous " Defence," and make more conspicu- ous the quaint mirthfulness with which he tingles the dulled ears of his countrymen who had cast scorn upon that art which was to find so soon its highest exemplification in their own land, for the " Faerie Queene " of Spenser was probably begun, and the first of Shakespeare's plays to see the light of print appeared within ten years. The next essay Milton's is, on the contrary, a stir- viii ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS ring appeal to emotion. Like the others, it exhibits the author's great learning, but in many respects it is what Milton calls it a speech. It is an elaborated oration, and the elaboration is a hindrance to its effectiveness. The classic model chosen that of the address of the Greeks before their Areopagus is followed with laboured exact- ness, and this causes the essay to be very unequal Parts of it are magnificent in their simple, straightforward force. Invective, appeal, argument, are used with moving effect. But invective has rarely been put into such fascinating form as that used by Cowley for a denunciation of Crom- well and the Commonwealth as a loyalist saw them. His essay is stately, picturesque, fiery, lofty in diction, and at- tractive by the curious form selected. Like Milton's, this essay is political, but there could be no greater contrast than the form in which the two author statesmen cast their appeals. Nothing is gained for this essay by the insertion of the poems that are characteristic of Cowley's work. His ambition was to be a poet, but apparently he is to be remembered only as a writer of elegant and forcible prose. Oliver Goldsmith's prose has little of the poetic quality that might be expected from the author of " The Deserted Village." His essays are witty, wise, and agreeable. They are didactic, and are aimed frequently at the weaknesses or follies of his age. The clever idea of holding the cus- toms of his country up to that country's ridicule by pre- tending to look at them through the eyes of a foreigner did not originate with Goldsmith, but has been used most effectively by him in his essays entitled " A Citizen of the World." These are, however, so frank in picturing coarse and repulsive conditions that many of them are unpleasant reading for a more refined era, though they may have had an influence in producing that greater refinement. Nearly all the essays thus far mentioned have been called forth by the author's desire to effect a change in his ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS ix own time, but of none of them is this so true as of the splendid oration-essay entitled " The Crisis." Liberty and literature are alike indebted to Thomas Paine' s series of brilliant pamphlets. We have next a strong contrast in Disraeli's theme, drawn as it is from the oldest form of literature the prov- erbs in which nations have unconsciously set down their own history in concrete phrases that pass current from lip to lip. A falsehood sanctioned by a proverb is doubly false, or, rather, doubly mischievous ; a truth in such a setting is likely to play a continual part in history; and the tracing of proverbs to their origin and through their adventurous wanderings is a task peculiarly suited to the genius of the essay. We think of Charles Lamb as the type of what the modern essay writer should be genial, gentle, dreamy, poetic, able to write out his own heart and personality, and yet reveal no overweening self-confidence or pride of intel- lect. This Lamb could do to perfection. Thus in his essay entitled " Imperfect Sympathies" he says: "That the au- thor of the ' Religio Medici/ mounted upon the airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and conjectural essences, in whose categories of being the possible took the upper hand of the actual, should have overlooked the im- pertinent personalities of such poor concretions as man- kind, is not much to be admired. It is rather to be won- dered at that in the genus of animal he should have con- descended to distinguish that species at all. For myself, earth-bound and fettered to the scene of my activities, ' standing on earth, not wrapped above the sky/ I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national and individual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste, for when once it becomes indifferent it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer X ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS words, a bundle of prejudices made up of likings and dis- likings the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipa- thies. In a certain sense I hope it may be said of me that I am a lover of my species I can feel for all indifferently, but I can not feel toward all equally. The more purely English word that expresses my sympathy will better ex- press my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, who upon another account can not be my mate or fellow. I can not like all people alike." Lamb himself is likeable in both his likes and his dislikes. His essays are of un- equal merit, and they are seldom profound in thought; but his life of hidden self-devotion somehow permeated the literature through which it found relief. Washington Irving in many respects suggests Charles Lamb. He is an ideal essayist of the thoughtful, sympa- thetic, humorous kind. The man of leisure, the student and writer, was rare in our country when Irving published his earliest work. Literature as a profession was not yet at home here. Prose was still dwelling in its log cabin as a frontiersman, and poetry was in the air, but had not alighted even in the tree-tops. We owe much of the hearthstone happiness of our expanding love of letters to the genius that gave us the " Sketch Book." Whittier's prose is too little known and read. A half- restrained merriment lends a charm to his terse and simple Saxon phrasing, which was seldom called out by the themes that stirred his Muse. His wide sympathies appear in his range of subjects, but one chain of thought unites them all the human element that gave interest to his essentially philanthropic soul. Whipple is one of the strongest essayists our country has produced. His power of argument, his persuasive appeal, his elevation of thought and elegance of language, render him a fireside writer of commanding interest. His work has also some essentials of the oration; it is forcible ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS xi when used as an address. The best essays lend themselves peculiarly to loud reading, and none more so than those of Whipple. Religious themes are not often chosen by the essayist, and for that reason we are the more indebted to one who presents a single spiritual idea in fascinating form. This Principal Shairp has done. His beautiful essay appears to grow naturally out of a securely rooted affection for the truth. The task he set himself was, to use his own words, " to offer such suggestions as have been gathered from a number of years not unobservant of what has been going on in that borderland where faith and knowledge meet." This field is apparently the one next to be gleaned by the student, and such trained knowledge and intelligent faith as Shairp's are of great value therein. Lowell did many things well, and some supremely well. It seems to me not only that he is the greatest American poet, but that his " Commemoration Ode " is the finest elegiac poem in our language. I also believe he leads his countrymen as an essayist of the fireside. He is not an orator in prose; he is a philosopher and a dreamer. He is singularly humorous, is forcible, full of conviction, and has a lover's instinct in making language serve occasion. His later political essays are inferior to his earlier work. Matthew Arnold's " Sweetness and Light " has been so thoroughly discussed that added words are needless, except to say that it seems to stand as the mouthpiece of that philanthropic socialism which has held a place among a large body of England's literary men for many years, and which, in this country at least, in municipal socialism, seems to be tending rapidly to unite with the state social- ism against which at the outset it protested. Arnold says, " The men of culture are the true apostles of equality." This remains to be proved, but the essay here given is a notable plea in its favour. xii ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS There are few essayists among women, but Gail Hamil- ton found this form of literature exactly suited to the cast of her mind. She is a natural essay writer, and gives us humour, pathos, good sense, and suggestion in a proverb- like fashion that is quite her own. She has more nearly made a fine art of quotation than has any other writer whom I recall. The homely Saxon of her essays never descends to the commonplace, and often rises to eloquence. What she says remains in the memory; it is not given to playing hide-and-go-seek with the reader. She herself is eminently quotable, and she puts the reader at once en rapport with her own mood. Hers is not the form of essay that arouses questioning and sets one thinking. We take her word for it, however startling and original her propo- sitions. This is a rare art in an essayist, and is worthy of profounder themes than those on which Gail Hamil- ton usually wrote. Richard Jefferies presents a fine specimen of the highly ornamented essay. The loving student of Nature has always found responsive minds, and the world cherishes White's "Selborne" and Walton's "Complete Angler" for the sake of the thing interpreted as much as for the method of interpretation. In Robert Louis Stevenson we lost an almost ideal essayist. His pictures of Nature and art and life come naturally into the fireside world. When one has read them in solitude he feels that he can not rest until he has read them aloud with a congenial friend. Stevenson is gay and tender, picturesque, suggestive, illuminating. Will not some children of a future generation be better understood and more wisely guided because of a glimpse of the child's world seen through his soul window, with its transparent setting of pure English words? The essay is a happy form of literature. It gains mel- lowness with age, and yet keeps the freshness of youth. ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS xiii And it is perhaps the most democratic of all forms, for there is no supreme essayist towering above his fellows. This throws a peculiar interest about the essay, and makes explicable its many decadences and revivals. It is now in fashion, and now out of fashion, to write essays or to read them; and this state of things is likely to continue until some future crisis calls forth a many-sided genius who shall fulfil all the conditions of the perfect essay. HELEN KENDRICK JOHNSON. CONTENTS OF THE INSTITUTION AND EDUCATION OF CHILDREN PAGB By Michel Eyquem de Montaigne ...... i THE DEFENCE OF POESY By Sir Philip Sidney 47 AREOPAGITICA : A SPEECH FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING By John Milton 99 A DISCOURSE, BY WAY OF VISION, CONCERNING THE GOVERN- MENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL By Abraham Cowley 147 OF REWARDING GENIUS IN ENGLAND By Oliver Goldsmith 183 ' COMMON SENSE By Thomas Paine 195 THE CRISIS By Thomas Paine 228 THE PHILOSOPHY OF PROVERBS By Isaac Disraeli 2 37 A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS By Charles Lamb 2 75 THE CONVALESCENT By Charles Lamb 28 5 RURAL FUNERALS By Washington Irving 2 9* xvi GREAT ESSAYS THOMAS ELLWOOD PAGE By John Greenleaf Whittier 33 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS By James Russell Lowell 329 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE By Edwin Percy Whipple 355 HINDRANCES TO SPIRITUAL GROWTH By John Campbell Shairp 379 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT By Matthew Arnold 397 A COMPLAINT OF FRIENDS By Gail Hamilton 4 2 7 THE PAGEANT OF SUMMER By Richard Jefferies 447 CHILD'S PLAY By Robert Louis Stevenson 467 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE MICHEL EYQUEM DE MONTAIGNE Frontispiece From an engraving by Augustin de St. Aubin. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 52 From an engraving after a painting by Isaac Oliver. CHARLES LAMB 282 From an etching after a painting by Henry Meyer. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 338 From an engraving by Alfred B. Hall. ROBERT Louis STEVENSON 47 2 From an etching by Samuel Hollyer. OF THE INSTITUTION AND EDUCATION OF CHILDREN BY MICHEL EYQUEM DE MONTAIGNE TRANSLATED BY JOHN FLORIO MICHEL EYQUEM DE MONTAIGNE was born at his father's chateau, in the old province of Perigord, France, February 28, 1533. The boy had a German tutor who could not speak French, and many of those about him were required by his eccentric father to learn Latin, that his son might become familiar with that tongue, in which, it is said, he was able to con- verse at the age of six. He was sent to college at Bordeaux, and then studied law. He succeeded to the estate and retired from business at the age of thirty-eight, and soon afterward began to write his " Essays," the first edition of which appeared in 1580. He was remarkable for his bad memory, which may have been the result of too much linguistic study in his infancy and youth ; and the list of ordinary things that he could not do is amazing. It is said that he could not swim, fence, carve, guess a riddle, saddle a horse, make a pen, or tell the use of the common agri- cultural implements. He disliked to read, and never revised his manu- scripts. He was familiar at court, and was called to mediate between Henry of Navarre and the Duke of Guise. In middle life he travelled extensively on the continent, and afterward he was Mayor of Bordeaux for four years. He died September 13, 1592. The two romantic episodes in his life were his friendship with tienne la Boetie, who died early, and whose literary remains Montaigne edited, and, in later life, that with Mademoiselle de Gournay, who after his death published an excellent edition of his " Essays." His biography has been written by Boyle St. John (1857). JOHN FLORIO, the first translator of Montaigne's " Essays," was the son of an Italian exile, and was born in London about 1553. He was a private tutor, did a large amount of work in the way of translating and compiling, and wrote an Italian and English dictionary. His trans- lation of Montaigne was published in 1603. The British Museum has two copies of it, one containing the autograph of Ben Jonson, the other that of Shakespeare. It is the only book that Shakespeare is known to have owned, and some doubt has been thrown even on this autograph. OF THE INSTITUTION AND EDUCATION OF CHILDREN I NEVER knew father, how crooked and deformed so- ever his son were, that would either altogether cast him off or not acknowledge him for his own; and yet (unless he be merely besotted or blinded in his affection) it may not be said but he plainly perceiveth his defects, and hath a feeling of his imperfections. But so it is, he is his own. So it is in myself. I see better than any man else that what I have set down is naught but the fond imaginations of him who in his youth hath tasted nothing but the paring, and seen but the superfices of true learn- ing, whereof he hath retained but a general and shapeless form: a smack of everything in general, but nothing to the purpose in particular. After the French manner. To be short, I know there is an art of physic, a course of laws, four parts of the mathematics, and I am not altogether ignorant what they tend unto. And perhaps I also know the scope and drift of sciences in general to be for the service of our life. But to wade farther, or that ever I tired myself with plodding upon Aristotle (the monarch of our modern doctrine), or obstinately continued in search of any one science, I confess I never did it. Nor is there any one art whereof I am able so much as to draw the first lineaments. And there is no scholar (be he of the lowest form) that may not repute himself wiser than I, who am not able to oppose him in his first lesson; and if I be forced to it, I am constrained very impertinently to draw in matter from some general discourse, whereby I examine and give a guess at his natural judgment: a lesson as much unknown to them as theirs is to me. I have not dealt or had com- merce with any excellent book, except Plutarch or Seneca, from whom (as the Danaides) I draw my water, incessantly 3 4 MONTAIGNE filling, and as fast emptying; something whereof I fasten to this paper, but to myself nothing at all. And touching bopksj history, is .my chief study, poesy my only delight, to which I li'mi pairtjpularly affected ; for as Cleanthes said, ,tha. as -{he, -voice, being- forcibly pent in the narrow gullet of a''lram'pet' sUisi'isiieth forth more strong and shriller, so meseems that a sentence cunningly and closely couched in measure-keeping poesy darts itself forth more furiously and wounds me even to the quick. And concerning the natural faculties that are in me (whereof behold here an essay), I perceive them to faint under their own burden; my conceits and my judgment march but uncertain, and as it were groping, staggering, and stumbling at every rush. And when I have gone as far as I can I have no whit pleased myself, for the farther I sail the more land I descry, and that so dimmed with fogs, and overcast with clouds, that my sight is so weakened I can not dis- tinguish the same. And then undertaking to speak indif- ferently of all that presents itself unto my fantasy, and having nothing but mine own natural means to employ therein, if it be my hap (as commonly it is) among good authors, to light upon those very places which I have un- dertaken to treat of, as even now I did in Plutarch, reading his discourse of the power of imagination, wherein in re- gard of those wise men I acknowledge myself so weak and so poor, so dull and gross-headed, as I am forced both to pity and disdain myself, yet am I pleased with this, that my opinions have often the grace to jump with theirs, and that I follow them aloof off, and thereby possess at least that which all other men have not, which is, that I know the utmost difference between them and myself; all which notwithstanding I suffer my inventions to run abroad, as weak and faint as I have produced them, without bungling and botching the faults which this comparison hath dis- covered to me in them. A man had need have a strong back to undertake to march foot to foot with this kind of men. The indiscreet writers of our age, amid their trivial compositions, intermingle and wrest in whole sentences taken from ancient authors, supposing by such filching theft to purchase honour and reputation to themselves, do clean contrary. For this infinite variety and dissem- EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 5 blance of lustres makes a face so wan, so ill-favoured, and so ugly, in respect of theirs, that they lose much more than gain thereby. These were two contrary humours: the phi- losopher Chrisippus was wont to foist in among his books not only whole sentences and other long-long discourses, but whole books of other authors, as in one he brought in Euripides's " Medea." And Apollodorus was wont to say of him that if one should draw from out his books what he had stolen from others, his paper would remain blank. Whereas Epicurus, clean contrary to him, in three hundred volumes he left behind him, had not made use of one alle- gation. It was my fortune not long since to light upon such a place: I had languishingly traced after some French words, so naked and shallow, and so void either of sense or matter, that at last I found them to be naught but mere French words; and after a tedious and wearisome travel I chanced to stumble upon a high, rich, and even to the clouds raised piece, the descent whereof had it been some- what more pleasant or easy, or the ascent reaching a little farther, it had been excusable, and to be borne withal; but it was such a steepy downfall, and by mere strength hewn out of the main rock, that by reading of the first six words methought I was carried into another world: whereby I perceive the bottom whence I came to be so low and deep, as I durst never more adventure to go through it; for, if I did stuff any one of my discourses with those rich spoils, it would manifestly cause the sottishness of others to ap- pear. To reprove mine own faults in others seems to me no more insufferable than to reprehend (as I do often) those of others in myself. They ought to be accused every- where, and have all places of sanctuary taken from them; yet do I know how over-boldly at all times I adventure to equal myself unto my filchings, and to march hand in hand with them; not without a fond hardy hope that I may perhaps be able to blear the eyes of the judges from discerning them. But it is as much for the benefit of my application as for the good of mine invention and force. And I do not furiously front, and body to body wrestle with those old champions: it is but by flights, advantages, and false offers I seek to come within them, and if I can to give them a fall. I do not rashly take them about the neck, 6 MONTAIGNE I do but touch them, nor do I go so far as by my bargain I would seem to do; could I but keep even with them, I should then be an honest man; for I seek not to venture on them, but where they are strongest. To do as I have seen some, that is, to shroud themselves under other arms, not daring so much as to show their fingers' ends unarmed, and to botch up all their works (as it is an easy matter in a common subject, namely, for the wiser sort) with ancient inventions, here and there huddled up together. And in those who endeavoured to hide what they have filched from others, and make it their own, it is first a manifest note of injustice, then a plain argument of cowardliness; who having nothing of any worth in themselves to make show of, will yet under the countenance of others' suffi- ciency go about to make a fair offer: moreover (oh, great foolishness!), to seek by such cozening tricks to forestall the ignorant approbation of the common sort, nothing fearing to discover their ignorance to men of understand- ing (whose praise only is of value) who will soon trace out such borrowed ware. As for me, there is nothing I will do less. I never speak of others but that I may the more speak of myself. This concerneth not those mingle-man- gles of many kinds of stuff, or, as the Grecians call them, Rhapsodies, that for such are published, of which kind I have (since I came to years of discretion) seen divers most ingenious and witty; among others, one under the name of Capilupus; besides many of the ancient stamp. These are wits of such excellence as both here and elsewhere they will soon be perceived, as our late famous writer Lipsius, in his learned and laborious work of the " Politics": yet whatsoever come of it, forsomuch as they are but follies, my intent is not to smother them, no more than a bald and hoary picture of mine, where a painter hath drawn not a perfect visage, but mine own. For, howsoever, these are but my humours and opinions, and I deliver them but to show what my conceit is, and not what ought to be be- lieved. Wherein I aim at nothing but to display myself, who peradventure (if a new prenticeship change me) shall be another to-morrow. I have no authority to purchase belief, neither do I desire it; knowing well that I am not sufficiently taught to instruct others. Some, having read EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 7 my precedent chapter, told me not long since, in mine own house, I should somewhat more have extended myself in the discourse concerning the institution of children. Now, madam, if there were any sufficiency in me touching that subject, I could not better employ the same than to bestow it as a present upon that little lad, which ere long threateneth to make a happy issue from out your honour- able womb; for, madam, you are too generous to begin with other than a man child. And having had so great a part in the conduct of your successful marriage, I may challenge some right and interest in the greatness and prosperity of all that shall proceed from it: moreover, the ancient and rightful possession, which you from time to time have ever had, and still have, over my service, urgeth me, with more than ordinary respects, to wish all honour, welfare, and advantage to whatsoever may in any sort con- cern you and yours. And truly my meaning is but to show that the greatest difficulty, and importing all human knowledge, seemeth to be in this point, where the nurture and institution of young children is in question. For, as in matters of husbandry, the labour that must be used be- fore sowing, setting, and planting yea, in planting itself is most certain and easy. But when that which was sown, set, and planted cometh to take life, before it come to ripeness much ado and great variety of proceeding be- longeth to it. So in men; it is no great matter to get them, but, being born, what continual cares, what diligent attendance, what doubts and fears, do daily wait to their parents and tutors, before they can be nurtured and brought to any good ! The foreshow of their inclination while they are young is so uncertain, their humours so variable, their promises so changing, their hopes so false, and their pro- ceedings so doubtful, that it is very hard (yea, for the wisest) to ground any certain judgment or assured success upon them. Behold Cymon, view Themistocles, and a thousand others, how they have differed, and fallen to better from themselves, and deceive the expectation of such as knew them. The young whelps both of dogs and bears at first sight show their natural disposition, but men head- long embracing this custom or fashion, following that humour or opinion, admitting this or that passion, allow- 8 MONTAIGNE ing of that or this law, are easily changed and soon dis- guised; yet it is hard to force the natural propension or readiness of the mind, whereby it followeth that for want of heedy foresight in those that could not guide their course well, they often employ much time in vain to address young children in those matters whereunto they are not naturally addicted. All which difficulties notwithstanding, mine opinion is, to bring them up in the best and most profit- able studies, and that a man should slightly pass over those fond presages and deceiving prognostics which we over- precisely gather in their infancy. And (without offence be it said) methinks that Plato in his " Commonwealth " allowed them too-too much authority. Madam, learning joined with true knowledge is an especial and graceful ornament, and an implement of won- derful use and consequence namely, in persons raised to that degree of fortune wherein you are. And, in good truth, Learning hath not her own true form, nor can she make show of her beauteous lineaments if she fall into the hands of base and vile persons. [For, as famous Tor- quato Tasso saith: " Philosophy being a rich and noble queen, and knowing her own worth, graciously smileth upon and lovingly embraceth princes and noblemen if they become suitors to her, admitting them as her minions, and gently affording them all the favours she can; whereas, upon the contrary, if she be wooed and sued unto by clowns, mechanical fellows, and such base kind of people, she holds herself disparaged and disgraced, as holding no proportion with them. And therefore see we by experi- ence that if a true gentleman or nobleman follow her with any attention, and wooed her with importunity, he shall learn and know more of her, and prove a better scholar in one year than an ungentle or base fellow shall in seven, though he pursue her never so attentively."] She is much more ready and fierce to lend her furtherance and direction in the conduct of a war, to attempt honourable actions, to command a people, to treat a peace with a prince of foreign nation, than she is to form an argument in logic, to devise a syllogism, to canvass a case at the bar, or to prescribe a receipt of pills. So (noble lady) forsomuch as I can not persuade myself that you will either forget or EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 9 neglect this point, concerning the institution of yours, especially having tasted the sweetness thereof, and being descended of so noble and learned a race for we yet pos- sess the learned compositions of the ancient and noble Earls of Foix, from out whose heroic loins your husband and you take your offspring; and Francis, Lord of Can- dale, your worthy uncle, doth daily bring forth such fruits thereof as the knowledge of the matchless quality of your house shall hereafter extend itself to many ages I will therefore make you acquainted with one conceit of mine, which is contrary to the common use I hold, and that is all I am able to afford you concerning that matter, the charge of the tutor which you shall appoint your son, in the choice of whom consisteth the whole substance of his education and bringing up; on which are many branches depending, which (forasmuch as I can add nothing of any moment to it) I will not touch at all. And for that point, wherein I presume to advise him, he may so far forth give credit unto it as he shall see just cause. To a gentleman born of noble parentage, and heir of a house that aimeth at true learning, and in it would be disciplined, not so much for game or commodity to himself (because so abject an end is far unworthy the grace and favour of the Muses, and besides hath a regard or dependency of others), nor for external show and ornament, but to adorn and enrich his inward mind, desiring rather to shape and institute an able and sufficient man than a bare learned man; my desire is therefore that the parents or overseers of such a gentle- man be very circumspect and careful in choosing his di- rector, whom I would rather commend for having a well- composed and temperate brain than a full-stuffed head, yet both will do well. And I would rather prefer wisdom, judgment, civil customs, and modest behaviour than bare and mere literal learning; and that in his charge he hold a new course. Some never cease brawling in their schol- ars' ears (as if they were still pouring in a tunnel) to follow their book, yet is their charge nothing else but to repeat what hath been told them before. I would have a tutor to correct this part, and that at first entrance, according to the capacity of the wit he hath in hand, he should begin to make show of it, making him to have a smack of all I0 MONTAIGNE things, and how to choose and distinguish them, without help of others, sometimes opening him the way, other times leaving him to open it by himself. I would not have him to invent and speak alone, but suffer his disciple to speak when his turn cometh. Socrates, and after him Arcesilaus, made their scholars to speak first, and then would speak themselves. Obest plerumque iis qui discere volunt, auctoritas eorum qui docent l " Most commonly the au- thority of them that teach hinders them that would learn." It is therefore meet that he make him first trot on before him, whereby he may the better judge of his pace, and so guess how long he will hold out, that accordingly he may fit his strength, for want of which proportion we often mar all. And to know how to make a good choice, and how far forth one may proceed (still keeping a due meas- ure), is one of the hardest labours I know. It is a sign of a noble, and effect of an undaunted spirit, to know how to second, and how far forth he shall condescend to his childish proceedings, and how to guide them. As for myself, I can better and with more strength walk up than down a hill. Those who, according to our common fash- ion, undertake with one selfsame lesson, and like manner of education, to direct many spirits of divers forms and different humours, it is no marvel if among a multitude of children they scarce meet with two or three that reap any good fruit by their discipline, or that come to any perfection. I would not only have him to demand an account of the words contained in his lesson, but of the sense and substance thereof, and judge of the profit he hath made of it, not by the testimony of his memory, but by the witness of his life. That what he lately learned he causes him to set forth and portray the same into sundry shapes, and then to accommodate it to as many different and several subjects, whereby he shall perceive whether he have yet apprehended the same, and therein enfeoffed him- self, at due times taking his instruction from the institution given by Plato. It is a sign of crudity and indigestion for a man to yield up his meat even as he swallowed the same; the stomach hath not wrought its full operation unless it has changed form and altered fashion of that which was given him to boil and concoct. EDUCATION OF CHILDREN n We see men gape after no reputation but learning, and when they say such a one is a learned man, they think they have said enough. Our mind doth move at others' pleasure, and tied and forced to serve the fantasies of others, being brought under by authority, and forced to stoop to the lure of their bare lesson; we have been so subjected to harp upon one string that we have no way left us to descant upon vol- untary; our vigour and liberty are clean extinct. Nunquam tutelse suae fiunt ' They never come to their own tuition." It was my hap to be familiarly acquainted with an honest man at Pisa, but such an Aristotelian as he held this infal- lible position, that a conformity to Aristotle's doctrine was the true touchstone and square of all solid imaginations and perfect verity; for whatsoever had no coherency with it was but fond chimeras and idle humours; inasmuch as he had known all, seen all, and said all. This proposition of his be- ing somewhat over-amply and injuriously interpreted by some made him a long time after to be troubled in the In- quisition of Rome. I would have him make his scholar nar- rowly to sift all things with discretion, and harbour nothing in his head by mere authority or upon trust. Aristotle's principles shall be no more axioms unto him than the Stoics or Epicureans. Let this diversity of judgments be pro- posed unto him: if he can, he shall be able to distinguish the truth from falsehood; if not, he will remain doubtful. Che non men che saper dubbiar m'aggrata." " No less it pleaseth me To doubt, than wise to be." For if by his own discourse he embrace the opinions of Xenophon or of Plato, they shall be no longer theirs, but his. He that merely followeth another traceth nothing, and seeketh nothing: Non sumus sub Rege, sibi quisque se vindicet 3 "We are not under a king's command; every one may challenge himself, for let him at least know that he knoweth." It is requisite he endeavour as much to feed himself with their conceits as labour to learn their pre- cepts; which, so he know how to apply, let him hardly forget where or whence he had them. Truth and reason are common to all, and are no more proper unto him that spake them heretofore than unto him that shall speak them 12 MONTAIGNE hereafter. And it is no mgre according to Plato's opinion than to mine, since both he and I understand and see alike. The bees do here and there suckle this and cull that flower, but afterward they produce the honey, which is peculiarly their own, then is it no more thyme or marjoram. So of pieces borrowed of others, he may lawfully alter, transform, and confound them, to shape out of them a perfect piece of work, altogether his own; always provided his judg- ment, his travel, study, and institution tend to nothing but to frame the same perfect. Let him hardly conceal where or whence he hath had any help, and make no show of anything, but of that which he hath made himself. Pirates, pilchers, and borrowers make a show of their purchases and buildings, but not of that which they have taken from others: you see not the secret fees or bribes lawyers take of their clients, but you shall manifestly discover the alli- ances they make, the honours they get for their children, and the goodly nouses they build. No man makes open show of his receipts, but every one of his gettings. The good that comes of study (or at least should come) is to prove better, wiser, and honester. It is the understanding power (said Epicharmus) that seeth and heareth, it is it that profiteth all and disposeth all, that moveth, swayeth, and ruleth all: all things else are but blind, senseless, and without spirit. And truly in barring him of liberty to do anything of himself we make him thereby more servile and more coward. Who would ever inquire of his scholar what he thinketh of rhetoric, of grammar, of this or of that sentence of Cicero? Which things thoroughly feathered (as if they were oracles) are let fly into our memory; in which both letters and syllables are substantial parts of the subject. To know by rote is no perfect knowledge, but to keep what one hath committed to his memory's charge is commendable: what a man directly knoweth that will he dispose of, without turning still to his book or looking to his pattern. A mere bookish sufficiency is un- pleasant. All I expect of it is an embellishing of my actions, and not a foundation of them, according to Plato's mind, who saith constancy, faith, and sincerity are true phi- losophy; as for other sciences, and tending elsewhere, they are but garish paintings. I would fain have Paluel or Pom- EDUCATION OF CHILDREN ! 3 pey, those two excellent dancers of our time, with all their nimbleness, teach any man to do their lofty tricks and high capers, only with seeing them done, and without stir- ring out of his place, as some pedantical fellows would instruct our minds without moving or putting it in prac- tice. And glad would I be to find one that would teach us how to manage a horse, to toss a pike, to shoot off a piece, to play -upon the lute, or to warble with the voice, without any exercise, as these kind of men would teach us to judge, and how to speak well, without any exercise of speaking or judging. In which kind of life, or, as I may term it, prenticeship, what action or object soever presents itself unto our eyes may serve us instead of a sufficient book. A pretty prank of a boy, a knavish trick of a page, a foolish part of a lackey, an idle tale, or any discourse else, spoken either in jest or earnest, at the table or in company, are even as new subjects for us to work upon: for further- ance whereof commerce or common society among men, visiting of foreign countries, and observing of strange fash- ions are very necessary, not only to be able (after the man- ner of our young gallants of France) to report how many paces the Church of Santa Rotonda is in length or breadth; or what rich garments the courtesan Signora Livia wear- eth, and the worth of her hosen; or, as some do, nicely to dispute how much longer or broader the face of Nero is which they have seen in some old ruins of Italy than that which is made for him in other old monuments elsewhere. But they should principally observe and be able to make certain relation of the humours and fashions of those coun- tries they have seen, that they may the better know how to correct and prepare their wits by those of others. I would therefore have him begin even from his infancy to travel abroad; and first, that at one shoot he may hit two marks, he should see neighbour countries, namely, where languages are most different from ours; for unless a man's tongue be fashioned unto them in his youth, he shall never attain to the true pronunciation of them if he once grow in years. Moreover, we see it received as a common opin- ion of the wiser sort, that it agreeth not with reason that a child be always nuzzled, cockered, dandled, and brought up in his parents' lap or sight; forsomuch as their natural 14 MONTAIGNE kindness, or (as I may call it) tender fondness, causeth often even the wisest to prove so idle, so overnice, and so base-minded. For parents are not capable, neither can they find in their hearts to see them checked, corrected, or chastised, nor endure to see them brought up so meanly, and so far from daintiness, and many times so dangerously, as they must needs be. And it would grieve them to see their children come home from those exercises that a gen- tleman must necessarily acquaint himself with, sometimes all wet and bemired, other times sweaty and full of dust, and to drink being either extreme hot or exceeding cold; and it would trouble them to see him ride a rough, un- tamed horse, or with his weapon furiously encounter a skil- ful fencer, or to handle or shoot off a musket; against which there is no remedy, if he will make him prove a sufficient, complete, or honest man: he must not be spared in his youth; and it will come to pass that he shall many times have occasion and be forced to shock the rules of physic. Vitamque sub dio et trepidis agat In rebus. 4 " Lead he his life in open air, And in affairs full of despair." It is not sufficient to make his mind strong, his muscles must also be strengthened: the mind is over-borne if it be not seconded; and it is too much for her alone to discharge two offices. I have a feeling how mine panteth, being joined to so tender and sensible a body, and that lieth so heavy upon it. And in my lecture I often perceive how my authors in their writings sometimes commend exam- ples for magnanimity and force, that rather proceed from a thick skin and hardness of the bones. I have known men, women, and children born of so hard a constitution that a blow with a cudgel would less hurt them than a fillip would do me, and so dull and blockish that they will nei- ther stir tongue nor eyebrows, beat them never so much. When wrestlers go about to counterfeit the philosophers' patience, they rather show the vigour of their sinews than of their heart. For the custom to bear travail is to tolerate grief: Labor callum obducit dolori 5 " Labour worketh a hardness upon sorrow/' He must be inured to suffer the pain and hardness of exercises that so he may be in- EDUCATION OF CHILDREN r $ duced to endure the pain of the colic, of cautery, of falls, of sprains, and other diseases incident to man's body: yea, if need require, patiently to bear imprisonment and other tortures, by which sufferance he shall come to be had in more esteem and account; for according to time and place the good as well as the bad man may haply fall into them; we have seen it by experience. Whosoever striveth against the laws threatens good men with mischief and extortion. Moreover, the authority of the tutor (who should be sover- eign over him) is by the cockering and presence of the parents hindered and interrupted: besides the awe and re- spect which the household bears him, and the knowledge of the means, possibilities, and greatness of his house, are in my judgment no small lets in a young gentleman. In this school of commerce and society among men I have often noted this vice, that in lieu of taking acquaintance of others we only endeavour to make ourselves known to them; and we are more ready to utter such merchandise as we have than to engross and purchase new commodities. Silence and modesty are qualities very convenient to civil conversation. It is also necessary that a young man be rather taught to be discreetly sparing and close-handed than prodigally wasteful and lavish in his expenses, and moderate in husbanding his wealth when he shall come to possess it. And not to take pepper in the nose for every foolish tale that shall be spoken in his presence, because it is an uncivil importunity to contradict what- soever is not agreeing to our humour: let him be pleased to correct himself. And let him not seem to blame that in others which he refuseth to do himself, nor go about to withstand common fashions, Licet sapere sine pompa, sine invidia 6 " A man may be wise without ostentation, without envy." Let him avoid those imperious images of the world, those uncivil behaviours and childish ambi- tion wherewith, God wot, too too many are possessed; that is, to make a fair show of that which is not in him; endeavouring to be reputed other than indeed he is; and as if reprehension and new devices were hard to come by, he would by that means acquire unto himself the name of some peculiar virtue. As it pertaineth but to great poets to use the liberty of arts, so is it tolerable but in l6 MONTAIGNE noble minds and great spirits to have a pre-eminence above ordinary fashions. Si quid Socrates et Aristippus contra morem et consuetudinem fecerunt, idem sibi ne arbitretur licere; Magis enim illi et divinis bonis hanc licentiam asse- quebantur 7 " If Socrates and Aristippus have done aught against custom or good manner, let not a man think he may do the same; for they obtained this license by their great and excellent good part.". He shall be taught not to enter rashly into discourse or contesting, but when he shall encounter with a champion worthy of his strength. And then would I not have him employ all the tricks that may fit his turn, but only such as may stand him in most stead. That he be taught to be curious in making choice of his reasons, loving pertinency, and by consequence brev- ity. That, above all, he be instructed to yield, yea, to quit his weapons unto truth, as soon as he shall discern the same, whether it proceed from his adversary or upon bet- ter advice from himself; for he shall not be preferred to any place of eminence above others for repeating of a prescribed part; and he is not engaged to defend any cause further than he may approve it; nor shall he be of that trade where the liberty for a man to repent and readvise himself is sold for ready money. Neque, ut omnia, que praescripta et imperata sint, defendat, necessi- tate ulla cogitur 8 " Nor is he enforced by any necessity to defend and make good all that is prescribed and com- manded him." If his tutor agree with my humour, he shall frame his affection to be a most loyal and true sub- ject to his prince, and a most affectionate and courageous gentleman in all that may concern the honour of his sover- eign or the good of his country, and endeavour to sup- press in him all manner of affection to undertake any action otherwise than for a public good and duty. Besides many inconveniences, which greatly prejudice our liberty by reason of these particular bonds, the judgment of a man that is waged and bought, either it is less free and honest, or else it is blemished with oversight and ingrati- tude. A mere and precise courtier can neither have law nor will to speak or think otherwise than favourably of his master, who among so many thousands of his subjects hath made choice of him alone, to institute and bring him EDUCATION OF CHILDREN i; up with his own hand. These favours, with the commodi- ties that follow minion courtiers, corrupt (not without some colour of reason) his liberty and dazzle his judg- ment. It is therefore commonly seen that the courtier's language differs from other men's in the same state, and to be of no great credit in such matters. Let, therefore, his conscience and virtue shine in his speech, and reason be his chief direction. Let him be taught to confess such faults as he shall discover in his own discourses, albeit none other perceive them but himself; for it is an evident show of judgment and effect of sincerity which are the chiefest qualities he aimeth at. That wilfully to strive and obsti- nately to contest in words, are common qualities, most apparent in basest minds; that to readvise and correct him- self, and when one is most earnest, to leave an ill opinion, are rare, noble, and philosophical conditions. Being in company, he shall be put in mind to cast his eyes round about and everywhere; for I note that the chief places are usually seized upon by the most unworthy and less capable, and that height of fortune is seldom joined with sufficiency. I have seen that while they at the upper end of a board were busy entertaining themselves with talking of the beauty of the hangings about a chamber, or of the taste of some good cup of wine, many good discourses at the lower end have utterly been lost. He shall weigh the carriage of every man in his calling, a herdsman, a mason, a stranger, or a traveller; all must be employed, every one according to his worth, for all help to make up a household; yea, the folly and the simplicity of others shall be as instructions to him. By controlling the graces and manners of others, he shall acquire unto himself envy of the good and contempt of the bad. Let him hardly be possessed with an honest curiosity to search out the nature and causes of all things; let him survey whatso- ever is rare and singular about him; a building, a foun- tain, a man, a place where any battle hath been fought, or the passages of Caesar or Charlemagne: Quae tellus sit lenta gelu, quae putris ab^aestu, Ventus in Italiam quis bene vela ferat. " What land is parched with heat, what clogged with frost, What wind drives kindly to th' Italian coast. 18 MONTAIGNE He shall endeavour to be familiarly acquainted with the customs, with the means, with the state, with the de- pendencies and alliances of all princes; they are things soon and pleasant to be learned, and most profitable to be known. In this acquaintance of men my intending is that he chiefly comprehend them that live but by the memory of books. He shall, by the help of histories, in- form himself of the worthiest minds that were in the best ages. It is a frivolous study, if a man list, but of invalu- able worth to such as can make use of it, and, as Plato saith, the only study the Lacedaemonians reserved for themselves. What profit shall he not reap, touching this point, reading the lives of our Plutarch? Always condi- tioned, the master bethinketh himself whereto his charge tendeth, and that he imprint not so much in his scholar's mind the date of the ruin of Carthage, as the manners of Hannibal and Scipio, nor so much where Marcellus died, as because he was unworthy of his devoir he died there; that he teach him not so much to know histories as to judge of them. It is among things that best agree with my humour, the subject to which our spirits do most diversely apply themselves. I have read in Titus Livius a number of things, which peradventure others never read, in whom Plutarch haply read a hundred more than ever I could read, and which perhaps the author himself did never intend to set down. To some kind of men it is a mere grammatical study, but to others a perfect anatomy of philosophy; by means whereof the secretest part of our nature is searched into. There are in Plutarch many ample discourses most worthy to be known; for in my judgment he is the chief work-master of such works, whereof there are a thousand, whereat he hath but slightly glanced; for with his finger he doth but point us out a way to walk in if we list; and is sometimes pleased to give but a touch at the quickest and main point of a dis- course, from whence they are by diligent study to be drawn, and so brought into open market. As that saying of his, That the inhabitants of Asia served but one alone, be- cause they could not pronounce one only syllable, which is Non, gave perhaps both subject and occasion to my friend Boetie to compose his book of voluntary servitude. EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 19 If it were no more but to see Plutarch wrest a slight action to man's life, or a word that seemeth to bear no such sense, it will serve for a whole discourse. It is pity men of un- derstanding should so much love brevity; without doubt their reputation is thereby better, but we the worse. Plu- tarch had rather we should commend him for his judgment than for his knowledge; he loveth better to leave a kind of longing desire in us of him than a satiety. He knew very well that even in good things too much may be said; and that Alexandridas did justly reprove him who spake very good sentences to the Ephores, but they were over- tedious. " Oh, stranger," quoth he, " thou speakest what thou oughtest, otherwise than thou shouldest." Those that have lean and thin bodies stuff them up with bom- basting. And such as have but poor matter will puff it up with lofty words. There is a marvellous clearness, or, as I may term it, an enlightening of man's judgment drawn from the commerce of men, and by frequenting abroad in the world; we are all so contrived and compact in our- selves that our sight is made shorter by the length of our nose. When Socrates was demanded whence he was, he answered, Not of Athens, but of the world; for he, who had his imagination more full and further stretching, em- braced all the world for his native city, and extended his acquaintance, his society, and affections to all mankind; and not as we do, that look no farther than our feet. If the frost chance to nip the vines about my village, my priest doth presently argue that the wrath of God hangs over our head, and threateneth all mankind; and judgeth that the pip is already fallen upon the cannibals. In viewing these intestine and civil broils of ours, who doth not exclaim that this world's vast frame is near unto a dissolution, and that the day of judgment is ready to fall on us? never remembering that many worse revolutions have been seen, and that while we are plunged in grief and overwhelmed in sorrow a thousand other parts of the world besides are blessed with happiness, and wallow in pleasures, and never think on us; whereas, when I behold our lives, our license, and impunity, I wonder to see them so mild and easy. He on whose head it haileth thinks all the hemisphere besides to be in a storm and tempest. And 20 MONTAIGNE as that dull-pated Savoyard said, that if the silly King of France could cunningly have managed his fortune, he might very well have made himself chief steward of his lord's household, whose imagination conceived no other greatness than his master's; we are all insensible of this kind of error, an error of great consequence and prejudice. But whosoever shall present unto his inward eyes, as it were in a table, the idea of the great image of our universal mother Nature, attired in her richest robes, sitting in the throne of her majesty, and in her visage shall read so gen- eral and so constant a variety; he that therein shall view himself, not himself alone, but a whole kingdom, to be in respect of a great circle but the smallest point that can be imagined, he only can value things according to their essential greatness and proportion. This great universe (which some multiply as species under one genus) is the true looking-glass wherein we must look if we will know whether we be of a good stamp or in the right bias. To conclude, I would have this world's frame to be my schol- ar's choice book. So many strange humours, sundry sects, varying judgments, divers opinions, different laws, and fantastical customs teach us to judge rightly of ours, and instruct our judgment to acknowledge his imperfections and natural weakness, which is no easy an apprenticeship. So many innovations of estates, so many falls of princes and changes of public fortune, may and ought to teach us not to make so great account of ours. So many names, so many victories, and so many conquests buried in dark oblivion, makes the hope to perpetuate our names but ridiculous, by the surprising of ten Argo-letters, or of a small cottage, which is known but by his fall. The pride and fierceness of so many strange and gorgeous shows; the pride-puffed majesty of so many courts, and of their greatness, ought to confirm and assure our sight, undaunt- edly to bear the affronts and thunder-claps of ours, with- out feeling our eyes. So many thousands of men, low- laid in their graves before us, may encourage us not to fear, or be dismayed to go meet so good company in the other world; and so of all things else. Our life (said Py- thagoras) draws near unto the great and populous assem- blies of the Olympic games, wherein some, to get the EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 21 glory and to win the goal of the games, exercise their bodies with all industry; others, for greediness of gain, bring thither merchandise to sell; others there are (and those be not the worst) that seek after no other good, but to mark how, wherefore, and to what end, all things are done; and to be spectators or observers of other men's lives and actions, that so they may the better judge and direct their own. Unto examples may all the most profit- able discourses of philosophy be sorted, which ought to be the touchstone of human actions, and a rule to square them by, to whom may be said: quid fas optare, quid asper Utile nummus habet, patriae charisque propinquis Quantum elargiri deceat, quern te Deus esse lussit, et humana qua parte locatus es in re. 10 Quid sumus, aut quidnam victuri gignimur. 11 " What thou may'st wish, what profit may come clear, From new-stamped coin, to friends and country dear What thou ought'st give: whom God would have thee be, And in what part among men he placed thee, What we are, and wherefore, To live here we were born." What it is to know, and not to know (which ought to be the scope of study), what valour, what temperance, and what justice is: what difference there is between ambition and avarice, bondage and freedom, subjection and liberty, by which marks a man may distinguish true and perfect contentment, and how far forth one ought to fear or ap- prehend death, grief, or shame: Et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem." " How ev'ry labour he may ply, And bear, or ev'ry labour fly." What wards or springs move us, and the causes of so many motions in us. For meseemeth that the first dis- courses wherewith his conceit should be sprinkled, ought to be those that rule his manners and direct his sense; which will both teach him to know himself, and how to live and how to die well. Among the liberal sciences, let us begin with that which makes us free. Indeed, they may all in some sort stead us, as an instruction to our life, and use of it, as all other things else serve the same to some purpose or other. But let us make especial choice of 22 MONTAIGNE that which may directly and pertinently serve the same. If we could restrain and adapt the appurtenances of our life to their right bias and natural limits, we should find the best part of the sciences that now are in use, clean out of fashion with us; yea, and in those that are most in use, there* are certain by-ways and deep-flows most profitable, which we should do well to leave, and, according to the institution of Socrates, limit the course of our studies in those where profit is wanting: -sapere aude, Incipe: vivendi qui recte prorogat horam, Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis, at ille, Labitur, et labetur in omne volubilis aevum." " Be bold to be wise: to begin, be strong, He that to live well doth the time prolong, Clown-like expects, till down the stream be run, That runs, and will run, till the world be done." It is mere simplicity to teach our children, Quid moveant Pisces, animosaque signa Leonis, Lotus et Hesperia quid Capricornus aqua. 14 " What Pisces move, or hot breath'd Leos beams, Or Capricornus bathed in western streams," the knowledge of the stars, and the motion of the eighth sphere, before their own: Ti n\tid$T Pe\riov, and of the superlatives Xeipio-Tov, /3e\rurrov, it is they that must chafe in entertain- ing themselves with their science: as for discourses of phi- losophy they are wont to glad, rejoice, and not to vex and molest those that use them ": Deprendas animi tormenta latentis in aegro Corpore, deprendas et gaudia; sumit utrumque Inde habitum facies. 1 * " You may perceive the torments of the mind, Hid in sick body, you the joys may find; The face such habit takes in either kind." That mind which harboureth philosophy ought by rea- son of her sound health make that body also sound and healthy; it ought to make her contentment to through- shine in all exterior parts; it ought to shapen and model all outward demeanours to the model of it; and by conse- quence arm him that doth possess it with a gracious stout- ness and lively audacity, with an active and pleasing ges- ture, and with a settled and cheerful countenance. The most evident token and apparent sign of true wisdom is a constant and unconstrained rejoicing, whose estate is like unto all things above the moon, that is ever clear, always bright. It is Baroco and Baralipton that makes their followers prove so base and idle, and not philosophy; they know her not but by hearsay: what? Is it not she that cleareth all storms of the mind? And teacheth mis- ery, famine, and sickness to laugh? Not by reason of some imaginary epicycles, but by natural and palpable reasons. She aimeth at nothing but virtue; it is virtue she seeks after; which, as the school saith, is not pitched on the top of a high, steepy, or inaccessible hill; for they that have come unto her affirm that clean contrary she keeps her stand, and holds her mansion in a fair, flourishing, and pleasant plain, whence, as from a high watch tower, she surveyeth all things, to be subject unto her, to whom any man may with great facility come if he but know the way or entrance to her palace; for the paths that lead unto her are certain fresh and shady green allies, sweet and flowery ways, whose ascent is even, easy, and nothing wearisome, like unto that of heaven's vaults. Forsomuch as they have EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 2$ not frequented this virtue, who gloriously, as in a throne of majesty sits sovereign, goodly, triumphant, lovely, equally delicious and courageous, protesting herself to be a professed and irreconcilable enemy to all sharpness, au- sterity, fear, and compulsion; having Nature for her guide, fortune and voluptuousness for her companions; they ac- cording to their weakness have imaginarily fained her to have a foolish, sad, grim, quarrelous, spiteful, threatening, and disdainful visage, with a horrid and unpleasant look; and have placed her upon a craggy, sharp, and unfrequented rock, amid desert cliffs and uncouth crags, as a scarecrow, or bugbear, to affright the common people with. Now the tutor, which ought to know that he should rather seek to fill the mind and store the will of his disciple, as much, or rather more, with love and affection, than with awe, and reverence unto virtue, may show and tell him that poets follow common humours, making him plainly to perceive, and as it were palpably to feel, that the gods have rather placed labour and sweat at the entrances which lead to Venus's chambers than at the doors that direct to Pal- las's cabinets. And when he shall perceive his scholar to have a sen- sible feeling of himself, presenting Bradamant or Angelica before him, as a mistress to enjoy, embellished with a nat- ural, active, generous, and unspotted beauty not ugly or giant-like, but blithe and lively, in respect of a wanton, soft, affected, and artificial flaring beauty; the one attired like unto a young man, coifed with a bright shining helmet, the other disguised and dressed about the head like unto an impudent harlot, with embroideries, frizzlings, and car- canets of pearls: he will no doubt deem his own love to be a man and no woman, if in his choice he differ from that effeminate shepherd of Phrygia. In this new kind of lesson he shall declare unto him that the prize, the glory, and height of true virtue consisted in the facility, profit, and pleasure of his exercises; so far from difficulty and in- cumbrances that children as well as men, the simple as soon as the wise, may come unto her. Discretion and tem- perance, not force or waywardness, are the instruments to bring him unto her. Socrates (virtue's chief favourite), that he might the better walk in the pleasant, natural, and 26 MONTAIGNE open path of her progresses, doth voluntarily and in good earnest quit all compulsion. She is the nurse and foster- mother of all human pleasures, who in making them just and upright she also makes them sure and sincere. By moderating them she keepeth them in ure and breath. In limiting and cutting them off whom she refuseth she whets us on toward those she leaveth unto us; and plenteously leaves us them which Nature pleaseth, and like a kind mother giveth us over unto satiety, if not unto wearisome- ness, unless we will peradventure say that the rule and bridle which stayeth the drunkard before drunkenness, the glutton before surfeiting, and the letcher before the losing of his hair, be the enemies of our pleasures. If common fortune fail her, it clearly scapes her; or she cares not for her, or she frames another unto herself, altogether her own, not so fleeting nor so rowling. She knoweth the way how to be rich, mighty, and wise, and how to lie in sweet- perfumed beds. She loveth life; she delights in beauty, in glory, and in health. But her proper and particular office is, first to know how to use such goods temperately, and how to lose them constantly. An office much more noble than severe, without which all course of life is un- natural, turbulent, and deformed, to which one may law- fully join those rocks, those incumbrances, and hideous monsters. If so it happen that his disciple prove of so dif- ferent a condition, that he rather love to give ear to an idle fable than to the report of some noble voyage, or other notable and wise discourse, when he shall hear it; that at the sound of a drum or clang of a trumpet, which are wont to rouse and arm the youthly heat of his companions, turn- eth to another that calleth him to see a play, tumbling, jug- gling tricks, or other idle lose-time sports; and who for pleasure's sake doth not deem it more delightsome to re- turn all sweaty and weary from a victorious combat, from wrestling, or riding of a horse, than from a tennis-court or dancing-school, with the prize or honour of such exercises. The best remedy I know for such a one is, to put him pren- tice to some base occupation, in some good town or other, yea, were he the son of a duke; according to Plato's rule, who saith, " That children must be placed not according to their father's conditions, but the faculties of their mind." EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 2 / Since it is Philosophy that teacheth us to live, and that infancy, as well as other ages, may plainly read her lessons in the same, why should it not be imparted unto young scholars? Udum et molle lutum est, nunc nunc properandus, et acri Fingendus sine fine rota." " He's moist and soft mould, and must by-and-by Be cast, made up, while wheel whirls readily." We are taught to live when our life is well-nigh spent. Many scholars have been infected with that loathsome and marrow-wasting disease before ever they came to read Aristotle's treatise of " Temperance." Cicero was wont to say, " That could he outlive the lives of two men, he should never find leisure to study the lyric poets." And I find these sophisters both worse and more unprofitable. Our child is engaged in greater matters, and but the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life are due unto pedantism, the rest unto action; let us therefore employ so short time as we have to live in more necessary instructions. It is an abuse; remove these thorny quiddities of logic, whereby our life can no whit be amended, and betake ourselves to the simple discourses of philosophy; know how to choose and fitly to make use of them: they are much more easy to be conceived than one of Boccaccio's tales. A child coming from nurse is more capable of them than he is to learn to read or write. Philosophy hath discourses, whereof infancy as well as decaying old age may make good use. I am of Plutarch's mind, which is, that Aristotle did not so much amuse his great disciple about the arts how to frame syllogisms, or the principles of geometry, as he en- deavoured to instruct him with good precepts concerning valour, prowess, magnanimity, and temperance, and an un- daunted assurance not to fear anything; and with such munition he sent him, being yet very young, to subdue the empire of the world, only with thirty thousand footmen, four thousand horsemen, and forty-two thousand crowns in money. As for other arts and sciences, he saith Alex- ander honoured them, and commended their excellency and comeliness; but for any pleasure he took in them, his affec- tion could not easily be drawn to exercise them: 28 MONTAIGNE petite hinc juvenesque senesque Finem animo certum, miserisque viatica canis. 11 " Young men and old, draw hence (in your affairs) Your minds' set mark, provision for gray hairs." It is that which Epicurus said in the beginning of his letter to Memiceus: " Neither let the youngest shun nor the oldest weary himself in philosophizing, for who doth otherwise seemeth to say, that either the season to live happily is not yet come, or is already past." Yet would I not have this young gentleman pent up, nor carelessly cast off to the heedless choler, or melancholy humour of the hasty schoolmaster. I would not have his budding spirit corrupted with keeping him fast tied, and, as it were, la- bouring fourteen or fifteen hours a day poring on his book, as some do, as if he were a day-labouring man; neither do I think it fit if at any time, by reason of some solitary or melancholy complexion, he should be seen with an over- indiscreet application given to his book, it should be cher- ished in him, for that doth often make him both inapt for civil conversation and distracts him from better employ- ments. How many have I seen in my days, by an over- greedy desire of knowledge, become as it were foolish? Carneades was so deeply plunged and, as I may say, be- sotted in it, that he could never have leisure to cut his hair or pare his nails; nor would I have his noble manners ob- scured by the incivility and barbarism of others. The French wisdom hath long since proverbially been spoken of as very apt to conceive study in her youth, but most inapt to keep it long. In good truth, we see at this day that there is nothing lovelier to behold than the young chil- dren of France; but for the most part they deceive the hope which was fore-apprehended of them; for when they once become men there is no excellency at all in them. I have heard men of understanding hold this opinion, that the colleges to which they are sent (of which there are store) do thus besot them; whereas to our scholar, a cabi- net, a garden, the table, the bed, a solitariness, a company, morning and evening, and all hours shall be alike unto him, all places shall be a study for him; for philosophy (as a former of judgments and modeller of customs) shall be his principal lesson, having the privilege to intermeddle herself EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 2 9 with all things and in all places. Isocrates the orator, being once requested at a great banquet to speak of his art, when all thought he had reason to answer, said: " It is not now time to do what I can, and what should now be done I can not do it; for to present orations, or to enter into dis- putation of rhetoric, before a company assembled together to be merry, and make good cheer, would be but a medley of harsh and jarring music." The like may be said of all other sciences. But touching Philosophy namely, in that point where it treateth of man, and of his duties and offices it hath been the common judgment of the wisest that in regard of the pleasantness of her conversation she ought not to be rejected, neither at banquets nor at sports. And Plato having invited her to his solemn feast, we see how kindly she entertaineth the company with a mild behaviour, fitly suiting herself to time and place, notwithstanding it be one of his most learned and profitable discourses. jEque pauperibus prodest, locupletibus aeque, Et neglecta aeque pueris senibusque nocebit. 19 " Poor men alike, alike rich men it easeth, Alike it, scorned, old and young displeaseth." So doubtless he shall less be idle than others; for even as the paces we bestow walking in a gallery, although they be twice as many more, weary us not so much as those we spend in going a set journey; so our lesson being passed over, as it were, by chance, or way of encounter, without strict observance of time or place, being applied to all our actions, shall be digested and never felt. All sports and exercises shall be a part of his study; running, wrestling, music, dancing, hunting, and managing of arms and horses. I would have the exterior demeanour or decency and the disposition of his person to be fashioned together with his mind; for it is not a mind, it is not a body that we erect, but it is a man, and we must not make two parts of him. And, as Plato saith, they must not be erected one without another, but equally be directed, no otherwise than a couple of horses matched to draw in one selfsame team. And to hear him, doth he not seem to employ more time and care in the exercises of his body; and to think that the mind is together with the same exercised, and not the contrary? As for other matters, this institution ought to be directed 30 MONTAIGNE by a sweet-severe mildness. Not as some do, who in lieu of gently bidding children to the banquet of letters, pre- sent them with nothing but horror and cruelty. Let me have this violence and compulsion removed, there is noth- ing that, in my seeming, doth more bastardize and dizzy a well-born and gentle nature. If you would have him stand in awe of shame and punishment, do not so much inure him to it; accustom him patiently to endure sweat and cold, the sharpness of the wind, the heat of the sun, and how to despise all hazards. Remove from him all nice- ness and quaintness in clothing, in lying, in eating, and in drinking; fashion him to all things, that he prove not a fair and wanton, puling boy, but a lusty and vigorous boy. When I was a child, when I became a man, and now when I am old, I have ever judged and believed the same. But among other things I could never away with this kind of discipline used in most of our colleges. It had peradven- ture been less hurtful if they had somewhat inclined to mild- ness or gentle entreaty. It is a very prison of captivated youth, and proves dissolute in punishing it before it be so. Come upon them when they are going to their lesson, and you hear nothing but whipping and brawling, both of chil- dren tormented and masters besotted with anger and chafT ing. How wide are they which go about to allure a child's mind to go to its book, being yet but tender and fearful, with a stern, frowning countenance, and with hands full of rods! Oh, wicked and pernicious manner of teaching! which Quintilian hath very well noted, that this imperious kind of authority namely, this way of punishing of chil- dren draws many dangerous inconveniences within. How much more decent were it to see their schoolhouses and forms strewed with green boughs and flowers than with bloody birchen twigs! If it lay in me I would do as the philosopher Speusippus did, who caused the pictures of Gladness and Joy, of Flora and of the Graces, to be set up round about his schoolhouse. Where their profit lieth, there should also be their recreation. Those meats ought to be sugared over that are healthful for children's stom- achs, and those made bitter that are hurtful for them. It is strange to see how careful Plato showeth himself in fram- ing of his laws about the recreation and pastime of the EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 3! youth of his city, and how far he extends himself about their exercises, sports, songs, leaping, and dancing, whereof he saith that severe antiquity gave the conduct and patron- age unto the gods themselves namely, to Apollo, to the Muses, and to Minerva. Mark but how far forth he en- deavoureth to give a thousand precepts to be kept in his places of exercises both of body and mind. As for learned sciences, he stands not much upon them, and seemeth in particular to commend poesy but for music's sake. All strangeness and self-particularity in our manners and con- ditions is to be shunned as an enemy to society and civil conversation. Who would not be astonished at Demo- phon's complexion, chief steward of Alexander's household, who was wont to sweat in the shadow and quiver for cold in the sun? I have seen some to startle at the smell of an apple more than at the shot of a piece; some to be frighted with a mouse, some ready to cast their gorge at the sight of a mess of cream, and others to be scared with seeing a feather bed shaken; as Germanicus, who could not abide to see a cock or hear his crowing. There may haply be some hidden property of Nature which in my judgment might easily be removed if it were taken in time. Institu- tion hath gotten this upon me (I must confess with much ado), for, except beer, all things else that are man's food agree indifferently with my taste. The body being yet supple, ought to be accommodated to all fashions and cus- toms; and (always provided his appetites and desires be kept under) let a young man boldly be made fit for all nations and companies, yea, if need be, for all disorders and surfeitings; let him acquaint himself with all fashions, that he may be able to do all things, and love to do none but those that are commendable. Some strict philosophers commend not, but rather blame Calisthenes for losing the good favour of his master Alexander, only because he would not pledge him as much as he had drunk to him. He shall laugh, jest, dally, and debauch himself with his prince. And in his debauching I would have him outgo all his fellows in vigour and constancy, and that he omit not to do evil, neither for want of strength or knowledge, but for lack of will. Multum interest utrum peccare quis nolit, aut nesciat 20 " There is a great difference, whether one 32 MONTAIGNE have no will or no wit to do amiss/' I thought to have honoured a gentleman (as great a stranger, and as far from such riotous disorders as any is in France) by in- quiring of him in very good company how many times in all his life he had been drunk in Germany during the time of his abode there, about the necessary affairs of our king; who took it even as I meant it, and answered three times, telling the time and manner how. I know some who for want of that quality have been much perplexed when they have had occasion to converse with that na- tion. I have often noted with great admiration that won- derful nature of Alcibiades, to see how easily he could suit himself to so divers fashions and different humours, with- out prejudice unto his health; sometimes exceeding the sumptuousness and pomp of the Persians, and now and then surpassing the austerity and frugality of the Lacedae- monians; as reformed in Sparta, as voluptuous in Ionia. Omnis Aristippum decuit color, et status, et res. 21 " All colours, states, and things are fit , For courtly Aristippus's wit." Such a one would I frame my disciple: -quern duplici panno patientia velat, Mirabor, vitae via si conversa decebit. " Whom patience clothes with suits of double kind, I muse, if he another way will find." Personamque feret non inconcinnus utramque. 22 " He not unfitly may Both parts and persons play." Lo, here my lessons, wherein he that acteth them profiteth more than he that but knoweth them, whom if you see you hear, and if you hear him you see him. God forbid, saith somebody in Plato, that to philosophize be to learn many things, and to exercise the arts. Hanc amplis- simam omnium artium bene vivendi disciplinary vita magis quam litteris persequnti sunt 23 " This discipline of living well, which is the amplest of all other arts, they followed rather in their lives than in their learning or writing." Leo, Prince of the Phliasians, inquiring of Heraclides Ponticus what art he professed, he answered, " Sir, I profess neither art nor science, but I am a philosopher." Some reproved EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 33 Diogenes that, being an ignorant man, he did neverthe- less meddle with philosophy; to whom he replied, " So much the more reason have I, and to greater purpose do I meddle with it." Hegesias prayed him upon a time to read some book unto him. ' You are a merry man," said he; " as you choose natural and not painted right and not counterfeit figs to eat, why do you not likewise choose not the painted and written, but the true and natural exer- cises? " He shall not so much repeat as act his lesson. In his actions shall he make repetition of the same. We must observe whether there be wisdom in his enterprises, integrity in his demeanour, modesty in his gestures, justice in his actions, judgment and grace in his speech, courage in his sickness, moderation in his sports, temperance in his pleasures, order in the government of his house, and indifference in his taste, whether it be flesh, fish, wine, or water, or whatsoever he feedeth upon. Qui disciplinam suam non ostentationem scientiae sed legem vitae putet: quique obtemperet ipse sibi, et decretis pareat 24 " Who thinks his learning not an ostentation of knowledge, but a law of life, and himself obeys himself, and doth what is decreed." The true mirror of our discourses is the course of our lives. Zeuxidamus answered one that demanded of him why the Lacedaemonians did not draw into a book the ordinances of prowess, that so their young men might read them. " It is," saith he, " because they would rather ac- custom them to deeds and actions than to books and writ- ings." Compare at the end of fifteen or sixteen years one of these collegial Latinizers, who hath employed all that while only in learning how to speak, to such a one as I mean. The world is nothing but babbling and words, and I never saw man that doth not rather speak more than he ought than less. Notwithstanding half our age is con- sumed that way. We are kept four or five years learning to understand bare words, and to join them into clauses, then as long in proportioning a great body extended into four or five parts; and five more at least ere we can suc- cinctly know how to mingle, join, and interlace them hand- somely into a subtle fashion and into one coherent orb. Let us leave it to those whose profession is to do nothing 34 MONTAIGNE else. Being once on my journey to Orleans, it was my chance to meet upon that plain that lieth on this side Clery with two masters of arts, travelling toward Bordeaux, about fifty paces one from another; far off behind them I descried a troop of horsemen, their master riding fore- most, who was the Earl of Rochefoucauld; one of my serv- ants inquiring of the first of those masters of arts what gen- tleman he was that followed him; supposing my servant had meant his fellow-scholar, for he had not yet seen the earl's train, answered pleasantly, " He is no gentleman, sir, but a grammarian, and I am a logician." Now we that contrariwise seek not to frame a grammarian, nor a logician, but a complete gentleman, let us give them leave to mis- spend their time; we have elsewhere, and somewhat else of more import to do. So that our disciple be well and sufficiently stored with matter; words will follow apace, and if they will not follow gently, he shall hail them on perforce. I hear some excuse themselves that they can not express their meaning, and make a semblance that their heads are so full stuffed with many goodly things, but for want of eloquence they can neither utter nor make show of them. It is a mere foppery. And will you know what, in my seeming, the cause is? They are shadows and chi- meras, proceeding of some formless conceptions, which they can not distinguish or resolve within, and by con- sequence are not able to produce them inasmuch as they understand not themselves; and if you but mark their ear- nestness, and how they stammer and labour at the point of their delivery, you would deem that what they go withal is but a conceiving, and therefore nothing near down- lying; and that they do but lick that imperfect and shape- less lump of matter. As for me, I am of opinion, and Socra- tes would have it so, that he who had a clear and lively imagination in his mind may easily produce and utter the same, although it be in Bergamasc or Welsh, and if he be dumb, by signs and tokens. Verbaque praevisam rem non invita sequentur." " When matter we foreknow, Words voluntary flow." As one said, as poetically in his prose, Cum res animum occupavere, verba ambiunt 26 " When matter hath pos- EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 35 sessed their minds, they hunt after words"; and another: Ipsae res verba rapiunt 27 " Things themselves will catch and carry words." He knows neither ablative, conjunctive, substantive, nor grammar, no more doth his lackey, nor any oyster-wife about the streets, and yet if you have a mind to it he will entertain you your fill, and peradventure stumble as little and as seldom against the rules of his tongue as the best Master of Arts in France. He hath no skill in rhetoric, nor can he with a preface forestall and captivate the gentle reader's good-will; nor careth he greatly to know it. In good sooth, all this garish paint- ing is easily defaced by the lustre of an inbred and simple truth; for these dainties and quaint devices serve but to amuse the vulgar sort, unapt and incapable to taste the most solid and firm meat; as Afer very plainly declareth in Cornelius Tacitus. The ambassadors of Samos being come to Cleomenes, King of Sparta, prepared with a long prolix oration to stir him up to war against the tyrant Po- licrates, after he had listened a good while upon them, his answer was: " Touching your exordium or beginning I have forgotten it; the middle I remember not; and for your conclusion I will do nothing in it." A fit and (to my thinking) a very good answer; and the orators were put to such a shift as they knew not what to reply. And what said another? The Athenians, from out two of their cun- ning architects, were to choose one to erect a notable great frame; the one of them more affected and self-presuming, presented himself before them, with a smooth fore-pre- meditated discourse about the subject of that piece of work, and thereby drew the judgments of the common people unto his liking; but the other in few words spake thus, " Lords of Athens, what this man hath said I will per- form." In the greatest earnestness of Cicero's eloquence many were drawn into a kind of admiration; but Cato, jesting at it, said, " Have we not a pleasant consul? " A quick, cunning argument, and a witty saying, whether it go before or come after, it is never out of season. If it have no coherence with that which goeth before, nor with what cometh after, it is good and commendable in itself. I am none of those that think a good rhyme to make a good poem; let him hardly (if so he please) make a short 36 MONTAIGNE syllable long, it is no great matter; if the invention be rare and good, and his wit and judgment have cunningly played their part. I will say to such a one, he is a good poet but an ill versifier. Emunctae naris, durus componere versus. 18 " A man whose sense could finely pierce, But harsh and hard to make a verse." Let a man (saith Horace) make his work lose all seams, measures, and joints. Tempora certa modosque, et quod prius, ordine verbum est. 29 Posterius facias, praeppnens ultima primis: Invenias etiam disjecti membra Poetae. 10 " Set times and moods, make you the first word last, The last word first, as if they were new cast: Yet find th' unjointed poet's joints stand fast." He shall for all that nothing gainsay himself, every piece will make a good show. To this purpose answered Menander those that chid him, the day being at hand in which he had promised a comedy, and had not begun the same. "Tut-tut!" said he, "it is already finished; there wanteth nothing but to add the verse unto it " ; for, hav- ing ranged and cast the plot in his mind, he made small account of feet, of measures, or cadences of verses, which, indeed, are but of small import in regard of the rest. Since great Ronsard and learned Bellay have raised our French poesy unto that height of honour where it now is, I see not one of these petty ballad-makers, or prentice doggerel rhymers, that doth not bombast his labours with high-swell- ing and heaven-disembowelling words, and that doth not marshal his cadences very near as they do. Plus sonat quam valet 31 " The sound is more than the weight or worth." And for the vulgar sort there were never so many poets and so few good; but as it hath been easy for them to represent their rhymes, so come they far short in imitat- ing the rich descriptions of the one and rare inventions of the other. But what shall he do if he be urged with sophis- tical subtilties about a syllogism? A gammon of bacon makes a man drink, drinking quencheth a man's thirst; ergo, a gammon of bacon quencheth a man's thirst. Let him mock at it, it is more witty to be mocked at than to EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 37 be answered. Let him borrow this pleasant counter-craft of Aristippus, " Why shall I unbind that which, being bound, doth so much trouble me? " Some one proposed certain logical quiddities against Cleanthes, to whom Chri- sippus said, " Use such juggling tricks to play with chil- dren, and divert not the serious thoughts of an aged man to such idle matters." If such foolish wiles, Contorta et aculeata sophismata 23 " Intricate and stinged sophisms," must persuade a lie, it is dangerous; but if they prove void of any effect, and move him but to laughter, I see not why he shall beware of them. Some there are so foolish that will go a quarter of a mile out of the way to hunt after a quaint new word if they once get in chase: Aut qui non verba rebus aptant, sed res extrinsecus arcessunt, quibus verba conveniant "Or such as fit not words to matter, but fetch matter from abroad, whereto words be fitted." And another, Qui alicujus verbi decore placentis, vocentur ad id quod non proposuerant scribere 33 " Who are al- lured by the grace of some pleasing word to write what they intended not to write." I do more willingly wind up a witty notable sentence, that so I may sew it upon me, than unwind my thread to go fetch it. Contrariwise, it is for words to serve and wait upon the matter, and not for matter to attend upon words, and if the French tongue can not reach unto it, let the Gascony, or any other. I would have the matters to surmount, and so fill the im- agination of him that hearkeneth, that he have no remem- brance at all of the words. It is a natural, simple, and un- affected speech that I love, so written as it is spoken, and such upon the paper as it is in the mouth, a pithy, sinewy, full, strong, compendious and material speech, not so deli- cate and affected as vehement and piercing. Haec demum sapiet dictio quae feriet. 84 " In fine, that word is wisely fit Which strikes the fence, the mark doth hit." Rather difficult than tedious, void of affection, free, loose, and bold, that every member of it seems to make a body; not pedantical, nor friar-like, nor lawyer-like, but rather downright, soldier-like. As Suetonius calleth that of Julius Caesar, which I see no reason wherefore he call- 3 38 MONTAIGNE eth it. I have sometimes pleased myself in imitating that licentiousness or wanton humour of our youths, in wearing of their garments; as carelessly to let their cloaks hang down over one shoulder; to wear their cloaks scarf or bawdrikwise, and their stockings loose hanging about their legs. It represents a kind of disdainful fierceness of these foreign embellishments, and neglect carelessness of art. But I commend it more being employed in the course and form of speech. All manner of affectation, namely, in the liveliness and liberty of France, is unseemly in a courtier. And in a monarchy every gentleman ought to address himself unto a courtier's carriage. Therefore do we well somewhat to incline to a native and careless behaviour. I like not a contexture where the seams and pieces may be seen. As in a well-compact body, what need a man dis- tinguish and number all the bones and veins severally? Quae veritati operam dat oratio, incomposita sit et sim- plex. 35 Quis accurate loquitur nisi qui vult putide loqui? 36 " The speech that intendeth truth must be plain and un- polished: who speaketh elaborately but he that means to speak unfavourably? " That eloquence offereth injury unto things which altogether draws us to observe it. As in apparel it is a sign of pusillanimity for one to mark himself in some particular and unusual fashion, so likewise in common speech for one to hunt after new phrases and unaccustomed quaint words proceedeth from a scholastical and childish ambition. Let me use none other than are spoken in the halls of Paris. Aristophanes the grammarian was somewhat out of the way when he reproved Epicurus for the simplicity of his words, and the end of his art ora- tory which was only perspicuity in speech. The imitation of speech, by reason of the facility of it, followeth presently a whole nation. The imitation of judging and inventing, comes more slow. The greater number of readers, because they have found one selfsame kind of gown, suppose most falsely to hold one like body. Outward garments and cloaks may be borrowed, but never the sinews and strength of the body. Most of those that converse with me speak like unto these essays; but I know not whether they think alike. The Athenians (as Plato averreth) have for their part great care to be fluent and eloquent in their speech; EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 39 the Lacedaemonians endeavour to be short and compendi- ous; and those of Crete labour more to be plentiful in con- ceits than in language. And these are the best. Zeno was wont to say that he had two sorts of disciples: the one he called i\o\byov$, curious to learn things, and those were his darlings; the other he termed Xo7o$/Xoiw?, who respected nothing more than the language. Yet can no man say but that to speak well is most gracious and com- mendable, but not so excellent as some make it; and I am grieved to see how we employ most part of our time about that only. I would first know mine own tongue perfectly, then my neighbours' with whom I have most commerce. I must needs acknowledge that the Greek and Latin tongues are great ornaments in a gentleman, but they are purchased at over-high a rate. Use it who list, I will tell you how they may be gotten better, cheaper, and much sooner than is ordinarily used, which was tried in myself. My late father having, by all the means and industry that is possible for a man, sought among the wisest and men of best understanding to find a most exquisite and ready way of teaching, being advised of the inconveniences then in use, was given to understand that the lingering while and best part of our youth that we employ in learning the tongues, which cost them nothing, is the only cause we can never attain to that absolute perfection of skill and knowledge of the Greeks and Romans. I do not believe that to be the only cause. But so it is, the expedient my father found out was this: that being yet at nurse, and before the first loosing of my tongue, I was delivered to a German, who died since (a most excellent physician in France), he being then altogether ignorant of the French tongue, but exquisitely ready and skilful in the Latin. This man, whom my father had sent for the purpose, and to whom he gave very great entertainment, had me con- tinually in his arms, and was mine only overseer. There were also joined unto him two of his countrymen, but not so learned, whose charge was to attend and now and then to play with me; and all these together did never enter- tain me with other than the Latin tongue. As for others of his household, it was an inviolable rule that neither him- self, nor my mother, nor man- nor maid-servant, were suf- 40 MONTAIGNE fered to speak one word in my company except such Latin words as every one had learned to chat and prattle with me. It were strange to tell how every one in the house profited therein. My father and my mother learned so much Latin that for a need they could understand it when they heard it spoken, even so did all the household serv- ants, namely, such as were nearest and most about me. To be short, we were all so Latinized that the towns round about us had their share of it; insomuch as even at this day many Latin names, both of workmen and of their tools, are yet in use among them. And as for myself, I was about six years old, and could understand no more French or Perigordine than Arabic; and that without art, without books, rules, or grammar, without whipping or whining, I had gotten as pure a Latin tongue as my master could speak, the rather because I could neither mingle nor confound the same with other tongues. If for an essay they would give me a theme, whereas the fashion in colleges is to give it in French, I had it in bad Latin, to reduce the same into good. And Nicolas Grouchy, who hath written " De comitiis Romanorum "; William Guerente, who hath com- mented Aristotle; George Buchanan, that famous Scottish poet; and Mark Antony Muret, whom (while he lived) both France and Italy to this day acknowledge to have been the best orator all which have been my familiar tutors, have often told me that in mine infancy I had the Latin tongue so ready and so perfect that themselves feared to take me in hand. And Buchanan, who afterward I saw attending on the Marshal of Brissac, told me he was about to write a treatise of the institution of children, and that he took the model and pattern from mine; for at that time he had the charge and bringing up of the young Earl of Brissac, whom since we have seen prove so worthy and so valiant a captain. As for the Greek, wherein I have but small understanding, my father purposed to make me learn it by art; but by new and unaccustomed means that is, by way of recreation and exercise. We did toss our declinations and conjugations to and fro, as they do who by way of a certain game at tables learn both arith- metic and geometry. For, among other things, he had especially been persuaded to make me taste and apprehend EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 4I the fruits of duty and science by an unforced kind of will, and of mine own choice, and without any compulsion or rigour to bring me up in all mildness and liberty; yea, with such kind of superstition that, whereas some are of opinion that suddenly to awaken young children, and as it were by violence to startle and fright them out of their dead sleep in a morning (wherein they are more heavy and deeper plunged than we), doth greatly trouble and distemper their brains, he would every morning cause me to be awakened by the sound of some instrument; and I was never without a servant who to that purpose attended upon me. This example may serve to judge of the rest; as also to com- mend the judgment and tender affection of so careful and loving a father: who is not to be blamed, though he reaped not the fruits answerable to his exquisite toil and painful manuring. Two things hindered the same: first, the bar- renness and unfit soil; for howbeit I were of a sound and strong constitution, and of a tractable and yielding con- dition, yet was I so heavy, so sluggish, and so dull that I could not be roused (yea, were it to go to play) from out mine idle drowsiness. What I saw I saw it perfectly; and under this heavy and, as it were, Lethe complexion did I breed hardy imaginations and opinions far above my years. My spirit was very slow, and would go no further than it was led by others; my apprehension block- ish, my invention poor; and, besides, I had a marvellous defect in my weak memory: it is therefore no wonder if my father could never bring me to any perfection. Sec- ondly, as those that in some dangerous sickness, moved with a kind of hopeful and greedy desire of perfect health again, give ear to every leech or empiric, and follow all counsels, the good man being exceedingly fearful to com- mit any oversight, in a matter he took so to heart, suf- fered himself at last to be led away by the common opinion which, like unto the cranes, followeth over those that go before, and yielded to custom, having those no longer about him that had given him his first directions, and which they had brought out of Italy. Being but six years old, I was sent to the College of Guienne, then most flour- ishing and reputed the best in France, where it is impos- sible to add anything to the great care he had both to 42 MONTAIGNE choose the best and most sufficient masters that could be found to read unto me, as also for all other circumstances pertaining to my education; wherein, contrary to usual customs of colleges, he observed many particular rules. But so it is, it was ever a college. My Latin tongue was forthwith corrupted, whereof by reason of discontinuance I afterward lost all manner of use; which new kind of in- stitution stood me in no other stead but that at my first admittance it made me to overskip some of the lower forms and to be placed in the highest. For at thirteen years of age, that I left the college, I had read over the whole course of philosophy (as they call it), but with so small profit that I can now make no account of it. The first taste or feeling I had of books was of the pleas- ure I took in reading the fables of Ovid's " Metamor- phoses "; for, being but seven or eight years old, I would steal and sequester myself from all other delights, only to read them: forasmuch as the tongue wherein they were written was to me natural; and it was the easiest book I knew, and by reason of the matter therein contained most agreeing with my young age. For of King Arthur, of Launcelot du Lake, of Amadis, of Huon of Bordeaux, and such idle time-consuming and wit-besotting trash of books wherein youth doth commonly amuse itself, I was not so much as acquainted with their names, and to this day know not their bodies nor what they contain, so exact was my discipline. Whereby I became more careless to study my other prescribed lessons. And well did it fall out for my purpose that I had to deal with a very discreet mas- ter, who out of his judgment could with such dexterity wink at and second my untowardness, and such other faults that were in me. For by that means I read over Virgil's " yEneados," Terence, Plautus, and other Italian comedies, allured thereunto by the pleasantness of their several subjects. Had he been so foolishly severe or so severely froward as to cross this course of mine, I think verily I had never brought anything from the college but the hate and contempt of books, as doth the greatest part of our nobility. Such was his discretion, and so warily did he behave himself that he saw and would not see: he would foster and increase my longing, suffering me but EDUCATION OF CHILDREN . 43 by stealth and by snatches to glut myself with those books, holding ever a gentle hand over me concerning other regu- lar studies. For the chiefest thing my father required at their hands (unto whose charge he had committed me) was a kind of well-conditioned mildness and facility of complexion. And, to say truth, mine had no other fault but a certain dull languishing and heavy slothfulness. The danger was not, I should do ill, but that I should do nothing. No man did ever suspect I would prove a bad but an unprofitable man, foreseeing in me rather a kind of idle- ness than a voluntary craftiness. I am not so self-con- ceited but I perceive what hath followed. The complaints that are daily buzzed in mine ears are these: that I am idle, cold, and negligent in offices of friendship and duty to my parents and kinsfolks; and touching public offices, that I am over-singular and disdainful. And those that are most injurious can not ask, wherefore I have taken, and why I have not paid? but may rather demand, why I do not quit, and wherefore I do not give? I would take it as a favour they should wish such effects of superero- gation in me. But they are unjust and over-partial that will go about to exact that from me which I owe not with more rigour than they will exact from themselves that which they owe; wherein if they condemn me they utterly cancel both the gratifying of the action and the gratitude which thereby would be due to me. Whereas the active well-doing should be of more consequence, pro- ceeding from my hand, in regard I have no passive at all. Wherefore I may so much the more freely dispose of my fortune, by how much more it is mine, and of my- self that am most mine own. Notwithstanding, if I were a great blazoner of mine own actions, I might peradven- ture bar such reproaches, and justly upbraid some, that they are not so much offended because I do not enough as for that I may, and it lies in my power to do much more than I do. Yet my mind ceased not at the same time to have peculiar unto itself well-settled motions, true and open judgments concerning the objects which it knew; which alone, and without any help or communication, it would digest. And among other things I verily believe 44 MONTAIGNE it would have proved altogether incapable and unfit to yield unto force or stoop unto violence. Shall I account or relate this quality of my infancy, which was a kind of boldness in my looks, and gentle softness in my voice, and affability in my gestures, and a dexterity in conforming myself to the parts I undertook? for before the age of the Alter ab undecimo turn me vix ceperat annus." " Years had I (to make even) Scarce two above eleven." I have undergone and represented the chiefest parts in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, Guerente, and of Muret, which in great state were acted and played in our College of Guienne; wherein Andreas Goveanus, our rector prin- cipal, who, as in all other parts belonging to his charge, was without comparison the chiefest rector of France, and myself (without ostentation be it spoken) was reputed, if not a chief master, yet a principal actor in them. It is an exercise I rather commend than disallow in young gentle- men; and have seen some of our princes (in imitation of some of former ages), both commendably and honestly, in their proper persons act and play some parts in trage- dies. It hath heretofore been esteemed a lawful exercise and a tolerable profession in men of honour, namely, in Greece. Aristoni tragico actori rem aperit: huic et genus et fortuna honesta erant: nee ars, quia nihil tale apud Graecos pudori est, ea deformabat 38 " He imparts the matter to Ariston, a player of tragedies, whose progeny and fortune were both honest; nor did his profession dis- grace them, because no such matter is a disparagement among the Grecians." And I have ever accused them of impertinency that condemn and disallow such kinds of recreations, and blame those of injustice that refuse good and honest comedians, or (as we call them) players, to enter our good towns, and grudge the common people such public sports. Politic and well-ordered commonwealths endeavour rather care- fully to unite and assemble their citizens together; as in serious offices of devotion, so in honest exercises of recre- ation. Common society and loving friendship is thereby cherished and increased. And, besides, they can not have EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 45 more formal and regular pastimes allowed them than such as are acted and represented in open view of all, and in the presence of the magistrates themselves. And if I might bear sway, I would think it reasonable that princes should sometimes, at their proper charges, gratify the common people with them, as an argument of a fatherly affection and loving goodness toward them; and that in populous and frequented cities there should be theatres and places appointed for such spectacles, as a diverting of worse in- conveniences and secret actions. But to come to my in- tended purpose, there is no better way to allure the affec- tion and to entice the appetite; otherwise a man shall breed but asses laden with books. With jerks of rods they have their satchels full of learning given them to keep. Which to do well one must not only harbour in himself, but wed and marry the same with his mind. NOTES 1 Cic., " De Nat.," 1. i. 1 Dante, " Inferno," cant, xi, 93. * Sen., " Epist," xxxiii. * Hor., 1. i, " Od.," ii, 4- * , it. rv* s~\. 99 4 10 Pers., " Sat.," iii, 69. 11 Ibid., 67. 11 Virg., " ^n.," 1. iii, 853. Sat.," V, 64. Epist.," cxxv. Hor., " Epist," xvii, 23. Hor., " Epist.," xvii, 25. Ibid., 29. Cic., " Tusc. Qu.," 1. iv. Cic., " Tusc. Qu.," 1. ii. Hor., " Art. Poet," 311. Sen., " Controv.," 1. vii, proae. Cic., " De Fin.," 1. iii, c. 5. Hor., 1. i, " Sat.," iv, 8. Hor., 1. i, " Sat.," iv, 58. Ibid., 62. Sen., " Epist.," xl. Cic., " Acad. Qu.," 1. iv. Sen., " Epist," liii. " Epitaph on Lucan," 6. Sen., " Epist," xl. Ibid., " Epist.," Ixxv. Virg., " Buc.," Eel. viii, 39- Liv., " Deo.," iii, 1. iv. THE DEFENCE OF POESY BY SIR PHILIP SIDNEY .SIR PHILIP SIDNEY was born in Penshurst, Kent, November 29, 1554. The scenery about his birthplace is described in Ben Jonson's " Forest." His father, Sir Henry Sidney, was ambassador of Edward VI at the French court. His friend and biographer, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, says of Sir Philip : " Of his youth I will report no other wonder but this, that though I lived with him and knew him from a child, yet I never knew him other than a man ; with such staidness of mind, lovely and familiar gravity, as carried grace and reverence above greater years. His talk ever of knowledge, and his very play tending to enrich his mind." He was educated at Oxford, and then travelled in France, Ger- many, and Italy. On his return, he became a familiar character at the court of Elizabeth, where his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, was for a time powerful. Sidney was ambassador first to Rudolph II of Austria, and then to William of Orange. He retired to Wilton in 1580, and there wrote his "Arcadia" and his "Defence of Poesy" at first entitled "Apology for Poetry" which was not published till 1591. He returned to court in 1583, was knighted, and married a daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. He accompanied his uncle, who commanded the forces sent to the Netherlands to take part in the war against the Spaniards, and in an action at Zutphen, October 2, 1586, received a mortal wound, of which he died on the iyth. Besides the works mentioned above, Sid- ney wrote a poem in sonnets, entitled " Astrophel and Stella." Charles Lamb devotes one of his essays to these sonnets, which he greatly ad- mired. Sidney stands as the historical model for a perfect gentleman, and his character is universally admired. His biography has been writ- ten over and over again. Some lines in an elegy on him by his friend Mathew Roydon are famous : "A sweet, attractive kind of grace, A full assurance given by looks, Continual comfort in a face, The lineaments of Gospel books I trow that countenance can not lie Whose thoughts are legible in the eye." THE DEFENCE OF POESY WHEN the right virtuous E. W. 1 and I were at the emperor's court together we gave ourselves to learn horsemanship of Gio. Pietro Pugliano; one that, with great commendation, had the place of an esquire in his stable: and he, according to the fertileness of the Italian wit, did not only afford us the demonstra- tion of his practice, but sought to enrich our minds with the contemplation therein, which he thought most precious. But with none, I remember, mine ears were at any time more laden than when (either angered with slow payment or moved with our learner-like admiration) he exercised his speech in the praise of his faculty. He said soldiers were the noblest estate of mankind, and horsemen the noblest of soldiers. He said they were the masters of war and ornaments of peace, speedy goers, and strong abiders, triumphers both in camps and courts: nay, to so unbelieved a point he proceeded as that no earthly thing bred such wonder to a prince as to be a good horseman: skill of government was but a " pedanteria " in comparison. Then would he add certain praises, by tell- ing what a peerless beast the horse was, the only service- able courtier, without flattery, the beast of most beauty, faithfulness, courage, and such more that if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to him I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse. But thus much, at least, with his no few words he drove into me that self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous wherein ourselves be parties. Wherein, if Pugliano's strong affection and weak argu- ments will not satisfy you, I will give you a nearer ex- ample of myself, who, I know not by what mischance, in these my not old years and idlest times, having slipped 49 50 SIDNEY into the title of a poet, am provoked to say something unto you in the defence of that my unelected vocation; which if I handle with more good-will than good reasons bear with me, since the scholar is to be pardoned that followeth the steps of his master. And yet I must say that, as I have more just cause to make a pitiful defence of poor poetry, which, from almost the highest estimation of learning, is fallen to be the laughing-stock of children; so have I need to bring some more available proofs, since the former is by no man barred of his deserved credit, whereas the silly latter hath had even the names of philosophers used to the de- facing of it, with great danger of civil war among the Muses. And first, truly, to all them that, professing learning, inveigh against poetry, may justly be objected that they go very near to ungratefulness to seek to deface that which, in the noblest nations and languages that are known, hath been the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk, by little and little, enabled them to feed after- ward of tougher knowledges. And will you play the hedge-hog that, being received into the den, drove out his host? or rather the vipers, that with their birth kill their parents? Let learned Greece, in any of her manifold sciences, be able to show me one book before Musaeus, Homer, and Hesiod, all three nothing else but poets. Nay, let any history be brought that can say any writers were there before them if they were not men of the same skill, as Orpheus, Linus, and some others are named, who, having been the first of that country that made pens deliverers of their knowledge to posterity, may justly challenge to be called their fathers in learning. For not only in time they had this priority (although in itself antiquity be ven- erable), but went before them, as causes to draw, with their charming sweetness, the wild untamed wits to an admira- tion of knowledge. So as Amphion was said to move stones with his poetry to build Thebes, and Orpheus to be listened to by beasts; indeed, stony and beastly people: so among the Romans were Livius Andronicus and Ennius: so in the Italian language, the first that made it to aspire THE DEFENCE OF POESY 51 to be a treasure-house of science were the poets Dante, Boccace, and Petrarch: so in our English were Gower and Chaucer; after whom, encouraged and delighted with their excellent foregoing, others have followed to beautify our mother tongue, as well in the same kind as other arts. This did so notably show itself that the philosophers of Greece durst not a long time appear to the world but under the mask of poets: so Thales, Empedocles, and Parmenides sang their natural philosophy in verses: so did Pythagoras and Phocylides their moral counsels; so did Tyrtaeus in war matters; and Solon in matters of policy; or rather they, being poets, did exercise their delightful vein in those points of highest knowledge which before them lay hidden to the world: for that wise Solon was directly a poet it is manifest, having written, in verse, the notable fable of the Atlantic island, which was continued by Plato. And, truly, even Plato, whosoever well considereth, shall find that in the body of his work, though the inside and strength were philosophy, the skin, as it were, and beauty, depended most of poetry. For all stands upon dialogues; wherein he feigns many honest burgesses of Athens speaking of such matters that if they had been set on the rack they would never have confessed them: besides, his poetical de- scribing the circumstances of their meetings, as the well ordering of a banquet, the delicacy of a walk, with inter- lacing mere tales, as Gyges's "Ring," and others; which who knows not to be flowers of poetry did never walk into Apollo's garden. And even historiographers, although their lips sound of things done, and verity be written in their foreheads, have been glad to borrow both fashion and, perchance, weight of the poets: so Herodotus entitled the books of his history by the names of the nine Muses; and both he, and all the rest that followed him, either stole or usurped, of poetry, their passionate describing of passions, the many particularities of battle which no man could affirm; or, if that be denied me, long orations, put in the mouths of great kings and captains, which it is certain they never pronounced. So that, truly, neither philosopher nor historiographer could, at the first, have entered into the gates of popular 52 SIDNEY judgments if they had not taken a great disport of poetry; which in all nations, at this day, where learning flourisheth not, is plain to be seen; in all which they have some feel- ing of poetry. In Turkey, besides their lawgiving divines they have no other writers but poets. In our neighbour- country Ireland, where, truly, learning goes very bare, yet are their poets held in a devout reverence. Even among the most barbarous and simple Indians, where no writing is, yet have they their poets, who make and sing songs, which they call " arentos," both of their ancestors' deeds and praises of their gods. A sufficient probability that if ever learning come among them it must be by having their hard, dull wits softened and sharpened with the sweet delight of poetry; for until they find a pleasure in the exercise of the mind great promises of much knowledge will little persuade them that know not the fruits of knowl- edge. In Wales the true remnant of the ancient Britons, as there are good authorities to show the long time they had poets, which they called bards, so through all the con- quests of Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, some of whom did seek to ruin all memory of learning from among them, yet do their poets, even to this day, last; so as it is not more notable in the soon beginning than in long continuing. But since the authors of most of our sciences were the Romans, and, before them, the Greeks, let us a little stand upon their authorities, but even so far as to see what names they have given unto this now scorned skill. Among the Romans a poet was called " vates," which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet, as by his conjoined words " vaticinium " and " vaticinari " is manifest, so heavenly a title did that excellent people bestow upon this heart- ravishing knowledge! And so far were they carried into the admiration thereof that they thought in the change- able hitting upon any such verses great foretokens of their following fortunes were placed. Whereupon grew the word of " sortes Virgilianae " ; when, by sudden opening of Virgil's book, they lighted upon some verse, as it is reported by many, whereof the histories of the emperors' lives are full: as of Albinus, the governor of our island, who, in his childhood, met with this verse: SIR PHILIP SIDNEY From an engraving after a painting by Isaac Oliver THE DEFENCE OF POESY 53 " Arma amens capio, nee sat rationis in armis "; and in his age performed it. Although it were a very vain and godless superstition; as also it was to think spirits were commanded by such verses: whereupon this word charms, derived of " carmina," cometh, so yet serveth it to show the great reverence those wits were held in; and altogether not without ground, since both the oracles of Delphi and the Sibyl's prophecies were wholly delivered in verses; for that same exquisite observing of number and measure in the words, and that high-flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet did seem to have some divine force in it. And may not I presume a little further to show the reasonableness of this word " vates," and say that the holy David's Psalms are a divine poem? If I do, I shall not do it without the testimony of great learned men, both ancient and modern. But even the name of Psalms will speak for me, which, being interpreted, is nothing but songs: then, that it is fully written in metre, as all learned Hebricians agree, although the rules be not yet fully found. Lastly, and principally, his handling his prophecy, which is merely poetical. For what else is the awakening his mu- sical instruments; the often and free changing of persons; his notable prosopopoeias, when he maketh you, as it were, see God coming in his majesty; his telling of the beasts' joyfulness, and hills leaping, but a heavenly poesy; wherein almost he showeth himself a passionate lover of that un- speakable and everlasting beauty, to be seen by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith? But, truly, now, hav- ing named him, I fear I seem to profane that holy name, applying it to poetry, which is, among us, thrown down to so ridiculous an estimation. But they that, with quiet judgments, will look a little deeper into it, shall find the end and working of it such as, being rightly applied, de- serveth not to be scourged out of the church of God. But now let us see how the Greeks have named it, and how they deemed of it. The Greeks named him TroiijTrjv, which name hath, as the most excellent, gone through other languages; it cometh of this word TTOU-IV, which is " to make "; wherein, I know not whether by luck or wis- dom, we Englishmen have met with the Greeks in calling 54 SIDNEY him " a maker," which name, how high and incomparable a title it is, I had rather were known by marking the scope of other sciences than by any partial allegation. There is no art delivered unto mankind that hath not the works of Nature for his principal object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend, as they become actors and players, as it were, of what Nature will have set forth. So doth the astronomer look upon the stars, and by that he seeth set down what order Nature hath taken therein. So doth the geometrician and arithmetician in their diverse sorts of quantities. So doth the musician in times tell you, which by Nature agree, which not. The natural philosopher thereon hath his name; and the moral philosopher standeth upon the natural virtues, vices, or passions of man: and follow Nature, saith he, therein, and thou shalt not err. The lawyer saith what men have de- termined. The historian, what men have done. The gram- marian speaketh only of the rules of speech; and the rhet- orician and logician, considering what in Nature will soon- est prove and persuade, thereon give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, accord- ing to the proposed matter. The physician weigheth the nature of man's body, and the nature of things helpful and hurtful unto it. And the metaphysic, though it be in the second and abstract notions, and therefore be counted supernatural, yet doth he, indeed, build upon the depth of Nature. Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own in- vention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature: in mak- ing things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or quite anew; forms such as never were in Nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely; her world is brazen, the poets only de- liver a golden. But let those things alone, and go to man; for whom THE DEFENCE OF POESY 55 as the other things are, so it seemeth in him her utter- most cunning is employed; and know, whether she have brought forth so true a lover as Theagenes; so constant a friend as Pylades; so valiant a man as Orlando: so right a prince as Xenophon's Cyrus; and so excellent a man every way as Virgil's ^neas? Neither let this be jestingly conceived, because the works of the one be essential, the other in imitation or fiction; for every understanding know- eth the skill of each artificer standeth in that idea, or fore- conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the poet hath that idea is manifest by the delivering them forth in such excellency as he had imagined them: which delivering forth, also, is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air; but so far substantially it worketh not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency, as Na- ture might have done; but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses; if they will learn aright, why and how that maker made him. Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man's wit with the efficacy of Nature; but rather give right honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who, having made man to his own likeness, set him be- yond and over all the works of that second nature; which in nothing he showeth so much as in poetry; when, with the force of a divine breath, he bringeth things forth sur- passing her doings, with no small arguments to the in- credulous of that first accursed fall of Adam; since our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it. But these arguments will by few be understood, and by fewer granted: thus much I hope will be given me that the Greeks, with some probability of reason, gave him the name above all names of learning. Now let us go to a more ordinary opening of him, that the truth may be the more palpable; and so, I hope, though we get not so unmatched a praise as the etymology of his names will grant, yet his very description, which no man will deny, shall not justly be barred from a principal commendation. Poesy, therefore, is an art of imitation; for so Aristotle 56 SIDNEY termeth it in the word JJU/JLTJO-K ; that is to say, a represent- ing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth: to speak metaphor- ically, a speaking picture; with this end to teach and de- light. Of this have been three general kinds: the chief, both in antiquity and excellency, were they that did imitate the inconceivable excellencies of God: such were David in his Psalms; Solomon in his Song of Songs, in his Ec- clesiastes, and Proverbs; Moses and Deborah in their hymns; and the writer of Job; which, beside others, the learned Emanuel Tremellius and Fr. Junius do entitle the poetical part of the Scripture: against these none will speak that hath the Holy Ghost in due holy reverence. In this kind, though in a wrong divinity, were Orpheus, Am- phion, Homer in his hymns, and many others, both Greeks and Romans. And this poesy must be used by whosoever will follow St. Paul's counsel, in singing psalms when they are merry; and I know is used with the fruit of comfort by some when, in sorrowful pangs of their death-bringing sins, they find the consolation of the never-leaving good- ness. The second kind is of them that deal with matters philo- sophical; either moral, as Tyrtaeus, Phocylides, Cato; or natural, as Lucretius, Virgil's " Georgics "; or astronomi- cal, as Manilius and Pontanus; or historical, as Lucan; which who mislike the fault is in their judgment, quite out of taste, and not in the sweet food of sweetly uttered knowledge. But because this second sort is wrapped within the fold of the proposed subject, and takes not the free course of his own invention; whether they properly be poets, or no, let grammarians dispute, and go to the third, indeed right poets, of whom chiefly this question ariseth: betwixt whom and these second is such a kind of difference as betwixt the meaner sort of painters, who counterfeit only such faces as are set before them; and the more excellent, who having no law but wit, bestow that in colours upon you which is fittest for the eye to see; as the constant, though lamenting look of Lucretia, when she punished in herself another's fault: wherein he painteth not Lucretia, whom he never saw, but painteth the outward beauty of THE DEFENCE OF POESY 57 such a virtue. For these three be they which most prop- erly do imitate to teach and delight; and to imitate, bor- row nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range only, reined with learned discretion, into the divine con- sideration of what may be and should be. These be they that, as the first and most noble sort, may justly be termed "vates": so these are waited on in the excellentest lan- guages and best understandings, the fore-described name of poets. For these, indeed, do merely make to imitate, and imitate both to delight and teach, and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand which, without delight, they would fly as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved: which being the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed, yet want there not idle tongues to bark at them. These be subdivided into sundry more special denom- inations: the most notable be the heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satiric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral, and certain others; some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with; some by the sort of verse they liked best to write in; for indeed the greatest part of poets have appar- elled their poetical inventions in that numerous kind of writing which is called verse. Indeed but apparelled verse, being but an ornament, and no cause to poetry, since there have been many most excellent poets that never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets. For Xenophon, who did imitate so excellently as to give us " effigiem justi imperii," the portraiture of a just empire, under the name of Cyrus, as Cicero saith of him, made therein an absolute heroical poem. So did Heliodorus, in his sugared invention of that picture of love in " Theagenes and Chariclea"; and yet both these wrote in prose; which I speak to show that it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet (no more than a long gown maketh an advocate, who, though he pleaded in armour, should be an advocate and no soldier); but it is that, feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a poet by. Although, indeed, the senate of poets have chosen verse as their fit- test raiment; meaning, as in matter they passed all in all, 58 SIDNEY so in manner to go beyond them; not speaking, table-talk fashion, or like men in a dream, words as they chanceably fall from the mouth, but piecing each syllable of each word by just proportion, according to the dignity of the subject. Now, therefore, it shall not be amiss, first, to weigh this latter sort of poetry by his works, and then by his parts; and if in neither of these anatomies he be commend- able, I hope we shall receive a more favourable sentence. This purifying of wit, this enriching of memory, enabling of judgment, and enlarging of conceit, which commonly we call learning, under what name soever it come forth, or to what immediate end soever it be directed; the final end is, to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of. This, according to the inclination of man, bred many formed impressions: for some that thought this felicity principally to be gotten by knowledge, and no knowledge to be so high or heavenly as to be acquainted with the stars, gave themselves to astronomy; others, per- suading themselves to be demi-gods if they knew the causes of things, became natural and supernatural philosophers. Some an admirable delight drew to music; and some the certainty of demonstrations to the mathematics; but all, one and other, having this scope, to know, and by knowl- edge to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying his own divine essence. But when, by the balance of experience, it was found that the astronomer, looking to the stars, might fall in a ditch; that the inquir- ing philosopher might be blind in himself; and the mathe- matician might draw forth a straight line with a crooked heart; then To! did proof, the overruler of opinions, make manifest that all these are but serving sciences, which, as they have a private end in themselves, so yet are they all directed to the highest end of the mistress-knowledge, by the Greeks called apxireicroviKr), which stands, as I think, in the knowledge of a man's self; in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well-doing, and not of well-knowing only: even as the saddler's next end is to make a good saddle, but his further end to serve a nobler faculty, which is horsemanship; so the horseman's to sol- diery; and the soldier not only to have the skill, but to THE DEFENCE OF POESY 59 perform the practice of a soldier. So that the ending end of all earthly learning being virtuous action, those skills that most serve to bring forth that have a most just title to be princes over all the rest; wherein, if we can show it rightly, the poet is worthy to have it before any other com- petitors. Among whom principally to challenge it, step forth the moral philosophers; whom, methinks, I see coming toward me with a sullen gravity (as though they could not abide vice by daylight), rudely clothed, for to witness outwardly their contempt of outward things, with books in their hands against glory, whereto they set their names; sophistically speaking against subtlety, and angry with any man in whom they see the foul fault of anger. These men, cast- ing largesses as they go, of definitions, divisions, and dis- tinctions, with a scornful interrogative do soberly ask, Whether it be possible to find any path so ready to lead a man to virtue as that which teacheth what virtue is; and teacheth it not only by delivering forth his very being, his causes and effects; but also by making known his enemy, vice, which must be destroyed, and his cumber- some servant, passion, which must be mastered; by show- ing the generalities that contain it, and the specialities that are derived from it: lastly, by plain setting down how it extends itself out of the limits of a man's own little world, to the government of families, and maintaining of public societies? The historian scarcely gives leisure to the moralist to say so much, but that he, laden with old mouse-eaten records, authorizing himself, for the most part, upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundation of hearsay; having much ado to accord differing writers, and to pick truth out of partiality; better acquainted with a thousand years ago than with the pres- ent age, and yet better knowing how this world goes than how his own wit runs; curious for antiquities, and inquisi- tive of novelties, a wonder to young folks, and a tyrant in table-talk, denieth, in a great chafe, that any man for teaching of virtue and virtuous actions is comparable to him. I am " testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitse, nuncia vetustatis." The philosopher, saith 60 SIDNEY he, teacheth a disputative virtue, but I do an active; his virtue is excellent in the dangerless academy of Plato, but mine showeth forth her honourable face in the battles of Marathon, Pharsalia, Poitiers, and Agincourt: he teach- eth virtue by certain abstract considerations; but I only bid you follow the footing of them that have gone before you: old-aged experience goeth beyond the fine-witted philosopher; but I give the experience of many ages: lastly, if he make the song-book, I put the learner's hand to the lute; and if he be the guide, I am the light. Then would he allege you innumerable examples, confirming story by stories, how much the wisest senators and princes have been directed by the credit of history, as Brutus, Al- phonsus of Aragon (and who not, if need be?). At length, the long line of their disputation makes a point in this, that the one giveth the precept, and the other the example. Now whom shall we find, since the question standeth for the highest form in the school of learning, to be mod- erator? Truly, as me seemeth, the poet; and if not a moderator, even the man that ought to carry the title from them both, and much more from all other serving sciences. Therefore compare we the poet with the historian, and with the moral philosopher; and if he go beyond them both, no other human skill can match him: for as for the divine, with all reverence, he is ever to be excepted, not only for having his scope as far beyond any of these, as eternity exceedeth a moment, but even for passing each of these in themselves: and for the lawyer, though " Jus " be the daughter of Justice, the chief of virtues, yet because he seeks to make men good rather " formidine pcenae " than " virtutis amore," or, to say righter, doth not en- deavour to make men good, but that their evil hurt not others, having no care, so he be a good citizen, how bad a man he be: therefore, as our wickedness maketh him necessary, and necessity maketh him honourable, so is he not in the deepest truth to stand in rank with these, who all endeavour to take naughtiness away, and plant good- ness even in the secretest cabinet of our souls. And these four are all that any way deal in the consideration of men's manners, which being the supreme knowledge, they that best breed it deserve the best commendation. THE DEFENCE OF POESY 6 r The philosopher, therefore, and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one by precept, the other by example; but both, not having both, do both halt. For the philosopher, setting down with thorny arguments the bare rule, is so hard of utterance, and so misty to be con- ceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him until he be old, before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest. For his knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and general that happy is that man who may understand him, and more happy that can apply what he doth understand. On the other side, the historian, want- ing the precept, is so tied not to what should be, but to what is, to the particular truth of things, and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no ne- cessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine. Now doth the peerless poet perform both; for what- soever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it, by some one by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example. A perfect picture, I say; for he yield- eth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul, so much as that other doth. For as, in outward things, to a man that had never seen an elephant or a rhi- noceros, who should tell him most exquisitely all their shape, colour, bigness, and particular marks; or of a gor- geous palace, in architecture, who, declaring the full beau- ties, might well make the hearer able to repeat, as it were, by rote, all he had heard, yet should never satisfy his inward conceit, with being witness to itself of a true living knowl- edge: but the same man, as soon as he might see those beasts well painted, or that house well in model, should straightway grow, without need of any description, to a judicial comprehending of them: so, no doubt, the philoso- pher, with his learned definitions, be it of virtues or vices, matters of public policy or private government, replenish- eth the memory with many infallible grounds of wisdom, which, notwithstanding, lie dark before the imaginative and judging power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of poesy. 62 SIDNEY Tully taketh much pains, and many times not without poetical helps, to make us know the force love of our coun- try hath in us. Let us but hear old Anchises, speaking in the midst of Troy's flames, or see Ulysses, in the fulness of all Calypso's delights, bewail his absence from barren and beggarly Ithaca. Anger, the Stoics said, was a short madness; let but Sophocles bring you Ajax on a stage, killing or whipping sheep and oxen, thinking them the army of Greeks, with their chieftains Agamemnon and Menelaus; and tell me if you have not a more familiar in- sight into anger than finding in the schoolmen his genius and difference? See whether wisdom and temperance in Ulysses and Diomedes, valour in Achilles, friendship in Nisus and Euryalus, even to an ignorant man, carry not an apparent shining; and contrarily, the remorse of conscience in CEdipus; the soon-repenting pride in Agamemnon; the self-devouring cruelty in his father Atreus; the violence of ambition in the two Theban brothers; the sour sweetness of revenge in Medea; and, to fall lower, the Terentian Gnatho, and our Chaucer's Pandar, so expressed, that we now use their names to signify their trades: and, finally, all virtues, vices, and passions so in their own natural states laid to the view that we seem not to hear of them y but clearly to see through them? But even in the most excellent determination of good- ness what philosopher's counsel can so readily direct a prince as the feigned Cyrus in Xenophon? Or a virtuous man in all fortunes, as ^Eneas in Virgil? Or a whole com- monwealth, as the way of Sir Thomas M ore's " Utopia "? I say the way, because where Sir Thomas More erred it was the fault of the man, and not of the poet: for that way of patterning a commonwealth was most absolute, though he, perchance, hath not so absolutely performed it. For the question is, whether the feigned image of poetry, or the regular instruction of philosophy, hath the more force in teaching. Wherein, if the philosophers have more rightly showed themselves philosophers than the poets have attained to the high top of their profession (as in truth, " Mediocribus esse poetis Non Dii, non homines, non concessere columnae "), THE DEFENCE OF POESY 63 it is, I say again, not the fault of the art, but that by few men that art can be accomplished. Certainly even our Saviour Christ could as well have given the moral common- places of uncharitableness and humbleness as the divine narration of Dives and Lazarus; or of disobedience and mercy as the heavenly discourse of the lost child and the gracious father; but that his thorough searching wisdom knew the estate of Dives burning in hell, and of Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, would more constantly, as it were, inhabit both the memory and judgment. Truly, for myself (meseems), I see before mine eyes the lost child's dis- dainful prodigality turned to envy a swine's dinner: which, by the learned divines, are thought not historical acts, but instructing parables. For conclusion, I say the philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only can under- stand him ; that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught. But the poet is the food for the tenderest stom- achs; the poet is, indeed, the right popular philosopher. Whereof ^sop's tales give good proof; whose pretty alle- gories, stealing under the formal tales of beasts, make many, more beastly than beasts, begin to hear the sound of virtue from those dumb speakers. But now may it be alleged that if this managing of matters be so fit for the imagination, then must the his- torian needs surpass, who brings you images of true mat- ters, such as, indeed, were done, and not such as fantas- tically or falsely may be suggested to have been done. Truly Aristotle himself, in his "Discourse of Poesy," plainly determineth this question, saying that poetry is i\o(Toa)Tpov ical (TJrov^aioTepov that is to say, it is more philosophical and more ingenious than history. His reason is, because poesy dealeth with Ka0o\0v, that is to say, with the universal consideration, and the history na& ereavrov, the particular. " Now," saith he, " the universal weighs what is fit to be said or done, either in likelihood or necessity; which the poesy considereth in his imposed names: and the particular only marks whether Alcibiades did or suf- fered this or that": thus far Aristotle. Which reason of his, as all his, is most full of reason. For, indeed, if the question were, whether it were better to have a particular 64 SIDNEY act truly or falsely set down, there is no doubt which is to be chosen, no more than whether you had rather have Vespasian's picture right as he was, or, at the painter's pleasure, nothing resembling. But if the question be, for your own use and learning, whether it be better to have it set down as it should be, or as it was, then, certainly, is more doctrinable the feigned Cyrus in Xenophon than the true Cyrus in Justin; and the feigned yEneas in Virgil than the right ^neas in Dares Phrygius: as to a lady that de- sired to fashion her countenance to the best grace, a painter should more benefit her, to portrait a most sweet face, writing Canidia upon it, than to paint Canidia as she was, who, Horace sweareth, was full ill favoured. If the poet do his part aright, he will show you in Tantalus, Atreus, and such like, nothing that is not to be shunned; in Cyrus, ^Eneas, Ulysses, each thing to be followed: where the his- torian, bound to tell things as things were, can not be lib- eral, without he will be poetical, of a perfect pattern; but, as in Alexander, or Scipio himself, show doings, some to be liked, some to be misliked; and then how will you dis- cern what to follow, but by your own discretion, which you had, without reading Q. Curtius? And whereas a man may say, though in universal consideration of doctrine, the poet prevaileth, yet that the history, in his saying such a thing was done, doth warrant a man more in that he shall follow; the answer is manifest: that if he stand upon that was, as if he should argue, because it rained yesterday therefore it should rain to-day; then, indeed, hath it some advantage to a gross conceit. But if he know an example only enforms a conjectured likelihood, and so go by reason, the poet doth so far exceed him, as he is to frame his example to that which is most reasonable, be it in warlike, politic, or private matters; where the historian in his bare was hath many times that which we call fortune to over- rule the best wisdom. Many times he must tell events whereof he can yield no cause; or if he do, it must be poetically. For that a feigned example hath as much force to teach as a true example (for as for to move, it is clear, since the feigned may be tuned to the highest key of passion), let us take one example wherein a historian and a poet did THE DEFENCE OF POESY 65 concur. Herodotus and Justin do both testify that Zopy- rus, King Darius's faithful servant, seeing his master long resisted by the rebellious Babylonians, feigned himself in extreme disgrace of his king; for verifying of which, he caused his own nose and ears to be cut off, and so flying to the Babylonians, was received; and, for his known val- our, so far credited, that he did find means to deliver them over to Darius. Much-like matters doth Livy record of Tarquinius and his son. Xenophon excellently feigned such another stratagem, performed by Abradates in Cyrus's behalf. Now would I fain know, if occasion be presented unto you, to serve your prince by such an honest dissimu- lation, why do you not as well learn it of Xenophon's fic- tion as of the others' verity? and, truly, so much the better, as you shall save your nose by the bargain; for Abradates did not counterfeit so far. So, then, the best of the his- torians is subject to the poet; for, whatsoever action or fac- tion, whatsoever counsel, policy, or war stratagem the his- torian is bound to recite, that may the poet, if he list, with his imitation, make his own, beautifying it both for further teaching and more delighting, as it please him; having all, from Dante's heaven to his hell, under the authority of his pen. Which if I be asked, What poets have done so? as I might well name some, so yet, say I, and say again, I speak of the art, and not of the artificer. Now, to that which commonly is attributed to the praise of history, in respect of the notable learning which is got by marking the success, as though therein a man should see virtue exalted and vice punished: truly, that com- mendation is peculiar to poetry, and far off from history; for, indeed, poetry ever sets virtue so out in her best colours making fortune her well-waiting handmaid that one must needs be enamoured of her. Well may you see Ulysses in a storm, and in other hard plights; but they are but exercises of patience and magnanimity, to make them shine the more in the near following pros- perity. And, on the contrary part, if evil men come to the stage, they ever go out (as the tragedy writer answered to one that misliked the show of such persons) so man- acled, as they little animate folks to follow them. But history being captived to the truth of a foolish world, is 66 SIDNEY many times a terror from well-doing, and an encourage- ment to unbridled wickedness. For see we not valiant Miltiades rot in his fetters? The just Phocion and the accomplished Socrates put to death like traitors? The cruel Severus live prosperously? The excellent Severus miserably murdered? Sylla and Marius dying in their beds? Pompey and Cicero slain then when they would have thought exile a happiness? See we not virtuous Cato driven to kill himself, and rebel Caesar so advanced that his name yet, after sixteen hundred years, lasteth in the high- est honour? And mark but even Caesar's own words of the forenamed Sylla (who in that only did honestly to put down his dishonest tyranny), " literas nescivit ": as if want o learning caused him to do well. He meant it not by poetry, which, not content with earthly plagues, deviseth new punishments in hell for tyrants: nor yet by philoso- phy, which teacheth " occidentes esse": but, no doubt, by skill in history; for that, indeed, can afford you Cyp- selus, Periander, Phalaris, Dionysius, and I know not how many more of the same kennel, that sped well enough in their abominable injustice of usurpation. I conclude, therefore, that he excelleth history not only in furnishing the mind with knowledge, but in setting it forward to that which deserves to be called and accounted good: which setting forward, and moving to well-doing, indeed, setteth the laurel crown upon the poets as victori- ous, not only of the historian, but over the philosopher, howsoever, in teaching, it may be questionable. For sup- pose it be granted that which I suppose, with great reason, may be denied, that the philosopher, in respect of his me- thodical proceeding, teach more perfectly than the poet, yet do I think that no man is so much <^XoX6 5 precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treas- ured up on purpose to a life beyond life. Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary, therefore, what per- secution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and, if it ex- tend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, where- of the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life. But lest I should be condemned of introducing license while I oppose licensing, I refuse not the pains to be so much historical as will serve to show what hath been done by ancient and famous commonwealths against this disorder, till the very time that this project of licensing crept out of the Inquisition, was caught up by our prelates, and hath caught some of our pres- byters. In Athens, where books and wits were ever busier than in any other part of Greece, I find but only two sorts of writings which the magistrate cared to take notice of: those either blasphemous and atheistical, or libellous. Thus the books of Protagoras were by the judges of " Areopagus " commanded to be burned, and himself banished the terri- tory, for a discourse begun with his confessing not to know " whether there were gods, or whether not." And against defaming, it was decreed that none should be traduced by name, as was the manner of Vetus Comcedia, whereby we may guess how they censured libelling; and this course was quick enough, as Cicero writes, to quell both the desperate wits of other atheists, and the open way of de- faming, as the event showed. Of other sects and opinions,, though tending to voluptuousness and the denying of Divine Providence, they took no heed. Therefore, we do not read that either Epicurus, or that libertine school of Cyrene, or what the Cynic impudence uttered, was ever questioned by the laws. Neither is it recorded that the 106 MILTON writings of those old comedians were suppressed, though the acting of them were forbid; and that Plato commended the reading of Aristophanes, the loosest of them all, to his royal scholar Dionysius, is commonly known, and may be excused, if holy Chrysostom, as is reported, nightly studied so much the same author and had the art to cleanse a scurrilous vehemence into the style of a rousing sermon. That other leading city of Greece, Lacedsemon, consider- ing that Lycurgus their lawgiver was so addicted to ele- gant learning as to have been the first that brought out of Ionia the scattered works of Homer, and sent the poet Thales from Crete to prepare and mollify the Spartan surliness with his smooth songs and odes, the better to plant among them law and civility, it is to be wondered how museless and unbookish they were, minding naught but the feats of war. There needed no licensing of books among them, for they disliked all but their own laconic apophthegms, and took a slight occasion to chase Archilo- chus out of their city, perhaps for composing in a higher strain than their own soldierly ballads and roundels could reach to; or if it were for his broad verses, they were not therein so cautious, but they were as dissolute in their pro- miscuous conversing; whence Euripides affirms, in " An- dromache," that their women were all unchaste. Thus much may give us light after what sort books were pro- hibited among the Greeks. The Romans, also, for many ages trained up only to a military roughness, resembling most of the Lacedaemonian guise, knew of learning little but what their twelve tables and the Pontific College with their augurs and flamens taught them in religion and law, so unacquainted with other learning that when Car- neades and Critolaus, with the Stoic Diogenes, coming ambassadors to Rome, took thereby occasion to give the city a taste of their philosophy, they were suspected for seducers by no less a man than Cato the Censor, who moved it in the Senate to dismiss them speedily, and to banish all such Attic babblers out of Italy. But Scipio and others of the noblest senators withstood him and his old Sabine austerity; honoured and admired the men; and the censor himself at last in his old age fell to the study of that whereof before he was so scrupulous. And yet AREOPAGITICA IO 7 at the same time Naevius and Plautus, the first Latin comedians, had filled the city with all the borrowed scenes of Menander and Philemon. Then began to be considered there also what was to be done to libellous books and authors, for Naevius was quickly cast into prison for his unbridled pen, and released by the tribunes upon his recantation. We read also that libels were burned, and the makers punished by Augustus. The like severity no doubt was used if aught were impiously written against their esteemed gods. Except in these two points, how the world went in books the magistrate kept no reckoning. And, therefore, Lucretius without impeachment versifies his epicurism to Memmius, and had the honour to be set forth the second time by Cicero so great a father of the commonwealth, although himself di'sputes against that opinion in his own writings. Nor was the satirical sharp- ness or naked plainness of Lucilius, or Catullus, or Flaccus, by any order prohibited. And for matters of state, the story of Titius Livius, though it extolled that part which Pompey held, was not therefore suppressed by Octavius Caesar of the other faction. But that Naso was by him banished in his old age for the wanton poems of his youth was but a mere covert of state over some secret cause; and besides the books were neither banished nor called in. From hence we shall meet with little else but tyranny in the Roman Empire, that we may not mar- vel if not so often bad as good books were silenced. I shall therefore deem to have been large enough in producing what among the ancients was punishable to write, save only which, all other arguments were free to treat on. By this time the emperors were become Christians, whose discipline in this point I do not find to have been more severe than what was formerly in practice. The books of those whom they took to be grand heretics were examined, refuted, and condemned in the General Coun- cils; and not till then were prohibited, or burned by au- thority of the emperor. As for the writings of heathen authors, unless they were plain invectives against Chris- tianity, as those of Porphyrius and Proclus, they met with no interdict that can be cited till about the year 400 in a 108 MILTON Carthaginian council, wherein bishops themselves were forbid to read the books of Gentiles, but heresies they might read; while others long before them, on the con- trary, scrupled more the books of heretics than of Gentiles. And that the primitive councils and bishops were wont only to declare what books were not commendable, pass- ing no further, but leaving it to each one's conscience to read or to lay by, till after the year 800, is observed already by Padre Paolo, the great unmasker of the Trentine Council. After which time the Popes of Rome, engrossing what they pleased of political rule into their own hands, extended their dominion over men's eyes, as they had before over their judgments, burning and pro- hibiting to be read what they fancied not; yet sparing in their censures, and the books not many which they so dealt with, till Martin V by his bull not only prohibited, but was the first that excommunicated the reading of heretical books; for about that time Wyclif and Huss growing terrible, were they who first drove the Papal court to a stricter policy of prohibiting; which course Leo X and his successors followed, until the Council 'of Trent and the Spanish. Inquisition engendering to- gether brought forth or perfected those catalogues and ex- purging indexes that rake through the entrails of many an old good author with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb. Nor did they stay in matters heretical, but any subject that was not to their palate they either condemned in a prohibition, or had it straight into the new purgatory of an Index. To fill up the measure of encroachment, their last invention was to ordain that no book, pamphlet, or paper should be printed (as if St. Peter had bequeathed them the keys of the press also out of paradise) unless it were approved and licensed under the hands of two or three glutton friars. For example : Let the Chancellor Cini be pleased to see if in this present work be contained aught that may withstand the printing. VINCENT RABATTA, Vicar of Florence. AREOPAGITICA IO9 I have seen this present work, and find nothing athwart the Catholic faith and good manners. In witness whereof I have given, etc. NICOLO CINI, Chancellor of Florence. Attending the precedent relation, it is allowed that this present work of Davanzati may be printed. VINCENT RABATTA, etc. It may be printed, July I5th. Friar SIMON MOMPEI D'AMELIA, - Chancellor of the Holy Office in Florence. Sure they have a conceit, if he of the bottomless, pit had not long since broke prison, that this quadruple ex- orcism would bar him down. I fear their next design will be to get into their custody the licensing of that which they say Claudius intended, but went not through with. Vouch- safe to see another of their forms, the Roman stamp: Imprimatur. If it seem good to the reverend Master of the Holy Palace. BELCASTRO, Vtceregent. Imprimatur. Friar NICOLO RODOLFI, Master of the Holy Palace. Sometimes five imprimaturs are seen together dia- loguewise in the piazza of one title-page, complimenting and ducking each to other with their shaven reverences, whether the author, who stands by in perplexity at the foot of his epistle, shall to the press or to the sponge. These are the pretty responsories, these are the dear antiphonies that so bewitched of late our prelates and their chaplains with the goodly echo they made, and besotted us to the gay imitation of a lordly imprimatur, one from Lambeth House, another from the west end of Paul's; so apishly Romanizing that the word of command still was set down in Latin, as if the learned grammatical pen that wrote it would cast no ink without Latin; or perhaps, as they thought, because no vulgar tongue was worthy to express the pure conceit of an imprimatur; but rather, as I hope, for that our English, the language of men ever famous 8 . 1 10 MILTON and foremost in the achievements of liberty, will not easily find servile letters enough to spell such a dictatory pre- sumption English. And thus ye have the inventors and the original of book-licensing ripped up, and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity, or church, nor by any statute left us by our ancestors, elder or later; nor from the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad; but from the most antichristian council, and the most tyrannous Inquisition that ever inquired. Till then books were ever as freely admitted into the world as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifled than the issue of the womb; no envious Juno sat cross-legged over the nativity of any man's intellectual offspring; but if it proved a monster, who denies but that it was justly burned, or sunk into the sea? But that a book, in worse condition than a peccant soul, should be to stand before a jury ere it be born to the world, and undergo yet in darkness the judgment of Radamanth and his colleagues, ere it can pass the ferry backward into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity, provoked and troubled at the first entrance of reformation, sought out new limboes and new hells wherein they might include our books also within the number of their damned. And this was the rare morsel so officiously snatched up and so ill- favouredly imitated by our inquisiturient bishops and the attendant minorites their chaplains. That ye like not now these most certain authors of this licensing order, and that all sinister intention was far distant from your thoughts when ye were importuned the passing it all men who know the integrity of your actions, and how ye honour truth, will clear ye readily. But some will say, What though the inventors were bad, the thing for all that may be good? It may be so; yet if that thing be no such deep invention, but obvious and easy for any man to light on, and yet best and wisest commonwealths through all ages and occasions have for- borne to use it, and falsest seducers and oppressors of men were the first who took it up, and to no other pur- pose but to obstruct and hinder the first approach of refor- mation, I am of those who believe it will be a harder AREOPAGITICA m alchemy than Lullius ever knew to sublimate any good use out of such an invention. Yet this only is what I request to gain from this reason, that it may be held a dangerous and suspicious fruit, as certainly it deserves, for the tree that bore it, until I can dissect one by one the properties it has. But I have first to finish as was propounded, what is to be thought in general of reading books, whatever sort they be, and whether be more the benefit or the harm that thence proceeds? Not to insist upon the examples of Moses, Daniel, and Paul, who were skilful in all the learning of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Greeks, which could not probably be with- out reading their books of all sorts, in Paul especially, who thought it no defilement to insert into Holy Scripture the sentences of three Greek poets, and one of them a trage- dian, the question was notwithstanding sometimes contro- verted among the primitive doctors, but with great odds on that side which affirmed it both lawful and profitable, as was then evidently perceived when Julian the Apostate and subtlest enemy to our faith made a decree forbidding Christians the study of heathen learning; for, said he, they wound us with our own weapons, and with our own arts and sciences they overcome us. And, indeed, the Chris- tians were put so to their shifts by this crafty means, and so much in clanger to decline into all ignorance, that the two Apollinarii were fain, as a man may say, to coin all the seven liberal sciences out of the Bible, reducing it into divers forms of orations, poems, dialogues, even to the cal- culating of a new Christian grammar. But saith the his- torian Socrates: The providence of God provided better than the industry of Apollinarius and his son by taking away that illiterate law with the life of him who devised it. So great an injury they then held it to be deprived of Hel- lenic learning, and thought it a persecution more under- mining and secretly decaying the Church than the open cruelty of Decius or Diocletian. And perhaps it was with the same politic drift that the devil whipped St Jerome in a lenten dream for reading Cicero; or else it was a phantasm bred by the fever which had then seized him. For had an angel been his disciplines unless it were for dwelling too much upon Ciceronianisms, and had chastised 112 MILTON the reading, not the vanity, it had been plainly partial, first, to correct him for grave Cicero, and not for scurril Plautus whom he confesses to have been reading not long before; next, to correct him only, and let so many more ancient fathers wax old in those, pleasant and florid studies with- out the lash of such a tutoring apparition; insomuch that Basil teaches how some good use may be made of " Mar- gites," a sportful poem, not now extant, writ by Homer; and why not then of " Morgante," an Italian romance much to the same purpose? But if it be agreed we shall be tried by visions there is a vision recorded by Eusebius far ancienter than this tale of Jerome to the nun Eusto- chium, and besides has nothing of a fever in it. Diony- sius Alexandrinus Was about the year 240 a person of great name in the Church for piety and learning, who had wont to avail himself much against heretics by being conversant in their books; until a certain Presbyter laid it scrupu- lously to his conscience how he durst venture himself among those defiling volumes. The worthy man, loath to give offence, fell into a new debate with himself what was to be thought, when suddenly a vision sent from God it is his own epistle that so avers it confirmed him in these words: " Read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright and to examine each matter." To this revelation he assented the sooner, as he confesses, because it was answerable to that of the Apostle to the Thessalonians: " Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." And he might have added another remarkable saying of the same author, " To the pure all things are pure," not only meats and drinks, but all kind of knowledge whether of good or evil; the knowledge can not defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and con- science be not defiled. For books are as meats and viands are, some of good, some of evil substance; and yet God in that unapocryphal vision said, without exception, " Rise, Peter, kill and eat," leaving the choice to each man's dis- cretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unappliable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad AREOPAGITICA II3 books, that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. Whereof what better witness can ye expect I should produce than one of your own now sitting in Par- liament, the chief of learned men reputed in this land, Mr. Selden, whose volume of natural and national laws proves, not only by great authorities brought together, but by ex- quisite reasons and theorems almost mathematically de- monstrative, that all opinions, yea, errors, known, read, and collated, are of main service and assistance toward the speedy attainment of what is truest. I conceive, therefore, that when God did enlarge the universal diet of man's body, saving ever the rules of temperance, he then also, as be- fore, left arbitrary the dieting and repasting of our minds; as wherein every mature man might have to exercise his own leading capacity. How great a virtue is temperance, how much of moment through the whole life of man ! Yet God commits the managing so great a trust, without par- ticular law or prescription, wholly to the demeanour of every grown man. And therefore, when He himself tabled the Jews from heaven, that omer which was every man's daily portion of manna is computed to have been more than might have well sufficed the heartiest feeder thrice as many meals. For those actions, which enter into a man rather than issue out of him and therefore defile not, God uses not to captivate under a perpetual childhood of pre- scription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his own chooser; there were but little work left for preach- ing if law and compulsion should grow so fast upon those things which heretofore were governed only by exhorta- tion. Solomon informs us that much reading is a weari- ness to the flesh, but neither he nor other inspired author tells us that such or such reading is unlawful; yet cer- tainly had God thought good to limit us herein, it had been much more expedient to have told us what was un- lawful than what was wearisome. As for the burning of those Ephesian books by St. Paul's converts, it is replied the books were magic, the Syriac so renders them. It was a private act, a voluntary act, and leaves us to a voluntary imitation; the men in remorse burned those books which were their own; the magistrate by this example is not ap- MILTON pointed; these men practised the books, another might per- haps have read them in some sort usefully. Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably, and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds, which were imposed on Psyche as an in- cessant labour to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil as two twins cleav- ing together leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil; that is to say, of knowing good by evil. As, therefore, the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I can not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue, therefore, which is but a young- ling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excre- mental whiteness, which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true tem- perance under the person of Guyon, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet ab- stain. Since, therefore, the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all man- ner of tractates, and hearing all manner of reason? And AREOPAGITICA Hj this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscu- ously read. But of the harm that may result hence three kinds are usually reckoned: First is feared the infection that may spread; but then all human learning and con- troversy in religious points must remove out of the world, yea, the Bible itself, for that ofttimes relates blasphemy not nicely it describes the carnal sense of wicked men not unelegantly, it brings in holiest men passionately murmur- ing against Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus; in other great disputes it answers dubiously and darkly to the common reader; and ask a Talmudist what ails the modesty of his marginal Keri, that Moses and all the prophets can not persuade him to pronounce the textual Chetiv. For these causes we all know the Bible itself put by the Papist into the first rank of prohibited books. The ancientest Fathers must be next removed, as Clement of Alexandria, and that Eusebian book of Evan- gelic preparation, transmitting our ears through a hoard of heathenish obscenities to receive the Gospel. Who finds not that Irenaeus, Epiphanius, Jerome, and others discover more heresies than they well confute, and that oft for heresy which is the truer opinion? Nor boots it to say for these, and all the heathen writers of greatest infection, if it must be thought so, with whom is bound up, the life of human learning, that they wrote in an unknown tongue, so long as we are sure those languages are known as well to the worst of men, who are both most able and most diligent to instil the poison they suck, first into the courts of princes, acquainting them with the choicest delights and criticisms of sin as perhaps did that Petronius whom Nero called his Arbiter, the master of his revels; and that notorious ribald of Arezzo, dreaded, and yet dear to the Italian courtiers. I name not him, for posterity's sake, whom Harry VIII named in merriment his Vicar of Hell. By which compendious way all the contagion that foreign books can infuse will find a passage to the people far easier and shorter than an Indian voyage, though it could be sailed either by the north of Cathay eastward or of Canada westward, while our Spanish licensing gags the English press never so severely. But, on the other side, that infection which is from books of controversy in re- Il6 MILTON ligion is more doubtful and dangerous to the learned than to the ignorant; and yet those books must be permitted untouched by the licenser. It will be hard to instance where any ignorant man hath been ever seduced by Papisti- cal book in English, unless it were commended and ex- pounded to him by some of that clergy; and, indeed, all such tractates, whether false or true, are as the prophecy of Isaiah was to the eunuch, not to be " understood without a guide." But of our priests and doctors how many have been corrupted by studying the comments of Jesuits and Sorbonnists, and how fast they could transfuse that cor- ruption into the people our experience is both late and sad. It is not forgot since the acute and distinct Arminius was perverted merely by the perusing of a nameless discourse written at Delft, which at first he took in hand to confute. Seeing, therefore, that those books, and those in great abundance, which are likeliest to taint both life and doc- trine, can not be suppressed without the fall of learning and of all ability in disputation; and that these books of either sort are most and soonest catching to the learned, from whom to the common people whatever is heretical or dissolute may quickly be conveyed; and that evil manners are as perfectly learned without books a thousand other ways which can not be stopped, and evil doctrine not with books can propagate, except a teacher guide, which he might also do without writing and so beyond prohibiting, I am not able to unfold how this cautelous enterprise of licensing can be exempted from the number of vain and impossible attempts. And he who were pleasantly dis- posed could not well avoid to liken it to the exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shut- ting his park gate. Besides another inconvenience, if learned men be the first receivers out of books and dis- preaders both of vice and error, how shall the licensers themselves be confided in, unless we can confer upon them, or they assume to themselves, above all others in the land, the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness? And again, if it be true that a wise man like a good refiner can gather, gold out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the best book, yea, or without book, there is no reason that we should deprive a wise man of any ad- AREOPAGITICA II7 vantage to his wisdom, while we seek to restrain from a fool that which being restrained will be no hindrance to his folly. For if there should be so much exactness always used to keep that from him which is unfit for his reading we should, in the judgment of Aristotle not only, but of Solomon and of our Saviour, not vouchsafe him good pre- cepts, and by consequence not willingly admit him to good books, as being certain that a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet than a fool will do of sacred Scrip- ture. 'Tis next alleged we must not expose ourselves to temptations without necessity, and next to that, not em- ploy our time in vain things. To both these objections one answer will serve, out of the grounds already laid, that to all men such books are not temptations nor vanities, but useful drugs and materials wherewith to temper and com- pose effective and strong medicines, which man's life can not want. The rest, as children and childish men, who have not the art to qualify and prepare these working minerals, well may be exhorted to forbear, but hindered forcibly they can not be by all the licensing that sainted Inquisition could ever yet contrive, which is what I prom- ised to deliver next: that this order of licensing conduces nothing to the end for which it was framed, and hath almost prevented me by being clear already while thus much hath been explaining. See the ingenuity of Truth, who, when she gets a free and willing hand, opens herself faster than the pace of method and discourse can overtake her. It was the task which I began with, to show that no nation or well-instituted state, if they valued books at all, did ever use this way of licensing; and it might be answered that this is a piece of prudence lately discovered; to which I return that, as it was a thing slight and obvious to think on, so if it had been difficult to find out there wanted not among them long since who suggested such a course, which they not following, leave us a pattern of their judg- ment, that it was not the not knowing, but the not ap- proving, which was the cause of their not using it. Plato, a man of high authority indeed, but least of all for his commonwealth, in the book of his " Laws," which no city ever yet received, fed his fancy with making many edicts to his airy burgomasters which they who otherwise admire H8 MILTON him wish had been rather buried and excused in the genial cups of an academic night-sitting; by which laws he seems to tolerate no kind of learning but by unalterable decree, consisting most of practical traditions, to the attainment whereof a library of smaller bulk than his own " Dialogues " would be abundant. And there also enacts that no poet should so much as read to any private man what he had written until the judges and law-keepers had seen it and allowed it. But that Plato meant this law peculiarly to that commonwealth which he had imagined, and to no other, is evident. Why was he not else a lawgiver to himself, but a transgressor, and to be expelled by his own magistrates, both for the wanton epigrams and dialogues which he made, and his perpetual reading of Sophron Mimus and Aristophanes, books of grossest infamy, and also for com- mending the latter of them, though he were the malicious libeller of his chief friends, to be read by the tyrant Diony- sius, who had little need of such trash to spend his time on? But that he knew this licensing of poems had refer- ence and dependence to many other provisos there set down in his fancied republic, which in this world could have no place; and so neither he himself nor any magis- trate or city ever imitated that course, which, taken apart from those other collateral injunctions, must needs be vain and fruitless. For if they fell upon one kind of strictness, unless their care were equal to regulate all other things of like aptness to corrupt the mind, that single endeavour they knew would be but a fond labour; to shut and fortify one gate against corruption, and be necessitated to leave others round about wide open. If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth but what by their allowance shall be thought honest; for such Plato was provided of. It will ask more than the work of twenty licensers to examine all the lutes, the violins, and the guitars in every house; they must not be suffered to prattle as they do, but must be licensed what they may say. And who shall silence all the airs and madrigals that whis- AREOPAGITICA per softness in chambers? The windows also, and the balconies, must be thought on; there are shrewd books with dangerous frontispieces set to sale; who shall prohibit them? Shall twenty licensers? The villages also must have their visitors to inquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebec reads, even to the ballatry and the gamut of every municipal fiddler, for these are the countryman's Arcadias and his Montemayors. Next, what more national corrup- tion, for which England hears ill abroad, than household gluttony? Who shall be the rectors of our daily rioting? and what shall be done to inhibit the multitudes that fre- quent those houses where drunkenness is sold and har- boured? Our garments also should be referred to the licensing of some more sober work-masters to see them cut into a less wanton garb. Who shall regulate all the mixed conversation of our youth, male and female to- gether, as is the fashion of this country? who shall still appoint what shall be discoursed, what presumed, and no further? Lastly, who shall forbid and separate all idle resort, all evil company? These things will be, and must be; but how they shall be less hurtful, how less enticing, herein consists the grave and governing wisdom of a state. To sequester out of the world into Atlantic and Utopian polities which never can be drawn into use will not mend our condition; but to ordain wisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God hath placed us unavoidably. Nor is it Plato's licensing of books will do this, which neces- sarily pulls along with it so many other kinds of licensing, as will make us all both ridiculous and weary, and yet frustrate; but those unwritten, or at least unconstraining laws of virtuous education, religious and civil nurture, which Plato there mentions as the bonds and ligaments of the commonwealth, the pillars and the sustainers of every written statute; these they be which will bear chief sway in such matters as these, when all licensing will be easily eluded. Impunity and remissness, for certain, are the bane of a commonwealth; but here the great art lies to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work. If every action which is good or evil in man at ripe years were to be under pittance and prescription and compulsion, what were 120 MILTON virtue but a name, what praise could be then due to well- doing, what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent? Many there be that complain of Divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We our- selves esteem not of that obedience or love or gift which is of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue? They are not skilful considerers of human things who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin; for, besides that it is a huge heap increasing under the very act of diminishing, though some part of it may for a time be withdrawn from some persons, it can not from all in such a universal thing as books are; and when this is done, yet the sin remains en- tire. Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewel left: ye can not bereave him of his covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised in any hermitage, ye can not make them chaste that came not thither so; such great care and wisdom is required to the right managing of this point. Suppose we could expel sin by this means: look how much we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue, for the matter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them both alike. This justifies the high providence of God, who though he command us temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us even to a profuseness all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety. Why should we then affect a rigour contrary to the manner of God and of Nature, by abridging or scanting those means which books freely permitted are, both to the trial of virtue and the exercise of truth. It would be better done to learn that the law must needs be frivolous which goes to restrain things uncertainly and yet equally working to good and to evil. And were I the chooser, a dram of AREOPAGITICA I2I well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil-doing. For God sure esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person more than the restraint of ten vicious. And albeit whatever thing we hear or see, sitting, walking, travelling, or conversing, may be fitly called our book, and is of the same effect that writings are, yet grant the thing to be prohibited were only books, it appears that this order hitherto is far insufficient to the end which it intends. Do we not see, not once or oftener, but weekly, that continued court-libel against the Parliament and city, printed, as the wet sheets can witness, and dispersed among us for all that licensing can do? Yet this is the prime service a man would think, wherein this order should give proof of itself. If it were executed, you'll say. But certain, if execution be remiss or blindfold now and in this particular, what will it be hereafter and in other books? If, then, the order shall not be vain and frustrate, behold a new labour, Lords and Commons! Ye must repeal and proscribe all scandalous and unlicensed books already printed and divulged, after ye have drawn them up into a list, that all may know which are condemned and which not, and ordain that no foreign books be de- livered out of custody till they have been read over. This office will require the whole time of not a few overseers, and those no vulgar men. There be also books which are partly useful and excellent, partly culpable and pernicious; this work will ask as many more officials to make expur- gations and expunctions, that the commonwealth of learn- ing be not damnified. In fine, when the multitude of books increase upon their hands, ye must be fain to catalogue all those printers who are found frequently offending, and for- bid the importation of their whole suspected typography. In a word, that this your order may be exact, and not deficient, ye must reform it perfectly according to the model of Trent and Seville, which I know ye abhor to do. Yet though ye should condescend to this, which God for- bid, the order still would be but fruitless and defective to 'that end whereto ye meant it. If to prevent sects and schisms, who is so unread or so uncatechised in story that hath not heard of many sects refusing books as a hindrance, and preserving their doctrine unmixed for many ages only 122 MILTON by unwritten traditions? The Christian faith, for that was once a schism, is not unknown to have spread all over Asia ere any Gospel or Epistle was seen in writing. If the amendment of manners be aimed at, look into Italy and Spain, whether those places be one scruple the better, the honester, the wiser, the chaster, since all the inquisitional rigour that hath been executed upon books. Another reason whereby to make it plain that this order will miss the end it seeks, consider by the quality which ought to be in every licenser. It can not be denied but that he who is made judge to sit upon the birth or death of books, whether they may be wafted into this world or not, had need to be a man above the common measure, both studious, learned, and judicious; there may be else no mean mistakes in the censure of what is passable or not, which is also no mean injury. If he be of such worth as behooves him, there can not be a more tedious and unpleasing journey-work, a greater loss of time levied upon his head, than to be made the perpetual reader of unchosen books and pamphlets, ofttimes huge volumes. There is no book that is acceptable unless at certain sea- sons; but to be enjoined the reading of that at all times, and in a hand scarce legible, whereof three pages would not down at any time in the fairest print, is an imposition which I can not believe how he that values time and his own studies, or is but of a sensible nostril, should be able to endure. In this one thing I crave leave of the present licensers to be pardoned for so thinking, who doubtless took this office up looking on it through their obedience to the Parliament, whose command perhaps made all things seem easy and unlaborious to them; but that this short trial hath wearied them out already, their own expressions and excuses to them who make so many journeys to solicit their license are testimony enough. Seeing, therefore, those who now possess the employment by all evident signs wish themselves well rid of it, and that no man of worth, none that is not a plain unthrift of his own hours, is ever likely to succeed them except he mean to put himself to the salary of a press correcter, we may easily foresee what kind of licensers we are to expect AREOPAGITICA ^3 hereafter, either ignorant, imperious, and remiss, or basely pecuniary. This is what I had to show wherein this order can not conduce to that end whereof it bears the intention. I lastly proceed from the no good it can do to the manifest hurt it causes, in being first the greatest discour- agement and affront that can be offered to learning and to learned men. It was the complaint and lamentation of prelates upon every least breath of a motion to remove pluralities and distribute more equally church revenues, that then all learning would be forever dashed and discour- aged. But as for that opinion, I never found cause to think that the tenth part of learning stood or fell with the clergy, nor could I ever but hold it for a sordid and unworthy speech of any churchman who had a competency left him. If, therefore, ye be loath to dishearten utterly and discon- tent, not the mercenary crew of false pretenders to learn- ing, but the free and ingenuous sort of such as evidently were born to study and love learning for itself, not for lucre or any other end but the service of God and of truth, and perhaps that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have consented shall be the re- ward of those whose published labours advance the good of mankind, then know, that so far to distrust the judg- ment and the honesty of one who hath but a common repute in learning and never yet offended, as not to count him fit to print his mind without a tutor and examiner, lest he should drop a schism or something of corruption, is the greatest displeasure and indignity to a free and knowing spirit that can be put upon him. What advantage is it to be a man over it is to be a boy at school, if we have only escaped the ferule to come under the fescue of an im- primatur? if serious and elaborate writings, as if they were no more than the theme of a grammar lad under his peda- gogue, must not be uttered without the cursory eyes of a temporizing and extemporizing licenser? He who is not trusted with his own actions, his drift not being known to be evil, and standing to the hazard of law and penalty, has no great argument to think himself reputed in the com- monwealth wherein he was born for other than a fool or a foreigner. When a man writes to the world, he summons 124 MILTON up all his reason and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditates, is industrious, and likely consults and confers with his judicious friends; after all which done he takes himself to be informed in what he writes as well as any that wrote before him. If in this the most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness, no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities can bring him to that state of maturity as not to be still mistrusted and suspected, unless he carry all his considerate diligence, all his midnight watchings, and expense of Palladian oil, to the hasty view of an un- leisured licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps far his inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the labour of book-writing, and if he be not repulsed or slighted, must appear in print like a puny with his guardian and his censor's hand on the back of his title to be his bail and surety that he is no idiot or seducer, it can not be but a dishonour and derogation to the author, to the book, to the privilege and dignity of learning. And what if the author shall be one so copious of fancy as to have many things well worth the adding come into his mind after licensing, while the book is yet under the press, which not seldom happens to the best and diligentest writers; and that perhaps a dozen times in one book? The printer dares not go beyond his licensed copy; so often, then, must the au- thor trudge to his leave-giver, that those his new insertions may be viewed, and many a jaunt will be made ere that licenser, for it must be the same man, can either be found, or found at leisure; meanwhile either the press must stand still, which is no small damage, or the author lose his accu- ratest thoughts and send the book forth worse than he had made it, which to a diligent writer is the greatest melan- choly and vexation that can befall. And how can a man teach with authority, which is the life of teaching, how can he be a doctor in his book as he ought to be, or else had better be silent, when as all he teaches, all he delivers, is but under the tuition, under the correction of his patri- archal licenser to blot or alter what precisely accords not with the hidebound humour which he calls his judgment; when every acute reader upon the first sight of a pedantic license will be ready with these like words to ding the book a quoit's distance from him: " I hate a pupil teacher, I AREOPAGITICA I2 5 endure not an instructor that comes to me under the ward- ship of an overseeing fist; I know nothing of the licenser, but that I have his own hand here for his arrogance; who shall warrant me his judgment? " " The state, sir," replies the stationer; but has a quick return: "The state shalfbe my governors, but not my critics; they may be mistaken in the choice of a licenser as easily as this licenser may be mistaken in an author; this is some common stuff "; and he might add from Sir Francis Bacon that such authorized books are but the language of the times. For though a licenser should happen to be judicious more than ordinary, which will be a great jeopardy of the next succession, yet his very office and his commission enjoin him to let pass nothing but what is vulgarly received already. Nay, which is more lamentable, if the work of any deceased author, though never so famous in his lifetime and even to this day, come to their hands for license to be printed or re- printed, if there be found in his book one sentence of a venturous edge, uttered in the height of zeal, and who knows whether it might not be the dictate of a divine spirit, yet not suiting with every low decrepit humour of their own, though it were Knox himself, the reformer of a king- dom, that spake it, they will not pardon him their dash; the sense of that great man shall to all posterity be lost for the fearfulness or the presumptuous rashness of a perfunc- tory licenser. And to what an author this violence hath been lately done, and in what book of greatest consequence to be faithfully published, I could now instance, but shall forbear till a more convenient season. Yet if these things be not resented seriously and timely by them who have the remedy in their power, but that such iron moulds as these shall have authority to gnaw out the choicest periods of exquisitest books, and to commit such a treacherous fraud against the orphan remainders of worthiest men after death, the more sorrow will belong to that hapless race of men whose misfortune it is to have understanding. Henceforth let no man care to learn, or care to be more than worldly wise; for certainly in higher matters to be ignorant and slothful, to be a common steadfast dunce, will be the only pleasant life and only in request. And as it is a particular disesteem of every knowing 126 MILTON person alive, and most injurious to the written labours and monuments of the dead, so to me it seems an undervaluing and vilifying of the whole nation. I can not set so light by all the invention, the art, the wit, the grave and solid judgment which is in England, as that it can be compre- hended in any twenty capacities how good soever; much less that it should not pass except their superintendence be over it, except it be sifted and strained with their strainers, that it should be uncurrent without their manual stamp. Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards. We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and license it like our broadcloth and our wool packs. What is it but a servitude like that imposed by the Philistines, not to be allowed the sharpening of our own axes and coulters, but we must repair from all quarters to twenty licensing forges. Had any one written and divulged erroneous things and scandalous to honest life, misusing and forfeiting the es- teem had of his reason among men, if after conviction this only censure were adjudged him, that he should never henceforth write but what were first examined by an ap- pointed officer, whose hand should be annexed to pass his credit for him that now he might be safely read, it could not be apprehended less than a disgraceful punishment. Whence to include the whole nation, and those that never yet thus offended, under such a diffident and suspectful prohibition, may plainly be understood what a disparage- ment it is; so much the more, when as debtors and delin- quents may walk abroad without a keeper, but inoffensive books must not stir forth without a visible jailer in their title. Nor is it to the common people less than a reproach; for if we be so jealous over them as that we dare not trust them with an English pamphlet, what do we but censure them for a giddy, vicious, and ungrounded people, in such a sick and weak estate of faith and discretion as to be able to take nothing down but through the pipe of a licenser? That this is care or love of them we can not pretend, when as in those Popish places where the laity are most hated and despised, the same strictness is used over them. Wis- dom we can not call it, because it stops but one breach of AREOPAGITICA I2 y license, nor that neither, when as those corruptions which it seeks to prevent break in faster at other doors which can not be shut. And, in conclusion, it reflects to the disrepute of our ministers also, of whose labours we should hope better, and of the proficiency which their flock reaps by them, than that after all this light of the gospel which is, and is to be, and all this continual preaching, they should be still frequented with such an unprincipled, unedified, and laic rabble, as that the whiff of every new pamphlet should stagger them out of their catechism and Christian walking. This may have much reason to discourage the ministers when such a low conceit is had of all their exhortations and the benefiting of their hearers, as that they are not thought fit to be turned loose to three sheets of paper without a licenser; that all the sermons, all the lectures preached, printed, vented in such numbers and such volumes as have now well-nigh made all other books unsalable, should not be armour enough against one single enchiridion, without the Castle St. Angelo of an imprimatur. And lest some should persuade ye, Lords and Com- mons, that these arguments of learned men's discourage- ment at this your order are mere flourishes and not real, I could recount what I have seen and heard in other coun- tries, where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes; when I have sat among their learned men, for that honour I had, and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philo- sophic freedom as they supposed England was, while them- selves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning among them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits, that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition for think- ing in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew that England then was groaning loudest under the prelatical yoke, nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happi- ness that other nations were so persuaded of her liberty. Yet was it beyond my hope that those worthies were then breathing in her air who should be her leaders to such a 128 MILTON deliverance as shall never be forgotten by any revolution of time that this world hath to finish. When that was once begun it was as little in my feaf that what words of complaint I heard among learned men of other parts uttered against the Inquisition, the same I should hear by as learned men at home uttered in time of Parliament against an order of licensing; and that so generally, that when I disclosed myself a companion of their discontent, I might say, if without envy, that he whom an honest quaestorship had endeared to the Sicilians was not more by them importuned against Verres than the favourable opinion which I had among many who honour ye and are known and respected by ye, loaded me with entreaties and persuasions, that I would not despair to lay together that which just reason should bring into my mind toward the removal of an un- deserved thraldom upon learning. That this is not, there- fore, the disburdening of a particular fancy, but the com- mon grievance of all those who had prepared their minds and studies above the vulgar pitch, to advance truth in others and from others to entertain it, thus much may satisfy. And in their name I shall for neither friend nor foe conceal what the general murmur is; that if it come to inquisitioning again and licensing, and that we are so timorous of ourselves, and so suspicious of all men, as to fear each book, and the shaking of every leaf, before we know what the contents are, if some who but of late were little better than silenced from preaching, shall come now to silence us from reading except what they please, it can not be guessed what is intended by some but a second tyranny over learning; and will soon put it out of contro- versy that bishops and presbyters are the same to us, both name and thing. That those evils of prelacy, which be- fore from five or six and twenty sees were distributively charged upon the whole people, will now light wholly upon learning, is not obscure to us, when as now the pastor of a small unlearned parish on the sudden shall be exalted archbishop over a large diocese of books, and yet not remove, but keep his other cure too, a mystical pluralist. He who but of late cried down the sole ordination of every novice bachelor of art, and denied sole jurisdiction over the simplest parishioner, shall now, at home in his private AREOPAGITICA chair, assume both these overworthiest and excellentest books and ablest authors that write them. This is not the covenants and protestations that we have made, this is not to put down Prelacy: this is but to chop an Episcopacy; this is but to translate the palace metropolitan from one kind of dominion into another; this is but an old canonical sleight of commuting our penance. To startle thus betimes at a mere unlicensed pamphlet will after a while be afraid of every conventicle, and a while after will make a con- venticle of every Christian meeting. But I am certain that a state governed by the rules of justice and fortitude, or a church built and founded upon the rock of faith and true knowledge, can not be so pusillanimous. While things are yet not constituted in religion, that freedom of writing should be restrained by a discipline imitated from the prel- ates and learned by them from the Inquisition, to shut us up all again into the breast of a licenser, must needs give cause of doubt and discouragement to all learned and re- ligious men, who can not but discern the fineness of this politic drift, and who are the contrivers: that while bishops were to be baited down, then all presses might be open; it was the people's birthright and privilege in time of Parlia- ment, it was the breaking forth of light. But now the bishops abrogated and voided out of the Church, as if our reformation sought no more but to make room for others into their seats under another name, the Episcopal arts begin to bud again, the cruise of truth must run no more oil, liberty of printing must be enthralled again under a prelatical commission of twenty, the privilege of the people nullified, and, which is worse, the freedom of learn- ing must groan again and to her old fetters, all this the Parliament yet sitting. Although their own late argu- ments and defences against the prelates might remember them that this obstructing violence meets for the most part with an event utterly opposite to the end which it drives at; instead of suppressing sects and schisms, it raises them and invests them with a reputation. " The punishing of wits enhances their authority," saith the Viscount St. Albans, " and a forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth that flies up in the faces of them who seek to tread it out." This order, therefore, may prove a nurs- 1 30 MILTON ing mother to sects, but I shall easily show how it will be a stepdame to truth: and first by disenabling us to the maintenance of what is known already. Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compared in Scripture to a stream- ing fountain: if her waters flow not in a perpetual pro- gression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth, and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assem- bly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. There is not any burden that some would gladlier post off to another than the charge and care of their re- ligion. There be who knows not that there be? of Prot- estants and professors who live and die in as arrant an im- plicit faith as any lay Papist of Loretto. A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure and to his profits, finds religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many peddling accounts, that of all mysteries he can not skill to keep a stock going upon that trade. What should he do? Fain he would have the name to be religious, fain he would bear up with his neighbours in that. What does he, therefore, but resolve to give over toiling, and to find himself out some factor to whose care and credit he may commit the whole man- aging of his religious affairs, some divine of note and esti- mation that must be. To him he adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys, into his custody; and, indeed, makes the very person of that man his religion, esteems his associating with him a suf- ficient evidence and commendatory of his own piety. So that a man may say his religion is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual movable, and goes and comes near him according as that good man frequents the house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him; his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep; rises, is saluted, and after the malmsey, or some well-spiced brew- age, and better breakfasted than he whose morning appe- tite would have gladly fed on green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem; his religion walks abroad at eight, and AREOPAGITICA , leaves his kind entertainer in the shop trading all day with- out his religion. Another sort there be who when they hear that all things shall be ordered, all things regulated and settled, nothing written but what passes through the custom-house of certain publicans that have the tunaging and the pound- aging of all free-spoken truth, will straight give themselves up into your hands; make them and cut them out what religion ye please. There be delights, there be recreations and jolly pastimes that will fetch the day about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream. What need they torture their heads with that which others have taken so strictly and so unalterably into their own purveying? These are the fruits which a dull ease and ces- sation of our knowledge will bring forth among the people. How goodly and how to be wished were such an obedient unanimity as this, what a fine conformity would it starch us all into! Doubtless a staunch and solid piece of frame- work as any January could freeze together. Nor much better will be the consequence even among the clergy themselves. It is no new thing never heard of before for a parochial minister, who has his reward and is at his Hercules' Pillars in a warm benefice, to be easily inclinable, if he have nothing else that may rouse up his studies, to finish his circuit in an English concordance and a topic folio, the gatherings and savings of a sober graduateship, a harmony and a catena, treading the con- stant round of certain common doctrinal heads, attended with their uses, motives, marks and means, out of which as out of an alphabet or sol fa, by forming and transforming, joining and disjoining variously a little book-craft, and two hours' meditation might furnish him unspeakably to the per- formance of more than a weekly charge of sermoning, not to reckon up the infinite helps of interlinearies, breviaries, synopses, and other loitering gear. But as for the multi- tude of sermons ready printed and piled up, on every text that is not difficult, our London trading St. Thomas in his vestry, and add to boot St. Martin and St. Hugh, have not within their hallowed limits more vendible ware of all sorts ready made; so that penury he never need fear of pulpit provision, having where so plenteously to refresh 132 MILTON his magazine. But if his rear and flanks be not impaled, if his back door be not secured by the rigid licenser, but that a bold book may now and then issue forth, and give the assault to some of his old collections in their trenches, it will concern him then to keep waking, to stand in watch, to set good guards and sentinels about his received opin- ions, to walk the round and counter-round with his fellow- inspectors, fearing lest any of his flock be seduced, who also then would be better instructed, better exercised and disciplined. And God send that the fear of this diligence which must then be used, do not make us affect the lazi- ness of a licensing church! For if we be sure we are in the right, and do not hold the truth guiltily, which becomes not, if we ourselves con- demn not our own weak and frivolous teaching, and the people for an untaught and irreligious gadding rout, what can be more fair than when a man judicious, learned, and of a conscience, for aught we know, as good as theirs that taught us what we know shall not privily from house to house, which is more dangerous, but openly by writing, publish to the world what his opinion is, what his reasons, and wherefore that which is now thought can not be sound? Christ urged it as wherewith to justify himself, that he preached in public; yet writing is more public than preach- ing, and more easy to refutation, if need be, there being so many whose business and profession merely it is to be the champions of truth, which, if they neglect, what can be imputed but their sloth or inability? Thus much we are hindered and disinured by this course of licensing toward the true knowledge of what we seem to know. For how much it hurts and hinders the licensers themselves in the calling of their ministry, more than any secular employment, if they will discharge that . office as they ought, so that of necessity they must neglect either the one duty or the other, I insist not, because it is a particular, but leave it to their own conscience, how they will decide it there. There is yet behind of what I purposed to lay open, the incredible loss and detriment that this plot of licensing puts us to. More than if some enemy at sea should stop up all our havens and ports and creeks, it hinders and retards AREOPAGITICA I33 the importation of our richest merchandise, truth; nay, it was first established and put in practice by antichristian malice and mystery on set purpose to extinguish, if it were possible, the light of reformation, and to settle falsehood, little differing from that policy wherewith the Turk upholds his Alcoran by the prohibition of printing. It is not de- nied, but gladly confessed, we are to send our thanks and vows to Heaven louder than most of nations for that great measure of truth which we enjoy, especially in those main points between us and the Pope with his appurtenances the prelates; but he who thinks we are to pitch our tent here, and have attained the utmost prospect of reformation that the mortal glass wherein we contemplate can show us, till we come to beatific vision, that man by this very opinion declares that he is yet far short of truth. Truth, indeed, came once into the world with her Divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on; but when he ascended, and his apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin truth, hewed her lovely form into a thou- sand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of truth, such as dost appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring to- gether every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection. Suffer not these licensing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyred saint. We boast our light, but if we look not wisely on the sun itself it smites us into darkness. Who can discern those planets that are oft combust, and those stars of brightest magnitude that rise and set with the sun, until the opposite motion of their orbs bring them to such a place in the firmament, where they may be seen evening or morning? The light which we have gained 9 MILTON was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to dis- cover onward things more remote from our knowledge. It is not the unfrocking of a priest, the unmitring of a bishop, and the removing him from off the Presbyterian shoulders that will make us a happy nation; no, if other things as great in the Church and in the rule of life both economical a.nd political be not looked into and reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zuinglius and Calvin hath beaconed up to us, that we are stark blind. There be who perpetually complain of schisms and sects, and make it such a calamity that any man dissents from their maxims. It is their own pride and ignorance which causes the disturbing, who neither will hear with meek- ness nor can convince; yet all must be suppressed which is not found in their syntagma. They are the troublers, they are the dividers of unity, who neglect and permit not others to unite those dissevered pieces which are yet want- ing to the body of truth. To be still searching what we know not by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body is homogeneal and propor- tional), this is the golden rule in theology as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a church, not the forced and outward union of cold and neutral and inwardly divided minds. Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof ye are and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to dis- course, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to. Therefore the studies of learning in her deepest sciences have been so ancient and so eminent among us, that writers of good antiquity and ablest judgment have been persuaded that even the school of Pythagoras and the Persian wisdom took beginning from the old philosophy of this island. And that wise and civil Roman, Julius Agricola, who governed once here for Caesar, preferred the natural wits of Britain before the laboured studies of the French. Nor is it for nothing that the grave and frugal Transylvanian sends out yearly from as far as the mountainous borders of Russia and beyond the Hercynian wilderness, not their youth, but their staid AREOPAGITICA l $$ men, to learn our language and our theologic arts. Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of Heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending toward us. Why else was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her as out of Sion should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europe? And had it not been the obstinate perverseness of our prel- ates against the divine and admirable spirit of Wickliff, to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Huss and Jerome, no, nor the name of Luther or of Calvin, had been ever known; the glory of reforming all our neighbours had been completely ours. But now, as our obdurate clergy have with violence de- meaned the matter, we are become hitherto the latest and the backwardest scholars, of whom God offered to have made us the teachers. Now once again, by all concurrence of signs and by the general instinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and solemnly express their thoughts, God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, even to the reforming of reformation itself. What does he then but reveal himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first to his Englishmen; I say, as his manner is, first to us, though we mark not the method of his counsels and are unworthy? Behold now this vast city: a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolv- ing new notions and ideas wherewith to present as with their homage and their fealty the approaching Reformation, others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. What could a man re- quire more from a nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge? What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant soil but wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a nation of prophets, of sages, and of worthies? We reckon more than five months yet to har- vest; there need not be five weeks; had we but eyes to 136 MILTON lift up, the fields are white already. Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic ter- rors of sect and schism we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious forward- ness among men to reassume the ill-deputed care of their religion into their own hands again. A little generous pru- dence, a little forbearance of one another and some grain of charity, might win all these diligences to join and unite in one general and brotherly search after truth, could we but forego this prelatical tradition of crowding free con- sciences and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men. I doubt not, if some great and worthy stranger should come among us, wise to discern the mould and temper of a people and how to govern it, observing the high hopes and aims, the diligent alacrity of our extended thoughts and reasonings in the pursuance of truth and free- dom, but that he would cry out as Pyrrhus did, admiring the Roman docility and courage: " If such were my Epi- rots, I would not despair the greatest design that could be attempted to make a church or kingdom happy." Yet these are the men cried out against for schismatics and sectaries; as if, while the Temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrational men who could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when every stone is laid artfully together it can not be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every piece of the building be of one form; nay, rather the per- fection consists in this, that out of many moderate varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly dispropor- tional arises the goodly and the graceful symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure. Let us therefore be more considerate builders, more wise in spiritual archi- tecture, when great reformation is expected. For now the time seems come wherein Moses the great prophet AREOPAGITICA I37 may sit in heaven rejoicing to see that memorable and glorious wish of his fulfilled, when not only our seventy elders but all the Lord's people are become prophets. No marvel then, though some men, and some good men too, perhaps, but young in goodness, as Joshua then was, envy them. They fret, and out of their own weakness are in agony, lest those divisions and subdivisions will undo us. The adversary again applauds, and waits the hour; when they have branched themselves out, saith he, small enough into parties and partitions, then will be our time. Fool! he sees not the firm root, out of which we all grow though into branches; nor will beware until he see our small divided maniples cutting through at every angle of his ill- united and unwieldy brigade. And that we are to hope better of all these supposed sects and schisms, and that we shall not need tliat solicitude, honest, perhaps, though over- timorous of them that vex in this behalf, but shall laugh in the end at those malicious applauders of our differences, I have these reasons to persuade me: First, when a city shall be, as it were, besieged and blocked about, her navigable river infested, inroads and incursions round, defiance and battle oft rumoured to be marching up even to her walls and suburb trenches, that then the people, or the greater part, more than at other times, wholly taken up with the study of highest and most important matters to be reformed, should be disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, even to a rarity and admiration, things not before discoursed or written of, argues first a singular good-will, contentedness and con- fidence in your prudent foresight and safe government, Lords and Commons; and from thence derives itself to a gallant bravery and well-grounded contempt of their enemies, as if there were no small number of as great spirits among us as his was, who when Rome was nigh besieged by Hannibal, being in the city, bought that piece of ground at no cheap rate whereon Hannibal himself en- camped his own regiment. Next, it is a lively and cheerful presage of our happy success and victory. For as in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigor- ous, not only to vital but to rational faculties, and those in the acutest and the pertest operations of wit and subtlety, I3 8 MILTON it argues in what good plight and constitution the body is, so when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly up, as that it has not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety but to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of controversy and new invention, it betokens us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off the old and wrinkled skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again, entering the glorious ways of truth and prosperous virtue, destined to become great and honourable in these latter ages. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undaz- zled eyes at the full midday beam, purging and unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance, while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms. What should ye do then, should ye suppress all this flowery crop of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in this city, should ye set an oligarchy of twenty ingrossers over it, to bring a famine upon our minds again, when we shall know nothing but what is measured to us by their bushel? Believe it, Lords and Commons, they who counsel ye to such a suppressing do as good as bid ye suppress yourselves; and I will soon show how. If it be desired to know the immediate cause of all this free writing and free speaking, there can not be assigned a truer than your own mild and free and human government; it is the liberty, Lords and Commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchased us, liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; this is that which hath rarefied and enlightened our spirits like the influence of Heaven; this is that which hath enfranchised, enlarged and lifted up our apprehensions degrees above themselves. Ye can not make us now less capable, less knowing, less eagerly pursuing of the truth, unless ye first make yourselves, that made us so, less the lovers, less the founders of our true liberty. We can grow ignorant again, AREOPAGITICA ! 39 brutish, formal, and slavish, as ye found us; but you then must first become that which ye can not be, oppressive, arbitrary, and tyrannous, as they were from whom ye have freed us. That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and exactest things, is the issue of your own virtue propagated in us; ye can not suppress that unless ye re-en- force an abrogated and merciless law, that fathers may des- patch at will their own children. And who shall then stick closest to ye, and excite others? Not he who takes up arms for cote and conduct and his four nobles of Danegelt. Al- though I dispraise not the defence of just immunities, yet love my peace better, if that were all. Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to con- science, above all liberties. What would be best advised then, if it be found so hurtful and so unequal to suppress opinions for the new- ness or the unsuitableness to a customary acceptance, will not be my task to say; I only shall repeat what I have learned from one of your own honourable number, a right noble and pious lord, who, had he not sacrificed his life and fortunes to the Church and commonwealth, we had not now missed and bewailed a worthy and undoubted patron of this argument. Ye know him, I am sure; yet I, for honour's sake, and may it be eternal to him, shall name him the Lord Brook. He, writing of Episcopacy, and by the way treating of sects and schisms, left ye his vote, or rather now the last words of his dying charge, which I know will ever be of dear and honoured regard with ye, so full of meekness and breathing charity, that next to his last testament, who bequeathed love and peace to his dis- ciples, I can not call to mind where I have read or heard words more mild and peaceful. He there exhorts us to hear with patience and humility those, however they be miscalled, that desire to live purely, in such a use of God's ordinances as the best guidance of their conscience gives them, and to tolerate them, though in some disconformity to ourselves. The book itself will tell us more at large, be- ing published to the world and dedicated to the Parliament by him who both for his life and for his death deserves that what advice he left be not laid by without perusal. I 4 MILTON And now the time in special is by privilege to write and speak what may help to the further discussing of matters in agitation. The Temple of Janus with his two contro- versal faces might now not insignificantly be set open. And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing. He who hears what praying there is for light and clearer knowledge to be sent down among us, would think of other matters to be con- stituted beyond the discipline of Geneva, framed and fabricked already to our hands. Yet when the new light which we beg for shines in upon us, there be who envy and oppose if it come not first in at their casements. What a collusion is this, when as we are exhorted by the wise man to use diligence, to seek for wisdom as for hidden treasures early and late, that another order shall enjoin us to know nothing but by statute. When a man hath been labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowl- edge, hath furnished out his findings in all their equipage, drawn forth his reasons as it were a battle ranged, scattered, and defeated all objections in his way, calls out his adver- sary into the plain, offers him the advantage of wind and sun, if he please, only that he may try the matter by dint of argument, for his opponents then to skulk, to lay am- bushments, to keep a narrow bridge of licensing where the challenger should pass, though it be valour enough in soldiership, is but weakness and cowardice in the wars of truth. For who knows not that truth is strong next to the Almighty? She needs no policies, no stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power. Give her but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true, as the old Proteus did, who spake oracles only when he was caught and bound; but then rather she turns herself into all shapes except her own, and perhaps tunes her voice according to the time, as Micaiah did before Ahab, until she be adjured into her own likeness. Yet is it not impossible that she may have more shapes AREOPAGITICA 141 than one. What else is all that rank of things indifferent, wherein truth may be on this side or on the other without being unlike herself? What but a vain shadow else is the abolition of those ordinances, that handwriting nailed to the cross, what great purchase is this Christian liberty which Paul so often boasts of? His doctrine is that he who eats or eats not, regards a day or regards it not, may do either to the Lord. How many other things might be tolerated in peace and left to conscience had we but char- ity, and were it not the chief stronghold of our hypocrisy to be ever judging one another! I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks; the ghost of a linen decency yet haunts us. We stumble and are impatient at the least dividing of one visible con- gregation from another, though it be not in fundamentals; and through orr forwardness to suppress and our back- wardness to recover any enthralled piece of truth out of the grip of custom, we care not to keep truth separated from truth, which is the fiercest rent and disunion of all. We do not see that, while we still affect by all means a rigid external formality, we may as soon fall again into a gross conforming stupidity, a stark and dead congealment of wood and hay and stubble forced and frozen together, which is more to the sudden degenerating of a church than many subdichotomies of petty schisms. Not that I can think well of every light separation, or that all in a church is to be expected gold and silver and precious stones; it is not possible for man to sever the wheat from the tares, the good fish from the other fry; that must be the angels' ministry at the end of mortal things. Yet if all can not be of one mind as who looks they should be? this doubt- less is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian: that many be tolerated rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated Popery and open superstition, which as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpated, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and misled; that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or manners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw itself; but those neighbouring differences, or rather indifferences, are what I speak of, 10 1 4 2 MILTON whether in some point of doctrine or of discipline, which though they may be many, yet need not interrupt the unity of spirit, if we could but find among us the bond of peace. In the meanwhile if any one would write, and bring his helpful hand to the slow-moving reformation which we labour under, if truth have spoken to him before others, or but seemed at least to speak, who hath so bejesuited us that we should trouble that man with asking license to do so worthy a deed? And not consider this, that if it come to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be pro- hibited than truth itself whose first appearance to our eyes, bleared and dimmed with prejudice and custom, is more unsightly and unplausible than many errors, even as the person is of many a great man slight and contemptible to see to. And what do they tell us vainly of new opin- ions, when this very opinion of theirs, that none must be heard but whom they like, is the worst and newest opinion of all others; and is the chief cause why sects and schisms do so much abound, and true knowledge is kept at dis- tance from us? Besides yet a greater danger which is in it: for when God shakes a kingdom with strong and health- ful commotions to a general reforming, it is not untrue that many sectaries and false teachers are then busiest in seducing; but yet more true it is that God then raises to his own work men of rare abilities and more than common industry, not only to look back and revise what hath been taught heretofore, but to gain further and go on some new enlightened steps in the discovery of truth. For such is the order of God's enlightening his Church, to dispense and deal out by degrees his beam, so as our earthly eyes may best sustain it. Neither is God appointed and confined, where and out of what place these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for he sees not as man sees, chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again to set places and assemblies and outward callings of men, planting our faith one while in the old Convocation house, and another while in the chapel at Westminster; when all the faith and religion that shall be there canonized is not sufficient, without plain convincement and the charity of patient instruction, to supple the least bruise of con- science, to edify the meanest Christian, who desires to walk AREOPAGITICA j^ in the spirit and not in the letter of human trust, for all the number of voices that can be there made; no, though Harry VII himself there, with all his liege tombs about him, should lend them voices from the dead to swell their number. And if the men be erroneous who appear to be the leading schismatics, what withholds us but our sloth, our self-will, and distrust in the right cause, that we do not give them gentle meetings and gentle dismissions, that we debate not and examine the matter thoroughly with liberal and frequent audience; if not for their sakes, yet for our own, seeing no man who hath tasted learning but will con- fess the many ways of profiting by those who, not con- tented with stale receipts, are able to manage and set forth new positions to the world? And were they but as the dust and cinders of our feet, so long as in that notion they may serve to polish and brighten the armoury of truth, even for that respect they were not utterly to be cast away. But if they be of those whom God hath fitted for the special use of these times with eminent and ample gifts, and those, perhaps, neither among the priests nor among the Phari- sees, and we, in the haste of a precipitant zeal, shall make no distinction, but resolve to stop their mouths, because we fear they come with new and dangerous opinions, as we commonly forejudge them ere we understand them, no> less then woe to us, while, thinking thus to defend the Gospel, we are found the persecutors. There have been not a few since the beginning of this Parliament, both of the presbytery and others, who by their unlicensed books to the contempt of an imprimatur first broke that triple ice clung about our hearts, and taught the people to see day. I hope that none of those were the persuaders to renew upon us this bondage which they themselves have wrought so much good by contemn- ing. But if neither the check that. Moses gave to young Joshua, nor the countermand which our Saviour gave to young John, who was so ready to prohibit those whom he thought unlicensed, be not enough to admonish our elders how unacceptable to God their testy mood of pro- hibiting is, if neither their own remembrance what evil hath abounded in the Church by this let of licensing, and what good they themselves have begun by transgressing 144 MILTON it, be not enough, but that they will persuade and execute the most Dominican part of the Inquisition over us, and are already with one foot in the stirrup so active in suppress- ing, it would be no unequal distribution in the first place to suppress the suppressors themselves, whom the change of their condition hath puffed up more than their late ex- perience of harder times hath made wise. And as for regulating the press, let no man think to have the honour of advising ye better than yourselves have done in that order published next before this: that no book be printed, unless the printer's and the author's name, or at least the printer's, be registered. Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy that man's prevention can use. For this authentic Spanish policy of licensing books, if I have said aught, will prove the most unlicensed book itself within a short while; and was the immediate image of a Star Chamber decree to that purpose made in those very times when that court did the rest of those her pious works, for which she is now fallen from the stars with Lucifer. Whereby ye may guess what kind of state pru- dence, what love of the people, what care of religion or good manners there was at the contriving, although with singular hypocrisy it pretended to bind books to their good behaviour. And how it got the upper hand of your pre- cedent order so well constituted before, if we may believe those men whose profession gives them cause to inquire most, it may be doubted there was in it the fraud of some old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of book-sell- ing, who, under pretence of the poor in their company not to be defrauded, and the just retaining of each man his several copy, which God forbid should be gainsaid, brought divers glozing colours to the House, which were indeed but colours, and serving to no end except it be to exercise a superiority over their neighbours, men who do not there- fore labour in an honest profession to which learning is indebted, that they should be made other men's vassals. Another end is thought was aimed at by some of them in procuring by petition this order, that having power in their hands, malignant books might the easier escape abroad, AREOPAGITICA 145 as the event shows. But of these sophisms and elenchs of merchandise I skill not. This I know, that errors in a good government and in a bad are equally almost inci- dent; for what magistrate may not be misinformed, and much the sooner, if liberty of printing be reduced into the power of a few? But to redress willingly and speedily what hath been erred, and in highest authority to esteem a plain advertisement more than others have done a sumptuous bribe, is a virtue (honoured Lords and Commons) answer- able to your highest actions, and whereof none can par- ticipate but greatest and wisest men. A DISCOURSE, BY WAY OF VISION, CONCERNING THE GOVERN- MENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL BY ABRAHAM COWLEY ABRAHAM COWLEY was the posthumous son of a London tradesman, and was born in that city in 1618. His mother had a copy of Spenser, and from reading this the boy (as he himself relates) determined to be a poet. At the age of ten he wrote a tragical poem, and at the age of twelve another. He was sent to Westminster School, and there pro- duced a comedy. In 1636 he was entered as a student at Cambridge, where he continued to write plays and poems, in Latin and in English. He saw Prince Charles when he passed through Cambridge on his way to York, and became an ardent Royalist so ardent that he had to leave Cambridge. He went to Paris, became secretary to Lord Jermin, and spent nearly all his time in "ciphering and deciphering the letters that passed between the king and the queen." In 1656 he was sent to Eng- land, where he was arrested as a spy, and found difficulty in securing a release on bail. He published his poems that year, and in the preface declared that " his desire had been for some time past, and did even now vehemently continue, to retire himself to some of the American planta- tions and to forsake this world forever." He obtained the degree of Doctor of Physic in 1657, studied botany, and practised as a physician. At the Restoration he expected a reward for his loyalty, but he did not get it ; and his old comedy, rewritten, was brought out under a new name, when it was mistaken for a satire on the Royalists and was a fail- ure. He was reduced to poverty, and obliged to give up any hope of living either by political preferment or by literary production. Obtain- ing a lease of farm lands in Surrey, he tried agriculture ; but in this he was hardly more fortunate. He wrote to a friend, " I can get no money from my tenants, and my meadows are eaten up every night by cattle put in by my neighbours." He died at the Porch House, Chertsey, July 28, 1667. The recognition that he failed to get in life was accorded to him after death. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, near Chaucer and Spenser, the king pronounced a eulogy upon him, and the Duke of Buckingham erected a monument. His poetry, once thought to be great, has long since gone out of fashion ; but his essays hold their place among the classics of English prose. The poet Campbell wrote, "Cowley's prose stamps him as a man of genius and an improver of the English language." THE GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL IT was the funeral day of the late man who made him- self to be called Protector. And though I bore but little affection either to the memory of him or to the trouble and folly of all public pageantry, yet I was forced, by the importunity of my company, to go along with them, and be a spectator of that solemnity, the expectation of which had been so great, that it was said to have brought some very curious persons (and no doubt singular vir- tuosos) as far as from the Mount in Cornwall, and from the Orcades. I found there had been much more cost bestowed than either the dead man, or indeed death itself, could deserve. There was a mighty train of black assist- ants, among which, too, divers princes in the persons of their ambassadors (being infinitely afflicted for the loss of their brother) were pleased to attend; the hearse was mag- nificent, the idol crowned, and (not to mention all other ceremonies which are practised at royal interments, and therefore by no means could be omitted here) the vast mul- titude of spectators made up, as it uses to do, no small part of the spectacle itself. But yet, I know not how, the whole was so managed that, methought, it somewhat repre- sented the life of him for whom it was made: much noise, much tumult, much expense, much magnificence, much vainglory; briefly, a great show; and yet, after all this, but an ill sight. At last (for it seemed long to me, and, like his short reign too, very tedious) the whole scene passed by, and I retired back to my chamber, weary, and I think more melancholy than any of the mourners, where I began to reflect on the whole life of this prodigious man; and sometimes I was filled with horror and detesta- 149 1 50 COWLEY tion of his actions, and sometimes I inclined a little to reverence an admiration of his courage, conduct, and suc- cess; till, by these different motions and agitations of mind, rocked, as it were, asleep, I fell at last into this vision; or if you please to call it but a dream, I shall not take it ill, because the father of poets tells us even dreams, too, are from God. But sure it was no dream, for I was suddenly trans- ported afar off (whether in the body, or out of the body, like St. Paul, I know not) and found myself on the top of that famous hill in the island Mona, which has the pros- pect of three great, and not-long-since most happy, king- doms. As soon as ever I looked on them, the not-long- since struck upon my memory, and called forth the sad representation of all the sins and all the miseries that had overwhelmed them these twenty years. And I wept bitterly for two or three hours; and, when my present stock of moisture was all wasted, I fell a-sighing for an hour more; and as soon as I recovered from my passion the use of speech and reason, I broke forth, as I remember (looking upon England), into this complaint: " Ah, happy isle, how art thou changed and curst, Since I was born, and knew thee first! When peace, which had forsook the world around, (Frighted with noise, and the shrill trumpet's sound) Thee, for a private place of rest, And a secure retirement, chose Wherein to build her halcyon nest; No wind durst stir abroad, the air to discompose. " When all the riches of the globe beside Flowed in to thee with every tide: When all, that Nature did thy soil deny, The growth was of thy fruitful industry; When all the proud and dreadful sea And all his tributary streams, A constant tribute paid to thee, When all the liquid world was one extended Thames; " When plenty in each village did appear, And bounty was its steward there; When gold walked free about in open view, Ere it one conquering party's prisoner grew; When the religion of our state Had face and substance with her voice, Ere she, by her foolish loves of late, Like echo (once a nymph) turned only into noise. GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 15! " When men to men respect and friendship bore, And God with reverence did adore; When upon earth no kingdom could have shown A happier monarch to us than our own; And yet his subjects by him were (Which is a truth will hardly be Received by any vulgar ear, A secret known to few) made happier ev'n than he. " Thou dost a chaos, and confusion now, A babel, and a bedlam, grow, And, like a frantic person, thou dost tear The ornaments and cloaths, which thou shouldst wear, And cut thy limbs; and, if we see (Just as thy barbarous Britons did) Thy body with hypocrisy Painted all o'er, thou think'st, thy naked shame is hid. " The nations, which envied thee erewhile, Now laugh (too little 'tis to smile): They laugh, and would have pitied thee (alas!) But that lay faults all pity do surpass. Art thou the country, which didst hate And mock the French inconstancy? And have we, have we seen of late Less change of habits there than governments in thee? " Unhappy isle! no ship of thine at sea Was ever tossed and torn like thee. Thy naked hulk loose on the waves does beat, The rocks and banks around her ruin threat; What did thy foolish pilots ail, To lay the compass quite aside? Without a law or rule to sail, And rather take the winds, than heavens, to be their guide? " Yet, mighty God, yet, yet, we humbly crave, This floating isle from shipwreck save; And though, to wash that blood which does it stain, It well deserve to sink into the main; Yet, for the royal martyr's prayer, (The royal martyr prays, we know) This guilty, perishing vessel spare; Hear but his soul above, and not his blood below." I think I should have gone on, but that I was inter- rupted by a strange and terrible apparition; for there ap- peared to me (arising out of the earth, 1 as I conceived) the figure of a man, taller than a giant, or, indeed, the shadow of any giant in the evening. His body was naked, but that nakedness adorned, or rather deformed all over, with several figures, after the manner of the ancient Britons, painted upon it; and I perceived that most of them were 152 COWLEY the representation of the late battles in our civil wars, and (if I be not much mistaken) it was the battle of Naseby that was drawn upon his breast. His eyes were like burn- ing brass, and there were three crowns of the same metal (as I guessed), and that looked as red-hot, too, upon his head. 2 He held in his right hand a sword that was yet bloody, and nevertheless the motto of it was, Pax quaeritur bello; and in his left hand a thick book, upon the back of which was written in letters of gold, Acts, Ordinances, Protestations, Covenants, Engagements, Declarations, Re- monstrances, etc. Though this sudden, unusual, and dreadful object might have quelled a greater courage than mine, yat so it pleased God (for there is nothing bolder than a man in a vision) that I was not at all daunted, but asked him reso- lutely and briefly, "What art thou? " And he said, "I am called the northwest principality, his highness, the Pro- tector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the dominions belonging thereunto; for I am that angel to whom the Almighty has committed the gov- ernment of those three kingdoms, which thou seest from this place." And I answered and said : " If it be so, sir, it seems to me that for almost these twenty years past your highness has been absent from your charge; for not only if any angel, but if any wise and honest man, had since that time been our governor, we should not have wandered thus long in these laborious and endless labyrinths of confusion, but either not have entered at all into them, or at least have returned back ere we had absolutely lost our way; but, instead of your highness, we have had since such a protector as was his predecessor Richard III to the king his nephew; for he presently slew the com- monwealth, which he pretended to protect, and set up himself in the place of it; a little less guilty, indeed, in one respect, because the other slew an innocent, and this man did but murder a murderer. 3 Such a protector we have had, as we would have been glad to have changed for an enemy, and rather received a constant Turk than this every month's apostate; such a protector, as man is to his flocks, which he shears, and sells, or devours him- self; and I would fain know what the wolf, which he pro- GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL tects him from, could do more? Such a protector- 153 and as I was proceeding, methought, his highness began to put on a displeased and threatening countenance, as men use to do when their dearest friends happen to be traduced in their company; which gave me the first rise of jealousy against him, for I did not believe that Crom- well, among all his foreign correspondences, had ever held any with angels. However, I was not hardened enough to venture a quarrel with him then; and therefore (as if I had spoken to the Protector himself in Whitehall) I de- sired him that " his highness would please to pardon me if I had unwittingly spoken anything to the disparage- ment of a person whose relations to his highness I had not the honour to know." At which he told me that " he had no other concern- ment for his late highness than as he took him to be the greatest man that ever was of the English nation, if not " (said he) " of the whole world, which gives me a just title to the defence of his reputation, since I now account my- self, as it were, a naturalized English angel, by having had so long the management of the affairs of that countrey. And pray,countreyman," said he, very kindly and very flat- teringly, " for I would not have you fall into the general error of the world, that detests and decries so extraordi- nary a virtue what can be more extraordinary than that a person of mean birth, no fortune, no eminent qualities of body, which have sometimes, or of mind, which have often, raised men to the highest dignities, should have the courage to attempt, and the happiness to succeed in, so improbable a design as the destruction of one of the most ancient and most solidly founded monarchies upon the earth? that he should have the power or boldness to put his prince and master to an open and infamous death; to banish that numerous and strongly allied family; to do all this under the name and wages of a Parliament; to tram- ple upon them too as he pleased, and spurn them out of doors, when he grew weary of them; to raise up a new and unheard-of monster out of their ashes; to stifle that in the very infancy, and set up himself above all things that ever were called sovereign in England; to oppress all his enemies by arms, and all his friends afterward by arti- COWLEY fice; to serve all parties patiently for awhile, and to com- mand them victoriously at last; to overrun each corner of the three nations, and overcome with equal facility both the riches of the south and the poverty of the north; to be feared and courted by all foreign princes, and adopted a brother to the gods of the earth; to call together Parlia- ments with a word of his pen, and scatter them again with the breath of his mouth; to be humbly and daily petitioned that he would please to be hired, at the rate of two mil- lions a year, to be the master of those who had hired him before to be their servant; to have the estates and lives of three kingdoms as much at his disposal as was the little in- heritance of his father, and to be as noble and liberal in the spending of them; and lastly (for there is no end of all the particulars of his glory) to bequeath all this with one word to his posterity; to die with peace at home, and triumph abroad ; to be buried among kings, and with more than regal solemnity; and to leave a name behind him, not to be extinguished but with the whole world; which, as it is now too little for his praises, so might have been too for his conquests, if the short line of his human life could have been stretched out to the extent of his immor- tal designs? " 4 By this speech, I began to understand perfectly well what kind of angel his pretended highness was; and hav- ing fortified myself privately with a short mental prayer, and with the sign of the cross (not out of any superstition to the sign, but as a recognition of my baptism in Christ), 5 I grew a little bolder, and replied in this manner: " I should not venture to oppose what you are pleased to say in commendation of the late great, and (I confess) extraordi- nary person, but that I remember Christ forbids us to give assent to any other doctrine but what himself has taught us, even though it should be delivered by an angel; and if such you be, sir, it may be you have spoken all this rather to try than to tempt my frailty, for sure I am that we must renounce or forget all the laws of the New and Old Testament, and those which are the foundation of both, even the laws of moral and natural honesty, if we approve of the actions of that man whom I suppose you commend by irony. GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 155 ' There would be no end to instance particulars of all his wickedness, but to sum up a part of it briefly: What can be more extraordinarily wicked than for a person, such as yourself qualify him rightly, to endeavour not only to exalt himself above, but to trample upon, all his equals and betters? to pretend freedom for all men, and under the help of that pretence to make all men his servants? to take arms against taxes of scarce two hundred thousand pounds a year, and to raise them himself to above two millions? to quarrel for the loss of three or four ears, and strike off three or four hundred heads? to fight against an imaginary suspicion of I know not what two thousand guards to be fetched for the king, I know not from whence, and to keep up for himself no less than forty thousand? to pretend the defence of Parliaments, and violently to dis- solve all even of his own calling, and almost choosing? to undertake the reformation of religion, to rob it even to the very skin, and then to expose it naked to the rage of all sects and heresies? to set up counsels of rapine, and courts of murder? to fight against the king under a com- mission for him; to take him forcibly out of the hands of those for whom he had conquered him; to draw him into his net, with protestations and vows of fidelity; and when he had caught him in it, to butcher him, with as little shame as conscience or humanity, in the open face of the whole world? to receive a commission for the king and Parliament, to murder (as I said) the one, and destroy no less impudently the other? to fight against monarchy when he declared for it, and declare against it when he contrived for it in his own person? to abuse perfidiously and supplant ingratefully his own general 6 first, and after- ward most of those officers who, with the loss of their honour and hazard of their souls, had lifted him up to the top of his unreasonable ambitions? to break his faith with all enemies and with all friends equally? and to make no less frequent use of the most solemn perjuries than the looser sort of people do of customary oaths? to usurp three kingdoms without any shadow of the least pretensions, and to govern them as unjustly as he got them? to set himself up as an idol (which we know, as St. Paul says, in itself is nothing), and make the very streets of London 156 COWLEY like the valley of Hinnon, by burning the bowels of men as a sacrifice to his molochship? 7 to seek to entail this usurpation upon his posterity, and with it an endless war upon the nation? and lastly, by the severest judgment of Almighty God, to die hardened, and mad, and unrepentant, with the curses of the present age, and the detestation of all to succeed? " Though I had much more to say (for the life of man is so short that it allows not time enough to speak against a tyrant) ; yet because I had a mind to hear how my strange adversary would behave himself upon this subject, and to give even the devil (as they say) his right, and fair play in a disputation, I stopped here, and expected (not without the frailty of a little fear) that he should have broken into a violent passion in behalf of his favourite; but he on the contrary very calmly, and with the dovelike innocency of a serpent that was not yet warmed enough to sting, thus replied to me: " It is not so much out of my affection to that person whom we discourse of (whose greatness is too solid to be shaken by the breath of any oratory), as for your own sake (honest countreyman), whom I conceive to err rather by mistake than out of malice, that I shall endeavour to re- form your uncharitable and unjust opinion. And, in the first place, I must needs put you in mind of a sentence of the most ancient of the heathen divines, that you men are acquainted withal: ' 'Tis wicked with insulting feet to tread Upon the monuments of the dead.' And the intention of the reproof there is no less proper for this subject, for it is spoken to a person who was proud and insolent against those dead men to whom he had been humble and obedient while they lived." " Your highness may please," said I, " to add the verse that follows, as no less proper for this subject: " ' Whom God's just doom and their own sins have sent Already to their punishment/ " But I take this to be the rule in the case, that, when we fix any infamy upon deceased persons, it should not be GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 157 done out of hatred to the dead, but out of love and charity to the living; that the curses, which only remain in men's thoughts, and dare not come forth against tyrants (because they are tyrants) while they are so, may at least be forever settled and engraven upon their memories, to deter all others from the like wickedness; which else, in the time of their foolish prosperity, the flattery of their own hearts and of other men's tongues would not suffer them to per- ceive. Ambition is so subtle a tempter, and the corrup- tion of human nature so susceptible of the temptation that a man can hardly resist it, be he never so much forewarned of the evil consequences; much less if he find not only the concurrence of the present, but the approbation, too, of following ages, which have the liberty to judge more freely. The mischief of tyranny is too great, even in the shortest time that it can continue; it is endless and insupportable, if the example be to reign too, and if a Lambert must be invited to follow the steps of a Cromwell, as well by the voice of honour as by the sight of power and riches. Though it may seem to some fantastically, yet was it wisely done of the Syracusans to implead with the forms of their ordinary justice to condemn and destroy even the statues of all their tyrants; if it were possible to cut them out of all history, and to extinguish their very names, I am of opin- ion that it ought to be done; but, since they have left be- hind them too deep wounds to be ever closed up without a scar, at least let us set such a mark upon their memory that men of the same wicked inclinations may be no less affrighted with their lasting ignominy than enticed by their momentary glories. And that your highness may perceive that I speak not all this out of any private animosity against the person of the late protector, I assure you, upon my faith, that I bear no more hatred to his name than I do to that of Marius or Sylla, who never did me, or any friend of mine, the least injury"; and with that, trans- ported by a holy fury, I fell into this sudden rapture: " Curst be the man (what do I wish? as though The wretch already were not so; But curst on let him be) who thinks it brave And great, his countrey 8 to enslave, Who seeks to overpoise alone The balance of a nation, 158 COWLEY Against the whole but naked state, Who in his own light scale makes up with arms the weight. " Who of his nation loves to be the first, Though at the rate of being worst. Who would be rather a great monster than A well-proportioned man. The son of earth with hundred hands Upon his three-piled mountain stands, Till thunder strikes him from the sky; The son of earth again in his earth's womb does lie. " What blood, confusion, ruin, to obtain A short and miserable reign! In what oblique and humble creeping wise Does the mischievous serpent rise! But even his forked tongue strikes dead: When he's reared up his wicked head, He murders with his mortal frown; A basilisk he grows, if once he get a crown. " But no guards can oppose assaulting fears, Or undermining tears, No more than doors or close-drawn curtains keep The swarming dreams out, when we sleep. That bloody conscience, too, of his (For, oh, a rebel red-coat 'tis) Does here his early hell begin, He sees his slaves without, his tyrant feels within. " Let, gracious God, let never more thine hand Lift up this rod against our land. A tyrant is a rod and serpent too, And brings worse plagues than Egypt knew. What rivers stained with blood have been! What storm and hail-shot have we seen! What sores deformed the ulcerous state! What darkness, to be felt, has buried us of late! " How has it snatched our flocks and herds away! And made even of our sons a prey! What croaking sects and vermin has it sent, The restless nation to torment! What greedy troops, what armed power Of flies and locusts, to devour The land, which everywhere they fill! Nor fly they, Lord, away; no, they devour it still. " Come the eleventh plague, rather than this should be; Come sink us rather in the sea. Come, rather, pestilence, and reap us down; Come God's sword rather than our own, Let rather Roman come again, Or Saxon, Norman, or the Dane: In all the bonds we ever bore, We grieved, we sighed, we wept; we never blushed before. GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 159 " If by our sins the divine justice be Called to this last extremity, Let some denouncing Jonas first be sent, To try, if England can repent. Methinks, at least, some prodigy, Some dreadful comet from on high, Should terribly forewarn the earth, As of good princes' deaths, so of a tyrant's birth." Here, the spirit of verse beginning a little to fail, I stopped, and his highness, smiling, said: "I was glad to see you engaged in the inclosure of metre; for, if you had stayed in the open plain of declaiming against the word Tyrant, I must have had patience for half a dozen hours, till you had tired yourself as well as me. But pray, coun- treyman, to avoid this sciomachy, or imaginary combat with words, let me know, sir, what you mean by the name tyrant, for I remember that, among your ancient authors, not only all kings, but even Jupiter himself (your juvans pater), is so termed; and perhaps, as it was used formerly in a good sense, so we shall find it, upon better considera- tion, to be still a good thing for the benefit and peace of mankind; at least, it will appear whether your interpreta- tion of it may be justly applied to the person who is now the subject of our discourse." " I call him," said I, " a tyrant, who either intrudes himself forcibly into the government of his fellow-citizens without any legal authority over them; or who, having a just title to the government of a people, abuses it to the destruction, or tormenting, of them. So that all tyrants are at the same time usurpers, either of the whole, or at least of a part, of that power which they assume to them- selves; and no less are they to be accounted rebels, since no man can usurp authority over others, but by rebelling against them who had it before, or at least against those laws which were his superiors: and in all these senses no history can afford us a more evident example of tyranny, or more out of all possibility of excuse or palliation, than that of the person whom you are pleased to defend; whether we consider his reiterated rebellions against all his superiors, or his usurpation of the supreme power to him- self, or his tyranny in the exercise of it; and, if lawful princes have been esteemed tyrants, by not containing themselves within the bounds of those laws which have l6o COWLEY been left them, as the sphere of their authority, by their forefathers, what shall we say of that man who, having by right no power at all in this nation, could not content himself with that which had satisfied the most ambitious of our princes? nay, not with those vastly extended limits of sovereignty, which he (disdaining all that had been prescribed and observed before) was pleased (out of great modesty) to set to himself; not abstaining from rebellion and usurpation even against his own laws, as well as those of the nation? " " Hold, friend," said his highness, pulling me by my arm, " for I see your zeal is transporting you again ; whether the Protector were a tyrant in the exorbitant ex- ercise of his power we shall see anon; it is requisite to examine, first, whether he were so in the usurpation of it. And I say that not only he, but no man else, ever was or can be so; and that for these reasons: First, because all power belongs only to God, who is the source and fountain of it, as kings are of all honours in their do- minions. Princes are but his viceroys in the little prov- inces of this world; and to some he gives their places for a few years, to some for their lives, and to others (upon ends or deserts best known to himself, or merely for his undisputable good pleasure) he bestows, as it were, leases upon them, and their posterity, for such a date of time as is prefixed in that patent of their destiny which is not legible to you men below. Neither is it more unlawful for Oliver to succeed Charles in the kingdom of England, when God so disposes of it, than it had been for him to have succeeded the Lord Strafford in his lieutenancy of Ireland, if he had been appointed to it by the king then reigning. Men are in both the cases obliged to obey him whom they see actually invested with the authority by that sovereign from whom he ought to derive it, with- out disputing or examining the causes, either of the re- moval of the one or the preferment of the other. Sec- ondly, because all power is attained, either by the election and consent of the people (and that takes away your ob- jection of forcible intrusion); or else, by a conquest of them (and that gives such a legal authority as you mention to be wanting in the usurpation of a tyrant); so that either GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 161 this title is right, and then there are no usurpers, or else it is a wrong one, and then there are none else but usurpers, if you examine the original pretences of the princes of the world. Thirdly (which, quitting the dispute in general, is a particular justification of his highness), the government of England was totally broken and dissolved, and extinguished by the confusions of a civil war, so that his highness could not be accused to have possessed him- self violently of the ancient building of the commonwealth, but to have prudently and peacefully built up a new one out of the ruins and ashes of the former; and he who, after a deplorable shipwreck, can with extraordinary industry gather together the dispersed and broken planks and pieces of it, and with no less wonderful art and felicity so rejoin them as to make a new vessel more tight and beautiful than the old one, deserves, no doubt, to have the com- mand of her (even as his highness had) by the desire of the seamen and passengers themselves. And do but consider, lastly (for I omit a multitude of weighty things that might be spoken upon this noble argument), do but consider seriously and impartially with yourself what admirable parts of wit and prudence, what indefatigable diligence and invincible courage, must, of necessity, have con- curred in the person of that man, who, from so contempt- ible beginnings (as I observed before), and through so many thousand difficulties, was able not only to make him- self the greatest and most absolute monarch of this nation, but to add to it the entire conquest of Ireland and Scotland (which the whole force of the world, joined with the Roman virtue, could never attain to), and to crown all this with illustrious and heroical undertakings and suc- cesses upon all our foreign enemies; do but (I say again) consider this, and you will confess that his prodigious merits were a better title to imperial dignity than the blood of a hundred royal progenitors; and will rather lament that he had lived not to overcome more nations than envy him the conquest and dominion of these." " Whoever you are," said I, my indignation making me somewhat bolder, " your discourse, methinks, becomes as little the person of a tutelar angel as Cromwell's actions did that of a protector. It is upon these principles that !6 2 COWLEY all the great crimes of the world have been committed, and most particularly those which I have had the misfor- tune to see in my own time and in my own countrey. If these be to be allowed, we must break up human society, retire into woods, and equally there stand upon our guards against our brethren mankind, and our rebels the wild beasts. For, if there can be no usurpation upon the rights of a whole nation, there can be none, most certainly, upon those of a private person; and, if the robbers of countreys be God's vicegerents, there is no doubt but the thieves and banditos and murderers are his under officers. It is true, which you say, that God is the source and fountain of all power; and it is no less true that he is the creator of serpents as well as angels; nor does his goodness fail of its ends even in the malice of his own creatures. What power he suffers the devil to exercise in this world is too apparent by our daily experience; and by nothing more than the late monstrous iniquities which you dispute for, and patronize in England. But would you infer from thence that the power of the devil is a just and lawful one, and that all men ought, as well as most men do, obey him? God is the fountain of all powers; but some flow from the right hand, as it were, of his goodness, and others from the left hand of his justice; and the world, like an island between these two rivers, is sometimes refreshed and nour- ished by the one and sometimes overrun and ruined by the other; and (to continue a little further the allegory) we are never overwhelmed with the latter till, either by our malice or negligence, we have stopped and dammed up the former. " But to come a little closer to your argument, or rather the image of an argument, your similitude. If Cromwell had come to command in Ireland in the place of the late Lord Strafford, I should have yielded obedience, not for the equipage, and the strength, and the guards which he brought with him, but for the commission which he should first have showed me from our common sovereign that sent him; and, if he could have done that from God Almighty, I would have obeyed him too in England; but that he was so far from being able to do that, on the contrary, I read nothing but commands, and even GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 163 public proclamations, from God Almighty not to ad- mit him. " Your second argument is that he had the same right for his authority that is the foundation of all others, even the right of conquest. Are we then so unhappy as to be conquered by the person whom we hired at a daily rate, like a labourer, to conquer others for us? did we furnish him with arms, only to draw and try upon our enemies (as we, it seems, falsely thought them), and keep them forever sheathed in the bowels of his friends? did we fight for liberty against our prince that we might become slaves to our servant? This is such an impudent pretence as neither he, nor any of his flatterers for him, had ever the face to mention. Though it can hardly be spoken or thought of without passion, yet I shall, if you please, argue it more calmly than the case deserves. " The right, certainly, of conquest can only be exercised upon those against whom the war is declared and the vic- tory obtained. So that no whole nation can be said to be conquered but by foreign force. In all civil wars, men are so far from stating the quarrel against their countrey that they do it only against a person or party which they really believe, or at least pretend, to be pernicious to it; neither can there be any just cause for the destruction of a part of the body but when it is done for the preservation and safety of the whole. It is our countrey that raises men in the quarrel, our countrey that arms, our coun- trey that pays them, our countrey that authorizes the undertaking, and, by that, distinguishes it from rapine and murder; lastly, it is our countrey that directs and com- mands the army, and is their general. So that to say, in civil wars, that the prevailing party conquers their coun- trey is to say the countrey conquers itself. And, if the gen- eral only of that party be conqueror, the army by which he is made so is no less conquered than the army which is beaten, and have as little reason to triumph in that vic- tory, by which they lose both their honour and liberty. So that if Cromwell conquered any party, it was only that against which he was sent; and what that was must ap- pear by his commission. It was (says that) against a com- pany of evil counsellors and disaffected persons, who kept 164 COWLEY the king from a good intelligence and compunction with his people. It was not then against the people. It is so far from being so that even of that party which was beaten the conquest did not belong to Cromwell, but to the Par- liament which employed him in their service, or rather, indeed, to the king and Parliament, for whose service (if there had been any faith in men's vows and protestations) the wars were undertaken. Merciful God! did the right of this miserable conquest remain, then, in his majesty? and didst thou suffer him to be destroyed, with more bar- barity than if he had been conquered even by savages and cannibals? was it for king and Parliament that we fought, and has it fared with them just as with the army which we fought against, the one part being slain and the other fled? It appears therefore plainly that Cromwell was not a conqueror, but a thief and robber of the rights of the king and Parliament, and a usurper upon those of the people. I do not here deny the conquest to be sometimes (though it be very rarely) a true title, but I deny this to be a true conquest. Sure I am that the race of our princes came not in by such a one. One nation may conquer another, sometimes, justly; and if it be unjustly, yet still it is a true conquest, and they are to answer for the in- justice only to God Almighty (having nothing else in au- thority above them), and not as particular rebels to their countrey, which is, and ought to be, their superior and their lord. If, perhaps, we find usurpation instead of conquest in the original titles of some royal families abroad (as, no doubt, there have been many usurpers before ours, though none in so impudent and execrable a manner), all I can say for them is that their title was very weak, till, by length of time, and the death of all juster pretenders, it became to be the true because it was the only one. " Your third defence of his highness (as your highness pleases to call him) enters in most seasonably after his pre- tence of conquest; for then a man may say anything. The government was broken; who broke it? It was dissolved; who dissolved it? It was extinguished; who was it, but Cromwell, who not only put out the light, but cast away even the very snuff of it? As if a man should murder a whole family, and then possess himself of the house, be- GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 165 cause it is better that he than only rats should live there. Jesus God! " said I, and at that word I perceived my pretended angel to give a start and trembled; but I took no notice of it, and went on; " this were a wicked pre- tension, even though the whole family were destroyed; but the heirs (blessed be God) are yet surviving, and likely to outlive all heirs of their dispossessors, besides their in- famy. ' Rode, caper, vitem,' etc. There will be yet wine enough left for the sacrifice of those wild beasts that have made so much spoil in the vineyard. But did Cromwell think, like Nero, to set the city on fire only that he might have the honour of being founder of a new and more beautiful one? He could not have such a shadow of virtue in his wickedness; he meant only to rob more securely and more richly in the midst of the combustion; he little thought then tliat he should ever have been able to make himself master of the palace, as well as plunder the goods of the commonwealth. He was glad to see the public vessel (the sovereign of the seas) in as desperate a condi- tion as his own little canoe, and thought only, with some scattered planks of that great shipwreck, to make a better fisher-boat for himself. But when he saw that, by the drowning of the master (whom he himself treacherously knocked on the head as he was swimming for his life), by the flight and dispersion of others, and cowardly patience of the remaining company, that all was abandoned to his pleasure; with the old hulk and new misshapen and dis- agreeing pieces of his own he made up, with much ado, that piratical vessel which we have seen him command, and which how tight, indeed, it was may best be judged by its perpetual leaking. " First, then (much more wicked than those foolish daughters in the fable, who cut their old father into pieces, in hope, by charms and witchcraft, to make him young and lusty again), this man endeavoured to destroy the building, before he could imagine in what manner, with what materials, by what workmen, or what architect it was to be rebuilt. Secondly, if he had dreamed himself to be able to revive that body which he had killed, yet it had been but the insupportable insolence of an ignorant mountebank; and, thirdly (which concerns us nearest), that ii 166 COWLEY very new thing which he made out of the ruins of the old, is no more like the original, either for beauty, use, or dura- tion than an artificial plant, raised by the fire of a chemist, is comparable to the true and natural one which he first burned, that out of the ashes of it he might produce an imperfect similitude of his own making. " Your last argument is such (when reduced to syllo- gism), that the major proposition of it would make strange work in the world if it were received for truth; to wit, that he who has the best parts in a nation has the right of being king over it. We had enough to do here of old with the contention between two branches of the same family. What would become of us when every man in England should lay his claim to the government? And truly, if Cromwell should have commenced his plea, when he seems to have begun his ambition, there were few per- sons besides that might not at the same time have put in theirs too. But his deserts, I suppose, you will date from the same term that I do his great demerits, that is, from the beginning of our late calamities (for, as for his private faults before, I can only wish, and that with as much charity to him as to the public, that he had continued in them till his death, rather than changed them for those of his latter days), and therefore, we must begin the con- sideration of his greatness from the unlucky era of our own misfortunes, which puts me in mind of what was said less truly of Pompey the Great, ' Nostra miseria magnus es.' But, because the general ground of your argumenta- tion consists in this, that all men who are the effecters of extraordinary mutations in the world, must needs have extraordinary forces of Nature by which they are enabled to turn about, as they please, so great a wheel; I shall speak, first, a few words upon this universal proposition, which seems so reasonable, and is so popular, before I descend to the particular examination of the eminences of that person which is in question. " I have often observed (with all submission and resig- nation of spirit to the inscrutable mysteries of Eternal Providence), that, when the fulness and maturity of time is come, that produces the great confusions and changes in the world, it usually pleases God to make it appear, by GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 167 the manner of them, that they are not the effects of human force or policy, but of the divine justice and predestina- tion; and, though we see a man, like that which we call Jack of the clock-house, striking, as it were, the hour of that fulness of time, yet our reason must needs be con- vinced that his hand is moved by some secret, and, to us who stand without, invisible direction. And the stream of the current is then so violent that the strongest men in the world can not draw up against it; and none are so weak but they may sail down with it. These are the spring- tides of public affairs, which we see often happen, but seek in vain to discover any certain causes: " ' Omnia fluminis ' Ritu feruntur, nunc medio alveo Cum pace delabentis Etruscum In mare, nunc lapides adesos, Stirpesque raptas, et pecus, et domos Volventis una, non sine montium Clamore, vicinaeque sylvae; Cum fera diluvies quietos Irritat amnes.' (Hor., 3, Carm., xxix.) And one man then, by maliciously opening all the sluices that he can come at, can never be the sole author of all this (though he may be as guilty as if really he were, by intending and imagining to be so); but it is God that breaks up the flood-gates of so general a deluge, and all the art then, and industry of mankind, is not sufficient to raise up dikes and ramparts against it. In such a time it was, as this, that not all the wisdom and power of the Roman Senate, nor the wit and eloquence of Cicero, nor the courage and virtue of Brutus, was able to defend their countrey or themselves against the unexperienced rash- ness of a beardless boy, and the loose rage of a voluptuous madman. 10 The valour and prudent counsels, on the one side, are made fruitless, and the errors and cowardice, on the other, harmless by unexpected accidents. The one general saves his life, and gains the whole world, by a very dream; and the other loses both at once by a little mis- take of the shortness of his sight. 11 And though this be not always so, for we see that, in the translation of the great monarchies from one to another, it pleased God to make choice of the most eminent men in Nature, as Cyrus, !68 COWLEY Alexander, Scipio, and his contemporaries, for his chief instruments and actors in so admirable a work (the end of this being not only to destroy or punish one nation, which may be done by the worst of mankind, but to exalt and bless another, which is only to be effected by great and virtuous persons); yet, when God only intends the temporary chastisement of a people, he does not raise up his servant Cyrus (as he himself is pleased to call him), or an Alexander (who had as many virtues to do good as vices to do harm); but he makes the Masaniellos and the Johns of Leyden the instruments of his vengeance, that the power of the Almighty might be more evident by the weakness of the means which he chooses to demonstrate it. He did not assemble the serpents, and the monsters of Afric, to correct the pride of the Egyptians, but called for his armies of locusts out of Ethiopia, and formed new ones of vermin out of the very dust; and, because you see a whole countrey destroyed by these, will you argue from thence they must needs have had both the craft of foxes and the courage of lions? " It is easy to apply this general observation to the par- ticular case of our troubles in England, and that they seem only to be meant for a temporary chastisement of our sins, and not for a total abolishment of the old and introduction of a new government, appears probable to me from these considerations, as far as we may be bold to make a judgment of the will of God in future events. First, because he has suffered nothing to settle, or take root, in the place of that which hath been so unwisely and unjustly removed, that none % of these untempered mortars can hold out against the next blast of wind, nor any stone stick to a stone, till that which these foolish builders have refused be made again the head of the corner. For, when the indisposed and long-tormented commonwealth has wearied and spent itself almost to nothing with the charge- able, various, and dangerous experiments of several mountebanks, it is to be supposed, it will have the wit at last to send for a true physician, especially when it sees (which is the second consideration) most evidently (as it now begins to do, and will do every day more and more, and might have done perfectly long since) that no usurpa- GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 169 tion (under what name or pretext soever) can be kept up without open force, nor force without the continuance of those oppressions upon the people, which will, at last, tire out their patience, though it be great even to stupidity. They can not be so dull (when poverty and hunger begin to whet their understanding) as not to find out this no extraordinary mystery, that it is madness in a nation to pay three millions a year for the maintaining of their servi- tude under tyrants, when they might live free for nothing under their princes. This, I say, will not always lie hid, even to the slowest capacities; and the next truth they will discover afterward is that a whole people can never have the will, without having, at the same time, the power to redeem themselves. Thirdly, it does not look (methinks) as if God had forsaken the family of that man, from whom he has raised up five children, of as eminent virtue, and all other commendable qualities, as ever lived, perhaps (for so many together, and so young), in any other family in the whole world. Especially, if we add hereto this con- sideration, that, by protecting and preserving some of them already through as great dangers as ever were passed with safety, either by prince or private person, he has given them already (as we may reasonably hope it to be meant) a promise and earnest of his future favours. And, lastly (to return closely to the discourse from which I have a little digressed) because I see nothing of those excellent parts of nature, and mixture of merit with their vices, in the late disturbers of our peace and happiness, that uses to be found in the persons of those who are born for the erection of new empires. " And, I confess, I find nothing of that kind, no, not any shadow (taking away the false light of some prosper- ity) in the man whom you extol for the first example of it. And, certainly, all virtues being rightly divided into moral and intellectual, I know not how we can better judge of the former than by men's actions; or of the latter than by their writings or speeches. As for these latter (which are least in merit, or, rather, which are only the instru- ments of mischief, where the other are wanting), I think you can hardly pick out the name of a man who ever was called great, besides him we are now speaking of, who COWLEY never left the memory behind him of one wise or witty apophthegm even among his domestic servants or greatest flatterers. That little in print, which remains upon a sad record for him, is such as a satire against him would not have made him say, for fear of transgressing too much the rules of probability. I know not what you can produce for the justification of his parts in this kind, but his having been able to deceive so many particular persons, and so many whole parties; which, if you please to take notice of for the advantage of his intellectuals, I desire you to allow me the liberty to do so too when I am to speak of his morals. The truth of the thing is this, that if craft be wisdom, and dissimulation wit (assisted both and im- proved with hypocrisies and perjuries), I must not deny him to have been singular in both; but so gross was the manner in which he made use of them, that, as wise men ought not to have believed him at first, so no man was fool enough to believe him at last; neither did any man seem to do it, but those who thought they gained as much by that dissembling, as he did by his. His very actings of godliness grew at last as ridiculous, as if a player, by putting on a gown, should think he represented excellently a woman, though his beard, at the same time, were seen by all the spectators. If you ask me why they did not hiss, and explode him off the stage, I can only answer that they durst not do so, because the actors and the door- keepers were too strong for the company. I must confess that by these arts (how grossly soever managed, as by hypocritical praying and silly preaching, by unmanly tears and whinings, by falsehoods and perjuries even diabolical) he had at first the good fortune (as men call it, that is, the ill fortune) to attain his ends; but it was because his ends were so unreasonable that no human reason could foresee them; which made them who had to do with him be- lieve that he was rather a well-meaning and deluded bigot than a crafty and malicious impostor; that these arts were helped by an indefatigable industry (as you term it), I am so far from doubting that I intended to object that diligence as the worst of his crimes. It makes me almost mad when I hear a man commended for his diligence in wickedness. If I were his son I should wish to God he GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL iyi had been a more lazy person, and that we might have found him sleeping at the hours when other men are ordi- narily waking, rather than waking for those ends of his when other men were ordinarily asleep. How diligent the wicked are, the Scripture often tells us: ' Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood,' Isa. lix, 7. ' He travels with iniquity/ Ps. vii, 14. ' He xfe- viseth mischief upon his bed/ Ps. xxxiv, 4. ' They 'search out iniquity, they accomplish a diligent search/ Ps. Ixiv, 6; and in a multitude of other places. , And would it not seem ridiculous to praise a wolf for his watchfulness, and for his indefatigable industry in ranging all night about the country, while the sheep, ,and perhaps the shepherd, and perhaps the very 4ag's, too, are all asleep? ' The Chartreux wants the warning of a bell To call him to the duties of his cell; There needs no noise at all t' awaken sin, Th' adulterer and the thief his 'larum has within.' " And, if the diligence of wicked persons be so much to be blamed, as that it is only an emphasis and exaggera- tion of their wickedness, I see not how their courage can avoid the same censure. If the undertaking bold and vast and unreasonable designs can deserve that honourable name, I am sure Faux and his fellow gunpowder friends will have cause to pretend, though not an equal, yet at least the next place of honour; neither can I doubt but, if they too had succeeded, they would have found their applauders and admirers. It was bold, unquestionably, for a man, in defiance of all human and divine laws (and with so little probability of a long impunity), so publicly and so outrageously to murder his master; it was bold, with so much insolence and affront, to expel and disperse all the chief partners of his guilt, and creators of his power; it was bold to violate, so openly and so scornfully, all acts and constitutions of a nation, and afterward even of his own making; it was bold to assume the authority of call- ing, and bolder yet of breaking, so many Parliaments; it was bold to trample upon the patience of his own, and provoke that of all neighbouring countries; it was bold, I say, above all boldnesses, to usurp this tyranny to himself; and impudent above all impudences to endeavour to trans- Ij2 COWLEY mit it to his posterity. But all this boldness is so far from being a sign of manly courage (which dares not transgress the rules of any other virtue) that it is only a demonstra- tion of brutish madness or diabolical possession. In both which last cases there use frequent examples to appear, of such extraordinary force as may justly seem more won- derful and astonishing than the actions of Cromwell; neither^ 4t stranger to believe that a whole nation should not be able tp govern him and a mad army than that five or six men shotijd not be strong enough to bind a dis- tracted girl. There is no man ever succeeds in one wicked- ness but it gives him^he boldness to attempt a greater. It was boldly done of Nero to kill his mother and all the chief nobility of the empire; it was... boldly done to set the metropolis of the whole world on fire and undauntedly play upon his harp while he saw it burning; I could reckon up five hundred boldnesses of that great person (for why should not he, too, be called so?) who wanted, when he was to die, that courage which could hardly have failed any woman in the like necessity. " It would look (I must confess) like envy, or too much partiality, if I should say that personal kind of courage had been deficient in the man we speak of; I am confident it was not; and yet I may venture, I think, to affirm that no man ever bore the honour of so many victories, at the rate of fewer wounds, or dangers of his own body; and though his valour might perhaps have given him a just pretension to one of the first charges in an army, it could not certainly be a sufficient ground for a title to the com- mand of three nations. " What then shall we say? that he did all this by witch- craft? He did so, indeed, in a great measure, by a sin that is called like it in the Scriptures. But truly and unpas- sionately reflecting upon the advantages of his person, which might be thought to have produced those of his for- tune, I can espy no other but extraordinary diligence and infinite dissimulation; and believe he was exalted above his nation partly by his own faults, but chiefly for ours. " We have brought him thus briefly (not through all his labyrinths) to the supreme usurped authority; and, be- cause you say it was great pity he did not live to com- GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 173 mand more kingdoms, be pleased to let me represent to you, in a few words, how well I conceive he governed these. And we will divide the consideration into that of his foreign and domestic actions. The first of his foreign was a peace with our brethren of Holland (who were the first of our neighbours that God chastised for having had so great a hand in the encouraging and abetting our troubles at home); who would not imagine, at first glance, that this had been the most virtuous and laudable deed that his whole life could have made any parade of? But no man can look upon all the circumstances without per- ceiving that it was purely the sale and sacrificing of the greatest advantages that this countrey could ever hope, and was ready to reap, from a foreign war, to the private in- terests of his covetousness and ambition, and the security 3f his new and unsettled usurpation. No sooner is that danger past but this Beatus Pacificus is kindling a fire in the northern world, and carrying a war two thousand miles off, westward. Two millions a year (besides all the vales of his protectorship) is as little capable to suffice now either his avarice or prodigality, as the two hundred pounds were that he was born to. He must have his prey of the whole Indies, both by sea and land, this great alligator. To sat- isfy our Anti-Solomon (who has made silver almost as rare as gold, and gold as precious stones in his new Jerusalem) we must go, ten thousand of his slaves, to fetch him riches from his fantastical Ophir. And, because his flatterers brag of him as the most fortunate prince (the Faustus as well as Sylla of our nation, whom God never forsook in any of his undertakings), I desire them to consider how, since the English name was ever heard of, it never received so great and so infamous a blow as under the imprudent conduct of this unlucky Faustus; and, herein, let me ad- mire the justice of God, in this circumstance, that they, who had enslaved their countrey (though a great army, which I wish, may be observed by ours with trembling), should be so shamefully defeated by the hands of forty slaves. It was very ridiculous to see how prettily they endeavoured to hide this ignominy under the great name of the conquest of Jamaica; as if a defeated army should have the impudence to brag afterward of the victory, be- 12 i;4 COWLEY cause, though they had fled out of the field of battle, yet they quartered that night in a village of the enemies. The war with Spain was a necessary consequence of this folly, and how much we have gotten by it let the custom-house and exchange inform you; and if he please to boast of the taking a part of the silver fleet (which, indeed, nobody else but he who was the sole gainer has cause to do), at least, let him give leave to the rest of the nation (which is the only loser) to complain of the loss of twelve hundred of her ships. " But because it may here, perhaps, be answered, that his successes nearer home have extinguished the disgrace of so remote miscarriages, and that Dunkirk ought more to be remembered for his glory than St. Domingo for his disadvantage, I must confess, as to the honour of the Eng- lish courage, that they were not wanting upon that occa- sion (excepting only the fault of serving at least indirectly against their master) to the upholding of the renown of their warlike ancestors. But for his particular share of it, who sate still at home, and exposed them so frankly abroad, I can only say that, for less money than he in the short time of his reign exacted from his fellow-subjects, some of our former princes (with the daily hazard of their own persons) have added to the dominion of England not only one town, but even a greater kingdom than itself. And, this being all considerable as concerning his enter- prises abroad, let us examine, in the next place, how much we owe him for his justice and good government at home. " And first he found the commonwealth (as they then called it) in a ready stock of about eight hundred thou- sand pounds; he left the commonwealth (as he had the impudent raillery still to call it) some two millions and a half in debt. He found our trade very much decayed, indeed, in comparison of the golden times of our late princes; he left it as much again more decayed than he found it; and yet, not only no prince in England, but no tyrant in the world, ever sought out more base or infa- mous means to raise moneys. I shall only instance in one that he put in practice, and another that he attempted, but was frighted from the execution (even he) by the infamy of it. That which he put in practice was decimation, 12 GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 175 which was the most impudent breach of all public faith that the whole nation had given, and all private capitula- tions which himself had made, as the nation's general and servant, that can be found out (I believe) in all history, from any of the most barbarous generals of the most bar- barous people. Which, because it has been most excel- lently, and most largely, laid open by a whole book 13 written upon that subject, I shall only desire you here to remember the thing in general, and to be pleased to look upon that author, when you would recollect all the par- ticulars and circumstances of the iniquity. The other de- sign, of raising a present sum of money, which he violently pursued, but durst not put in execution, was by the call- ing in and establishment of the Jews at London, from which he was rebutted by the universal outcry of the divines, and e^ en of the citizens too, who took it ill, that a considerable number, at least among themselves, were not thought Jews enough by their own Herod. And for this design, they say, he invented (O Antichrist! Howjpbv and 6 TLovrjpbs !) to sell St. Paul's to them for a synagogue, if their purses and devotions could have reached to the purchase. And this, indeed, if he had done only to reward that nation which had given the first noble example of crucifying their king, it might have had some appearance of gratitude; but he did it only for love of their mammon, and would have sold afterward, for as much more, St. Peter's (even at his own Westminster) to the Turks for a mosquito. Such was his extraordinary piety to God that he desired he might be worshipped in all manners, ex- cepting only that heathenish way of the ( Common Prayer- Book.' But what do I speak of his wicked inventions for getting money; when every penny, that for almost five years he took every day from every man living in Eng- land, Scotland, and Ireland, was as much robbery as if it had been taken by a thief upon the highways? Was it not so? or can any man think that Cromwell, with the assist- ance of his forces and moss-troopers, had more right to the command of all men's purses than he might have had to any one's whom he had met, and been too strong for, on a road? And yet, when this came, in the case of Mr. Coney, 14 to be disputed by a legal trial, he (which was the COWLEY highest act of tyranny that ever was seen in England) not only discouraged and threatened, but violently imprisoned the counsel of the plaintiff; that is, he shut up the law itself close prisoner, that no man might have relief from or access to it. And it ought to be remembered that this was done by those men who a few years before had so bitterly decried and openly opposed the king's regular and formal way of proceeding in the trial of a little ship-money. " But, though we lost the benefit of our old courts of justice, it can not be denied that he set up new ones; and such they were! that as no virtuous prince before would, so no ill one durst, erect. What, have we lived so many hundred years under such a form of justice as has been able regularly to punish all men that offended against it; and is it so deficient, just now, that we must seek out new ways how to proceed against offenders? The reason which can only be given in nature for a necessity of this is, be- cause those things are now made crimes which were never esteemed so in former ages; and there must needs be a new court set up to punish that which all the old ones were bound to protect and reward. But I am so far from declaiming (as you call it) against these wickednesses (which, if I should undertake to do, I should never get to the peroration), that you see I only give a hint of some few, and pass over the rest, as things that are too many to be numbered, and must only be weighed in gross. Let any man show me (for, though I pretend not to much read- ing, I will defy him in all history), let any man show me (I say) an example of any nation in the world (though much greater than ours) where there have, in the space of four years, been made so many prisoners, only out of the endless jealousies of one tyrant's guilty imagination. I grant you that Marius and Sylla, and the accursed trium- virate after them, put more people to death; but the rea- son, I think, partly was because in those times, that had a mixture of some honour with their madness, they thought it a more civil revenge against a Roman to take away his life than to take away his liberty. But truly, in the point of murder, too, we have little reason to think that our late tyranny has been deficient to the examples that have ever been set it in other countries. Our judges GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 177 and our courts of justice have not been idle, and, to omit the whole reign of our late king (till the beginning of the war), in which no drop of blood was ever drawn but from two or three ears, I think the longest time of our worst princes scarce saw many more executions than the short one of our blest reformer. And we saw and smelt in our open streets (as I marked to you at first) the broiling of human bowels as a burnt-offering of a sweet savour to our idol; but all murdering, and all torturing (though after the subtilest invention of his predecessors of Sicily), is more humane and more supportable than his selling of Christians, Englishmen, gentlemen; his selling of them (oh, monstrous! oh, incredible!) to be slaves in America. If his whole life could be reproached with no other action, yet this alone would weigh down all the multiplicity of crimes in any cf our tyrants; and I dare only touch, with- out stopping or insisting upon so insolent and so exe- crable a cruelty, for fear of falling into so violent (though a just) passion, as would make me exceed that temper and moderation which I resolve to observe in this discourse with you. " These are great calamities, but even these are not the most insupportable that we have endured; for so it is, that the scorn, and mockery, and the insultings of an enemy are more painful than the deepest wounds of his serious fury. This man was wanton and merry (unwittily and un- gracefully merry) with our sufferings: he loved to say and do senseless and fantastical things, only to show his power of doing or saying anything. It would ill befit mine, or any civil mouth, to repeat those words which he spoke con- cerning the most sacred of our English laws, the Petition of Right, and Magna Charta. 15 To-day you should see him ranting so wildly that nobody durst come near him; the morrow, flinging of cushions, and playing at snow- balls with his servants. This month he assembles a Parlia- ment, and professes himself, with humble tears, to be only their servant and their minister; the next month he swears by the living God that he will turn them out of doors, and he does so, in his princely way of threatening, bid- ding them ' Turn the buckles of their girdles behind them/ The representative of whole, nay, of three whole COWLEY nations, was, in his esteem, so contemptible a meeting, that he thought the affronting and expelling of them to be a thing of so little consequence as not to deserve that he should advise with any mortal man about it. What shall we call this? boldness or brutishness? rashness or frenzy? There is no name can come up to it; and therefore we must leave it without one. Now, a Parliament must be chosen in the new manner, next time in the old form, but all cashiered still after the newest mode. Now he will gov- ern by major-generals, now by one House, now by another House, now by no House; now the freak takes him, and he makes seventy peers of the land at one clap (extempore, and stans pede in uno); and, to manifest the absolute power of the potter, he chooses not only the worst clay he could find, but picks up even the dirt and mire to form out of it his vessels of honour. It was said anciently of Fortune that, when she had a mind to be merry, and to divert herself, she was wont to raise up such kind of people to the highest dignities. This son of Fortune, Cromwell (who was himself one of the primest of her jests), found out the true haut-gout of this pleasure, and rejoiced in the extravagance of his ways, as the fullest demonstra- tion of his uncontrollable sovereignty. Good God ! What have we seen? and what have we suffered? what do all these actions signify? what do they say aloud to the whole nation, but this (even as plainly as if it were proclaimed by heralds through the streets of London), * You are slaves and fools, and so I will use you ! ' " These are, briefly, a part of those merits which you lament to have wanted the reward of more kingdoms, and suppose that, if he had lived longer, he might have had them which I am so far from concurring to that I believe his seasonable dying to have been a greater good fortune to him than all the victories and prosperities of his life. For he seemed evidently (methinks) to be near the end of his deceitful glories ; his own army grew at last as weary of him as the rest of the people ; and I never passed of late before his palace (his, do I call it? I ask God and the king pardon), but I never passed of late before Whitehall with- out reading upon the gate of it ' Mene Mene, Tekel Uphar- sin.' But it pleased God to take him from the ordinary GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 179 courts of men, and juries of his peers, to his own high court of justice, which being more merciful than ours be- low, there is a little room yet left for the hope of his friends, if he have any; though the outward unrepentance of his death afford but small materials for the work of char- ity, especially if he designed even then to entail his own injustice upon his children, and, by it, inextricable con- fusions and civil wars upon the nation. But here's at last an end of him. And where's now the fruit of all that blood and calamity, which his ambition has cost the world? Where is it? Why, his son (you will say) has the whole crop. I doubt he will find it quickly blasted. I have nothing to say against the gentleman, or any living of his family; on the contrary, I wish him better fortune than to have a long and unquiet possession of his master's inherit- ance. Whatsoever I have spoken against his father is that which I should have thought (though decency, perhaps, might have hindered me from saying it) even against mine own, if I had been so unhappy, as that mine, by the same ways, should have left me three kingdoms." Here I stopped, and my pretended protector, who, I expected, should have been very angry, fell a-laughing; it seems at the simplicity of my discourse, for thus he re- plied: " You seem to pretend extremely to the old obso- lete rules of virtue and conscience, which makes me doubt very much whether, from this vast prospect of three king- doms, you can show me any acres of your own. But these are so far from making you a prince that I am afraid your friends will never have the contentment to see you so much as a justice of peace in your own country. For this, I perceive, which you call virtue is nothing else but either the frowardness of a cynic or the laziness of an epicurean. I am glad you allow me at least artful dissimulation, and unwearied diligence in my hero; and I assure you that he, whose life is constantly drawn by those two, shall never be misled out of the way of greatness. But I see you are a pedant, and Platonical statesman, a theoretical common- wealth's-man, a Utopian dreamer. Was ever riches got- ten by your golden mediocrities? or the supreme place attained to by virtues that must not stir out of the middle? Do you study Aristotle's politics, and write, if you please, COWLEY comments upon them; and let another but practise Ma- chiavel, and let us see, then, which of you two will come to the greatest preferments. If the desire of rule and superior- ity be a virtue (as sure I am it is more imprinted in human nature than any of your lethargical morals) and what is the virtue of any creature but the exercise of those powers and inclinations which God has infused into it? if that (I say) be virtue, we ought not to esteem anything vice which is the most proper, if not the only, means of attaining of it: " It is a truth so certain, and so clear, That to the first-born man it did appear; Did not the mighty heir, the noble Cain, By the fresh laws of Nature taught, disdain That (though a brother) any one should be A greater favourite to God than he? He strook him down; and, so (said he) so fell The sheep, which thou didst sacrifice so well. Since all the fullest sheaves, which I could bring, Since all were blasted in the offering, Lest God should my next victim too despise, The acceptable priest I'll sacrifice. Hence, coward fears; for the first blood so spilt, As a reward, he the first city built. 'Twas a beginning generous and high, Fit for a grandchild of the Deity. So well advanced, 'twas pity there he stayed; One step of glory more he should have made, And to the utmost bounds of greatness gone; Had Adam too been killed, he might have reigned alone. One brother's death, what do I mean to name, A small oblation to revenge and fame? The mighty-souled Abimelec, to shew What for a high place a higher spirit can do, A hecatomb almost of brethren slew, And seventy times in nearest blood he dyed (To make it hold) his royal purple pride. Why do I name the lordly creature man? The weak, the mild, the coward woman, can, When to a crown she cuts her sacred way, All that oppose, with manlike courage, slay. So Athaliah, when she saw her son, And with his life her dearer greatness gone, With a majestic fury slaughtered all Whom high birth might to high pretences call: Since he was dead who all her power sustained, Resolved to reign alone; resolved, and reigned. In vain her sex, in vain the laws withstood, In vain the sacred plea of David's blood; A noble, and a bold contention, she (One woman) undertook with destiny. She to pluck down, destiny to uphold (Obliged by holy oracles of old) The great Jessaean race on Juda's throne; GOVERNMENT OF OLIVER CROMWELL 181 Till 'twas at last an equal wager grown, Scarce fate, with much ado, the better got by one. Tell me not, she herself at last was slain; Did she not, first, seven years (a lifetime) reign? Seven royal years t' a public spirit will seem More than the private life of a Methusalem. 'Tis godlike to be great; and, as they say, A thousand years to God are but a day; So to a man, when once a crown he wears, The coronation day's more than a thousand years." He would have gone on, I perceived, in his blas- phemies but that, by God's grace, I became so bold as thus to interrupt him: " I understand now perfectly (which I guessed at long before) what kind of angel and protector you are, and though your style in verse be very much mended since you were wont to deliver oracles, yet your doctrine is much worse than ever you had formerly (that I heard of) the face to publish; whether your long practice with mankind has increased and improved your malice, or whether you think us in this age to be grown so impu- dently wicked that there needs no more art or disguises to draw us to your party." " My dominion," said he hastily, and with a dreadful, furious look, " is so great in this world, and I am so power- ful a monarch of it, that I need not be ashamed that you should know me; and that you may see I know you too, I know you to be an obstinate and inveterate malignant; and for that reason I shall take you along with me to the next garrison of ours; from whence you shall go to the Tower, and from thence to the court of justice, and from thence you know whither." I was almost in the very pounces of the great bird of prey: " When, lo, ere the last words were fully spoke, From a fair cloud, which rather op'd than broke, A flash of light, rather than lightening, came, So swift, and yet so gentle, was the flame. Upon it rode (and, in his full career, Seemed to my eyes no sooner there, than here) The comeliest youth of all th* angelic race; Lovely his shape, ineffable his face. The frowns, with which he strook the trembling fiend, All smiles of human beauty did transcend; His beams of locks fell part dishevelled down, Part upward curled, and formed a nat'ral crown, Such as the British monarchs used to wear; If gold might be compared with angel's hair. 1 82 COWLEY His coat and flowing mantle were so bright, They seemed both made of woven silver light: Across his breast an azure ribbon went, At which a medal hung, that did present In wondrous living figures to the sight, The mystic champion's, and old dragon's fight; And from his mantle's side there shone afar, A fixed, and, I believe, a real star. In his fair hand (what need was there of more?) No arms, but th' English bloody cross, he bore, Which when he toward th' affrighted tyrant bent, And some few words pronounced (but what they meant, Or were, could not, alas! by me be known, Only, I well perceived, Jesus was one) He trembled, and he roared, and fled away; Mad to quit thus his more than hoped-for prey. Such rage inflames the wolf's wild heart and eyes (Robbed, as he thinks, unjustly of his prize) Whom unawares the shepherd spies, and draws The bleating lamb from out his ravenous jaws: The shepherd fain himself would he assail, But fear above his hunger does prevail, He knows his foe too strong, and must be gone: He grins, as he looks back, and howls, as he goes on." NOTES 1 That is, from a low and plebeian original. I The idea of this figure appears to be taken from the frontispiece to Hobbes's " Leviathan." * Meaning the Commonwealth. 4 Hume has inserted this character of Cromwell, but altered, as he says, in some particulars, from the original in his " History of Great Britain." 6 In virtue of which he was bound to fight against sin, the world, and the devil. 6 Sir Thomas Fairfax. T Cowley only means that under the Protector's government some persons suffered the customary death of traitors. * This word, in the sense of patria, or as including in it the idea of a civil constitution, is always spelled by Cowley with an e before the y countrry; in the sense of rus, without an e country. * Cowley inserts " omnia " for the " caetera " of Horace. 10 Octavius and Antony. " It was owing to a dream of his physician that Octavius saved his life (by quitting his tent, where he was sick, in a critical moment), and assisted at the battle of Philippi, which gained him the whole world. Cassius's death, and the ill success at Philippi, was owing to a mistake caused by his shortness of sight. 12 Decimation here means not the putting to death of every tenth man, but the levying of the tenth penny on the estates of the royalists. II This book is probably that which was written by the king's com- mand at Cologne, most probably by Sir Edward Hyde. (" History of the Rebellion," vol. iii, p. 445, fol.) 14 See Clarendon's " History," vol. iii, p. 506, fol. " In the case of Coney before mentioned. OF REWARDING GENIUS IN ENGLAND BY OLIVER GOLDSMITH OLIVER GOLDSMITH was the son of a clergyman, and was born in Pallas, in the county Longford, Ireland, November 10, 1728. His birth- Elace is supposed to be the scene of his " Deserted Village," and his ither the original of Dr. Primrose in " The Vicar of Wakefield." His earliest schoolmaster was Thomas Byrne, who is described in his most famous poem. He was entered as a sizar, or poor student, at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1744, got into all sorts of scrapes, and finally ran away, but returned and took his degree (at the foot of his class) in 1749. He tried to take clerical orders, but was rejected ; set out for America, but got no farther than Cork ; was supplied with money to study law in London, but immediately lost it in gambling. He studied medicine in Edinburgh and Leyden, then spent two years wandering about the Con- tinent, and in 1756 returned to England. He practised as a physician a little while in a suburb of London, then became a proof reader, then usher in an academy, and then assistant editor of a magazine. After that he lived in London, and was author, editor, and compiler by turns, with all sorts of business and social adventures, till his death, April 4, 1774. Dr. Johnson, Garrick, and Sir Joshua Reynolds were among his intimate friends. His first published book was a series of essays under the title, "An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Eu- rope," from which the one here given is chosen. This book was pub- lished anonymously in 1759; an( ^ one f tne ^ ast things he did was to prepare a revised edition, which appeared soon after his death. His Chinese Letters," or "Citizen of the World," form another series of essays, which appeared first in a newspaper. Besides these, his famous works are his novel, "The Vicar of Wakefield" ; his poems, "The Trav- eller" and "The Deserted Village "; and his comedies, "She Stoops to Conquer" and "The Good-natured Man." He is supposed to have been in love with Mary Horneck, who was called the Jessamy Bride, but he never married perhaps because of his improvidence and utter lack of common sense in business matters, which kept him forever bankrupt. He was two thousand pounds in debt when he died. OF REWARDING GENIUS IN ENGLAND THERE is nothing authors are more apt to lament than want of encouragement from the age. What- ever their differences in other respects, they are all ready to unite in this complaint, and each indirectly offers himself as an instance of the truth of his assertion. The beneficed divine, whose wants are only imaginary, expostulates as bitterly as the poorest author. 1 Should interest or good fortune advance the divine to a bishopric, or the poor son of Parnassus into that place which the other has resigned, both are authors no longer: the one goes to prayers once a day, kneels upon cushions of velvet, and thanks gracious Heaven for having made the circum- stances of all mankind so extremely happy; the other bat- tens on all the delicacies of life, enjoys his wife and his easy-chair, and sometimes, for the sake of conversation, deplores the luxury of these degenerate days. All encouragements to merit are therefore misapplied, which make the author too rich to continue his profession. There can be nothing more just than the old observation, that authors, like running horses, should be fed, but not fattened. If we would continue them in our service we should reward them with a little money and a great deal of praise, still keeping their avarice subservient to their ambition. Not that I think a writer incapable of filling an employment with dignity; I would only insinuate that, when made a bishop or statesman, he will continue to please us as a writer no longer; as, to resume a former allusion, the running horse, Vvhen fattened, will still be fit for very useful purposes, though unqualified for a courser. No nation gives greater encouragements to learning than we do; yet, at the same time, none are so injudicious in the application. We seem to confer them with the same view that statesmen have been known to grant employ- 18$ GOLDSMITH ments at court, rather as bribes to silence than incentives to emulation. Upon this principle all our magnificent endowments of colleges are erroneous; and, at best, more frequently enrich the prudent than reward the ingenious. A lad whose passions are not strong enough in youth to mislead him from that path of science which his tutors, and not his inclinations, have chalked out, by four or five years per- severance may probably obtain every advantage and hon- our his college can bestow. I forget whether the simile has been used before, but I would compare the man whose youth has been thus passed in the tranquility of dispas- sionate prudence to liquors which never ferment, and con- sequently continue always muddy. Passions may raise a commotion in the youthful breast, but they disturb only to refine it. However this be, mean talents are often re- warded in colleges with an easy subsistence. The candi- dates for preferments of this kind often regard their ad- mission as a patent for future indolence; 2 so that a life begun in studious labour is often continued in luxurious affluence. Among the universities abroad, I have ever observed their riches and their learning in a reciprocal proportion, their stupidity and pride increasing with their opulence. Happening once, in conversation with Gaubius of Leyden, to mention the college of Edinburgh, he began by com- plaining that all the English students which formerly came to his university now went entirely there; and the fact surprised him more, as Leyden was now as well as ever furnished with masters excellent in their respective professions. He concluded by asking if the professors of Edinburgh were rich? I replied that the salary of a pro- fessor there seldom amounted to more than thirty pounds a year. " Poor men," says he, " I heartily wish they were better provided for; until they become rich we can have no expectation of English students at Leyden." Premiums, also, proposed for literary excellence, when given as encouragements to boys, may be useful; but when designed as rewards to men are certainly misapplied. We have seldom seen a performance of any great merit in con- sequence of rewards proposed in this manner. Who has OF REWARDING GENIUS IN ENGLAND xg; ever observed a writer of any eminence a candidate in so precarious a contest? The man who knows the real value of his own genius will no more venture it upon an un- certainty than he who knows the true use of a guinea will stake it with a sharper. 3 Every encouragement given to stupidity, when known to be such, is also a negative insult upon genius. This appears in nothing more evident than the undistinguished success of those who solicit subscriptions. When first brought into fashion, subscriptions were conferred upon the ingenious alone, or those who were reputed such. But at present we see them made a resource of indigence, and requested, not as rewards of merit, but as a relief of dis- tress. If tradesmen happen to want skill in conducting their own business, yet they are able to write a book; if mechanics vant money, or ladies shame, they write books and solicit subscriptions. Scarce a morning passes that proposals of this nature are not thrust into the half-open- ing doors of the rich, with perhaps a paltry petition, show- ing the author's wants but not his merits. I would not willingly prevent that pity which is due to indigence, but while the streams of liberality are thus diffused, they must, in the end, become proportionably shallow. What, then, are the proper encouragements of genius? I answer, subsistence and respect; for these are rewards congenial to its nature. Every animal has an aliment peculiarly suited to its constitution. The heavy ox seeks nourishment from earth; the light chameleon has been supposed to exist on air; a sparer diet even than this will satisfy the man of true genius, for he makes a luxurious banquet upon empty applause. It is this alone which has inspired all that ever was truly great and noble among us. It is, as Cicero finely calls it, the echo of virtue. Avarice is the passion of inferior natures money the pay of the common herd. The author who draws his quill merely to take a purse, no more deserves success than he who pre- sents a pistol. 4 When the link between patronage and learning was entire, then all who deserved fame were in a capacity of attaining it. When the great Somers was at the helm, patronage was fashionable among our nobility. The mid- !88 GOLDSMITH die ranks of mankind, who generally imitate the great, then followed their example, and applauded from fashion, if not from feeling. I have heard an old poet 5 of that glorious age say that a dinner with his lordship has procured him invitations for the whole week following that an airing in his patron's chariot has supplied him with a citizen's coach on every future occasion. For who would not be proud to entertain a man who kept so much good com- pany? But this link now seems entirely broken. Since the days of a certain prime minister, of inglorious memory, 6 the learned have been kept pretty much at a distance. A jockey, or a laced player, supplies the place of the scholar, poet, or the man of virtue. Those conversations, once the result of wisdom, wit, and innocence, are now turned to humbler topics, little more being expected from a com- panion than a laced coat, a pliant bow, and an immoderate friendship for a well-served table. Wit, when neglected by the great, is generally despised by the vulgar. Those who are unacquainted with the world are apt to fancy the man of .wit as leading a very agreeable life. They conclude, perhaps, that he is attended to with silent admiration, and dictates to the rest of man- kind with all the eloquence of conscious superiority. Very different is his present situation. He is called an author, and all know that an author is a thing only to be laughed at. His person, not his jest, becomes the mirth of the company. At his approach the most fat, unthinking face brightens into malicious meaning. Even aldermen laugh, and revenge on him the ridicule which was lavished on their forefathers: " Etiam victis redit in praecordia virtus, Victoresque cadunt." It is indeed a reflection somewhat mortifying to the author who breaks his ranks and singles out for public favour to think that he must combat contempt before he can arrive at glory; that he must expect to have all the fools of society united against him before he can hope for the applause of the judicious. For this, however, he must prepare beforehand; as those who have no idea of OF REWARDING GENIUS IN ENGLAND 189 the difficulty of his employment, will be apt to regard his inactivity as idleness and, not having a notion of the pangs of uncomplying thought in themselves, it is not to be expected they should have any desire of rewarding it in others. Voltaire has finely described the hardships a man must encounter who writes for the public. I need make no apology for the length of the quotation: " Your fate, my dear Le Fevre, is too strongly marked to permit your retiring. The bee must toil in making honey, the silk-worm must spin, the philosopher must dis- sect them, and you are born to sing of their labours. You must be a poet and a scholar, even though your inclina- tions should resist: Nature is too strong for inclination. But hope not, my friend, to find tranquility in the employ- ment you a.e going to pursue. The route of genius is not less obstructed with disappointment than that of am- bition. " If you have the misfortune not to excel in your pro- fession as a poet, repentance must tincture all your future enjoyments; if you succeed, you make enemies. You tread a narrow path: contempt on one side, and hatred on the other, are ready to seize you upon the slightest deviation. " But why must I be hated? you will perhaps reply; why must I be persecuted for having written a pleasing poem, for having produced an applauded tragedy, or for otherwise instructing or amusing mankind or myself? " My dear friend, these very successes shall render you miserable for life. Let me suppose your performance has merit let me suppose you have surmounted the teasing employments of printing and publishing; how will you be able to lull the critics who, like Cerberus, are posted at all the avenues of literature, and who settle the merits of every new performance? How, I say, will you be able to make them open in your favour? There are always three or four literary journals in France, as many in Holland, each supporting opposite interests. The booksellers who guide these periodical compilations, find their account in being severe; the authors employed by them have wretch- edness to add to their natural malignity. The majority 190 GOLDSMITH may be in your favour, but you may depend on being torn by the rest. Loaded with unmerited scurrility, perhaps you reply; they rejoin; both plead at the bar of the public, and both are condemned to ridicule. " But if you write for the stage your case is still more worthy compassion. You are there to be judged by men whom the custom of the times has rendered contemptible. Irritated by their own inferiority, they exert all their little tyranny upon you, revenging upon the author the insults they receive from the public. From such men, then, you are to expect your sentence. Suppose your piece admitted, acted; one single ill-natured jest from the pit is sufficient to cancel all your labours. But allowing that it succeeds, there are a hundred squibs flying all abroad to prove that it should not have succeeded. You shall find your bright- est scenes burlesqued by the ignorant; and the learned, who know a little Greek, and nothing of their native lan- guage, affect to despise you. " But, perhaps, with a panting heart you carry your piece before a woman of quality. She gives the labours of your brain to her maid to be cut into shreds for curl- ing her hair; while the laced footman, who carries the gaudy livery of luxury, insults your appearance, who bear the livery of indigence. " But granting your excellence has at last forced envy to confess that your works have some merit; this, then, is all the reward you can expect while living. However, for this tribute of applause you must expect persecution. You will be reputed the author of scandal which you have never seen, of verses you despise, and of sentiments directly con- trary to your own. In short, you must embark in some one party, or all parties will be against you. " There are among us a number of learned societies where a lady presides, whose wit begins to twinkle when the splendour of her beauty begins to decline. One or two men of learning compose her ministers of state. These must be flattered, or made enemies by being neglected. Thus, though you had the merit of all antiquity united in your person, you grow old in misery and disgrace. Every place designed for men of letters is filled up by men of intrigue. Some nobleman's private tutor, some court flat- OF REWARDING GENIUS IN ENGLAND 191 terer, shall bear away the prize, and leave you to anguish and to disappointment." 7 Yet it were well if none but the dunces of society were combined to render the profession of an author ridiculous or unhappy. Men of the first eminence are often found to indulge this illiberal vein of raillery. Two contending writers often, by the opposition of their wit, render their profession contemptible in the eyes of ignorants, 8 who should have been taught to admire. And yet, whatever the reader may think of himself, it is at least two to one but he is a greater blockhead than the most scribbling dunce he affects to despise. The poet's poverty is a standing topic of contempt. His writing for bread is an unpardonable offence. Per- haps of all mankind an author in these times is used most hardly. We keep him poor, and yet revile his poverty. Like angry parents who correct their children till they cry, and then correct them for crying, we reproach him for living by his wit, and yet allow him no other means to live. His taking refuge in garrets and cellars 9 has of late .been violently objected to him, and that by men who, I dare hope, are more apt to pity than insult his distress. 10 Is poverty the writer's fault? No doubt he knows how to prefer a bottle of champagne to the nectar of the neigh- bouring alehouse, or a venison pasty to a plate of potatoes. Want of delicacy is not in him, but in us, who deny him the opportunity of making an elegant choice. Wit certainly is the property of those who have it, nor should we be displeased if it is the only property a man sometimes has. We must not underrate him who uses it for subsistence, and flies from the ingratitude of the age even to a bookseller for redress. If the profession of an author is to be laughed at by stupids, it is better sure to be contemptibly rich than contemptibly poor. For all the wit that ever adorned the human mind will, at present, no more shield the author's poverty from ridicule than his high-topped gloves conceal the unavoidable omissions of his laundress. To be more serious: new fashions, follies, and vices make new monitors necessary in every age. An author I 9 2 GOLDSMITH may be considered as a merciful substitute to the legis- lature. He acts, not by punishing crimes, but prevent- ing them. However virtuous the present age, there may be still growing employment for ridicule or reproof, for persuasion or satire. If the author be therefore still so necessary among us, let us treat him with proper con- sideration, as a child of the public, not a rent-charge on the community. And, indeed, a child of the public he is in all respects; for while so well able to direct others, how in- capable is he frequently found of guiding himself! His simplicity exposes him to all the insidious approaches of cunning; his sensibility to the slightest invasions of con- tempt. Though possessed of fortitude to stand unmoved the expected bursts of an earthquake, yet of feelings so exquisitely poignant as to agonize under the slightest dis- appointment. Broken rest, tasteless meals, and causeless anxiety shorten his life, or render it unfit for active employ- ment; prolonged vigils and intense application still further contract his span, and make his time glide insensibly away. Let us not, then, aggravate those natural inconveniences by neglect; we have had sufficient instances of this kind already. Sale and Moore n will suffice for one age at least. But they are dead, and their sorrows are over. The neglected author of the " Persian Eclogues/' which, how- ever inaccurate, excel any in our language, is still alive; happy, if insensible of our neglect, not raging at our in- gratitude. 12 It is enough that the age has already pro- duced instances of men pressing foremost in the lists of fame, and worthy of better times, schooled by continued adversity into a hatred of their kind, flying from thought to drunkenness, yielding to the united pressure of labour, penury, and sorrow, sinking unheeded, without one friend to drop a tear on their unattended obsequies, and indebted to charity for a grave. 13 The author, when unpatronized by the great, has natu- rally recourse to the bookseller. There can not be, per- haps, imagined a combination more prejudicial to taste than this. It is the interest of the one to allow as little for writing, and of the other to write as much, as possible. Accordingly, tedious compilations and periodical maga- zines are the result of their joint endeavours. In these cir- OF REWARDING GENIUS IN ENGLAND 193 cumstances the author bids adieu to fame, writes for bread, and for that only imagination is seldom called in. He sits down to address the venal Muse with the most phlegmatic apathy, and as we are told of the Russian, courts his mis- tress by falling asleep in her lap. His reputation never spreads in a wider circle than that of the trade, who gen- erally value him, not for the fineness of his compositions, but the quantity he works off in a given time. A long habit of writing for bread thus turns the ambi- tion of every author at last into avarice. He finds that he has written many years, that the public are scarcely ac- quainted even with his name; he despairs of applause, and turns to profit which invites him. He finds that money procures all those advantages, that respect, and that ease, which he vainly expected from fame. Thus the man who, under the protection of the great, might have done honour to humanity when only patronized by the bookseller, be- comes a thing little superior to the fellow who works at the press. 14 NOTES 1 " That ever snuffed his candle with finger and thumb." (First edition.) " Laziness." (First edition.) 1 The first edition adds, " by throwing a main." (Editor.) 4 Kenrick, Goldsmith's successor on the " Monthly Review," in reviewing this work made a gross personal attack upon the author. Dr. Young. (Percy.) Sir Robert Walpole, no doubt, as Cunningham and Forster say. T From Voltaire's letter, " A. M. Le Fevre, sur Les inconvenients attaches a la Litterature," 1732. Percy's edition has " ignorant persons." (Editor.) The first edition has also " and living among vermin ; which re- calls the picture of our author in Green Arbour Court, when he wrote on the " Sagacity of Some Insects," and when, indeed, he wrote the principal part of the present work. 10 Perhaps in allusion more particularly to Pope s continual ridi- cule of poor poets. u The first edition had " Sale, Savage, Amhurst, More. u Our author here alludes to the insanity of Collins. (Percy.) " " Among the dregs of mankind." (First edition.) 14 " Sint Maecenates, non deerunt, Flacce, Marones." (First edition.) COMMON SENSE AND THE CRISIS BY THOMAS PAINE THOMAS PAINE English by birth, American by adoption, French in many of his ideas and part of his life was a native of Thetford, Nor- folk, where he was born, January 29, 1737. His father was a Quaker. Thomas engaged in several business enterprises, apparently with little success, and in 1774 sailed for Philadelphia, bringing letters of intro- duction from Franklin. He was made editor of the " Pennsylvania Magazine," and his writings soon attracted attention. In his "Serious Thoughts," published in 1775, he expressed his belief that the American colonies would become independent, and a hope that slavery would be abolished. The idea of independence was specially urged in a separate pamphlet entitled "Common Sense," which had a wide circulation. It was not copyrighted, and he received nothing from the sale ; but the Legislature gave him five hundred pounds. When independence was declared he enlisted in the army, and afterward he was on the staff of Gen- eral Greene. In December, 1776, he published "The Crisis," the essay that is presented here. By order of the commander it was read at the head of every regiment, and it did a great deal to strengthen the courage of the people in their efforts for independence. Seventeen other chapters, on the same subject, appeared at irregular intervals during six years. Paine was for a time secretary of a congressional committee, and then Clerk of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. When, in 1780, Washington wrote to that body that the distress of the army was likely to result in mutiny, Paine started a relief subscription with five hundred dollars, his salary, and the roll was soon increased by patriotic citizens to an amount that averted the danger. The next year Paine went to Europe and secured large loans. In 1785 Congress voted him three thousand dollars as a testimonial, and the Legislature of New York gave him a confiscated estate in New Rochelle. Two years later he went to France, and then to England, where he set up a remarkable iron bridge of his own invention. In i79i-'92 he published his " Rights of Man," as a reply to Burke's essay on the French Revolution. This was translated into French and had a wide circulation, and it was followed by his election to a seat in the French National Convention. The book also caused his indictment in England for sedition. As he did not appear for trial, he was outlawed. In the Convention he voted with the Girondists. He favoured the trial of Louis XVI, but wanted him banished to America instead of executed. Robespierre imprisoned him as a foreigner, and on the way to prison he gave Joel Barlow his "Age of Reason." When this was published, Paine s political opponents seized the opportunity to bring him into dis- repute by representing it as grossly atheistical. This it is not, as it expresses belief in God and in the immortality of the soul, but it is deis- tical. James Monroe, then American Minister in Paris, procured his liberation after the death of Robespierre. He published several other pamphlets, returned to the United States in 1802, and died in New York city, June 8, 1809. COMMON SENSE SOME writers have so confounded society with gov- ernment as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last is a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its frest state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one, for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government which we might ex- pect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to insure it to us with the least expense and greatest benefit is preferable to all others. In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of per- sons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, uncoa- 13 *97 198 PAINE nected with the rest, they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world. In this state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought. A thou- sand motives will excite them thereto; the strength of one man is so unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another, who in his turn requires the same. Four or five united would be able to raise a tolerable dwelling in the midst of a wilderness, but one man might labour out the common period of life without accomplishing anything; when he had felled his timber he could not remove it, nor erect it after it was removed; hunger in the meantime would urge him from his work, and every different want would call him a different way. Disease, nay, even misfortune, would be death, for though neither might be mortal, yet either would disable him from living, and reduce him to a state in which he might rather be said to perish than to die. Thus necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the recip- rocal blessings of which would supersede, and render the obligations of law and government unnecessary while they remained perfectly just to each other; but as nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably happen that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of emigration, which bound them together in a common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attach- ment to each other; and this remissness will point out the necessity of establishing some form of government to sup- ply the defect of moral virtue. Some convenient tree will afford them a state-house, under the branches of which the whole colony may assem- ble to deliberate on public matters. It is more than prob- able that their first laws will have the title only of Regu- lations, and be enforced by no other penalty than public disesteem. In this first parliament every man by natural right will have a seat. But as the colony increases, the public concerns will in- crease likewise, and the distance at which the members may be separated will render it too inconvenient for all of them to meet on every occasion as at first, when their COMMON SENSE number was small, their habitations near, and the public concerns few and trifling. This will point out the con- venience of their consenting to leave the legislative part to be managed by a select number chosen from the whole body, who are supposed to have the same concerns at stake which those have who appointed them, and who will act in the same manner as the whole body would were they present. If the colony continue increasing, it will become necessary to augment the number of representatives, and that the interest of every part of the colony may be attended to, it will be found best to divide the whole into convenient parts, each part sending its proper number; and that the elected might never form to themselves an interest separate from the electors, prudence will point out the propriety of having elections often, because as the elected might by that means return and mix again with the general body of the electors, in a few months their fidelity to the public will be secured by the prudent re- flection of not making a rod for themselves. And as this frequent interchange will establish a common interest with every part of the community, they will mutually and natu- rally support each other, and on this (not on the unmean- ing name of king) depends the strength of government and the happiness of the governed. Here, then, is the origin and rise of government namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz., freedom and security. And however our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound, however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of Nature and reason will say it is right. I draw my idea of the form of government from a prin- ciple in Nature, which no art can overturn viz., that the more simple anything is the less liable it is to be disor- dered, and the easier repaired when disordered and with this maxim in view I offer a few remarks on the so-much- boasted constitution of England. That it was noble for the dark and slavish times in which it was erected is granted. When the world was overrun with tyranny, the least remove therefrom was a glorious rescue. But that 200 PAINE it is imperfect, subject to convulsions, and incapable of producing what it seems to promise, is easily demon- strated. Absolute governments (though the disgrace of human nature) have this advantage with them that they are sim- ple; if the people suffer, they know the head from which their suffering springs, know likewise the remedy, and are not bewildered by a variety of causes and cures. But the constitution of England is so exceedingly complex that the nation may suffer for years together without being able to discover in which part the fault lies; some will say in one and some in another, and every political physician will advise a different medicine. I know it is difficult to get over local or long-standing prejudices, yet if we will suffer ourselves to examine the component parts of the English constitution we shall find them to be the base remains of two ancient tyrannies, com- pounded with some new republican materials: 1. The remains of monarchical tyranny in the person of the king. 2. The remains of aristocratical tyranny in the persons of the Peers. 3. The new republican materials, in the persons of the Commons, on whose virtue depends the freedom of England. The first two, by being hereditary, are independent of the people; wherefore in a constitutional sense they con- tribute nothing toward the freedom of the state. To say that the constitution of England is a union of three powers, reciprocally checking each other, is farcical; either the words have no meaning or they are flat contra- dictions. To say that the Commons is a check upon the king presupposes two things: 1. That the king is not to be trusted without being looked after, or, in other words, that a thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy. 2. That the Commons, by being appointed for that purpose, are either wiser or more worthy of confidence than the crown. But as the same constitution which gives the Com- COMMON SENSE 2OI mons a power to check the king by withholding the sup- plies, gives afterward the king a power to check the Com- mons, by empowering him to reject their other bills, it again supposes that the king is wiser than those whom it has already supposed to be wiser than him. A mere ab- surdity! There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the com- position of monarchy: it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the differ- ent parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless. Some writers have explained the English constitution thus: the kLig, say they, is one, the people another; the Peers are a house in behalf of the king, the Commons in behalf of the people. But this hath all the distinctions of a house divided against itself; and though the expressions be pleasantly arranged, yet when examined they appear idle and ambiguous; and it will always happen that the nicest construction that words are capable of, when applied to the description of something which either can not exist, or is too incomprehensible to be within the compass of description, will be words of sound only, and though they may amuse the ear they can not inform the mind; for this explanation includes a previous question viz. : How came the king by a power which the people are afraid to trust, and always obliged to check? Such a power could not be the gift of a wise people, neither can any power which needs checking be from God; yet the provision which the constitution makes supposes such a power to exist. But the provision is unequal to the task; the means either can not or will not accomplish the end, and the whole affair is a felo de se; for as the greater weight will always carry up the less, and as all the wheels of a machine are put in motion by one, it only remains to know which power in the constitution has the most weight, for that will govern ; and though the others, or a part of them, may clog, or, as the phrase is, check the rapidity of its motion, yet so long as they can not stop it their endeavours will 202 PAINE be ineffectual; the first moving power will at last have its way, and what it wants in speed is supplied by time. That the crown is this overbearing part in the English constitution needs not be mentioned, and that it derives its whole consequence merely from being the giver of places and pensions is self-evident, wherefore, though we have been wise enough to shut and lock a door against abso- lute monarchy, we at the same time have been foolish enough to put the crown in possession of the key. The prejudice of Englishmen in favour of their own government, by kings, lords, and commons, arises as much or more from national pride than reason. Indi- viduals are undoubtedly safer in England than in some other countries, but the will of the king is as much the law of the land in Britain as in France, with this difference, that instead of proceeding directly from his mouth, it is handed to the people under the formidable shape of an act of Parliament. For the fate of Charles I hath only made kings more subtle, not more just. Wherefore, laying aside all national pride and preju- dice in favour of modes and forms, the plain truth is that it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not the constitution of the government, that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey. An inquiry into the constitutional errors in the English form of government is at this time highly necessary; for as we are never in a proper condition of doing justice to others while we continue under the influence of some lead- ing partiality, so neither are we capable of doing it to ourselves while we remain fettered by any obstinate preju- dice. And as a man who is attached to a prostitute is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will dis- able us from discerning a good one. II Mankind being originally equals in the order of crea- tion, the equality could only be destroyed by some sub- sequent circumstance; the distinctions of rich and poor may in a great measure be accounted for, and that without COMMON SENSE 203 having recourse to the harsh ill-sounding names of avarice and oppression. Oppression is often the consequence, but seldom or never the means of riches; and though avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it gen- erally makes him too timorous to be wealthy. But there is another and greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into kings and subjects. Male and female are the distinctions of Nature; good and bad, the distinctions of heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distin- guished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind. In the early ages of the world, according to the Scrip- ture chronology, there were no kings; the consequence of which was. there were no wars; it is the pride of kings which throws mankind into confusion. Holland, without a king, hath enjoyed more peace for the last century than any of the monarchical governments of Europe. Antiquity favours the same remark, for the quiet and rural lives of the first patriarchs have a happy something in them which vanishes when we come to the history of Jewish royalty. Government by kings was first introduced into the world by heathen, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. It was the most prosperous invention that was ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry. The heathen paid divine honours to their deceased kings, and the Christian world hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones. How impious is the title of sacred majesty applied to a worm, who in the midst of his splendour is crumbling into dust! As the exalting one man so greatly above the rest can not be justified on the equal rights of Nature, so neither can it be defended on the authority of Scripture; for the will of the Almighty, as declared by Gideon and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapproves of government by kings. All antimonarchical parts of Scripture have been very smoothly glossed over in monarchical governments, but they undoubtedly merit the attention of countries which have their governments yet to form. " Render unto 204 PAINE Caesar the things which are Caesar's " is the Scripture doc- trine of courts, yet it is no support of monarchical gov- ernment, for the Jews at that time were without a king, and in a state of vassalage to the Romans. Near three thousand years passed away from the Mo- saic account of the creation, until the Jews, under a national delusion, requested a king. Till then their form of gov- ernment (except in extraordinary cases, where the Al- mighty interposed) was a kind of republic, administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes. Kings they had none, and it was held sinful to acknowledge any being under that title but the Lord of Hosts. And when a man seriously reflects on the idolatrous homage which is paid to the persons of kings, he need not wonder that the Al- mighty, ever jealous of his honour, should disapprove a form of government which so impiously invades the pre- rogative of Heaven. Monarchy is ranked in Scripture as one of the sins of the Jews, for which a curse in reserve is denounced against them. The history of that transaction is worth attend- ing to. The children of Israel being oppressed by the Midian- ites, Gideon marched against them with a small army, and victory, through the divine interposition, decided in his favour. The Jews, elate with success, and attributing it to the generalship of Gideon, proposed making him a king, saying, " Rule thou over us, thou and thy son, and thy son's son." Here was temptation in its fullest extent; not a kingdom only, but a hereditary one; but Gideon in the piety of his soul replied: " I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you; the Lord shall rule over you." Words need not be more explicit; Gideon doth not decline the honour, but denieth their right to give it; neither doth he compliment them with invented declarations of his thanks, but in the positive style of a prophet charges them with disaffection to their proper sovereign, the King of Heaven. About one hundred years after this they fell again into the same error. The hankering which the Jews had for the idolatrous customs of the heathens is something ex- ceedingly unaccountable; but so it was, that laying hold COMMON SENSE 205 of the misconduct of Samuel's two sons, who were in- trusted with some secular concerns, they came in an abrupt and clamorous manner to Samuel, saying, " Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways, now make us a king to judge us like all the other nations." And here we can not but observe that their motives were bad, viz., that they might be like unto other nations i. e., the heathen whereas their true glory lay in being as much unlike them as possible. " But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, Give us a king to judge us; and Samuel prayed unto the Lord, and the Lord said unto Samuel: Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee, for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. Accord- ing to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt, even unto this day; wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other Gods; so do they also unto thee. Now therefore hearken unto their voice, howbeit, protest solemnly unto them and show them the manner of the king that shall reign over them " i. e., not of any particular king, but the general manner of the kings of the earth, whom Israel was so eagerly copying after. And notwithstanding the great distance of time and difference of manners, the character is still in fashion. " And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people, that asked of him a king. And he said, This shall be the manner of the king that shall reign over you; he will take your sons and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen, and some shall run be- fore his chariots " (this description agrees with the present mode of impressing men) > " and he will appoint him cap- tains over thousands, and captains over fifties, and will set them to ear his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots; and he will take your daughters to be confec- tionaries, and to be cooks and to be bakers " (this de- scribes the expense and luxury as well as the oppression of kings), "and he will take your fields and your olive yards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants; and he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give them to his officers and to his servants" (by 14 206 PAINE which we see that bribery, corruption, and favouritism are the standing vices of kings); "and he will take the tenth of your men servants, and your maid servants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work; and he will take the tenth of your sheep, and ye shall be his servants, and ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen. And the Lord will not hear you in that day." This accounts for the continua- tion of monarchy; neither do the characters of the few good kings which have lived since either sanctify the title or blot out the sinfulness of the origin: the high encomium given of David takes no notice of him officially as a king, but only as a man after God's own heart. " Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel, and they said, Nay, but we will have a king over us, that we may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us, and go out before us and fight our battles." Samuel con- tinued to reason with them, but to no purpose; he set be- fore them their ingratitude, but all would not avail; and seeing them fully bent on their folly, he cried out, " I will call unto the Lord, and he shall send thunder and rain " (which was then a punishment, being in the time of wheat harvest), " that ye may perceive and see that your wicked- ness is great which ye have done in the sight of the Lord, in asking you a king. So Samuel called unto the Lord, and the Lord sent thunder and rain that day, and all the people greatly feared "the Lord and Samuel. And all the people said unto Samuel, Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God that we die not, for we have added unto our sins this evil, to ask a king." These portions of Scripture are direct and positive. They admit of no equivocal con- struction. That the Almighty hath here entered his pro- test against monarchical government is true, or the Scrip- ture is false. And a man hath good reason to believe that there is as much of kingcraft as priestcraft in withholding the Scripture from the public in Popish countries. For monarchy in every instance is the Popery of government. To the evil of monarchy we have added that of heredi- tary succession; and as the first is a degradation and less- ening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and imposition on posterity. For all men COMMON SENSE 2O/ being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever, and though himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them. One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of heredi- tary right in kings is that Nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion. Secondly, as no man at first could possess more public honours than were bestowed upon him, so the givers of those honours could have no power to give away the right of posterity; and though they might say, " We choose you for our head," they could not, without manifest injustice to their children, say that " your children and your chil- dren's children shall reign over ours forever." Because such an unwise, unjust, unnatural compact might (perhaps) in the next succession put them under the government of a rogue or a fool. Most wise men, in their private senti- ments, have ever treated hereditary right with contempt; yet it is one of those evils which when once established is not easily removed; many submit from fear, others from superstition, and the more powerful part shares, with the king, the plunder of the rest. This is supposing the present race of kings in the world to have had an honourable origin; whereas it is more than probable that, could we take off the dark covering of an- tiquity, and trace them to their first rise, we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-emi- nence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers; and who by increasing in power, and extend- ing his depredations, overawed the quiet and defenceless to purchase their safety by frequent contributions. Yet his electors could have no idea of giving hereditary right to his descendants, because such a perpetual exclusion of themselves was incompatible with the free and unrestrained principles they professed to live by. Wherefore, heredi- tary succession in the early ages of monarchy could not take place as a matter of claim, but as something casual or complimental; but as few or no records were extant 208 PAINE in those days, and traditionary history stuffed with fables, it was very easy, after the lapse of a few generations, to trump up some superstitious tale, conveniently timed Mo- hammedlike, to cram hereditary rights down the throats of the vulgar. Perhaps the disorders which threatened, or seemed to threaten, on the decease of a leader and the choice of a new one (for elections among ruffians could not be very orderly) induced many at first to favour hereditary pretensions; by which means it happened, as it hath hap- pened since, that what at first was submitted to as a con- venience was afterward claimed as a right. England, since the conquest, hath known some few good monarchs, but groaned beneath a much larger num- ber of bad ones; yet no man in his senses can say that their claim under William the Conqueror is a very honourable one. A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself King of England against the con- sent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it. However, it is needless to spend much time in exposing the folly of hereditary right; if there are any so weak as to believe it, let them promiscuously worship the ass and the lion, and welcome. I shall neither copy their humility nor disturb their devotion. Yet I should be glad to ask how they suppose kings came at first? The question admits but of three answers viz., either by lot, by election, or by usurpation. If the first king was taken by lot, it establishes a precedent for the next, which excludes hereditary succession. Saul was by lot, yet the succession was not hereditary, neither does it appear from that transaction that there was any intention it ever should be. If the first king of any country was by election, that likewise establishes a pre- cedent for the next; for to say that the right of all fu- ture generations is taken away by the act of the first electors, in their choice not only of a king, but of a family of kings forever, hath no parallel in or out of Scripture but the doctrine of original sin, which supposes the free will of all men lost in Adam; and from such compari- son, and it will admit of no other, hereditary succession can derive no glory. For as in Adam all sinned, and as COMMON SENSE 20Q in the first electors all men obeyed; as in the one all man- kind were subjected to Satan, and in the other to sover- eignty; as our innocence was lost in the first, and our authority in the last; and as both disable us from reassum- ing some former state and privilege, it unanswerably fol- lows that original sin and hereditary succession are paral- lels. Dishonourable rank! Inglorious connection! Yet the most subtle sophist can not produce a juster simile. As to usurpation, no man will be so hardy as to defend it, and that William the Conqueror was a usurper is a fact not to be contradicted. The plain truth is that the an- tiquity of English monarchy will not bear looking into. But it is not so much the absurdity as the evil of heredi- tary succession which concerns mankind. Did it insure a race of good and wise men, it would have the seal of divine authority, but as it opens a door to the foolish, the wicked, an$ the improper, it hath in it the nature of op- pression. Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind, their minds are early poisoned by im- portance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large that they have but little opportu- nity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions. Another evil which attends hereditary succession is that the throne is subject to be possessed by a minor at any age; all which time the regency acting under the cover of a king have every opportunity and inducement to betray their trust. The same national misfortune happens when a king, worn out with age and infirmity, enters the last stage of human weakness. In both these cases the public becomes the prey to every miscreant who can tamper suc- cessfully with the follies either of age or infancy. The most plausible plea which hath ever been offered in favour of hereditary succession is that it preserves a nation from civil wars; and were this true it would be weighty, whereas it is the most barefaced falsity ever im- posed upon mankind. The whole history of England dis- owns the fact. Thirty kings and two minors have reigned in that distracted kingdom since the conquest, in which PAINE time there have been (including the Revolution) no less than eight civil wars and nineteen rebellions. Wherefore, instead of making for peace, it makes against it, and de- stroys the very foundation it seems to stand upon. The contest for monarchy and succession between the houses of York and Lancaster laid England in a scene of blood for many years. Twelve pitched battles, besides skirmishes and sieges, were fought between Henry and Edward; twice was Henry prisoner to Edward, who in his turn was prisoner to Henry. And so uncertain is the fate of war and the temper of a nation, when nothing but per- sonal matters are the ground of a quarrel, that Henry was taken in triumph from a prison to a palace, and Edward obliged to fly from a palace to a foreign land; yet, as sud- den transitions of temper are seldom lasting, Henry in his turn was driven from the throne, and Edward recalled to succeed him, N the Parliament always following the strong- est side. This contest began in the reign of Henry VI, and was not entirely extinguished till Henry VII, in whom the families were united including a period of sixty- seven years viz., from 1422 to 1489. In short, monarchy and succession have laid (not this or that kingdom only) but the world in blood and ashes. 'Tis a form of government which the word of God bears testimony against, and blood will attend it. If we inquire into the business of a king we shall find (and in some countries they have none) that after saunter- ing away their lives without pleasure to themselves or ad- vantage to the nation, they withdraw from the scene, and leave their successors to tread the same useless and idle round. In absolute monarchies the whole weight of busi- ness, civil and military, lies on the king; the children of Israel in their request for a king urged this plea, " that he may judge us, and go out before us and fight our battles." But in countries where he is neither a judge nor a general, as in England, a man would be puzzled to know what is his business. The nearer any government approaches to a republic the less business there is for a king. It is somewhat dif- ficult to find a proper name for the government of Eng- COMMON SENSE 211 land. Sir William Meredith calls it a republic; but in its present state it is unworthy of the name, because the cor- rupt influence of the crown, by having all the places at its disposal, hath so effectually swallowed up the power, and eaten out the virtue of the House of Commons (the repub- lican part in the constitution), that the government of Eng- land is nearly as monarchical as that of France or Spain. Men fall out with names without understanding them; for it is the republican and not the monarchical part of the constitution of England which Englishmen glory in viz., the liberty of choosing a House of Commons from out of their own body and it is easy to see that when republican virtue fails, slavery ensues. Why is the constitution of England sickly but because monarchy hath poisoned the republic, the crown hath engrossed the Commons? In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which, in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business, indeed, for a man to be allowed eight hun- dred thousand sterling a year for, and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived. ill In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense; and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossesion, and suffer his reason and his feelings to determine for themselves; that he will put on, or rather that he will not put off, the true character of a man, and generously enlarge his views beyond the present day. Volumes have been written on the subject of the strug- gle between England and America. Men of all ranks have embarked in the controversy, from different motives, and with various designs; but all have been ineffectual, and the period of debate is closed. Arms, as the last resource, must decide the contest; the appeal was the choice of the king, and the continent hath accepted the challenge. It has been reported of the late Mr. Pelham (who, 212 PAINE though an able minister, was not without his faults) that on his being attacked in the House of Commons, on the score that his measures were only of a temporary kind, replied, ' They will last my time." Should a thought so fatal or unmanly possess the colonies in the present contest, the name of ancestors will be remembered by future genera- tions with detestation. The sun never shone on a cause of greater worth. 'Tis not the affair of a city, a county, a province, or a kingdom, but of a continent of at least one eighth part of the habit- able globe. 'Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed-time of continental union, faith, and honour. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full-grown characters. By referring the matter from argument to arms, a new area for politics is struck; a new method of thinking hath arisen. All plans, proposals, etc., prior to the igth of April i. e., to the commencement of hostilities are like the almanacs of last year; which, though proper then, are superseded and useless now. Whatever was advanced by the advocates on either side of the question then, termi- nated in one and the same point, viz., a union with Great Britain; the only difference between the parties was the method of effecting it: the one proposing force, the other friendship; but it hath so far happened that the first has failed, and the second has withdrawn her influence. As much hath been said of the advantages of reconcilia- tion, which, like an agreeable dream, hath passed away and left us as we were, it is but right that we should examine the contrary side of the argument, and inquire into some of the many material injuries which these colonies sustain, and always will sustain, by being connected with and de- pendent on Great Britain to examine that connection and dependence, on the principles of Nature and common sense, to see what we have to trust to, if separated, and what we are to expect, if dependent. I have heard it asserted by some that as America has COMMON SENSE 213 flourished under her former connection with Great Britain, the same connection is necessary toward her future hap- piness, and will always have the same effect. Nothing can be more fallacious than this kind of argument. We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next twenty. But even this is admitting more than is true, for I answer roundly that America would have flourished as much, and probably much more, had no European power had any- thing to do with her. The articles of commerce by which she has enriched herself are the necessaries of life, and will always have a market while eating is the custom of Europe. But she has protected us, say some. That she hath en- grossed us is true, and defended the continent at our ex- pense as well as her own, is admitted, and she would have defended Turkey from the same motives viz., for the sake of trade and dominion. Alas! we have been long led away by ancient preju- dices, and made large sacrifices to superstition. We have boasted the protection of Great Britain without consider- ing that her motive was interest, not attachment; and that she did not protect us from our enemies on our account, but from her enemies on her own account, from those who had no quarrel with us on any other account, and who will always be our enemies on the same account. Let Britain waive her pretensions to the continent, or the continent throw off the dependence, and we should be at peace with France and Spain were they at war with Britain. The miseries of Hanover's last war ought to warn us against connections. It hath lately been asserted in Parliament that the colo- nies have no relation to each other but through the parent country i. e., that Pennsylvania and the Jerseys, and so on for the rest, are sister colonies by way of England ; that is certainly a very roundabout way of proving relation- ship, but it is the nearest and only true way of proving enemyship, if I may so call it. France and Spain never were, nor perhaps ever will be, our enemies as Americans, but as our being the subjects of Great Britain. But Britain is the parent country, say some. Then the 214 PAINE more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not de- vour their young, nor savages make war upon their fami- lies; wherefore the assertion, if true, turns to her reproach; but it happens not to be true, or only partly so, and the phrase parent or mother country hath been jesuitically adopted by the king and his parasites, with a low papistical design of gaining an unfair bias on the credulous weakness of our minds. Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This New World hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious lib- erty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home pursues their descendants still. In this extensive quarter of the globe we forget the narrow limits of three hundred and sixty miles (the ex- tent of England), and carry our friendship on a larger scale; we claim brotherhood with every European Chris- tian, and triumph in the generosity of the sentiment. It is pleasant to observe with what regular gradations we surmount local prejudices, as we enlarge our acquaint- ance with the world. A man born in any town in Eng- land divided into parishes will naturally associate with most of his fellow-parishioners (because their interest in many cases will be common) and distinguish him by the name of neighbour; if he meet him but a few miles from home he drops the narrow idea of a street, and salutes him by the name of townsman; if he travel out of the county, and meets him in any other, he forgets the minor divisions of street and town, and calls him countryman i. e., county- man; but if in their foreign excursions they should associ- ate in France or any other part of Europe, their local re- membrance would be enlarged into that of Englishman. And by a just parity of reasoning, all Europeans meeting in America, or any other quarter of the globe, are country- men; for England, Holland, Germany, or Sweden, when compared with the whole, stand in the same places on the larger scale, which the divisions of street, town, and county do on the smaller one; distinctions too limited for continental minds. Not one third of the inhabitants, even COMMON SENSE 215 of this province, are of English descent. Wherefore, I reprobate the phrase of parent or mother country applied to England only, as being false, selfish, narrow, and un- generous. But, admitting that we were all of English descent, what does it amount to? Nothing. Britain being now an open enemy, extinguishes every other name and title, and to say that reconciliation is our duty is truly farcical. The first King of England, of the present line (William the Con- queror), was a Frenchman, and half the peers of England are descendants from the same country; wherefore, by the same method of reasoning, England ought to be governed by France. Much hath been said of the united strength of Britain and the colonies, that in conjunction they might bid defi- ance to the .vorld. But this is mere presumption; the fate of war is uncertain, neither do the expressions mean anything; for this continent would never suffer itself to be drained of inhabitants to support the British arms in either Asia, Africa, or Europe. Besides, what have we to do with setting the world at defiance? Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe; because it is the interest of all Europe to have America a free port. Her trade will always be a protection, and her barrenness of gold and silver secure her from invaders. I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation to show a single advantage that this continent can reap by being connected with Great Britain. I repeat the chal- lenge; not a single advantage is derived. Our corn will fetch its price in any market in Europe, and our imported goods must be paid for, buy them where we will. But the injuries and disadvantages which we sustain by that connection are without number, and our duty to mankind at large as well as to ourselves instructs us to renounce the alliance; because any submission to or de- pendence on Great Britain tends directly to involve this continent in European wars and quarrels, and sets us at variance with nations who would otherwise seek our friend- ship, and against whom we have neither anger nor com- plaint. As Europe is our market for trade, we ought to PAINE form no partial connection with any part of it. It is the true interest of America to steer clear of European conten- tions, which she never can do while, by her dependence on Britain, she is made the make-weight in the scale of Brit- ish politics. Europe is too thickly planted with kingdoms to be long at peace, and whenever a war breaks out between England and any foreign power the trade of America goes to ruin because of her connection with Britain. The next war may not turn out like the last; and should it not, the advocates for reconciliation now will be wishing for separa- tion then, because neutrality in that case would be a safer convoy than a man-of-war. Everything that is right or natural pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of Nature, cries, " Tis time to part." Even the distance at which the Almighty hath placed England and America, is a strong and natural proof that the author- ity of the one over the other was never the design of Heaven. The time likewise at which the continent was dis- covered adds weight to the argument, and the manner in which it was peopled increases the force of it. The Refor- mation was preceded by the discovery of America, as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford nei- ther friendship nor safety. The authority of Great Britain over this continent is a form of government which sooner or later must have an end; and a serious mind can draw no true pleasure by look- ing forward under the painful and positive conviction that what he calls " the present constitution " is merely tempo- rary. As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to insure anything which we may bequeath to posterity; and by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next genera- tion into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight. Though I would carefully avoid giving unnecessary COMMON SENSE 2I 7 offence, yet I am inclined to believe that all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation may be included within the following descriptions: Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men, who can not see; prejudiced men, who will not see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves; and this last class, by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this continent than all the other three. It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow; the evil is not sufficiently brought to their doors to make them feel the precariousness with which all American property is possessed. But let our imaginations transport us a few moments to Boston; that seat of wretchedness will teach us wisdom, and instruct us forever to renounce a power in whom we can have no trust. The inhabitants of that unfortunate city, who but a few months ago were in ease and affluence, have now no other alternative than to stay and starve or turn out to beg endangered by the fire of their friends if they con- tinue within the city, and plundered by the soldiery if they leave it. In their present situation they are prisoners with- out the hope of redemption, and in a general attack for their relief, they would be exposed to the fury of both armies. Men of passive tempers look somewhat lightly over the offences of Britain, and, still hoping for the best, are apt to call out, " Come, come, we shall be friends again, for all this." But examine the passions and feelings of mankind, bring the doctrine of reconciliation to the touchstone of Nature, and then tell me whether you can hereafter love, honour, and faithfully serve the power that hath carried fire and sword into your land? If you can not do all these, then are you only deceiving yourselves, and by your delay bringing ruin upon your posterity. Your future con- nection with Britain, whom you can neither love nor hon- our, will be forced and unnatural, and being formed only on the plan of present convenience, will in a little time fall into a relapse more wretched than the first. But if you say you can still pass the violations over, then I ask: Hath your house been burned? Hath your property been de- 218 PAINE stroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have? But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you un- worthy the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant. This is not inflaming or exaggerating matters, but try- ing them by those feelings and affections which Nature justifies, and without which we should be incapable of dis- charging the social duties of life or enjoying the felicities of it. I mean not to exhibit horror for the purpose of provoking revenge, but to awaken us from fatal and un- manly slumbers, that we may pursue determinately some fixed object. It is not in the power of Britain or of Europe to conquer America, if she does not conquer herself by delay and timidity. The present winter is worth an age if rightly employed, but if lost or neglected the whole continent will partake of the misfortune; and there is no punishment which that man will not deserve, be he who, or what, or where he will, that may be the means of sacri- ficing a season so precious and useful. It is repugnant to reason, and the universal order of things, to all examples from former ages, to suppose that this continent can longer remain subject to any external power. The most sanguine in Britain do not think so. The utmost stretch of human wisdom can not, at this time, compass a plan, short of separation, which can promise the continent even a year's security. Reconciliation is now a fallacious dream. Nature hath deserted the connection, and art can not supply her place. For, as Milton wisely expresses, " Never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep." Every quiet method for peace hath been ineffectual. Our prayers have been rejected with disdain, and only tended to convince us that nothing flatters vanity, or con- firms obstinacy in kings, more than repeated petitioning nothing hath contributed more than this very measure to make the kings of Europe absolute: witness Denmark and COMMON SENSE 219 Sweden. Wherefore, since nothing but blows will do, for God's sake let us come to a final separation, and not leave the next generation to be cutting throats, under the vio- lated unmeaning names of parent and child! To say they will never attempt it again is idle and visionary; we thought so at the repeal of the Stamp Act, yet a year or two undeceived us; as well may we suppose that nations which have been once defeated will never re- new the quarrel. As to government matters, it is not in the power of Britain to do this continent justice; the business of it will soon be too weighty and intricate to be managed, with any tolerable degree of convenience, by a power so distant from us, and so very ignorant of us; for if they can not conquer us they can not govern us. To be always running three or four thousand miles with a tale or a petition, waiting four or five months for an answer, which, when obtained, requires five or six more to explain it in, will in a few years be looked upon as folly and childishness. There was a time when it was proper, and there is a proper time for it to cease. Small islands, not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island. In no instance hath Nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet; and as England and America, with respect to each other, reverse the common order of Nature, it is evident that they belong to different systems: England to Europe, America to itself. I am not induced by motives of pride, party, or resent- ment to espouse the doctrine of separation and independ- ence; I am clearly, positively, and conscientiously per- suaded that it is the true interest of this continent to be so; that everything short of that is mere patchwork; that it can afford no lasting felicity; that it is leaving the sword to our children, and shrinking back at a time when going a little further would have rendered this continent the glory of the earth. As Britain hath not manifested the least inclination to- ward a compromise, we may be assured that no terms can 220 PAINE be obtained worthy the acceptance of the continent, or any ways equal to the expense of blood and treasure we have been already put to. The object contended for ought always to bear some just proportion to the expense. The removal of North, or the whole detestable junto, is a matter unworthy the mil- lions we have expended. A temporary stoppage of trade was an inconvenience which would have sufficiently bal- anced the repeal of all the acts complained of, had such repeals been obtained; but if the whole continent must take up arms, if every man must be a soldier, it is scarcely worth our while to fight against a contemptible ministry only. Dearly, dearly do we pay for the repeal of the acts, if that is all we fight for; for, in a just estimation, it is as great a folly to pay a Bunker-Hill price for law as for land. I have always considered the independency of this conti- nent as an event which sooner or later must take place, and, from the late rapid progress of the continent to ma- turity, the event can not be far off. Wherefore, on the breaking out of hostilities, it was not worth the while to have disputed a matter which time would have finally re- dressed, unless we meant to be in earnest; otherwise, it is like wasting an estate on a suit at law to regulate the tres- passes of a tenant whose lease is just expiring. No man was a warmer wisher for a reconciliation than myself be- fore the fatal iQth of April, I775, 1 but the moment the event of that day was made known I rejected the hard- ened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England forever, and dis- dain the wretch that, with the pretended title of Father of his People, can unfeelingly hear of their slaughter and com- posedly sleep with their blood upon his soul. But admitting that matters were now made up, what would be the event? I answer, the ruin of the continent. And that for several reasons: i. The powers of governing still remaining in the hands of the king, he will have a negative over the whole legislation of this continent. And as he hath shown him- self such an inveterate enemy to liberty, and discovered such a thirst for arbitrary power, is he, or is he not, a proper person to say to these colonies, " You shall make no laws but what I please "? And is there any inhabitant COMMON SENSE 221 of America so ignorant as not to know that, according to what is called the present constitution, this continent can make no laws but what the king gives leave to? And is there any man so unwise as 'not to see that, considering what has happened, he will suffer no law to be made here but such as suits his purpose? We may be as effectually enslaved by the want of laws in America, as by submitting to laws made for us in England. After matters are made up (as it is called) can there be any doubt but the whole power of the crown will be exerted to keep this continent as low and humble as possible? Instead of going forward we shall go backward, or be perpetually quarrelling, or ridiculously petitioning. We are already greater than the king wishes us to be, and will he not hereafter endeavour to make us less? To bring the matter to one point, is the power who is jealous of our prosperity a proper power to govern us? Whoever says " No! " to this question is an independent, for independency means no more than this, whether we shall make our own laws, or whether the king, the greatest enemy which this continent hath, or can have, shall tell us, " There shall be no laws but such as I like." But the king, you will say, has a negative in England; the people there can make no laws without his consent. In point of right and good order, it is something very ridicu- lous that a youth of twenty-one (which hath often hap- pened) shall say to several millions of people, older and wiser than himself, " I forbid this or that act of yours to be law." But in this place I decline this sort of reply, though I will never cease to expose the absurdity of it; and only answer that, England being the king's residence, and America not, makes quite another case. The king's nega- tive here is ten times more dangerous and fatal than it can be in England; for there he will scarcely refuse his consent to a bill for putting England into as strong a state of de- fence as possible, and in America he would never suffer such a bill to be passed. America is only a secondary object in the system of British politics England consults the good of this coun- try no further than it answers her own purpose. Where- fore, her own interest leads her to suppress the growth of ours in every case which doth not promote her advantage, 222 PAINE or in the least interferes with it. A pretty state we should soon be in under a second-hand government, considering what has happened! Men do not change from enemies to friends by the alteration of a name; and in order to show that reconciliation now is a dangerous doctrine, I affirm that it would be policy in the king at this time to repeal the acts, for the sake of reinstating himself in the govern- ment of the provinces; in order that he may accomplish by craft and subtlety, in the long run, what he can not do by force in the short one. Reconciliation and ruin are nearly related. 2. That as even the best terms which we can expect to obtain can amount to no more than a temporary expedient, or a kind of government by guardianship, which can last no longer than till the colonies come of age, so the gen- eral face and state of things in the interim will be unsettled and unpromising. Emigrants of property will not choose to come to a country whose form of government hangs but by a thread, and which is every day tottering on the brink of commotion and disturbance; and numbers of the present inhabitants would lay hold of the interval to dispose of their effects and quit the continent. But the most powerful of all arguments is that nothing but independence i. e., a continental form of government can keep the peace of the continent and preserve it in- violate from civil wars. I dread the event of a reconcilia- tion with Britain now, as it is more than probable that it will be followed by a revolt somewhere or other, the con- sequences of which may be far more fatal than all the malice of Britain. Thousands are already ruined by British barbarity. Thousands more will probably suffer the same fate. Those men have other feelings than us who have nothing suf- fered. All they now possess is liberty; what they before enjoyed is sacrificed to its service; and having nothing more to lose, they disdain submission. Besides, the gen- eral temper of the colonies toward a British government will be like that of a youth who is nearly out of his time: they will care very little about her. And a government which can not preserve the peace is no government at all, and in that case we pay our money for nothing. And COMMON SENSE pray what is it that Britain can do, whose power will be wholly on paper, should a civil tumult break out the very day after reconciliation? I have heard some men say, many of whom I believe spoke without thinking, that they dreaded an independence, fearing that it would produce civil wars. It is but seldom that our first thoughts are truly correct, and that is the case here; for there is ten times more to dread from a patched-up connection than from independence. I make the sufferer's case my own, and I protest, that were I driven from house and home, my property destroyed, and my circumstances ruined, as a man sensible of injuries I could never relish the doctrine of reconciliation or consider myself bound thereby. The colonies have manifested such a spirit of good order and obedience to continental government as is suf- ficient to make every reasonable person easy and happy on that head. No man can assign the least pretence for his fears, on any other grounds than such as are truly childish and ridiculous viz., that one colony will be striving for superiority over another. Where there are no distinctions there can be no su- periority; perfect equality affords no temptation. The republics of Europe are all (and we may say always) in peace. Holland and Switzerland are without wars, foreign or domestic. Monarchical governments, it is true, are never long at rest; the crown itself is a temptation to en- terprising ruffians at home, and that degree of pride and insolence ever attendant on regal authority swells into a rupture with foreign powers in instances where a repub- lican government, by being formed on more natural prin- ciples, would negotiate the mistake. If there is any true cause of fear respecting independ- ence, it is because no plan is yet laid down. Men do not see their way out; wherefore, as an opening into that busi- ness, I offer the following hints, at the same time mod- estly affirming that I have no other opinion of them myself than that they may be the means of giving rise to some- thing better. Could the straggling thoughts of individuals be collected, they would frequently form materials for wise and able men to improve into useful matter. Let the assemblies be annual, with a president only. 224 PAINE The representation more equal. Their business wholly do- mestic, and subject to the authority of a continental con- gress. Let each colony be divided into six, eight, or ten con- venient districts, each district to send a proper number of delegates to Congress, so that each colony send at least thirty. The whole number in Congress will be at least three hundred and ninety. Each Congress to sit ... and to choose a president by the following method: When the delegates are met, let a colony be taken from the whole thirteen colonies by lot, after which let the Congress choose (by ballot) a president from out of the delegates of that province. In the next Congress, let a colony be taken by lot from twelve only, omitting that colony from which the president was taken in the former Congress, and so proceeding on till the whole thirteen shall have had their proper rotation. And in order that nothing may pass into a law but what is satisfactorily just, not less than three fifths of the Congress to be called a majority. He that will promote discord under a government so equally formed as this would have joined Lucifer in his revolt. But as there is a peculiar delicacy, from whom, or in what manner, this business must first arise, and as it seems most agreeable and consistent that it should come from some intermediate body between the governed and the gov- ernors that is, between the Congress and the people let a Continental Conference be held, in the following man- ner, and for the following purpose: A committee of twenty-six members of Congress viz., two for each colony. Two members from each House of Assembly, or provincial convention; and five representa- tives of the people at large, to be chosen in the capital city or town of each province, for and in behalf of the whole province, by as many qualified voters as shall think proper to attend from all parts of the province for that purpose; or, if more convenient, the representatives may be chosen in two or three of the most populous parts thereof. In this conference, thus assembled, will be united the two grand principles of business, knowledge and power. The members of Congress, assemblies, or conventions, by hav- ing had experience in national concerns, will be able and COMMON SENSE 225 useful counsellors, and the whole, being empowered by the people, will have a truly legal authority. The conferring members being met, let their business be to frame a Continental Charter, or Charter of the United Colonies (answering to what is called the Magna Charta of England), fixing the number and manner of choosing members of Congress, and members of Assembly, with their date of sitting, and drawing the line of business and jurisdiction between them (always remembering that our strength is continental, not provincial); securing freedom and property to all men, and above all things, the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience, with such other matter as it is necessary for a charter to contain. Immediately after which, the said conference to dissolve, and the bodies which shall be chosen conformable to the said charter to be the legislators and governors of this continent for the time being: whose peace and happi- ness may God preserve, Amen. Should any body of men be hereafter delegated for this or some similar purpose, I offer them the following ex- tracts from that wise observer on governments, Dragonetti. " The science," says he, " of the politician consists in fix- ing the true point of happiness and freedom. Those men would deserve the gratitude of ages who should discover a mode of government that contained the greatest sum of individual happiness with the least national expense." But where, say some, is the king of America? I'll tell you, friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the royal brute of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honours, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God ; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know that, so far as we approve of monarchy, in Amer- ica the law is king. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other. But lest any ill use should afterward arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the cere- mony be abolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is. A government of our own is our natural right, and 22 6 PAINE when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs he will become convinced that it is infinitely wiser and safer to form a constitution of our own in a cool, deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance. If we omit it now, some Masaniello 2 may hereafter arise, who, laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, finally sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge. Should the government of America return again into the hands of Britain, the tottering situation of things will be a tempta- tion for some desperate adventurer to try his fortune; and in such a case, what relief can Britain give? Ere she could hear the news the fatal business might be done, and our- selves suffering like the wretched Britons under the oppres- sion of the Conqueror. Ye that oppose independence now, ye know not what ye do; ye are opening a door to eternal tyranny by keeping vacant the seat of government. There are thousands and tens of thousands who would think it glorious to expel from the continent that barbarous and hellish power which hath stirred up the Indians and negroes to destroy us. The cruelty hath a double guilt: it is dealing brutally by us, and treacherously by them. To talk of friendship with those in whom our reason forbids us to have faith, and our affections, wounded through a thousand pores, instruct us to detest, is mad- ness and folly. Every day wears out the little remains of kindred between us and them; and can there be any reason to hope that, as the relationship expires, the affection will increase, or that we shall agree better when we have ten times more and greater concerns to quarrel over than ever? Ye that tell us of harmony and reconciliation, can ye restore to us the time that is past? Can ye give to pros- titution its former innocence? Neither can ye reconcile Britain and America. The last cord now is broken, the people of England are presenting addresses against us. There are injuries which Nature can not forgive; she would cease to be Nature if she did. As well can the lover for- give the ravisher of his mistress as the continent forgive the murders of Britain. The Almighty hath implanted COMMON SENSE 227 within us these unextinguishable feelings for good and wise purposes. They are the guardians of his image in our hearts, and distinguish us from the herd of common animals. The social compact would dissolve, and justice be extirpated from the earth, or have only a casual exist- ence, were we callous to the touches of affection. The robber and the murderer would often escape unpunished did not the injuries which our tempers sustain provoke us into justice. O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the Old World is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted around the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. Oh, re- ceive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for man- kind. NOTES 1 The date of the massacre at Lexington. 1 Tommaso Aniello, otherwise Masaniello, a fisherman of Naples, who after spiriting up his countrymen in the public market-place, against the oppression of the Spaniards, to whom the place was then subject, prompted them to revolt, and in the space of a day became king. THE CRISIS THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily con- quered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more gorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly: 'tis dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to tax but) " to bind us in all cases whatsoever," and if being bound in that manner is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the ex- pression is impious, for so unlimited a power can belong only to God. Whether the independence of the continent was de- clared too soon, or delayed too long, I will not now enter into as an argument; my own simple opinion is, that had it been eight months earlier it would have been much better. We did not make a proper use of last winter, neither could we, while we were in a dependent state. However, the fault, if it were one, was all our own; we have none to blame but ourselves. But no great deal is lost yet; all that Howe has been doing for this month past is rather a ravage than a conquest, which the spirit of the Jerseys a year ago would have quickly repulsed, and which time and a little resolution will soon recover. I have as little superstition in me as any man living, but my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that 228 THE CRISIS 22 9 God Almighty will not give up a people to military de- struction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war by every decent method which wisdom could invent. Neither have I so much of the infidel in me as to suppose that he has relinquished the government of the world and given us up to the care of devils; and as I do not, I can not see on what grounds the King of Britain can look up to Heaven for help against us: a common murderer, a highwayman, or a housebreaker has as good a pretence as he. Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will some- times run through a country. All nations and ages have been subject to them: Britain has trembled like an ague at the report of a French fleet of flat-bottomed boats; and in the fourteenth century the whole English army, after ravaging the kingdom of France, was driven back like men petrified with fear; and this brave exploit was performed by a few broken forces collected and headed by a woman, Joan of Arc. Would that Heaven might inspire some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen, and save her fair fellow-sufferers from ravage and ravish- ment! Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypoc- risy, and bring things and men to light which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. In fact, they have the same effect on secret traitors which an imagi- nary apparition would have upon a private murderer. They sift out the hidden thoughts of. man, and hold them up in public to the world. Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head that shall penitentially solemnize with curses the day on which Howe arrived upon the Dela- ware. As I was with the troops at Fort Lee, and marched with them to the edge of Pennsylvania, I am well ac- quainted with many circumstances which those who live at a distance know but little or nothing of. Our situation there was exceedingly cramped, the place being a narrow 2 3 PAINE neck of land between the North River and the Hacken- sack. Our force was inconsiderable, being not one fourth so great as Howe could bring against us. We had no army at hand to have relieved the garrison had we shut ourselves up and stood on our defence. Our ammunition, light artillery, and the best part of our stores had been removed, on the apprehension that Howe would endeav- our to penetrate the Jerseys, in which case Fort Lee could be of no use to us; for it must occur to every thinking man, whether in the army or not, that these kind of field forts are only for temporary purposes, and last in use no longer than the enemy directs his force against the par- ticular object which such forts are raised to defend. Such was our situation and condition at Fort Lee on the morn- ing of the 2Oth of November, when an officer arrived with information that the enemy with two hundred boats had landed about seven miles above: Major-General Greene, who commanded the garrison, immediately or- dered them under arms, and sent express to General Washington at the town of Hackensack, distant by the way of the ferry six miles. Our first object was to secure the bridge over the Hackensack, which laid up the river between the enemy and us, about six miles from us and three from them. General Washington arrived in about three quarters of an hour, and marched at the head of the troops toward the bridge, which place I expected we should have a brush for; however, they did not choose to dispute it with us, and the greatest part of our troops went over the bridge, the rest over the ferry, except some which passed at a mill on a small creek, between the bridge and the ferry, and made their way through some marshy grounds up to the town of Hackensack, and there passed the river. We brought off as much baggage as the wagons could contain; the rest was lost. The simple ob- ject was to bring off the garrison, and march them on till they could be strengthened by the Jersey or Pennsylvania militia, so as to be enabled to make a stand. We stayed four days at Newark, collected our outposts with some of the Jersey militia, and marched out twice to meet the enemy on being informed that they were advancing, though our numbers were greatly inferior to theirs. Howe, THE CRISIS 231 in my little opinion, committed a great error in general- ship in not throwing a body of forces off from Staten Island through Amboy, by which means he might have seized all our stores at Brunswick, and intercepted our march into Pennsylvania: but if we believe the power of hell to be limited, we must likewise believe that their agents are under some providential control. I shall not now attempt to give all the particulars of our retreat to the Delaware; suffice for the present to say that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, without rest, covering, or provision,- the inevi- table consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit. All their wishes centred in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back. Voltaire has remarked that King William never appeared to full advantage but in difficulties and in action; the same remark may be made on General Washington, for the character fits him. There is a natu- ral firmness in some minds which can not be unlocked by trifles, but which, when unlocked, discovers a cabinet of fortitude; and I reckon it among those kind of public blessings which we do not immediately see that God hath blessed him with uninterrupted health and given him a mind that can even flourish upon care. I shall conclude this paper with some miscellaneous remarks on the state of our affairs; and shall begin with asking the following question: Why is it that the enemy have left the New England provinces and made these middle ones the seat of war? The answer is easy: New England is not infested with Tories, and we are. I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness. The period is now arrived in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall. And what is a Tory? Good God! what is he? I should not be afraid to go with a hundred Whigs against a thousand Tories were they to attempt to get into arms. Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave. 232 PAINE But, before the line of irrecoverable separation be drawn between us, let us reason the matter together: your conduct is an invitation to the enemy, yet not one in a thousand of you has heart enough to join him. Howe is as much deceived by you as the American cause is in- jured by you. He expects you will all take up arms and flock to his standard, with muskets on your shoulders. Your opinions are of no use to him unless you support him personally, for 'tis soldiers, and not Tories, that he wants. I once felt all that kind of anger which a man ought to feel against the mean principles that are held by the Tories: a noted one, who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and, after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, " Well, give me peace in my day! " Not a man lives on the continent but fully believes that a separation must some time or other finally take place, and a generous parent should have said, " If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace"; and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty. Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them. A man can distinguish himself between temper and principle, and I am as confident as I am that God governs the world that America will never be happy till she gets clear of foreign dominion. Wars, without ceasing, will break out till that period arrives, and the continent must in the end be con- queror; for though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire. America did not nor does not want force, but she wanted a proper application of that force. Wisdom is not the purchase of a day, and it is no wonder that we should err at the first setting off. From an excess of tenderness we were unwilling to raise an army, and trusted our cause to the temporary defence of a well-meaning militia. A summer's experience has now taught us better; yet with those troops, while they were collected, we were able to THE CRISIS 233 set bounds to the progress of the enemy, and, thank God! they are again assembling. I always consider militia as the best troops in the world for a sudden exertion, but they will not do for a long campaign. Howe, it is prob- able, will make an attempt on this city; should he fail on this side the Delaware, he is ruined: if he succeeds, our cause is not ruined. He stakes all on his side against a part on ours; admitting he succeeds, the consequence will be that armies from both ends of the continent will march to assist their suffering friends in the Middle States; for he can not go everywhere, it is impossible. I consider Howe the greatest enemy the Tories have; he is bringing a war into their country, which, had it not been for him and partly for themselves, they had been clear of. Should he now be expelled, I wish, with all the devotion of a Christian, that the names of Whig and Tory may never more be mentioned; but should the Tories give him en- couragement to come, or assistance if he come, I as sin- cerely wish that our next year's arms may expel them from the continent, and the Congress appropriate their posses- sions to the relief of those who have suffered in well- doing. A single successful battle next year will settle the whole. America could carry on a two years' war by the confiscation of the property of disaffected persons, and be made happy by their expulsion. Say not that this is revenge; call it rather the soft resentment of a suffering people, who, having no object in view but the good of all, have staked their own all upon a seemingly doubtful event. Yet it is folly to argue against determined hard- ness; eloquence may strike the ear, and the language of sorrow draw forth the tear of compassion, but nothing can reach the heart that is steeled with prejudice. Quitting this class of men, I turn with the warm ardour of a friend to those who have nobly stood, and are yet determined to stand the matter out: I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this State or that State, but on every State; up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little when so great an object is at stake. Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when noth- ing but hope and virtue could survive, the city and the 234 PAINE country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it. Say not that thousands are gone, turn out your tens of thousands; throw not the burden of the day upon Providence, but " show your faith by your works," that God may bless you. It matters not where you live or what rank of life you hold, the evil or the blessing will reach you all. The far and the near, the home counties and the back, the rich and the poor, will suffer or rejoice alike. The heart that feels not now is dead: the blood of his children will curse his cowardice who shrinks back at a time when a little might have saved the whole and made them happy. I love the man that can smile at trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his prin- ciples unto death. My own line of reasoning is to myself as straight and clear as a ray of light. Not all the treas- ures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my prop- erty, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to " bind me in all cases whatsoever " to his absolute will, am I to suffer it? What signifies it to me whether he who does it is a king or a common man; my countryman or not my countryman; whether it be done by an individual villain or an army of them? If we reason to the root of things we shall find no difference; neither can any just cause be assigned why we should punish in the one case and pardon in the other. Let them call me rebel and welcome: I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man. I conceive likewise a horrid idea in receiving mercy from a being who at the last day shall be shrieking to the rocks and mountains to cover him, and fleeing with terror from the orphan, the widow, and the slain of America. There are cases which can not be overdone by lan- guage, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they THE CRISIS 235 solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he suc- ceed, will be merciful. This is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf; and we ought to guard equally against both. Howe's first object is, partly by threats and partly by promises, to terrify or seduce the people to deliver up their arms and to receive mercy. The ministry recommended the same plan to Gage, and this is what the Tories call making their peace " a peace which pass- eth all understanding," indeed! A peace which would be the immediate forerunner of a worse ruin than any we have yet thought of. Ye men of Pennsylvania, do reason upon these things! Were the back counties to give up their arms, they would fall an easy prey to the Indians, wno are all armed; this, perhaps, is what some Tories would not be sorry for. Were the home counties to de- liver up their arms, they would be exposed to the resent- ment of the back counties, who would then have it in their power to chastise their defection at pleasure. And were any one State to give up its arms, that State must be garrisoned by Howe's army of Britons and Hessians to preserve it from the anger of the rest. Mutual fear is the principal link in the chain of mutual love, and woe be to that State that breaks the compact! Howe is mercifully inviting you to barbarous destruction, and men must be either rogues or fools that will not see it. I dwell not upon the powers of imagination; I bring reason to your ears; and in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up truth to your eyes. I thank God that I fear not. I see no real cause for fear. I know our situation well, and can see the way out of it. While our army was collected Howe dared not risk a battle, and it is no credit to him that he decamped from the White Plains and waited a mean opportunity to ravage the defenceless Jerseys; but it is great credit to us that, with a handful of men, we sustained an orderly retreat for near a hundred miles, brought off our ammu- nition, all our field-pieces, the greatest part of our stores, and had four rivers to pass. None can say that our re- 2 3 6 PAINE treat was precipitate, for we were near three weeks in per- forming it, that the country might have time to come in. Twice we marched back to meet the enemy, and remained out till dark. The sign of fear was not seen in our camp, and had not some of the cowardly and disaffected inhabit- ants spread false alarms through the country the Jerseys had never been ravaged. Once more we are again col- lected and collecting; our new army at both ends of the continent is recruiting fast, and we shall be able to open the next campaign with sixty thousand men, well armed and clothed. This is our situation, and who will may know it. By perseverance and fortitude we have the pros- pect of a glorious issue; by cowardice and submission, the sad choice of a variety of evils a ravaged country a de- populated city habitations without safety, and slavery without hope our homes turned into barracks and bawdy houses for Hessians, and a future race to provide for, whose fathers we shall doubt of. Look on this picture and weep over it; and if there yet remains one thought- less wretch who believes it not, let him suffer it unla- mented. THE PHILOSOPHY OF PROVERBS BY ISAAC DISRAELI 16 ISAAC DISRAELI was the son of a Jewish merchant, and was born in Enfield, England, in 1766. He was educated in a school near his native place, and then at Amsterdam, and deliberately devoted his life to author- ship. He married in 1802, and had a daughter and four sons, the eldest of whom was Benjamin, the eminent statesman, who became Lord Bea- consfield. In the fifteenth century his Jewish ancestors fled to Venice to escape the Inquisition in Spain, and there took the name of D'Israeli, " that their race might be forever recognised." But in 1817 Isaac re- nounced the ancient faith and had all his children baptized. He pub- lished seven novels and two volumes of poetry, none of which survive. He was an omnivorous reader at the British Museum, and found his true vocation in producing a mingled compilation and essay in which he never has been approached. His "Curiosities of Literature," " Calamities of Authors," " Quarrels of Authors," and "Amenities of Literature," were published at various dates between 1791 and 1840; all have been through many editions and found recognition as standard works, into which every reader likes to dip occasionally. He also published "Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles I," for which Oxford gave him the degree of D. C. L. He was blind nine years, and died January 19, 1848. THE PHILOSOPHY OF PROVERBS IN antique furniture we sometimes discover a conven- ience which long disuse had made us unacquainted with, and are surprised by the aptness which we did not suspect was concealed in its solid forms. We have found the labour of the workmen to have been as ad- mirable as the material itself, which is still resisting the mouldering touch of time among those modern inven- tions, elegant and unsubstantial, which, often put to- gether with unseasoned wood, are apt to warp and fly into pieces when brought into use. We have found how strength consists in the selection of materials, and that, whenever the substitute is not better than the original, we are losing something in that test of experience which all things derive from duration. Be this as it may! I shall not unreasonably await for the artists of our novelties to retrograde into massive greatness, although I can not avoid reminding them how often they revive the forgotten things of past times! It is well known that many of our novelties were in use by our ancestors! In the history of the human mind there is, indeed, a sort of antique furniture which I collect not merely for their antiquity, but for the sound condition in which I still find them, and the compactness which they still show. Centuries have not worm-eaten their solidity! and the utility and delightfulness which they still afford make them look as fresh and as ingenious as any of our patent inventions. By the title of the present article the reader has antici- pated the nature of the old furniture to which I allude. I propose to give what, in the style of our times, may be called the " Philosophy of Proverbs " a topic which seems virgin. The art of reading proverbs has not, in- 239 240 DISRAELI deed, always been acquired even by some of their ad- mirers; but my observations, like their subject, must be versatile and unconnected; and I must bespeak indul- gence for an attempt to illustrate a very curious branch of literature, rather not understood than quite forgotten. Proverbs have long been in disuse. " A man of fash- ion," observes Lord Chesterfield, " never has recourse to proverbs and vulgar aphorisms"; and, since the time his lordship so solemnly interdicted their use, they appear to have withered away under the ban of his anathema. His lordship was little conversant with the history of proverbs, and would unquestionably have smiled on those " men of fashion " of another stamp, who, in the days of Eliza- beth, James, and Charles, were great collectors of them; would appeal to them in their conversations, and enforce them in their learned or their statesmanlike correspond- ence. Few, perhaps, even now suspect that these neg- lected fragments of wisdom, which exist among all na- tions, still offer many interesting objects for the studies of the philosopher and the historian; and for men of the world still open an extensive school of human life and manners. The home-spun adages and the rusty " sayed-saws " which remain in the mouths of the people are adapted to their capacities and their humours.' Easily remembered, and readily applied, these are the philosophy of the vul- gar, and often more sound than that of their masters! whoever would learn what the people think, and how they feel, must not reject even these as insignificant. The proverbs of the street and of the market, true to Nature, and lasting only because they are true, are records that the populace at Athens and at Rome were the same peo- ple as at Paris and at London, and as they had before been in the city of Jerusalem! Proverbs existed before books. The Spaniards date the origin of their refranes que dicen las viejas tras el fuego, " sayings of old wives by their firesides," before the existence of any writings in their language, from the circumstance that these are in the old romance or rudest vulgar idiom. The most ancient poem in the " Edda," " the sublime speech of Odin," abounds with ancient THE PHILOSOPHY OF PROVERBS 241 proverbs, strikingly descriptive of the ancient Scandina- vians. Undoubtedly proverbs in the earliest ages long served as the unwritten language of morality, and even of the useful arts; like the oral traditions of the Jews, they floated down from age to age on the lips of succes- sive generations. The name of the first sage who sanc- tioned the saying would in time be forgotten, while the opinion, the metaphor, or the expression remained, con- secrated into a proverb! Such was the origin of those memorable sentences by which men learned to think and to speak appositely; they were precepts which no man could contradict, at a time when authority was valued more than opinion, and experience preferred to novelty. The proverbs of a father became the inheritance of a son; the mistress of a family perpetuated hers through her household ; the workman condensed some traditional secret of his craft into a proverbial expression. When countries are not yet populous, and property has not yet produced great inequalities in its ranks, every day will show them how " the drunkard and the glutton come to poverty, and drowsiness clothes a man with rags." At such a period he who gave counsel gave wealth. It might, therefore, have been decided, a priori, that the most homely proverbs would abound in the most ancient writers and such we find in Hesiod; a poet whose learning was not drawn from books. It could only have been in the agricultural state that this venerable bard could have indicated a state of repose by this rustic proverb : Ur)$